Robert Browne - The Paradise Prophecy

“Time to call it a night,” the tourist said softly, looking considerably more confident than he had when he first walked into the bar.

The biker threw his hands up. “Easy, buddy. We just came here for a drink. He started it.”

“And I’m finishing it. Grab your skank, get on your bike and get the hell out of here. Now.”

There wasn’t any room for negotiation in the tourist’s tone, and apparently the biker wasn’t as stupid as he looked. He glared at Batty, then grabbed hold of his girlfriend’s arm, pulling her away, and a moment later, their bike was roaring down the street.

Batty got up on his elbows, squinting at the tourist, who tucked his gun away and crouched next to him, pulling him upright. “You okay, Professor?”

So it hadn’t been his imagination. This guy knew who he was. “Still alive, more or less. Who the hell are you?”

“Just a friend.”

“Well, I appreciate the help, friend, but I could’ve handled the sonofabitch just fine on my own.”

“That’s a debate we’ll have to save for another time. We’re running late.”

Batty furrowed his brow at him. “Late for what?”

“You’ve got a plane to catch.”

Then the guy quickly brought a hand up, and to Batty’s surprise, something sharp and hot stung his neck.

He grabbed at his throat and fell back, but before he could say a word, the world tilted sideways and the tourist started to double and triple right there in front of his eyes as the moonlight suddenly grew very dim.

Then it disappeared altogether as Sebastian “Batty” LaLaurie fell down a deep, dark hole.

LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA

He watched the girl get off the bus at the Greyhound station, her doe eyes taking in the world around her with obvious disappointment.

It was not, he imagined, what she had expected to find. The city wasn’t as clean as it looked on network TV-cars choking the boule-wasn’t as clean as it looked on network TV-cars choking the boulevard, trash clogging the gutters, the smog not as thick as it once was, but still smelling faintly of dirt and spit and sulfur.

There were no digitally enhanced blue skies here. And the only palm trees left were now victim to a slow-killing rot.

A homeless woman was huddled on the sidewalk near the bus station exit and the girl gave her wide berth, clutching her knapsack as she moved, looking as if she were afraid the old woman might spring to her feet and block her passage like a troll at the gates of Purgatory.

But the old woman remained still, only her eyes moving as the girl hurried past and made her way up Cahuenga toward Hollywood Boulevard, where surely things would look much better.

This was, after all, the land of dreams. Home to the stars.

But he knew that things would not look better. And as he followed the girl, staying a discreet distance behind her, he could see the change in the way she carried herself as her disappointment deepened. The footsteps slowed, the shoulders slumped, the head swiveled back and forth, hoping to find something-anything-that looked even remotely inviting.

The chicken hut on the corner? The check-cashing store? The urgent care clinic with iron bars on its front window? The tattoo parlor?

There was nothing. And he knew she was suddenly terrified, wondering if she’d made a mistake.

In this day and age she should have known better. But fifteen-year-old girls are not prone to critical thinking, especially when they want desperately to get away from home.

Some things just never change.

He had been watching her for many days now. Had followed her all the way from Lawton, Arizona. She’d gone missing from her home, but he’d found her at the bus depot there, counting the money she’d kept hidden in her dresser drawer, holding it close to her budding chest, eyes darting, hoping no one was paying much attention to her.

But he was.

And all the time he had watched her, from Arizona to California, he had been second-guessing himself, wondering if his instincts were wrong.

They’d certainly been wrong before. Many times, in fact.

There was the exchange student in eastern France. The painter in Hammersmith. The humanitarian in Macedonia. The missionary in northern Thailand . . .

He had searched the globe, year after year, and thought he’d heard her song. But what he’d really heard was his own wishful thinking. Nothing more. And he had begun to wonder if it was all a lie. A cruel deception, perpetrated by a father who no longer cared.

But this one was different.

This one gave him hope.

The kind of hope he had almost forgotten about. The kind of hope he’d felt in the long ago days, when he’d first made the decision to stop the killing, the debauchery, the self-serving narcissism that drove so many of his kind.

Maybe he was crazy, but it seemed that the circumstances were finally right for once. The fourth moon would soon be here, and he could hear the girl’s soul calling out to him, so much stronger than any of the others.

And he knew that she was different. Special.

A gift from an absentee father.

His message to God.

After wandering up Hollywood Boulevard for several long blocks, her knapsack starting to weigh her down, the girl turned into a small coffeehouse on the corner of Gower, the kind of place that looked as if its prices might be right for her miniscule budget.

He waited as she bought a muffin and a cup of tea. She took a seat near the window, looking back the way she came with small-town eyes, full of trepidation and confusion, clouded faintly by tears. He knew it was really sinking in now, and before long the panic would start, and she’d be ripe for the taking by the first “kind soul” who came along.

She had been much safer back in Lawton. Despite her repugnant stepfather, the world around her had been smaller there, more easily controlled. But try to convince a teenager she’s better off where she is and see how far that gets you. Especially when the aforementioned stepfather starts getting friendly and making comments about her changing body. Doing it while Mom is conveniently at work.

And Mom was always at work.

Stepping into the coffeehouse, he moved toward a table in back, careful not to make direct eye contact with her.

Too early for that. He didn’t want to scare her away.

The girl gave him only a cursory glance as he entered-which was just fine with him. She kept her gaze on the street, sipping her tea, nervously nibbling her muffin, probably wondering if she had enough money to find a place to sleep tonight and still have any left over. There was a free shelter less than a block down Gower, but he doubted she knew about it. The only planning she’d done before getting on that bus was to buy a ticket.

And because he wasn’t quite ready to make contact with her, he knew he’d have to find a way to guide her there.

Which, of course, was the difficult part.

One thing he had learned in all these years of “sobriety,” as he called it, was that people had minds of their own, and getting them to do what he’d like them to do without resorting to treachery-and thereby breaking his code-took a lot of ingenuity. But he also found that if you presented them with the opportunity to make the right decision, they often did.

But as he well knew, it wasn’t the decision itself that mattered. It was the intent behind it that counted.

Pulling the plug on a dying loved one because you want to inherit his estate is vastly different from pulling that plug because you want to end his suffering. You’re either a murderer or a humanitarian, but you can’t be both.