Beneath the Cracks (4 page)

Orion was standing in the family room,
staring up at a balcony that opened to the recreation room
above.  I wasn't sure he was aware of my presence until he
spoke.

"You could put a massive Christmas tree in
here."

"I could, if I celebrated Christmas."

"Oh, you've got to with a place like
this.  Damn.  I can't believe how incredible the house
looks.  It's hard to believe this was all ash and charred
timber a few months ago."

"They did use new materials to build the new
house."

"I like it.  It's very…warm.  Very
you."

How little you know me
.

"Do you use the fireplace?"

"Yes.  It's a little chilly here for my
tastes."

Johnny chuckled.  "Washington has its
share of brutal winters.  It doesn't generally snow in
Darkwater Bay."

"No, it's just cold and damp and foggy year
round.  We have a saying about summer back east.  It's
not the heat, it's the humidity.  The same applies to the
cold, or so I've learned.  I think I've cleaned out Macy's
winter stock of leather getting ready for when the temperature
really drops."

"I have a confession to make.  When
Maya told me you were too busy to call, I thought she was giving me
some sort of gal-pal brush off.  I was wrong.  This is
really amazing what you've done."

"I like it.  It's very different
from…"

"What you had in D.C.?"

"Yeah.  We had an old brownstone that
we spent what felt like forever restoring.  There's definitely
something to be said for painting on a blank canvass.  No lead
plumbing.  No faulty wiring.  We actually had a fuse box
if you can believe that.  And mortar.  It's far superior
in the 21st century to that of the 19th."

"You were happy there."

"For a long time.  That doesn't mean I
felt peaceful.  Getting away from murder and mayhem has been
the best thing I think I've ever done."

"Hmm.  That doesn't speak well to our
ability to entice you to help out with certain cases as they crop
up."

"Tony has had a couple," I said. 
Suddenly the rim of my wine glass became utterly fascinating to
me.  "All he had to do was pick up the phone and call."

"Yo, Eriksson!"

I spun around toward the sound of Briscoe's
voice.

"Winslow thinks you're some kinda goddamned
concert pianist.  I got a Jackson riding on you givin' us a
little show."

I glanced at Orion.  "A Jackson?"

"Andrew.  Twenty bucks.  Tony bets
on anything."

"Should I be concerned?"  I handed
Briscoe my wine glass and walked into the great room. 
"Apparently my friend has an overactive imagination."

Maya grinned.  "We want to hear you
play, Helen."

I cracked my knuckles. 
"Chopsticks?"

"Aw, c'mon, Helen.  Don't be coy. 
Who puts a piano like this in their home if they don't play?"

I cut her off with the very simplistic
opening music everyone knows on a keyboard.  She buried her
face into her hands until I started adding increasingly complex
runs up and down the keyboard before bursting into a full on
Liberace-esque rendition.  Jaws around the room dropped. 
I grinned and segued into a mambo beat for the grand finale.

"Hah!  Pay up, suckers!"  Briscoe
burst out in glee when I finished. 

I winked at him and held out a hand. 
"My percentage of course."

"I knew I liked you the minute we met," he
grinned and peeled off twenty percent of his take.  "You
should get you one of them tip glasses, Eriksson.  We could
take this show on the road and make a killing."

The mood of the party spiked toward
jocularity.  I started feeling a little less separate from the
guests.  Even Darnell was smiling and forking over a twenty to
Briscoe with good humor.

His head throbbed in time with the wild
beating of the muscle nestled deep in the left side of his
chest.  What should've been painful was muted by a haze
Preacher couldn't quite identify.

What the hell had happened?  How could
he feel so miserable on the surface, yet at the same time
fantastic.  Waves of euphoria crashed through him. 
Invincibility.  Confidence.  God, what a rush! 
Preacher wanted to savor it, to sink his fingers inside his skull
if for no other reason than to reassure himself that any of this
was real, the brain quivering beneath flesh and bone, so alive and
aware, was really his.

He moved two fingers, a twitch really. 
Yeah.  His hand, his nerves awake in a way he'd never felt
before. 

But the sudden movement, slight as it was,
awakened more nerves, others not so free to move.  Preacher's
eyes snapped open.  The flood of light in his eyes should've
hurt in its brilliance, but there was no pain.  Only keen
vision, and the sudden acuity that felt unnatural somehow, even to
his finely honed instincts.

Vision traveled down his bared arm, one
sleeve having been torn away, and came to rest on a metal band that
bisected his left wrist. 
I know what that is
,
recognition registered swiftly followed by the automatic response
to it.  He jerked his wrist.  The sharp edges of the
handcuff dug into the tender flesh.

"No!" Preacher rasped.  "Let me
loose!"

"I don't think so."  A single chair
scraped over the floor into his field of vision followed quickly by
a face he vaguely recognized.  The light bounced off
sun-pinked skin of a smooth scalp. 

Preacher's eyes absorbed every detail, the
stubble on the squared jaw, black as the dirt he'd been digging in
his last lucid memory, the shiny gleam on the freshly shaven scalp,
the tiny nicks in the skin here and there where bony bumps weren't
so cautiously shorn of stubble.  Veins on the arms stood out
like living ropes that twisted sinuously beneath the skin barely
containing them.  He followed the writhing highway from the
back of the hairy hand upward.  The thin sliver of blood oozed
out from a darker track at the bend of the elbow.

The chilling laughter went straight to
Preacher's gut.

"I shared," the man chuckled.  "I do
that when it suits my purpose.  But now, it's time you and I
had a serious chat, Preacher.  For starters, I think it's high
time we stop dancing around the real issue at hand.  You feel
awful good right now, but I promise you, that'll all change if I
don't hear what I want."

Preacher's body tensed without
volition.  Restraint cut into his ankles, and the euphoria
he'd felt only moments ago evaporated into panic.  His arms
tightened and jerked while his legs bounced with such force that
the chair hopped several inches over the slick gray floor.

"You're not going anywhere.  Might as
well tell me why you volunteered for the job, Preacher."

"Bed and meals," he rasped.  "Warm
place to sleep."

"You had that at your cozy little
shelter.  Funny thing though.  One of the guys over there
tells me you didn't spend as many nights under that roof as some of
our other
volunteers
.  Got me wonderin' why that
was.  You ready to tell me the truth now,
Preacher
?"

He struggled for the carefully practiced
words.  "In the beginning was the word, and the word was
–"

"Knock that shit off.  You're about as
religious as I am."

Preacher's eyes widened when the light
caught the glimmer of thin silver, a clear droplet drizzling from
the open beveled tip.

"We can do this easy, or we can do it
hard.  You're choice, man, but you're not getting out of here
until I get some fuckin' answers, and I mean right now.  Who
are you really?  A cop?  That's the word on the street
you know.  You got too much money to be a bum."

His eyes fluttered shut.  So
careful.  So much work.  So much ridiculous suffering
with the lice and the smell and the active resistance to any
inclination toward basic hygiene.  All for nothing.

Part of Preacher's brain resisted the
temptation to crumble.  The other part craved the return of
euphoria and the certainty that he could do anything.  A
parched fleck of dry muscle poked through lips dying for a little
moisture.  Futile.  As futile as escaping the shackles at
wrist and ankle. 

He clenched his teeth and whispered, "Our
father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name."

The needle advanced, pierced the tender
flesh in his arm.  Another wave of euphoria was aborted
quickly by the crushing pain in his chest of a heart that could not
possibly beat harder for another moment.  In the end, his only
comfort was knowledge that whatever had been in the needle had not
stripped him of his loyalty.

It was a faint smile that played about
Preacher's lips before they parted with the expulsion of his last
breath.

Maya was hauling a platter from the butler's
pantry to the dining room.  Her guests followed the savory
smells that wafted through the house as though nothing else
mattered.  My impromptu recital was a minor diversion among
old friends. 

I was outside all of it, superficially
engaged in the conversation that rippled around the table, volleyed
in bursts between detectives and police officials, that dragged my
thoughts away from murder and mayhem of my own invention into Zack
Carpenter's world of prosecutions and Steve Smith's never-ending
passion for crime scene photography.

I was present but not
there
. 
When Maya asked Chris Darnell if he'd do the honors and carve her
beautiful brisket, I imagined sliding a scalpel through Danny
Datello's flabby flanks.  Instead of relishing the melting
beef on my tongue like my guests were, I relished the imagined
shrieks of Datello's prolonged agony. 

Everyone was in the moment, that happy place
where nothing could disturb the pleasure of whatever it was they
desired.  For them, it was camaraderie.  For me, it was
vengeance.  Reality, in all it's brutal glory came half way
through the meal when a cacophony of cellphone ringtones pierced
the jovial conversations.

"Sorry, chicklet," Maya pulled hers off her
belt first.  "Billy?  We're up."

"Us too," Briscoe said.

"Yeah," Forsythe glanced at Smith. 
"Must be serious if we're all getting the call at the same
time."

Shelly had her cell phone in hand. 
"They're calling me too.  It must be worse than serious."

Hasty apologies followed the mass exodus
from the dinner table.  Carpenter excused himself at Shelly's
request.  Even Darnell dashed off to see if Shelly might
require OSI's assistance.  I closed the door and pressed my
forehead against it.  Part of me, if I were honest, regretted
not being part of the pack running out to right a wrong.  The
other part liked the new house just fine the way it was without
another psycho coming after it.

I lifted my head, dazed a little bit that it
was over, that they were gone and again, I was alone with my
red-black rage, those thoughts that not even fear of becoming a
monster could suppress.  I turned around to start the tedious
process of cleaning up after my guests – and saw Johnny Orion
watching me from the dining room doorway.

Chapter 4

"Don't feel obligated to stay.  If
Darnell thinks OSI might need to be out there –"

"I can't openly work their cases, Doc. 
It might be hard not to rush into the thick of it, but Chris will
let me know what needs to be done from our end, if anything." 
He held out one hand.  "Let's finish dinner.  I'll even
stick around to help clean up."

Would it be inhospitable to beg off on the
rest of dinner?  My appetite was nonexistent on a good
day.  What I really wanted was a roaring fire and whatever
remained in the open wine bottles.  And solitude for my
thoughts to age, to gel all these delicious notions of revenge.

"Of course," damned social protocol. 
"Just because everyone else had to leave doesn't mean you can't
finish dinner."

Orion returned to the dining room. 
"Grab the glasses, would you?"

I followed him into the kitchen where he
promptly deposited our plates at the smaller breakfast
table. 

"Much better."  He surveyed his
handiwork.  "Not that the dining room isn't something that
looks like Martha Stewart might've flown to Darkwater Bay to design
it herself, I prefer being a little more informal if it's just the
two of us.  C'mon.  Let's finish dinner."

I spent half an hour rearranging food on my
plate, watching the clock and giving bare minimum responses to
Johnny's conversation.

"It bothers you, doesn't it?"

"Hmm?"

"That they're all out there working and
you're here, safely away from the action."

"Not really.  I don't think anyone ever
tried to kill me before I came to Darkwater Bay.  It wasn't an
experience I'd like to repeat.  Every time I start the car,
there's this fraction of a second where I wonder if we got the
right guy."

"Do you need to get that?"

Phone.  Ringing.  I hadn't even
noticed.  I glided to the wall near the kitchen counter.

"Hello?"

"Hey Eriksson, it's Briscoe."

"Oh, hello.  Did you forget something
when you ran out of here?"

"Brisket on a kaiser to go," he chuckled,
but sobered instantly, "I was wondering if you might be free to
head over to Downey tonight.  This big thing that busted up
your party is the fourth in a series of similar circumstances we've
encountered since the beginning of the year.  Winslow said
there's been a couple more in Darkwater proper, and we ain't got
the first clue what sorta rhyme or reason is behind the whole
thing."

I glanced over my shoulder at Orion,
studiously trying to look disinterested.  "Why don't you fax
the notes from your investigation over to me, and I'll take a look
whenever they arrive?"