First Grave On The Right Part 15

"I fell."

"No s.h.i.+t."

"Someone hit me."

"Again? I didn't realize it was National Kill Charley Davidson Week."

"Do we get a vacation day with that?" Garrett asked. Uncle Bob must have flashed him his famous glower because Garrett jumped up and said, "Right. I'm on it." He took off, supposedly in search of the a.s.sailant.

The sirens were getting closer, and I heard men shuffling about below me.

"Is anything broken?" Uncle Bob's voice had softened.

"My eyelids, I think. I can't open them."

I heard a soft chuckle. "If it were anyone else, I'd say eyelids can't be broken. But considering the source..."

A weak grin spread across my face. "So I'm, like, special?"

He snorted as he pressed gingerly here and there, testing for broken bones and the like. "Special wouldn't even begin to cover it, my dear."

Miracles happen. I figured I was living proof. To walk away-well, to limp away with lots of help-from a fall like that without a single broken bone was nothing short of miraculous. With a capital M.

"We really should get some X-rays," the EMT said to Uncle Bob as I lounged on the stretcher.

Ambulances were cool. "You just want to fondle my extraneous body parts," I said to the EMT as I picked up a silver gadget that looked disturbingly like an alien orifice probe, broke it, then promptly put it back, hoping it wouldn't leave someone's life hanging in the balance because the EMT couldn't alien-probe his orifices.

EMT Guy chuckled and checked my blood pressure for the gazillionth time.

"Really, Uncle Bob, I'm fine. Who owns this warehouse?"

Uncle Bob closed his phone and looked at me through the open doors of the ambulance. "Well, if you're hoping for a neon sign above his head that flashes Bad Guy, you're going to be very disappointed."

"Don't tell me. The guy's a canonized saint?"

"Close. His name is Father Federico Diaz."

Wow. Why would a Catholic priest own a warehouse in the middle of nowhere? Why would a Catholic priest own a warehouse, period? This case was getting more bizarre by the minute.

"No one," Garrett said, jogging up to us. "I don't understand it. If there were two guys inside and one on the roof, where'd they go?"

"The van was the only vehicle on the premises. They had to leave on foot," Uncle Bob said, scanning the area with a quizzical look on his face.

"Or not leave at all," I added. "Where are the boxes?"

They both turned around and surveyed the empty warehouse.

"What boxes?" Uncle Bob asked.

"Exactly." I eased off the stretcher, picked up and handed the broken probe to the EMT, who reattached the alien part and put it back with a grin, then stepped to the ground with far more wincing than was socially acceptable.

"I have three words for you," EMT Guy said. "Possible internal bleeding."

I turned back to him. "Don't you think if I was bleeding internally, I'd know somewhere deep inside? Like, internally?"

"One X-ray," he bargained. When I winced again, he added, "Maybe two."

Uncle Bob wrapped a beefy arm around me. I was a nanosecond away from arguing with EMT Guy when he said, "Charley, we have men all over the place. I promise we'll look for your missing boxes."

"But-"

"You're going to the hospital if I have to handcuff you to that stretcher," Garrett said, stepping in front of me as if to block my only escape route.

With an annoyed sigh, I folded my arms and glared at him. "Stop trying to get me into your handcuffs. I want to be there when you talk to Father Federico," I said to Uncle Bob, ignoring Garrett's surprised expression. Would he never learn?

"Deal," Uncle Bob agreed before I could change my mind. "I'll call you tomorrow with a time."

"You'll need a ride home from the hospital," Garrett reminded me.

"You just want to try out those handcuffs. I'll call Cookie. Go figure out where those boxes went."

"Do you want to look at mug shots tomorrow, as well?" Uncle Bob asked. "Can you ID the guy who hit you?"

"Well..." My nose scrunched as I considered the possibility of positively identifying my a.s.sailant based on the knuckle sandwich he gave me. "I got an almost clear peripheral look at the guy's left fist. I might could recognize his pinkie."

For some bizarre reason that baffled the heck out of me, Cookie seemed none too happy about being called out at one in the morning to extract me from the hospital.

"What did you do now?" she asked, walking into the examining room. Still in her pajama bottoms with a ma.s.sive robelike sweater thrown over a tee, she looked a tad postapocalyptic. And she had a wicked case of bedhead. It was funny.

I eased off the examining table, moving as if there were a bomb in the room set to go off with a motion-detecting sensor. She rushed to my side to help. Had there actually been a bomb set to go off with a motion-detecting sensor, we'd have been blown to bits.

"Why are you a.s.suming it was my fault?" I asked when my feet were firmly planted.

Her lips thinned into a grim reprimand. "Do you have any idea what it's like to get a call from the hospital in the middle of the night? I jump into panic mode. I can barely put two words together."

"I'm sorry." After limping to my jacket, I shrugged into it, amazed at how much effort it took not to pa.s.s out. "You probably thought something happened to Amber."

"Are you kidding? Amber's an angel compared to you. Having you around makes me appreciate her p.u.b.escent, hormone-induced ways. Honestly, I don't know how your stepmother did it."

A lightbulb went off in my head when she said that. Not a particularly bright one-maybe a 12-watter-but it did make me rea.s.sess my stepmother's lack of interest in my well-being. Perhaps our rocky relations.h.i.+p was partially my fault.

Not.

Cookie lectured me all the way home. Thankfully, I'd had the ambulance take me to Pres, so it was a short drive. Her concern was sweet and, at the same time, oddly annoying. My concern, however, was leaning toward homicidal. Hard as I tried, I couldn't help but get a little hot under my seven-dollar thrift-store Gucci collar. Someone hit me. Someone tried to kill me. Had he succeeded, I could have died.

Then, as if my perpetual state of suns.h.i.+ne couldn't allow such a negative thought to infect my mind-I'm pretty sure I was a flower child in a past life-I just had to see the cup half full. Hopefully of Jack Daniel's. I'd learned something tonight, besides the legitimacy of the sudden-stop thing. I'd learned that somehow, in some bizarre coincidence of fate, Reyes and the Big Bad were connected. But how? Reyes couldn't have been more than three when I was born. How did Bad know he would call me Dutch fifteen years later?

I couldn't have been imagining it. I remembered it so clearly. Dutch. Whispery and soft, deep and mesmerizing. Rather like Reyes himself. And the similarities didn't stop there. My mind started registering all kinds of likenesses between the two. The heat and energy that radiated off them both. The way they moved-a blur-very unlike the departed. The paralyzing power of their touches, their stares. The way my knees almost gave beneath my weight with the appearance of either one.

Maybe I was losing it. Either that or Reyes and Bad were the same kind of being. But how was that even possible? I needed a second opinion. As Cookie pulled her Taurus into the parking lot, I said, "I saw him again."

She braked short and looked at me.

"When I fell through the skylight," I added.

"Reyes?" she asked in disbelief.

"No. I don't know." Fatigue seeped into my voice. "I'm beginning to wonder. I'm beginning to wonder about a lot of things."

She nodded her head in understanding, eased up to the curb, and turned off the engine. "I've been doing some research. It's late, but I have a feeling you won't be able to sleep until some of your questions are answered."

After Cookie more or less carried me into my apartment, she went to check on Amber. I shouted out a hey to Mr. Wong then put on a pot of coffee in my brand-new coffeepot that, according to the card and bow attached, had been provided by the good people at AAA Electric for the investigation I did on the missing switchgears-whatever the heck a switchgear was and why ever the heck anyone would steal one. It was red. The coffeepot, not the switchgear. I had no idea what color switchgears were, as I'd discovered the thief long before it came to that. Still, I doubted they were red.

I poured a small gla.s.s of milk and downed it so I could take four ibuprofen at once without tearing up the lining of my stomach. I'd refused the prescription painkillers the doctor in the ER had offered. Scripts and I didn't generally get along. But the soreness was already infiltrating my muscles, stiffening them until I thought they would break with each move I made. That fall may not have done any permanent damage, but the temporary c.r.a.p was going to suck. I could barely breathe.

Still, even a slight ability to breathe was better than a nonexistent one.

Between visiting Mark Weir in jail, chasing Rocket around the asylum, breaking into the law offices, and falling through the skylight at the warehouse, I had yet to get my hands on a computer long enough to search the prison database for more information on Reyes. As I eased into the chair at my computer, Cookie strode in with an armful of notes and printouts. Knowing her, she'd already researched Reyes's life down to his shoe size and blood type. I logged on to the New Mexico Department of Corrections Web site while she poured us some coffee. Ten seconds later, thanks to fiber optics, Reyes's mug shot shone brightly on the screen.

"My G.o.d," Cookie said from behind me, apparently experiencing the same visceral reaction to Reyes that I did every time I looked at him.

She set a cup beside me.

"Thank you," I said, "and I'm sorry I had to call you out in the middle of the night."

She pulled up a chair, sat down, and put a hand over mine. "Charley, do you honestly think it bothers me one iota that you called me?"

Was that a trick question? "Well, yes, with a sprinkle of duh on top. Who wouldn't be upset?"

"I wouldn't," she said, taken aback, as if I'd hurt her feelings for even suggesting such a thing. "I would have been furious had you not called me. I know you're special and you have an extraordinary gift that I'll never fully understand, but you're still human, and you're still my best friend." Her face transformed into a map of worry lines. "I wasn't upset that you called me. I was upset because you think you're indestructible. You're not." She paused to let her gaze bore into mine, to drive her point home. It was sweet. "And because of this false sense of security, you get yourself into the most ... bizarre situations."

"Bizarre?" I asked, pretending to be offended.

"Three words. Sewage plant disaster."

"That totally wasn't my fault," I argued, balking at the very idea of it. As if.

She pursed her lips and waited for me to come to my senses.

"Okay, it was my fault." She knew me too well. "But only a little. And those rats had it coming. So, what did you find out?" I asked, looking back at Reyes's picture.

Cookie thumbed through the printouts and slid one out. "Are you ready for this?"

"As long it doesn't contain nude pictures of elderly women, I'm good." I kept my eyes locked on to Reyes's, fierce and intense as they were.

She handed me the printout. "Murder."

"No," I whispered, as if the wind had been forced out of my lungs. It was a news article dated ten years earlier. No, no, no, no, no. Anything but murder. Or rape. Or kidnapping. Or armed robbery. Or indecent exposure, 'cause that's just creepy. I scanned the article with a reluctant eye, like when you pa.s.s by an accident and can't help but look.

ALBUQUERQUE MAN FOUND GUILTY.

Short. To the point.

A man with a past more mysterious than the circ.u.mstances surrounding his father's death was found guilty Monday after three days of jury deliberation. The prosecution faced several unusual problems during the trial, such as the fact that Reyes Alexander Farrow, 20, doesn't exist.

Reyes Alexander Farrow. I stopped a moment, tried to catch my breath, to slow my pulse. Even Reyes's name gave me heart palpitations. And he didn't exist? Heck, I could have told them that.

"Farrow has no birth certificate," the prosecution stated after the two-week trial ended. "He has no medical records, no social security number, no school records beyond a three-month stint at Yucca High. On paper, this man is a ghost."

A ghost. As Morpheus would say, fate is not without a sense of irony.

Farrow's father, Earl Walker, was found dead in his car after a group of hikers discovered it at the bottom of a canyon five miles east of Albuquerque. Though his body had been burned beyond recognition, the autopsy concluded that he'd died from blunt force trauma to the head. Several witnesses saw Farrow fighting with his father the day before Walker was reported missing by his fiancee.

"Our hands were tied," Stan Eichmann, the lead defense attorney for Farrow, stated after the verdict was handed down. "There is much more to this case than meets the eye. I guess we'll never know how it could have turned out."

Eichmann's statement was only one of dozens of mysteries surrounding this case. For example, Walker has no social security number either and has never filed a single tax return.

"He had nothing that would establish him as a law-abiding citizen," Eichmann said. "He seemed to be living under several aliases. It took weeks to track down what we believe was his real name."

"This is actually more common than you might think," the prosecution stated. "But it's a choice career criminals make as adults. Farrow, on the other hand, has never existed. According to our records, he was never born, and DNA results conclude that Walker was not his biological father. Based on what we know about him, if I had to guess, I'd say Reyes Farrow was quite possibly abducted as a child."

My breath caught in my chest. Could he really have been abducted?

I quickly scanned the rest of the article.

Farrow never took the stand in his own defense, leaving jurors hard-pressed to see past the circ.u.mstantial evidence despite the defense's success at debunking several key theories pertinent to the prosecution's strategy.

The article went on to talk about Walker's fiancee, Sarah Hadley. She'd testified that Reyes had threatened Walker on several occasions-right-and that they were both in fear for their lives. Yet another witness, an a.s.sociate of Ms. Hadley's, refuted the statement, swearing under oath that Walker's fiancee was secretly in love with Farrow and would have left Walker in a heartbeat to be with him. The witness stated that if Ms. Hadley was afraid of anyone, it was of Walker himself.

"This is a case about a broken heart and a broken mind," Eichmann told the jury minutes before they broke for deliberation. "Walker's criminal record alone casts numerous doubts as to the legitimacy of anything even remotely resembling a motive by his only child."

His only child? But Reyes had a sister.

"The circ.u.mstances surrounding his death are about as transparent as I am," Eichmann continued.

Farrow, who had been taking night cla.s.ses with a stolen social security number before his arrest, ironically, toward a law degree, stood impa.s.sively, his head bowed slightly, as the verdict was read.

My heart sank in my chest with the image of Reyes standing in a courtroom, waiting for his peers to judge him, to find him guilty or innocent. I wondered what he felt, how he coped with their decision.

"The mystery that is Reyes Farrow deepens by the minute," I said. Walker's fiancee was, for lack of a better phrase, full of s.h.i.+t. Abused children rarely attack their abusers, much less torment them. And women were never secretly in love with someone who they believed might kill them at any moment.

"But murder, Charley."