When Mas saw the well-preserved 1976 Toyota Land Cruiser parked in the driveway, she knew she finally found the right house. She had been tooling along the back roads of Chantilly Flats for the better part of an hour, and had little to go on but her memory of the vehicle and the rumor that Peter Johnson was living somewhere on the outskirts of town in an unmarked house on a street with no name.
The house had seen better days, but then so had Chantilly Flats. The locals had taken to calling the place Chantilly Flattened, and the few hearty souls who remained were still cleaning things up bit by bit.
Mas rolled into the driveway and killed the engine, then got off the BMW and pulled it up on the stand. She removed her helmet, shook her hair out, and took a look around. The one-acre lots gave the folks in Chantilly Flats plenty of elbowroom. It was a place where you could keep a horse and some yard birds if you felt like it, and the next-door neighbors wouldn’t raise a fuss if you did.
But that was then. Now there was hardly anyone left to raise a fuss about anything. Neighbors had become few and far between. The houses that were still standing were made of brick, and the occupants had more elbowroom than they knew what to do with.
Mas clipped her helmet to the bike, and took the brick walk to the front door. There used to be a screen door but she guessed that it must have blown away, along with most of the roof shingles. A large blue plastic tarp covered the roof above the porch, and flapped lazily in the breeze.
She knocked on the door and waited for a response, glancing around and peeking in the front window. She couldn’t see much, due to the glare of sunshine on the smudged pane of glass. The man should invest in a squeegee, she thought idly, waiting for him to come to the door.
After a polite interim she knocked again, and listened for footsteps inside. When none came, she knocked a third time, much louder, but still shy of sounding like a storm trooper. She was fairly certain he was home, and unless he was dead asleep he’d know by now that someone was at the door.
“Agent Johnson? Sir? Please open up.” There was no response. “I need to talk to you,” she continued. “It’s important.”
Still, there was no response. Mas began debating whether or not she should leave, but she concluded that it was a long way out here and a long way back into town for nothing.
Maybe he’s in the shower, she thought, and stepped off the porch to walk around the house for a listen.
The deadbolt clicked. She stopped in her tracks, turned around, and stepped back on the porch as the door cracked open a few inches. Peter Johnson peered out at her.
He was a large, slightly stooped man in his sixties, hawk-nosed, with a receding hairline and a furrowed brow. He had deep-set eyes that didn’t quite match, but Mas couldn’t put her finger on exactly why. He possessed a powerful gaze, but it was hobbled by a bad habit of flitting from one thing to another, as if he were an over-tired sentry at a forward base, harassed and surrounded by an elusive enemy. The man was a mess.
“Agent Johnson?” Mas inquired.
He flinched at her choice of words and shrank back, closing the door as he admonished her, “Don’t call me that. I’m retired.”
She jammed her motorcycle boot in the door like a traveling salesman. He stared down at her boot, and then his eyes darted back up to hers. He was more surprised than offended by the tactic. She cracked a disarming grin.
“I’m not, and I need your help. I’m Agent Christine Mas.”
Johnson looked her up and down, and then looked past her to her bike in the driveway, then up and down the asphalt road. No one was around, and from what he could tell no one was peeking out their windows, either, although she was a sight to see. She was wearing a full set of leathers.
“Who sent you?” he demanded to know.
“I did. It’s my day off.”
He studied her eyes, and saw something. He nodded over and over. “It’s happening, isn’t it?”
“Sir?”
“It’s getting to you,” Johnson said. “He’s getting to you. Isn’t he?”
Johnson repeatedly nodded once again, a silent answer to his own question. In fact, he was nodding up a storm. Mas just rode it out, waiting for him to knock it off and start making sense.
“I know that look,” he said. “I can still see it in the mirror, most days.”
She started to speak, but he jabbed a finger in her face, scowling at her.
“Don’t say it! Don’t you dare! Not here! Not in my house! I don’t want his name mentioned under my roof –”
The blue plastic tarp above their heads suddenly flapped in a fitful breeze. Mas stifled a grin, and Johnson scowled at her all over again. She pursed her lips, contrite.
“Yes, sir, I promise.”
The house was dark and cluttered, with books stacked on the living room floor in disorganized piles. There was a collection of Bibles on the coffee table, along with a handful of esoteric works, among them The Apocrypha, The Gnostic Texts, and The Aquarian Gospel of Jesus the Christ. Other books scattered on the floor nearby delved into Satanism, black magic, various kinds of paganism, and heresy.
A volume on the subject of Bible codes lay open on the coffee table, beside a large-print Bible. A notepad and a clutch of pens were nearby. From the looks of things, Mas guessed that he was engaged in some sort of Bible study, sitting on the couch surrounded by an ad hoc library. She wondered if he found any peace from it. From the look in his eyes, it didn’t seem so.
As they passed the coffee table on the way to the dining table off the kitchen, she caught a glance of a legal pad with a series of numbers carefully written on it, beside the large-print Bible that looked to be the centerpiece of his study space. A piece of notepaper dangled out of the Bible and served as a bookmark, with the number 1147 carefully written on it. The paper had been ripped from the dashboard notepad in his Land Cruiser. Mas didn’t know that, but she did recognize the number. It was Fareed Aly’s street address.
There were several framed pictures of saints hung on the walls and paneling. Votive candles lined the mantel and various other Christian knick-knacks were scattered about on the end tables, the TV, and the credenza. A crucifix with a dried palm frond tucked behind it was hung next to a lavishly framed painting of a haloed baby Jesus, bestowing a blessing on whoever laid eyes on the Child.
Mas took a seat at the dining table as Johnson poured them both a cup from the coffeemaker on the crowded kitchen counter. She looked around, keeping her expression neutral, and her eyes landed on an article thumbtacked to the side of the kitchen cabinet. It was yellowed, already five years old and counting. FBI Special Agent Christine Mas Leads Branding Killer Case.
Johnson sat across from her and handed her a mug of coffee. He gestured to the sugar and powdered cream on the table, but she waved it off. He dug a small bottle of eye drops out of his shirt pocket and dosed his left eye, blinking rapidly.
He put the eye drops away and then doctored his coffee, carefully portioning out the sugar and powdered cream like he was compounding a prescription. It’ll get cold before he’s done, she thought, and glanced around the room as he dialed in the magic ratio.
In contrast to the mess around the couch, there was a beautiful Christmas tree by the front window, still fresh and green and decorated with handcrafted ornaments. It would have made Martha Stewart proud. Mas allowed herself a ghost of a smile.
She turned back to him, and found that he was watching her as he stirred his coffee. “Looks like you made it through the storm,” she said pleasantly.
He shrugged; he wasn’t in the mood for chitchat. “I don’t think the owners did,” he grumbled, and sipped his coffee, fiddling with his shirt buttons.
“This isn’t my place. I’m homesteading, I guess you could call it. It’s safe here. When the Devil lays waste, he moves on. He never backtracks. That’s one of his flaws. Arrogant self-confidence. You learn to hide in his wake, among the debris.”
Mas diplomatically nodded, and sipped her black coffee. It was bitter and strong, and slightly scorched. She could see the pot and the coffeemaker behind him. They both needed a good scrubbing and a flush of white vinegar as well. Martha Stewart would not be amused.
“So how are you?” she asked him. “I mean, since you stopped working on... you know...”
He bristled, giving her a stern look over the rim of his coffee cup. “What does it matter? I am where I am, in here...” He pointed to his head, “...and here.” He pointed to his heart, and then resumed fiddling with the button on his chest.
She noticed an old police scanner, sitting on the kitchen counter behind him. He could see where her eyes had drifted, and waited for her to say something.
“I saw you at the jump site the other day,” she told him. “Been following the case?”
Johnson nodded and repeatedly sipped his coffee, shifting uncomfortably in his rickety chair.
“Why?” she probed. “It drove you...”
He shot a cold glance at her and she trailed off, realizing that she almost said the wrong thing. She looked around the room, thinking fast. “...out here,” she finished lamely, but her foot was already in her mouth.
“Say it!” he insisted. “Go on. ‘It drove me crazy,’” he coached her, almost mockingly, and she responded to the edge in his voice by looking right back at him.
“Why’d you walk away from the case?” she asked bluntly.
Instead of shrinking away, like he had from her other questions, Johnson looked her in the eye, and to her surprise she was the one who shifted uncomfortably. There was something about the man that she couldn’t fathom, and it wasn’t nuttiness. That was obviously a part of it, but something else was going on, too. Whatever it was, she felt as if he was suddenly controlling the conversation. The thing that disturbed her the most was that she couldn’t quite spot when the tables turned. But they had.
“What made you want to be a Fed?” he asked her.
Before she realized what she was doing, she found herself telling him exactly what he wanted to hear. “My father was a cop,” she mumbled, suddenly introspective. “He was killed right in front of me.”
Mas was inwardly stunned. No one had ever gotten that out of her in their first conversation. She focused on her coffee cup on the table before her, but she could see his expression out of the corner of her eye. He seemed genuinely moved by her revelation.
“That must have been awful,” he said quietly.
She nodded, pursing her lips as she felt her face flush despite herself. This guy’s good, she thought, as the memory enveloped her and then swallowed her whole.
Officer Julian Mas was off-duty, driving around town in the family car with his kid when she had a sudden yen for a treat. Her exact words were, “Daddy, the A&W done flung a hankerin’ on me.” She was a charmer at the tender age of twelve, and he was a sucker for those big brown eyes. And Chrissy was a sucker for peanut butter malts.
It was just after lunch, with plenty of time until dinner, so he pulled into the A&W parking lot and stopped the car. He shut off the engine, but her favorite song was on the radio and she turned it back on to keep singing along. “Rock Lobster” would take forever to get through, plus she had to do the whole hold your nose and sink to the bottom of the sea routine, which was quite a trick to do in the front seat of a Buick, but somehow she would always manage. She sang loudly to him, and he got the message. He’d get the malt and she’d guard the car.
Julian got out and shrugged his jacket around him. It was early September, but it was already getting chilly. A frosty malt didn’t make a lick of sense to him when it was below seventy, but it was warm in the car and he wasn’t going to talk her out of it. Maybe he’d get a coffee while he was at it, he thought.
As he got out of the car, he slipped his service revolver out of the holster under his seat and tucked it behind his back. He felt naked without it, and it made less of a bulge there than riding on his hip or tucked in his waist. Besides, he didn’t want to leave it in the car with Chrissy. He trusted her, but a gun was a gun and her mother would have a fit if she ever found out he’d left it in reach of their baby girl.
The song was over by the time he came back outside, with a coffee in one hand and her peanut butter malt in the other. She was already bored stiff, suffering through a long string of radio ads. He went around to her door, and she cranked down her window as he put his coffee on the roof. He handed her the malt, and she immediately sat back in her seat and got to work on it.
Julian was about to pick up his coffee from the roof of the car, when he caught something in his peripheral vision and turned around.
An enormous, muscular African-American man dressed in a colorful tropical outfit was by the Dumpster on the side of the building. A boy’s dead body was slung over his shoulder like a sack of potatoes. The boy looked to be about twelve, the same age as Chrissy. Behind the man’s massive form, Julian caught a glimpse of someone else dressed in a black greatcoat, disappearing behind the back of the A&W.
Zamba Boukman looked Julian Mas in the eye and smiled, and then dropped the boy’s limp body into the Dumpster. Behind Julian, Chrissy was wondering why her father was still standing by her door with his back to her.
“HEY!” Julian bellowed.
Chrissy sat up in alarm, dropping her malt on the floor. Something was wrong, but she couldn’t see what was happening. Her father’s broad back was blocking her view, and he was making matters worse by pressing against her window, as if he were trying to shield her from danger. Which he was.
Zamba looked up in surprise at the would-be hero, and held his hand out like a cop directing traffic, silently warning Julian to back off. With no time to deal with the intruder, Zamba summoned his loas to swoop down on the man standing by the Buick.
Julian suddenly found himself pinned against the car. In an instant, the confrontation had catapulted him into another realm, and the ground rules no longer applied. Something lethal was pressing down on him, and he somehow knew that the strange man was the source of it. And he also knew that in the next few seconds one of them was going to die.
Julian reached around to the small of his back and pulled his service revolver out of his belt, in full view of his daughter sitting in the car behind him. In the half-second that he took to draw a bead on his target, he couldn’t spare a breath to shout a warning to her. But he knew that just drawing his weapon would tell her that something bad was going down. She was a smart girl; she’d know what to do.
Zamba’s chest absorbed three hollow-point rounds from Julian’s .357 Ruger Speed Six, in a two-inch grouping just to the left of the lower part of his breastbone. At a distance of less than thirty feet, the man’s heart should have exploded along with most of his left lung. The hydrostatic shock from the three fragmentation rounds should have punched a ragged red hole out the back of Zamba’s ribcage the size of a soccer ball.
Instead, the three puncture wounds simply closed up and healed.
Zamba grinned at Julian, his arm still outstretched, his palm still facing the astonished cop. An instant later, the same three slugs slammed into Julian Mas in the exact same place; a perfect, bizarre boomerang.
In the car, Chrissy was already hunkered on the floor in front of the passenger seat, stunned from the ear-splitting sound of her father’s gunfire just seconds before. Now, just inches above her head, he was slammed back against the passenger door window as the three silent rounds blew a hole through his back.
Blood and safety glass sprayed the inside of the car and showered down on her. She was too paralyzed by fear and horror to scream. She couldn’t even move. She just looked up and watched in uncomprehending shock as her father wavered for a moment on his feet, and then slumped out of sight.
Sunlight poured in through the windowless door, where his wide shoulders and back had been shading her as she sat with her peanut butter malt just moments before. She was kneeling in the mess now, but that wasn’t the chill she was feeling.
She grabbed the sill of the car door above her, oblivious to the shards of safety glass caught by the window trim, and pulled herself onto the seat, cautiously peering outside.
No one was there except for her father, motionless on the ground below.
Mas was staring into her coffee as her tears found their way down her cheeks from a pair of red, swollen eyes. She slowly shook her head, pursing her lips as she puzzled yet again over something that had been haunting her for most of her life.
“He just drew his gun and fired three rounds, just like that. No let the kid go, no you’re under arrest, no Miranda, no nothing. Then he slammed up against the car, real hard, and then he just dropped. But by then, the perp was gone. I never saw him.”
Johnson was blinking rapidly, moved by her story, but only his right eye was tearing up. He dabbed at it with a tissue, and then wiped the tears away from his other eye. Mas was having a hard time of it, but she forged ahead. “Ballistics said the three rounds they recovered from his chest were from his own gun. As near as they could figure, the perp took the gun and shot him.”
She sneered, and peeked at Johnson. He had much the same reaction that she did. The official story didn’t match what happened. Official stories seldom did.
“But I know what I saw,” she insisted, “and I know what I heard. He fired those rounds, and then he slammed up against the car. And here’s the kicker – the cops found a kid’s body in the dumpster, next to the A&W. He was the fifth Branding victim.”
Johnson nodded. “I remember that kid.”
She nodded back, and some of the tension finally drained from her. She could tell that he believed her story. In fact, he was the only person who had ever taken her word for it, without a trace of skepticism, despite how utterly unbelievable it seemed. She felt she should thank him somehow, but she wasn’t quite sure what to say or what to do, other than return the favor somehow.
The opportunity wasn’t long in coming. “Do you believe in God?” he asked her.
She stifled a dry grin, and sipped her coffee to buy enough time to formulate a polite response.
“I guess,” she replied with a shrug. I should have known this was coming, she thought.
“You gotta believe in something,” she offered, and she peeked at him, allowing her grin to show. “Depends on what day of the week it is.”
He chuckled, but not at her quip. It was her foolishness that he found amusing. “Spoken like a true secular progressive, Agent Mas.”
She sat back in her chair and waited for the sermon, or whatever it was that he had to say. He propped his elbows on the table, coffee cup in hand, and leaned an inch closer to her. But he wasn’t leaning into her so much as trying to reach her.
“I’m a Catholic, through and through. And you didn’t answer me. Do you believe in God? Tell me.”
She had been through this before, with fundamentalists and men of the cloth and even her own mother. Depending on who was asking the question, she either gave it serious consideration or short shrift, or she just kept things pleasant and hoped that the person would eventually change the channel. But Johnson was one of those who sincerely wanted to know. She figured she at least owed him the courtesy of an honest answer.
“I believe that there’s more to this world than science can show us. And if you want to call it God, then I suppose that’s as good a name as any. But whether He exists or not, you still gotta get up and go to work in the morning.” She sipped her coffee and smiled. “Does that answer your question?”
Johnson didn’t reply. Besides, she owed him more of a response than she gave him, and collected her thoughts to deliver her next point.
“There was a mass murder at that clinic and then the place got hit by a tornado, but the tornado didn’t kill a soul.”
From the pile of books he was studying, she knew he would place a lot of weight on the odd coincidence, and that was precisely what she was driving at.
“Was the massacre the wrath of God, or was the tornado some kind of miracle? Or does evil just touch down at random and skip over the lucky ones, like lightning?”
Johnson didn’t have any answers for her, at least none that he could articulate. Her expression softened to ease him off the hook, and she could see he was thankful for it.
“You must have found something, Peter.”
“It’s not what I found,” he told her quietly. “It’s what found me.”
She was confused by that, and a little frustrated. She had opened up to him and he wasn’t returning the favor, he was being coy. They were both Feds, whether he had retired or not, and just like Marines there was no such thing as an ex-Fed. Despite his condition, whatever the hell it was, she expected more out of him. Perhaps she was being unreasonable, but that was just too damn bad. People were dying. How reasonable was that?
“I believe in God, Agent Mas,” he told her, as a prelude to saying something more. She nodded perfunctorily but other than that she didn’t reply, hoping he would leave it alone. His beliefs were his to choose and she didn’t want to debate the subject, but the man wasn’t finished.
“And I believe that God needs all of us to pray for him,” Johnson said, quietly finishing his statement.
“Excuse me?”
He suddenly became animated and lunged toward a book on the counter, grabbing it with both hands. It was a Bible. He turned back to her, leaning over the table.
“We have to pray for Him!” he urged her.
He was utterly sincere, and the anguish in his eyes was a painful thing to witness. She just looked at him, wondering if he really had gone crazy after all.
Mas straddled her idling BMW and slipped on her helmet. Johnson was peering out his front room window, his Bible in hand. He deliberately deadbolted the front door, his eyes locked on hers. She ignored him, glancing away as she placed a call on her iPhone.
Mark answered at once. “Detective Kaddouri, NOPD.”
“How’d it go?”
“Well, it went. South, mostly.”
She could see Johnson in the rearview mirror next to her throttle as she goosed the gas. The engine quietly purred in response. Mas glanced in her mirror again.
Johnson was still watching her, but now he had the Bible tucked under his arm and his notepad and pen in hand. He watched her wrap up her call, then tuck her phone away and nudge her bike off the stand.
She rolled down the driveway, and as she paused to check both ways for traffic he jotted down her license plate number – 1184 – on his notepad, and went quickly to the couch.
He sat down before his big Bible on the coffee table, placing the Bible that was tucked under his arm onto the couch beside him. He opened the big Bible, his notepad in hand, and then opened his book on Bible codes and got to work.