The Parker Trilogy Read online

  Her mother, calling her three or four times a day when things first went down, on anti-anxiety pills.

  Her father and the stroke. How much of that was caused by his worry over her?

  Her roommate in Miami. Michael had raped her and chopped off her hair, terrifying her so much into silence that she’d kicked Maggie out and demanded never to see her again.

  Stop it! This isn’t helping anything. You’re wasting time!

  Then Julie. Poor Jules. Stuffed into the trunk of his car, driven down the eastern seaboard. Beaten. Tortured. Humiliated.

  You know you can’t take responsibility for the actions of another human being. Your therapist has told you that.

  My own therapist hardly knows anything about me.

  Because you keep it that way.

  Because it has to be that way.

  Why?

  What? You want to tell her the truth? That I have dreams that tell me things about the past and the future? Some that just happen to come true? Ha. I’d be in a straitjacket in a padded room in no time.

  Silence. Then: It’s a gift.

  No. It’s a curse. Of the worst kind.

  You don’t mean that.

  “I don’t know what I mean anymore,” Maggie said aloud before sighing heavily, like an old person weary with their days.

  She closed her eyes and quieted the debate in her mind.

  “Focus,” she whispered softly, centering her attention on the feeling of her teeth on her lower lip as she said the word. “Focus.”

  She’d been keeping busy since moving to LA, staying late at work, visiting all the museums and farmers markets. There was her Taekwondo classes and the excessive workouts at the gym, and her weekly trip on Fridays to Grand Central Market for her reward of a fried chicken sandwich from Dane’s. Busy, busy, busy. But no dates. Busy, busy, busy. But no flirting. Broken mind, broken heart . . . she was too useless for anyone to want and she knew it.

  She gripped the wheel. “Stop it.” She was stronger than this. She was.

  So where is this shit coming from?

  Her panicked breathing had steamed up the windows and she instinctively wiped the windshield. The storm that had been hovering over the city for days had left, but it looked like a new one was moving in to take its place. Heavy fog was multiplying over the street.

  Then she again noticed the crucifix. She’d bumped it with her elbow while swiping at the windshield, and it instantly made her think of Father Soltera. When she’d last seen him, he’d been at the mouth of that cave, in that haunted place, not looking well but looking better than he’d looked in that hospital bed at White Memorial.

  He was a good man.

  The crucifix kept swinging, like a pendulum again.

  God was good, too.

  He was here now. Maggie could feel Him. Calming her.

  She felt weary. That old sensation was coming on, when her body tried to force her to sleep. But there was no way she was going to be taking any naps now. Right around the corner and down the street was her best－maybe her last－chance to save Luisa.

  Follow the plan.

  She grabbed the cell phone and dialed Detective Murillo’s number. When he answered on the third ring, she sighed and said, “Detective Murillo, it’s Maggie. I think I found Luisa by tracking my cell phone.”

  “What?”

  “Yeah. It was in the bag she took with her when she snuck off. The address is a warehouse for Benpo Tire Company, corner of Elliot and Barrows in South El Monte. I’m here now.”

  Sounding stunned, he simply repeated himself. “What?”

  “Yeah. She left me a few voicemail messages. She’s in trouble. I have to—”

  “Ms. Kincaid, stay right there, don’t you—”

  She hung up in his ear.

  Her mind begged for rest at the same time pure adrenaline coursed through her veins, her nerves so raw now that she began to tremble. She felt her eyes begin to close and fought it off. No. No way.

  So, for the first time, sleep or no sleep, the other world decided to talk to her anyway.

  It was Father Soltera’s voice, screaming in a tragic, tortured sort of desperation.

  “They’re after her soul!” he screamed. “Maggie! They’re after her soul!”

  Her eyes flew wide open. She started the car and punched the gas, her tires squealing as she pulled off the curb and raced to Elliot Street and made a sharp right.

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Parker was sitting at his desk and still trying to decide as to whether he should tell the captain and Special Agent Clopton that he needed off the case, wondering how and if that would trigger a sea tide of questions or demands for a psych eval or medical release, when he noticed Hopkins staring at him from his desk across the station house.

  Having caught him looking, Hopkins suddenly looked away and started lamely shuffling through some papers on his desk. Was he a rat? Parker hardly knew the man, but if he was, how long before he figured out they were on to him. Or what if, somehow, he already had?

  He was mulling over the idea of striking up a conversation with him, just to get a vibe, when Murillo ran up in a panic and began typing on his computer.

  “What’s going on?” Parker asked.

  “We got a problem on the case!” Murillo said, a little too loudly.

  “Okay, but you might want to keep it down,” he said softly, tossing his eyes toward Hopkins’ desk.

  Murillo glanced over at Hopkins, then lowered his voice. “We got a bigger problem right now.”

  Parker raised his eyebrows. “What?”

  “The Kincaid woman?”

  “Yeah?”

  “She’s tracked down the girl . . . or at least she thinks she has.” Murillo told him the rest.

  “Shit. She could get killed if she goes in there alone.”

  “Ya think?” Murillo said, pure frustration drenching his voice.

  “That’s El Monte PD, right?”

  “No. South El Monte is the Sheriff’s Department.”

  “Let’s call them and get over there now to—”

  Murillo shook his head. “You know better. Police business is out for you. You’re still technically on leave until after tomorrow.”

  “Screw that, Murillo.”

  “No. I mean it, Parker. You could get me fired.”

  Rain began to speckle the station windows, still light enough for empty spaces to hold between the drops. Now he was the one who sounded frustrated. “Well, hell. What am I—”

  Murillo held up a hand to cut him off. “You can at least call it in to the Sheriff’s for me. Help that way. I tried to call Klink, but it went to voice mail. He left to do some Metro duty hours after our meeting, so the bastard’s probably already eating a corn dog in one of the stations that has weak reception. Keep blowing him up for me while I head over there?”

  Parker threw up his hands but nodded.

  Murillo grabbed his jacket and headed out of the station.

  Parker called the sheriff’s station and initially got a gruff veteran named Watkins who sounded more annoyed than interested, until Parker told him that he might have a kidnapping victim who was a minor being raped or tortured in a warehouse in their jurisdiction. The raped and tortured part was a bit over the top, but a dick like Watkins deserved the extra dose of motivation.

  After that, he tried Klink’s cell three times with no more luck than Murillo, so he sat back in his chair and began to feel useless again. He felt his mind trying to rehash everything with Trudy before he diverted it to their plans for capturing Güero Martinez.

  The plan that he wasn’t sure he even wanted to be a part of anymore.

  You pull out, they’re gonna know something’s up. The cap already has an eye on you. What’re you going to say, that you suddenly have a cold or that you’re “tired”? Yeah. No red flags there. Sure. But Trudy is looking like she’s had enough. And what if she’s right? What if you’re a time bomb, about to go off? Not in a little way, like you d
id with Tic Toc in that alley, but worse?

  The macho part of him refused to think about the other way this disease could get him, and he immediately saw in himself even the cowardice of that notion. It was not a “disease.” It had a name. He forced himself to think it. Post-traumatic stress disorder.

  And the symptoms of it were brutal fists that each took turns hitting you. Listlessness. Depression. Lack of sleep. Anxiety. A short temper.

  Name it. Own it.

  No.

  He didn’t want to name it or own it.

  If Trudy leaves you over this . . .

  She won’t.

  You sure?

  No. I’m not.

  And without her, what was the point? To any of it? And a part of him knew that this, too, was an unhealthy way to think. He couldn’t transfer all the power of his life over to another person, could he? If that was love . . .

  That’s not love. You know that. It’s okay to care enough about her to prioritize her the right way in your life.

  He was so lost in thought that he barely heard his phone ringing, right there on his desk. It was Klink.

  “What’s up?” he asked.

  “Murillo may have found the girl. He needs your help. Here’s the location.” Glancing up warily and catching Hopkins looking over a second time now, Parker rotated his chair nonchalantly to the side, opened his palm in a relaxed grip on the phone to covertly muffle his voice and filled Klink in on the details. “I’d help, or at least cover your Metro duty, but I can’t do crap but sit here.”

  “Yeah. That’s gotta suck. No worries, Parker. We got it.”

  Then Klink was gone, and Parker was back to sitting, alone, in the cocoon of the station house, with its soundtrack of ringing phones, clicking keyboards and occasional chatter.

  “How’s desk duty?” a voice said out of nowhere, startling Parker. It was Hopkins, who had managed to walk up on him while he was hanging up the phone.

  Parker nodded and replied, “A bowl of laughs.”

  Hopkins stood there for a moment as Parker sized him up: tall, overweight, with skin that looked dehydrated. His hands looked older than they should have, with yellow under some of the fingernails. Nicotine. So, he was a smoker. Parker had never worked with him, so he didn’t know much about him, except that right now, at this moment, he caught Hopkins trying to steal glances at the papers on his desk and at his computer screen.

  “You lose something?” Parker said, knowing it was a bit heavy-handed. He didn’t want to blow the Feds’ cover on Hopkins, but he wanted to see for himself.

  “Nah, just wondering if desk duty is all it’s cracked up to be!” Hopkins said with a laugh. But it was a forced laugh, awkward and off pace.

  Parker had a feeling that Clopton was on to the right guy. Luckily, there was nothing on his desk or computer monitor that had anything to do with what was going on. Still, he moved to smooth things over, just in case. “Sorry, man,” Parker said with a shrug, “I’m a bit grumpy these days.”

  Hopkins nodded. “Totally understandable. It can’t be easy.”

  “No, it’s not.”

  “Well, we’re all here for you, so hang in there,” Hopkins added. He nonchalantly walked away.

  Parker loosened his tie and looked around. He sure could use a chat with Napoleon right now. Maybe he could give some sort of . . . divine . . . direction. Parker shook his head. Still, even now, it sounded crazy. He wondered if it would ever stop sounding crazy. Probably not.

  Sighing, he decided he’d had enough. Screw it. He was no good to anyone here, now. He would leave early for the day—it was a happy middle-ground option—and just go to the gym.

  As he got up to leave, he looked around the station house one more time.

  Did he really want to stay here? To deal each day with the dirt and filth of this city? The tragedies and cries for help?

  And if so, how badly?

  Because somewhere between the wanting and the having? There would be a price.

  Hector was lying on a cot in the prison infirmary when The Black-Veiled Nurse came to his side. She was wearing a dark, navy-blue dress with a white front and sleeves, like he’d seen in his history books back in school, or maybe in some Civil War movie or something. She was dressed for the olden days, when her main role had been to plug the gaping holes left by musket balls, and wait.

  Reading his mind, she spoke from behind her veil. “I used to wait with patience . . . for the patients . . . to die!” And then she sniggered at her turn of phrase.

  The veil was horrible. Jet-black, it covered her whole face, and there was something to the sound of her voice that told him he never wanted to see that face, that to do so might mean having his soul ripped out of him in strips, like linen.

  He opened his mouth to scream for help, but she stepped forward and touched his hand. His throat locked shut so tightly that only a wisp of breath escaped his lungs. He began wheezing as a creeping numbness spread out over his entire body.

  His panic, however, did not creep. It sprang into life. I can’t move!

  “Sure you can,” she said. “But only the way I want you to. See?”

  Stepping back again, she lifted her left hand and began to make her fingers dance.

  Incredibly, as she did, his limbs followed suit, as if he were a puppet on a set of strings. His body betraying him, his legs and arms began to move, up, down, side to side. It would’ve been funny if it was happening to someone else. But when she closed her hand into a fist and forced his arms and legs to fold up in a fetal position so tight that he thought his spine was going to snap, there was nothing funny about it.

  The pain was so extreme that it brought tears to Hector’s eyes, his scream trapped in his mouth and reverberating against the back of his throat and over his tongue.

  Constricted the way he was, blood rushed to his head, and along the way it had reopened the cuts and scrapes from the beating he’d taken in his cell. Liquid stitches for his smaller cuts gave way while the real stitches, sewn into a cut over his right eye and another on his forehead, stretched and strained at the holes. Blood began to trickle over his face and he used the only thing he seemed to still have control of—his eyes—to look around for someone, anyone, for help.

  His despair only multiplied when he saw them: a doctor in the far corner and a man dressed in a brown suit, both frozen in place, like mannequins in a store display window. He looked at the clock on the wall over the door to his left and it too was stuck: the second hand frozen in place between the three and the four. Nothing moved, not even the curtain on a barred window next to his bed. It had been blown in by a gust of wind and was now locked in a mid-air reach toward nothing. Just like with The Levi’s Man, time had apparently come to a halt.

  Except this time there was no way for Hector to fight back.

  Oh, God!

  “You dare mention his name?” The Black-Veiled Nurse spat. Her fisted hand sprung open, and now Hector was on his back, his arms and legs spread wide open, a force pulling so violently at his feet and hands that he thought he would be pulled apart, limb by limb, at any second.

  Please! Stop. It hurts. It hurts. It hurts.

  She came closer to him. “Yes. I know. It’s what I live for . . . the pain. I used to love it, during the war. The bodies just kept coming.” The veil on her face moved slightly, and for one terrified second, Hector thought it was going to reveal her face, but it shifted back as she continued speaking. “Some were holding their guts in their hands like bread from the market, others had shredded legs that had to be sawed and leveled, like on a dining table, before their wounds could be dressed. The other girls would treat them tenderly, give them hope and then go outside the tents to weep at the horrors they saw each day. But me? They said I was tough. But really? Oh, how I loved all that pain.”

  Hector could feel his pulse in his joints, beating, straining to drown out the screaming nerves throughout his body.

  She was right next to him now and he heard somethin
g, a hissing sound, from beyond the veil. He looked away and she suddenly moved her hand, mercifully releasing her control of his limbs. But the pain only tripled as a billion pins and needles set in, his flesh struggling to come back to life.

  But she wasn’t done with him, it was obvious, not by a long shot. She waved her index finger sharply from right to left, forcing his eyes back to her.

  “I used to make their pain worse, you know? I used to cut their dosage of morphine. Or, when no one was looking? I used to poke at their wounds. The ones with head wounds were the best because their jaws were usually dressed tightly, which would mute their cries. Really, causing men to cry like that? It was better than making love to one ever was. I used to get so . . . excited . . . when I’d get the night watch. You know, the overnight shift? Because it meant it was just me and them, all in their beds or on their stretchers, tucked in tightly. I would spike the shift doctor’s coffee and knock him clean out—they always blamed it on battle fatigue—and then I could move bed to bed, all night long, and spread the pain . . . round and round and round!” She laughed behind the veil and the hiss that followed it was louder this time.

  Chills swam over Hector’s body in undulating waves. He knew just being this close to her was giving him a fever.

  “I still love it. The pain, I mean. It’s exquisite, really. And when I died? My master plucked me out of the grave and made me who I am now. Do you want to see who I am now?”

  Hector didn’t even hesitate. He began to shake his head firmly.

  Another laugh. Ignoring him, she reached up and pulled her veil back behind her head, like a blushing bride showing herself to him for the first time on their big day.

  Except this bride had four red eyes, two where you’d expect them to be and then one more on each of her temples, and a mouth that looked like a knife wound, as if someone had tried to slit her neck from ear to ear but missed the mark four inches north, and instead had done the deed through her cheeks and lips. Her ears were mostly melted off and she had scorched, patchy hair.