Chapter Ten
Topside
3:04 A.M.
The night melted, blurred, reformed, and opened up, birthing forth a man.
Detective John Waterson startled so violently, his cigarette leapt from between his fingers and hit the floorboard of his Chevy in a burst of orange sparks. “Jesus Christ!” He banged his foot around to stamp out the glowing butt while his heart tried to run away from his chest.
A pair of pale hands appeared on the doorframe of the open driver’s side window, moonlight glinting off stark white fingernails.
Breathing in short, croaky gulps, John glared at the hands. Considering the current state of his health, he didn’t have many near-seizures like this left in him. And how the hell had this prick snuck up on him? Off the force only six months, and he was already allowing himself to be surprised. Pathetic. Or maybe it was because the guy was practically invisible dressed all in black: homespun tweed pants, scuffed boots, and a wool trench coat hanging past his knees. He looked like a dock worker.
“Justice Seeker?” the owner of the hands inquired, speaking with a European accent. A Romanian accent, in all likelihood, since it’s where he came from.
“Yeah. Who else?” John snarked. Who else would be waiting at the top of Soledad Mountain at the ungodly hour of three in the morning, if not the person this guy had arranged to meet? “Which makes you MoonRiderOne.” John yanked out a handkerchief—something he never left home without—and mopped his face. Even that small amount of cigarette-stomping had sweat flooding off his forehead and down his cheeks. But then these days, the mere act of breathing made him sweat.
“Correct.” The man bent lower to peer into the car. He had a face like Pee Wee Herman’s, white flesh—extra-white where a scar ran along his left jawline—with unnaturally red lips and narrow features. His hair was short, although long enough on top for his bangs to form an up-and-over swoop, like a hairdryer-exaggerated cowlick. The swoop was gray-silver while the rest of the hair was black. “You said you have a way for me to draw out Devid Nichita?”
Getting right down to business, was he? Fine by me. John didn’t have the energy to waste on pleasantries, either. “First we have to talk about how my own justice fits into this.” Or rather, revenge…a revenge John never would’ve been able to achieve had MoonRiderOne not dropped fortuitously into his life.
“Nichita travels in the same circles as a guy who has black hair, black eyes, and black teeth tattoos on at least one of his forearms.” John had never seen the two men together, but it took only a little deductive reasoning to conclude that they both worked security for the same top-secret research institute. “My beef is with this second man.” Because he was the one who’d kidnapped Toni Parthen, the only woman John had ever loved.
Before Toni was ripped from her life—and John’s—the two of them had been on the road to dating, happiness, and then, surely, marriage and children. Teeth-Tattooed Asshole—John’s not-so-affectionate nickname for the life-ruiner—had to pay for screwing this up.
“If you draw out Nichita,” John went on, “there’s a good chance this other guy will follow.”
“And how do I draw out these men?” Back to the original question, and MoonRiderOne sounded a little impatient re-asking it.
John dug a piece of paper out of his breast pocket. “This is the email address a group of criminals used a few years ago to arrange a trade-off for some women. One gang was supposed to deliver the women to another gang at a warehouse, but Nichita and his security team showed up and saved the women. It’s probably safe to assume Nichita’s people monitor this email address.”
How John acquired the email was simple enough. He and his former partner, Pablo Ramirez, investigated the warehouse in response to a complaint of “shots fired.” A laptop was found there, and the SDPD’s IT guy hacked into it, discovering the email exchange. Since then, the email had gone dark, so it was probably a dead end, like John had told Dr. Sevilli. But it was all he had.
“If you use this email address to write a bogus message,” John explained, “saying that you want to turn over some abducted women or something similar, then there’s a good chance Nichita will show.” Good chance might be stretching it, but whatever. “You’ll be able to set a trap wherever you say the exchange will take place.”
“Very well.” MoonRiderOne held out his hand for the paper.
For some reason, John didn’t give it to him right away. He flipped the paper through his fingers. “When will you set your plan in motion?”
“A couple of weeks, perhaps. It will take time to organize. I’ll email you.”
They went silent.
Crickets sang out a string of chirps, and if John strained his ears, he could hear the low hum of traffic on the faraway Interstate 5 freeway.
MoonRiderOne dropped his hand. “Was there something else?”
John turned to stare out the front windshield of his car. Here at the top of Soledad Mountain, eight hundred twenty-three feet up, he had an airplane’s view of the town of La Jolla below. City lights looked like sparkling jewels tossed across a long stretch of black cloth, garnet, agate, and citrine for the stoplights, diamonds for the streetlamps.
It was quite a vista.
“What are you going to do to bring down justice on my man?” John asked.
“Anything you wish.”
Anything. John shifted his gaze down to the hand he had resting on the steering wheel. Skeletal bone was covered only by a thin parchment of skin. His belly curled in on itself, trying to cower behind his liver. How bad did it suck that he was too weak to seek vengeance himself? How much more did it suck that one of SDPD’s former finest was lowering himself to do business with a bad guy. And John had no doubts that MoonRiderOne was bad.
The reason I seek Devid Nichita is a highly personal matter to me meant that MoonRiderOne was going to seriously fuck Nichita’s shit up.
Which further meant that John should have reached back into his noble core and stopped this before it went any farther. Hadn’t he made a career out of incarcerating men exactly like MoonRiderOne? Exactly. So in response to the anything you wish statement, John should have answered with, never mind, I wanna do a take-back.
But strange things happened to a man who’d been stewing too long in regret and resentment. Amazing, too, what a man found himself capable of doing when he was on the verge of death.
And John was mere days away from shuffling off this world for the next.
Was it really so wrong that he wanted his last act on earth to be retribution for Toni? And damn well for himself too?
John turned back to MoonRiderOne. The twenty-nine-foot Mount Soledad Cross rose up tall behind him, making it look like he belonged crucified on it. “Whatever you do to Nichita,” John said, “do it to my guy.”
MoonRiderOne arched a single brow high.
John handed him the piece of paper with the email on it.