The Parker Trilogy Page 46

  “And why’s that?”

  “He’s local. Right here in your jurisdiction.”

  “We’ve heard of him. Rumors of crazy shit.” Murillo checked himself. “Well. What we thought was just rumors.”

  “Look. San Francisco, San Diego and Los Angeles are three of the top five human trafficking cities in the United States. We don’t want to go stumbling around the streets of LA tipping everyone off to what we’re up to. We’ve had agents on the ground working with local law enforcement agencies in SD and SF already because the territory is smaller, the layouts simpler, and—as far as we know—there are no moles on the inside. But here in LA? It’s a web. A complicated-ass web.”

  “And?” Parker said.

  “And instead of working the web in this direction or that direction? I’d rather go straight to where the spider lives.”

  “And that’s East LA.”

  “Exactly.”

  Arrested at dawn. Booked by morning. In a cell and off to sleep when most of the world was just getting to work. Hector had not been out of jail nearly long enough from the last time to have forgotten what this was like. Jail was hell on earth, he was sure of it, because in jail, time did not go by, march by or pass by at all. Time was just a big, heavy anchor that you dragged with you, from sunup to sunset.

  TV shows helped mark the evening hours, and the news, but everything in the joint that reminded you of the outside brought with it a dangerous sort of melancholy that added up, like drips of water into a bucket of misery that could tip over on top of your head at a moment’s notice.

  And misery made you weak . . . and vulnerable.

  Hector knew that his time of having a cell all to himself, of being able to sleep with any sense of security, would not last long. So, when he closed his eyes, he made himself let go of all the heavy thoughts and realities of his life. Amazingly, he began to dream.

  Which was odd, because he’d never been aware of himself dreaming when he was sleeping before. It just sort of happened. Awake, asleep, dreaming, awake again. Plain and simple.

  But not this time.

  This time he told himself, “I’m dreaming.” And then he was in a dark room with a single lightbulb that was swinging aimlessly from a cord. Beneath it were two stainless-steel chairs and a stainless-steel table, like the kind in a police interview room.

  But there were no police here. Just him and . . .

  When his cousin stepped out of the shadows, Hector’s heart sank. “No.”

  Hymie shuffled his feet across the floor, the laces of his sneakers untied and dragging along. He was wearing a pair of jeans, a white T-shirt and a blue Dickies jacket, each covered with blood spots and splatter. His hands were out in front of him, and he was feeling his way along like a blind man, which was appropriate, as he couldn’t see.

  Because his eyes were sewn shut.

  Hector told himself to wake up, but it didn’t happen. Instead, the darkness around the room only got thicker, like a cloud of ink, and the floor beneath his feet began to move, carrying him like an escalator to his chair. Once there, a force of some kind simply picked him up and forcefully sat him at the table. No, no, no, no . . .

  The fingers of Hymie’s left hand finally found the top of his chair and he felt his way around it and took a seat, just opposite Hector.

  But then, his cousin said nothing.

  Hymie’s face was dry and leathery. Worst of all, his ears were gone. They’d been cut clean off.

  “What’s going on, Hymie?” Hector mumbled.

  A sound like a roaring wind far in the distance grew louder. Before long, the inky darkness began to sift away in scattered swathes as the wind blew against it. The room began to glow in a soft, fiery orange. Then yellow. Then with small flickers of red. The wall behind Hymie was wiped away entirely, and Hector realized it was a window now.

  On the other side of the window were rolling sand dunes littered with burnt cacti—a desert on fire, massive thorny tumbleweeds rolling precariously up, over the tops and then swiftly down the undulations in the sand.

  A streak of black crows crossed a skyline the color of burning embers, and on a hilltop in the distance Hector saw a pack of wild dogs with glowing red eyes chasing a woman, her arms flailing wildly as she stumbled and ran as fast as she could. They seemed to be playing with her, letting her get away before one of them would run up and knock her over and the routine would start all over again. After four or five times, though, they grew bored and set upon her.

  Her screams were faint and distorted, as if he were hearing them while underwater.

  Hector tried to wake himself up again, but it was still no use. He didn’t want to look at Hymie, at what his face had become, but there was no one else to turn to.

  “Primo! Get me out of here, man. Please,” Hector begged.

  Hymie’s face stayed fixed on him, but he made no reply. Instead, Hymie put his hands palms-down on the table and leaned in, as if to try to whisper something to him.

  A crackle of black lightning creased the orange sky through the window behind Hymie. The black-cloud darkness of the room vibrated into microdots beneath its force and then coalesced together, trying to blot out the view again, to no avail.

  At the bottom of the window, on the other side of the glass, first one, then twenty, then what looked to be over a hundred mice, all with red eyes, began to crawl up a black branch that had shot up out of the sand. They wove and danced their way up and around it in feverish pirouettes.

  Hector’s skin grew clammy. If that window breaks . . .

  He forced himself not to think that. He knew, dreaming or not, that he couldn’t lose it here, because this place welcomed you with open arms if you lost it.

  Not knowing what else to do, Hector leaned slowly and cautiously over the table toward his cousin. Right when he was just within reach, Hymie’s hands shot out, grabbed Hector’s forearms and violently slammed them down on the table. His grip was inhuman and agonizing. Hector felt his bones giving way beneath it and he cried out, “Hymie! Let me go.”

  Instead, Hymie leaned forward as his dry lips struggled to crease up at the corners and form a sickening smile.

  When the visions came over Hector, his body went stiff as a board and vibrated with convulsions.

  He was in a liquor store. There was an old man. He shot the old man in the chest.

  Hymie suddenly spoke, his voice a hoarse version of its old self. “This is from my last night alive on earth,” he said. “The night you set me up . . . primo.”

  The last word dripped with a hatred that was worse than anything Hector was seeing.

  “No. Stop it, Hymie. I don’t want to see this.”

  “What? See what you did. No. You will. See and feel.”

  The next thing Hector knew, he was running outside the liquor store . . . and then there were . . . gunmen there . . .

  “Gunmen sent there. By you,” Hymie sneered.

  “I didn’t send them.”

  “No, you coward. You didn’t. You had someone else send them.” And now his grip had snapped both of Hector’s wrists and the pain was agonizing. “But you knew they were coming for me.”

  The vision became yet another form of reality. There seemed to be no concept of place or time in this room. It could be anything, anywhere.

  Now it was the place Hymie had been murdered. And Hector experienced it all.

  Bullet hole after bullet hole erupted in Hector’s chest and stomach, and the pain was so far beyond words that he simply screamed in agony. When he felt a hard thud against his chest and his heart burst in a rush of pumping, syrupy blood, he was amazed at how the mind could feel and record wounds happening to the body in such a cold, distant way—as if the brain, in shock, forgot that it was still part of the body being hurt. Nerves fired, numbness spread, and then Hector was falling to the ground.

  Falling, sad.

  Falling, brokenhearted.

  “No,” Hector said, overcome with emotion. “How did you know?
How?”

  “It was so obvious that they were there for me. Waiting. You were so pushy about me going to that liquor store, all the way on that side of town. How could I not realize it?”

  “Hymie—”

  “Traitor!”

  With this last word, something in Hector suddenly came alive. He snapped his head up in righteous indignation. “Traitor? Me?”

  “Yes.”

  The vision dissipated. The darkness in the room seemed to squirm alive again. “No, you little shit.” Hector sneered. “You’re the one that sold us out. You. For that little bitch.”

  Hymie’s head shook from side to side in some odd display of emotion. “I loved her.”

  “More than us? More than your own crew, man? More than me?”

  Hymie let go of his arms. “No.”

  “Yes,” Hector said, pulling his hands carefully toward him, so enraged that he could barely feel his throbbing wrists.

  Hector realized that the black ink was now moving to his command, and he began to will it to cover the window, to . . .

  But just then, the tip of the mice-covered branch pierced the window as though it were made of film, and the creatures began crossing over it in a sea of filthy, scampering feet and sharp teeth. Covering Hymie’s head and shoulders, they began to gnaw.

  “Ow,” he said matter-of-factly. “Ow. Okay, cousin. Ow. Fine. I’ll leave. Ow. Stop that. It hurts!” He reached up with one hand to swipe at a mouse who had bitten into his eyebrow. “But remember . . . we’ll all be waiting for you, when it’s your turn. Remember that. When, for the last time, you wake up, wake up, wake up—”

  “Wake the hell up!” someone shouted directly over Hector’s face as he lay on his cot in the jail cell.

  It was a sheriff, beyond annoyed by Hector’s deep sleep.

  “Shit! Okay! S-sorry.” Hector stammered as he sat up and rubbed his eyes.

  “Wash up a bit. You’re heading out in five,” the sheriff yelled.

  Hector swallowed and nodded. The sheriff stomped off and Hector was just about to get up when a skinny, dark-skinned man wearing Levi jeans and a tattered denim jacket, in the cell across from him, spoke up.

  “Wow,” the man said with a big grin. “You were sleeping like . . . the dead, homeboy.”

  But Hector barely heard a word he said because all his attention was on the man’s eyes.

  They were glistening black orbs.

  Chapter Sixteen

  “What’s the matter?” Ikuro asked, evidently seeing the look of concern that had crossed Father Soltera’s face.

  “Nothing,” Father Soltera replied. “It’s just that—”

  “We are still trying to get acclimated to this place,” Michiko interrupted.

  “Yes. Well, I’m afraid this is not a place you want to be if you don’t have to be. Neither of you seem to belong.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “You’re too alive,” Ikuro replied sadly, before looking to the ground.

  “So, what happened next, after the line broke?” Father Soltera asked.

  “I awoke, in the forest you just fled, and stumbled my way here.”

  There was a misty fog growing in this forest now, too. When they’d first arrived, it had been only a few inches off the ground, but now it was almost a foot high. The smell of damp wood and foliage filtered through the air and Father Soltera could’ve sworn that he’d caught a waft of mint. Thinking of the cats, Father Soltera asked, “You weren’t . . . bothered by anyone?”

  “You mean the cats?” Ikuro said with a chuckle.

  “We did not find them to be very humorous,” Michiko said with surprise.

  “Why not?”

  “They attacked us.”

  “Really? They did not bother me so much. They were not friendly, but they did not seek to harm me. They stayed in the trees and bushes mainly and let me pass.”

  “Did you see anyone else?”

  “No. Perhaps they bothered you because you don’t belong here?” Ikuro said, scratching at his chin, his eyes earnest with curiosity.

  “Yes. That must be it,” Father Soltera replied, sensing full well that it was more than that, at least when it came to Michiko. This place was evil, or at best, undecided in the universal scale of things. As a human being, Father Soltera was probably foreigner enough to be unwanted here. But Michiko . . . she was an agent of God. Somehow. Someway. He didn’t know why he was so sure of that, but he was. Just as he knew the same about Napoleon Villa.

  “Would either of you like some tea?” Ikuro asked.

  Michiko smiled politely. “Thank you, but no. We’re just passing through.”

  This seemed to amuse Ikuro even more. “Through? Through to where?”

  The mist was lifting even higher now, three feet off the ground and climbing. Creeping up Father Soltera’s pant legs, it seemed to sting a bit. An echo rang through the forest, the sound of wood knocking against wood, like an elk rutting against a tree trunk.

  Father Soltera looked at Michiko and saw a look of concern on her face. “Do you . . . ?”

  She nodded. “Ikuro? What is this mist?”

  Ikuro looked around as if he’d just been awoken from a daze. “Oh. This is not good. We must get moving.”

  “Why? What is it?”

  “It is the mist from The Hanging Forest,” he answered. He turned suddenly and began rushing down the path. He motioned for them to follow.

  “Are we now in The Whiting Woods?” Father Soltera asked.

  Ikuro looked back with a face of shock. “What? No. The Whiting Woods are miles from here.”

  The path was uneven and muddy. Green ivy with yellow speckles grew along both sides of it in places, and odd-shaped boulders, which they stepped carefully between as they advanced, crowded it in others.

  “Then what is this place?”

  Michiko had drawn her long sword again.

  Ikuro waved a hand over his shoulder. “This place has no name. I set my camp up here because I’ve tried to make my way myself, many times, to The Whiting Woods. But I can’t get in.”

  “Why not?”

  “When you get there, you will see. There is a huge moat that separates it from this place. The ravine downward is steep on this side, shallow on the other, but it’s the water . . . there’s something in the water that doesn’t let you pass.”

  The old man could walk incredibly fast, and between his harried pace and Michiko unsheathing her sword again, it became obvious to Father Soltera that they were in danger once more.

  “Hurry,” Ikuro said, almost breathlessly. “We must make it to my camp. It’s in a cave, just around the bend. We will start a fire to ward off the mist. I’m sorry that I have no food. I don’t get hungry here. But I will make us some tea.”

  The knocking in the woods was growing louder again, the sound seeming to climb up and down all the surrounding tree trunks, bouncing between them like handfuls of marbles in a wooden maze. And it was growing closer.

  As they moved, the mist around their legs parted and swirled, but it was thickening, like a broth. Worse still, it made the path harder to see; twice Father Soltera felt his knees groan as he stepped awkwardly into the dips.

  The boulders, too, were becoming nearly impossible to see, the tops of them looking like the tips of black icebergs in a roiling sea of moist air.

  Having no better idea, Father Soltera matched his steps and pace with Ikuro, willing himself to keep up as he felt Michiko doing the same from behind him, guarding their rear.

  The sky had now become pitch black. This, more than anything, seemed to worry Ikuro. He looked to the sky and then to the right and left, into the forest, his eyes creased with worry and his mouth in a tight grimace.

  “Almost there,” he said. “Almost there.”

  After about another fifty feet, there was a split in the path. Cutting off to the left was a trail made of mostly trampled grass that led to a small open space next to a large rock formation.

  A campf
ire was set up there, with an A-frame grill made of large branches, and a small kettle hanging from the middle of it. Beyond the camp was an opening to a cave, about twelve feet tall by twenty feet wide. As they drew closer, Father Soltera could see a burned-out campfire inside it too.

  “When the mist and darkness come, I move my camp inside,” Ikuro said, seeming to read Father Soltera’s mind. “Being outside is not an option.”

  Father Soltera was barely able to speak, he was so tired from the pace. “Why?” he asked, in a half-gasp.

  “Grab that side,” Ikuro said, ignoring Father Soltera’s question as he motioned to Michiko to help him with the A-frame. She sheathed her sword after cautiously looking around one more time, and then complied. Together, she and Ikuro carried the makeshift grill into the mouth of the cave.

  He motioned for Father Soltera to join them, but Father Soltera hesitated. Tightly enclosed spaces had never been his thing. He’d been claustrophobic his entire life, ever since his cousins had played a prank on him and thrown him inside an old refrigerator one day, closing the door and then holding it shut until his screams had ruined their laughter.

  Michiko saw his face and raised her left hand. It began to glow white and cast a bright light into the cave’s depths, which was a generous word, really, because the cave was pretty shallow—twenty feet deep, at best.

  Ikuro grabbed at some kindling and logs near the cave opening. After bringing them inside, he began striking a flint against the kindling. It took a half-dozen tries before a spark caught and a small fire began to grow. Deciding, at last, to join them, Father Soltera sat down with exhaustion and asked himself again if maybe this wasn’t all some sort of crazy dream, all in his head.

  After some time, the fire grew large and Ikuro hung his kettle over it, sprinkling twigs and leaves into it. “Jasmine and mint,” he said softly. “Good for the heart and stomach.”

  Michiko was sitting cross-legged with a hand on each knee, her left hand no longer emitting the white light now that the fire had taken hold. If not for the fact that her eyes were actively scanning the terrain outside the cave, she would’ve looked as if she were meditating.