Ashes to Ashes (51 page)

That had been Ashes hope the whole time he
had been knocking Lucky Barrett of his already wobbly axis. But
would it work? Could he turn the minion against the master?

“Are you going to stand by
his
side?”
Ashe continued questioning the hired soldier. “He is losing his
mind right in front of you and will take you with him. Will you
follow this madman to the depths of hell? I sure hope not. You
don’t look like a complete moron to me.”

“Don’t listen to him,” Lucky commanded. “Give
me your gun. Now! Give it to me!”

“Don’t,” the psychologist pleaded. “Use your
head…your common sense. Trust your alarms, I know that they are
going off right now, loud and blaring in your ears.”

But the former soldier didn’t listen to Ashe.
He hesitated for a few seconds but then handed over the silenced
pistol to his boss and stood at attention, like the good soldier he
turned out to be. The psychologist helplessly watched as Lucky
Barrett, a man on the verge, slowly unscrewed the silencing tip
from the pistol. He let the piece of metal fall. It
clanged
against wooden floor boards. Whatever Lucky was about to do, he
wanted to make a lot of undeniable noise.

It was obvious that the tension was also
getting to Scott, because he chose the moment to speak, to beg, to
plead with Lucky for the knowledge that he so gravely desired.
“What is the pill, Lucky? Please. I need to know. Why did it show
me a way to stop my own death when I only ended up in this mess, in
this chair? Why did it do this to me?” His voice was cracking with
emotion. “I don’t understand. What was the point?”

“You think there is a point?” Lucky spat.

“If it was God,” Scott continued, “shouldn’t
there be a point?”

“You don’t believe in God,” the mad man
reacted.

“Where did it come from then?” Scott
continued to question. “It is not just a drug, I’m not dumb enough
to believe that.” Turning to his father, “It isn’t dad, I swear.”
Looking back at Lucky, “but I don’t know
what
it is. You do,
though. Don’t you? You have to know. If you don’t, then who?
Who?”

“Calm down, son,” Ashe implored.

“Why do you think that
I
know?” Lucky
replied.

“Because you
have
to know,” Scott
replied, growing troubled. “How could you not? So…Tell me! All of
this…this had to be for a reason. It couldn’t have been for
nothing. I need to make sense of it! Please!”

Lucky Barrett then unloaded the clip of
bullets into Scott’s chest. Scott didn’t see it coming and before
his brain could register the pain, he was dead and gone.

“He didn’t see
that
coming, did he?!”
Lucky screamed into Ashe’s face. “Or maybe he did. Maybe he took
the pill he stole from me and knew it was going to end this way.
Either or. Neither nor. Now…I
have
killed someone. Go
figure. It was inside of me the whole time. What a relief. I
thought I would remain a virgin forever.”

He began a laugh that was loud and all
encompassing. His entire body shook with it.

For Ashe, the man’s words became background
noise the instant that the lead was pumped into his son’s
heart.

There was so much blood.

“Oh god,” he bellowed. “Oh god, Scott. Hang
out, son. Hang on. Oscar will be coming any minute. Oh god. Don’t
leave me, Scott. Please. Please Scott…no. No. Look at me. Scott.
Look at me, son. No. Jesus Christ. Jesus.” The words turned to
basic groans and whimpers. He lost the ability to create words.

Chapter 62

“Those were gunshots!” Oscar howled to Wiles.
Even in the rain he heard the explosions. “We are going in! Let’s
move!”

Officer Wiles screeched into the mouth of his
phone, “Gunshots fired! We are going in! We are going in! SWAT team
move in!”

While the young suburb officer was giving the
order, the city detective was already jogging toward the front
door. He knew SWAT and other armed officers were at his back. They
were breaching that house, one way or another, with all the force
that they could muster.

Chapter 63

Ashe couldn’t believe what had just happened.
It was impossible. But as he looked at his son’s limp, lifeless
body, he knew it be real. Scott was gone. Taken. Just like Susanne
had been taken from him. By a lunatic. In an instant. One minute
they were alive and the next they were alive no longer.

He
had
poked another bear and his son
had been the one to pay the ultimate price that time, the same way
his wife had paid when Ashe had poked his big stick at Steven
Reynolds. And it was all his fault, back then and right at that
moment. It was the only truth that he needed to take from it. It
was his fault and no one else’s.

The ability to form words continued to elude
him. He could only stare at Lucky Barrett. Ashe’s stare took up his
entire material presence, involving more than just his two eyes.
The glare came from every fiber of his being. And it remained
unshaken, unbroken as the world around him began to explode. Even
as the Calvary invaded, officers and armored SWAT, Ashe refused to
take his attention away from the man that had just killed his son.
If any part of him honestly believed in the paranormal and
unexplained, he would have tried to kill the man with his
thoughts.

But that was impossible.

Or was it?

Vertigo took over Ashe’s senses and he could
no longer identify up from down. What he considered to be his deep
rooted beliefs began to spin like a top. What good were his
beliefs, anyway? He felt his whole self faltering, shuddering at a
place beneath the skin, a low place within his body where his soul
might be cradled, if a soul did indeed exist. Maybe a soul did
exist. For the first time he considered the possibility, which went
against everything that he had allowed himself to believe in. He
didn’t know what he honestly believed anymore. His whole mountain
of understanding was crumbling and rocks and boulders were falling
all around him. What good were his beliefs anyway? Could everything
he was sure of about the world be wrong? Maybe the pill could
foretell someone’s death? That might indeed be possible. Lucky
Barrett knew it to be true, without a single ounce of doubt to sway
him. And so had Scott. What made Ashe right and made them wrong?
What? It was arrogance to assume that he was right about
everything.

Along with paranoia, arrogance controlled
people like Franklin and Lucky Barrett. And Ashe was far from
immune to the effects of his own arrogance. It had gotten his wife
and son killed. Maybe he should learn to look at the world
differently, with an open mind to the impossible, to the limits of
his psychological understanding, toward mysterious pills and future
foretelling. What else could be possible outside of his little
box?

He instantly came to the conclusion that he
no longer had room for arrogance in his life. He needed to throw
out everything that he had had one hundred percent faith in and go
back to square one. He needed go back to being what the philosopher
John Locke had called a Tabula Rasa…a blank slate, clear of
anything that his education and experiences had jotted down upon
the surface. It would be erased at once, wiped clean, only to be
covered back over with new and fresh information he obtained from
new found and seemingly impossible perspectives.

Even if he was to late save his son or his
wife, he needed to take the journey from that point on. Ashe needed
to gut himself empty, because his so called knowledge had led to
his destructive arrogance. He no longer
had
knowledge. He no
longer
knew
shit about anything.

It was all gone.

Oscar, his old friend, found him amongst the
onslaught. The detective was beginning to free Ashe when he noticed
Scott’s form slumped over in the parallel chair. Oscar instantly
became like a statue, motionless. “I’m sorry, my friend,” he said.
Breaking the temporary stillness, he grabbed a second to look back
over his shoulders to make sure that Lucky Barrett was being
secured, along with his armed goon. He then continued to rid Ashe’s
wrists and ankles of the wire restraints. Oscar brought his mouth
close to Ashe’s ear. “We have him. We have him, Ashe. And he will
pay for this. I promise you.”

Oscar stayed close, within arm’s reach, when
Ashe was able to stand. He watched for any sudden movements from
his old friend. But the psychologist didn’t have the energy to
retaliate. He could rush toward Lucky Barrett, ignited by a desire
for immediate revenge. Instead, he went over to Scott and closed
his son’s eyelids.

How could his son ever truly rest with his
eyes wide open? The psychologist wondered. His eyes had been
opened. That phrase had come to mean something different. Ashe,
too, had had his own eyes opened. He didn’t know if God had a hand
in it or not but Ashe no longer ruled out the existence of God…or a
God-like being. His eyes had been truly opened to any and all
possibilities, even those on the fringes of what science was able
to explain.

“I’m sorry,” the father said to his son. “I
love you. And I let you down.” He kissed his son’s forehead, which
was already becoming cold. “I am truly sorry, my boy. Forgive me.
Please.”

Oscar put a hand on Ashe’s shoulder.

“Will you get me out of here, Oscar?”

“Where do you want to go?”

“Anywhere else,” Ashe replied. “Anywhere else
in the world...whatever world that I may have left, that is.”

Part Four

“So shall it be at the end of the world: the
angels shall come forth, and sever the wicked from among the
unjust, and shall cast them into the furnace of fire: there shall
be wailing and gnashing of teeth.”

--Mathew 13:47

Chapter 64

“Dust of the dead,” Ashe began. “Inhaled each
day. In. Through. And out again.” He took a needed breath in order
to stifle the ever present threat of tears. The threat had circled
him for the past few days, ever since his son was executed. “Ashes
to Ashes…one breath at a time. In. Through. And out again.” He
paused one last time before finishing. “Taste it on the tongue.
Those who fill our chests. In. Through. And out again.”

He brought his eyes up from the cemetery dirt
and allowed the small group of people, family and friends to fill
his view. They were gathering, along with himself, for Scott’s
funeral. They come together, collected at the spot of ground where
Scott would forever be laid and buried.

Ashe was happy to see them. He gave a nod to
Oscar. A smile to his sister. He then forced another smile for
Ginger, Rains, Phillips, Wiles, along with other familiar faces.
His sight lingered for a moment on the form of Katherine, who to
his own surprise had showed up as well. Her beautiful figure stayed
at the back of the group. She didn’t need to come but he was
pleased that she had.

“That was one of my wife’s own poems,” Ashe
continued from his position in front of the freshly dug hole. “I
know that poems have complex levels and layers of meaning attached
to them. And I don’t always comprehend them, even though I consider
myself to be a semi-intelligent fellow. My wife, Susanne, would
never let me in on the intended meanings to what she wrote. Even if
I begged her.” He nervously laughed to himself. “I remember how
annoyed I would get when she refused to give me any insight into
her work. I forgave her for that, though, a very long time ago. She
claimed that I should find my own meaning. A poem could be whatever
I wanted it to be, she would say. That
that
was the beauty
of poetry…in her eyes. And she was right. Everyone could take their
own interpretation from the words, the lines.”

He inhaled and then exhaled.

He trekked forward. “This little poem was
always special to me. For me it was always about love and loss.
More now than ever before. Dust of the dead. Those who fill our
chest. The poem is stating that we are always breathing in those we
have loved and lost…those that continue to fill our chest by way of
memories and our never dying love for them. In. Through. And out
again. With each breath. For as long as we are able take the
memories into our chests.”

He thought hard about his next words.

“My son Scott is being buried a murderer who
was shot to death by another killer,” Ashe bluntly stated. “To some
people, to a lot of people, the facts are cut and dry. But they are
misguided by their own ignorance. They don’t know what we know.
They didn’t see what we saw. What
I
saw. They didn’t
experience what some of us experienced. So they go on with their
simple lives and condemn my son, a confused young man who was led
astray by forces beyond his control. It could have happened to any
one of us, to any one of
them
. But it didn’t. It happened to
Scott. My son. And he will forever be labeled a killer. But not in
my eyes. And not in my heart. I love you all. I will always love my
son…because I knew him…I knew his character…no matter what others
may think. If there is a heaven…Scott is there…with his mother. I
am sure of it. The innocent would never go anyplace else.”

“Amen,” Oscar chimed in, his almost
unrecognizable accent largely present in the vibrations of his
lord’s word. “We all love Scott. And we love you, too, Ashe.”

“Thank you, old friend,” Ashe replied,
letting a couple tears escape. “That means a lot. Thank you all for
coming. Scott and I both appreciate having you here. Thank you from
the bottom of our hearts.” Leaning down, he scooped up a handful of
dirt and turned to pour it down into the hole where his son’s
casket had already been lowered. He watched as the dirt trickled
downward, fighting a subtle breeze in order to reach the top of the
polished wooden box. Picking his head back up, he ended the
ceremony by saying, “I love my son and he loved m.”