Authors: Bryan Smith
“It’s summer. I open the windows a lot.”
She eyed him disdainfully. “It’s stupid to make yourself so vulnerable. There’s a world full of predators out there. I should know, seeing how I’m one of them. On the other hand, it allowed me to get in here and save your ass.”
Casey nodded. “See. I was thinking ahead, planning for all contingencies.”
Echo sat up. “I need to call my friends and let them know what’s going on. They expected me back a while ago.”
Casey sat up too. “Who are these friends?”
Echo glanced at him as she slid off the bed and headed for the door. “Dez and Lana. My partners in crime.”
Then she was out the door and headed down the hallway. Moments later he heard her voice and realized she was talking to someone on a phone. Her phone, he guessed, which presumably was with her discarded clothes in the kitchen. Her tone was soft at first but quickly became more agitated. He couldn’t know exactly what was being said on the other end of the conversation, but the gist of it was easy to discern. Her friends were unhappy about her extended absence, but they were even less happy about her decision not to kill him after all.
She was dressed again by the time she returned to the bedroom. No more sex then, at least not for now. Casey was again taken aback by the depth of his renewed desire for her. It was temporarily making him forget about a lot of important things, like what to do about Keely.
She stared at him without speaking for a moment. There was a glint in her eyes that indicated her thoughts weren’t far removed from what he was thinking. Then she breathed a regretful sigh and said, “You need to get dressed.”
“You need to get undressed.”
This earned him a roll of her blue eyes, but a small smile played at the edges of her mouth. “Wish I could, baby. But we’re getting out of here. So get up and put your fucking clothes on.”
Casey moved to the edge of the bed and swung his legs over the side. “Where are we going?”
A troubled look clouded Echo’s features. “To meet my friends.”
Casey frowned. “I don’t know. I heard you talking out there. Doesn’t sound like they much care for me.”
Echo snorted. “They don’t even fucking know you. Well, not aside from the shit I’ve been telling them about you, which admittedly has kinda prejudiced them against you. They were very supportive of the idea of me getting some closure by capping your ass.”
“Normally I’d say it’s good to have supportive friends, but in this case…”
“You might want to knock off the whole wiseass thing when you meet them. You’re kinda gonna be on trial. You’ve got to make them like you and that’s not gonna be easy, especially with Dez.”
“Why? What’s her deal?”
“She hates men.”
“Well, that’s reassuring.”
“Again with the sarcasm.” Echo shook her head. “You’re doomed.”
Casey got off the bed and headed out to the kitchen with Echo right behind him. He pulled on his jeans and shirt and sat in a chair to put on his socks and shoes. He looked up at Echo as he tied the laces. “Look, I get that you have reasons for wanting me to meet these people, but I can’t put off dealing with this Keely thing. I can’t take time out to meet your friends when I should be working out my next moves. Plus…” He waved a hand around at the carnage in the kitchen. “I’ve got to figure out what to do about all this.”
“I may have an idea.”
Casey cocked an eyebrow at her. “Oh, really? Because I’ve got a confession to make. I don’t have the first fucking clue what to do.”
“Lana has a friend who might be able to help. A shady big money guy. He’s gotten us out of some of our stickier situations.”
“And why would he help me?”
Echo shrugged. “I’m not saying he will. I’m saying
maybe
he will. It’ll depend on the impression you make on Lana. You’ve got to try really hard to make her like you. And then there’s the other reason you can’t stick around here.”
“That being?”
Echo sniffed. “Because, Casey,” she said, enunciating the words with deliberation, as if addressing a “slow” person. “Before long the guy who sent these dead motherfuckers will start to wonder why they’re not reporting back to him. He might then send more thugs around to see what’s up. You probably won’t want to be around when that happens.”
“Oh. Yeah. That’s a good point.”
Echo shook her head. “It’s a wonder you managed to survive a year without me around.”
Casey stood up. “Fine. Let’s go meet your friends. But it’s on you if they kill me.”
Echo smiled. “But maybe that’s been the real plan all along.”
Casey eyed her carefully a moment before giving his head a wry shake. “You’re evil.”
Echo just laughed.
After gathering all the available weaponry, they walked out of Casey’s house.
Neither of them would ever return.
Chapter Fifteen
Two days after the shootout on 2
nd
Avenue
A time of hard reckoning was nearly at hand. John Wayne de Rais believed this with a conviction that easily eclipsed anything in his conman past. The Order of Wandering Souls had started as yet another attempt to part fools from their money, but it had become so much more than that.
There was a certain kind of fragile, possibly damaged soul that was eager to believe in an imminent collapse of the social order. These people saw the modern world as corrupt to the core, as a festering cesspool tainted by excessive greed and self-interest. It was a viewpoint John was able to exploit with instinctive ease and skill. He told his new audience the things he knew they wanted to hear, affirmations of all their darkest fears. He talked to them about how there was a handful of mysterious and very powerful men who controlled the bulk of the global economy and pulled the strings of political leaders behind the scenes. It was essentially a repackaging of the Illuminati myth, though he never used that term out of concern it would invoke kneejerk skepticism. But his followers found it easy to believe in a shadowy collective that controlled world affairs and relentlessly trampled on the downtrodden. After a while, John began to infuse his sermons with warnings of a coming revolution, a time when the downtrodden would rise up and wrest control of the world out of the hands of the puppeteers. The popularity of the Order began to surge, at least in part because so many of those damaged souls he’d courted also wanted to believe in revolution.
At some indefinable point along the way, John began to believe in it too. In part it was because he had spent so much of his life believing in nothing. And he had reached an age where it felt important to replace the soulless emptiness inside him with something that had real meaning. He began to wonder whether he might be a spiritual vessel of some sort, the means by which God would bring about the great cleansing that would allow the world to start afresh. Maybe that had been the real purpose behind his existence all along and he was just now awakening to it.
The shootout downtown had changed things yet again. It was impossible not to see the incident as a watershed event in the history of the Order. There were more eyes on them than ever now, both in the media and in law enforcement. The national press had even taken note of them for the first time, including reports on all the major cable news outlets. At any other point in his life, John would have shied away from such scrutiny. There were too many skeletons in his closet waiting to be unearthed. With this kind of attention, it was inevitable he would be linked to some of his previous scams. Even now his old instincts were telling him it was time to ratchet things down until the heat wore off.
But it was too late for that now.
This was his moment, his time to make his mark on the world. If things unfolded the way he hoped, he would likely be dead or in jail very soon, but it didn’t matter because either way his legacy would be secured. The world would remember John Wayne de Rais and his deeds for generations to come.
And maybe, just maybe, the events he was about to set in motion would provide the spark for a real revolution.
He was backstage at the compound’s community hall. This was where the faithful gathered every week to hear him speak about the coming great change that would signal the end of a dying world order. He could hear their murmuring voices on the other side of the curtain. There was a palpable extra level of excitement in the air. Though most of them were not allowed access to media, all were aware of the incident that had occurred. Many of them had been interviewed by the police in the intervening days. As a result, the rumor mill was working overtime. There was talk that a raid on the property was imminent. John Wayne had no idea whether this was true, though he suspected it was inevitable.
All the more reason to set the wheels in motion sooner rather than later.
He reviewed his handwritten notes a final time before folding the two sheets of lined notebook paper and shoving them into a hip pocket of his jeans. He glanced down at his hands, which were shaking ever so slightly. There was nothing he could do about this, just as there was little he could do about the throbbing ache behind his eyes. He withdrew a vial of pills from an inner pocket of his blazer, the shaking in his hands increasing as he worked to unscrew the cap. When he did finally get it open, he immediately popped three pills into his mouth and grimaced as he dry-swallowed them.
He breathed a tired sigh.
The pills would help a little—but not nearly enough, nor for long enough.
Before stepping out onto the stage, he peered through the part between the curtains at his audience. There wasn’t a single unoccupied seat in the house. Many more Order members were standing against the back wall.
John couldn’t help smiling.
Standing room only, literally.
There were a few notable absences that couldn’t be helped, but nearly the entire Order membership was under this roof this morning. The speech he was about to deliver would be the most important he’d given since founding the Order. Everything was riding on his ability to fire up the faithful in just the right way. And John Wayne had total faith in his ability to do just that.
He cleared his throat, moved through the part between the curtains, and strode confidently out to the podium at the front of the stage to thunderous applause.
Keely was not allowed to attend John Wayne’s momentous speech to the faithful. Though this was disappointing, it did not come as a surprise. She had been kept out of sight since shortly after returning from that debacle on 2
nd
Avenue. A scheme to cover up her identity as the target of the kidnapping attempt had been set in motion almost immediately after Casey was forced to flee the scene. She had been spirited away by Order security before the police could arrive and clamp things down. Another young blonde girl who had been part of the recruiting party that day wound up acting as her stand-in. The scheme worked thanks to the chaos surrounding the event.
She assumed this was a contingency plan that had been in place since her ascension into John Wayne’s inner circle. But it was more than just that. They didn’t want the police to track Casey down for inscrutable reasons. He knew things that could hurt the Order, supposedly. Also, John had a real thing for her. All she had to do was look at him the right way and he would get hard. So a desire to shield the hot young piece of ass he’d taken as a lover was maybe part of it too. Yet another factor was her brother’s original bungled attempt to snatch her away from the Order’s clutches.
Thinking about that stoked her anger anew. Butting in where he wasn’t wanted was just like Casey. He had been pulling this concerned big brother routine forever even though she was actually the older sibling. It had gotten old a long time ago and it was high time he left her alone to make her own decisions about her life. If anything good had come out of the events of the other day, it was the shedding of the last vestiges of his former psychological hold on her. She had a new family now and a new purpose in life—to serve John Wayne and the Order.
Her comfortable new living space was more proof that her recent choices had been the right ones. There had been some rough times and many uncertain moments, but she knew now she was right where she belonged. John Wayne had installed her in a second-floor room of the big house. A large window in a corner of the room overlooked the cabins where the Order’s lower level initiates lived—where she had lived until just a few days. She stood at the window now, staring out at the warm yellow light visible through the windows of the gathering hall.
Most of John Wayne’s congregation was inside that building, listening raptly as the great man delivered another of his stirring, inspiring speeches. Keely wished she could be there with them. She imagined John’s booming voice resonating powerfully inside the building. Though he was far older than she was, that voice always stirred something primal and libidinous within her. But that wasn’t the only reason she wished she could be there this morning. John had been telling her of a big change on the horizon. The Order was at the forefront of a coming revolution that would shake the world to its foundations. To an outsider this would undoubtedly sound like a lot of overblown bullshit, just so much blustery rhetoric to pump up the faithful. But to the true believers it was akin to the holy word of God, wisdom handed down from on high.