Ashes (8 page)

11

 

THE DOORKNOB TWISTED WITH a whine. Krane dragged his feet into the apartment. Defeat was a prisoner inside his wrinkled, sleep-starved eyes. Cracking his back, he let out a long sigh, and with it, pent-up frustration. The amount of damage incurred back in his underground city was a weight he wasn't prepared to carry. Not when he was so close to weeding out the imperfections.

The last few hours hadn't gone as he'd hoped or planned. But plans often changed. After all, besides testing a girl who didn't appear to show any signs of manifesting genuine power, he had the privilege of working with a subject whose body and mind were in constant flux, unstable and uncertain.
Like the future.
Like the dreams he and Morpheus fought hard to steal.
 

Was he stupid to think there was even a point to it all? The troubling idea toyed with him too often, and each time, he remembered his mother's words, words he believed were buried with the past. “Do something miraculous with your life, Emanuel. Help people. Change the world.” Well, the world would be changed because of his work.

Hope I made you proud
,
Ma
.

 

Krane rubbed the tension from his body by massaging his temples. It felt as though a stampede were crashing through his skull. He set his briefcase down on one of his ripped sofas and stumbled into the kitchen.

Cluttered countertops and unwashed dishes welcomed him. No wife to kiss, no child to scorn for homework she didn't have done.
Just home, sweet home.
Little ever changed in this apartment. The off-center picture frames hadn't been moved in nearly four years and were now weighed down by dust. Newspaper clippings and magazine articles were pasted and stuck to the wall at the center of the kitchen so he could easily scan the contents and judge the progress made. Words and pictures ran along the dull-colored Sheetrock, pieced together by sloppy glue and thumbtacks. His research. His life.
Their lives.

The filth had never really bothered him, not in all these years. In fact, he wouldn't know what to do with
himself
if these rooms were clean. Odd how much of a hypocrite he could be, so quick to notice another's imperfection, perhaps quicker to notice his own, but unwilling to change.

A bottle of ibuprofen spilled out into his palm the moment he opened the cabinet door. He must've forgotten to cap it the last time a migraine fought to split his brain. He spent the next four and a half minutes reorganizing the shelf full of prescriptions before giving up completely when he realized it would never
be
as he wanted things.

He walked over to the sink, flipped up the faucet handle, and cradled a handful of water, drawing it to his mouth. It tasted like copper. He swallowed the pills and reached into the freezer to pull out a frozen dinner—Salisbury steak and mashed potatoes. With a sigh, he tore the package. After popping open the microwave, he tossed the frozen entrée onto the wheel and nuked it.

The microwave finally beeped moments later, not enough time to allow him to escape his thoughts, the ones still stuck in the obscurity of the lab. After forcing himself back to the reality he was in, Krane grabbed the platter without using a glove. He quickly jerked back with a curse. The pain made him think of the arson, probably afraid now yet unable to burn, even if the sick desire lingered to do so.

He imagined controlling that kind of power. Such power was beautiful.

Krane licked the burn already beginning to blister the tips of his fingers then found a fork amidst the dirty items in the sink and used it to eat. The clock on the microwave glowed yellow. He didn't bother to register what time it was. He was too busy thinking on what he'd say when Hoven came to prod for an explanation for the loss of visual data.

He just needed the arson to keep dreaming. Whatever mysteries roamed inside the fire-breathing teenager turned him hostile, made him react. Reacting, as long as it could be controlled, was a good thing. Losing expensive equipment wasn't.

Krane shuffled over to a sofa that was falling apart in the corner of his small, unimaginative living room. Balls of
years-old
cat hair, magazines, and papers with statistics littered the carpet. With the remote, he turned on the television, an outdated unit with a big back end. He proceeded to surf the static channels, eventually settling on a Travel Channel special. Some re-run of a magician's journey to prove he possessed true magic. His name was easily forgettable once he performed the first trick, but it was at this point that Krane became intrigued. He leaned up in his chair, pushing around the bad flavor of the Salisbury steak and soupy potatoes in his mouth, and focused on the screen as the magician began to levitate. Or so he was expected to believe. But he knew a scam when he saw one. The crowd, unlike him, was in awe; some were terrified. Even the
camera man
leapt back momentarily, perhaps not expecting such a stunt. “
It's
just television,” Krane mocked. But was that all it was? A cheap stunt created for a gullible audience?

The next scene shifted to the magician in the middle of a downtown city square. Probably Chicago. Again, a crowd had gathered to hear him speak his slow, soft words, almost hypnotic. He began guessing their thoughts, and the people were amazed, like the crowd before. Next, he gave a homeless man a gold coin then allowed him to scratch a lottery ticket, said to be worth a fortune. As predicted, the beggar won several thousand dollars with the ticket and the coin.

Krane grunted. These were such trivial things. Hocus-pocus nonsense. As a man of science, he couldn't be perplexed, just frustrated at how easily people believed in such dull magic. It was nothing more than a trick, a distraction or the proper lighting. “Bring someone back to life. Heal an infant. F-feed a th-th-thousand men.”

If a man could really do these things, without trickery, that man would become someone to be feared. Perhaps even one to be set on high, if he possessed the proper genes to rule. Why, then, was this vagabond hungry for an audience? He wasn't a god. He wasn't something to be feared. Why was he walking street corners and doing signs and wonders that undoubtedly could be manipulated or reenacted for an unintelligent target market?

“Nothing but ch-cheap-cheap tricks,” Krane concluded, shutting off the television.

12

 

REDD'S OFFICE LOOKED FRAIL and worn down from the outside. Joel noticed a sign that hung on the front of the chipped vinyl siding, but he couldn't make out what it said. There wasn't much light. It was the kind of building you had to know was there in order to find it, and he surmised that was precisely the intention of the owners. Being built on possibly one of the worst corners Hartford had to offer didn't really help. On his way in, he'd witnessed two drug deals go down, just yards away. He got sized-up once, hard, by a dealer with dreads down to his waist. It was warning enough to mind his own business and find where he needed to go. No problems.

He waited outside for a moment once he arrived.
A long moment.
Maybe it was fear keeping him unbalanced on the outside. Maybe it was lack of faith in what this Redd guy, whose hidden office resembled something out of
The Exorcist
, could do to reunite him with his daughter. A cold wind sliced at his jaw, chilled his neck. He watched his breath unfold around him. His gaze drifted forth and back to littered streets and cracked sidewalks with gang symbols painted on them. It reminded him of his home in Camden.

New Jersey had left its mark on him for sure, but he'd tried to leave that part of him in the past, where it belonged. If he'd stayed in that filth long enough, God only knew what he might have been capable of.

The front sign's letters flickered one last time before the sign went completely dead. No more hum, no more distraction. It was just there, a sight of lost light, hung in the dark for
all the
world and this lonely street corner to miss.

Soon after, he found himself taking in the warm air of the office. The exterior was gravely misleading, and the quite-normal interior calmed him down some. A small desk waited at the center of the room. A receptionist with a headset sat behind it. Her fingers no doubt punched away at an email while she simultaneously finished up a phone call with someone. It was admirable how efficiently some secretaries did their work, becoming more like liaisons or emissaries than mere desk workers punching a clock.

The woman had tenacious curls flowing from the top of her head down to her chin, and it fit her just right.
Her makeup was neither overdone nor underdone
,
complementing the blouse she wore
. But what dragged him from despair was her welcome. It had such a life to it that Joel nearly surrendered all his apprehensions right then and there.

“You look like you're carrying the world on your back, Mr. Phoenix,” she said.

Joel sat down slowly. “How'd you know my name?”

“You're our six o'clock. I pinpointed your demeanor, anyway.” She studied him briefly. “Thought you might look something like this. Hope you don't mind my saying so.”

“No, it's all right, I suppose,” he returned.

“Redd'll be off the phone in a minute. If we take this case, I'm sure we'll put your mind at ease. We haven't let a client down yet, and we certainly don't intend to. We're a small operation, but we take care of our clients' needs like they're our needs. Can I get you a cup of cocoa to warm up?”

“Uh,” Joel hesitated. “Sure. That'd be nice.”

He couldn't help feeling like he was a patient, about to get seen by Dr. Redd. He pictured the “turn your head and cough” routine several times before getting weirded out by it.

“Here you go,” the kind girl said, returning with a steaming cup of cocoa. “Man, winter's definitely here. Now be careful, it might burn you if you drink it too fast. Sort of like a reverse brain freeze, I call it.” She had such a bright personality that Joel's emotions wrestled some with it but only slightly. The truth was that he wanted to be at ease, swooned by the quiet of the place.

“Thank you so much,” Joel said, taking his first sip. “It's pretty good.”

“And it's homemade,” she chuckled. “From the bag. I love those little marshmallows too. They rock.”

This young girl's persona made him wonder what Emery might have been like if she had not gotten burned.
She
was computer savvy, people savvy.
She
had had such life, such ambition as a little girl, and then one accident—one night—changed everything. If he blinked enough times, maybe this girl would become his daughter.

She went back to feverishly typing away at the next group of emails or whatever she was working on.

“Can I use your bathroom?” Joel asked after some waiting.

“Sorry about the wait. As you can see, it's not Rockefeller Center here. We try to keep a low profile, but sometimes we get swamped with calls from clients and business folks. I'm sure you can imagine how complex certain cases can get. But all you asked for was the restroom, and here I am talking your ear off. The answer is
yes,
you can use it, small as it may be. Walk precisely six and a half steps to my left and the bathroom is the first, the only, door right there.”

Joel said thank you with a smile; inwardly he returned to the frontlines of a battle, where his thoughts continued warring. A hundred doubting scenarios came all at once. The second-guessing was killing him. Maybe it was merely the pressure from Aimee to get out there and “do something again.” He only hoped this wasn't a mistake.

Joel checked his pockets. He had a roll of a thousand dollars. Close to all of his savings. The last few months had been tight. Shortly after relieving himself, Joel paused in front of the mirror. “Maybe this can change things,” he admitted.

Joel sighed as he let the water run over his hands. After drying, he reached into his back pocket to find the picture of Emery and one of the flyers he'd posted in nearly every city in Connecticut.

As he stepped out, a voice called to him. “Joel Phoenix?”
 

“Yes?” he answered.

“I'm Redd Casey.”

Joel froze slightly.

“Right. This is the awkward,
‘I'm-actually-a-chick'
moment. I get it a lot. I'm ready for you now.”

Joel wasn't sure which he was more shocked by, the fact that Redd was a woman or the fact that someone as firm and strongly attractive as she would refer to herself as a
chick
, especially considering her line of work. But he disregarded it and entered.

“Please sit down,” she invited. “Let's talk about why you came to see me.”

Joel adjusted his jacket before sitting then folded his hands. “As I'm sure your secretary, uh…”

“Jana,” Redd firmly added.

“As I'm sure your secretary, Jana, informed you, I am searching for my daughter. She was taken over three months ago.” Joel tried not to sound so weak and desperate, but it was the only tone his voice managed to create.

“Right. I'm terribly sorry for your loss, Mr. Phoenix. It's not easy, not by a long shot, to lose someone you love.”

“You speak as if you've lost someone.”

“Haven't we all?”

“Recently?”

Redd hesitated. “A long time ago. But let's stick with your situation. Emery. Tell me about her.”

“What's there to say? She's wonderful. Spontaneous. Funny. Sarcastic. A bit rebellious.” He swallowed and pushed his lips together as these one-word tags came like bullets out of his mouth. “Fragile. Beautiful.”
 

“She definitely sounds like a seventeen-year-old,” Redd said, rotating slightly in her chair.

“I loved her.”

“Use the present tense, Mr. Phoenix.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“When you refer to her, always use the present tense. Don't allow yourself to think for a second that you've lost her for good. Odds are already against us. The last thing we need right now is doubt. If we're gonna find her, you need to be with me in here.” She pointed to her head and then flipped open a notebook. “Should you decide to work with me, this little notebook is like our bible. Are you a religious man?” Redd asked, nodding to the cross hanging from his neck.

“Used to be. But I suppose, to some degree, we all believe in something, don't we?”

“Not here to judge,” she said with a shrug, making a note or two before her eyes returned to his. “I'll be collecting notes about your daughter from you, anywhere I go, and from anyone I meet. And then I'll use that data to track her down, if I can. Of course, you'll be in the loop every step of the way.”

Joel simply nodded. He wanted to work with her personally, but this would do.

“Do you have a picture of Emery?”

“Yes,” Joel said, almost flustered. He handed her the crinkled photograph.
 

“There was an accident?” Redd asked.

“When she was a little girl, her face was burned and scarred,” Joel said slowly. He didn't like to talk about Emery's condition or what had happened to her; most people didn't really care, but Redd seemed different. When she asked something, it practically demanded an answer, and Joel wanted to supply one. “It's been a struggle for me and my family ever since.”

“I can imagine. Your wife…are the two of you still together?”

Joel looked down at his hand, toyed with the ring on his finger. “Separated. It's complicated.”

“She didn't feel up to the meeting?”

Joel forced another sigh out.

“Complicated, right. Sorry. I try not to dive too much into the personal, but I find it's better if I get to know my clients a little. We've all got problems, complications, but my uncle always said that it's how we deal with the crap this world chucks at us that shows our true colors.”

“Sounds like a smart guy.”

“When he was drunk, maybe. He tended to spit out little proverbs like that whenever he hit the bottle. Strangest thing. Some men turn into bitter animals after a drink and others into prophets.” She chuckled but only slightly. “Anyway, I'm not at all trying to make light of your situation. It hurts, may even kill, inside. I am so sorry for everything.”

“None of this is your fault.”

“If only that could make everything right again for you. To be honest, I want to find your daughter, Mr. Phoenix.”

“Thank you. And, please, call me Joel.”

Redd blinked slowly after his comment. “Now, before I go and label this an abduction, you're absolutely certain your daughter didn't run away? Checked with family? I mean, there's nothing you or your wife did to trigger a reaction or cause her to high-tail it out of this beautiful state, right?”

“She's not the kind of girl who runs away like that,” he said abruptly. “She wouldn't.”

“Point taken. I just don't want assumptions to rule this case, that's all. I want to be thorough and diligent.”

Joel was distracted by her long red hair, noticing how it was the only vibrant thing in the room, how he wanted to stare at it forever. Her almond-shaped, green eyes fit well inside a soft but determined face. She had direction and fuel behind them. Her full lips formed every word, and in no time Joel was wondering how long he'd be captivated.

“Is everything all right?” she asked. “You seem distracted.”
 

“Yeah, everything's fine,” he said, brushing it off. He hoped she didn't think he was a creep.

“I'm assuming you've exhausted other avenues before coming to me?”

“Yes.”

“Ah, the justice system isn't what it used to be. Sooner or later,
there'll be anarchy
,
I'm convinced
. You can't really trust anyone these days. It's sad but true.”

“It's a huge risk to put your faith in someone, only to have it ripped away,” Joel said. “For more than three months, I've heard all the excuses and polite rejections, and swallowed all the bull. Enough to make me choke.”

“Gotta love all the bureaucratic charm. But you're here now, and we're
gonna
bring your daughter home. I want to be honest with you, though. It's not easy. Right now, she's
nothing more than a thousand pixels
on a flyer, a name on a list. I'm
gonna
make her famous. You'll see. It's not all doom and gloom. There's a big, wide world out there. And I network pretty good with others in the field.”

Joel nodded.

“But I want you to understand that I can't just punch some digits into a computer or make a few calls and have her miraculously appear. She was taken, okay. You've done phase one walking through my front door. Now it's time for phase two: keeping the pace. It's a marathon, not a sprint. It has been more than a hiccup in time that she's been gone, so I don't want to mislead you into thinking I've got superpowers, 'cause I don't.”

“It's difficult. I get that. You don't have to stress it any more than you've already done. I've been living without her for the last three godforsaken months, and I'm losing my marriage, my sanity. I'm quite familiar with what's difficult.”

“All right, then, we've officially begun,” Redd said, making several more notes. “Now, it's getting late, and this city isn't exactly friendly once the lights go out.”