The Parker Trilogy Read online

  That the universe had placed Felix at the liquor store near Luisa’s apartment building one day, to buy a Red Bull and some Zig-Zags for the joints he wanted to roll, at the exact same time that Luisa came by to get a bag of BBQ chips and a Pepsi on her way home from school, was just a cruel twist of fate.

  As Luisa told the story to Maggie, her eyes had lit up again. Felix was funny. Felix was a bad boy. Felix could protect her.

  It was easy to be critical, but Maggie didn’t go there, because doing so would’ve made her the biggest hypocrite in the world. Hadn’t Michael been a lot of those same things? Yes. And Maggie had fallen just as hard, the only difference being she’d been in her twenties and a little bit wiser to what behavior was acceptable and unacceptable in a relationship. And even then, love had blurred the lines and made her stay too long, wait too much for a change, and try too hard.

  “He’s lost it. But I can still fix this,” Luisa had said in the cafeteria with a ghost-like stare out the window. She’d barely gotten down half a ham sandwich and the tomato soup in front of her had grown cold. Then, just like that, she was out of thoughts and Maggie had talked her into getting some sleep, noticing that Luisa’s pretty, young face looked very weary.

  Sitting now on the couch in the shift supervisor’s office, which had been offered to her along with a few blankets and a small pillow as a bed for the night, Maggie shook her head. That this girl had all this going on and still a full pregnancy ahead of her was almost beyond imagining.

  The idea of her getting an abortion was still lurking there, in the shadows, but Maggie had a feeling that was a lot like trading one difficulty for another. And Father Soltera would probably have something more to say about that too.

  If he lives.

  The thought was like a car crash. Stunned, she shook the words off, but the whiplash they left behind remained.

  There’s a chance, you know full well, that he won’t come out of that coma.

  Shut up.

  Regardless, at least right now? You’re all she has.

  And what of it?

  You barely know either of them, Luisa or the Father, but they’ve known each other since Luisa’s childhood. You should honor that bond, if nothing else, by representing what you think the Father would tell her to do or say.

  Shit. I’m only one person.

  No one is ever just “one” person.

  Arguing with herself like this kind of proved that, Maggie realized and smiled faintly.

  She felt the melatonin in her body spiking. This was how sleep always came at her: full, heavy and immediate. She had no idea why.

  Lying down on the couch, she wrapped herself in her blankets—she was cold somehow, even though the shelter’s heater was running—and pulled the pillow over her face. Her neck was stiff and she could almost hear her body sigh with relief at finally getting some rest. It had been a brutally draining day.

  Her dreams were no less brutal.

  She had no sooner fallen through the trapdoor of her consciousness when regret washed over her.

  No. I just want to sleep tonight. No dreams. No . . . anything. Please. Please.

  But she was in the sky, flying over a forest—a Forest of Faith; the words came to her instantly. It was like any other forest, with pockets of light and dark green trees, brush, grass, scattered meadows and a few steep, rocky hills.

  Interspersed through the entire landscape was a pervasive fog, thick in some places, merely curly wisps in others. As she swooped in, defying the laws of the natural world like dreams always allowed you to do for some reason, she noticed there was no sun here, and only a dull skyline. Parts of the forest were dead, some from decay, others from wildfires.

  Flying was wonderful, but she was descending, slowly, and the part of her that seemed to have a sixth sense in every dreamworld she had ever entered was telling her not, under any circumstances, to land.

  But she was not a bird, superhero or angel. She had no idea how to fly. She only knew her body was gliding downward, through a fog that burned her skin and eyes like a misty acid.

  What is this place? Why am I—

  Father Soltera was somewhere down below. She sensed him immediately. Looking left to right as she squinted to protect her eyes, she saw a low mountain nearby with a rocky cliff face, trapped like the rest of this place in a stultifying twilight.

  She dipped, then went into a quicker descent at a reckless speed, weaving in and out of trees, dodging sheets that were hanging from the branches.

  No. Those were bodies. Not sheets. Those were people. Hanging people.

  She looked forward and jerked her head. Her body followed as she barely missed one of the people, a young woman in a wedding dress who was hanging from a tree high up near the cliff, her neck broken and her rotted tongue lolling from her mouth.

  Maggie kept moving forward through the forest, and as she did, the twilight began to fade until at last it was gone and a pitch-black night swept across the land.

  The air hurt more now, as if the fog was more acidic, but down below she saw a fire, small but alive, at the mouth of a cave.

  The Father was in that cave and he wasn’t alone, but she couldn’t tell who he was with. She was straining to see more, when instead, she saw something else. Wolves, about ten of them, and they were giant－nearly five times the normal size. Illuminated by the light of the campfire, she could see them forming a semi-circle around the cave entrance, trapping anyone within.

  Father Soltera needed her help again. But what could she do? Last time, a word had just come to her and she’d shared it. Sent it. Pushed it from her mind to his.

  Perhaps this time she was supposed to help physically somehow? Was that why she was here, like this, in this form? She banked left, to test the theory, and grabbed a tree branch, which snapped off the trunk of its tree. She would try to glide in and strike at the creatures; she might—

  This was silly. It was just a dream. Actually, it was more like a nightmare. She had to stop believing this stuff was real, she had—

  But the scream that echoed from the cave and into her mind was as real as anything she’d ever experienced in her entire life. It was Father Soltera. He was there. This was happening. And she had to help. Willing her body to swoop downward, she fell into a dive, heading directly for the cave opening.

  She never made it.

  “Maggie!” a voice yelled. Then again, “Maggie!” This time it was a scream.

  She woke up from a dead sleep, under the weight of someone shaking her by the shoulders. Blinking hard to focus, she was finally able to make out who it was: Kim, the night shift supervisor. A tall woman with a dark complexion and hair woven in cornrows over her scalp, she was leaning over Maggie and shaking her awake.

  “What?” Maggie mumbled. “What is it?”

  “Luisa,” Kim said almost breathlessly, a look of panic on her face. “Maggie. She’s gone!”

  Chapter Nineteen

  It had been pitch black when Parker had left the station house, Napoleon having blinked away with a promise to meet again the next day. The latest storm clouds had blotted out the stars and left only a choppy gouge in the sky, which the half-moon was using to peek through.

  But in his head it was even darker. As he drove home, he tried to grapple with the usual beasts while contemplating how in the world he was going to handle this new, inconvenient truth: he was being visited by the ghost of his dead partner, who was now some sort of angel and could interact with Parker in the physical world.

  On some level, Parker knew this was supposed to make him feel better; Napoleon was alive, somehow and some way, which meant that the part of Parker that had been mourning for months could take hope.

  But in the place of the mourning, there had come a very real and creeping fear, from skin to bone, of what it all meant. Sitting there in the conference room with him, once the surrealism of it had worn off, Parker suddenly began to realize that the spirit world he’d always viewed as mythical—or at best, possi
ble—was actually real.

  To make matters worse, all this only accentuated his feeling that he wasn’t well in the head. He knew this. Trudy knew this. And it was funny how the mind worked, how it wanted to deny something like his PTSD until it needed it to fend off something even more massive, like proof of an afterlife. Of angels. Of demons. As if insanity was its own form of atheism.

  Now, instead of wanting to deny his illness, he wanted to use it as footing for the idea that he was simply having a full-on mental breakdown. That he was imagining Napoleon. That, like some little child, his mind had manifested an imaginary friend to help him through a tough time.

  But, and he’d have to find a sneaky way to ask his therapist this, was it possible for a mentally ill person, deep in the throes of some sort of breakdown, to also have such logical thoughts about it? Probably not.

  So. Either Napoleon really was there or . . . what?

  As he whizzed through traffic and made it to his exit, Parker forced himself to think like a detective. Was there physical evidence? Yes. The air moved when Napoleon arrived, creating an odd, distant, sizzling sound like how Pop Rocks sounded in your head as they dissolved in your mouth. And hadn’t Parker keenly observed that the edges of the pages in each file, though not singed, were slightly discolored whenever Napoleon had slid one his way?

  And what about Napoleon’s behaviors and mannerisms? All still there, save the cursing. He’d even tried to make a few jokes. But it was still all too soon for he and Napoleon to really click. That canyon between who they once were and who they had become was still too wide.

  When his cell rang, he hit the answer button on his steering wheel, thinking it was Trudy checking in on him.

  It wasn’t.

  Instead, Güero’s voice filled the inside of the car with a darkness that the night sky could never match. “You shot that boy in the back, didn’t you, Detective? I’m curious . . . What kinda hero does that?”

  Parker was beyond shocked. “What are you talking about?”

  “You hunted him down like an animal, crippled him, left him there to die in the desert. Even worse. You liked doing it, deep down.”

  “That’s a lie.”

  “Such a good soldier. You’d be a good one for our side, for sure. You already were, until you met Detective Villa and had your little moment in that driveway . . . when you saw that hideous creature from that land of useless hope—”

  “Stop.”

  “—and all that promise of salvation. You got a glimpse. Then another, at that car accident, and then? Aaall of a sudden, you caught the worst virus of all: awareness.”

  “Listen, Güero. Carefully. Your little taunt calls? They’re doing you no good. I’m still going to get your punk ass.”

  “Only after you’ve crawled over all the dead bodies of the men you’ve killed or watched get killed. All of them gone now—while you’re here, tucked into your tidy little life with a career and a future. You remember their names, don’t you, Detective?”

  “Shut up!”

  “Waheeb. Anderson. Fenn. Martinez. You failed them all. But once, only once, did you want to run. Only once did you want to give up. Do you remember that time, Detective Parker?”

  Parker’s head began to swim with the smell of flashbang grenades. He could almost feel the hot air on his face.

  “You do, don’t you? Yes. Of course you do. You try not to. You lock it all up in your head each day. You go to your therapy appointments every week and call your Wounded Warrior sponsor on the down low when it gets really bad. Tsk, tsk. The drinks help, when you can sneak off to the bar or gun a beer before your girl gets home. But not thinking about a thing is not the same as forgetting it, now, is it? No. And Outpost Keating is a hard place to forget, isn’t it?”

  How does he know all this? How!?

  But he knew. He did. Güero was like a Napoleon, for the other side.

  “I’m hanging up, you piece of shit.”

  “That’s fine. I’m done anyway. You go on home now. Go nighty-night and remember to pull those sheets up over your head. It won’t matter. Because it’s what’s in your head that’s gonna get you, Detective. One splintery thought at a time. You just watch.”

  The phone disconnected loudly across the car speakers, making Parker jump.

  He sighed. Thank God he hadn’t told anyone earlier about Güero’s call. Because look what they’d have now if they’d tapped his phone. On tape. All the crap that was dragging him down. They would’ve asked questions about all that Güero had said about Parker’s ugly past and current struggles—how could they not have? Never mind how Güero knew it all—that’d come later. And when it did, what would he tell them? That being an agent of hell gave you inside information on people?

  He could hear Captain Holland now. “An agent of what, again, Parker?”

  He could hear Clopton. “Uh, Parker. Who’s this kid you shot in the back?” Right before she called the army base in Bell Gardens and asked for a military police investigator to be sent over.

  And he could hear the IA goons too. “Detective Parker, why is it again that you did not disclose the extent of your struggles with a psychological disorder that was clearly a detriment to your ability to serve, as per departmental procedures?”

  Then how could any of them not ask the inevitable: “Is this how Detective Villa got killed? Is this how Detective Campos got hurt? Is this how Hector Villarosa managed to evade capture?”

  Reaching his building, he forced it all out of his head, hit the clicker and waited for the security gate to the garage to open before he pulled into his parking space. As he got out of the car, he took a deep breath and told himself to count it out. Every step. From here to the front door of his apartment. Trudy was waiting for him, he knew it. She’d hug him, warm him up some leftovers and want to know about his day.

  In counting the steps, he could walk himself backward, from the cliff of his thoughts and Güero’s voice to the reality of his life with her.

  But when he got to the apartment and opened the door, he saw that Trudy had fallen asleep on the couch, her head against a throw pillow and her body wrapped in a large brown blanket. Only a side-table lamp was on, it’s yellow light mingling with the white light from the TV, which was showing the local news. At first, Parker was disappointed. But then, as he closed the door softly behind him, he took note of the look on Trudy’s face as she slept.

  Her lips were relaxed and curved slightly upwards over her soft chin, her forehead cast in the light from the TV, her eyelashes drawn over her cheeks. She seemed so small and vulnerable. He’d never looked at her that way before, and Parker knew it was because of the lingering effects of studying up on this case. And this was his second sort of “disconnect” that night.

  How? How in the world did love and happiness, Trudy and the future, live in the same world as monsters like Güero and the lives of the women he tragically abused? What twist of fate in those stars outside put Trudy on this couch, peacefully asleep, while only fifteen miles across town, at this very moment, women were on couches in nightclubs built solely to force them into acts of humiliation and misery?

  Parker put his jacket over one of the chairs in the dining room and closed his eyes.

  How? How am I ever going to do this?

  Because to Parker, the world had always been such a black-and-white place, hadn’t it? There was black and there was white, right and wrong, clear and unclear. Period.

  But Napoleon’s return had turned everything all to gray.

  More questions, this time from a pair of detectives who read Hector his Miranda rights again, even though he’d already had them read to him by the arresting officers back at the house on Gage Street.

  Again, even though it was stupid and against everything he’d been taught on the street, Hector waived his right to an attorney. What was the point? They no doubt had security footage of him shooting David Fonseca at The Mayan, maybe not the kill shot in the storage room but certainly the one at the bar, an
d by default, the one that came before it, when Hector shot Marisol in the neck. So, minimum, two counts of attempted murder right there. Then, the same cameras would show Hector shooting wildly at the bar, which would only add counts of reckless endangerment.

  If the DA really had a hard-on for the case, and he or she probably would, they might even try to call those shots attempted murder, too, claiming that Hector was aiming at the bartenders or other patrons. Considering Hector’s past, and the fact that he was only days out of jail on probation for his last crime, this was pretty much it for him.

  Hard time.

  Hector knew it. The detectives knew it. What the hell else could a shitty public defender know? How to maybe save him five years on a thirty-year sentence? Not likely.

  One of the detectives that interviewed him was Asian, last name Chan, and the other was a white dude with a clean-shaven face, last name Houghton. They both looked serious as cancer and in no mood to even bother talking shop.

  “So? You care to tell us why you did what you did?”

  “The cops and detectives already drilled me when they brought me in last night.”

  Detective Chan rolled his eyes. “That wasn’t a drilling. It was preliminary questioning.”

  “Why’d they bother, then? So you could just bug the shit out of me again?”

  “Yeah. Except this time you’ve had time to sober up,” Houghton interjected.

  Hector felt hot. The room was painted white, with a metal table and three chairs. Not quite the room with Hymie from his dream, but still too close for comfort.