John Miller - Death Draws Five

“John?” Angel asked, staring at a worried-looking figure standing near the doorway to one of the bedrooms.

He shook his head. “No. It’s me.”

“Creighton,” Ray said.

“My name’s not Creighton. It’s Strauss. Jerry Strauss. I just wanted you to know that.”

Ray nodded.

“John’s in the bathroom, with Fortunato,” Jerry said.

“They’ve been in there a long time,” Mushroom Daddy said.

“What’s going on?” Ray asked.

A little old black man standing next to a big young black man armed with an automatic weapon said, “He’s trying to heal him.”

Ray shook his head. Time enough later to sort out who was who. “Well—has someone checked on them lately?”

No one said anything.

“Someone should,” Ray said.

Still no one said anything. He looked at Angel, who nodded. He went quietly through the bedroom, Angel at his side. He listened at the closed bathroom door, but heard nothing.

“Should I open it?” he asked quietly.

Angel nodded again.

He hesitated, took her hand, then quickly opened the door. Fortunato was lying on the bathroom floor, his son in his arms. As they watched, John Fortune’s golden aura flickered and went out. Ray and Angel stared at each other for a moment, then rushed into the bathroom, vaguely aware of the crowd that had gathered at the door behind them

Ray gently lifted Fortunato off his son and felt his wrist. He looked at the Angel, then at the others crowded around the bathroom door. “There’s no pulse,” Ray said flatly, as if he could hardly believe it himself. “Fortunato’s dead.”

“The boy?” Angel asked in a shaky voice.

“He’s all right,” Fortunato said. He lifted his head and opened his eyes and gripped Ray’s arm hard. It was the only thing that prevented the stunned ace from dropping him. “He’s all right. Tell Peregrine not to worry. He’ll just be a normal boy now. Tell her I took the virus... away...”

“God,” Ray said. “My God. You have no pulse. You’re dead.”

Fortunato smiled. “That’s right,” he said, and he kept smiling as his body slumped in Ray’s arms.

John Fortune opened his eyes, looked around the room, looked at everybody crowding around the doorway, looked at Fortunato’s limp body in Ray’s arms. He asked in a quiet voice, “What happened?”

The Angel went to him and put her arms around him. She said nothing, but held him as he cried, until he stopped shaking.

The Feds arrived on the scene, as usual, half an hour too late. Agents from half a dozen bureaus wandered about the lobby of the Angels’ Bower in a daze, watching as EMTs helped the last of the wounded civilians.

Ray and the Angel sat in the lobby’s wreckage with John Fortune. The Angel held the boy’s hand while he stared numbly into space. Jerry Strauss, who wore his real face, Sascha, back from his fruitless trip to the airport, and Mushroom Daddy stood around them. Barnett was up in his penthouse, praying and refusing to come down. The Witness was still unconscious in the hallway. Magda was still frozen in Fortunato’s suite. Ray figured it would be better to leave them up there for now. Couple less thing to worry about.

“Man,” Ray said. “I don’t even want to think about trying to explain all this.” He looked at the old black man who had just joined them, and the young big black man at his side. “Like where in the Hell you fit into it.”

“Us?” John Nighthawk said. “We were never here.” He and the big guy strolled away.

Jerry looked at Ray expectantly.

“Go ahead, take off,” Ray told him. “I’ll save a ton of the paperwork for you.”

“Thanks a lot,” Jerry said sourly, turning to go.

“And Jerry—” Ray added.

“Yeah?”

“It was fun.”

Jerry paused. “It was. In an odd sort of hallucinogenic kind of way. Come on,” he added to Sascha and Mushroom Daddy.

“I wonder if I can find another van,” Daddy said wistfully. “Hey! We could drive back together!”

Digger Downs came by, his tape recorder in his hand. “Hey, guys,” he said.

Ray looked at him unenthusiastically. He still hadn’t forgiven Downs for once dripping blood on his fighting suit, sixteen years ago. “What do you want?” Ray asked.

“The story,” Digger said. “What happened between John Fortune and his father during those last moments?”

“Can’t you leave the kid alone?” Ray asked.

“No,” John Fortune said quietly. “I’ll tell him. I’ll tell him about the most powerful ace in the world, and the final gift he gave me.”

The Angel nodded. “Your father would want the story to come from you.”

Downs had his tape-recorder out and was listening with a wide grin—Visions of a Pulitzer probably dancing in his head, Ray thought—as Billy Ray and the Angel strolled away.

“Well,” Ray said, gesturing at the devastated lobby and the squads of cops and federal agents wandering around it in a daze, “alone at last. Got any plans for this evening?”

The Angel shook her head. “Do you?”

“I was thinking of a good meal, a hot shower, a romp in the sack, and then about twenty hours of sleep. How’s that sound?”

“Billy—” She stopped, started again. “I’ve got a lot of thinking to do.”

“We can always find some time for that. I guess.”

“Do you really believe that you and I can make it?”

Ray shrugged. “I don’t know. I believe we’d be crazy not to try, though. Besides, I could drink a case of you. Whatever that means.”

“You remember our song!”

“Remember it? Hell, I’ve never even heard it.”

The Angel smiled and put her head on his shoulder as they stepped through the debris littering the lobby floor.

“By the way,” Ray said. “You look bitching in red.”

Cardinal Romulus Contarini sat alone in Nighthawk’s suite. He jumped when Nighthawk opened the door and came in on silent feet.

“Well?” he asked.

Nighthawk sighed. “Well, you were wrong, as usual.”

“Wrong?” Contarini said angrily. “I was not wrong! I am righteous in my faith and in my wrath! We will begin again,” he said, a cunning look in his eyes. “The diabolists cannot match the might of Mother Church—”

“But you were right about one thing,” Nighthawk said thoughtfully as he approached the Cardinal. “There is a false prophet in this story.” He removed the glove from his left hand. “It was you,” he said, reaching for the cowering churchman.

He had barely said Hello, when suddenly it was time to say goodbye. But life, and death, are like that, Fortunato thought. He remembered the last great Zen lesson.

Enlightenment comes to you only when you stop looking for it.

He stood some where, on some thing, the universe open before him.