He wanted to say something profound but could only manage, “I’m here, baby.” It didn’t matter. They both knew full well that he’d barely made it in time, and the fact that she was in his arms alive was enough.
As the EMT shut the door to give them some privacy, the sky above collapsed under the weight of the rain it was holding and came down in drumbeats against the roof of the ambulance. Parker listened to it as he cradled Trudy’s head under his chin and rocked her back and forth.
After a while, when her crying stopped, he scolded her gently. “You should’ve let them take you to the hospital.”
She shook her head. “Not without you.” And since her voice was threatening another deluge of tears, he moved immediately to appease it.
“Okay, okay. I got you. I’m not going anywhere. We’ll go together.”
A few machines mounted beneath the stretcher were beeping aimlessly as the two of them sat in the cramped cocoon of medical boxes and equipment and listened to the rain. Finally, because he simply had to, he said, “Trudy, I’m so sor—”
“No. No apologies,” she said.
“But—”
She pulled back and looked at him with swollen eyes. “Evan. Stop it. You didn’t send those men.”
“Yeah, I know, it’s just that—”
Then, she stunned him. “And while we’re at it? You didn’t draft Waheeb into becoming a translator for the army or tell all those men at Outpost Keating to enlist, either.”
The rain lightened and then returned full force before she continued. “You’ve got to stop taking responsibility for the whole world, Evan. Especially for the evil in it.”
“What?”
“The men who dragged Waheeb away as a traitor? They did what they did. Same as the monsters who surrounded that outpost determined to kill everyone in it. Each time, Evan? Each time you were trying to do the right thing. You were trying to protect people or save them.”
“But . . . I failed.”
“Did you? Really? Waheeb joined up to provide for his family, to give them an opportunity at a better life, didn’t he?”
Parker nodded.
“And with the money the army gave his family after his death, he did. Because of his sacrifice, didn’t they get out of that godforsaken country?”
“Yes.”
“And yeah, a lot of men died at the outpost. But if you hadn’t been there, a lot more men might’ve died too, right?”
Parker nodded again.
Then, her voice dropped to a sad whisper. “Look what you almost just did, Evan. You almost blew that man’s head off, right in front of me.”
He felt sick with shame. “Trudy . . .”
She cupped his ears with her hands and forced him to look her in the eye. “You’ve got to go to therapy more, and you’ve got to let go of all this, do you understand? You’ve got to see . . .”
Sadness, the desert and the war all tried desperately to cover his eyes. “See what?”
“That you’re a good man, Evan. Period.”
He was trying to muster a reply when she put her fingers over his lips, signaling an end to the conversation, and kissed him on the forehead.
After a few minutes, he reached back and rapped on the ambulance door with his knuckles. The EMT opened it and hopped in with them, looking relieved to be out of the rain.
“You staying with her?” he asked.
Parker nodded. Because he was.
Forever, really.
Because he realized, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that in this woman he had a future that could give him a chance to finally leave the past behind.
One way or another.
One Gray Day
The Parker Trilogy Book 3
Tony Faggioli
For Ed, thanks for being such
a shining example of faith.
“When you start to live outside yourself, it’s all dangerous.”
— Ernest Hemingway
Prologue
The old man walked unevenly down the side of the road, his grief like a bag over his shoulder throwing him off balance, his feet stirring up dirt clouds beneath the canopy of maple trees that stretched over the road between him and the cold Connecticut sky. He wanted to be alone, but her words would not leave him.
A flock of sparrows lit from a nearby tree and flew downward, towards the east, before reversing course entirely and swooping towards the west in a sharp curve upwards, as if they were dancing with the currents in the air. And this reminded him of her, too. How he hated to dance but she always managed to get him onto the dance floor and how, once there, she made him feel weightless and less awkward. Like his feet weren’t made of stone. Like his heart was made of feathers.
A truck was approaching on the newly paved road. A Studebaker, maybe a few years old, it came by loaded with teenagers, the radio on too loud, playing that irritating new Buddy Holly song that was all over the place these days. The old man sighed. She had left him behind now and it felt like so had the world. Ike would be leaving office soon and God help everyone if that Kennedy kid won office.
Yeah. As if it mattered. As if anything mattered anymore. The sky could collapse like a curtain over the forest now, right before his eyes, and he couldn’t have cared less. He knew he wasn’t in his right mind, but that was because her words would not let his mind be. They kept floating there. A seven-word sentence rolling over and over behind his eyes, blinding his concentration.
The thing was, the old man knew, he knew, you weren’t ever supposed to love someone this much. He’d known it all his life. Love was a dangerous thing. He’d seen it stroll in and out of his courtroom like a harlot, from divorce cases to crimes of passion, over twenty-five years on the bench. He told himself that the former didn’t understand the weight of true love, and the latter had been crushed by the responsibility of it. All along, thinking that what he and her had was different. That what they had was special. And it was true, for the most part. Their love story had not resulted in divided property or a bloody murder.
But it had ended, all the same, hadn’t it? And now the old man finally understood that wild, crazed look people would often have in his courtroom. Eyes full of both rage and desperation. Sometimes the men would have it, sometimes the women. It was the look you had when you had a broken heart with no idea how to fix it. When the realization was finally dawning on you that it would never be fixed. That it would just clunk along now, like a broken motor.
They’d never had any children together. She couldn’t. It didn’t matter. He loved her all the same. Even more, really, because he was then more the focus of her life. There was more time to read together, take walks together, travel together. They worked with the church for a while, as foster parents, until the goodbyes became too hard. After that, he volunteered with troubled youth in the area and she worked for a time at the orphanage in Waterbury, enjoying the kids like rays from the sun, knowing the warmth would pass each day and the night would come but there was always tomorrow.
He sighed and moved on, down the road, still walking away from home, knowing that eventually he would have to walk back, the day cool but feeling hot, both from his clothes and what he was sure was a rising fever in his body. Not born of sickness, no, but rather born of rage. Step by step he made his way, knowing full well that he’d left behind a house full of family and guests, all dressed in black. But not him. He’d worn his favorite gray suit for her because she said it brought out the blue in his eyes and he wanted to look good for her, one last time. But it had been too much. The wake. The funeral. Like rocks being poured over him in a quarry, he would never escape. The reception afterwards had been too much, too. How could they chat and eat and so blatantly display that life was just moving right along? So he’d fled his own home, the guests speaking in hushed whispers of concern, a few of them telling the others to let him be. To let him walk it off. As if grief were a cramp and not a permanent wound.
The light was beginning to wane and stretch lazily across
the horizon, but he didn’t have far to go. Just a little further and he’d be there, at her favorite meadow, where she liked to sneak off with hot tea in her Peanuts thermos and wait behind the same large oak tree, every time, for the deer to come out. As if the deer didn’t know by now, hadn’t told each other over the years in whichever way deer communicated, that she was there. That the slender woman with the soft brown hair and caramel colored eyes, that had both faded over the years, was one of the loving humans you could trust not to harm you.
When he arrived, he began to cry immediately, just like he knew he would. He let the tears come because he knew he had no hope in the world of stopping them. They burned his face and blurred his vision and did absolutely nothing to quench his rage that was boiling deep in his soul. He was a church-going man with a regular seat in the same pew every Sunday, and he knew full well that the rage in him now was not healthy. That it was so red hot that it might be from hell itself. He didn’t care.
God, you see, had done this to him. God. And he had come to this meadow, like Jacob, to have it out with Him. There would be blood. He took off his suit jacket, folded it in half, laid it over one of the tree stumps nearby, and waded full speed into the tall grass, fists balled up, past wanting answers and only wanting revenge on the being who had done this to him. Who had taught him how to love and then taken that love away, despite a thousand prayers at the foot of her bed the past year, as the leukemia destroyed her one ruthless, gasping, rattling breath at a time.
God had done that to her. God. No need for explanations. That would be too respectful. No. Now it was time for open defiance. Confrontation. And his rage in him agreed, wholeheartedly, that this was a grand idea. That every Maker had to someday contend with what it made. People were not toy cars. They weren’t ideas to just be thought up and then erased. No. No. No.
He was still crying as he rolled up his sleeves. When he noticed there were no deer present, he was not the least bit surprised. He had no doubt they knew she was dead and gone and that somewhere in the depths of the woods they were mourning, too. And the thought of this brought too much pain to bear, so he looked up into the sky and screamed full bore. He screamed again and again and again, demanding an audience with Him. Cursing Him. Using foul words that he’d never used or allowed others to use in his presence in his entire life. Daring Him to come out.
Daring Him.
Instead, all he got were her words again, back in his mind, refusing to go away. So worried about him. She had been beyond concerned. As if she knew his faith, his soul, were not strong enough for what was coming. For her exit. She had loved him so much she had stayed way past when her pain was too much to try and protect him. But God had finally insisted, hadn’t He? So, a day before she died, she uttered her final words to him. Calling him by name. Promising him that he’d be okay. Promising it. Then? Just seven words.
“A broken heart is an open heart,” she whispered, her frail hands cupping his, her eyes imploring him to continue the journey of his life without her now. As if it were that easy. As if you could lose the love of your life and just pack up and push on. Like a vagabond. Like some damned nomad.
He was still screaming in the meadow—his voice going hoarse, his face strained, the memory like a vicious shard of glass slicing into his mind—when he noticed it swaying there in the grass all by itself: a lone marigold, determined to outlive the autumn.
It was nothing special but . . . there was something about it that took his rage away, just like that. Perplexed, he realized that his sorrow remained. But the flower kept looking at him and he at it, so he reached down and plucked it.
Night was approaching, and a cold wind came through the hills and across the meadow. But he no longer felt alone. He had the flower, and that was something. A little something. Something better than nothing.
“A broken heart is an open heart,” she had said. But had she lied to him? Because the truth was, sometimes a broken heart was just a broken heart. Especially when you were too old to put it back together again. What was he going to do now? Who was he going to turn to? The answer was simple: the same being he’d come here to fight. He struggled mightily to get the words to the prayer out, but he finally did. “God. Please forgive me. Please help me.”
Silence. He sighed, walked back to the tree stump, grabbed his suit jacket, and was just about to head back to the house when he felt the air crackle like lightning behind him and go white-hot. Something was there. Human instinct said to turn around and then not to.
For a tick of time, nothing happened, then someone spoke his name in a voice that was deep, authoritative and came from somewhere to his right.
“William Chesterson?”
“Y-y-yes?” was all he managed in reply.
“You have sinned greatly by calling on the Living God with pride and blasphemy. But you have also prayed for forgiveness and help. And God has heard.”
He was suddenly filled with fear. “What? Wait. I’m sorry. I didn’t—”
“Don’t apologize, my friend. Because with what now lies ahead of you?” The voice was sad. “You may regret that your prayer today was ever heard.”
The old man gasped, and as the air around him crackled with energy, he was suddenly ripped from all the reality he ever knew.
But he did not drop the marigold.
Chapter One
The city was stained with rain. Rain that wouldn’t end. Rain that came sideways from the west one day and in flat, hard sheets straight down the next. In Seattle, two weeks of rain would’ve been nothing to notice, but in Los Angeles, the city built in a desert, it was unheard of. The streets became slick with oil and grease that leached up from the asphalt, making them hard to navigate and turning the freeways into treacherous strings of car accidents. The trash of the city clogged drains, causing the gutters to overflow, and the LA Reservoir reached its highest point since 1948. Hollywood Lake, man-made and hemmed in by the Hollywood Hills, became a spectacle, climbing so high that it began to drag down at the roots of trees along its bank. Landslides struck the Foothills, the Valley flooded and the beaches became frigid in the face of a churning ocean that would not relent. The news reported on it all as if it were the End Times, while the rest of the country, quite honestly, laughed. Angelenos were famous for wilting in the face of a two-day storm, but two weeks? Two weeks was unthinkable. Two weeks was outrageous. Two weeks had them readying for the apocalypse.
Detective Evan Parker sat at his desk, numb, and watched the wetness outside his window at the LAPD’s Hollenbeck Station and couldn’t have cared less. He had only one thing on his mind: Güero Martinez, the drug dealer and human sex trafficker that had, nearly a week ago, tried to murder Parker’s girlfriend, Trudy. The coward hadn’t tried to do it himself, though. No. Instead, he’d called Parker to say it was going to happen and then sent his goons to do all the dirty work. Seven of them, to be exact. Four of whom Parker had sent to the hospital and three of whom Parker had sent to the morgue. It had to be done. If he had to do it all over again, he would, and in exactly the same way.
But that still didn’t make what had just gone down, minutes ago, in his meeting with Captain Holland and the Feds, any easier to swallow.
“We’re removing you from the case,” the cap had said, barely even able to look at Parker.
You should’ve seen it coming, Parker told himself. The truth was, things had begun to go downhill fast once the press had caught on. Detective Evan Parker? Wasn’t he the one who helped catch The Bread Man, that serial killer who had been murdering young women across San Bernardino County? Yes. But hadn’t he done that while on suspension? Yes. But, wait. Wasn’t he also the one who later saw his partner, Detective Napoleon Villa, get shot to death in Hollenbeck Park? Yeah. Then, waitaminute now, wasn’t he also the one who just two weeks ago had been involved in a shootout at The Mayan nightclub downtown? The one where his newest partner, Eloy Campos, was shot and wounded? Yep. They’d put Parker on desk duty during the investigation of that m
ost recent fiasco. And now this: an apartment complex in Pasadena turned into a scene from a movie – bodies everywhere, a man with a hunting knife through his hand – during Detective Evan Parker’s bold rescue of his girlfriend.
The LA Times was in convulsions over the story. In a city and a country already on the brink with police brutality stories all over the news, valid or otherwise, it was trouble, and Parker was trouble. As a result, the department was backpedaling quickly on any notion of supporting him in the face of all the heat.
Anyone could see that it could break either way. But in politics it always only broke one way: the easy way. Parker knew his number was up when the chief had strolled in that morning with a lieutenant, both of them in full-dress code, marching with a purpose, a wake of anxiety spreading out before them.
It reminded Parker of when he was in the military. When the officers got involved, it would all turn into a big shit show, sooner rather than later. And sure enough, that’s exactly what had happened the minute they all gathered in the conference room.
SWAT Sergeant Davenport had fought for Parker, and so had Detectives Murillo and Klink, the latter getting so upset that his face turned a beet red that spread up his forehead and over his balding scalp like a hot rash. But surprisingly it had been the Fed heading up the Güero Martinez case, FBI Special Agent Olivia Clopton, who had been most adamant that Parker stay on.
In the middle was Captain Holland, his face twisted with concern as he tried arguing that Parker be allowed to work the case from the station, in a research capacity only. But by then the DA had arrived, in his tight brown suit and fancy blue tie, and he was having none of it. “No way in the world he stays on,” he said, waving his hand at Parker. “If he does? When we catch this guy, his defense attorney will be licking his chops. I can hear the arguments for police vendetta and evidence tampering already, and who knows what else.”
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