The Parker Trilogy Read online

  She slipped the dock of night and was back at sea again.

  The sea before had been one of memory, but this one was different. It was a sea of being. She could feel others, all around her. Untouchable, but there. There was no land in sight, just dark-blue water occasionally broken by white streaks of breaking waves. The sky overhead was a normal sort of blue, but there was no sun to justify the light, no clouds to offer the sky any depth or range, and there was no real way to determine direction. What you knew here, you knew only by feeling.

  When the breeze came over your right arm and crossed over your body to the left, you knew the wind was moving that way. When the water moved forward, you knew you were heading toward something, whereas backward meant moving away. To what or whom or for what purpose, she had no idea.

  The boat she was on was also different than the one she had used to conquer her demon. That one was stark with deep engravings and mysterious symbols. This one was a plain wooden row boat, the oars of which sat docile in their rungs, awaiting her hands.

  The oars called to her. Many nights. But she ignored them. Because she didn’t want to be here, or to be having these dreams again. Ever. She wanted to just lead a normal, happy life that didn’t involve so much thought or so much mystery.

  “Haven’t I been through enough?” she whispered on the boat. “I don’t want this.”

  The breeze blew harder, rocking the boat and carrying a voice that was unmistakable. It was Father Soltera’s voice, the Catholic priest who had brought Luisa, a pregnant sixteen-year-old girl, to Eden Hill Women’s Shelter for protection from her psycho boyfriend.

  When last she’d spoken with him, Father Soltera had told Maggie that he could speak Latin, and he was doing so now, in her dream.

  “Ego morior,” he said. “Servo puella.”

  No, she thought, selfishly and with no small measure of guilt. She didn’t want these dreams any more, or to be here, or to hear any of it. But the words were too frightening to ignore.

  Especially when her mind translated them: “I’m dying. Save the girl.”

  Chapter Three

  After visiting Campos at the hospital, the captain had sent Parker home “for a few days’ rest.” He was to check in after getting a medical clearance at the station’s approved clinic.

  But before that, he briefed Parker, Murillo and Davenport in a side room next to the nurses’ station.

  Their huddle was small but intense, as decisions were checked, cross-referenced and rechecked. As Davenport had originally feared when they had strategized about going into The Mayan, the department had a bit of a PR nightmare on their hands. Two dead. Two wounded. Three dozen trampled and injured in the chaos.

  Still, no one on earth could’ve ever planned for Hector Villarosa to come out of nowhere and start shooting the place up like something out of an Al Pacino movie. The fact that it all went down before any police action had been initiated, would give the captain the breathing room he needed with both the chief and the press.

  Güero Martinez, Mondo and the rest were held for questioning, but with no cause for arrests, they had been cut loose. Regardless, not even a low man on the totem pole was willing to talk about any possible connection between Jin Yeung and the murder of Hymie Villarosa. Not that it mattered, since Jin was dead and there’d be no need to build a case against him anyway.

  Parker imagined that somewhere out there in the city, Danny Noh, aka Tic Toc, and the girl known as Toolie—both of whom had ratted Jin out under pressure from Parker and Campos—would breathe long sighs of relief once they found out that neither of them would be needed to testify now.

  The drive home was foggy and void of feeling. The numbness of Bahrain had returned, as had his acute sense of smell. Now it was the flat smell of the leather seats in his Camaro and the pungent gunpowder residue on his sleeve. Back then, it had been the buttery treats being served by one of the vendors in the airport as he waited—at long last—to be shipped home for the last time. He knew it for sure then. He would never go back. Not after what happened at the outpost. No way.

  It was just past 4 a.m. as he rolled down the 210 Freeway toward Pasadena, surrounded by sparse traffic and a lot of darkness. He called on Step One of his ongoing therapy: focus on the good.

  Campos is okay. Neither wound was serious. And we got Jin.

  The goodness was interrupted.

  No. You killed Jin. You’ve killed again. How many is that now?

  He tried as hard as he could not to think of the number, not to let it pop into—

  Fifteen.

  The goodness was ruined.

  So, he called on Step Two: deliberate, measured breaths meant to break down time and slow his mind. He inhaled and tried to corral his thoughts, but the effort failed instantly.

  You’re thinking of things even when you don’t think you are.

  Waheeb. Wanting to know about American girls. Wanting to know about sex. The sandstorms of Afghanistan that would come out of nowhere and surround his tent in a wind tunnel that would void out all other sounds. That one tribal chief in the northern hills with the stooped back who had no left eye and only used his right hand to gesture with. Heat. Sand. The camels that would pee a river and spit phlegm without warning. The sun like a ruthless sentinel. Waheeb. Screaming. Off the road, in that pass. Being dragged away. The bullets coming from every direction each time Parker tried to scramble to help him.

  Parker never should have gone back for that second tour of duty. There was bad shit from each tour, but the worst stuff happened during the final one. Because by then he’d grown to respect some of the culture and people, to understand that there were ten ways to look at things and to—if he were honest—be a little jealous of boys like Waheeb, who had strong family ties and were still innocent about love, if nothing else.

  “You All American Boy, yes, soldier?” the tribal chief had asked one day in crudely chopped English.

  Parker had just shrugged in reply but there were some things you couldn’t hide. He’d led a textbook boyhood in Nebraska, one of three boys, with a mother who hovered and cooked preserves and a father who worked for Prudential in Omaha, a thirty-minute drive from their house in the suburbs.

  Parker played linebacker for the football team, dated the prom queen and lost his virginity under a full moon in a parked car on a dirt road after the two of them had split a bottle of Peppermint Schnapps. Michelle . . . To this day he could still smell her perfume, sweet against the earthy scent of the wheatfields all around them that night, and recall the pupils of her eyes, filled with the moon as she looked past him out the window and to somewhere else, when it happened.

  Changing lanes for no reason, Parker smiled softly at the memory of Waheeb one day, as they sat and waited for a helicopter. “What are American girls like, Mr. Parker?”

  He’d tried for months, and in vain, to get Waheeb to quit calling him “Mr.,” and by then he just went with it. Thinking a long time, he finally answered, “Mostly? They’re always looking somewhere else.”

  “Shit on a biscuit, Parker!” Corporal Benitez interrupted from the next crate over, a camouflage net blowing in waves behind him. “Are you that damn naïve?” He chuckled sarcastically and shook his head.

  “What?” Parker snapped, as Waheeb smiled and looked back and forth between them.

  “That’s women everywhere, man. Not just America. I had a girl in Paris for a while. Every leave I had? I was going there instead of home. She loved me. I loved her. Blah, blah, puke. And there was this girl in Portugal one summer, when I took a break between tours? Same thing. Parisian girls? Portuguese women? American. Scandinavian. I don’t give a shit. They’re all looking somewhere else.”

  “Why, sir?” Waheeb asked Benitez.

  Benitez laughed. “Because that’s how it works, Waheeby my man! Men are always looking at someone else, women are always looking somewhere else. Men, shit, best we can do is imagine another piece of ass. Women, though? They can imagine whole other lives and
places.”

  “Don’t listen to a word he says, Waheeb,” Parker interjected.

  “C’mon, Parker. You know that’s just how it is. Don’t be filling his head up with no romantic bullshit. The first time a woman loses her shit at him over letting the condom slip off, it’s gonna rock his world.” In a whiny voice he added, “Why she mad at me? I thought she loooooved me?”

  Ten feet away, Adams, a Navy Seal on special assignment who never seemed like he was paying attention to anyone, laughed.

  Waheeb looked confused before noticing a chopper coming in from the distance. It was their ride up into the northern hills to ask the one-eyed tribal leader why he was siding with the Taliban.

  As Benitez grabbed his pack, Parker looked to the horizon. Apaches were deadly quiet until you learned how to listen for one. A small whit-whit at first, and a dark speck, like a distant dragonfly. Then? The roar of God himself descending on mortal man.

  As it came in low and they grabbed their stuff, Parker caught Waheeb looking at him. “You okay?” he shouted over the propellers.

  Waheeb shook his head. He suddenly looked very sad. He was eighteen, a man in war, yes, but still very much a child in life.

  Parker leaned over to Waheeb’s ear, so he could hear him clearly. “Don’t listen to him, buddy!” With a smile he added, “He’s just bitter. When playing poker, never listen to the man who can’t get a winning hand!”

  They laughed together as they ran to the helicopter, their boots sinking and pulling at the thick sand, as the sun cast Parker’s memory of the moment in a permanent shade of orange.

  Like the orange glow of the speedometer that showed he was approaching his exit at ninety miles an hour, way too fast. Easing off the pedal, he hit the brakes hard, only partially thankful that no one was behind him.

  “You were dead just a few months later,” Parker murmured to himself as he exited the 210 at Seco Street.

  It was tragic, yes, but like all tragedies it had a few tender mercies. Because Waheeb hadn’t lived long enough to be there the day that a stack of letters Parker had mailed home to Michelle had been returned to him, unopened.

  Proving that Benitez had been right.

  Parker sighed.

  Michelle. They’d kept their relationship going for four years after high school. She got her degree while he went into the military. They had planned it all out: the neighborhood they would live in someday, in a house with a big porch where their golden retriever would lie in the shade, and the size of their family and the cars they would drive . . . but there was no way to accurately plan for dreams, and in the end, she had hers.

  She’d gone off to be a dancer in New York.

  She’d left him for another place.

  Hector came back to the present, breathless for some reason, as if memories could somehow burn up the oxygen in your lungs. They were on the move again, through time and space.

  “Why? Why did you show me all that?”

  So you could see the start of it.

  “Of what?”

  The pain that smoldered in you and later flamed into the anger and hate that let loose the fires of sin in your life.

  The light tunnel they were in came to a stop at a dark corner. First and Gage. Where he’d done his first drug sale. The street light overhead was blown out now, the area barely illuminated by a halo of piss-yellow light from a nearby liquor store.

  “Why are we here?”

  Because this is where you started to spread it.

  “Spread what?”

  Hector. When are you ever going to learn to stop looking at the world through a telescope? At least try to graduate to binoculars and use both eyes, won’t you?

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  The Gray Man sighed. That’s the hardest part with some of you; the way you blind yourselves. And it’s only gotten worse since my day. So many distractions, so many various immersions into sin.

  “C’mon, old man. You don’t know me, you don’t know what I’ve been through.”

  Yes, Hector. I do know you. You are known. What’s tragic about all of this is that you don’t know yourself. And that is why I am here.

  Hector stifled a laugh. “Man. I know myself just fine.”

  And what about all you’ve been through?

  Hector threw up his arms. “You mean like a dad who ran off on us, to Phoenix, with some chick he met at work? Or how about my mom and how she—”

  That justifies what you did tonight? Do you think you’re the only one who has—

  “Look, pops. I ain’t doin’ this, okay?”

  You’re not doing what?

  The air between them stilled with silence before the bang of a closing gate from a distant house echoed from down the street. Neither of them looked in that direction, and Hector could feel The Gray Man waiting for him to continue.

  “I ain’t going to go talking about my personal shit with someone I just—”

  That’s what I mean, Hector. You still aren’t getting it.

  “What?”

  We aren’t here to TALK about anything. We’re here to SEE.

  “See what? That my mom started drinking because she loved his sorry ass so much? That she didn’t have a chance after that? That is was one dude after another up in our place, either ignoring me or trying to tell me how to be a man, to suck things up, to go outside and play or to run up to the liquor store to grab them some cigs or whatever else it took to get rid of me, so they could be alone with her?”

  Hector—

  “What do you want, old man? You want me to bow down before God and thank him for the bullshit life He gave me?”

  A line had been crossed. A force emanated from The Gray Man, in a suppressed wave, that came at Hector, passed through his body and then just beyond it, pushing a Coke can down the street and lightly rattling a few lids on the trash cans that were lodged against the curb. Then, The Gray Man’s eyes began to glow blue. Yes, Hector. That’s exactly what I want. But ultimately, it’s your choice.

  Hector responded to his sudden fear the way his neighborhood had trained him to: with aggression. He set his chin on edge and balled up his fists. “Yeah? You think so, huh?”

  The Gray Man shook his head as a look of disappointment spread over his face. He took one hand out of his pocket and waved it upwards.

  Instantly, Hector rose off the ground and was tipped upside down, his feet high in the air, gravity curving his body into a lazy “c.” He yelped in shock, but The Gray Man waved his hand again to silence him, the blue in his eyes raging brighter as he stepped forward, so that he and Hector were eye to eye.

  For the first time in your life, you’re beginning to see the utter mirage your life is and the complete monster that you’ve become.

  “I don’t think so . . .” Hector replied defiantly, shaking his head. But there was a wetness coming to his eyes.

  First, we’re going to start with the human desire to blame others for who we are.

  “Look. I did my best. My mom—”

  Your mother chose other men over you.

  Hector’s eyes widened with rage, the tears that were just forming in them now falling to the ground. “That’s a lie.”

  No, Hector, it’s the truth and we both know it. More importantly, it is simply one truth that is part of many truths.

  “I don’t care about no truth.”

  The Gray Man’s face went from disappointed to sad. Hector, what am I going to do with you? Can’t you see the truth is all you’ve ever cared about?

  Maybe it was his words, or maybe it was the real, genuine concern with which he said them. Whatever it was, Hector fell silent. He blinked and looked into The Gray Man’s eyes again.

  It’s why you read your books, my boy. Especially whenever life hurt. You’ve been searching for the truth since you were a child. Unable find it in your own life, you tried to find it in the lives and stories of others.

  Hector dropped his head and choked back his emotions.

&n
bsp; But here’s the thing. The truth was ALL around you, Hector. Take your mom, for instance. A truth within a truth among many truths. You chose to see the world through a telescope, up close but from a distance, through one lens and one eye. But your mother, she chose to see it through rose-colored glasses.

  “Stop it.”

  Because without her, you would’ve had nothing.

  “I said stop.”

  But then—

  “What? Do you think I should have hated her or something?”

  No. Never that, Hector. Never. I want you to see her neither through one lens nor through colored lenses.

  “What, then?”

  I want you to see her bathed in truth. A human being, with her own faults and strengths, trying to keep up with the math of all her decisions, to take heart from each personal success, no matter how small or large—the online course she took to get her nursing degree, the time she spent talking a friend who had just had a miscarriage out of killing herself—and counterbalance them against each failure, be it the pain of one more man that didn’t love her or the drink she would use to hide from the fact that she couldn’t even love herself anymore.

  Hector wiped at his eyes. “I’m getting dizzy, man. The blood’s rushing to my head up here.”

  The Gray Man nodded, waved his hand, righted Hector and eased his feet back to the ground.

  A silence fell between them again before Hector said, “Why? Why are you telling me all this?”

  Because her truths affected your truths, good and bad. It is both the beauty and the fury of humanity. The Gray Man looked out over the city. So many lives intersecting, influencing, encouraging and defeating one another. You’ve all been given free will, and my oh my, the things you do with it.

  Hector measured the man before him and trembled. He did not need a priest or a bible to tell him what he was. “I’m sorry. I don’t understand yet.”