Awakenings (2 page)

“Well, I assume … the mother took off with the kid because she didn’t want him raised in a ‘connected’ family.”

Dorn laughed. “A compliment, Mr. Dretch. Alas, I do not bear the honor of belonging to that distinguished group.”

Colby was amused. After years on the job, he knew a thug when he saw one. If Dorn hired him for his scruples as he claimed, then he’d also know working for organized crime posed no problem.

“I guess that’s not important, as long as your money is good,” Colby said.

“Shall we secure his commitment, my lord?” Symian asked.

“And
your
loyalty, Colby, how do we ensure that?” Dorn’s tone changed, making the previous conversation until now seem almost jovial. “Are we to trust you with our secrets?” Dorn’s voice exuded a deep severity.

For the first time, the detective wondered if he was in over his head. He wished he’d replaced the clip in the Beretta sitting in his bottom drawer.

Colby took a deep breath and convinced himself he had the upper hand. After all, if other detectives had failed before him, and they went out of their way to hire an indicted, unlicensed detective, he must be exactly what they need.

“Look, Mr. Dorn—I’m smart enough to know who not to screw with. I promise, the retainer will assure my loyalty.”

Dorn gave a nod to Symian. The bundled-up man pulled a small velvet sack out of his coat pocket.

“I disagree,” Dorn said. “Where I come from, fealty is a matter of life and death. Since your oaths mean little, you have to give us something very important to you. Something you could never live without.”

That’s a new twist.
Colby had never been asked to put up collateral for a job. “I thought you read the
Post
article. I put up most of my money for bail. The government took my passport and froze my assets until the investigation is complete. I sleep on that fold-out couch over there. I got nothing to give you.” Colby glanced at the photo of Tory, and immediately regretted it. “My boy’s a quadriplegic. I won’t lift a damn finger if you bring him into this.”

“I do not want your son,” Dorn said. “Some creatures throw their young to the wolves if it means one more day for themselves. I have something more dear to you in mind. Hesz.”

The large man scurried behind the detective in a flash, faster than Colby thought possible for someone so big, and locked him in a full nelson.

“What the hell are you doing?” the detective shouted. “Carla! Call the cops!” The detective struggled, but Hesz’s grip was like refrigerated steel. It was only when Hesz was breathing right on top of him that Colby finally realized the mist coming out of his mouth wasn’t cigarette smoke … it was frost. As was the “dandruff” on the man’s suit.

“Call the cops!” Colby shouted again.

Symian walked up to him. He glanced at Dorn and said, “Bet you a purse of Krakens it bursts. He doesn’t look too healthy.”

Dorn gave Symian a fierce look and said, “If he dies, I’ll braid your liver into a rope and hang you with it.”

Symian’s grin revealed canine teeth. He turned back to Colby and put two small pills into the detective’s mouth and said, “Swallow these.”

Colby spat them out. “Fuck you! Carla!” A frightening thought occurred to Colby. Carla might be dead.

“It’s just nitroglycerine,” Symian said. “Trust me.”

Symian gripped the detective’s face, pried his mouth open, slipped two fresh pills under the detective’s tongue, and Hesz clamped the detective’s jaw shut with a massive hand.

When Symian was sure the pills had dissolved, he ripped Colby’s shirt open and drew a circle in the center of his chest with a foul-smelling, thick, cloudy liquid that he seemed to be scraping off his own forearm. Using a Sharpie marker he drew five symbols around the circle and then spread more of the goop over the symbols. Then he placed the fingers of his right hand on the circle under each symbol. He uttered an undecipherable word.

Pushing forward, Symian’s hand sunk into Colby’s chest up to his wrist. Colby’s eyes almost came out of their sockets. He anticipated the agony of such a violation, but as the seconds passed, he realized it was a numb sensation, like pins and needles.

At the door, a shocked, hysterical Carla crawled in, sobbing. Her torn blouse revealed symbols drawn around a red welt on her chest. “Give it back!” she cried at Symian. “Oh, Colby, make him give it back!”

Colby never screamed louder in his life. He could feel the gray man’s hand clamping his heart, but was too gripped with terror to realize there was little blood coming forth. Symian’s hand pulled the organ free of its attachments. Within moments, Symian held Colby’s still-beating heart in front of his face. He put it in the velvet bag, thumping like a trapped rat, and pulled the drawstring shut.

CHAPTER 1

HERO SANDWICHED

1

Callum MacDonnell woke up in a cold sweat and managed to stifle a yell at the last minute. He caught his breath, then rolled out of bed as softly as possible so as not to disturb Cat. Not easy at six foot five, and two hundred and fifty pounds. The light from the street tinted him the same shade of blue as his eyes, like snow under moonlight.

“You don’t really think I’m still asleep?” his wife said groggily from the other side of the bed. Catherine MacDonnell propped herself up on her elbows. “You were thrashing around like shark prey.”

“Sorry,” he said, and sat back down on the bed.

Cat hoisted herself up from the mattress and rested her chin on his shoulder straining to keep her eyes open. “Bad dreams again?” she asked, rubbing his back.

The same dream had plagued Cal for almost two weeks now. He tried to retain the peculiar details of his nightmare even as they dissolved into the ether of his memory. The lack of sleep affected him on patrol, and in New York City that could get a cop killed, especially in his precinct.

“Want to talk about it?” Cat asked.

“It’s probably just stress,” Cal said.

“Maybe you’re worried about the ESU exam?” She slid her fingers up to the back of his neck and kneaded the tension out with an aggressive thumb. Cal responded instantly. His shoulders dropped, his head bobbed to the side, and his muscles softened.

“No,” Cal said. “I’ll ace it.”

“Maybe you’re stressed because you’re having reoccurring nightmares.” She kissed his cheek.

Cal smirked. “You missed your calling as an analyst.” He let her dig into his neck and shoulders for a little while more. He’d been reluctant to discuss the dreams because of how strange they were—both in content and familiarity. “This dream feels like I’m living a memory,” he said to his wife. There, it was out.

That prospect brought Cat further out of her sleepy haze. “Cal, could it be you’re remembering something from before the accident? From your childhood?”

“I don’t think so. What I’m dreaming … it’s surreal. I’m in a stone building; there’s a fight; someone tells me to go through a door.”

“Who told you? Did you recognize a face? A landmark?”

“I was with a group. We were going on a trip. We had a talking horse…”

“A what?”

“It’s weird. At the end, there’s this intense grief, a pressure like a moose standing on my chest. Like somebody died.”

The thought of that pain made Cal tense up again. He squeezed the bridge of his nose hard and realized he needed an Advil.

“And then…,” Cat prodded.

“That’s when I usually wake up. This is the kind of stuff a fifteen-year-old boy dreams of,” he said, frustrated. “I just want a full night’s sleep. I am feeling stretched thin.”

They heard a shuffle in the hallway. The door to the bedroom creaked open.

“Hi Pa,” said their five-year-old daughter, Brianna, in a sleepy voice. She stood in the doorway in her flannel
Dora the Explorer
pajamas, clutching her Elmo doll in her hand. A testament to modern-day marketing.

“Bree, you should be in bed,” Cat said, a bit annoyed.

“I heard talking,” she offered as her excuse.

Catherine MacDonnell was the law in the MacDonnell home, which was the way Cal liked it in lieu of life in the outside world: long patrols, city politics, and administrative headaches. Her temper was legendary in the neighborhood when someone broke that order. Her hypnotic gunmetal-gray eyes and raven hued tresses—a gift from her Sioux grandmother—gave her a formidable presence, despite her small stature. She could turn whatever spot she stood on into the center of the universe when the mood suited her.

But, despite Cat’s protestation, Cal was happy to see Brianna. She was his anchor—his only known blood relative in the world, and he never lost his patience with her. “Don’t you have school in a few hours?” Cal said halfheartedly.

Bree looked at her father seriously and said, “It’s only kindergarten. All we do is color and play games. And then they make us take a nap so the teachers can relax.”

Cal laughed. Even Cat had to fight off a chuckle. “When did you get to be so smart?” Cal asked, holding his arms out. Bree jumped into her father’s massive arms, the safest place in her universe.

“Oh, don’t encourage her, Cal. We
all
need to go back to sleep,” she said looking at their daughter.

As if on cue, Maggie trotted in wondering who had called a family meeting at this hour and could she get a cookie out of it. The pit bull–lab mutt barked to announce her arrival, then jumped on the bed and proceeded to lick Bree like an ice cream cone.

“Brianna MacDonnell, get to bed this instant,” Cat said. “Maggie down!”

Cal knew better than to push his luck. He gave Bree a peck on the cheek and put her down with a pat on the butt. She left the room with Maggie in tow. Cat shook her hair, a bit flustered at the chaos. She studied her husband.

“You’ve got to see someone about this. You can’t keep going to work strung out on no sleep. It’s affecting all of us.”

“I know. I’ll make an appointment with one of the department shrinks.”

“Today?”

“Yes, right away,” Cal said, rolling his eyes. He lay back down on the bed facing the window, staring out at the winter sky.

Cat snuggled next to Cal and put her arm around him. She kissed him tenderly on the temple and then rested her head against his. “Don’t be mad,” she said. “That little girl needs her daddy to come home safe every day.”

“What about this little girl,” he said stroking her arm.

Cat snuggled closer and wrapped her leg around his. They stayed that way until they both fell asleep.

2

It was the silliest domestic dispute Cal and his partner, Erin Ramos, had ever been called on. The complainant was a seventy-three-year old recent émigré from El Salvador who accused her seventy-eight-year old husband of hiding her teeth because she refused to have sex. Perhaps the ambience of the South Bronx was not as conducive to romance as the Salvadoran countryside. A shouting match ensued, followed by the husband’s playfully spanking his wife on the rear end with a spatula. She responded with a rolling pin to his head. One of the neighbors called it in.

“Technically, he battered her first,” Erin noted.

Embarrassed by the sudden appearance of the law, the wife was on her third straight minute of explaining her story without coming up for air. Erin tried to keep up for Cal’s sake.

“She says she’s in America now,” Erin translated. “And doesn’t have to perform ‘wifely’ duties when she has a headache. There was an article in the Spanish
Cosmo
at the manicure shop.”

Neighbors spilled into the hallway to witness the commotion.

“Everyone back in their apartment,
por favor
!” Cal said. He squeezed the bridge of his nose, trying to drive the fatigue from his mind. “I don’t have the energy for this tonight. What’s the husband say?”

The husband, holding an ice pack on his little bald head, stood about four-foot-nine in slippers. His green pajamas and large thick eyeglasses gave him a tortoise-like countenance.

“He’s been getting—
‘it’
—daily since they were married almost fifty years ago,” Erin said. “They have fourteen children. All of a sudden, she started putting him off. And you think
you
have no energy?”

A trickle of blood slid down the side of the man’s age-mottled head. The wife, alarmed, used her dishrag to stop the bleeding and led her husband to an armchair in the living room. At first, he sat stone-faced with wounded pride, but soon patted her arm. She kissed his cheeks even as tears began rolling down her own.

“We’re not arresting him,” Cal said.

“But…”

“Two hours in Central Booking over
this
? Look at them. They adore each other. She probably got razzed at the manicure shop for being old-fashioned. My own wife used to read
Cosmo
—I’m aware of the consequences. If we arrest him, she’s going to feel awful.”

“Well, short of booking them separate vacations, what do we do?”

“She
is
seventy-three. We should probably cool him down a bit.” Cal pulled out his ticket book and wrote, “conjugal engagements, three times per week, only.” He tore out the ticket and showed it to Erin.

“Translate this and inform them it’s an official warrant. They can have sex three times a week.”

“This isn’t legal,” Erin said.

“
They
don’t know that.”

“But…”

“Erin, who’s going to know their business? If she’s in the mood, they’ll think they’re being naughty. If she’s not, he’ll be too worried about what the next cop will write up to push it.” Cal gave his partner a big smile. “For God’s sake, Erin, the woman can’t chew.”

Erin laughed. “Okay, but Lord help us if she turns frigid and he whips out your ‘warrant’ to the next unit that answers the call.”

The old woman gave some rosary beads to Erin and a tin of butter cookies to Cal before shutting the door. Cal called it in to Central, and they left.

Rain pattered the roof of their cruiser as Cal and Erin resumed patrolling the South Bronx. The drumming water had a pacifying effect. No one knew better than Cal how the four-to-twelve shift could put a kink in a person’s biological clock. Add to that his insomnia and it was a recipe for bad judgment on a dangerous job. He’d promised Cat he’d see a department therapist, but had yet to make an appointment. As of 11:00
P.M.
, Cal was willing to give out slaps on the wrist until midnight so that he wouldn’t have to pull overtime booking suspects. He prayed the rain would keep people indoors and out of trouble. He was determined to hit his pillow before 1:00
A.M.