One In A Million (The Millionth Trilogy Book 1) Page 8

  Had Kyle really done this? Oh my God. This can’t be true. Their community was small and affluent, which meant the gossip might be tinged with just a little bit of glee. Word would spread fast. What will everyone say? Will I have to pull the kids out of school? Jesus, what do I do?

  She looked around their dimly lit bedroom, everything a water-colored blur through her tears, before her attention rested on Kyle’s pillow, right next to her. How many times had she looked upon him in his sleep and thought how lucky she was to have him? It was all ashes now, every bit of it. She kept trying to tell herself that nothing had been proven yet, and that she owed it to her husband to hold the line.

  But she couldn’t forget Kyle’s voice, and worse, she couldn’t get the look in that Mexican detective’s eyes out of her head either, those dark Saint Bernard eyes with the big bags beneath them. They seemed to be gently telling her that her world was coming undone.

  Wiping an arm across her eyes, she tried to pull herself together but couldn’t. There was too much to think about. She would have to call off work for Monday, but not right now. Tomorrow she could call Ben and let him relay the message that she wouldn’t be in for a few days. That would be better. He would understand if she told him something had come up, and he wouldn’t pry, though right now that wouldn’t necessarily be an unwelcome thing. At least he’d care. Perhaps a bit too much, but she told herself that maybe she didn’t care about that anymore either. All this time while she’d been busy playing the good wife, Kyle was probably having his affair with Caitlyn.

  How long has this been going on? I’m such a fool!

  Shame came over her, and her mind began going round and round, one detail after another of what might’ve happened, could’ve happened and now would happen. Details upon details, like a Google search in her head predicating the answer to one query alone: What do I do next?

  FROM THE CIRCLE K, Kyle made his way to the main boulevard. Once there, with the night at its darkest, he found it impossible to get the lay of the land. He had nowhere to go and nothing he could do, at least not yet, and it was getting cold.

  Beaury was a small town, and enough behind the times that it still had, to his amazement, a stand-alone telephone booth. He went back and forth in his mind over which was safer, the exposed openness of sitting on the curb, where he could at least escape another attack if something else came after him, or the shelter of the telephone booth, which could leave him hopelessly trapped. Who was he kidding? Without The Gray Man’s help the last time around, he would’ve been killed easily anyway.

  After stepping inside the phone booth, he shut its accordion-like door tightly and sat on the corrugated steel floor, where he jammed his feet against the door hinge to give him an added sense of security. It was a little warmer in the booth than it was outside, but not nearly warm enough or comfortable enough to get any sleep. Or so he thought. The next thing he knew he was somehow waking up to the morning sun and the sound of a passing car.

  He exited the phone booth groggily and with a splitting headache. The morning shadows were coming to life, casting themselves off trash cans and parked cars, and his eyes, still filled with sleep, were having trouble focusing, so at times it appeared as if the shadows were moving. He wished more cars would come by, to break up the silence. Hours earlier, that silence had been eerie. Now it was just lonely. Neither feeling was a good one.

  He heard the coos of wild doves in the brush across the road and felt anything but refreshed. There was a lingering grief hanging on him, heavy, like one of those x-ray smocks filled with lead at the dentist’s office. He knew this feeling. He’d felt this way after his dad had died, two years ago. He realized with bitterness that it made sense; he was experiencing another death now: the death of the life he once knew. One night, one mistake and now this. That’s all it took.

  Looking around he noticed that Beaury was small but not backwater small. Off to the east was a gas station. He set off towards it, figuring it was a good mile or so away. The road he traveled was wide, with a few bus stops on one side and a row of houses on the other. Taking note of the yards, trees and bushes staggered in front of and between the houses, he opted for safety reasons to stay on the bus stop side, his head and neck tucked into his shoulders against the cold morning air, his eyes scanning the road for signs of any more attackers.

  Once at the gas station, he was tempted to go in, but then noticed a Denny’s sign further down the road to the north and opted instead to push on. As he got closer he could see that the restaurant was actually part of a mini-mall. There was also a Dickies outlet, a CVS, a tiny post office, “Troutie’s Bait and Tackle” and the obligatory yogurt shop.

  Once inside the Denny’s, he noted that the clock on the wall said 7:45 a.m. and took a seat at the counter and ordered coffee and pancakes from the skinny waitress who came over. He was hungry, mostly from nerves he guessed, because the smell of bacon and eggs in the air made his stomach roll instead of rumble.

  The Gray Man promised him that he would be able to see them now, the demons, when they were present. He warily glanced around. There was another waitress on duty, a heavy-set redhead who was cackling in the corner with an old man in a Dodgers jacket. Besides them, a number of early waking truckers were scattered about, laughing and talking between sips of coffee, and a delivery man sat by himself, the word “Lolo’s Breads” in blue cursive letters stitched on his shirt, hunched over his newspaper in furtive study of the sports page.

  None of them displayed the dark eyes or sneer of the girl he was now going to be accused of murdering. He was thankful for that, but he was more thankful that none of them resembled the boy on the bike, with his gnashing teeth and hate-filled eyes.

  When his order came, the skinny waitress lingered, making sure that everything was to his satisfaction. Her nametag said “Jasmine” and it made Kyle think of Tamara, of how it was the name of her favorite perfume. When Jasmine left, between syrup-covered bites of what the menu advertised as “Buttermilk Bliss” pancakes, the wheels began to turn in his head, and he was surprised at how quickly one could go from thinking like a domesticated husband to thinking like a wanted felon, as if all of us have, lying dormant within us, the ability to go rogue if forced to.

  The mini-mall probably had all he would need.

  The CVS could provide him with scissors, black hair dye and a bandage for the cut on his hand from when he’d smashed his cell phone against the Circle K wall the night before. He had no intention of using either the scissors or the hair dye. It was a bluff. They would hopefully begin to look for a man with short black hair. Whatever. His hair would be neither short nor black.

  Kyle had one edge when he didn’t want to be recognized: he was a freak when it came to wearing baseball caps. Hardly anybody could recognize him in one, not even his pastor, who one day at The Coffee Bean had stood right next to Kyle while waiting for his latte, not recognizing him until he turned to leave. His pastor had done not a double, but a triple-take before saying hello, and Kyle was used to this. The same thing had happened to him his whole life, at high school parties, in college, even at the gym. People often joked that he could rob the neighborhood bank with a cap on and get away with it.

  The CVS would have cameras, a requirement now with all the meth head Sudafed and cough syrup junkies out there. Kyle imagined the cameras would be everywhere, which was fine by him. He would also buy a calling card, and the thought of what he would do with this gave him hope.

  It dawned on him that he could also get a greeting card for Tamara there, and the thought of her almost made him lose it. Tears began to creep into the corners of his eyes, but he held them back. God, I’m a basket case. I’ve screwed up so bad… he thought before downing the rest of his coffee in one gulp.

  The greeting card might be a bad idea, but he had no other way now of telling Tamara about what had happened, or how sorry he was, without it. Phones were out of the question.

  He would get a change of clothes from the Dickies s
tore. He doubted there would be cameras there, but just in case the hat could come later. Again, he wanted them looking for a dark-haired man with short hair, not one in a cap.

  He ate a few more bites of pancakes as Jasmine came by to top off his cup, and that’s when he noticed them: two truckers who hadn’t been there before, sitting at the opposite end of the counter.

  One wore a John Deere hat, green with a blazing yellow logo, over greasy blond hair that fell to his shoulders. He was also wearing a denim jacket over a dirty Lynyrd-Skynyrd t-shirt. Kyle couldn’t see the rest of his outfit, but he imagined jeans and work boots. The man’s eyes were a flat blue, and they stared at Kyle with such intensity that Kyle immediately shifted his gaze to the second trucker, who had long brown hair beneath a black beanie and a patchy beard. He was staring directly at Kyle too.

  Beanie smiled, ever so slightly, and then inhaled deeply through his nose, like a dog catching a scent. He glanced at Jasmine, who had just arrived in front of them with their waters.

  “You in season, honey?” he said to her with a sudden smile that revealed dirty yellow teeth.

  Jasmine grimaced at him as if he’d spat on her. “Pig!” she said in protest, but it was a weak protest. Her body language said she didn’t know them, and the grimace was soon replaced with a look of insecurity, as if maybe Beanie had been right.

  “Oh, baby cakes, don’t be so uptight.” John Deere chuckled.

  As she walked away, the look on her face was one of fear, the same thing Kyle felt when both men returned their gazes to him.

  He was so lost in his grand plans of throwing the police off his trail that he hadn’t even seen them come in or sit down. They were making no secret of their purpose, and they didn’t seem to care one bit that Kyle knew either: they were here for him.

  He thought of running, but like an animal that knows instinctively not to turn its back on two predators, Kyle knew that was a bad idea. Instead, he took a deep breath. The Gray Man would certainly come again, right? He just had to wait.

  The idea was short-lived.

  The Gray Man will not be coming this time. He’s preoccupied somewhere. I’m on my own right now. All three thoughts were his, but they came to him like telegrams from a far off part of his mind, a part previously unknown to him.

  Kyle glanced down at his pancakes. They were half gone and so was his appetite, but he opted to force some down to buy time. As he did so, Beanie started smacking his lips together like a baby suckling on a bottle. Kyle didn’t want to look at them again but felt an unnatural pull to do so. As soon as he looked up, he wished he hadn’t.

  He was now confronted by a new vision, as if a veil had been pulled from his eyes. Beanie and John Deere still had human bodies, but their heads and faces looked like those of badly burned animals, goats perhaps. They had long, twisted horns that rose above their heads to sharp tips and their eyes were orbs—not black, as Caitlyn’s had been, but red, like the boy on the bike’s. It was a distinguishing difference that he knew was important but had no time to consider right now. Their animal mouths were pulled back in ghoulish grins that reached from ear to ear and emanated a raw sense of insanity.

  Again, a bending sense of reality overcame Kyle, paralyzing him. No animal should ever cast a human-like grin at you.

  If these were demons, these horribly mangled things with their sick smiles, what did the devil himself look like?

  “You’ll find out,” the creature that had been Beanie said.

  “Like sugar on toast, boy. Yum-yum,” John Deere added before he licked his teeth with his little goat tongue and chortled.

  Oh Jesus!

  “Get this one, will ya? Now he’s calling on a savior!” Beanie laughed.

  John Deere leaned forwards and turned his head sideways at Kyle, mocking him. “Yeahhhhh… why weren’t you doin’ that when you were doggy-styling that little bitch of yours last night, boy?”

  “Shut up,” Kyle whispered, unable to turn away now, his gaze fixated on those horrible eyes.

  “Nah. Where’s the fun in that? Do you wanna know, slug, where she’s at right now?”

  “No,” Kyle managed. His head pounded. He had the sudden sensation that this restaurant was a trap, with doors and windows but still no way out. As if to confirm this fact, he managed with the greatest of effort to use his peripheral vision.

  His heart sank.

  Everyone in the restaurant was frozen in place, frozen in time.

  “What? You don’t care no more about your little honey bee? Your little whore?”

  “Shut up!” Kyle’s heart raced as his words bounced around the restaurant in a muffled echo.

  “Oh loooook, buddy.” Beanie chuckled, slapping his partner on the shoulder. “He don-wanna know, do he?”

  John Deere’s eyes flashed like two briquettes peaking on the grill. A wave of hatred and mockery washed over Kyle and stole the breath from his lungs. “She getting it good now, boy. Hundreds of us are just taking turns, gang-banging her something wonderful. Did you know you could still bleed in hell, Kyle-man? She’s bleeding too, a lot.”

  Involuntarily, something shifted inside of Kyle, starting with an odd warmth in his eyes that grew and seemed to melt into his brain. Like hot porridge going slowly down your throat, it burned but also comforted as it went.

  It was a power that was neither self-righteous nor self-serving, but indignant in the face of what he’d just heard and the evil he was confronting, and it began to overtake him.

  The warmth spilled over his shoulders and down his arms until it pooled like water in his hands. He felt his eyes widen and air pour back into his lungs in a rush, and then, incredibly, his hands started to glow a soft whitish-blue.

  Another telegram came to him from that other place, this one encouraging and firm: You’re never alone.

  When Kyle looked back up at the creatures from hell that had come to kill him, he noticed something.

  They weren’t grinning anymore.

  CHAPTER 10

  Despite his protests, the captain had sent Napoleon home to combat his cold right after they got back to the station from the Fasano house, assuring him that he wouldn’t be pulled from the case. Three additional detectives were assigned the tasks of interviewing witnesses, re-canvasing the crime scene and securing a warrant to pull Kyle Fasano’s cell phone data. It was grunt work but it was important, and Napoleon didn’t like missing it. Still, he felt beyond horrible, and it was obvious he was no good to anyone right now anyway.

  Still. It felt wrong. He might miss something, like he had once before.

  He’d managed his way home and to bed just before 3:00 a.m., slipping into the meager, restless sleep that his fever would allow. Somewhere in the early morning, he vaguely recalled getting up to piss and then drinking a cold glass of water, which aggravated his parched throat as much as it alleviated his fever. He tripped over his shoe on his way back to bed, literally falling on to the covers before burying his head under his pillow and passing out again.

  He dreamed of his grandmother and those barrio days, with her potions and crooked teeth. She sold herb-induced oils and remedies every week, using one in particular to rub into her own arthritic hands, the same hands she used to hold her rosary every morning in prayer to Jesus and the Saints. Even as a little boy, Napoleon found this behavior to be a little conflicted, but he didn’t dare mention such thoughts to his grandmother for fear of upsetting her. She always worried about him, and fretted over his soul in a mundo del mal, a world of evil.

  When he awoke six hours later to a blindingly bright morning sun, he could’ve sworn he could still smell that oil: an odd mix of hemp, fennel and lemongrass. But that was silly. Dreams didn’t have smells, did they?

  He sat up and stretched weakly. The night held him down and his cold beat on him until dawn, but he could finally feel his immune system beginning to put up a fight. His throat and head hurt a little less, but the congestion in his chest had gotten worse. After making his way to the ki
tchen, he spat a few rounds of phlegm into the wastebasket and set on a pot of coffee, using his old-school percolator. It had been in the family for decades, cared for and watched over like an Egyptian relic. To Napoleon, Starbucks coffee was a travesty, nuclear hot and overly spiked with caffeine. The real deal got you high and alert the same way it brewed, nice and slow.

  His apartment was part of a small building on the corner of Fourth and Boyle, right near the on-ramp to the 5 Freeway. Every morning was like waking up on a manhole cover in the middle of the street, the sound of traffic so thick it felt as if the apartment itself was in the fast lane. The barrio he had just dreamed of was only a few miles away, but it was like a different world now. It had gone from a simple but tough neighborhood to a brutally murderous one, with tennis shoes from twenty different gangs hung on power lines like Christmas ornaments, the neighborhood being claimed at different times, and with varying body counts, by White Fence, Evergreen or Cuarto Flats, to name a few.

  It was the East LA version of the Bermuda Triangle; whoever went into it might not come out, and more than a few folks simply disappeared forever.

  Before the city temporarily drained the man-made lake at Echo Park, Napoleon had been sure many of these missing souls would be found there, bloated and rotten corpses that laid in silent protest for years beneath the pedal boats filled with romantics who floated around on the surface on all those sunny Saturdays. But that theory proved false. The lake was empty, save for the remains of a few dead animals.

  Napoleon wanted to feel relieved, but he hadn’t. It simply meant that the bodies were somewhere else, still waiting to be found, the end of their lives still a mystery.

  Nothing bothered Napoleon more than things that remained unsolved. As a child it didn’t matter if it was a game of Clue, the latest Encyclopedia Brown book or a crossword puzzle; it had to be finished and solved. He remembered to this day the time his grandfather, to challenge him, had gotten him a five thousand piece jigsaw puzzle of nothing but M&M’s. In his mind, Napoleon could still see them: thousands upon thousands of pieces with the same shapes and colors. It was maddening. He struggled over it for weeks before his grandmother waited until he went to school one day and threw it out. He’d come home later and thrown the biggest fit of his life.