Klink shrugged angrily. “Man. That’s some X-Files type shit right there, Cap.”
“The tape is all we had to go off. No mobile phones. These guys, La Marea as a whole, and including Güero, their procedures are very sophisticated. The rule is simple: throwaway phones only, some foreign-bought, tossed at least once a day, if not two or three times. Human intel is all we have to work with.”
Parker sighed. There was his answer: No. But still, he had nothing to hide, regardless. He could actually ask the Feds to tap his cell in case Güero dared to call him again. But…no. Something in Parker’s gut was practically screaming for him not to say a word. Why? He didn’t know.
Murillo rolled his eyes. “They sound like a damned terrorist group.”
Clopton shrugged. “It was our efforts at going after such groups that caused the drug cartels to begin adopting many of their same practices, unfortunately.”
Holland seemed to agree. “Regardless, you could’ve just asked, or gone through IA—”
“No time for that. You guys are the ones that stepped into this, remember? So, we can all pitch a fit about protocol or—”
“Or what?” the captain said loudly.
“Or we can get back to trying to help the women we were just talking about. Remember them? The ones who right this moment, in this city, your city, are being forced to have sex against their will?”
The room went quiet before Agent Clopton leaned onto the conference table with her hands spread and added, “Because with that in mind, Captain Holland? I couldn’t give a shit about you boys and your hurt feelings.”
The Gray Man blinked away again, leaving Hector standing alone in the foyer, staring at the floor and then the doorknob that awaited his hand. The muscles in his neck went tight as he struggled with the moment before him.
When he opened the door to step out of the house, Hector squinted hard against the flashing lights that were barely piercing the darkness of the surrounding neighborhood.
His vision seemed warped, like someone had slipped filters over his eyes and he could see the world differently somehow. The moment didn’t last long, just enough time for him to make out five police cars and eight cops with their guns, all in exaggerated silhouettes.
Beyond them, about a dozen creatures with glowing red eyes were either pacing along the edges of the lights or had climbed up a few telephone poles— and all were glaring at him. Some were grossly malformed wolves with massive humps on their backs and long, glistening fangs; others looked like monkeys with incredibly long arms and claws that scratched so deeply into the telephone poles that you could hear the wood giving way.
Hector felt his jaw go slack. The law had come for him tonight, that much was obvious, but evil had, too.
The moment, and the vision, was ruined when two of the cop cars lit their spotlights right into his face, blinding him completely.
The voice boomed over the microphone again. “Hands behind your head with your fingers interlaced! Now!”
Hector complied.
“Drop to your knees and remain still.”
The overwhelming urge to run, the instinct that these men with their badges always brought out in him, came back with a vengeance. But he knew that would be suicide. Too many guns were trained on him.
He heard the back door of the house crash open, and heavy, booted feet scampering in behind him now. Guns all around. It would be easy to take a pass on this whole “millionth” thing. To catch a few bullets in the head, wait for The Gray Man to reappear so that Hector could say, “Sorry, man. Peace. Out.”
Except there was no peace where he would be going next at that point, and Hector knew it. Somehow, someway, this was his only feeble path to ever finding any kind of place in heaven.
“Don’t move, not one inch, you little bastard,” a woman said from behind him.
Then the usual pomp and circumstance ensued. His wrists were grabbed, he was forced to the ground and cuffed, then picked up and surrounded by cops, one of whom put on plastic gloves and searched his pockets. Hector had a second to see the name badge of the woman who was behind him, “Davenport,” as she stood there staring at Hector with two other members of the SWAT team, her AR-15 angled across her body and pointed toward the ground.
“He’s clear, Sarge,” one of the cops said to the woman. She nodded, but she did not break her stare with Hector. Not for a second.
“Tell me. How does it feel?” she said to Hector.
He cleared his throat. “How does what feel?”
“How does shooting a defenseless woman in the neck from nearly point-blank range feel?” Her eyes were not red, like those creatures he’d seen a moment ago, but they still burned when Hector looked into them. He looked away and ignored her.
Her voice was seething. “No answer? How about shooting someone unarmed in the head, like the boy in the supply room? How about that?”
Again, Hector simply shook his head.
Davenport sighed heavily. “Get this low-life piece-of-shit coward out of here.”
Two cops, one on each side, dragged him to one of the police cars, where they opened the door, read him his Miranda rights and placed him in the back seat.
Again. He’d been here before. Different car, same plastic smell, with no handles on the door and a black cage that separated the front and back seats.
The radio squawked as two lights on it flashed from yellow to red and back again. With his ankles crossed, Hector closed his eyes and leaned his head back, feeling his shoulders groan against his arms, jammed as they were against the seat behind him.
Outside there was more commotion as cops went here or there, chased off a few nosey neighbors, put away their equipment and cleared the rest of the house.
So, they had him now. And they had to have the gun from The Mayan. Probably had statements from everyone there, too. No doubt by the time he got to the station, they’d be rounding up witnesses to eyeball him in a lineup and that would be that. Not a public defender on earth, not even Atticus Finch, would be able to save him then.
But that wouldn’t be necessary anyway.
“Yeah. I know,” Hector said softly into the emptiness of the car, because he could feel The Gray Man, sitting right there next to him. “I’m supposed to go in and flat-out plead guilty.”
No reply in words. No feelings. Just a silent affirmation that moved through the car like a mental push.
The drive to the police station was like a parade of goodbyes, and Hector allowed himself the moments. Leaning against the window, he said farewell to each spot they passed by: the corner where he’d first crashed his bike, the yard where he’d gotten into a fight with Bobby, Evergreen Park where he’d run the gauntlet to earn his way into the gang, and Arroyo Liquor where he’d bought his first Old English 800, before the eighth-grade dance, and gotten wasted.
As they drove on, there was the house where Lorena, his first true crush, once lived. The first girl that had ever let him put his hand up her shirt. Then they passed Chico’s house, the windows dark, and a few blocks up they passed the street where, if you made a left and went a half mile, you’d find Bennie’s apartment.
Hector smiled sadly. Each place had a name and a memory attached to it, but now each one was becoming a monument to the past. He doubted he would ever see these streets again, and though it was stupid and selfish, sorrow overwhelmed him and tears filled his eyes.
Once at the station he was fingerprinted, photographed and booked into custody. He felt all sorts of eyes on him, but he was in no mood to trade glares or engage in anything but required conversation. Name. Address. Etc.
They removed his shoes and belt, then put him in a cell by himself, which was new. He’d never gotten the Ritz-Carlton treatment before, and as he sat on the cot he realized that he wasn’t just tired, he was stone-cold exhausted. There was a heaviness on him, a depression, that was moving to shut him down. To switch off his eyes, unplug his brain and take him away from this place.
He realize
d that this would be the only way he would ever be free again: in sleep, in dreams.
A few cells down, some guy, sounding high and delusional, was moaning, “I need help,” over and over again. The cops down the hallway were ignoring him, instead chattering among themselves about two guys in the general holding cell that were drunk and might go at it. Bets were being placed and a short debate broke out over how long to let the fight last.
It was sad. Everything was sad.
Living a life where only sleep was a way out of your misery was saddest of all.
He was just nodding off when a thought came to him that made the tiniest of smiles crease his lips—books. There was always the prison library.
He would still have books.
If nothing else, he could still live there, in the pages of someone else’s life.
Chapter Fourteen
After Michiko gave him a foul-tasting herb and made him chew it down, Father Soltera began to feel better almost instantly. They rested briefly, before she helped him to his feet and they began walking swiftly again. The Hanging Forest was behind them now, but the bodies were not. Two of them had fallen free from their nooses and were now stumbling around up ahead, pale and so decomposed that their eyes were gone. They were essentially blind, so they were easy to sidestep and evade as Father Soltera and Michiko moved past them and continued on.
After a time, Father Soltera and Michiko took a short rest before making their way down the path, Father Soltera taking notice of the changes in the landscape, which had now become a mix of more familiar looking plants, and trees and bushes that reminded him once again of the woods in Michigan from his seminary days.
Why, lately, was he remembering those days so much? First, back in his office a few times, before everything in that world had gone insane, and now here. There was a reason, he was sure of it, and he was just beginning to dig for it, like a dog for a bone, when he saw more bodies.
As he and Michiko grew closer to the first one, Father Soltera could see him clearly. It was an old man, with a face full of misery and a mop of black hair matted to his head. He was wearing an old, faded, tan shirt and blue shorts that were filthy with dirt. His arms were bent at the elbows and the fingers of one hand were playing with the fingers of the other, the rotted tips ticking softly against one another.
Michiko had sheathed her swords, and since they remained that way, Father Soltera was willing to guess that the man posed no threat.
“Who is it?” Father Soltera asked.
She shrugged and looked around, scanning the rest of the forest intently before she said cryptically, “Maybe you should ask him, tomodachi.”
The man had been walking aimlessly off to the left, but now he corrected his course so that he was headed directly toward them.
Father Soltera stopped walking and waited until the man was about ten feet away.
“Are you finally here to take me?” the man asked in a feeble, weary voice.
“What?” Father Soltera replied.
The man looked at the crucifix around Father Soltera’s neck. “You are a man of God, no?”
Taken aback, it took a moment for Father Soltera to respond. “Y-yes. I am.”
“Not of my God, but of God anyways.”
“There is but one—”
“What’s your name?” Michiko interjected.
The man, fidgety and confused, had eyes like a small bird, which darted in all directions in a sort of obsessive loop. He mumbled to himself between moments of actual speech, his lower lip seeming to be working feverishly to keep up with the words spilling from his head.
“The path goes in too many directions. It is so easy to get lost. I came here . . . oh, am I being rude? I’m sorry. My name is Ikuro.”
“Ikuro.” Michiko bowed. “I am Michiko, and this is my companion, Bernardino.”
Ikuro bowed. Not wanting to be rude, Father Soltera bowed back.
For no apparent reason, Ikuro added, “I used to be a musician.”
Michiko smiled. “Ah. What did you play?”
His lips grew still, and his face seemed to relax. “Violin.” And when he said it, he smiled so beautifully that Father Soltera was almost able to ignore his yellow, rotted teeth, one of which—his left incisor—was so loose that it was practically dangling from his gums. “But I left my instrument by my tree.”
Father Soltera’s eyes fell on the telephone cord that was dangling across Ikuro’s shirt. It was tan, like his shirt, which is why Father Soltera hadn’t noticed it earlier. Twisted along its length, it was knotted higher up, near Ikuro’s neck, the flesh of which was scarred with three deep lines of red with bruised borders. A dried line of blood, so old it was almost brown, trailed out of one of his ears.
The old man was looking right at him. “It broke.”
“Broke?”
“The line. My noose. It broke. From my tree.” Tears filled his eyes. “I failed.”
Father Soltera was taken aback. What to say, he wondered, to a man not of his own faith? Based on his earlier comment about not worshiping the same God, it was probably safe to assume that Ikuro was Buddhist, or perhaps Taoist, and as such there would be no point in bringing any lessons of Christ to bear here.
Except, perhaps, the most important lesson of all: to love.
Father Soltera stepped forward and embraced Ikuro, ignoring his frail body and its rank smell. “You have not failed.”
Ikuro’s small hands gripped feebly at Father Soltera. “Yes, I have. I came here to end my suffering. Instead, I’ve only prolonged it.”
“Why do you say that?”
“When the line broke, I did not die. I did not leave and yet . . . I did not stay.”
A dozen thoughts about the church, church doctrine, suicide and all that it entailed—from usurping the Lord’s will to the borderlands of purgatory—scrambled like panicked mice through Father Soltera’s mind. He knew the rules, had always wondered at their severity, and yet, again, they held no function over a nonbeliever.
He took a deep breath and did his best. “Ikuro, by not dying, by not taking your own life . . . you may not to be able to see it now . . . but you succeeded. You did not fail.”
“Ha! You call the way I am now anything but?”
Michiko came up beside them and put a hand on Ikuro’s shoulder. “What happened, my friend?”
A few staggered breaths rattled through Ikuro’s chest. “Before . . . or after?” And the way he asked it, like he didn’t really believe that either one of them really cared, was sad.
Michiko’s voice was barely a whisper now. “Either. Both.”
The old man sighed. “Before, I had a wife and two children. Then the tsunami came. I was on a business trip to Tokyo. I was not there to help. My wife and daughter were found in the car. It was turned upside down, washed into a ravine and caught between two large boulders. My son was not with them. He had been out riding his new bike at the park. They found him stuck in the top of a tree the next day at sunset.”
“I’m so sorry,” Michiko said. As she rubbed his back, he began to weep.
“That was the part I could never overcome,” he moaned as he looked into Father Soltera’s eyes. “My precious boy. My pride and joy. Just stuck in a tree.”
The forest around them remained motionless save for a few more bodies that had walked off the trail and off into the bushes.
Ikuro looked to the ground and continued. “He was only eight years old. Eight. In jeans and his Transformers T-shirt. At least my wife and daughter died together. But my boy? My boy died alone.”
Speechless, Father Soltera looked to Michiko, but she only shook her head slightly.
Ikuro took a deep breath. “As for after? What is after, if nothing but a sea of ‘before’s? Ha. I’m a foolish old man, no? I always wanted to be a poet, you see. But I was better at violin.”
“Yes, but—”
Ikuro held up his hand, determined to finish. “I could never get past the fact that he was found up in
that tree . . . at sunset. If I were a poet, I’d know how to explain that sunset. I think. Maybe. But after that? I could never watch another sunset again.” He wiped his eyes and looked up at them. “After that, the sun was just too heavy, don’t you see?”
They nodded at him, Father Soltera secretly grateful that Michiko knew better than to try to add words to the moment. Most of the time the only thing pain needed was silent company.
“So, after a year, I decided to come to The Forest. The telephone cord was a hasty and stupid decision. But I was not in my right mind. I packed an overnight bag, my violin and a bottle of chocolate milk, my son’s favorite. I drank it under the tree, played a song my wife used to love, and then hanged myself. But that’s not the worst part. The worst part is that I was almost there.” He shook his fist at these last words. “I was so . . . close!”
“Where?”
“There. Not here. And it was so peaceful. It was a sky of nothing but wide-open ease.” He was looking off into the forest now, but it was obvious he was seeing that sky again. “Then? The line broke.”
“You’ve been stuck here ever since?” Father Soltera asked.
He nodded.
But something wasn’t making sense. “You said the tsunami took your family. Do you mean the one in 2011? The one that partially destroyed that nuclear reactor?”
Ikuro nodded again.
“But, that was only seven years ago,” Father Soltera said, looking the man before him over again. “How old are you?”
“Forty-five,” Ikuro said, his expression confused, as if he found the question to be an odd one.
The Parker Trilogy Page 44