The Book of Paul -- A Paranormal Thriller (29 page)

I’m in a cloud,
Rose thought
. I’m…in heaven.
At least the way heaven is often depicted in contemporary movies, with a big white background and dry ice fog on the floor. She was really impressed…and feeling impressed was really important after everything that had happened.
If there’s heaven, there’s hope,
she thought, shoring up her confidence.

“So, is this guy your boyfriend?” Michael asked, searching for something to break the silence, unable to stifle the jealousy in his voice.

“Yeah,” Rose nodded, hesitantly. Why did she feel like she was lying?

“Nice tat,” Michael sidetracked, admiring her inked bicep. “Where do you live?”

“Upstairs,” she said, pointing to the ceiling. Was he hitting on her? Who was this kid, anyway? How did he know Martin? Then it finally dawned on her that she could ask him instead. “How do you know Martin?”

“Just met him,” Bean admitted. “I guess he’s known Paul a while.”

“That’s his name?” asked Rose.

Michael nodded with a wince. “Just so you know, that guy is totally…” Bean began, then cut himself off when he noticed a strange light pouring from an open door on the wall facing away from the chair. The light came from an open army footlocker in a closet.

Rose’s heart practically burst with joy.
I knew it. He’s a soldier. Maybe special forces or something.
She pictured Martin in the jungle with camouflage makeup. It was less of a stretch than imagining him sitting in that white chair.

Michael walked to the door. Rose pulled on his jacket, wanting to give him some shit for poking around without Martin here, but the strange glow pulled her like a magnet too. What the hell was it? They stepped inside. When Michael saw what was in the locker, his eyes bugged out like ping-pong balls. Rose had to cover her mouth to keep from shouting.

The locker was filled to the brim with gold.

When Rose stepped into the closet, she was almost as awestruck by the size of the space as she was by the rays of golden light streaming from the locker. But instead of wondering how Martin came to be in possession of enough gold to ransom a Mayan princess, she became totally preoccupied with trying to figure out why his closet was so much bigger than hers. If she had known anything about carpentry, she could have looked up at the ceiling and seen that a new wall had been created that ran the entire length of one side of the room.

Everyone in Manhattan complains about closet space. Not Martin. When he didn’t have enough room to suit his needs he simply made some more. The added wall had the dual advantage of making his “sitting room” perfectly square (ah, symmetry!) while creating ninety-six square feet of extra space. He could fit a lot of stuff in there.

After her initial excitement wore off, Rose became more aware of all that other stuff. There was a clothes rack and a dresser and a small cot next to a tiny table and a lamp. There was a bookshelf above the pillow on the cot and a poster of a painting by Andrew Wyeth called
Christina’s World
taped to the ceiling above it.

“Holy shit,” she whispered upon realizing that this extremely big closet was actually an extremely small bedroom. “Is this how people who sleep in cardboard boxes feel?”

Then she saw the chair. It was at the foot of the cot facing the wall. It was a little kid’s chair with an embroidered pillow and a ratty stuffed dog sitting on top of it. She picked up the pillow and was about to read it when she saw Michael kneel in front of the footlocker.

“Whoa!” he gasped reverently, drawn to the gold like a beaver to wood. It was all he saw and all he ever wanted to see. He dug both hands into the gleaming heap with all the fervor of…well…a drunken pirate. “Yarrrgh!” He didn’t say it, but as he dug his hands in deeper and deeper (oh my God it goes all the way to the bottom!) he felt woozy with desire.

“Whoa!” he repeated. Rose set the pillow down without reading it and walked over. The light from the single bulb overhead made the gold sparkle like ocean waves at sunset. It was the most beautiful thing she’d ever seen.

So this is why you always see people throwing coins in the air when they find a treasure chest.
It was exactly what she wanted to do and it almost hurt that she couldn’t. She couldn’t, of course, out of respect for Martin. That, plus a healthy dose of trepidation over what he would do if he saw them in his closet at all, never mind throwing his gold rapturously in the air.

Where did he get all this?
Shit. He had stolen it, of course. He really was a criminal. A thief and a killer.
Or maybe a merc!
she thought, still trying to pull a plum out of the pie. Why she thought being a merc was more palatable than a thief or a hit man didn’t occur to her; she was just happy to come up with any explanation for the footlocker that didn’t imply that Martin was even more dangerous and demented than her father.

Strangely enough, some of Rose’s speculations about Martin’s career path were correct. He had been a soldier and later, a mercenary, if the assignments were challenging enough. He enlisted in the navy when he was just sixteen, only a few months after leaving Paul, signing up mainly to get as far away as he could from anywhere he had ever been before. He used one of his many fake identities (Dan White was still his favorite) to fool the recruiters, not that they cared much anyway. His drill instructor was so impressed with his already finely-honed combat skills that he was immediately trained as a SEAL.

Martin enjoyed it immensely. He liked swimming underwater in that cool, dark, silent world. He liked blowing things up. He liked it so much that he resigned after his first tour of duty, just so he could enlist in the Army and train as a Green Beret. He enlisted everywhere except NASA…which he still harbored regrets about. The military life was a hard life, but compared to those years with Paul, it was like a trip to Disney World. And along with the rigorous lifestyle, there was a regimental predictability he found extremely comforting. But after a while, he got tired of taking orders from men he respected even less than Paul, so he packed away his uniforms and became a mercenary, only to discover that he hated taking orders from petty despots and contract soldiers even more than his previous commanders.

He bummed around for a while before settling into his current abode. Then one rainy afternoon, while he was leafing through
Soldier of Fortune,
an ad for bounty hunters caught his eye. It sounded perfect. It was, for the first three years. He was his own boss and could pick his own assignments. Nobody to report to. Even better, no one to talk to. He preferred hunting sex offenders, pedophiles in particular. He liked catching them…
dead or alive,
as the saying goes.

However, none of those previous professions in any way accounted for the vast amount of gold Michael and Rose were staring at so intently. Michael had a much more informed deduction about the treasure’s origin, not that it mattered to him right now. He only knew one thing. He wanted it. He wanted it bad. His mind went into overdrive trying to figure out how he could possibly wrangle it away from someone as incredibly lethal as Martin.

But he was injured now, wasn’t he? Fuckin’ A right he was! He sure as shit wasn’t at the top of his game now! Maybe Paul would be interested in knowing more about this situation. Maybe he would help him. Maybe they could be partners!

The instant he thought about teaming up with Paul, his euphoria evaporated. Paul didn’t seem like the kind of guy you could talk to about partnerships. Definitely not equal partnerships. On the other hand, a finder’s fee wouldn’t be out of the question, would it?

Shit. He had to have that gold. He had to!

Back in the kitchen, Paul was edging uncomfortably close to Martin.

“I’m guessing it’s been a while since you had your pipes cleaned, and I can’t fault you for feeling some loyalty to this feisty wench for helping you out of that scrape downstairs. But now that you’ve put the plumbing in, what other good can come from this sordid little tryst? Do you really think you’re doing her a favor bringing her into this cramped little lockbox you call a life? If she ever finds out who you really are and what you’ve done, d’ya reckon she’ll keep hangin’ around? Trust me, even if you’re riding her tall in the saddle, you’re certainly no one’s idea of Prince Charming. She’ll leave you high and dry just like she thought of doing a few minutes back. You saw her looking at the door. You can’t trust her. A girl like her is no different from slow-acting poison. You might as well gargle with Drano and spare yourself the wait. So now it’s time for you to put all those warm, fuzzy feelings back inside your zipper and wave this bitch a sad farewell!”

“No!” Martin yelled, standing toe to toe with Paul again. “I won’t!”

Paul shoved Martin’s gasping chest so hard he knocked him back on the table.

“You don’t understand me, boy!” he yelled fiercely. “That girl is not for you!”

“What do you mean, she’s not for me?” Martin shouted with equal passion, trying to get up from the table while Paul pinned him down by the shoulders.

“She’s only going to hurt you more in the end,” Paul lied, pressing down harder.

“No!” Martin shouted, not knowing what else to say, or even what he was feeling.

Paul bit his lip, trying not to laugh. But as he felt the depth of loneliness and despair howling from every pore of Martin’s being, as he saw the tiny whirlpool rising in the whites of his eyes, he experienced a surge of emotion he didn’t think he was still capable of feeling.

“It’s…okay,” he said haltingly, easing his pressing hands. “It was wrong of me to interfere. This is your life and you’re entitled to the pleasures you can take from it. I’ll leave you two alone now…and you can sort all this out for yourself.”

Martin eyed Paul suspiciously. When he saw the sadness in his face, he felt a glimmer of hope. “Do you mean it?” he asked, his eyes probing for any trace of deceit.

“Yes,” Paul answered, shocked to feel a lump in his throat.

Martin slowly rose from the table and gave Paul a hug so strong it hurt his gun wound. Paul hugged him back even harder. They backed up a foot and looked into each other’s eyes. Then Paul squeezed the back of his neck between his massive thumb and forefinger and Martin fell to the floor like a tipped cow.

Pow!
The sound of the thud reverberated through the walls and floor. Paul knelt over Martin’s body and made sure no serious damage was done. When he was certain he was simply unconscious and would remain so for approximately eight more minutes, Paul straightened up and shook his head sadly.

“Martin…will you ever learn?”

Rose didn’t hear the thud as much as she felt it. Martin had soundproofed the closet, so it was difficult to hear anything above the din of golden nuggets cascading into the locker through Bean’s greedy fingers. She hadn’t heard the yelling. But the thud? That she felt.

Michael felt it too. He was terrified. They looked at each other and the door leading back to the kitchen. Neither wanted to move. They watched silently, ears pricked up like hound dogs’, waiting for the aftershock. When none came, Michael relaxed a little.