Warrior in the Shadows Read online

  There was a motion he barely caught in the corner of his vision, a sudden dark blur, and then the revolver was snatched from his grasp, twisted out of his hand in a movement so fast he couldn't comprehend what was happening. Then he was gripped by hands stronger than he imagined a vise might be like, spun and whirled and shoved down into his recliner with such force that the heavy chair slid back a full two feet.

  Directly in front of him stood a medium-sized man dressed in a heavy black leather jacket, a black sweatshirt, and dark denim pants. A black motorcycle helmet, padded gloves, and a black canvas courier's bag rested on the floor beside the big-screen television. The man's skin was the color of café au lait without enough milk, just a shade too dark, his nose broad and his heavy lips full. Long black kinky hair was pulled back into a ponytail that hung down his back. His nose was pierced at the septum and he wore some small and pale piercing there. His left ear was pierced with many small pins and rings, but his hands were bare of any ring or ornament.

  "Who are you?" Madison Simmons said, wheezing. "Who are you?"

  The dark man studied the revolver in his hand, then opened the cylinder with the familiarity of someone who knew how to handle a firearm, and emptied the brass cartridges into his hand.

  "Bloody hell, mate," the dark man said. "When did you change the ammo last… Second World War?"

  "Who are you?"

  "Call me Alfie, mate. All me friends do."

  "What do you want?"

  "A little of this, a little of that, a little bit of your body fat. You got some spare, eh, mate?"

  Madison squeezed the leather of the recliner armrests, his hands slick with sweat. The leather was cold against his bare legs and buttocks. He stared up at the man who stood over him. The dark man's eyes were brown with yellowed whites, sunken beneath a heavy orbital ridge slashed with thick eyebrows.

  Then the dark man's face split with a huge and seemingly genuine smile.

  "Take it easy, mate," he said. He dropped the revolver on the floor and scattered the handful of cartridges carelessly across the carpet, then reached into the black courier bag and pulled out an intricately carved stick, about an inch thick and two feet long, with a bulbous swell on one end that was studded with what looked to be wide nail heads. The dark man took the stick and whirled it in his hand, the blurring stick just in front of Madison's face.

  "Like my look, mate?" the dark man said, touching his chest with his free hand.

  "What do you want from me?"

  "Some people tell me I look like a musician, rock and roll type. What do you think?"

  "I can give you money…"

  "Money got you into this, mate."

  "What?"

  "I do play a couple of instruments," the dark man said. "Though I don't think you'd know a didge if I was to bring one out, me old china plate. That's Aussie for mate, mate. I do play a mean didgeridoo."

  The man in black twirled his heavy club.

  "And I do like to play, Madison, me boy. But not with the likes of you."

  The dark man twirled the club and stepped forward, then brought the stick arcing down in an axelike swipe that put the heavy bulb end neatly into the space between Madison Simmons's left ear and temple. The club came forward so fast that it impacted before Madison's flinch reflex brought his hands up. The blow snapped the banker's head over sharply, positioning it perfectly for the second blow that came right at the nape of the neck, shattering the spine and sending bone splinters into the spinal cord and brain.

  Madison Simmons's last dying vision was one of the man in black standing in what seemed to be a great nimbus of white light, slowly fading.

  The dark man who called himself Alfie studied the bloody end of his club, then looked down to make sure the spray of blood and brain matter hadn't spotted his clothing.

  "Not much work to see to that dag, eh?" he said to the club.

  He set the club down carefully, then stepped back and removed his clothing. His body was lean and very hard, stripped a long time ago of any superfluous flesh. His arms, legs, chest, and back were carved with old scar tissue in an intricate array of forms. Some of the designs centered on old wounds, like one deep healed puncture on his right thigh that served as a starting point for a rayed pattern of incised tissue.

  He took a Velcro soft roll out of the courier bag and opened it up. The soft roll held a variety of small tubes and jars with paint. He took out a tube of red ochre paint and smeared long vertical lines down his trunk, arms, and legs. He carefully drew white and yellow horizontal lines on his torso while he studied himself in the mirror beside the racked CDs. He saved his face for last: charcoal on his forehead, a white band from each eyebrow down the front of each ear and continuing down his shoulders to his arms.

  Then he set his paints away and took a CD from his courier bag and studied Madison Simmons's stereo system.

  "Bloody hell," he said. "Got to be a rocket scientist or a bloody banker to figure this lot out."

  Finally he found the appropriate slot for his CD and started his music. The eerie high-pitched drone of the didgeridoo began to sound in the entertainment room with a hypnotic drumbeat in the background. Alfie hung his head for a moment, listening for the rhythm and letting it build in him. Then he began to shuffle his feet in rhythm and to hum deep in his throat, a guttural drone that counter pointed the drone of the recorded didgeridoo.

  The dark man closed his eyes, and in his mind's eye visualized all those who watched him from the Dreamtime. He felt a tingle that began at the base of his neck and swept down through his whole body before he opened his eyes and saw, as he did each time with this ritual, as though he saw with someone else's eyes.

  "Time to flash me Dover," he said out loud. He took a knife from the front pocket of his carefully folded pants. It was an Ernest Emerson Commander, a fighting folding knife with an aggressive cutting edge, a partially serrated black steel blade that folded into a titanium handle.

  "Good thing you ate well tonight, Maddy, me boy," the dark man said. "My turn now."

  1.2

  Charley Payne made lousy coffee and he knew it. He never seemed able to find just the right balance of grounds to water, and the little pot he'd bought cheap at Target never got the water hot enough. He woke every morning to the smell of properly brewed coffee filtering up from the restaurant two floors down in the old building he lived in. His apartment was small and old: it dated back to the twenties, when most small stores had a few rooms upstairs for storage or for let. But it was cheap and the neighborhood was good, in Charley's opinion the best neighborhood in Minneapolis.

  In one of his periodic attempts to be thrifty, he'd bought the coffeemaker and decided to brew his own morning mud. But he missed the friendly chat with the girls who worked the counter of the Linden Hills Diner downstairs. Charley didn't have much money to spend on coffee since he'd worked through the funds he took out of his federal retirement plan after he'd quit the government, and the little bit of money he got from his free-lance work had to go first to his rent, then to his equipment and supplies, then to groceries before luxuries like coffee, beer, and cigars. Most of the time it seemed as though he reversed those commonsense priorities, but then that kind of perverse disregard for the normality of things was one of Charley's trademarks, at least according to Bobby Lee Martaine, who was Charley's best friend.

  Charley spat the brew he made into his sink, then poured the rest of the pot down the drain. He went to the window of his studio apartment and looked out over the intersection of Forty-fourth Street and Upton, the anchor of the Linden Hills neighborhood in Minneapolis. Charley liked to be up high and have the vantage point; he liked to be able to see where he was at all times. From here he could see the tree-lined streets and sturdy homes, the lone apartment building on Forty-fourth Street, and the trees in all the yards and along the streets stretching down to the greenery around Lake Harriet.

  The trees were all aflame with the colors that heralded fall in the Upper Midwest: glor
ious crimson, heartbreaking yellow almost butter gold. Leaves rippled when the wind passed through them, like the mad brushstrokes of Vincent van Gogh, alive with energy and life and a bit of madness.

  Charley loved to see. He often felt drunk with seeing. The best description he'd ever run across that captured his love of vision was a line from a poem by Wallace Stevens: "the voluptuousness of looking." From a poem called "Sunday Morning," if he remembered correctly. He'd read that poem in college over twenty years ago, and it pleased him that he could recall it. It was a little test, one of many he gave himself each day to see just how sharp— or dull— he was becoming.

  He turned away from the window reluctantly, driven by the dull headache that pounded caffeine, caffeine, caffeine behind his forehead. He squeezed into the miniscule bathroom, not much larger than an airplane toilet, where a shower stall was wedged in the corner beside an undersized toilet stool, and a small rust-stained sink with two old-fashioned porcelain four-pronged taps sat below a cracked mirror.

  Charley ran the water till he had a tepid flow from the hot water tap, then lathered his face and scraped at his gray and blond beard. He had a long face, with deep lines that ran like scars from his high cheekbones down to the corners of his mouth. His forehead had three deep furrows that ran across his brow above thin eyebrows. His eyes were a deep, dark blue, almost a light violet. Women always commented first on his eyes.

  When Charley was alone, his face fell into a collection of lines, like the rigging of a sail falls into repose in the absence of wind. It took interaction with people to breathe life into the rigging of his face, and from the lines and the way his face fell, one couldn't help but wonder if all those interactions had been good ones.

  Charley splashed warm water on his face, then rinsed the loose hairs down the drain. He wiped his face and got the bit of white lather that clung to one ear, then sniffed at one armpit to see if he could wring one more day out of the T-shirt he'd slept in. He decided not, took it off and tossed it into the plastic bucket he kept in the bottom of his closet. A fresh black T-shirt and patterned cotton boxers, a pair of well-worn and faded Levi's 501s (and he was pleased that he could still fit into a thirty-four-inch waist pants), a brown checkered flannel shirt and a wool baseball cap to keep the chill off his thinning head of hair, and a zip-up Patagonia fleece jacket as a final layer against the fall cool.

  His room was small but carefully organized. A twin-sized bed folded out of a sofa, a small table in front of the sofa served as dining area as well as a makeshift work space. An undersized stuffed chair sat in front of the window that opened out onto the street; directly across from that was a small television with a VCR player. Books overflowed onto the floor from makeshift shelves assembled from old boards and bricks. The walls were covered in photographs, some framed, others merely tacked in place: brilliant Cibachromes of leaves, forests, wildlife, black-and-white shots of people on the street, and several candid portraits, some of an astonishingly attractive young woman.

  Charley opened up the drawer of the tiny dresser he kept beside the couch. Inside the top drawer was a Glock 30 .45 automatic pistol in a Kydex plastic holster. Two fully loaded magazines were in another Kydex holder. Loose in the drawer with the pistol and ammunition were two knives: an Ernest Emerson Perrin neck knife in a sheath dangling from black parachute cord, and another Emerson, the CQC-7 folding fighting knife. Charley tucked the CQC-7 into the right front pocket of his Levi's, where the fabric was frayed from daily carry of the fighting knife. He hung the neck knife around his neck and tucked the tiny sheath away beneath his shirt where no one would see it. He picked up the pistol and press-checked it, easing back the slide to see the brass of the chambered round, making sure it was loaded. The first round in the chamber and the next three in the magazine locked in the pistol's well were blue-tipped Glaser Safety Slugs that would blast a cantaloupe-sized hole in a man's chest. He returned the pistol to the drawer and draped a loose bandanna over the pistol and the magazines.

  Beside the dresser on the floor was a battered, stained, and frayed canvas Domke camera bag. Charley knelt and opened up the bag. Two identical Nikon F-100s were tucked inside, one wearing a 35–70 2.8 zoom lens, the other one equipped with a 80–200 2.8 lens. There was a 28–200 zoom and a fixed 24mm lens placed in their slots, along with a number of film cartridges— mostly black and white, Tri-X Pan, some 3200 Kodak, along with fewer color slides, the Fuji Velvia and Sensia chromes. What he was looking for was his tiny Olympus Epic, with its astonishingly good 35mm 2.8 fixed lens, which he tucked into the breast pocket of his fleece jacket.

  After all, he never knew when he might have to shoot something.

  Downstairs, the young woman art student who worked mornings in the Linden Hills Diner looked up and smiled when she saw Charley come through the door.

  "Hey, stranger!" she said. "Where have you been?"

  Charley smiled and leaned on the counter. "Hey, Jill. I been hiding out. Had some damn woman banging on my door at three this morning."

  Jill laughed and poured coffee into an oversized mug she took from a rack behind the counter. She measured three spoons of sugar and a dollop of cream into the cup and stirred it till she was satisfied with the color.

  "And so? What did she want?" she said, handing Charley the cup of coffee.

  "I dunno," Charley said. He sipped the coffee and closed his eyes in happiness, the lines of his face unfurling. "I finally just got up and let her out."

  Jill flicked a hand towel at him. "You're so bad, Charley."

  "Quit hitting on my staff, Charley," the owner said. He was lanky and cadaverous with a wry sense of humor. "Where you been? Thought we'd lost you to Sebastian Joe's." He pointed at the ice cream/coffee shop across the street, the only other place in the neighborhood you could sit outside at a table with your coffee.

  "You did lose me, Neil," Charley said. "But they make worse coffee than you do, and the help is prettier over here."

  "You want something to eat?" Neil said.

  "I've got fresh croissants," Jill said. "Special is two croissants and butter with coffee."

  "Twist my arm," Charley said.

  "I'd beat you up," Jill said. She was a sunny brunette with a runner's build. She bustled around behind the counter, leaving the two other people in line looking at each other as she put together a plate for Charley.

  "Here you go," she said, handing him the plate. "You sitting outside?"

  "We don't get enough days like this to waste it inside," Charley said. "Is there a paper around here?"

  "Take Neil's… just bring it back when you're done," Jill said. She handed him a Star-Tribune, still rolled up with the rubber band in place.

  Neil shook his head and went back to the grill. "Wish I could get her to wait like that on the people who pay."

  Charley laughed and slid a five-dollar bill across the counter. "Here, darling. You keep the rest. Tell Neil to stay out of the tip jar, too."

  Charley took his coffee, his plate, and his newspaper, all balanced precariously, out the front door and onto one of the tables that faced out onto Upton Street and caught the full morning sun. It was warm there in the morning sun and his was the last empty table; the others had a smattering of singles and couples, and one regular morning coffee club had pushed two together and were busy dishing gossip on the neighborhood. Charley pushed one of the chairs from his table out in front of him so he could prop his feet up, then sat down. When he sat, the clip of his fighting knife clanged against the metal of the chair. Without looking he pulled his fleece jacket low to hide the clip and cushion it from the metal. He set the paper aside for the moment and took his coffee mug in both hands and sipped slowly and appreciatively from it. After a few minutes he started on the bread and found the croissants to be perfect: flaky, still warm, slightly crusty on the bottom side and deliciously soft inside.

  Charley pressed his chair back against the brick wall behind him and felt the warmth of the bricks through his jacket. He enjoyed th
e different sensations, the sun on his face, warmth on his back, the coolness and the slight chill the early morning air played on his wrists and neck. He shut his eyes for a moment and turned his face to the sun and let the sunshine play across him, the sun dazzling him through his closed eyelids.

  He finished one croissant and took his time buttering the next. The couple at the table beside him looked at him, smiled at each other as though sharing a secret, and went back to their shared newspaper. Charley smiled lazily and nodded and said nothing, as was his custom. He cultivated an ability he'd developed long ago, the ability to tune out noise and distraction to concentrate on what he was doing— and right now what he was doing was drinking the best coffee he could hope for and eating a fine croissant.

  Part of that long-standing habit of concentration was the ability to immediately sort out what was important and what wasn't, and one thing that was important in his life right now was his telephone. He heard, faint and far off from above, the distinctive ring of his cordless phone that sat in its cradle beside the window while it charged. He debated for a moment whether to jog upstairs and answer it, and immediately dismissed the thought as his automatic answering service picked up the message after four rings. Anything really urgent would bring him a message on his pager.

  Charley touched the spot on his belt, just front of his left hip, where he would normally carry his pager and then, to the amusement of the couple beside him, said, "Shit." He fumed for a moment and then laughed. He'd left the pager upstairs. He knew himself well enough to know that unconsciously he didn't want to be bothered this morning and that was why he'd left his electronic leash upstairs.

  He swallowed the last buttered bit of his croissant and washed it down with the rich bottom of his coffee when Jill poked her head out the front door of the diner.

  "Charley?" she said. "There's a phone call for you… it's your friend Bobby Lee. He said it's important."

  Charley moved so quickly it startled the couple beside him. He rolled up out of the chair to his feet, scooping up his coffee cup, the crumb-filled plate, and the unread newspaper, and continued on through the open door Jill held for him.