James Grippando - Afraid of the Dark

“Damn it,” said Vince.

Chuck turned and saw his friend sitting on a tomb and rubbing his shin. Vince’s guide dog had a sorry look on his face.

“What happened?” asked Chuck.

“Either I tripped over a tomb or a dead guy jumped out and kicked me in the shin. What do you think happened?”

Chuck gave him a minute, but he didn’t dare help him up. He knew how much Vince hated that.

“Sorry,” Vince said, rising. “I didn’t mean to snap at you like a royal smart-ass. Especially here. Today of all days.”

“Forget it,” said Chuck. He turned and continued toward the north end of the cemetery. Sam followed, and Vince was right behind his guide dog.

McKenna was buried beneath two large oak trees in one of the oldest sections of the cemetery. Hers was among relatively few tombs from the twenty-first century. The cemetery had been essentially full for years. Space came available only as the oldest tombs, holding bodies unknown, disintegrated. But it wasn’t just the new tombs that were decorated with flowers. Even Mrs. Blackshear, “Asleep in Jesus” since 1927, had a vase filled with plastic carnations. It was a touching gesture, even if by a stranger, but it saddened Chuck to wonder who might visit McKenna in eighty, ninety, or a hundred years.

And then he froze: A hundred yards ahead, between two oak trees, someone was at McKenna’s grave.

“What’s wrong?” asked Vince, sensing his vibe.

“Wait here,” said Chuck.

He started toward the grave, moving quickly between the tombs-much faster than he could have with Vince following behind him. The going was getting tougher, however, as he moved into the oldest part of the cemetery. Tombs were so crowded together that he had to put one foot directly in front of the other to walk between them. He was about fifty yards away when he noticed that it was a woman at McKenna’s grave. She was on her knees, clearing away weeds around the marker. But she wasn’t dressed like a maintenance worker. Her head was covered by a large scarf, hijab style.

Chuck picked up the pace until he was almost at a jog, but with his eyes riveted on the woman who was wearing the hijab scarf, he tripped and knocked over a porcelain vase. It crashed into pieces against the concrete base of a tomb.

The woman at McKenna’s grave looked up. Just thirty yards separated them, and Chuck’s gaze cut like a laser over the ragged rows of tombs. The scarf covered her hair, but she wore no veil or sunglasses. She stared back at him for a moment-and then she sprang to her feet and ran.

“Stop!” Chuck shouted. He started after her, but the tight spaces between tombs made it impossible to gather speed. The north end of the cemetery had no fence, and the woman was getting away.

“Wait!” Chuck shouted, but the gap between them was widening. Meaning no disrespect to the dead, Chuck hopped up on a tomb and ran at full speed, leaping from one to the next the way superheroes leaped from building to building. The woman was doing the same, but she was much lighter on her feet. Chuck was losing ground.

Come on, Mays, faster!

He picked up the pace, but the older crypts were spaced so irregularly that it was hard to hit his stride. He hopped from a white tomb to a silver one, and then to a crumbling marker for a pioneer unknown. He was keeping one eye on the woman, who was pulling away, when he caught sight of trouble. Vandals had destroyed the next tomb in his path. The lid was a pile of rocks, and the empty tomb lay open. Chuck reached for another gear and soared right over the battered tomb. He landed hard-all 240 pounds of him-on the next tomb over. It was a century old, however, and it couldn’t support his weight. Chuck crashed through the lid like a human cannonball. He was almost up to his knees in a smashed tomb, but the pain made the horror of it almost irrelevant.

“My leg!”

Chuck pulled himself out, rolled onto the adjacent tomb, and lay on his back. Surely the woman in the hijab scarf was long gone, and even if she weren’t, giving chase was out of the question. His only hope was that he hadn’t destroyed his ankle. He was staring up at the sky, trying to bring the pain under control, when he heard Vince approaching with his guide dog.

“I heard you yelling at someone,” said Vince, “and then a crash. What happened?”

Chuck groaned, then fed Vince his own line: “Either I tripped over a tomb or a dead guy jumped out and kicked me in the shin.”

“I’m serious,” said Vince. “Were you chasing after someone?”

Chuck was winded from the chase and needed to catch his breath. He listened for a car engine or other sound of the woman’s getaway, but the streets around the cemetery were quiet, and he was still trying to understand what had just happened.

“You’re going to think I’m crazy,” said Chuck.

“I already think you’re crazy.”

Chuck would have laughed under any other circumstances. Instead, he sat up, scratched his head in disbelief, and said, “I think I just saw Shada.”

Andie spent Sunday morning coloring her hair. Luckily, raven black looked best all one shade, no highlights, so it was easy enough to do it herself, given the time constraints. Losing the blond was for Jack, but she also hoped her boss would like it. Or more precisely, Lisa Horne’s boss. Danilo Bahena was the principal reason that the FBI had arranged for Andie’s crash course in male fetishes at Capital Pleasures. Andie caught up with Bahena at a private heliport in northern Virginia. Bahena took her inside the executive waiting room, away from the noise of the company’s Agusta AW-139, where they could talk in private.

“Black is more… authoritative,” Andie said. “A good thing, don’t you agree?”

Bahena stepped closer for a better look. As usual, his expression was about as easy to read as tea leaves in a windstorm.

Bahena’s official title was vice president of training and recruitment for Vortex Inc., and Andie-Lisa-was a trainee on the cusp of what Vortex referred to as “activation.” Vortex was a privately held company, a subsidiary of a foreign corporation of obscure ownership, which made it impossible to know what the real business of Vortex was and who was actually running it. Bahena was equally enigmatic. He claimed to be from Los Angeles, California, but Andie and the FBI knew better. His closer ties were to Angeles, Pampanga, in the Philippines-a hotspot for human trafficking and sex trade. The skinny on Bahena was that, before he’d moved to Pentagon City and become such a friend to the U.S. government, the Japanese Yakuza and Chinese Triad had paid him a small fortune to feed their insatiable appetite for young prostitutes. He was built more like a wrestler than a businessman, and Andie could easily have envisioned him standing up to any element of organized crime. He was also a man of few words, which made him a tough study.

“I like it,” he said finally.

“I thought you would,” said Andie.

Bahena went to the coffee machine and poured himself a cup. He didn’t offer Andie anything.

“Now for the bad news,” said Andie. “I need a week off. Family emergency.”

“No,” he said.

“Sorry, maybe you didn’t hear. It’s an emergency.”

“I heard you fine. I said no.”

Andie disliked Bahena more than anyone she’d ever worked for-which was saying something, since in actuality she didn’t even work for him. “Look, I wouldn’t ask, but it’s my mother. She needs-”

“I don’t give a shit about your mother. We’ve got too much invested in you, and we’re on a strict timetable.”

“I’m only asking for a week.”

“I said strict. If your mother’s sick, hire a home health-care nurse.”