Friday, August 12, 2011

Chapter 3

The next morning we sat on the two stools on either side of the breakfast bar and talked over mugs of steaming coffee, after bowls of cold cereal in non-fat milk. The coffee was real, brewed—not the decaffeinated instant we’d had the night before. It was a special blackberry blend sent two years ago by my nephew, Tyler, in Seattle. I’d never had reason to brew a pot until now. Mine had a shot of Jack Daniels in it.

Crystal looked as ragged as I felt. She hadn’t had a fix in at least a day, maybe longer. Her fix up had been interrupted by Billy’s murder. Her hair stood out in all directions and appeared considerably dirtier than the night before. Her eyes were more shadowed, her hands shook on the counter before her, and she slapped at something invisible crawling on her legs and arms. I knew she hadn’t slept last night. I’d heard her moaning and tossing on the futon.

I hadn’t slept well either. But then, I seldom did since returning from Afghanistan. And when she went to the bathroom at about four in the morning, I checked my coffee can bank in the closet. It hadn’t been touched.

“I had a horrible nightmare last night,” Crystal said after taking a tentative sip of steaming coffee. “I dreamed the short man smashed Billy’s head with the sledgehammer.”

“That wasn’t a dream. It was a memory.”

“You mean it really happened?”

“That’s right.”

“Why didn’t I remember it last night?”

“Your mind was trying to hide something that scared the hell out of you.”

Again we fell silent.

“Where are you from?” I finally asked, wrapping my hands around my mug to warm them. I used electric space heaters in the apartment during the winter months, and by morning there was usually a chill in the air.

Crystal shivered, then warmed her shaking hands on her own mug. “From here, for the past four years.”

“I mean before that. Your accent sounds southern.”

She nodded. “Georgia. Atlanta, Georgia.”

“And what brought you to Denver?”

“Work. I was doing television—the weather for a network affiliate.” That explained her precise speech pattern. “I was offered better pay to come out here.”

“What happened?”

She paused, then shrugged and said, “I guess I fell in with the wrong crowd. One thing led to another, and I started using drugs. I got hooked, lost my job and eventually burned through my savings. I’ve been on the street now for the past two years.”

Her story was an all too common one that could have just as easily applied to me, had I not got at least some control over my life. In spite of the ravages of meth and two years on the street, she did look like she could have been on television at one time. Her face had the underlying bone structure that belonged in entertainment. And let’s face it, television weather is about half entertainment. If the weather person isn’t an intelligent wise-cracking male, she’s air-headed eye candy. The weather is the only place on the evening news where the networks and their affiliates can inject a bit of not-so-subtle sex.

But as soon as word gets out that the weather girl is married, she loses her appeal and is replaced. 

And, if she starts using drugs, and it begins to show....

“Do you have family in Georgia?”

She looked down into her coffee and shook her head. “No one who would claim me.”

“No one, anywhere, who might help you, who might put you up for a while?”

Without looking up, she said, “No one, except for Father Albright.” She finally looked up. “And he sent me to you.”

“So he did.” I’d have to talk to him about that. “I’ll go see him this morning, see if he has any options for a place for you to stay.”

But if the killers saw her last night, I thought, maybe it’s best she stay here, with me. That was probably what Chester had been thinking when he sent her to my apartment. I just wasn’t sure it would work out. I had other plans for my life—or lack thereof.

I finished my coffee, then did the breakfast dishes and re-enforced the door-opening instructions with Crystal. When I was sure she understood the security precautions I tucked the .44 beneath my jacket at the small of my back. I didn’t usually carry a weapon around town, but I couldn’t see leaving the pistol in the apartment with someone strung out on meth. And if she went looking for the gun, she might stumble across my coffee can bank.

#

The weather was crisp and clear. If it weren’t for the eight inch blanket of snow on the ground, it would have been hard to believe there had been a blizzard the night before. But that’s Denver. One day a blizzard and the next near spring weather.

Chester’s church, Holy Sacrament, crouched in the shadows of a glass and steel skyscraper in lower downtown Denver. The church had deeded the property to a developer fifteen years ago, with the understanding that the church could remain on the property as long as the building stood—the skyscraper, not the church. The modern office building wrapped itself around the Gothic architecture of the church as if protecting the older building from all elements of the modern world.

I climbed the worn marble steps to the massive wood and brass doors. Pulling them open, I slipped into the relative darkness inside.

My eyes adjusted quickly as I stood at the back of the church. Then I made my way up the central aisle toward the large ornate altar, my steps echoing in the empty church. I went to the left, around the altar, stepping through a nondescript doorway that led to a series of small rooms. I went past the choir director’s office/music room and on toward the assistant pastor’s office.

As I approached, a large man in a light gray suit, sporting long, curly, brilliantly white hair and a neatly trimmed white mustache and goatee, opened the door and stepped from the assistant pastor’s office. He seemed to be a very fit fifty-five or sixty years old.

“Thank you, Senator!” came Father Andrew Groff’s voice from his office as the white haired man passed me in the hallway without a word, not even acknowledging my presence. He went out into the church.

I continued on down the hall. The sign on the door where I stopped read: Father Chester Albright, Pastor. I rapped lightly on the frame.

“Come in,” came Chester’s pleasant tenor voice.

I opened the door and stepped inside. He sat behind his desk, doing the inevitable paperwork. Papers and books were stacked in every corner and on the straight-backed chair before the desk.

“Welcome, John,” he said, getting to his feet. He was dark haired with gray at the temples, of medium build and five-feet-nine. “I thought I’d see you today.” He offered his hand.

I shook it across the desk. “Chester.”

“What happened to your teeth?” he asked.

“You didn’t know what you were doing, but you saved my life last night.”

The priest frowned and sat back down behind his desk. “It’s become that bad?” He motioned for me to clear the papers off the chair and sit. I put the papers on the floor.

“It has,” I said and sat.

“You have to get beyond your loss, John. And you have to get over what happened in Afghanistan.”

I nodded. “Both of those things are a huge part of it, but not all of it.”

“There’s something more?” I nodded. “What is it?”

I waited a few seconds, then said, “It’s the loss of everything I possessed in Afghanistan, everything I could lay claim to as a Navy SEAL. I feel myself getting weaker by the day. Every minute I’m away from the SEALs, away from special ops, I’m losing a bit more of the only thing I could ever do well. It’s all I’ve ever known, all I’ve ever been. Without it, my life has become useless and hollow.”

“There’s nothing you can do about that, John. You know there isn’t.”

Chester was right, of course. He was the only person I had ever told about how I left the military. It hadn’t been a voluntary separation. I’d been released from the Navy SEALs because of what had happened during my final op in Afghanistan, because of what I had done to the enemy. And it wasn’t the first time something like that had happened under my command.

“And your anger management issues?” the priest asked, as if reading my mind.

“It goes far beyond anger management. Let’s face it—I’m addicted to violence.”

The priest nodded. “Are your urges lessening?”

I shook my head. My addiction to violence was as strong as it had ever been. The excitement I’d felt the night before at seeing Billy Simpson’s mutilated body, the two men on the mall shuttle, and the old man outside the hotel had made that abundantly clear.

Chester frowned. “Are you considering what I think you’re considering?”

“That depends on what you think I’m considering.”

“Suicide.” I didn’t respond. “You know that’s a sin.”

“Not for an atheist, it isn’t,” I said.

“Yes, it is. An atheist just doesn’t know it’s a sin.”

I grunted noncommittally. I’m not absolutely sure I’m an atheist—more an agnostic leaning toward atheism. But I’ve found it easier to simply tell everyone I’m an atheist, and let it go at that. And I hope with all my heart there isn’t a god. If there somehow is one, I know that at my death I will be shuffled off to the darkest and hottest corner of hell. If there is such a place.

“You aren’t going to do it right away, are you?”

“No, not right away. First I want to figure out if I’m going to get involved with Crystal’s problem, or not.”

“God provides,” Chester said. After a pause, he continued, “I’m going to ask you one last time, and then I’ll never bring it up again. Will you let me arrange for counseling? You need help, John.”

“I don’t need help,” I said.

“I think you do. Killing comes at a high psychological price.”

“Not for me, it doesn’t.”

“It does for you, too. You just don’t know it yet.”

I shrugged. “At any rate, I don’t need counseling right now. Crystal’s problem will see me through for a while—if I decide to help her.”

“Then there’s actually a chance you won’t?”

“A good chance. I’m not sure I want to become involved. And I don’t know why you sent her to me. You know it isn’t the right time for this—for her. The holidays, and again no Sylvia.”

“I thought you might do her some good. If nothing else, you could protect her. And it sounds like it would certainly do you some good as well, if only to postpone matters.”

Again, I didn’t respond. After a couple seconds, the priest continued, “She told you what she saw?”

“She did. I took a look for myself.”

“What did you find?”

I told him, and he went pale.

“Pretty grim stuff,” he said.

“You can say that again. But I guess as long as they didn’t get a good look at her, Crystal will be all right.”

“I don’t know,” Chester said, shaking his head. “There was a cop in here this morning, asking about her.” 

Damn, I thought, it can never be that simple.