Scorpio Rising

  From the BMW’s stereo system came a cacophonous roar of Arabic music – bazoukis and tablahs and reed pipes all screaming for attention like a bunch of cats on fire. What the hell…?

  Cassidy jerked open the door. The music assaulted his ears in a near-deafening wave. He heaved himself into the driver’s seat and jabbed at the volume control.

  Two cars over, the music was so loud that Morris turned abruptly, just in time to see Cassidy’s vehicle erupt in a violent fireball. He flattened himself behind his Mustang and narrowly avoided a hailstorm of glass fragments blowing outward from the explosion. When he raised his head a moment later, debris from the BMW was raining down all over the parking lot and what was left of the X5 was burning like an oilcan. Car alarms were going off all around him.

  Within minutes, alarms of a different kind went off all over Los Alamos. Some of them were heard as far away as Washington.

  Chapter 8

  New York

  Carrie Cassidy was at Broadway and Fifty-first by 10:25 PM. As the taxi pulled away, she crossed the street and stationed herself in front of an electronics store. She glanced at a TV on display and was shocked to see herself in a playback from a camcorder on a tripod. She moved away from the camera. That’s all she needed, evidence placing her at the scene. She checked her watch again.

  Across the intersection just east of Broadway, a theatre marquee lit up the front of its building. The doors suddenly opened and hundreds of theatre-goers spilled into the street. People dispersed in all directions, some spreading out along Broadway to hail taxis, others bunching up at the crosswalk waiting for the light to change.

  Carrie felt herself tense up, eyes narrowed as she scanned the unfamiliar faces among the crowd. Relax, she told herself, it’s no different from a cowhand cutting an animal from a herd, just a question of one out-maneuvering the other. Piece of cake when only one of them knows what’s going on.

  The light changed. A group of pedestrians surged onto the crosswalk. Among them were two blondes in their mid-thirties, one in a light beige raincoat, the other in a short red leather jacket. Carrie’s focus jumped back and forth between the two. Then a bearded man took the hand of the leather-jacketed blonde and they swung south on Broadway. Carrie saw this was not the woman whose photos she’d received in the mail last month. The one she now recognized, the blonde in the raincoat, headed east on Fifty-first walking alone.

  Carrie looped her purse strap over her head, thrust her hands in her pockets and followed. She had a golf glove in one pocket which she pulled onto her left hand. Staying on the south side of the street, she paralleled the blonde for most of a block, meanwhile steadily drawing ahead of her.

  At the next intersection, Carrie crossed to the north side, getting about twenty feet ahead of the blonde. It was a deserted stretch of block – a long line of parked cars, some obscene graffiti on a plywood wall where a building was under renovation. Only a few pedestrians were in sight, far ahead on the other side of the street and going the same direction. Carrie glanced over her shoulder. The blonde was still behind her and there was no one else on the street as far back as Broadway.

  Carrie staggered against a parked car, kicking a shoe off. “Oh, Jesus, my ankle!” she yelped, loud enough for the blonde to hear, as she leaned against the nearest fender for support using her gloved hand.

  The blonde began to swing wide of her.

  Carrie stepped away from the car, balancing on one foot as she tried to get her other foot back into her shoe. “Frigging sidewalks. I never should have worn these heels.”

  The blonde paused. “Are you all right?”

  “I think I sprained something.” Carrie flailed an arm, still balanced on one foot. “Give me a hand, would you?” The blonde hesitated, then approached. Carrie put her right arm over the blonde’s shoulder.

  She glanced up and down the street. The nearest pedestrian was half a block distant, going the other way. Now or never.

  Carrie hooked her forearm across the blonde’s neck and clapped her gloved left hand over the woman’s mouth. The blonde bit her. Carrie cursed and yanked her hand free. Before the woman could cry out, she slammed the heel of her gloved hand against her victim’s chin, snapping her head back. With the blonde’s neck still in the crook of her arm, she gave her head a violent twist.

  There was a muffled squeal of pain from the blonde and then, to Carrie’s surprise and alarm, the woman’s right hand came out of her coat pocket with a small red canister. There was a sudden hiss. Carrie caught a bitter whiff of pepper spray as it discharged toward the sidewalk. She seized the blonde’s wrist and rotated sharply left with the woman’s face pulled tight into her jacket to muffle her cries, trying to snap her neck as she’d intended. They turned in a tight circle, still struggling. The blonde tried to punch Carrie with her free hand but only succeeding in thumping the back of her head. Their breathing grew labored. The pepper spray hissed again into the air above their heads.

  Carrie banged the blonde’s hand on the nearest fender, dislodging the pepper spray from her grip. With that threat eliminated, she got a fresh purchase on the blonde’s neck and gave it a savage twist. She heard a satisfying crunch and a gasp from her victim. As the woman suddenly sagged in her arms, Carrie guided her down between two parked cars. The pepper spray lay a foot from the curb. Carrie grabbed it and forced the blonde’s mouth open with her gloved hand.

  “Had to make it hard for me, did you?” Carrie hissed, her jaw clenched with anger. She held the pepper spray in place until its pressure was expended, along with her fury, and everything else.

  Chapter 9

  Toronto

  Axel Crowe whistled a lively blues tune as he approached an apartment building in the Parkdale neighborhood. Lately he’d learned to play Little Girl from one of the early John Mayall albums on which Eric ‘Slowhand’ Clapton had established himself as a guitar god. Now the tune was stuck in his mind day and night.

  Crowe entered the lobby and pressed a button on a mailbox. The door buzzed open and he walked inside. He took the elevator to the seventh floor and arrived at a door with a brass OM symbol mounted above the peephole. He knocked lightly, opened the door and entered. He slipped his shoes off and walked into the living room.

  The place was an incredible clutter. A take-out pizza carton lay on the coffee table. Newspapers littered the floor; stacks of books covered two-thirds of a sofa. Small brass statues of the elephant-headed god Ganesha, Remover of Obstacles, and other Hindu deities stood atop the TV, on window ledges and bookcase shelves. Across the mantle of a fake fireplace, monkey god Hanuman and other deities competed for space, reminiscent of battle scenes from the epic Ramayana.

  Guruji sat in a reclining chair watching the news on TV. He was East Indian, Bengali to be exact, seventy years old but looking ten years younger. His head was shaven and he wore a kurta, a long check-patterned shirt that came to his knees.

  Crowe bent and touched both hands to Guruji’s bare feet, then touched the top of his own head.

  Guruji used his remote to mute the TV. He gestured toward the pizza carton. “Are you hungry?”

  “No thanks. I ate earlier.” Crowe pushed some books aside to make room on the sofa.

  “What did you eat?”

  Crowe shrugged.

  Guruji gave him a canny look. “Something hot and spicy? Something that satisfied your appetite or left you hungry for more?”

  Crowe looked at the floor. There was no right answer to these rhetorical questions. Guruji had the uncanny ability to discern virtually anything about anyone. What color underwear were you wearing? What did you dream of last night? How much money in your wallet? These were parlor tricks Crowe had seen Guruji perform so many times that he’d long ago ceased to be astonished. You could hide no secrets from Guruji. If you’d spent a couple of hours with a woman, you might as well have tattooed all the details right there on your forehead for him to read.

  “What a program! Constant eating is going on. What the eye
s see, the eyes want, and then the belly cannot digest. Better that you should turn your eyes inward before you devour the world.”

  “You would make me a blind man, Guruji?”

  “If you had ears to hear, I could give you eyes to see.”

  “I’m listening.”

  “Listening is not enough. Invite five hundred people to a lecture, only two hundred will come. Of those two hundred, only fifty will listen. Of those fifty, only ten will remember. Of those ten, only one will practice. Where are you?”

  Crowe descended from the sofa and sat cross-legged on the floor. “Right here, Guruji.”

  Guruji sighed. “In the old days, a guru would beat a student with a stick until he wept tears of gratitude. Lucky for you I’ve become civilized from living in Canada too long.”

  “I’m sorry to disappoint you, Guruji.”

  “You are not sorry. You are an omnivore. You just want to eat everything on the table – sound, touch, color, taste and smell.”

  “I am here to learn.”

  “You have learned all you can from me. We are finished with this program.”

  “But there’s so much more. You said you would teach me...”

  “Stop it. You sound like a little kid whose eyes are bigger than his stomach.”

  Crowe looked at the floor. Guruji had told him many times that he was an infomaniac, obsessively collecting concepts and techniques. Crowe acknowledged this truth but at the same time excused it because he was fascinated by the rich spectrum of Vedic thought. But Guruji had said it was all too easy to mistake information for knowledge, that long periods of reflection were necessary to let the big mind catch up to the little mind.

  “We have spent fourteen years together. In that time you have learned many useful tricks. I trust they serve you well.”

  Crowe nodded.

  “It would take me another seven years just to empty your head so we could start a new program. You would learn nothing new. You would have to deny yourself your usual pleasures. Only by letting go of everything coarse could you make yourself pure enough to let the light shine through. Are you ready for that?”

  “I believe I am.”

  Guruji stared at him. “A man says to his parrot, ‘Are you ready to discuss the Bhagavad Gita?’ And the parrot says, ‘I believe I am.’ What do you think?”

  “That’s one smart parrot.”

  “Just because the bird speaks the language doesn’t mean it knows the subject.”

  “You think I’m a parrot, Guruji?”

  “It would be simpler if you were. I’d keep you in a cage away from the female parrots and you’d have eyes and ears only for me.”

  “What do you want of me, Guruji?”

  “Nothing more. We have done our best but now it’s time to go our separate ways.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “It’s time for you to fly away. You need to be with the other parrots.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Yes, you do. And you know that’s why you have to go.”

  Crowe stared at the floor. He’d always known this day would come but he hadn’t known it would come this soon. Perhaps that’s just the way it was, you were never quite as ready as you thought you ought to be. It was all part of the endless ebb and flow, the cycle of seeking, getting and letting go. But to be reborn, you first had to die… Crowe cleared the corner of his eyes with a finger.

  “Don’t cry,” Guruji said. “There was a time when that worked on me, but I have no sympathy for you now. You were a man before you met me, you will be a man once again.”

  “May I have your blessing?”

  “You are already blessed. You need nothing more from me.”

  Guruji laid his hand on Crowe’s head. Crowe sat motionless at Guruji’s feet. Hanuman looked down from the mantelpiece with a magnificent scowl. Even the gods agreed, it was time for him to move on.

  Chapter 10

  San Rafael

  Out on San Pedro Road, traffic approaching the suburb of Peacock Gap found a San Rafael Police Department patrol car blocking the road to China Camp State Park. Three hundred yards further uphill was another SRPD patrol car, an ambulance, a white van and a black sedan. Drivers gawked as they were waved through by a pair of cops wielding flashlights made redundant by the lingering California twilight.

  At the incident scene a female Field Evidence Technician took pictures from different angles of the victim in the ditch. Moving in a crouch along the road, her male partner bagged fragments of glass and orange plastic left behind by the hit-and-run vehicle. A dozen feet away, two ambulance attendants waited for the technicians to finish up so they could take the body to the coroner’s office.

  Detective Fred Hutchins leaned on the fender of an unmarked Ford, talking on his cell phone. In his mid-fifties, Hutchins had a huge shock of snow-white hair and enough extra weight to have made him Santa Claus for the SRPD’s annual Christmas charity event seven years running. Some guys in the department considered him ready for pasture but Hutchins was still helping a daughter through med school and retirement wasn’t in his plans for a few more years.

  On the other side of the road, his partner Detective Jim Starrett, mid-forties, was talking to a guy on a trail bike. Starrett was a rangy six-foot-one with no extra weight on him and had the wind-burned complexion of a weekend sailor. One of Starrett’s guiding principles was ‘Work hard, play hard’, to which either of his two ex-wives might have added ‘party hard’. If anyone looked close enough to distinguish hairline traces of broken blood vessels in his nose and cheeks from the more innocent ravages of sun and wind, there was probable cause to believe the ladies.

  Starrett had a few final words with the guy on the trail bike and stuck his notepad into his back pocket. He crossed the road to speak to the Field Evidence Technician putting her camera back in its case. She and Starrett had an on-and-off thing that was currently off since she’d hooked up with a plumber from Petaluma with a remarkable talent for laying pipe.

  “Finished with my body?” Starrett said.

  “That old thing?” she smirked. “Some time ago.”

  “Time is on my side. You’ll come running back.”

  “Sure, and the South’s gonna rise again.”

  “A lot of things have come back from the dead. Many a time you’ve been pleasantly surprised. Even grateful, however little you like to admit it.”

  She shook her head, conceding her inability to keep up with the smartass repartee that had attracted her in the first place. She could keep up with him in every other way, but his mouth was in a league of its own.

  “Seriously,” she said, looking into the ditch at the crumpled fellow in yellow, “I think we’re done here.” A glance over her shoulder confirmed her partner was sealing his two bags of roadside vehicle debris, apparently sufficient to the task ahead.

  “How soon can we get a vehicle confirmation?”

  “If you’re lucky, maybe within a few hours. Depends on the lab.”

  Starrett whistled to the ambulance attendants. “Okay, boys, let’s get him out of there.”

  The attendants went into the ditch and put Lang’s body on a stretcher. As Starrett watched, Hutchins finished his call and came over to join him. The attendants carried the body to the ambulance. The victim’s face was intact but the jacket of his track suit had turned dark red with blood coughed up in his last minutes of life.

  “I’ve put a bulletin out for a blue Jeep Cherokee with a smashed headlight,” Hutchins said. “In case it’s already back home inside a garage, I asked DMV for a listing of every Jeep in Marin County. You get anything else from the cyclist? Partial plate numbers, description of the driver?”

  “Nope,” Starrett said. “He only spotted the body as he came up the hill, and remembered seeing the Jeep go by a minute earlier.”

  “But he recognized the vic?”

  “Both belonged to the Peacock Gap Golf and Country Club.” From where Starrett and Hutchins stood, they cou
ld see the golf course from here, surrounded by a relatively new subdivision of luxury homes, the like of which honest cops could never call home.

  “His face looked familiar,” Hutchins said. “I must’ve seen him around town.”

  “Maybe in the newspaper. Bernie Lang. High-tech whiz, made a few million in the dot-com heyday. Openly gay but an upstanding member, quote-unquote, of the community, the cyclist said. He lives just down the road apiece in that gated community, Marin Bay Park.”

  “Check out his digs?” Hutchins twirled the silver keychain he’d removed from Lang’s body. They’d found nothing else in his pockets to provide ID. Lucky the cyclist had recognized him, otherwise they’d have faced hours of canvassing door-to-door with a photo of the victim.

  “Let me call Dispatch first, get the right address,” Starrett said. “They can phone his place, give anybody there a heads-up that we’re dropping in for a visit.”

  ~~~

  The entrance to Marin Bay Park was only three hundred yards from where Lang’s body had been found. The gated community had a Y-shaped driveway at the edge of the highway, one gate in and one gate out. Although the entrance gate was closed, awaiting a resident to buzz a visitor in, ironically, the exit gate was open, so Starrett just drove in the wrong way. They followed a serpentine road through some trees up a hill. Lang’s house was right on top of one of Marin County’s many little rolling hills.

  A yellow Porsche Boxster sat in a driveway whose paving stones were bordered on either side by flowerpots, all of which hosted yellow blossoms. Although Starrett prided himself on being able to identify at a glance the make and model of most guns, cars or sailboats, he’d never applied much of his skills to botanical classification.

  “Pretty flowers,” Hutchins observed, summing up all that needed to be said about that. “Guess his favorite color was yellow.”