One In A Million (The Millionth Trilogy Book 1) Read online

  “Aren’t you listening? He’s a human being. In crisis, we revert back to our original programming, like any animal, sadly. I ain’t met a criminal yet who hasn’t. They all do.”

  The words were barely out of his mouth when Napoleon realized he’d just lied. There was one who hadn’t followed that pattern, wasn’t there? He pushed the thought out of his mind. He was teaching the rookie the rules, not the exceptions. Joaquin had been an exception the likes of which Napoleon hoped Parker would never encounter.

  “Okay. So I make the Denny’s for our first stop.”

  Napoleon suppressed the urge to reply, “Brilliant, my dear Watson,” and instead he went with, “No? Ya think? By the looks of things, it’s the only restaurant in the whole damn town.”

  Parker shrugged and drove to the Denny’s.

  It was rare when you struck gold so soon, but this wasn’t Los Angeles; it was a small town that looked like it moved as fast as molasses straight out of the icebox. This being Saturday, the feeling was even worse.

  Both waitresses at Denny’s remembered him, and the one who actually waited on him, Jasmine, a skinny little thing with multiple piercings in her ears, seemed a bit foggy on a lot of the basic details. One would expect her to remember what he ordered and when he left, but she couldn’t. She described him, but barely, as if she had amnesia—or was covering for him.

  This prompted Napoleon to grill her. Hard. Did she know him? Had she met him before? Jasmine’s eyes were panicked, but they had the usual look of the innocent when being wrongly accused: they got really big, but stayed focused on the accuser, no shifting up to the right or down to the left. No slouched shoulders. No words or questions repeated back to buy time. She was a dead end but not a deadhead.

  Napoleon “bookmarked” the moment in his mind. It was a technique he’d begun using after a friend of his talked him into taking a psychology class at Cal State LA one year. He’d only taken the class because his “friend” was a hot redhead from the 911 call center who was playing unusually hard to get. By mid-semester he’d finally been able to get her to lower her guard, but, sadly, the class proved to be more interesting than the redhead.

  “I’m… I’m sorry, but that’s all I can remember. I swear, I never saw the guy before. I’ve had a headache all morning, and I can’t seem to recall everything. He didn’t stay long, though.”

  “You’re sure he was alone, right?” asked Parker, his notepad open and his pen scribbling away as she talked.

  “Yes. He maybe talked to some other guy in a hat, but, no, wait…”

  “A hat?”

  “Yeah. A John Deere hat, maybe? Or maybe I’m thinking of someone else who came in yesterday. I dunno.” She sighed heavily. “I’m sorry.”

  “He looked dog-tired though, I’ll tell ya that,” Irene, a heavy-set waitress, chimed in.

  “Yeah?” Napoleon shifted his attention to her, and as he did he could almost hear Jasmine sigh with relief.

  “His hair was a mess. His shirt seemed a little dirty. He had big bags under his eyes, and he needed a shave. Still, even with all that, he was a cutie.”

  “Irene,” Jasmine uttered under her breath.

  “What? They’re asking. Shit. I got nothin’ to hide. I thought he was cute. So did you. You even said so when he came in. We had no idea the cops were looking for his ass.”

  Now it was Napoleon’s turn to sigh. This was going nowhere. They’d gotten all they could out of these two.

  “Ladies, please take these.” Napoleon reached out and gave a business card to each of them. “Should you remember any other details you think would be helpful to our investigation, please call us immediately.”

  “Sure thing,” Irene replied.

  Napoleon noticed that Jasmine still had something on her mind. “Anything else you wanna tell us, Ms. White?”

  She looked up at Napoleon kind of sheepishly. “Well… it’s silly, I know… but he seemed really, really sad.”

  “You would be too, Jazy, if the cops were after ya,” Irene piped in.

  Jasmine shot Irene a look, then continued, “He seemed interested in one of the posters in the lobby too, on the way out. I do remember that.”

  Parker and Napoleon followed Jasmine’s nod towards the lobby. From where they were standing they could see three or four small posters on a bulletin board opposite a candy machine.

  “Any poster in particular?” Napoleon asked.

  “I couldn’t tell,” Jasmine replied.

  “Okay. Thanks.”

  In the lobby they were able to eliminate two of the posters right away. They were fairly sure that Kyle Fasano wasn’t interested in either the bake sale at the Rotary Club or “Fender,” the missing Jack Russell terrier that belonged to Burt and Katie Matthews and was deemed worthy of an 11x14 sheet of paper displaying six photos and a $250 reward. Napoleon wasn’t sure, but $250 could most likely go a long way in Beaury. By now some of the townsfolk had probably formed a posse.

  Of the two remaining posters, one was for tomorrow’s gun and ammo convention at the Bentley High Gymnasium and the other was for the “Alfred Hitchcock Movie Festival” at the Beaury Public Library.

  “Looks like we’re going to the library,” Napoleon said instantly.

  Parker was, but of course, confused. “Why not the gun show? Why a film festival?”

  “Well, it’s neither really.”

  “What?”

  “He’s on the move. By default that means he can’t be hanging around for a full day and a half for the gun show to start. Nor do I suspect that he’s looking to watch any movies.”

  “So what’s he after?”

  “Follow me,” Napoleon replied. As they exited the restaurant he continued, “Think, Parker. Who does Mr. Fasano work for?”

  “Dynavac Industries.”

  “What department is he in?”

  “Sales.”

  “Sales of what?”

  Parker had to think a minute. “IT hardware.”

  “Exactly.”

  “So…”

  Napoleon chuckled. “This guy lives part of his life every day in the tech world. Most everyone does now, but a guy like this, without his iPhone, cut off from the world, he’s most likely gonna want one thing…”

  “A computer,” Parker said with a smile.

  Napoleon nodded. Light dawns on marble head. “Every library has computers these days, even one in this Podunk town, I’ll bet.”

  “Cool. I’ll GPS it.”

  “Fine by me.”

  They walked slowly across the open asphalt to their car. To Napoleon’s amazement, a lone tumbleweed nudged by a sudden gust of wind actually skirted across the edge of the parking lot.

  A tumbleweed.

  What was next? Vultures?

  KYLE NOTICED the demon-woman as soon as he boarded his next bus. She was seated ten rows down the aisle and to the left. There was no missing her really. She wore the body of a woman in her mid-fifties, dressed in a white blouse and maroon sweater over a blue skirt that hung just above a pair of black flats. But her face was a garden of bone spurs that protruded slightly out of her skin at varying angles, each one circled by a little ring of blood. Like her brethren before her, she had red marble eyes that pushed back her eyelids. They burned a stare into Kyle and froze his soul.

  He stopped, forcing the man behind him to bump into him and bark, “Hey!”

  Kyle barely heard himself apologize as he began a measured approach to get past Bonespur. It didn’t help that the line of people getting on the bus behind him was getting longer. Pretty soon he would be pushed into her. He thought of turning back, but despite the sneer she was throwing at him, Kyle sensed for some reason that she was not an imminent threat.

  Watcher.

  Again came that voice from inside himself, and he was learning not to ignore such revelations. It was as if he was growing a new set of instincts. Bonespur was a watcher. Her job was to follow. Nothing more.

  He sidled past her cautious
ly, feeling her gaze as her head remained fixed straight forwards but her eyes tracked him, all the way to the corner of her eye sockets. He wondered if those eyes would just keep rotating, through her brain and to the back of her head, where they would poke out from behind her hair.

  As he passed her, he heard the soft buzzing of flies, as if she were made up of them, or filled with them, or… He glanced down quickly at her and saw multiple flies on her lips.

  She’s breathing them.

  The bus was an older model, probably a castoff from a large city where it had seen better days. The scratched aluminum siding was riddled with graffiti, tagger names or gang names, he didn’t really know which. The letters always seemed like gibberish and numbers to him, as if it were a language all its own. There were assorted advertisements for condoms and television shows along the overhead runner, and the light from outside shone through the windows at muted angles, made uneven by the tinting that was peeling off the outside of the glass in certain places.

  He made his way to the bench at the back of the bus, keeping Bonespur in his line of sight, before he finally sat down. As the passengers behind him scattered and took their seats, he momentarily lost sight of her, but then as the brakes on the bus disengaged and they pulled into traffic, he saw her again.

  He was stunned.

  She had switched to the opposite side of the aisle she’d originally been in and was now seated facing the back of the bus. Facing him. Staring.

  Watching.

  But why? The boy on the bike had attacked him, and so would’ve John Deere and his little buddy had they not been caught off guard by… the blue light. All the demons thus far had been out to kill him.

  Even Caitlyn. But she hadn’t been a demon. Her eyes had been black, not red. And it dawned on him as to why. These creatures were from some other place, hell no doubt. But Caitlyn had been occupied, in the midst of being persuaded: possessed.

  He winced. It hurt to even think of her name. He saw her face again, in the hotel room before she finally became what she chose to become. He could still remember her pained expression of inner torture as she struggled so hard to reason with whatever it was that was changing her.

  Bonespur shifted in her seat.

  She’s watching me for someone, for some… thing.

  He couldn’t help himself. He glanced at her and met her eyes again. She widened them in some sort of sickly intimidation tactic. It worked. Kyle felt his chest lock up. He couldn’t breathe and… the flies. Were they multiplying? He forced his eyes away again, barely this time, but there was no shutting up his ears, the buzzing was coming on, wave after wave of sound.

  He blinked. Another image of Caitlyn came to him; she was smiling at him at the bar, her blond hair tossed to one side, a bump from a tiny pimple hidden on her cheek by extra makeup revealed by the harsh light of the liquor display. He teased her about being a big college grad, and she betrayed a little bit of the girl still left in her by giggling instead of laughing. She was no innocent baby, but she was still young, still a bit of a child, still someone’s daughter. What would Kyle have thought if his own baby girl, if Janie, someday right out of college had come home and confessed that she’d slept with, been used by, a married man seventeen years her senior? He shook his head.

  There was no getting around it. If he failed in this task or on this mission, or plan, or whatever it was, he deserved to go to hell. How did this happen? How did he screw things up this badly?

  Like bookends to the straight and narrow, Victoria and Caitlyn stood, pushing the bound pages of his life together. But they were weak bookends, lies at both ends of the truth he’d tried to make of his life, and they had now given way to the harsh weight of reality.

  On some sort of autopilot, he glanced at every other person on the bus. There was only one creature to deal with, and she was a good fifteen feet away. Still staring. Not looking. Watching.

  He sighed and shifted his weight, feeling anxious and alone. So this was it then. His life. A journey of sorts. No. A gauntlet. Of demons and sins. He remembered the story of Jesus in the desert for forty days. Tortured and tempted. The Son of God had prevailed.

  But Kyle was the son of Frank and Georgette Fasano. The oldest of two children, he had a brother, Vinnie, two years younger, with an extra chromosome and a sleepy face, droopy eyelids and slurred speech.

  And there it was: another worm turning within him. Hadn’t Kyle been his hero? Hadn’t Vinnie loved to see Kyle in his letterman jacket after every game? Hadn’t he wanted to talk about the plays his big brother had been a part of as much as he could, in his limited capacity, yes, but still… hadn’t he tried, so hard? And what did Kyle give him in return, almost every time? “Sorry, Vinnie. Big party to get to, little buddy. We’ll talk tomorrow, okay?” And Vinnie always nodded his head, with those sad eyes looking very much like those of a sheepdog.

  The sins were mounting.

  Kyle Fasano was sure of one thing: he was no Jesus. Not by a long shot.

  The tears banked across his eyelids and down his face like guilt and pain transformed to liquid form, his lips quivering with suppressed emotion and his throat burning.

  He deserved hell. He did. At a wholesale price.

  The buzzing stopped.

  Kyle didn’t have to ask how or why. He knew.

  It stopped because what was watching him was very much enjoying what it was seeing.

  CHAPTER 16

  Napoleon sighed. The head librarian at the Beaury Public Library, Mrs. Hattie Tettle, was the exact opposite of the skinny waitress at the diner. She was talkative beyond belief and a good old-fashioned “nosey-ninny,” or “chismosa,” as his grandmother would’ve called her. Every cop’s worst nightmare, she gave too much information about too much shit that had hardly anything to do with the questions being asked. Parker was taking notes so furiously that Napoleon feared his hand was going to cramp any minute and wouldn’t that be great? Then Napoleon would have to take the notes.

  “I knew he was no good, that one. He just shuffled in, looking like he’d slept in his work clothes, all charm and smiles. We had a guy like that used to work at the lumber yard for years, just all chuckles and compliments, used to bring his kids in here. Later we find out he was beating them and his poor wife. Can you believe that? Just horrible. I mean sometimes people can just be—”

  “Mrs. Tettle, I don’t mean to interrupt,” Napoleon lied, “but can you describe what—”

  “Oh, you’re not interrupting, Officer, er, I mean, Detective. My. I don’t think I’ve ever spoken to a detective before. And one from the city, no less! This is like in one of my Ed McBain novels. You know those, right? Have you read them?”

  ¡Madre mia! “No, ma’am,” Napoleon said with a sigh, pinching the pressure points on his nose between his eye sockets for some blessed relief. “That’s sorta like being a librarian and reading a book about librarians.”

  “Oh. Well, but there are some great books about librarians… and the library. Except that horrible Stephen King book with that story about The Library Policeman. Every year or so some poor child will read that and tell all the rest of the kids, and that’s it! They’re afraid to come in here. It’s a shame. Though, funny enough, it does mean a drop in late fees on books for a while, I’ll tell you that.”

  Parker looked at Napoleon as if suicide were swiftly becoming an option, or at the very least, a request to be transferred back to foot patrol. To his surprise, Napoleon had to suppress a laugh.

  “That’s fascinating, but please understand, ma’am… we’re very pressed for time here and—”

  “Well, of course. It’s a manhunt! Like The Fugitive! Oh, my husband used to love that show. He’s passed now. Six years ago.”

  Try as he might, Napoleon simply couldn’t corral her. Fuck me ten times over. “I’m sorry to hear that, ma’am. But please, can you remember what Mr. Fasano did when he was here?”

  She was a librarian. Old school. Her mind was a filing cabinet, and Nap
oleon had no doubt that her memories were probably arranged by the Dewey Decimal System. It took her some time to gather them up, but when she did, like everything else in their conversation so far today, they came in rapid fire.

  “He walked in. Said hello. He got some magazines from the periodicals section, read for a while, and then spent some time at the computer island.”

  Ding! Napoleon glanced at Parker, who nodded and pursed his lips as if to say, “Well done, Obi-Wan Kenobi.”

  “Do you remember which computer he was at?”

  She blinked and pinched up her face at being asked such a silly question. “Why of course, it was number four. There are eight of them. It’s the one on the far side of the island right over there, nearest the reading tables. They each have a little number on the monitor. Would you like me to show you?”

  Seeing his out, Napoleon took it. “No! No, thanks. You’ve got the desk here to run. We’ll check into it and come back with any further questions.”

  “Suit yourself,” Mrs. Tettle replied, with no small hint of disappointment.

  Napoleon and Parker made their way into the library, their shoes dragging a bit on the carpet.

  “Whew!” Parker whispered softly.

  “Damn. If that isn’t a walking commercial for Ritalin, I don’t know what is,” Napoleon whispered back.

  “Well, the old lady’s been a widow a long time. Must get lonely.”

  “Yeah. Well. Ever hear of bingo?”

  The computer island was a set of old computers with large monitors. As promised, each had a designated number. The library was as one would expect a library to be: quiet. Napoleon wondered if he and Parker had whispered to avoid Mrs. Tettle hearing them or because it was just part of their inner programming from childhood. He guessed it was more the latter. Like riding a bike, whispering in the library was second nature.

  It appeared that Parker was going to try taking charge again. He didn’t wait for Napoleon to go to the computer, but instead did so himself without asking, his assumption evidently being that he knew more about computers than the old man he had been teamed up with. Napoleon was no computer idiot, but when he saw Parker’s typing speed, the way he navigated the history menus of the computer’s hard drive and how he cross-referenced the computer’s two different search engine histories, it was obvious that Parker knew what he was doing. He even switched to a DOS window for a minute or two, but Napoleon suspected that he was just showing off.