Ghost Key (10 page)

When Sanchez finally left half an hour later, Nicole walked out to the car with him and Jessie. She was a couple of inches shorter than he was, about five foot nine, and although she was eight years older, she could pass for a woman in her early twenties, something she attributed to daily yoga. He suspected good genes and a healthy lifestyle had a lot to do with it, too.

“Your dog is a miracle worker,
hermano
. I’ve never seen Dad respond like that to any animal.”

“It’s just a temporary reprieve, Nicole. Sooner or later, it’s going to get to the point where he’ll have to move.”

“I know. Later in the week, I’m going to take him out to lunch and then drive him over to the facility, just so he can see it. The place is great. They’ve got domino groups, chess groups, book groups, everything Dad enjoys.”

“He probably won’t like it, but maybe he’ll surprise us.”

“What’s going on with your work?” she asked.

“The usual.” It was easier to say that than to explain. Nicole was many things, but a true believer was not among them. It had taken her years to accept his ability as genuine. He handed her three hundred-dollar bills. “For Carmen, a bonus and a raise. I’ll call and let her know.”

As their hands brushed, an image exploded inside his head with such violence and color that he felt himself falling into it and grabbed onto her arm to steady himself. Bad move. The images became specific, detailed. He saw her confront Delaney outside the ISIS building, her face set with fierce determination as she demanded to know where her brother was and what the hell was going on. Delaney patted the air as though she were a wild animal he hoped to tame.

Don’t patronize me, Delaney. Something’s happened to him.

I don’t know what you’re talking about, Nicole. I swear. He’s on Cedar Key, on official business, and I’ll be flying up there to meet him. He’s fine.

Fine?
She whipped out her iPhone.
These text messages are scary, they’re—

The next thing Sanchez knew, he was on his ass in one of the bushes, striated leaves cool against the sides of his face. Nicole reached out to help him up, while Jessie barked from the other side of the gate.

“Shit.” RV wasn’t supposed to work like this, wasn’t supposed to be personal. But then, what had just happened didn’t have anything to do with remote viewing, he thought. It was what had been happening to him most of his life, abrupt, explosive psychic connections with people he touched. His RV training had helped to mitigate and structure it, but hadn’t eradicated it completely.

He started to grasp his sister’s extended hand, but thought better of it. “I’m okay.” He got up, brushing off his jeans, irritated with himself. “Do me a favor, Nicole. Don’t confront Delaney.”

She frowned. “That’s what you just saw? Why would I confront him?”

He told her the rest of it and her frown deepened. “An unknown virus. What the hell does that mean?”

“I don’t know yet.” He hesitated, then continued. “Mom dropped by my place the other night. She told me you had the answer about where the terrorist cell is located. She was right.”

Her mouth pursed with disbelief. “Mom? C’mon, Nick. That’s crazy.”

“Now you sound like Dad.”

She threw her arms out at her sides. “So now you not only
hear
the dead, you
see
them, too?”

He jammed his hands in the pockets of his windbreaker, wondering why he always ended up defending his ability. “I don’t see and hear the generic dead, okay? But I’ve been hearing Mom for months around my place, and the other night I woke up and she walked out of the bookcase and looked as solid and real as you do.”

Nicole looked as if she’d bitten into a lime, mouth pursed, eyes bulging in their sockets. “Walked out of the bookcase.” She made a quick sign of the cross. “
Dios mío, hermano
. You know how that sounds?”

“I don’t give a shit how it sounds. It’s what happened.”

“Shit. Okay, okay. How’d Mom look?”

“Young. Beautiful. Whole.” He didn’t tell her about the rest of what Jenean had said, about her friend Charlie.

Tears brimmed in Nicole’s eyes. “Did she say anything else?”

“Not really. The visit seemed to be primarily to tell me you had the answer about where the terrorist cell is located.”

“But why Cedar Key? Why would any terrorist cell be located there? It’s an old fishing village, a tourist place.”

He didn’t say anything.

“Listen,
hermano.
” Her hands touched his shoulders and Sanchez shut down completely so he wouldn’t pick up anything else. “I don’t doubt your ability, okay? It’s just that you caught me by surprise. If you end up in Cedar Key, just keep me posted about what’s going on. Text or otherwise. And I promise not to confront Delaney.” Her fingers traced an
X
over her heart, a childhood thing between them.

Sanchez hugged her. “I’ll be in touch.”

*   *   *

The
bonfire burned brightly now, the flames dancing in the breeze, the wood crackling, popping. Maddie reached out to Von again, comforting and encouraging him to hold loving thoughts.

It’s hard to hold loving thoughts, Maddie, when I’m about to be burned at the stake.

You’re already dead,
she reminded him.
You got confused and lost your way and now you’re going to find your way to where you’re supposed to be.

Just then, an odd-looking man appeared next to the box—bald, portly, with Oriental features. It took Maddie a moment to realize he was a ghost and that none of the
brujos
could see him.

I’ll take care of things from here, Maddie.

Who’re you?

Name’s Victor. Charlie sends his regards.

You’re a chaser?

But he was already gone. Maddie reached out to Von, calling his name. She felt his essence, but he didn’t answer.

“I think the fire’s hot enough now,” Gogh said.

“What’s going to happen to him when he’s obliterated?” Jill asked. “Where’s he going to end up?”

“Nowhere,” Dominica replied. “Obliteration means destruction, Jill.”

“We went somewhere when we died,” Liam said.

“Exactly,” Jill agreed.

Maddie sensed Dominica’s confusion about this issue and her annoyance at Jill’s question. The bottom line was that Dominica didn’t have any answers to the ultimate question, but she realized the others were expecting something from her, so she bullshitted her way through it.

“Well, yes, technically, we did go somewhere when we died. And we found out that being dead just meant we don’t have bodies and that we have a whole lot of power to draw upon from the world of the dead.”

Jill frowned. “So where’re heaven and hell?”

“There’re no such places,” Whit replied. “Believe me, if there was a hell, I’d be there.”

Joe nodded. “Me, too.”

“So Von will just cease to be?” Liam asked.

Gogh rolled his eyes. “Yeah, dude. That about sums it up. Look, can we just get on with it?”

“This is really wrong,” Liam burst out. “Von died once, why should he have to die again?”

Maddie understood that Liam, like Von, was waking up to the truth about the
brujo
world and she wondered if and when others would, too.

“He broke a sacred law and attempted to escape,” Dominica snapped, her voice razor sharp.

Liam’s face turned apple red, a pulse beat hard at his temple. “Fuck this. I refuse to be a part of this.” With that, Liam strode away from them, pushed his kayak into the water, got in, and paddled off into the darkness.

Defiance. Rebellion. Independent thinking. The seeds of destruction, Maddie thought, gleeful at the prospect of insurrection within Dominica’s tribe.

“Liam just lost his position on the committee,” Dominica announced, staring after him.

No one leaped to his defense.

Dominica picked up the box from the sand and held it a moment. “Does, uh, anyone want to say anything?” she asked.

“I understand that Von committed a heinous act,” Jill said. “But we’re obliterating one of our own.”

Joe nodded his agreement.

“He broke the law.” Dominica didn’t want to discuss this anymore.

Jill’s mouth tightened. “It’s still wrong.”

“Your objection is noted.” Dominica looked pointedly at each of the others. “Anyone else?”

“Let’s just get it the fuck over with,” Gogh said. “Joe and I need to get back to the hotel.”

“All right, engage with the net,” Dominica said.

Maddie sensed that Dominica expected to hear Von’s wild, frantic sobbing, his wails. It confused her when she heard only silence. She frowned and tapped her finger against the lid. “He should be shrieking,” she said.

Gogh impatiently shifted his weight from one foot to the other. “C’mon, c’mon.”

Dominica tossed the box into the flames, and as they stood there, quietly, watching it burn, Maddie suddenly saw Victor and another man standing on the other side of the fire pit.
Von,
she thought at him.

He looked the way he probably had in his life as a surgeon, a tall African-American with salt-and-pepper hair. He brought his hand to his heart and his consciousness pressed up against hers.
Thank you, Maddie, with all of my heart. Victor assures me he and Charlie are working to get you out of this. I’ll hold them to it, you have my word.

Then he and Victor faded into the darkness and Maddie was alone again with the
brujos,
on this deserted strip of sand, the flames in the rock pit leaping higher and higher. The rectangular box in which Von had been imprisoned was now little more than a mound of glowing embers.

Five

As the tide rose, the water slapped rhythmically against the sides of the houseboat, a sound that always soothed Kate. Fish jumped, their bodies shimmering in the light from the rising moon. The moon wasn’t full, but the light was bright enough to transform the trees and brush in the back bayou to silhouettes. It highlighted the striated golds in Liberty’s wings, turned her red tail feathers the color of fire, and limned her profile as she picked at the bowl of raw chicken Rocky had set on the railing for her.

He and Kate were eating dinner on the back balcony of the houseboat. They often ate dinner together out here, with Liberty somewhere nearby, the hawk an endless source of fascination for them both.

“Mom, you think it’s okay for us to feed her? I don’t want her to forget how to survive in the wild.”

“We’ve been feeding her for months. But it doesn’t seem to have affected her ability to hunt on her own. She’s always catching fish.”

Rocky had his father’s high cheekbones, Kate’s blond hair, and eyes the same unusual shade of blue that Kate’s father had. Tall for his age, he had the kind of good looks that girls in his sophomore class found irresistible. They called him night and day, but the only girl who interested him was Amy, who worked at the animal rescue center with him.

“And yesterday, she flew in here with a live rat.”

Liberty swiveled her head to look at them. Her dark, deeply set eyes caught the glint of the moonlight and turned them to amber. She fluttered her wings, stretched out the left one, and tilted it slightly toward them, like a hand waving hello or good-bye.

“Were you on the porch at the time?” Rocky asked.

“Sitting right here. I shot to my feet and scrambled inside.”

Rocky laughed, a sound so pure and musical that it made Kate smile. He had his father’s laugh, too, full, vibrant, and filled with that seductive joy that had captured Kate’s heart the first time she heard it in a mythology class her senior year in college. She and Jake had spent five years together, most of them good years. But when Rocky was born, Jake had changed. He hadn’t taken to parenthood as she had. He was jealous of the time Kate spent with their son rather than with him. He began to have affairs.

When Rocky was a year old, she and Jake split up. Kate stayed on in Gainesville for another year, juggling her job as an English teacher with her responsibilities as a single mom. She moved back to Cedar Key when Rocky was two, and never regretted it. The island was home.

“What did Liberty do when you freaked?” he asked.

“Killed the rat, ate it, then tapped at the door.”

The hawk looked at them again, almost as if she knew they were talking about her. “Sometimes,” Rocky went on, “I get this weird feeling that she sticks around because she thinks she owes me a favor or something for rescuing her.”

Kate thought of the night that Liberty had dive-bombed Bean when he’d come here after the incident in the bar. “She’s definitely protective.”

“The other day when I was riding the scooter home from school, these rednecks in an electric cart tried to force me off the road. Liberty went after them, Mom. You should’ve seen her. She made that high-pitched shriek, that
kree-ee-ar,
and then dived at them again and again, until they swerved off the road and into a ditch.”

She could barely speak around a terrible lump that formed in her throat. “Rednecks? Who were they? Where were you? Jesus, Rocky, I told you to tell me if anything weird like this happened.”

“Hey, there was nothing weird about it. They’d probably had too much weed or beer or something. I was never in danger.”

“Did you know these kids?”

“Adults, they were adults. I think they were part of Zee Small’s group.”

Zee Small was an island old-timer, a survivalist and fundamentalist whom Kate had known since she was a kid. He and her father used to fish together. Back then, he was just a humorous eccentric. But during the Y2K hoopla, Zee believed the end-time had arrived and he and some of his flock had moved into the woods on the farthest island that comprised Cedar Key.

Cedar Key actually consisted of four small islands connected by isthmuses. The largest island was where they were—the tourist and downtown areas that extended to the first bridge. The second island was where the wealthiest people lived, their homes lining the island’s runway. The third part of the island was located on either side of Gulf Road, a working-class area, blue-collar, where zoning laws were nonexistent. Here, everything was mixed together: trailers, new homes on pilings, old homes flush to the ground. Yards often looked like used-car lots.