The Parker Trilogy Read online

  Hector’s horror was so palpable that vomit churned in his stomach. He continued to wheeze air, in and out of his lungs, as another wave of chills came over him. In desperation, he reached out for The Gray Man. Help me! Please!

  He no sooner had he finished the words than he felt as if he’d somehow done the right thing.

  Quietly, and with no small amount of awe, Hector noticed a blue glow at his feet. He watched in amazement as it began to move up his legs, across his waist and to his chest. It was the most bizarre kind of light that sort of reminded him of black light in a dance club, except that it shimmered and vibrated with energy.

  He felt one thing now: power. It was exhilarating, and with it came hope.

  Until The Black-Veiled Nurse paralyzed him again.

  “Ah,” she said, and as her mouth moved he saw a forked tongue dancing behind her teeth. “Help has arrived at last? I don’t think so, little boy.”

  Hector’s despair was immediate as he suddenly felt the warmth of the blue light fading from his body.

  She sneered with contempt. “Your friend? He has his limits. He has his stupid rules that he must play by. What’s that? You have a question?”

  Hector nodded, like a child begging for a snack. The grip around his throat was released and he began to suck in huge gobs of air, nodding as he did so, to buy time to speak. Finally, he managed, “What do you want?”

  Her mouth collapsed into a tiny line and her two front eyes double in size, as if his question had truly surprised her. Then her mouth opened wide and she laughed, loud and hard. “Oh, Hector, my little boy. How funny you are. Want? What do I want? I thought I made that abundantly clear: I want to see you suffer. We all do. Including your short little friend that you were so mean to. Seriously, after all he did for you? To just betray him like that? A deal was a deal. He got you out alive, and—okay, okay, he never told you that your soul would be the price, but c’mon now, who deals with a demon and doesn’t know that up front? But no, you refused to pay up. So now you have the lackeys that beat you earlier today, idiots really, but it’s always good to have some muscle. And now? Me.”

  “P-p-please,” Hector stammered, “I already s-s-said I’d do w-what I was asked.”

  “Yes. And I’m sure you thought that’d be the end of it. Just like I’m sure you had no intention of waiting on or reaching out to your gray friend for help just now, when the opportunity arose.”

  Hector began to shake his head in denial.

  In a flash, she was on him, with both hands around his neck as her eyes blazed with rage. Her tongue darted a few times at his face as, incredibly, her shoulder blades began to grow out and up sharply until a pair of giant, black wings cut through her dress and spread out wide behind her.

  “Don’t lie to me, little boy. Where I come from, lies are the native tongue. You were planning on reaching out to him before I arrived, weren’t you?”

  Hector nodded, noticing at the same time how the feathers of her wing were a mix of dark gray and black and seemed to absorb all the light in the room.

  “Well, then. You should know that I’m here for that very reason. You see, your gray friend has had an easy time of it, pushing around the lesser beings. But me? I’m not afraid of him in the least. As a millionth, I should be killing you, right here and now. But he’s put this stupid blue aura around you now for protection. Okay. Fine. It’s only a matter of time.”

  Hector’s confused look made the anger in her face subside a bit.

  “You see, little boy, the prison you’re being sent to is a hellhole of its own kind. And the further you go in? The more of us there will be. And the harder it will be for your gray friend to protect you.”

  She flapped her wings and the smell of burning wood overcame him as the whole room went dark. There was a loud pop as the blue around him came alive again, but it didn’t matter.

  He was alone in his bed again. The second hand on the clock began its march once more and the curtain flapped in the window.

  If not for the blood still trickling down his face from the wounds she’d reopened there, you’d have never known she’d ever been there at all.

  An orderly called out from his left. “Dr. Phillips, please come, stat! Something’s wrong in Bed 2.” A male nurse in purple scrubs came running into the room but ran to the right, not the left. The nurse called out too. “Dr. Phillips!” And his voice was drenched in panic.

  The infamous Dr. Phillips entered the room, but Hector couldn’t see him because there were plastic privacy drapes between each bed.

  “What in the—” he said. “Grab some gauze! Quickly.”

  They began working on the patient in Bed 2 for a few seconds before the male nurse called again from the bed to Hector’s right. “We have a problem over here. He’s bleeding out. Harrison? Get the cart! Doctor, I need your help!”

  Dr. Phillips walked past the foot of Hector’s bed at a quick clip. “Oh my . . . How did this happen?”

  “I don’t know, Doctor.”

  “Keep pressure on the wound. Where’s Donna!?”

  A woman replied with a shout from down the hall. “I’m here, Dr. Phillips!”

  “Call Dr. Benjamin. He’s on lunch break. Tell him we’ve got two critical and to get up here, stat.”

  “Yes, Doctor.”

  For the next half hour, Hector listened as the two lives on either side of him were saved, but only after a lot of blood loss and a lot of chaos. He learned that the man to his left was healing from multiple stab wounds and the one to his right from an emergency appendectomy.

  Two other patients were in the infirmary—a man who’d come in with a sprained arm that was now broken in three places, and another who had the flu and now had a temperature that was so high he needed to be put into an ice bath.

  At some point, the nurse in the purple scrubs checked on Hector. Besides his face, he was fine, so he was left alone for the time being. But once things calmed down, he listened as they all traded the same question. How? How had this happened? How had all those wounds been reopened? How had new wounds occurred?

  But Hector knew why.

  Because The Black-Veiled Nurse had made her rounds.

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Father Soltera watched the goldfish as it flopped desperately on The Gossamer Lady’s cheek. Having been partially squashed before her decapitated head rolled to stop mere feet from him, the goldfish was now helplessly tangled in her hair and in its death throes.

  A saltwater-like substance full of tiny air bubbles flowed out of The Gossamer Lady’s mouth, gelatinous at the edges of her lips. But her eyes? Her eyes were still somewhat alive, blinking slowly and matching the shocked expression that still remained on her face.

  She was looking right at him when her lips curled up ever so slightly into the smallest of snarls. She tried to talk, but with her vocal chords severed it was futile and all she managed to do was weakly open and close her mouth a few times. Then her eyes began to melt, the red that had been contained in them now bursting through her charred eye sockets. It was a death from hell, for someone who had failed that place, and it made Father Soltera shudder.

  His body ached, all over. He was too old for this kind of adventure, too sick and too weak. He closed his eyes for a moment and was resting his head against the ground when he heard a plaintive cry, so weak that it was hardly audible. “Is anybody there?”

  It was Ikuro.

  He was lying in a spot not ten feet from The Gossamer Lady’s head, face down, his back and neck completely mauled. The blood from his wounds had formed a puddle around his upper torso, darkening the dirt.

  Father Soltera sat up and got to one knee as Michiko ran past him, her athletic movements fluid and graceful as she threw her sword point down into the ground and knelt beside Ikuro. The air was still and everything around them was silent. Then Father Soltera heard them speaking in hushed Japanese that he couldn’t understand but that held all the tones of comfort and concern that said a goodbye was c
oming.

  When it was time for someone to die, it did not matter the language; the words were always in a whisper, almost always in a sad desperation. In all his time of giving last rites, he had never failed to tell the dying or those about to grieve them the same thing. “It is a goodbye,” he would say. “But it is a short goodbye. You will see them soon enough, and in the meantime? They get to see God.”

  As he stood, his knees popping loudly in the effort, Father Soltera could see that Michiko had rolled Ikuro onto one side. Her left hand was holding him in place and her right hand was cupping his chin. The way a mother holds a child when consoling them, to wish away a bruise or talk away a bully.

  This place was a forest of rampaging emotions—Father Soltera was beginning to figure that out—and they came over him again now. How much suffering was humankind or the world meant to endure? It seemed measureless, and he knew why. He’d known it from the moment he’d decided to join the priesthood: because for Christ it had been measureless. For a time. On that cross. Measureless and abundant. But if He could still find a way to pray for the guilty men beside Him and the persecuting masses all around Him? Then surely all the hate in the world was but a cup that love could fill. And Father Soltera had realized, way back then, that he wanted to be someone who did the pouring.

  But now he was not so sure. Even the air here seemed like a morbid thing. It was as if all the hanging people in the forest had sent the sorrows that had driven them to try to commit suicide up into the sky, where they formed rain clouds of sadness that drizzled nothing but despair.

  “Father?” Michiko said softly, jerking him out of his trance.

  “Y-yes?” he replied, his throat dry.

  “He wants to speak with you,” she said somberly as she shifted her weight.

  Father Soltera walked gently to where they were and fell to his knees next to Ikuro. The old man’s face wore exhaustion. Confusion hung from one brow, surrender from the other. Still, he managed a swift smile as he looked into Father Soltera’s eyes and said, “I’ve been here too long, you know.”

  Father Soltera nodded.

  “Far, far too long,” Ikuro went on. “So much running that I lost track of the miles on my shoes.”

  “You mustn’t—” Father Soltera began. But Ikuro shook his head weakly.

  “I must. I must do only—” He coughed and spat up some blood. “Only two things. I must say I’m sorry to all those I pained by leaving the way I did, and I must say thank you to you both. For coming here and rescuing me from the wolves and the sight of this horrible woman who would appear to me, every night it seemed, on the edge of the forest, so that even what little sleep I could manage was always infested with nightmares.”

  “Ikuro-san, you must save your strength . . .” Michiko interjected.

  “For what, child?”

  She had no answer for him. Instead, all three of them looked up. A hum had filled the sky with the escape of the dove. At first, the reverberations had dissipated, but now they had returned and were growing.

  “I’d always wanted to get there, to see it.”

  “See what?” Father Soltera asked.

  “Where you must go, while there’s still time: The Whiting Woods.”

  Michiko nodded as Father Soltera squinted at the old man and asked. “Why there?”

  “Your friend, this lovely lady, knows why. It’s your only hope of escape, Mr. Bernardino.”

  Around them, the woods and meadow had gone completely still. Wolf carcasses were spread in scattered mounds but whatever else this place had left to throw at them had receded back and away, into the forest’s depths, evidently having suffered a great defeat. But Father Soltera could feel it in his bones: the evil here was simply regrouping.

  When Ikuro’s regrets began, Michiko tried to stop him, but Father Soltera, knowing that it was all part of the process of finally letting go, put out his hand to touch her elbow. When she looked at him, her almond eyes were pained and filled with tears, but she let Ikuro speak.

  They heard of the mistakes he’d made and the hurts he’d inflicted, intentional or otherwise, on others. He told them of the things he wished he’d told his children, and about the night his brother had left to go off to the war, never to return, his 8x10 picture in a bamboo frame forever within reach of his mother until the day it was placed in her coffin. There was his dog, Kobe, that had run away when he was eleven. He’d always wondered what had happened to Kobe. And then there was the day he’d taken a woman from his accounting class on a date to visit Fukuroda Falls, with its split cascade of creasing waters over jet-black rocks, and how her red lipstick had blended so perfectly with the fiery fall leaves of the Japanese elms all around her that he knew, in his heart, that she was the one.

  Until the tsunami came and took her away.

  He told them all this in stops and starts, his breathing growing more labored, the light in his eyes growing dimmer, until finally he asked the oddest thing. “Mr. Bernardino? Does this life, the time I spent here, count as part of that life too?”

  Father Soltera was going to say that he had no idea, until he recognized the small tinge of fear that was in Ikuro’s voice. What was this place, anyways? He could only guess. But whatever it was, full of darkness and pain as it was, Father Soltera decided he would not call it a place that had anything to do with life. Instead, it was more a place that was part of dying. For some. For many.

  “No, I don’t believe so, my friend,” he said with a gentle smile to Ikuro.

  The hum in the sky rumbled in a few places, like dampened thunder.

  The quiet came next, like a heavy blanket. Ikuro tried desperately to breathe against it, to fend it off, to make it go away. Finally, as his face was becoming gentle and soft, he mustered the strength for one more question, which he nearly cried out, his eyes opening wide with hope as he looked at Father Soltera. “Do I get to go home now?”

  And the question made the man seem more childlike than ever.

  Michiko cupped his cheek again as she stifled a sob.

  “Yes,” Father Soltera replied.

  The old man died right after he lifted his arm and pointed to the woods just to the east.

  Toward where Father Soltera had no doubt they would find The Whiting Woods.

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  When Maggie reached the corner of Barrows Street and Santa Anita Avenue, she found the site to be exactly as the Google photo online had portrayed it: a large, beige building set back in an even larger parking lot, the fading lines of its parking spaces matching the faded red letters on the sign overhead that read: “Benpo Tire Company.”

  At some point, Benpo must’ve employed a lot of people in the neighborhood. Now, it was a relic. Potholes marked the parking lot in various places and weeds had sprouted up from cracks in the asphalt, some three or four feet high, others having taken root and now climbing the rusty chain link fence that was around the perimeter of the property.

  There was one driveway, just up ahead, fenced on both sides the entire way down, giving her a claustrophobic feeling the minute she pulled down it. Up ahead, a chain link gate was pulled wide open, its rusty wheel locked in place by a piece of wood.

  As she pulled through the opening, she was able to see the back of the building, where there were three cars parked. One of them was a black Nissan that looked just like the one in the security footage from the shelter. Felix was probably here, and if so, then the odds were good that Luisa was too. The other two cars were a black Escalade and a white Mercedes. Evidently, Felix ran with a pretty wealthy crowd.

  Maggie slowed the car to a stop and tried to get the lay of the land. Next to the cars was a loading dock, with two roll-up doors that were closed. To the left of the loading dock were cement stairs that led to a set of metal double doors, also closed. Taking a deep breath, she tried to gauge how long it would take for the police to arrive. Having confirmed everything, she could just wait for them now.

  Liking this compromise, she pulle
d just a little bit closer to try and get the license plates of the vehicles－just in case－when instead, the decision was taken from her. The doors of the warehouse flew open and out came six men . . . and Luisa. They were all looking in Maggie’s direction.

  One of them, Felix she presumed, was dressed like a cholo. He had Luisa in an arm bar by her neck and was attempting to drag her to the Nissan. Maggie looked around. They had spotted her somehow, probably through one of the filthy warehouse windows on the south side of the building or . . . There it was: a security camera mounted right over the loading docks, painted beige like the building, which was how she’d missed it.

  What did it matter if they saw her or didn’t see her? She’d known in her gut the whole drive here that this moment was coming anyway, hadn’t she?

  With reckless abandon, she accelerated across the parking lot and came to a screeching halt right behind the Nissan. Think, Maggie. Think!

  She was outnumbered, and it was highly likely that one or all of them had guns. But she had to stall them, somehow, long enough for the police to arrive to balance the scales. She had an idea: she would try to reason with them first, knowing it was most likely futile, but still worth the effort just to buy time.

  Five men stood in a staggered line to the left of her car. Felix and Luisa were directly in front of her and he was trying to force her into the back seat as she kicked at the door and struggled against his grip. It took all Maggie had to restrain her rage and stay with the plan.

  Reaching over to the passenger seat, she pulled her Eskrima sticks from her bag and coyly brought them alongside her right hip. As she got out of the car, she dropped them on the driver’s seat and closed the door. Her window was down, so she could get to them if she needed to.

  Once out of the car, Felix swung Luisa around.

  “Let her go!” Maggie shouted.