One In A Million (The Millionth Trilogy Book 1) Page 2

  “Why?”

  “Because God has heard you. But I’m not sure you’re going to like His answer.”

  CHAPTER 2

  HER THOUGHTS AS HEAVY as her heart, Tamara Fasano turned north on McClendon Street on her way to the freeway, which would take her home to Janie and Seth.

  It wasn’t supposed be like this, but they had made their choices, she and her husband, for a nicer home and fancier vacations. Somewhere on that path their priorities shifted. The time she wanted to spend with the children was sacrificed to sixty-hour workweeks and nights like tonight.

  Janie had taken it the hardest, not understanding why the cake she and her little brother Seth made after school with Juanita would have to wait until tomorrow. Tamara explained, but really, how could a ten-year-old understand the notion of working to past 9:00 p.m. on your birthday?

  She sighed heavily. At seven, Seth had probably understood even less.

  Kyle had actually taken it worse, though, but that wasn’t a surprise; things were strained between them and only getting worse. Ever since their romance began in college seventeen years ago, he’d sent her mixed colored roses on her birthday. Today none had come, and tonight, intent on going to some stupid office party, he’d bluntly hung up in her ear when she’d asked him to get home early because she had to work late.

  That was a first, and once her fury subsided she’d taken refuge in her spreadsheets, determined to talk to him in the morning after things cooled off. Ripping his head off when she got home would do no good, especially since he willingly moved to the couch these days anyway.

  A Prius cut into her lane at the on-ramp, forcing her to hit the brakes and momentarily lose her train of thought. She heard the crunch of gravel beneath the tires of her SUV as she hit an uneven patch of road. The Prius sped off on to the freeway ahead of her as she held back the urge to lay on the horn.

  The night bloomed full around her, a swath of stars like paint specks off to her left, a waning moon directly overhead. She took a deep breath and turned on the radio, channel surfing until she came across a Dave Matthews song, yet another reminder of her college days, and settled in for the ride home.

  Trying not to think about Seth, she stared through the windshield at the sporadic red maze of taillights ahead of her across all four lanes, everyone jockeying for position even though there was no real traffic to speak of at this hour. Habits die hard. What was that quote? Habit is a second nature which prevents us from knowing the first? Something like that. Working late, always hurrying, and treating traffic like mortal combat: they were all habits. Everyone had them, and little Seth was no exception. In fact, his whole world was still about routine, like Mommy reading him a book after his shower, both of which she had missed tonight.

  Radiohead flooded the speakers next. She thought of changing the station but didn’t really care enough to follow through. Drained, the road ahead no longer seemed to have an end, as if the home she was headed to was getting further away instead of closer. It was an odd thought.

  She didn’t like it, so she tried to ignore it.

  She pulled her hair back and rubbed her neck.

  The meeting for the east coast project had extended well past dessert. Tim and Ben tried their best to hold the line on support and implementation strategies, but the German client was relentless, wanting drill downs on almost every issue. How many assembly plants could the sales center support? How many employees could be squeezed into part-time slots? It didn’t help that he’d also had an instant eye for Tamara, who was the lead on the project. Evidently, in some perverted male way, being a female leader made her something to conquer as much as any price point or contract nuance.

  Since many of their contracts were with EU firms she was used to the European male approach to business, so this didn’t bother her too much at first. At least he wasn’t Italian. They were the worst. She tolerated it, and yes, even used a little innocent flirtation to get what she wanted from time to time. In a man’s world it was a woman’s prerogative, and she wasn’t going to apologize for it.

  Tonight though, with thoughts of her daughter’s pleas to come home and her birthday cake waiting, she was in no mood. The meeting didn’t go badly, but it wasn’t a home run either, making the sacrifices of the evening only harder to accept.

  She dazed out, awake but mostly on autopilot, vaguely hearing Blind Melon come and go, then Bowie. The songs kept coming and her eyelids kept trying to shut. The last thing she needed to do was crash the damned car, so she lowered the windows and resolved to think about something that would keep her awake.

  Like something that would piss her off.

  What was it that Kyle said to her earlier? “If you don’t care enough anymore to be home, what's the point?” She started to ask him what the hell that meant just before he hung up on her.

  The point of what? Life? Their marriage? Or was she just being dramatic? Maybe he had just been referring to her birthday. Whatever.

  She yawned. This wasn’t working.

  How about the German client? That might work. Mr. Holger was twenty years her elder but still convinced he was just as virile as a man half his age, like Ben. Tamara worked all the time with Ben. She knew he had a crush on her, but she ignored it for both of their sakes.

  Tonight things had been different though, with some silly rivalry between the two men injecting itself into the meeting. Who could tell the better joke? Who could sound the most knowledgeable? Mr. Holger, as the client, had all the leverage before the water glasses even hit the table, but Ben was too young and stubborn to accept this. Worse still, he was barely able to hide a subtle hint of jealousy every time Mr. Holger got chatty with her. Holger’s reference to how much Tamara looked like Vera Farmiga—as if she’d never heard that one before—started their little male digression, and it lasted until the end of the meal.

  That’s what botched the meeting. Not her. Not her concern over a birthday cake (“With sprinkles, Mom!”) that the kids made just for her with those little hands working the blender and bowls, their nanny at their sides, where Tamara herself should’ve been standing.

  That did the trick. She was wide-awake now.

  She promised herself that she wouldn’t take this out on Juanita when she got home. It wasn’t her fault that she was asked to—no, paid to—play Mommy.

  The freeway opened up and she pushed on the gas pedal, eager to end the night. When her off-ramp was in sight, the lights of a highway patrol car lit up behind her.

  She banged the steering wheel with the base of her palm in frustration. “Give me a break!” she yelled in the empty car.

  She exited the freeway while shaking her head, preparing for the ticket to come, having no idea that after tonight the police were going to be a regular part of her life for quite a while.

  At least until they were finally convinced that Kyle was dead.

  HE KNEW football season was just around the corner, but in spite of this fact, Napoleon Villa, Detective Third Grade, with the Los Angeles Police Department’s Central Station, couldn’t get excited. He attributed his lack of interest to the fact that he was fighting off a cold and lacking a girlfriend to make him some sopa de pollo.

  Being a tough-guy homicide detective was hard when you felt like you had a fever and your nose was stuffy. He would never admit it to anyone but himself, but he needed a little babying right now.

  It was almost 10:00 p.m. and he wished he could just go home and crawl into bed. Instead, he took another swig of his green tea and got back to the file on his desk.

  The police report and photos strewn there told the story of a very simple robbery gone terribly wrong.

  One of the last places you wanted to mess up these days was in Koreatown. The kid from Cuarto Flats, one Hymie Villarosa, had been outside of his safe zone, probably earning jump points of some kind with his gang, when he walked into the liquor store at Sixth and Commonwealth and stuck a gun in the owner’s face.

  Hymie was too young to know that K
oreans, be they from the north or south, don’t give up in a war, much less in a robbery. The owner was a veteran of that war and after playing nice to get the kid to lower his guard he pulled a Gold Cup .45 from behind the counter and began shooting. Being in his mid-eighties, that meant he shot in just about every direction, missing Hymie entirely, clipping one customer in the leg and blowing a large bag of Doritos out of the hands of another.

  Hymie, of course, returned fire. And after surviving two years of a bloody war that, officially, still wasn’t over, Woo-Jin Kim had a nine-millimeter bullet shot through his chest by a kid younger than some of his grandchildren.

  Hymie then fled the store and promptly found himself face-to-face with two members of a Korean gang who had been across the street changing the tire on their ride, which unfortunately for Hymie meant that he was in exactly the wrong place at exactly the wrong time.

  Hymie was shot five times and would never live to have any children, much less any grandchildren.

  Napoleon, on nothing stronger than two herbal cold pills every four hours for the past two days, had been left to sort through the facts and clues with a sore throat and Echinacea-fogged mind as he tried to identify the two Korean gang members who, like ice, had melted into the background of Sixth and Commonwealth right after the shooting.

  The car? Stolen, of course. Gotta love thieves who are willing to change a tire.

  His tea was cold. He drank it anyway.

  “Yo, Nap!” The voice came from a young detective named Parker, who was new to the precinct.

  “Whatup, rook?” Napoleon replied.

  “Nothing. Except a dead girl who took a header right outta the twenty-third floor of the Hilton about an hour ago.”

  Shit. Sometimes the bodies just kept coming. It was beyond frustrating.

  Folding the file in front of him, he put the two murderers from Koreatown on hold and moved on to the next case.

  “So what’re the facts?” Napoleon asked. “And be ready to take notes.”

  Parker smiled. All the rookies did.

  At this point in his career, Napoleon was fairly well known as the guy who worked the Robbery-Homicide Division for over twenty years and as the detective who was “street” once, long ago, with the tats to prove it. He never had a record of any kind, nor any arrests, nor any proven gang affiliation, and back in the ’80s they were a little more flexible at the LAPD with their enrollment guidelines. So in snuck Napoleon to police the very streets he once roamed.

  Parker scratched his head and began. “The girl was twenty-one. Blond. Blue eyes, I think. The uniforms that just called it in say her face is kinda like pudding now, she’s a mess, and the way they described—”

  “Cut the shit, Parker.” Napoleon sighed.

  “Okay, okay. They found her driver’s license in the room. Caitlyn Hall. From Pasadena. Found an expired UCLA student ID too.”

  “And?”

  “Based on a business card they found in her purse in the room, she worked nearby.”

  “Where?”

  “Dynavac Industries. She was a sales rep.”

  “She check in with anyone?”

  “Desk clerk says a guy was with her. Kinda handsome. Brown hair. Built like a baseball player, whatever the hell that means.”

  “Probably means he was fit, dumb shit.”

  “Well, yeah, but so are football players and hockey players and lacrosse players.”

  “So?”

  “So what exactly makes a person fit like a baseball player?”

  Napoleon’s head hurt, and it wasn’t only from his nasal congestion. He counted to ten. A dead body on the docket and diaper boy here was obsessed with fitness types. He knew he was getting old, but truly, the city was in a ton of hurt if he didn’t get Parker trained up right.

  “Did the desk clerk see the guy leave?” Napoleon asked.

  “Yeah. But, like, almost a half-hour before the body took the tumble.”

  “How do we know that?”

  “Well… the body wasn’t found until then,” Parker replied, sounding nervous.

  “That doesn’t mean she didn’t take the tumble before then, maybe with lover boy’s help.”

  “With all due respect, I got that.”

  “So then you think she had help?”

  “Yeah. Most likely. No doubt.”

  “Never rule out doubt, Parker.” Napoleon had learned this the hard way, more than once.

  “Well, if she didn’t have help, then the theory would be that she jumped, and to do that she musta had wings,” Parker said with a shrug.

  Napoleon blinked, not sure if he’d heard him right. “What?”

  “Wings. There’s no other way she could’ve jumped.”

  “And you have ‘detectivized’ your way to this idea how, exactly?”

  “The hole in the window.”

  “What about it?”

  “They’re telling me it’s clean, a solid hole with most of the window still intact.”

  “That’s possible. It’s a hotel window. It’s thick. It’s not supposed to just shatter. I’m actually surprised it even gave way,” Napoleon countered.

  “Maybe. Sure. But it’s a big-ass window. Twelve feet. The hole is almost at the ceiling, like, eleven feet up. So she musta had a flying start. Ya know, wings.”

  “Dude looks like a baseball player.” Napoleon shrugged. “He’s probably six foot plus. With a body lifted over his head, that’s nine foot plus. He throws her with some elevation, eleven is doable, especially if he’s trippin.’”

  “Yeah. I thought of all that too,” Parker said with a smirk.

  Napoleon sneezed. He was beyond annoyed now. “So what are you leaving out, shithead?”

  “The hole?”

  “Yeah?”

  “The glass was melted, all the way around.”

  “Melted? Was she on fire or something?”

  Parker’s smirk grew bigger. “Nope.”

  “What the hell then?”

  “They’re saying we gotta see this for ourselves, man.”

  But Napoleon was already past him, his jacket in one hand and a throat lozenge in the other. If you want something done right, do it yourself. He wasn’t sure what the kid heard wrong when the call came in, but this didn’t add up.

  Twenty minutes later in Room 2303 of the Los Angeles Hilton and standing in front of the window in question, Napoleon shook his head.

  The hole in the window was about six foot by three foot. It looked like some odd work of art, melted glass with black rounded tips where the shatter points were and a brown film that spread out around the entire circumference of the hole in a smoky outline.

  The heat that would’ve had to have been generated to do this to glass would’ve left some sort of residue or burn marks elsewhere, on the drapes perhaps, or the ceiling. But there were none. Napoleon took in the crime scene the way he’d been trained, from top to bottom, around the room in sections. The room was clean.

  The crime scene guys were down below looking over the body, but they’d already radioed up that from their preliminary review of the remains there was no evident sign that the victim had been on fire.

  Already shit wasn’t adding up.

  “Remember when I told you last week that I’d seen it all, Parker?” Napoleon asked with a sigh.

  “Yeah,” Parker replied.

  “I shoulda known better.”

  CHAPTER 3

  “IT GOES LIKE THIS…” The Gray Man began. They were seated at a coffee shop some fifteen miles from the hotel, a distance covered not with Kyle’s car but by some sort of teleportation that still had his head spinning, a process of white light and warm heat that pressed in on every inch of his body the entire way here.

  “I don’t want to hear how it—” Kyle objected.

  “Nor did you want to come here, did you? Or speak to me at all? And yet here we are, nonetheless.”

  “Why?”

  “Because you just don’t get it yet, and, to be fair,
it’s too soon for you to get, which is why I’m trying to explain it to you.”

  The waitress arrived with their order, which The Gray Man had made when they were seated: two cups of coffee and a blueberry scone.

  “Here you go, gentlemen.” Her name badge said “Tammy.” She was on the skinny side and had red hair and an orchid tattoo on her left wrist. After sliding their coffees to them, she gave The Gray Man a big smile and presented the scone to him as if it were on a platter.

  “Many thanks to you, my dear,” The Gray Man said with a nod. “The older I get, the more I enjoy the simplest of things.”

  “No problem. Let me know if you need anything else,” she chirped. Kyle caught her sideways glance at The Gray Man as she walked away though; her curiosity at his shade was obvious, as if maybe he were some sort of albino or leper.

  Their privacy now intact, The Gray Man continued, “You’ve made a mistake, Kyle, a grave one, and you know it.”

  “I didn’t mean to. I’ve never done it before. I just lost myself there for a bit.”

  “Yes, you did mean to, and never having done it before in no way lightens the punishment for having done it at all… because you’ve lost more than your self, my boy.” He paused to sip his coffee, and looking over the rim of his cup and directly into Kyle’s eyes, he added, “You’ve now lost your soul.”

  “What?” Kyle said, feeling his face twist in perplexity as he struggled with what he was hearing.

  “Give yourself time,” The Gray Man replied, turning his attention to his scone. He ignored his fork and simply picked it up and chomped into it, a slight grunt of pleasure escaping his otherwise heavy demeanor.

  “This is…” was all Kyle could manage. His brain was on overload. He knew this wasn’t a dream, but in less than an hour he’d just fled from a psychotic lover in a hotel, ran directly into a man who could read his thoughts, and then been teleported in an instant from the front of that same hotel to this coffee shop in the middle of nowhere. All the rules of logic and physics were like rowboats being tossed about in a hurricane, and now, somehow, he was supposed to understand and accept the condemning words of someone he’d just met.