The Parker Trilogy Page 52

  “You have no idea what a tortured mind feels like, homeboy,” one of the demons hissed at him through the bars. “Wait until I get ahold of you. Then you’ll see!” He laughed as he climbed the bars, gripping them with his hands and feet, bouncing back and forth violently like an overly excited chimpanzee.

  The two demons in the same cell laughed and Hector noticed that their eyes were different from those of The Levi’s Man. Instead of orbs that were shiny and black, these eyes were red and dull, with an orange back-lit glow from some other place.

  The Gray Man’s voice whispered in his mind. The Levi’s Man was possessed. These creatures are here from that other place.

  “What place?” Hector whispered in reply, so softly that his words were barely perceptible to his own ears.

  You know what place.

  Hector’s curiosity morphed into suspicion. “Then why stay in the bars? Why not just come after me?”

  While here on this plane, they must adhere to most of its physical laws.

  “Most?”

  Yes. Especially when there are witnesses around, as there are now.

  “Why?”

  Because their role here, as is the role of my kind, is to influence, not strong-arm.

  Hector chuckled bitterly. “Influence? That sounds shady to me.”

  The florescent lights overhead were painfully bright. Hector squinted against them and against all the screams and shouts around him.

  He’d been brought in with six other prisoners, two of whom were walking ahead of him and green as summer grass. Their heads were tucked deep into their shoulders and they were trying to stay as close as possible to the deputy leading the line, their fear palpable and no doubt only being exacerbated with each threat of rape or murder the prisoners all around were hurling at them.

  Hector shook his head gently, briefly recalling his first time in the joint. It was not a pleasant feeling, losing your freedom, dignity and sense of self-worth all in one day.

  After a long pause, The Gray Man finally answered. Shady? I think not. Your friend, the one short in stature? It took him months to nurture those things within you—the rage, the hate, the disappointment—to the point you eventually did what you did.

  Hector jumped on the chance. “You mean it’s not my fault, what I did?”

  Of course it is. In the end, as in the beginning and throughout the entire process of being led astray, you had a series of choices. That is the essence of free will.

  “And?”

  And you consistently chose wrong.

  Along the left side of the hallway there were four more demons, three in one cell, one in the other. Like the rest, their skin was charred, with slivers of it falling like carne asada meat to the floor below them before disintegrating, each of them reaching through the bars toward him, their fingers splayed and revealing long claws.

  Beneath the lights, a gray ghost flickered into and out of existence, like an image on a TV screen that was getting bad reception. The Gray Man wove his way between the prisoner and deputy up front to the demons on the left, and waved his hand. The demons shrank back in protest, gnashing their teeth at him as they shook their heads maniacally from side to side.

  Hector couldn’t help himself. “Watch it! You’re outnumbered.”

  The Gray Man chuckled. Please. These lice? They wouldn’t stand a chance.

  The demons hissed loudly before they unleashed a string of words in a mind-numbing combination of languages. Hector could only understand the English and Spanish ones when they rotated into the sequence, and if they were like the rest, then all the words were vile and vulgar curse words.

  The Gray Man snapped his head to face them and swathes of gray light shot in their direction, forcing the demons to scream and retreat backward into their cells.

  Hector raised his eyebrows. “Damn.”

  You mean . . . damned.

  They continued making their way down the hall, the red door up ahead growing closer bit by bit. Once there, they would be checked in to one of the world’s worst hotels. Vegas it was not. No slot machines here, no house bets, no strippers on poles over the blackjack tables. There was no winning in this place, just an attempt at limiting your losses.

  The three prisoners behind him had enough sense to stay silent and suffer the gauntlet the rest of the way, but the kid right in front of Hector was losing it, wincing and wobbling out of line, back and forth a foot here or there, getting chastised by the deputy in the rear and further mocked by the prisoners all around them.

  It was just like in The Lord of the Flies. When left to the nature of their ways? Human beings reverted right back to a tribal existence. The guard up front was white, the one behind black, but Hector and the rest of the guys in his line? All Hispanic. As were all the prisoners around them, at least the ones that were human.

  They were being admitted into the Latin wing of the prison, separate from the black wing and white wing. If you were Asian, you were screwed and got tossed in wherever. Then, in a further division of identity, each would segregate into pods based on gang identity. The Crips in the black wing, for instance, did not mix with the Bloods; the Mexican gangs did not mix with the Central American gangs, and so on.

  Given time and intent, each gang would fashion shanks and other crude tools to fight with, like cavemen in ancient times. And it was this thought that, for whatever reason, finally pushed Hector over the edge.

  Despair filled him like stagnant water into a fractured vessel. He began to leak his feelings for a second before he recovered them quickly. No. Don’t show emotion.

  He hated this place. Prison was the most inhuman thing ever created.

  “I’d be better off dead,” Hector whispered under his breath.

  Ahead of him he saw The Gray Man drop his head, ever so slightly, as if maybe, just maybe . . . he agreed.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  The world was liquid pain, all around, as if Father Soltera, in stepping out of the cave, had been immediately submerged in water.

  He realized now how the goldfish in front of The Gossamer Lady’s face could swim like that, in the air that wasn’t quite air. Even the dire wolves, rooted to the ground as they were, and that poor bird, struggling to break free from her hair in that mesmerizing up-and-down pattern, were breathing it.

  The liquid was highly oxygenated and it made him dizzy. Somehow, somewhere, he heard beeping machines and a woman’s panicked voice, the words reaching his ears in fragments: “. . . blood pressure . . . grab Connie . . . reset the numbers . . . stat . . .” But he heard the words the same way you did as a kid in the swimming pool, when you tried to talk to your friends underwater. It was a muted, bubbly kind of sound.

  The Gossamer Lady had her arms out, as if offering him a loving embrace. He knew it wasn’t Gabriella, but she was close enough. Sometimes when the reality you want will never come into being, a lie is the next best thing. He was ready now. He was tired.

  Unlike Ikuro, he had no interest in wandering these lands for decades, trying to find a way out. No. Maybe this was a quiet little province in purgatory, or an outlying territory of hell. Whichever. It certainly wasn’t heaven, and it was just more proof that his Lord had determined him unworthy of such a destination.

  He was sad about that, but perhaps in the cunning embrace that he was now walking toward, for one split second, he could get a taste of what it would’ve felt like to hold the real thing, to kiss Gabriella’s lips, to surrender every aching crack in his heart to someone who would’ve filled them.

  He heard Michiko yelling out from miles behind him. When two of the wolves charged past him, he knew that she was trying to save him, and they, with their bared fangs, were going to try to prevent her from doing so. If they couldn’t defeat her, then two more would follow. Then two after that.

  Having stepped out of the cave now, and with his eyes fully adjusted to the dark, his heart sank. Behind The Gossamer Lady, the meadow was full of wolves. Dozens of them, some smaller than the o
thers. Some with red eyes, others with yellow and a few with orange. In the tree line past the meadow, he could see the Fire-Belly Cats had returned too. Their tiny eyes glinting in the tree branches, their stomachs aglow with that eerie inner flame, as if they’d come to be spectators to his end.

  Whatever. A few more steps and none of it would matter. Ikuro could go back to his hiding. Michiko could return to Napoleon Villa and tell him it just wasn’t meant to be. She’d tried and all that, but his heart had been too weak when his soul cried out.

  Some random words rattled around in his mind: Reasoned. Child. Trust. Heart. Understanding.

  “Code Blue . . .” the woman in the sky was yelling. “10CCs . . . lights . . . paddles . . .”

  The Gossamer Lady smiled. But it was only her for a moment before she became a mirage of Gabriella. And what a stunning mirage it was. Father Soltera smiled softly. He imagined that The Gossamer Lady was pulling memories of Gabriella from his mind to fashion it, much as Ikuro had pulled his memories of the piano chords to “Ombra Mai Fu” to fashion his song.

  His body vibrated violently and the sky overhead, dark and foreboding, was smacked with a sea of lightning bolts. Startled, the wolves yelped and scattered.

  But Gabriella still stood before him in the white dress she’d worn the day she’d come to the confessional and hinted at her love for him, the dress that hugged her hips and showed just the tiniest hint of cleavage. Arms long and tan. He’d given her the leftover tulips from a wedding from the day before, like a groom who could never say his vows. Their hands had touched, and he felt her slender fingers waiting to intertwine with his and hold on forever anyway.

  Because vows didn’t mean everything, did they?

  Did they?

  The sky crackled around him yet again, startling him from the memory. This time, when he looked up, he saw someone vaguely outlined between the bolts. They were too far away to see, but distance in this place meant next to nothing. Here, you just knew, and he knew who it was: Maggie Kincaid.

  She had come to visit him somehow, but there was no getting to him like this, so she’d done the next best thing: she’d made herself seen.

  In so doing, she made herself a memory.

  And every memory carries with it a reality.

  There would only be two reasons she was here: so she could help or because she needed help. And if she needed help, it would be for one person in particular.

  Another shock blast, more sky full of brilliant light. And then the words rattled back into his head again. Reasoned. Child. Trust. Heart. Understanding.

  Why? Why was he stuck on these words? And then it came to him: because they were some of the words he always used as part of his quinceañera sermon.

  The one he always prayed over the girls in his church on their fifteenth birthday, when their entrance into womanhood was celebrated in front of their family, friends and God. Next to baptisms, they were his favorite part of church. In many ways the two sacred rituals were similar; they celebrated innocence, no matter how fleeting it was or might be.

  In honor of the transition ahead of the girl before him, into womanhood, he always opened with a passage from Corinthians:

  “When I was a child, I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man (or woman), I put the ways of childhood behind me.”

  Then he gave them a passage from Proverbs as hope in the face of the challenges that transition would entail:

  “Trust in the Lord with all your heart, and do not lean on your own understanding. In all your ways acknowledge him, and he will make straight your paths.”

  Another shock to the sky, another cry from the strange woman’s voice: “. . . find . . . again.”

  Find . . . what again?

  It came to him in the liquid air like the negative to a photograph that had been waiting to develop all along: the sunny spring day when Luisa, little Luisa, had enjoyed her quinceañera.

  He had stood like a proud papa at the end of the aisle when the church doors were opened and there, at the other end of the aisle, she stood. In her culture, next to her wedding day, this was the biggest day of her life and she showed it—nervous smile, huge eyes.

  Her hands were folded in front of her, the ends of a red silk scarf that was wrapped over her shoulders being held down flat under each wrist. Her white dress was flowing and decorated in places with soft floral embroidery.

  Behind her was her procession, seven girls in cream dresses, and their escorts, seven young men in tan suits. Her family having deep roots in the farming communities of Mexico and California, the celebration to follow would be ranchero style, with country music and lots of alcohol.

  But during that mass, all was somber in the presence of the delicate beauty that was Luisa, trembling in the aisle.

  Her mother, not ten feet to Father Soltera’s right, stifled a sob. With Luisa’s birth father dead and gone, she had scraped together a year’s worth of savings and collected donations from family to pull off the incredible expense of this day.

  He had encouraged her each step of the way, even helping her choose the cake from pictures she’d brought to church one afternoon, and even though Father Soltera had held mass for more quinceañeras than he could count, he too felt a surge of emotion.

  How could he not? Wasn’t the girl slowly walking her way down the aisle, as people on either side stood and the music began to play, the same human being he held as an infant the day she was baptized, when she squirmed so delicately beneath the refreshing touch of the holy water and looked up at the ceiling of the church with eyes so wide you’d have thought she was seeing God himself up there?

  Yes. Yes, she was.

  The stained-glass windows of the church were bathing her white dress in a rainbow of colors, making its embroidered flowers appear to be in bloom, as if God were a guest in the sunshine, visiting her this day.

  When she finally kneeled on the pew right before him, she managed a quick glance at her mother before she looked nervously up at Father Soltera and smiled ever so slightly. He read her the passages from Corinthians and Proverbs, before adding another one from Proverbs, passage 31:30, then continuing with the gospel and the homily.

  Then, in a tiny voice, Luisa renewed the vows she’d made after catechism and began a two-way public dialogue with Father Soltera, whereby she dedicated herself to the Virgin Mary and, most importantly, to the Lord, her voice trembling a little as she did so.

  After this, her mother and godparents came forward to present her with gifts and a bouquet of flowers. Hugs. Tears.

  Love.

  Father Soltera stood watching it all, wondering at the grace that had brought this young lady so far, through so much, with a single mother forced to work two jobs just to survive, in a neighborhood that could be so ruthless at times.

  Solemn grace gave the moment all the fullness of sanctity that it required as Luisa turned to go back down the aisle and out into the big world outside, where the reality of Felix and her evil uncle, Güero Martinez—who Father Soltera now realized had not been there that day—were lying in wait to steal that innocence and . . .

  “No,” Father Soltera said, the word like an earthquake, shaking the ground beneath him violently. The Gossamer Lady’s mirage shattered, and she stumbled backward as the wolves began to run in chaotic circles, half-excited, half-panicked.

  One final jolt and the woman’s voice in the sky again. “We’ve got . . . stabilized . . . roll it . . . a pulse.”

  The lightening returned, and Maggie was still there, but the outline of her body was disappearing backward, growing smaller and smaller with each passing second. She was doing something odd with her arms as she retreated; she was flapping them in an exaggerated fashion, as if she had wings.

  She was trying to tell him something, but he didn’t care. He wasn’t important anymore. What he’d just realized about Luisa was all that mattered. His face melted in panic. “They’re after her soul!” he screamed out to h
er. “Maggie! They’re after her soul!”

  Then Maggie was gone, and The Gossamer Lady curled back her lips, revealing a mouthful of gleaming fangs, and attacked.

  Stunned, Maggie clicked the map icon and up popped a picture of an old, dilapidated warehouse with fading beige stucco and a worn sign that said “Benpo Tire Company.”

  Thank God for technology, she thought.

  But her thanks didn’t last long. She could also see four emails from her Visual Voicemail app sitting in her inbox.

  One was Julie’s number from last night. Her little sister had called to check in on her, as she suspected. Unlike before though, during Maggie’s days with Michael, Julie wouldn’t panic when Maggie didn’t answer or call back. Normalcy had returned to Maggie’s life, at least until now.

  The timestamps on the other three voice mails made Maggie worried. They’d all rolled in between 2:00 a.m. and 2:10 a.m.

  She clicked the first one. It was only about ten seconds of muffled sound. The second call was more of the same. Finally, in the third voice mail, Luisa had managed to talk.

  The message was short, but it detonated inside Maggie like a bomb.

  Luisa was crying, hard, as she spoke. “Maggie? Please help me. I made a mistake. He’s crazy. He’s—”

  Maggie struggled, unsuccessfully at first, to contain wave after wave of cold panic that washed over her. She thought of twenty different directions to go in twenty seconds flat, then closed her eyes and stilled her breathing, just like she’d been taught in her Taekwondo classes. Deep breaths. In and out. Focus. Discipline. Calm.

  The storm is brought, not endured, she told herself. Then, more breaths. In. Out. Before long, her plan was complete—simple and ready to be enacted.

  She left the computer room and went to the safe room, where she grabbed her bag with her Eskrima sticks. She walked calmly to the office, where Kim sat behind the desk looking very much like someone who was afraid they were going to lose their job. “This is a mess,” Kim said when she saw Maggie.