Footprints of a Dancer (Detective Elliot Mystery) (31 page)

Inside the barn, Elliot went to the workbench where he’d seen the tools. He placed the obsidian knife into the vise and cranked the handle until the jaws held the relic in place, though at that point he stopped and went no further.

He needed to think this through. He carried around a lot of pain and he’d felt the power of the obsidian, knew firsthand what it could do. For fear of losing his sanity, he’d continually reminded himself his excursions into the past lives of
loved ones had existed only in his mind, but in his heart he wondered if he’d experienced times and places that had been more than flights of fancy, had been, in some unknown intersection of time and place, quite real.

The temptation
of preserving the knife flowed easily through Elliot’s mind and grew with dimensions of feasibility, but his hands, as if acting independently of his senses, had continued to turn the handle of the vise. As he watched in a near state of disbelief at what he’d done, he quickly cranked the vise tighter.

The handle of the relic, the image of an Aztec god, busted into several pieces, but the blade of obsidian, having been freed by the action, fell to the floor.

Still operating in a mode somewhere between coveting power at will, and fear of where it might lead, Elliot retrieved the blade and placed it back into the vise and closed the jaws around it.

The shiny glass-like material busted into fragments and fell onto the workbench, some bouncing onto the floor.

Elliot gathered the remains and placed them into a pile. He grabbed a hammer from the pegboard, raised it into the air and brought it down, pounding again and again until he’d pulverized the shiny chunks into a near powder-like state. Afterward, he brushed the powdered obsidian into his hand, being careful to get it all.

Elliot carried the powder to Gerald’s Cadillac. He leaned inside the car, opened the glove compartment, and pushed the button to release the latch for the fuel door. He stumbled around the vehicle, opened the fuel door, and removed the gas cap. Steadying his hand, he poured the powdered obsidian into the tank.

The keys to the vehicle dangled from the trunk latch. Elliot grabbed them, and after picking up one of the bricks alongside the wall of the garage, he climbed inside the car.

He inserted the key into the ignition switch and with a flick of the wrist completed the circuit, causing sparks of electricity to jump between the gaps of the plugs, igniting the fuel-air mixture gathered in the cylinders, and the old V8 sprung to life.

The barn doors were open.

Elliot dropped the Cadillac into gear, eased it from the barn, and coaxed it across the yard toward the burning remains of the house where Charles McDugan had lived. As Elliot maneuvered a turnabout on the lawn, positioning the Cadillac so it looked as if it had come to its senses and was now driving away from the carnage, he thought of Gerald. Wherever his old friend was right now, he would be offering a nod of approval at what Elliot had in mind.

Elliot left the car running but shoved the gear selector into park and climbed out. He leaned back inside, placed the brick against the accelerator pedal, dropped the car into reverse and jumped out of the way.

Seeming to welcome its part in the plan, the Cadillac drove itself through the back wall of the house and had made it through the kitchen and into the living room before it exploded into flames.

Elliot turned away and started toward his truck. A feeling of triumph weaved through him, but somewhere between the truck and the driveway, his consciousness began to fade and everything went black.

Chapter Forty-Four

Carmen Garcia saw that Wayne had noticed her pacing the floor of the waiting room. She could have stepped into the hallway, where there was more room and walked there, but she did not want to be missing if someone came with news about Kenny.

She found a magazine she’d only been through once and sat down and started flipping through the pages again.

Wayne was trying to be strong for her. They had been at the hospital for hours and he had not complained, or even asked when they might be going home. Some might think she should not have brought him there, and that he would have been better left with a friend or relative, but Kenny was his father, and she thought Wayne should be there. Judging by his behavior, she thought he wanted that as well.

Kenny’s Captain Dombrowski was there also. Each time Carmen glanced in his direction, she found him looking at her and this made her uncomfortable. She did not think he was that kind of man. He was just concerned and unsure of what to do.

Carmen lowered the magazine to her lap and looked at Wayne. “If you want, we can take a few minutes and go to the cafeteria to get some lunch.”

Wayne shook his head. “I’ll be all right. I don’t feel much like eating anyway.”

Carmen noticed someone’s shadow on the floor and looked up to see Captain Dombrowski standing in front of her.

“I could go down to the kitchen and bring something back for you,” he said.

Carmen was about to tell Captain Dombrowski she did not think it was allowed when someone called her name.

It was Doctor Hopkins, the physician that had been attending to Kenny. The doctor smiled, but his demeanor said he was tired. “Mr. Elliot is doing well, considering what he’s been through. I was there when he stumbled into the emergency room. I’m not sure how he managed to get himself here. He’d lost a lot of blood, and his attempts at explaining had been incoherent. But he was clear about one thing. He gave me your name and phone number, wanted me to call you.”

Carmen fought back the tears. “Can we see him?”

“His signs have stabilized. It shouldn’t be a problem. Are you a relative?”

“I am,” Wayne said. “He’s my dad.”

As was often the case, Wayne surprised Carmen with his compassion, and his ability to assess a situation. “I am a friend,” she said. “But we are close, and he needs to see me.”

Captain Dombrowski said something as well, but Carmen was too focused on the doctor to make out what it was.

The doctor turned and started down the hallway.

Carmen took the doctor’s actions as a sign of affirmation and followed him.

Chapter Forty-Five

Elliot leaned back in the chair in Pastor Meadows’ office. A month had passed since he’d showed up at St. John’s, and the wounds he’d suffered, the physical ones anyway, were mending ahead of expectations. The doctor said he wasn’t ready for active duty with the police department, and for once he agreed with them. He suspected it was Carmen Garcia’s presence that got him well anyway, having more to do with his recovery than all the medicine he had to choke down. Not a day of his recuperation went by that she wasn’t there. She’d often run her fingers through his hair and say, “It’s the only part of you that isn’t damaged.” Elliot’s love for her was indescribable, but he doubted she knew how close to the truth her assessment had been.

The pastor had asked him why he’d come to see him. Elliot wasn’t quite sure how to respond, so he settled on a reflection of the guilt that had coiled up inside him, even though that was only a small part of it. “Have you ever let anyone down, Pastor Meadows?”

The pastor stared across the desk. “If I were to recount the times, we’d have to send out for lunch, possibly dinner.”

Elliot managed a smile, though he suspected it was unconvincing. They’d found Gerald’s body buried beneath the rubble of the old apartment house in Tulsa, just like Elliot said they would, but Gerald had not been alone. A veritable graveyard, Dombrowski had called it. The property outside of Stillwater, owned by Professor David Stephens, yielded similar results, including the remains of Corey Sherman, Jake Sherman’s missing brother. No one had bothered to look for the Depression era victims, but Elliot suspected they were out there somewhere, if nothing more than scraps of bones, scattered by the coyotes across the hills of Eastern Oklahoma.

“An old friend of mine stirred up some trouble he couldn’t handle,” Elliot said. “With his back against the wall, he needed my help. But I let him down. He’s dead because of it.”

Pastor Meadows shook his head. “You know better than that, Detective. We can’t go through life looking back and wondering if things might have turned out differently had we done this, or that. Not only is that kind of thinking counterproductive, it’s potentially destructive as well.”

Elliot glanced at the floor.

“However, I suspect you already know that,” the pastor said. “In fact, I think something else is bothering you. Why don’t you tell me what it is?”

Elliot sat forward. It was true. He’d been skirting the issue, but only because he wasn’t sure of how to talk about such a thing. “I’ve been a cop for a long time,” he said. “I’ve seen some pretty bad stuff.”

Thoughts of the obsidian knife snaked through Elliot’s head, how it had pulled him in, how he’d almost given in to it. “But something dark and vile on a level way beyond my understanding has walked across my soul.”

Elliot felt tears building up, but he held them back. He’d known that expressing what was going on inside of him would be difficult. “I feel unclean,” he continued, “unworthy of being here, in God’s house, even of being in your presence.”

Pastor Meadows sat forward, his eyes reflecting both interest and concern. “If I had to guess I’d say you got into your profession not only to bring a little light into the world in the form of justice, but to redeem yourself as well.”

Elliot wondered how the pastor could know about that, motives behind a behavior even he had trouble admitting, but as he thought it through he realized the process was not fantastic. He often sized people up in a hurry, had, in fact, gotten pretty good at it. “You could say that.”

“Well,” the pastor said, “at least in that respect, we have something in common.”

“I’m not sure I’m following you.”

“What I’m saying is I’m not all that different from you, Kenny. Being a pastor does not shield one from the weaknesses, desires, and emotions anyone else might experience. It’s all about the choices we make, whether we give in to sin or resist it.”

Elliot nodded. The pastor was trying to demonstrate that he was, in fact, on Elliot’s level. It was a strategy he’d often used himself. “I appreciate your honesty,” he said, “but it seems I haven’t effectively communicated the gravity of my situation.”

The pastor shook his head. “I guess I’m going to have to break out the big guns, heavy artillery if you will.” He leaned forward. “What I’m about to tell you is no secret, but few people know about it just the same.”

“All right,” Elliot said, acknowledging his understanding of the quasi-confidential nature of the matter. It was something he was used to, being a cop.

“There was a time,” the pastor continued, “when I, too, considered myself unredeemable. Don’t get me wrong. I come from a good family, had good parents who treated me well, made every effort to raise me up right. But I took to rebellion, determined, it seemed, to destroy myself. My young adult life was nothing but a downward spiral. One night, after finishing off my second fifth of vodka, I realized I’d sunk about as low as a person can and still be alive. It wasn’t enough to stop me, though. Instead of dwelling on how to pull myself out, I started looking for something else to drink.

“I don’t know how I ended up where I did, an old glass-fronted building with a light inside. Could be I thought the light was neon, thought the place was a bar, or a store where I could find more alcohol. I started pounding on the door, beat on it until someone let me in; an elderly black man who must have been pushing eighty opened the door to me. Had the tables been reversed, I’m not so sure I would have done the same.

“It was when he flipped on the lights that I realized where I was. The old guy had converted the place into a church, a house of worship. He gingerly guided me to one of the pews and pressed on my shoulders until I sat. After that, he walked out of the room.”

Elliot rubbed his temples. Hearing Pastor Meadows revealing such personal matters put a knot in his stomach. “You don’t have to do this, Pastor. Not on my account.”

“Indulge me on this, Kenny. It’s important to me. Anyway, something happened to me while I was sitting there alone in that makeshift church. When the old man finally came back into the room I started crying. It was like all those years had finally caught up with me. He handed me a hot cup of coffee and sat down beside me. When he put his arm around me, I just let it all out, told him things I hadn’t even told my parents. I must have been there for hours. We talked about a lot of things, but the old guy told me one thing that I will never forget. You could say it changed my life. He was a good man. A few years later, I went to his funeral and cried like he was my own father. It drew quite a few stares from the predominately black audience.”

Elliot noticed one of the other pastors waiting outside the door of the office, and when it became obvious Pastor Meadows wasn’t going to say anymore, Elliot had to ask, “What was it the old man said to you?”

Pastor Meadows smiled. “I’m glad you asked. I’m always happy to share his wisdom. This is what he said: ‘There ain’t no sin bigger than God’s grace, son. No, sir.’ He was right about that, Kenny. And I can’t think of any truer words to tell you.”

Elliot thought for a moment then smiled. “Thank you, Pastor Meadows, for everything.”

“Anytime you want to talk, feel free to call or stop by.”

The pastor at the door cleared his throat.

Pastor Meadows stood and shook Elliot’s hand. “Why don’t you reflect on what I said, and we’ll talk later.”

Elliot rose to his feet and walked out of the office. He thought he held a straight face, but he wasn’t sure. Pastor Meadows had spoken to him as if he were a long-time confidant, an old friend, sharing pastoral duties and the problems that went along with such a responsibility. He had done so out of concern for Elliot’s wellbeing, of that he had no doubt, but Elliot didn’t know if it had helped or if it had added to the confusion.