The Resurrector (The Dominic Grey Series)

by Layton Green

  Grey pressed the gun harder, looked Dale in the eye, and made him a believer. “Last chance.”

  “Ronnie,” he whispered. “Ronnie Lemieux.”

  “Where can I find him?”

  “He owns a tire garage in East Atlanta.”

  Grey rose as two people burst through the door, one of them the blond woman from the Tiki bar at the rally, the other a tall man with a moustache. The man was holding a gun, but Grey was already aiming at his chest.

  “Lose it,” Grey said.

  The man complied, and Grey picked up the second gun, a Beretta nine-millimeter, on his way out. He walked backwards to the Jeep Cherokee, eyeing the door of the Peach Shack the entire way.

  After placing the Beretta in his lap and stuffing the .22 under the seat, Grey Googled Lemieux and East Atlanta tires as he drove off, knowing the men inside the Peach Shack were already on their phones.

  -20-

  Darkness.

  Hunger.

  Fear.

  Charlie had no idea how long she had been locked in the back of the van. A day, at least. Where were they taking her? Alaska?

  No, little girls didn’t disappear in Alaska. They disappeared in New York City.

  So why move her?

  Charlie had tried hard not to cry, she really had. She was a homeless teen on the streets of New York, and life didn’t get much rougher than that. She was tough. Hard.

  But this was no good. No good at all. She knew that some people, pimps and some kinds of gangs, snatched girls off the streets and forced them to work as drug mules and sex slaves. That was how Charlie had ended up homeless. After her mother died of a drug overdose, leaving Charlie orphaned, the court had sent her to live with an aunt in the Bronx. Her aunt’s new husband, a man whose grease-stained shirts and sleepy eyes Charlie hadn’t trusted from the start, took her to a hotel in the South Bronx one night and said she had to start earning money for the family.

  It’ll be easy, he had said. We’ll have ice cream when it’s done.

  At the time, Charlie was eleven years old. One of the many tragedies was that she had known exactly what he was talking about. She had cried and demanded to talk to Aunt Desiree. Her new uncle handed her the phone with a smile, and Charlie called.

  Aunt Desiree told her to be a good girl and do what her uncle wanted.

  When Charlie started to cry, her aunt said she did it sometimes, too.

  Forcing back the horror and panic rising like bile in her throat, Charlie had given her uncle the phone back and said she needed a minute in the bathroom for girl things. He let her go. Charlie crawled out a window and hid in a dumpster until sure her uncle was gone.

  And she never went back.

  The memory made her hug her knees and rock in the darkness. “Stay strong, Charlie,” she whispered to herself.

  Unlike most of the homeless girls she knew, Charlie had never used drugs or turned to prostitution. Her mother always made her promise not to make the same mistakes she had. Said that if Charlie stayed clean and worked hard, she could do anything she wanted. Be a doctor one day. Even though Charlie knew the world didn’t work like that, that homeless black teens became doctors about as often as paraplegic Vietnam vets won the New York City marathon, she clung to her mother’s words like a life raft on a heaving sea. It gave her hope, those words. And on the streets, no commodity was more precious.

  Every now and then, Grey would teach a class on Chee-Gung, or something like that. He said it was an internal martial art, and that it was just as important to be strong on the inside as the outside. The kids in class had laughed at the strange breathing exercises. Grey always smiled and let them poke fun, then made them lay still and quiet for the last ten minutes of class, asking them to pretend their minds were hourglasses that would slowly empty.

  The first time was a surreal experience for Charlie. New York was not a quiet place. Hers was not a quiet mind. But eventually, after the giggling stopped and she tried to follow Grey’s soft commands, her mind drifted to unexpected places. Out of her body, out of the streets of Washington Heights that comprised her world, out of New York, out of everywhere. She went to someplace dreamy and vast, where race and money didn’t matter and the world did not revolve around where to get her next meal.

  In the black van, after she tried without success to force the door open, she had regulated her breathing and gone to that place again. It had worked for a while. But the clock kept ticking and her hunger pangs grew worse, and she couldn’t stop thinking about where they were taking her. Shit, it would take some kind of Buddhist monk sitting in the snow with no clothes on to have the kind of discipline to get through this. Not thirty minutes of slow breathing on a dirty mat in a homeless shelter.

  That’s fine, she muttered to herself. Grey had taught them lots of stuff. Not just fighting, but what to do in bad situations. How to keep their wits and not panic.

  Charlie was a survivor. She was alone now, but she had been alone for years.

  But you’re not enough, that persistent voice in the back of her head whispered. You never have been. That’s why you’re still on the streets, dummy.

  The van rolled to a stop. Someone on the outside fumbled with the lock, and Charlie sat up straight. Instead of scrambling to the back of the van, she positioned herself by the door and balled her fists. Her handcuffs, secured in front of her body, were not that tight. She would have one shot at this. If she was lucky and they had taken her to another city, she might be able to stun her kidnapper and disappear into the streets.

  The back of the van opened. Someone untied her hood and yanked it off.

  Sunlight flared.

  Charlie had not counted on the effect of prolonged darkness. She was blinded by the light.

  Didn’t matter. She had to take a chance.

  After leaping out of the van, she swung upward with her bound fists, striking at empty air. Her pupils adjusted in time to see a red-bearded man, as cartoonishly big as a professional wrestler, take her by the arm with a grin. Charlie tried to shake free, but it was like trying to pry her arm out of a cement block.

  The man was not alone. A group of scary-looking whiteys were smoking cigarettes and taking crates out of a huge barn and loading them into a pair of semis. Behind them was a scraggly field peppered with mobile homes and Harleys. Behind that, the skyline of a city she had never seen before.

  The big man’s eyes roved over her as if inspecting chattel. His gaze made her feel smaller and more helpless than she had ever felt in her life. Like a slave who had just stepped onto the shores of America and met her new owner.

  They didn’t bother to hood her again. The redheaded man gave a curt nod, then shoved her into the arms of another man. “She’ll be flying out with me.”

  -21-

  Van Draker disappeared into the wine cellar. As the guard, Pieter, slipped back inside the crypt and closed the door, it unsettled Viktor further, as if he and Naomi had been left alone on purpose in the cemetery, helpless prey for some foul thing lurking inside one of the tombs.

  Naomi’s face looked drawn. “The first guard that disappeared? I recognized him. His name was Robey Joubert.”

  “Was?”

  “Robey was three years ahead of me in school. During the end of Apartheid, he was a commando for the South African military. He hunted down militant members of the ANC and PAC. After that, he joined the Cape Town police force.”

  “And?” Viktor said, when she didn’t continue.

  Naomi finally tore her eyes away from the tomb. “Three years ago, he was killed in action. I have friends who attended the funeral.”

  At first Viktor was stunned, and then he scoffed. “It’s dark. You were far away.”

  “I’ll show you a picture. You can judge for yourself.”

  “I’ll do that.”

  Viktor started walking towards the wine cellar, shoulders hunched in determination.

  “You’re sure about this?” she asked.

  “I thought you wanted t
o find out more about him.”

  “I do,” she said, hurrying to keep up with his long stride. “I just . . .” She glanced back at the crypt one more time, but before she could speak, van Draker stepped into the doorway, wine glass in hand.

  Jans gave a lopsided smile. “Coming?”

  Naomi slowed as she fumbled with her phone. “Just texting the station.” She forced confidence into her voice. “Reporting the break-in.”

  “Ah,” van Draker said faintly. “Of course.”

  Smart woman, Viktor thought.

  Unless van Draker controlled the entire police station except for Sergeant Linde, and they were walking right into a trap.

  As Viktor ducked the thick wooden beam topping the door frame, his eyes were everywhere, taking in the brick-walled tasting room and the two passages of rough-hewn stone that curved deeper into the earth.

  The furnishings in the old tasting room consisted of an oblong wooden table surrounded by chairs, a pair of ledgers hanging from pegs on the wall, dusty oak barrels with the vintage written in pink chalk, an old map of the Cape Province, and a fading black and white photo of the ancestral van Drakers. The air was a touch cooler than outside and smelled of musty stone.

  As far as Viktor could tell, the wine cellar was typical for an old estate. No sign of medical equipment or the two people in scrubs they had seen. Then again, from having visited similar cellars, he knew those stone corridors could lead to a maze of tunnels and storage rooms.

  Naomi declined the offer of a drink, but Viktor accepted a pour from a bottle bearing the van Draker name. The professor sniffed. Still a little rough. Under their host’s watchful eye, Viktor swirled for longer than usual, examining the color by lifting the glass towards the light bulb hanging above their heads.

  “Very nice,” Viktor murmured, after taking a sip. “Quite smoky, tannins not too strong, just the right touch of acidity. A Pinotage-Syrah blend?”

  Van Draker tipped his head in approval. “You know your wine. Shall we sit?”

  “I’ve an affinity for old wine cellars,” Viktor said. “Perhaps we could tour yours?”

  The professor thought Jans would decline, but instead he beamed with pleasure, took a handheld kerosene lantern out of a cabinet, and led them down the passage to the right.

  Rows and rows of wine bottles lying on their sides, tips white with dust, honeycombed the plaster-covered walls. The group’s footsteps slapped on the stone floor, and the dusty barrels looked as if they hadn’t been touched for a century. Viktor often had to duck beneath the cobwebs clinging to the low, rounded ceiling.

  Naomi walked beside van Draker as he related the history of the wine cellar, first built in 1697 and expanded at the turn of the eighteenth century. They learned the cellar had shielded guerrilla fighters during the second Boer War, and even served as a makeshift hospital.

  When he paused the narrative, she said, “You mentioned your thoughts on Akhona’s disappearance.”

  Van Draker stroked his beard. “Ya, it’s a curious one. I assume you’ve made a full forensic examination?”

  Naomi walked a few steps before answering. “I’m afraid that will be difficult. This is not public knowledge, and please see that it stays that way, but the body has disappeared from the morgue.”

  “Oh my.” Van Draker gave a dramatic pause. “Then I’m afraid my speculation is on the mark. The only person of whom I can conceive taking an interest in a dead body is a witch doctor.” His tone soured. “I hear the market for certain body parts is quite a lucrative one, in the townships. A disgusting practice which I find hard to believe has survived into the modern age.”

  He’s toying with us, Viktor thought. But why bring us down here?

  “I find it hard to believe that rape, murder, and sexual abuse have survived into the modern age,” Naomi said. “Crimes that occur infinitely more often than stolen body parts. In fact, I’ve never worked such a crime.”

  “I have,” Viktor said. “Many times. Though I must disagree with our host’s conclusions. I’m well aware of the . . . interest . . . certain practitioners of a few indigenous religions have in such matters, but nothing about Akhona’s disappearance—or his re-appearance, I should say, implies such involvement. Akhona was tagged and studied. Altered. Not by a witch doctor, but by a scientist.”

  “You might be surprised by what the witch doctors can accomplish with their roots and potions,” van Draker said. “With enough time, anyone can stumble onto science.”

  “Surprised?” Viktor said, amused. “I’ve known witch doctors who could redefine your concept of reality, not to mention pharmacology. Thousands of years of practice and refinement are hardly stumbling onto.”

  Van Draker spread his hands in surrender. “I’m afraid I can’t be of more help.”

  As they spoke, he led them deeper and deeper into the structure, past a dozen storage rooms and a host of dank, unlit passages with cobwebs stained black from decades of grime and debris. There was no sign of medical equipment, or anything other than a semi-abandoned wine cellar. Viktor managed to keep the route in his head, wondering if van Draker was leading them into a trap somewhere deep beneath the earth.

  “How would you accomplish the task?” Viktor said suddenly, deciding to appeal to their host’s vanity. “The thickening of muscle, the growths on the fingers, the imperviousness to electricity?”

  “Oh,” van Draker said, with a careless wave of the hand, “I wouldn’t know where to begin.”

  “You’re a brilliant doctor,” Viktor said. “Why don’t you speculate? Are we dealing with a virus, an anomaly of nature?”

  “Bah,” Jans said, though a sudden shrewd look brightened his eyes. “Was the boy not absent for weeks? Steroids and growth hormones could easily account for the increased muscle mass. VO2 and adrenaline can be manipulated, taken to extremes. Keratin can be grown in culture. As for the superhuman response to electricity, the makeshift wires in the townships are far from full strength, and there are pharmaceuticals and nerve agents, even medical conditions, that can dull or suspend the body’s response to pain. This is without account for the advances in molecular biophysics, gene editing, modulation of ion channels, and recombinant DNA. Today’s scientists can hack genetic codes like a computer program.”

  Viktor lifted a palm. “It sounds simple. A project for a homemade lab.”

  Jans stopped walking and turned to Viktor. “It is in fact easy, compared to the portion of the boy’s story which, if true, stands out as a medical impossibility. I’m a brain surgeon, professor. Manipulation of human physiology pales in comparison to the sort of scientific advance it would take to create a true Frankenstein monster, to breach the boundary between life and death, to dig Akhona out of his grave and breathe life into him once again. Restore a consciousness. Ya, it would take a true genius to accomplish such a feat, and mark a transition in our understanding of what it means to be human.” His eyes gleamed. “Let me know.”

  Sergeant Linde started. “I’m sorry?”

  “If Akhona did in fact return from the dead, please do let me know. I’d be highly intrigued to know how the feat was accomplished.”

  They resumed walking. Just as Viktor began to suspect Jans was ready to spring a trap, they emerged into the tasting room from a different passage by which they had arrived.

  Van Draker spread his hands. “You’ve seen it all, I’m afraid, except for a few storage halls which haven’t been used in fifty years. I warned you it was modest.”

  With a sinking heart, Viktor realized why van Draker had brought them inside and agreed to the tour. Whatever he had wanted to conceal from them was still hidden. If Viktor and Naomi tried to obtain a warrant, they would now have a hard time overcoming the fact that they had seen inside the wine cellar and found nothing of interest.

  On the walk back to Sergeant Linde’s Land Cruiser, cutting across the hill by the light of the crescent moon, Viktor couldn’t stop thinking about the conversation with van Draker and the appearance of
Robey Joubert, the man Naomi claimed was a deceased classmate. Viktor felt exposed on the hill, subject to the watchful eye of the manor, and he dispelled his tension with a long breath.

  “Thank you for stepping out in the cemetery,” he said. “You didn’t have to do that.”

  “He had his hand on a weapon. I would hardly be doing my duty if I didn’t intervene.”

  “Will there be repercussions?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t know what to make of any of this, professor.” She folded her arms across her chest and shuddered.

  “Call me Viktor,” he said absently, glancing back at the manor. What manner of thing, what dark creation of van Draker’s, was incubating inside? When the Land Rover finally appeared, he wiped his brow with relief. “I believe the time has come for a full exchange of information.”

  Naomi bit her lip and surprised him by saying, “Well, I can hardly sleep after that. I know it’s late, but would you care for a nightcap?”

  “You’re willing to discuss what you know about van Draker?”

  Her eyes grew distant as she nodded.

  -22-

  On the way to Ronnie Lemieux’s tire shop, guided by GPS, eyes skittering back and forth between the rearview and the road, Grey thought about canceling his plane ticket to New York. He decided to call Sergeant Palmer instead, then changed his mind and dialed 411 to get the number for the NYPD.

  Unable to make a decision, he set the phone down and gripped the wheel. He couldn’t think straight. He didn’t know what to do.

  Deep breaths, Grey. You have to hold it together.

  With a shudder so deep it scooped him out and left him hollow, Grey forced his rage and grief to the background and tried to think it all through. The first forty-eight hours were critical to a missing persons investigation. Scratch that. A kidnapping.

  Revered Dale had notified the police, but an investigation would take too long. Even if Grey went solo, he would have to scour the streets and work backwards, or start wading into the white supremacist community. He would go that route if he must, but he had the gut feeling the order to kidnap Charlie had come from Dag—who was right here in Atlanta.