Chalk Man

  Chalk Man

  Tony Faggioli

  ATTICUS CREATIVE, INC.

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Epilogue

  Also by Tony Faggioli

  About the Author

  For The Amie Street Gang

  Chris, Tony, Billy, Troy, J.R., Dave and Erik

  Thanks for every single memory

  Stay Gold

  Copyright ATTICUS CREATIVE, INC. September 2020

  This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  ISBN (ebook): 978—7331018-1-3

  ISBN (Print): 978-7331018-0-6

  Chapter 1

  Detective Evan Parker made his way down the narrow walkway between Cloven Street and Oak Circle and carefully studied the chalk letters on the pink concrete bricks. The words were scribbled in a child’s hand, spaced out and erratic.

  Followwwww

  Meeeeee

  Drawwwww her

  They’d been made by a ten-year-old boy in the neighborhood named Charlie Henson, which in and of itself was no great thing, except that Charlie Henson was currently missing and this was the last place he’d been seen alive.

  Even more disturbing was the drawing that had been done past the words, further down the wall, using the same colors of blue, green, white and yellow that the words were written in. It was the image of a circular face with wide eyes and a gaping mouth, like a Mayan mask of some kind, drawn in nearly professional detail.

  It was obviously not drawn in a child’s hand.

  Uniform cops had already canvassed the neighborhood and gathered what preliminary details they could. Depending on who you talked to, Charlie was known in the neighborhood as either a troubled kid or a troublesome kid. His parents had divorced a year earlier over his “antics” or “issues.” The father had moved back to his home state of Missouri. The mother was currently in their small rented home down the street, inconsolable, and under the watchful care of one of Parker’s fellow detectives from LAPD’s Hollenbeck Station, Detective Juan Murillo and an EMT unit that had been called in.

  Right now, though, Parker’s focus turned to what was perhaps the most damning thing about the scene. There in the corner of the cut-through, as if it had been cast aside in a hurry, was a red and blue Captain America backpack, left behind like a sentinel to report on a doom that no one wanted to contemplate.

  A voice startled him from behind. “What do you make of the drawings?” It was Adam Klink, another one of Parker’s fellow detectives.

  Parker shrugged. “A game, maybe?”

  “Word is the kid only played by himself.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “He was . . . odd, I guess.”

  “Odd how?”

  “Most of the neighbors are kinda vague about it. Family just moved here about six months ago. Not long after that, the parents split up. Kid was already struggling at school, that only made it worse.”

  Parker continued to work his way down the wall, looking for any evidence he could—a strip of clothing, a patch of hair, a drop of blood—as Klink followed. “Struggling in school how? Like, ya know, making friends and stuff?”

  “Naw,” Klink said. “Worse. He was getting pretty mercilessly bullied, which is why the mom had kept him home from school today.”

  “Great,” Parker said before he gave a heavy sigh. “Kids, huh?”

  “Merciless little beasts, if ya ask me,” Klink said.

  “Some. Yeah. Anyone know why he was being bullied?”

  Klink was studying the rough asphalt walkway, his blue eyes scanning from left to right and back again. “No details there. I’m assuming for the usual reason anyone is bullied: for being different.”

  “Or because the bullies feel different.”

  Klink grunted. “Good point.”

  The left side of the walkway was not as uniform as the right side. It began with the stucco wall of the garage from an adjacent property. After about ten feet, it ended and was replaced by a long stretch of rusty chain link fence about four feet high. The walkway itself was narrow, about thirty feet long, and made of roughly poured asphalt. For some reason, the walkway felt a bit claustrophobic, as it dead-ended up ahead at another concrete wall that doglegged sharply right to the cul-de-sac.

  “I’ve walked it five times,” Klink said.

  Parker nodded and shrugged. “I figured. Just gotta do it for myself.”

  “I know, I know. Can never have too many eyes look over a crime scene.”

  “Murillo get anything out of the mom yet?” Parker asked.

  “Nope. He says she’s just talking in a loop: she made the kid breakfast, went to work, came home, and he was gone,” Klink answered as he kicked at something on the asphalt.

  “What’s that?”

  “Bubble gum wrapper. I’ll bag it.”

  Parker paused and put his hands on his hips. It was a sunny, normal kind of looking Los Angeles day. As if the sun had risen, looked out over the blue sky and down upon the tiny people below and said, “Sorry, folks. Nothing special. Just your usual boring dose of sunshine today.”

  He pivoted his attention to the chain link fence and his heart sank. Beyond the fence was a foreboding stretch of tall dead grass on what was probably county property. It led down to a wash and a much taller fence, about eight feet high. If someone had hurt Charlie, they might find him in that tall grass. Or maybe Charlie had gone exploring and tried to climb the fence to the wash and fallen over, which might mean he’d be down below, injured perhaps, but still alive. It was impossible to tell from the walkway if the fall was a big one.

  “None of the grass looks disturbed or flattened,” Klink said as he came up alongside Parker.

  “Not the tall stuff, no. But it’s too hard to tell with the short stuff or dirt areas.”

  “Yeah. Well. No one’s gone over yet, so I guess that means we’ll be the first.”

  Parker nodded, found a spot in the fence that looked solid enough to support his weight and used his arms to push up and leap over it. After Klink had done the same, they carefully made their way forward. “You got the right; I got the left?” Parker asked. Klink nodded.

  They both scanned the area, but the grass offered nothing but weeds, a few old beer cans and wind-blown sections of the LA Times. So, they advanced to the fence along the wash, Parker noticing that he was holding his breath a little more with each step along the way. If there was the body of a little boy down there . . .

  There wasn’t. And Parker could have sworn that he heard a sigh of relief out of Klink to match his own. From their vantage point it was obvious that if little Charlie had tried to climb this fence then the fall to the dry concrete below would most likely have killed him. It was a good twenty-five feet.<
br />
  “Lots of trash down there . . .”

  “From lots of rain gutters . . .”

  “But no Charlie.”

  Parker shook his head. “Nope.”

  After a few more moments of looking around they were just turning to go back to the walkway when Parker noticed something: another section of concrete brick that ran perpendicular to the wash fence, barely visible because it was almost completely overgrown with thick ivy. Only a small patch of the concrete was visible.

  “Shit. Do you see that?” Klink said. But Parker was already making his way through the grass to the wall, his eyes narrowing with suspicion.

  A hole had been knocked through the wall, like a secret passageway, to the busy street beyond. But that was only the half of it. More curious still was yet another word, written in chalk, right over the hole.

  haLLO!

  But the writing looked to be in a completely different hand, the letters more spaced out and completely inconsistent in style.

  “Lower case, lower case, three upper case . . . and what’s with the weird exclamation point?” Klink asked.

  Parker shrugged. “I dunno. Inverted pyramid over a smiley face?”

  “Yeah, but I’m not getting a playful vibe.”

  “Me neither,” Parker replied. Then, as he knelt down and peered through the hole, his heart sank once again. There, in a patch of dirt just inside the hole, was a piece of white chalk.

  “Hmm.”

  “What?” Klink said.

  “Get forensics over here. I think we have the kid’s chalk stick box.”

  “Shit,” Klink said under his breath. “Okay.” Then he hesitated before adding, “But let’s just hope he wandered off with a friend from here.”

  Parker grimaced. “Didn’t you just say that he didn’t have any friends?”

  “Yeah. I know. I know. So maybe it was a good ol’ fashioned imaginary friend,” Klink added before he hurried off to the walkway and began calling for assistance.

  Parker was still staring at the chalk stick box when the air grew warm and the grass next to him stirred for no good reason. It immediately reminded Parker of the grass at Evergreen Park, and that fateful day when his partner, Detective Napoleon Villa, had been gunned down in a desperate attempt to save his nephew, Efren, from the forces of evil that had carried a case they’d been working—the now notorious Kyle Fasano case—on to its fateful conclusion. It had been nine months since that day and nine months since Parker had learned that the dead do not always leave us. Sometimes they stay. Because they want to. Because they need to.

  The warmth of the air around him told him that Napoleon was back again and when he spoke next, it only confirmed it. Klink’s right, he said.

  “About what? The imaginary friend?”

  Yeah. But there are some imaginary friends you don’t want to play with, Parker. And unfortunately, Charlie’s found one.

  Parker sighed. So as not to sound like some muttering idiot if Klink happened to hear him talking back, he spoke to Napoleon using only his mind. “Please tell me he’s not dead.”

  Napoleon shook his head. He’s not. Yet. But something’s taken him . . . out there, he added, motioning his head toward the city.

  “And?” Parker asked with concern.

  Napoleon sighed. And we don’t have much time to save him.

  Chapter 2

  After the forensics team did a field match between the fingerprints on the chalk stick box and one that was on the Xbox controller in Charlie Henson’s bedroom, they felt confident enough to call it a match and over the next hour the CSI team cordoned off the entire field. They parsed it into sections and moved methodically across the field, along the fence line of the wash and eventually through the hole in the wall and out on to the street beyond. Besides the beer cans and newspapers that Parker and Klink had already seen, they found more overgrown grass, a scattering pack of cockroaches and a crumpled lollipop wrapper. Everything was numbered, bagged and tagged.

  It was then decided that an APB should be issued for a little boy, aged ten, last seen in a blue-and-white-striped Old Navy t-shirt and blue jeans. The simple act of doing this brought a new sense of urgency to the scene as Parker joined Murillo and the semicircle of EMTs that had gathered around Charlie’s mother in the kitchen of their tiny apartment.

  Ms. Henson looked to be in her late twenties, with stringy brown hair and a pale, drawn face that had probably looked exhausted even before her life had descended into the chaos it was in now. Tragically, try as they might, they couldn’t get her to lock in on whether or not Charlie had worn his blue Converse sneakers that day or white Nikes, and it was her inability to marshal this simple piece of information that seemed to be the final handful of sand that tilted the scales of guilt in her mind and sent her into hysteria. “I never should’ve left him home alone,” she cried over and over as she lowered her head and ground her balled fists against her temples. When she finally looked up again, her green eyes were glazed over with the wetness of tears and the dullness of shock. There was no use—and no need—in pressing. It was a simple enough question to answer. Quietly, Parker went into Charlie’s bedroom and looked around. There at the foot of the bed were his white Nikes. Since Charlie only owned two pairs of shoes, blue Converse it was.

  A crowd of neighbors had assembled along the sidewalk, the virulent sounds of hushed rumors and innuendo coming through the screen of Charlie’s partially opened bedroom window, which Parker checked. Neither the window, frame nor screen had been tampered with. As Murillo joined Klink outside and began canvassing the neighbors for a second time, Napoleon studied the bedroom with Parker.

  What do you see, Parker?

  Parker looked around. The walls were painted off-white and the ceiling was sprayed with popcorn stucco, which was cracking around the heating vent, a brown water stain in one corner. There was a weight to the room that belied its emptiness. Parker reminded himself to maintain his emotional distance from things, which he managed to do for about five seconds until he noticed the tiny finger smudges around the light switch. Small hands. If they found Charlie somewhere, not alive, Parker didn’t want to be there.

  Shake it off, Parker. You’re not helping anyone with the morbidity.

  A small twin bed was against one wall, covered with a disheveled set of Captain America sheets and a mismatching Iron Man pillowcase. On the wall over the bed there were three posters of different Captain America comic book covers. Against the opposite wall there was a tiny desk, on which sat random sheets of lined paper covered with homework writing. Beyond that? No photos. No knickknacks. The other two walls were bare. The floor was carpeted and torn in places.

  “There’s not much to see here, man.”

  Keep looking.

  “It would be faster—”

  Yes. I know. And we’ve already talked about that. I can’t just give directives—it would interfere too much with the balance of things. And again, you’re overestimating what I know in the first place. We’re both working different sides of the same street, as it were. Yours the physical, mine the spiritual.

  “I know. And as we each uncover clues on our respective sides, we help uncover clues on the other.”

  More or less, yes.

  Parker shook his head and looked at Napoleon, who, like always these days, was dressed in a pair of tan slacks and a white dress shirt, the sleeves rolled up to his elbows. He was invisible to everyone but Parker, even though he didn’t appear ghost-like in the slightest. Save for the soft tan-colored aura that outlined his body, Parker would’ve though he was present in the flesh. But he knew better. “Yeah, yeah. But this is all taking time, and meanwhile we have a little boy in grave danger here!”

  Which is why you need to argue less and look more.

  Parker sighed heavily, put his hands on his hips and looked around further. In truth, the room felt like a box of loneliness. There was a small TV in the corner with a beat-up Xbox attached to it, both of which were covered in fine finge
rprint powder, along with the controller. His gut told him to turn the TV and the Xbox on. He was not surprised when Call of Duty came up on the screen. It was a popular game, for those that had never actually been in real combat at least, but regardless, ten was a little young to be playing it.

  “Okay. Not a ton of parental supervision going on, I’m guessing.”

  No wide assumptions just yet, Parker. It could also just be a mom desperately trying to keep her child happy somehow. We already know we’ve got a sudden move west, then a divorce, the dad splits, maybe, and then this disappearance.

  “Fair enough. So whatever Charlie wants—”

  And Mom can afford.

  “—Charlie gets.”

  Yes.

  Parker was no stranger to Xbox, though he exclusively played the sports games. Any first-person shooter game was a high risk to trigger his PTSD, which he had finally managed to tamp down.

  Reaching out, he scooped up Charlie’s controller and began to thumb through the menu, smiling at Charlie’s avatar (Captain America, of course) and gamertag: 723Bucky. Parker smiled sadly—Bucky was Captain America’s sidekick—and then took note of the games menu. Minecraft. NHL 2019. LEGO Marvel Super Heroes. And something called Skylanders Imaginators, which Parker had never heard of. Beyond that, nothing of great note. Until he noticed Charlie’s message box. There were five messages.

  The first three had been sent the night before from someone who went by the gamertag BigArch5. The fourth was from a HotGirl57 and sent early this morning, just after seven, and the last message was from a WillowWalker10.