The Prophet (Ryan Archer #2) (15 page)

Archer’s hands were scabbed from his fall in the gravel. The headache was fading, perhaps purely because he was distracted by Danielle’s disappearance. He remembered Danielle’s wavy red hair with dark streaks. She reminded him of the redhead from the bar. Archer had a bad feeling about Danielle. Something in his gut told him Tatum Cloud was alive, but he was equally certain Danielle’s story would not have a happy ending. And he believed that her fate had been sealed because of her friendship with Cecile Espinoza. Maybe they would find her on a park bench with a syringe in her arm too, or floating in the LA River. However it turned out, he was convinced it would look like an accident, but she would be dead. For whatever reason, he was as certain of that as he was that the sun would set tonight and rise again in the morning.
 

“I understand all of that better than you might think,” he told her.

One side of her mouth twitched up in an effort to smile. From the look in her eyes he thought maybe she believed him.
 

“You did the right thing calling me,” he said.

“Thanks,” she said.

“How long had Danielle known Cecile?”

“I have no idea.”

“What is her boyfriend’s name?”

“Danielle’s boyfriend?”

Archer nodded.

She screwed up her face, thinking. Then she brightened. “His name is Chad. He’s got a gnarly Mohawk.”

Archer nodded. He remembered Danielle mentioning Chad at the Hollywood Bowl.
 

“Don’t hesitate to call me if you think of anything else,” he told her, “or if you’d just like to talk. Take care of your brother and stay of out trouble.”

She smiled and wiped another tear. “I’ll try,” she said.

* * *

He knew better, but couldn’t help himself.

Archer pulled into a random parking lot and jerked his key from the ignition. Got out and paced. Walked down through the ditch bordering the pavement and into the weedy vacant lot on the other side. Marched seventy-five yards out, then halted, hitching his hands on his hips and grunting to himself. Then he turned and marched right back, down into the ditch and up the other side, across the pavement to the truck and braced both hands against the top edge above where the Uzi had stitched a zipper from left to right.

“Damnit,” he said.

He thought about Dewey pouring beer and realized that the addiction to alcohol wasn’t nearly as powerful a draw as what he faced now. He knew the smart move was to turn the truck around and punch the gas and follow a clue that might bring him a little closer to locating Tatum Cloud. But the pull was too strong. It made him feel weak.

He plugged the key into the ignition and listened to the familiar rumble under the hood. He dropped the transmission into gear and nosed the truck out onto the road. Turned right instead of left and bit his lip because he knew turning right was a stupid thing to do. But he couldn’t fight the impulse.

The school was a mile away. After two years of battling the impulse, he could make the drive with his eyes closed. He turned onto the manicured grounds and parked at the outer limit of the parking lot. He spotted her white Volvo and felt his pulse quicken. He plucked the key and dropped it on the passenger seat. Sat with hands at ten and two. Glare from the sun was in his eyes but he didn’t notice. He had parked where he couldn’t stare at the Volvo. He cast a glance at the keys on the seat and again knew what the smart move would be, and again he ignored the instructions his logical mind was sending him.
 

He closed his eyes and took a deep breath. Then he climbed out and pushed the door shut. Crossed the parking lot and followed the sidewalk to the lovely courtyard that separated the buildings for the school for deaf children.

Then he stepped off into the grass and eased over to a brick wall, stopping at the corner. They were there as he had expected. A group of eight or ten children, and a teacher working with them. The students were smiling. Smiling at her. And she was smiling back at them, conducting the lesson, holding their attention with the sound of her voice. The landscaping in the courtyard was lush and beautiful. The air smelled of honeysuckle and roses. There were trees with fruit hanging from the branches, and leafy bushes sculpted to look like animals. The courtyard was terraced, with wide steps leading down to the area where the woman was working with her students. The students were seated in plastic chairs with tubular metal legs.

Archer felt his chest tighten.
 

He watched her, brown hair aglow in the afternoon light, her smile, even from a distance, cutting a hole through his chest. The way she gestured with her hands. Her body language. The slope of her neck. The angle of her arms. He wasn’t near her but swore he could detect her perfume on the breeze.
 

She was dressed in a long, flowing skirt, and the way her long hair framed her face paralyzed his heart. She laughed and it caused every molecule of his body to cease to move. Archer backed away one step, his shoulder brushing against brick. Then she pushed her hair out of her face and his impulse was to lean out and smell her neck, to get close enough to touch her hand, to remind her of the electricity that had always passed between them when they touched.

Idiot
, he thought.
You shouldn’t have come here.

He turned away and took a step toward the parking lot and heard her laugh again. Heard the delightful laughing of happy children. He resisted the pull of gravity and continued on toward the parking lot. Back at the truck he squeezed the steering wheel with both hands until he thought it might snap to pieces.

He turned back onto the highway and cursed under his breath that he hadn’t been strong enough to resist. He had known better, but couldn’t help himself.

TWENTY-ONE

As he walked into Dr. Pressfield’s office, Archer got a text from Jason Eckhart but decided to ignore it until after his session with the therapist.

Pressfield was seated, finishing with notes from a previous client when Archer stood in the open door and bumped a knuckle against the wooden doorframe. Pressfield gestured at the chair across from him without looking up.

“Come on in,” he said.

Archer sat down, sucked in a deep breath, and closed his eyes for a moment. He had driven directly from the school to Pressfield’s office. He took a few more deep breaths; an exercise intended to let his thoughts settle. Pressfield was a prim-looking man of about sixty, with thinning hair and frames that made him look older and perhaps slightly more scholarly than he would have without them. Archer liked him. Liked the way the therapist interacted with him, liked his therapeutic style. He had first gone to see Pressfield after an incident during his time with the FBI. It had not been voluntary. And that first session had not been productive in Archer’s eyes, mostly perhaps due to his resistance to talking out what he was feeling. He had not been raised to talk things about in such a fashion. The notion felt foreign, but over the years had grown on him. And now he looked forward to his fifty minutes twice a month with Pressfield.

Pressfield was seated in a deep leather chair, one leg draped over the other, a pad of paper resting on his thigh, a Montblanc pen scratching at the lined page. Archer had learned to wait patiently until the therapist had finished his thought.

There was a window behind Pressfield, and Archer watched the sky beyond the trees darkening. Shadows fell on the carpet at his feet. He could hear the whisper of the air conditioner through the vents.

Pressfield looked up and smiled.

“How are you, Ryan?”
 

Archer shrugged. “I’m alive and surviving.”

“Good. Pleased to hear that.”
 

Pressfield noticed his hands and face and the condition of his clothes. “Looks me to like you might have had a rough day.”

Archer fluttered his fingers, glancing down at his arms. “It come with the job sometimes.”

“Did you see her again?” Pressfield asked.

Archer had known the question was coming. “Yes,” he said. At least once a month Archer would drive by the school prior to therapy. He didn’t always get out of the truck. Sometimes he would sit and grip the wheel until it felt like his knuckles might explode. Sometimes he would recline the seat back and watch the shapes made by the clouds. He just wanted to see her again. To remember her face. To remember what it felt like to have her smile at him. It was really that simple.

“Did you speak to her?”

“No.”

The therapist made a note on his pad, then capped the expensive pen.

“Perhaps you should, Ryan.”

Archer’s eyes drifted past the therapist to the window.
 

“What would I say?” Archer asked.

“Well, what do you feel when you see her?”

“I still love her,” Archer said with more honesty than he would have preferred. But the answer was truthful and lies did not come easily for him.

“That makes sense to me. After all, the two of you were married. Maya is your ex-wife. I’m sure that a lot of emotions rise to the surface whenever you see her.”

“It’s difficult. I’m not always comfortable feeling certain things and not having the opportunity to deal with them properly.”

“That is understandable.”

“My feelings for her never changed, but her feelings for
me
apparently
did
change.”

“We’ve talked a lot about this, Ryan. You have no way of knowing what she feels, and it’s none of your business what goes on in her mind. You are only responsible for you. You’ve made yourself crazy for a long time trying to find answers to all the questions you hold inside. But you might never get those answers. Maya is a grown woman and has the freedom to make her own decisions, regardless of how it makes you feel. You never got the closure you desired, and here you are still wrestling with the pieces of the puzzle to make them fit.”

It was an old conversation, an old topic, but Pressfield was correct that Archer’s questions had never been satisfactorily answered, and it felt like an itch in the middle of his brain that he desperately wanted to scratch so he could have some relief.
 

“Perhaps you should consider speaking to her.”

Archer turned the notion over in his mind. “That’s probably not a good idea.”

“It’s merely a suggestion. Perhaps Maya would be open to it. She might even enjoy the opportunity to sit down and have a conversation.”

“She is such a beautiful woman,” Archer said.

“Yes, you’ve told me many times.”

“There has always been something about her, some kind of magic between us, something indefinable.”

“Love and interpersonal chemistry are both great mysteries.”

Archer nodded. He pursed his lips and let out a long, shallow breath.

Pressfield removed his glasses. Folded them and placed them on the arm of his chair. The flesh around his eyes was pale from the heavy frames. His eyes looked smaller, almost birdlike, without the lenses magnifying them. He tapped the Montblanc against his chin. The silence between them lingered. Pressfield was allowing Archer time to find the words he needed.

Archer leaned forward. His eyes drifted again. “I killed two men today.”

Pressfield’s eyebrows twitched. “Oh? How do you feel about that?”

“Not good. Not bad. Not anything, really.”

“I don’t believe that’s true, Ryan.”

Archer shrugged. “It’s not the first time I’ve pulled the trigger like that.”

“It’s not a matter of simply pulling the trigger, though, is it? It has to be a traumatic experience to take another person’s life, regardless of the person or the situation. Even if your own life is in jeopardy. And you are a good man, Ryan. A compassionate man. Taking a life is not a natural, normal event. You need to understand that, and allow yourself to process through it in a healthy way. The worst thing you could do is to compartmentalize it and lock it away in your mind so that you don’t have to deal with it or face the emotions.”

He was right, of course. You never got used to it. It never became a thing you could stuff in your back pocket and forget. It became a part of the pain-body, that segment of the mind where pain and trauma sometimes got snagged and couldn’t process properly so that it could be freed. And then the smallest, most benign things could trigger those moments back to the forefront of the mind, and suddenly the trauma was re-experienced as you tumbled back through weeks or months or decades to the moment when the trauma originally occurred.
 

Pressfield opened his glasses and put them back on his face. The setting sun made the scalp beneath his thinning hair appear bright pink. His eyes were ice blue and he rarely blinked during their sessions.
 

“You are sounding better all the time, Ryan,” Pressfield commented. “Are you feeling better?”

Archer glanced at the clock on the table beside the therapist. He grinned.

“It looks like our time is up,” Archer said.

“So it is.”

Archer stood. “I’ll see you in two weeks.”

“Be kind to yourself, Ryan.”

Easier said than done, Archer thought.

* * *

The text from Jason Eckhart said: CALL ME

Archer was on the freeway, warm air off the Pacific blasting him in the face when he dialed Eckhart’s number. It rang for eternity before there was an answer.

“I expected it to go to voice mail twenty minutes ago,” Archer said. “That damn thing rang forever.”

“Well, I texted you an hour ago,” Eckhart said in rebuke. “You’re lucky I answered at all.”

“What do you have for me?”

“I found a little meat on the bone,” Eckhart said. “Got a list of names for the board of directors at NTW.”

Archer popped on his aviators to keep the wind out of his eyes. “NTW? I’ve had more than one conversation since the last time we talked, Jason. Refresh my memory.”

“Neustadt-Traugott-Weismuller,” Eckhart said. “The German outfit that owns HMI.”

Archer nodded to himself. “Okay, I’m back on track with you. Go ahead. What about it?”

“There’s a name on the list that might be of interest. If nothing else, it stands out as odd, if only to me.”