The Parker Trilogy Read online

  Their laughter filled the inside of the car. It was a good sound and Parker embraced it. Taking a good, long look at his old partner, Parker realized that he was finally ready to fully embrace Napoleon’s reality. “Hey, man.”

  “What?”

  “It’s good to have you back.”

  Napoleon gave a little shrug. “Yeah, yeah.”

  “No. I mean it.”

  “What? You gonna try to kiss me now, too?”

  “Yeah, right.”

  A teasing look came over Napoleon’s face. “Hey. All I’m saying is you’re lightening up all pink and stuff, man.”

  Parker shook his head. “Screeew you.”

  “You better slow your roll, Parker. Jus’ saying.”

  “This guy,” Parker said to no one, “he thinks he’s got jokes.”

  The 210 Freeway was partially closed to construction, but they made it to his apartment in short order. As Parker pulled into the underground garage, he felt a tightness come over his entire body.

  “Take a deep breath, Parker. In fact, take about ten of them.”

  Parker nodded. Coming back here, after what had happened, was not entirely different than letting his mind wander back to the desert in Afghanistan.

  The complex had quickly been cleaned up and repaired, except for the “Arroyo Villas” sign out front, which still had bullet holes in it. But his apartment, being a crime scene, took a little longer to clear. The front door and living room window had been replaced, but the bedroom door was still off its hinges. He’d torn down all the yellow tape and thrown away his shattered furniture but he hadn’t yet replaced it, which created empty spots in the house that only served as reminders of what had happened almost as much as the broken wood and glass would’ve.

  The landlord had also waited for as long as possible for the insurance people to get all their photos, so the bullet holes inside his apartment had been filled but not yet painted over. Parker wondered if his apartment manager, Susan, was going to be politely asking him to move soon, as a number of the other tenants had completely freaked out over what had happened.

  “Do what ya gotta do. I’ll be back soon,” Napoleon said. Then he was gone.

  Parker finished his breathing exercises, then quietly went up to his apartment and packed a duffel bag with a few days’ clothes and his phone charger. It was nearly 2:00 a.m. He hadn’t slept but he could probably do that on the flight, which he immediately booked on his laptop. LAX direct to Cabo, just as Clopton had instructed. Leaving at 8:45 a.m., it would be a two-and-a-half-hour flight. It was too early to call Melon, so Parker took a hot shower. The long drive had only added to the tension that had balled up in his neck and shoulders like knots strung across the rope of his muscles. Letting the hot water do its work, he felt his mind going numb as his body began to completely uncoil.

  He wanted to work and plan and do all the logistics, but his mind was having none of it. By the time he got out of the shower and toweled off, his fatigue hit him square, and he reconsidered his idea to wait for the flight to sleep. Still, he dressed in running sweats and a plain blue t-shirt, so he’d be ready to go when he awoke. Then, like a zombie, he packed his laptop in his duffel bag and carried both it and his tennis shoes over to a stuffed chair in the living room and collapsed onto it. It wasn’t the most comfortable chair in the world, but he’d slept on boulders, crates and on the inside of rumbling C-30s, so it would do.

  The last thing he managed to do was set his cell phone alarm to 6:00 a.m. This would give him enough time to make it to the airport for his flight.

  Then? His mind went as black as the night.

  When his cell phone began to sing its song to wake him up four hours later, his eyes popped open with stunned fatigue. He’d need more sleep for what was coming, and he reminded himself the flight would provide it. Now, though, it was time to hit to the road.

  On the freeway to the airport, he called Melon, who answered on the third ring.

  “Dude! Heading to my favorite panga now. The tuna are biting. What’s up?” Melon said bluntly, his answer revealing why he sounded so awake at this hour.

  “I need help,” Parker said, equally bluntly.

  A few ticks of silence followed. Sounding concerned but also very much like a man having his life interrupted, Melon replied. “What kind of help?”

  Parker smiled. Old buddies were one thing. Old war buddies quite another thing entirely. The military lingo never went away, and you always spoke in code. “What kind of help?” was a totally innocuous and expected question at this point in any normal conversation, but they both knew that Parker would be asking for the fishing report right about now if this were going to be a normal chat. Something was up by the way Parker had gone straight in, and Melon knew it.

  “I’m having a tough time. Love on the rocks . . . and all that.”

  And there was the actual code.

  Melon picked up the dance. “Like the drink or like the song?”

  “No, man. I’m talking the song, all the way.”

  “Hmm.” Melon cleared his throat and added somberly, “Good. I’m not into pussy drinks, anyway.”

  “You cool if I come in for a visit today?”

  “Today, huh?” And now he sounded a bit alarmed. “Yeah. Sure, man. Sounds bad.”

  Then, just in case the call was somehow being recorded by someone or anyone, because that’s how ops worked—always assume exactly that—Parker added some garbage. “Yeah. I quit the job and lost the girlfriend.”

  “Shit. Talk about running the table, huh?”

  “Yeah.”

  “What time you getting in?”

  “Flight leaves at 8:45 a.m. Number 1102. United. I can—”

  “I’ll pick you up at the airport. You can fill me in then, buddy.”

  “Fair enough.”

  “Just one thing, though.”

  “What’s that?”

  And now Melon, whose voice was stiffer than usual, was obviously throwing in some garbage, too. “This is gonna make me miss my panga. The tuna are biting, asshole. So, you owe me dinner.”

  “You got it. See you soon.”

  “Affirmative.”

  The line went dead. Parker sighed.

  The bowels of the 110 Freeway were constipated with the usual weekday morning commuters, and he had to suffer through most of it to get to the 105 West to LAX. He despised this drive. The cloudy skies remained but there was no rain.

  Thinking he saw a flash of beige light, he turned his head to the passenger seat. “You there?”

  Nope. Once again, things were not as they seemed. And for anyone monitoring this trip, things were not as they seemed either. On the surface? He was flying to see a friend in Cabo to cry on his shoulder about losing his girl and to get career advice.

  In reality? It was likely that no sooner had Melon hung up the phone, he’d called his panga captain, who was guaranteed to be a local, and not only pushed the reservation out three hours but also booked an extra spot for Parker. Not because they were actually going to go fishing, but because it had to look like they had gone fishing. And Melon would know this. Full well. Because together, he and Parker had done this before, many times, to nab or take out one terrorist leader or another. And they always began with a song.

  “Porcupine Pie.” “I Am . . . I Said.” “September Morn.”

  Every mission had code words that had something to do with Mr. Neil Diamond.

  Sleep, Maggie’s familiar friend, had been forced upon her this time.

  She could tell because when it came naturally it was black, deep and refreshing as a spring well. Anything could happen and her depth of perception was a Wi-Fi signal with full bars. But the few times she’d passed out or been knocked out in her life, including this time at the hands of Meenie, the blackness was always tinged orange around the edges, shallow and dry as fall leaves.

  She could still see things here, but the images were often vague or inconsistent: a seesaw tilting back and forth in
a soundless wind, a child chasing a bicycle, headlights in night traffic. The images spun across the diorama in her head until one image looked familiar: Father Soltera. He was still lying in his hospital bed, his eyes closed, but he was no more in that room than she was, Maggie could feel it. Absent his body, his mind had gone wandering. But where? Back to that place she’d seen before, with the big wolves and warped sky?

  No. Somewhere else. A place where something he wanted had been, but she couldn’t figure out what. She willed herself to focus but was hit with another round of stunning images. Her breast, cupped in Mario Ewing’s hand after the junior high dance. Wanting to feel excited but instead feeling violently ill. Blaming it on the Hi-C punch, the finger sandwiches or the strobe lights inside the dance hall they’d left behind. Back before she discovered the dark secret inside herself. Then a hard right turn across the hills of Virginia, just outside of Charlottesville, when she’d gone backpacking all alone and run into a family of racoons next to a muddy green river.

  None of these images were important now. She knew that. Now, all that mattered was Luisa. And the only one that could help her was the one she’d just lost her grip on. So, again, she reached out to Father Soltera, like a child sticking their hand through a hole in a tree, feeling around for a bird’s egg. All fingertips. Gently. Gingerly. So as to do no harm. Because she knew, when you were this deep inside your own head, you could do untold amounts of damage if you weren’t careful.

  Finally, she found him. He was in danger. Again. The poor man’s life had been nothing but a sequence of dangers since he’d met Luisa. She felt Father Soltera’s fear and remorse come crashing down over a part of him that was in aching pain. The selfish, human part of him was resenting what life had brought him to, but in many ways, from the moment she’d met him that first time at Eden Hill Women’s Shelter, Maggie had known he was special. Different. Kind, in a voluminous way, as if the love of God was not something he wore, but something he was. It was his eyes that gave it away. The way they asked something with only a glance, or saw not some things but all things, with an empathy that was profound.

  But that meant little now, because he was under attack. All alone and . . .

  No.

  Someone was with him. A woman . . . of sorts. Yes. An Asian woman.

  When Maggie’s mind took her in, it immediately recoiled. As if it were not prepared to even conceive of such a thing, much less see it.

  And then the woman noticed her, too. Her head whipped towards where Maggie’s consciousness floated up above them, and Maggie’s soul trembled, to the core.

  The woman was beautiful, with long black hair tied back in a ponytail with a strip of leather, a few wisps of it crisscrossing over the creamy white skin of her face and framing her dark, almond-shaped eyes. She was a warrior, not only of this world but . . . She was wielding a long sword of some kind, that was glowing white. And her eyes glowed. And the wings on her back, folded in tight, glowed white, and she knew what Maggie was going to say (Please tell him Luisa’s in danger and she needs his help) and she answered immediately in a way that Maggie did not want to hear (His path is to save another now. Your path is to save the girl).

  And then the dark sky with all its sharp edges collapsed in on itself in quadratic angles, corner over corner, and Maggie was both glad and sad, because she’d seen a light that she had always believed in but had never fully embraced, and it had looked upon her not with disappointment but with reassuring love. And like with one of those paper fortune tellers you played with when you were a kid, being folded in and out with various answers to the only question that mattered—were you liked by that special someone—Maggie had found the answer she’d always hoped for. And it was all good.

  Until she woke up to Luisa screaming at the top of her lungs, her eyes wide, a gray fluid spilling down her chin and neck. The witches were holding her down and trying to force her to drink their concoction but having little success, until one of them evidently had enough and grabbed Luisa around the throat and squeezed so tightly that her mouth opened to gasp for air.

  An adrenaline that was almost otherworldly coursed through Maggie’s veins. Her left temple hurt from being smashed against the wall, but it didn’t matter. She rammed her skull backwards suddenly, a move totally unexpected by Meenie. Probably still thinking she was unconscious, he had relaxed his grip on her just enough for her to arch her back into it. She felt her head smash into his nose and heard a crack of bone just before he howled and instinctively let go of her. Wasting no time at all, she spun and caught him flush in the forehead with her right elbow. He went down in a heap, but the room was full of guns and both Eenie and Miney trained them on her immediately. Eenie looked like he was begging for her to make a move, his finger dancing on the trigger.

  None of that mattered. What did matter was that all three witches had been distracted just enough for Luisa to squirm loose. Getting one arm free, she swung her hand at the bowl and sent it flying across the room, splattering its contents all over the floor. Delva shrieked with rage as her sisters struggled to get Luisa back under control. Maggie stood, frozen, waiting for anyone to get close enough to attack, but no one did.

  Meenie was still on the ground, thrashing around in pain. “You . . . stupid little . . . bitch!”

  “Get up, fool!” Misha screamed at him.

  As he tried, Maggie turned sideways to fend him off, half expecting to get shot and surprised when she didn’t. Eenie took aim but Delva shouted at him. “No! Wait. We might need her.”

  “What?” Anastasia yelled.

  Delva slowly, patiently, walked over to a table and picked up a pair of long sewing scissors. With a smile, she walked over to Luisa. “Hold her hand still,” she said to Anastasia, who complied.

  “No!” Luisa yelled. She began whimpering as Delva opened the scissors and placed them over the pinky finger of her hand.

  Looking at Maggie, Delva went from smile to full grin. “This little piggy went to market?” she asked, raising her eyebrows.

  The situation was obvious. Surrender or they’d start cutting off Luisa’s fingers, right in front of her.

  Maggie glared at them all and stepped back against the wall. She placed her hands in front of her in full compliance as Miney twist-tied them together.

  “There,” Delva said. “Now wasn’t that easy?”

  “But—” Anastasia began to protest.

  “But what? Remake another batch. We can wait. And then? She’ll drink it for sure.”

  “How? Why?” Misha asked, contempt dripping in her voice.

  Delva walked over and lifted Maggie’s left hand. Putting Maggie’s index finger between the shears, she looked at Luisa. “Hey, little girl? See this? Tell me. Is this little piggy going to have to go to market?”

  Luisa’s face melted with despair as her eyes filled with tears. Calmly, with a look of utter defeat, she shook her head and said, “No.”

  Chapter Fourteen

  La Patrona glared at Father Soltera over Michiko’s left shoulder. “You think this one is worth saving, Woman of the East?”

  “What do you care what I think? When have you ever cared about what anyone thinks? All you care about is causing hurt and pain.”

  Taking two wide steps to her left, La Patrona’s hands disappeared into her clothing. When they reappeared, she was holding two long knives with black handles and silver blades. Michiko matched her steps and smiled. “You seek to fight a sword with knives?”

  “Yes and no,” La Patrona answered. “These blades are for my two little warriors who have practiced with Mommy the most. Tabitha? Come here. And you too, Addie.”

  From the woods the girls came, still looking a bit stunned by the havoc Michiko had caused. Tabitha was the first to arrive. Dropping the wooden stake in her mouth, she reached up and took one of the knives from La Patrona’s hand as the girl named Addie came bear-crawling in from the left with feral grunts. Her hair was blond, with smeared patches of blood from head wounds that
had long ago clotted. Her eyes were also black, but one of them was completely missing an eyelid, giving her a half-faced permanent stare.

  La Patrona caught him staring and took a dig. “Head wounds are a bitch, Mr. God Man. Your little whore out there on that island can tell you that.”

  Father Soltera held his tongue. There was too much tension in the air and he didn’t want to be the one to spark anything or rush Michiko into battle until she was ready.

  Tabitha glared up at La Patrona with awe and envy, but it was an evil sort of look that held zero love and all the promise of betrayal the first chance she got. Perhaps after she grew up, if such a thing were possible in hell, or perhaps when La Patrona turned her back on her one day for a second too long. Next to her, grunting again, perhaps incapable of talking for some reason, Addie took her blade from La Patrona and stared at it with glee. Then, disgustingly, she stuck out her tiny tongue and licked it.

  “Okay, then,” La Patrona said with a sigh. “You girls go on and play now. I want the man cut up in pieces, please. Arms first, then legs. Save his head for me when I’m done with the little samurai here, okay?”

  “Yes, Mother,” Tabitha replied dutifully. Addie nodded her head vigorously. The girls split wide, one to the left flank, the other to the right, leaving Michiko with too many fronts to defend. Glancing from one girl to the next, she backed up a step, evidently trying to cut off their paths towards Father Soltera.

  Now empty-handed, La Patrona reached back into a void that opened up behind her and produced a black leather vest full of throwing knives and stars, which she calmly put on, locking eyes with Michiko the whole time. “You know, when your man got to hell? I had him. Many times. He was good, you know. We all wanted a piece of him, but I was one of the few who had earned enough chits with The Master to get a taste . . . just a taste . . . of all the love he had for you.”

  Michiko’s blade lit a bright, hot white.

  “And by taste, I literally mean it,” La Patrona added, widening her eyes with exaggerated joy. “I mean, his heart was like a filet mignon. Rare. I only got a nibble, but boy did it run with the juices of all your love, too.”