Praise for Robert W.
Walker's
City for Ransom
"
"Walker's
taken on Caleb Carr's territory, upgrading it to a dark dirge of demonic grace
with a superb haunted protagonist with a graveyard on his back…alongside the
most eccentric character to shadow the halls of noir in a long time. It's the best pairing of two damaged souls
since Lucifer chose an ally…while nailing
"Gut-wrenchingly
suspenseful, luridly atmospheric, and utterly plausible,
"City
is crime noir at its finest." –David Ellis, Edgar Award Winner, author In the Company of Liars
"Chicago World's
Fair pageantry juxtaposed by outrageously colorful characters… evoking the city's
mystical past as neither gala nor carefree. Inspector Alastair Ransom's
Other Books by Robert W. Walker
Alistair Ransom
City Series
City of the Absent (2008)
Shadows in the
City for Ransom
Jessica Coran
Instinct Series
Absolute Instinct
Grave Instinct
Unnatural Instinct
Bitter Instinct
Blind Instinct
Extreme Instinct
Darkest Instinct
Pure Instinct
Primal Instinct
Fatal Instinct
Killer Instinct
Edge Series
Final Edge
Cold Edge
Double Edge
Cutting Edge
PSI
Psychic Sensory Investigation
Blue
By
Robert W. Walker
PSI:
Blue
A Psychic Sensory
Investigation Thriller
Book One
An Echelon Press Book
First Echelon Press paperback printing / December 2006
All rights Reserved.
Copyright © 2006 by Robert W. Walker
Art Design © Stephen Walker
Titling Design ©
2004 Ariana "Best in Category" Award winner
Echelon Press
9735 Country
www.echelonpress.com
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or
reproduced in any m
For information address Echelon Press.
ISBN 978-1-59080-508-4
1-59080-508-9
Paperback
1-59080-509-7 E-Book
Library of Congress Control Number: 2006931527
Printed in the
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Prologue
"You be good," said Carnivore Man as he slapped on the
last of the paint, covering Toby's hair and head and the last unpainted portion
of his face–even as the squealing old merry-go-round took Toby off again for
another revolution.
"You be good, boy, and maybe I'll let you live,"
Carnivore man said just before Toby spit in his eye.
Toby Slayter, on his thirteenth birthday, had awakened to a
kaleidoscope of color and the sound of Calliope music filling his mind; so loud
in fact, it seemed to smother him, and yet no one came rushing to his rescue in
this strange back-of-the-yards area of the carnival. No one wanted to challenge
Satan.
The villainous man, in paint-streaked, rainbow-colored red pants
and shirt, dribbled orange, yellow, green, and blue from his palette, but
mostly he slapped the child with a paintbrush dripping with blood-orange Kilz; Sears' cheapest oil-base bulk buy–an exterior deck
coating. He was nearly finished with his masterpiece. Just had to do the
close-in work of the recesses about the nostrils, the coil of the ears, and the
eyelids. Usually the hardest part to deal with. Kids fought like hell during
the finishing touches, but soon after, the skin, unable to breathe, they'd quit
flailing.
Toby would join two other 'works of human art' in the spook house.
One, an eye-popping chartreuse, the other a neon moon-glow yellow, so a
blood-orange kid would set the others off perfectly. Some of Satan's victims
didn't get that honor or ease of passing; others–for no reason the
handyman-turned-murderer could fathom–somehow invited a weeklong torture
session. It was satanic of him, he knew, but it was the only way he could feel
anything; only through the pain and suffering of a child, could he arrive at
any sort of heightened sexual gratification. He understood the needs of the
infamous child killers labeled as sociopaths, like the Red Demon of Russia in
the film Citizen X. Some would call
him a monster. Some scientific types, like those who trained under Dr. Mitchell
Graham and FBI agents who understood the inner workings of
He consoled himself that all art must first pleasure the artist,
perhaps more in the doing than in the
final product, and he was an artist after all, in love with process. However
macabre the content. The children on the street and those who found their way
to the carnival, and especially those who found their way to his side of the
curtain, just called him Satan. They knew intuitively in their little hearts
and minds and spleens that Satan always assumes, on this plane, a pleasing
human form. "The Devil made me do it," has everything to do with the
supernatural taking on a natural shape. In this case, that of a humble man
doing a simple, necessary job that brought a smile to the lips of a child.
It's been proven by authorities and demonstrated on Oprah's TV
show that children don't heed warnings, and whose fault was that?
Certainly not his, and not even Satan's. Kids gotta learn; in a
sense, he dispensed a public service here. His victims brought it on themselves.
All he did was put out the lure. If these damned kids weren't evolved enough to
avoid his simple lures, what kind of future did they have in the first place?
And if not painted and put on display here, what else lay ahead for them? They
invited him across a certain threshold when they accepted him, when they eased
back on their natural instincts and their God-given gift of fear, getting comfy
around him. He then took complete and swift advantage like a long-tongued frog
that strikes a fly at an impossible distance. Not the frog's fault, frog is
just following its frog nature.
1
Children at play in the shadow of a wrecking ball that beats a
rhythm with jackhammer screams, all amid squalor and trash and discarded
bottles, broken pyramids of brick in dusky red and gray yards like a red bone
factory. It's a dream. Just a recurring dream, part of Aurelia's brain tells
her, but the other part sees the images. Discards mixed with dull brown adobe
crumbling to dirt…all visited by and bathed in a blinding blue light that
transforms the brickyard of destroyed buildings into a lush green-carpeted park
filled with stylized, rigid trees in a land where no wind blows, where even the
leaves resist change, and sadly, no birds flirt among the unbending branches.
Within this eerie stillness, a verdant Gauguin-like green hue is
cast overall, replacing all that is dirty red brick and dull with a warm,
glowing still life. In this painting, children are now angels in stiff-winged
pose, lifting up on tiptoe to embrace one another, some floating in the thralls
of their embrace like Chagall lovers. However, the overall effect lacks beauty
and flowing life, as the angels, like the trees, rigidly pose like cutouts
placed against a canvas not wanting them, or painted with hesitation, perhaps trepidation.
Fear of a wrong rendering? A separate backdrop overall in this oil on canvass
world comes now again–a pair of curious childlike eyes framed in a rectangle
opening in the sky, looking on in curious wonder.
Eyes looking on. The eyes of God? Those of an angel, a cherub? No,
Aurelia recognizes the questioning orbs as her own, at perhaps age five or six.
Yes, they are her innocent eyes. She is like the artist Dali, who painted
himself into his own canvass, depicting himself as a child dressed in a sailor
suit, holding a balloon and observing the strange life created from his own
mind, curiously wondering at its existence, purpose, and meaning–and wondering
if perhaps it came via some supernatural filter or challenge or ch
Like Dali, Aurelia often felt the same way while looking on at her
own visions. What did it mean, and why the dark horn-rimmed edges of a frame
around her eyes, like seeing herself in a rearview mirror? Only the bridge of
her nose showed with her symmetrical black eyebrows. A penetrating, searching
black Asian eye on the left, and a cerulean blue eye on the right. One eye
stamped her Japanese, the other indelibly her mother's Irish child.
It was as if she looked in from out of a box, some kind of trap. Caged
perhaps. Only able to see from a tiny barred window in the corner of the
universe the size of a wheelbarrow…relegated to the point of view of a single
restraining portion of a canvass too vast to contemplate at once.
Painting, art–it was at the heart of this mystery: To all who enter this garden of children
beware. Beware its lull, its lure, its peace, as mere illusion within illusion;
some powerful message, some thematic counterpart, some echo of whispers, some
inherent warning as when Aurelia's mother so often said, "A curse can be
wrapped in a compliment."
Some warnings go up like red flags, but the moment was shattered
again by the strange mantra of metallic noise: Ba-Kerrrack! Ba-kerrrack! Ba-kerrrack!
The new environment is a dream within a dream, from some far away
place on a distant dimension; Aurelia's Irish Wiccan
mother might decipher it in her unique way, her Buddhist father quite another. She
could hear her mother's reassuring voice now: Dear one, it's just a dream. Dreams can't hurt you.
How wrong could a mother be?
Aurelia's deceased mother kindly lied. You can put your mind at ease; find pleasing sleep, if you put effort
into it.
"But Mother, shouldn't pleasing sleep come effortlessly?"
she'd asked at age four.
"The darkness within that tells you to embrace your fears can
make you strong in a dangerous world," had been her mother's reply.
Now this 'harmless' adult dream had come repeatedly, had evolved as
a series of screenings now for over a month. The children had not at first had
angel wings; now they did, and they kissed one another in less rigid m
And there was the oddly angelic blue light bathing the scene.
The angel children played lovely music. They splashed in the
fountain, giving vent to gaiety and mirth, when suddenly a sinister darkness
obliterated the blues and greens, until an inky blackness covered all. Then a
red glow filled the sky like an angry single Cyclops' eye, blotting out even
her window on the scene for a flashing, blinding, explosive second.
The devastated landscape returned with added horror, bodies now
buried in the rubble that had been the brickyard.
Then the brickyard became fluid, the red bricks dissolving into
clay, then mud, and next morphing into a red ocean. In this flaming ocean lay,
naked and helpless, the angels joined by humans, male, female, child and adult
alike. Now in a writhing river of one another's bodies, the features and limbs
of the child angels all coalesced, as if mixing colors in a jar–bodies
spiraling fluidly–blood dropped into water.
They all hung below the surface of the red ocean current that had
engulfed and obliterated the greenery and the blue light. They lay caught in a
tangle of coral wreath that cut and bled them. Like a dancer with graceful
moves, straddling the children as a giant, a Lucifer creature with a dragon's
tale like an external backbone thrashed as he stood dominating the helpless,
writhing masses below him.
Nothing of kindness or caring, nothing but horror and mutilation
filled the mind of the Hellion as he stabbed children with his scorpion's tail,
paralyzing each with its stinger. Then the red demon in the red sea devoured
each helplessly paralyzed blood-orange-red child with a glee beyond joy. Repeatedly,
the small angelic life of each prisoner in this strange coral nest disappeared
into the demon as if swallowed whole.
Aurelia Murphy Hiyakawa awoke in her night slip, nestled in her
bed, her wide Oriental eye jade black, her Celtic eye blue in the darkness–both
searching the room even as her brain searched the horrible dream for useful
clues, images, symbols that might make sense. But nothing of the sort readily
leapt to fill in the blanks of what this extraordinarily powerful vision might
portend.
"Does it ever?" she audibly reminded herself.
She realized now that shivers shot through her. The images had
been so cartoonish–surreal; yet real beyond mere
dream to what Jung called the Big Dream–the life-altering dream. On the order
of the one that'd sent her to a divorce lawyer to alter her real life
accordingly, else live in a perpetual state of suffocation.
Aurelia's best friend, Etta, scoffed once, "Aurelia Murphy
Hiyakawa, you are the only person I know who ever divorced a man on the say-so
of a little bad dream."
"It was no little
dream; it was a big-assed nightmare! A
whopping compensatory one at that, and Carl Jung would've run screaming from
that marriage long before I did."
Now this dream. So real.
So much so that she prophetically guessed it related to one of her cases at FBI
headquarters, but which one and how? So large, this dream, that her thin frame
had shaken and perspired from the heat of Satan's coral reef! A fiery bubbling
cauldron amid a reef that burned with far-reaching fingers below the unnatural
waters of Satan's domain until you looked closer and realized the bloody reef
was made up of bloody bodies.
"Silly," she told herself and the silent room. "I
don't even believe in freakin' Satan or a place
called Hell." Aside from learning self-protection in the form of Jujitsu
from her Buddhist father, Aurelia had learned that Hell was the negative life
some people chose.
Her kindly father had told her once that in a sense, planet Earth
was the asylum for the universe and that's why mankind was placed here. That
the human race was a child, and in need of much therapy. And that heaven and
hell existed only in the mind. "We control the controls in perception. Perceiving
the world and ourselves positively is up to us." He would smile and add, "One
day science will catch up to mysticism and prove it right."
In any event, Hell was not a physical location where demons and
devils and agents of Satan sat about contemplating attacks on mankind. Much as
the egocentric child called mankind wanted to believe–but such symbolism
floated about in the minds and genetic wiring of countless generations of
Christians and other religious followers. So the symbolism and the sum of all
such fears could certainly be counted on to have meaningful resonance.
But what were these recurrent images and sounds and that stifling,
choking air filled with odors of earth and vermin and metal and decay and
sweetness like the mix of flowers left too long at a gravesite mingling with
oils and canvass and blood?
Why did such things assail her now with these odd night sweats? Something
wicked just over her horizon–coming at her with such force as to have sound and
odor? And from what mysterious source?
Who had repeatedly sent these signals that held her telepathic
mind in such rapt embrace? No answer came.
Who seemed bent on her receiving such horrid snapshots from the
ether of an astral plane as busy and as populated with thoughts as conscious
life populated with the babble of tongues? No ready reply.
Who created the PSI world that set sub-atomic nano-images
adrift on a psychic wind, which bombarded every sentient creature on the planet?
A wind invisible to, and ignored by, all save a few? Still no answer.
Who were the angels…the children? What time frame was it? Past,
present, future? Where might the greenest ever park bathed in bluest ever sky
be? Was it a real place or a figurative one? A billboard sign on I-95 or a
rural
She stared across at her image in the mirror. She saw a beautiful
woman with a mix of Asian and Caucasian features in a blue chemise nightgown
alone in bed, seemingly destined to be alone for the rest of her life.
"Perhaps the horror of the bad recurrent dream is beginning
to take its toll," she told her image and brushed back her long-flowing
black hair with both hands.
The dream had begun soon after the divorce. Perhaps it was as Lyn
Polkabla, her shrink, said: "It
merely reflects your inner turmoil, Aurelia–the angel in you being overwhelmed
by Tomi Yoshikani's venomous and self-centered need to punish you."
"Punish me? For what? He's the one that broke our marriage
vows, and became abusive!"
"All the more reason for him to hate you for divorcing him. The
arrogant Japanese-American mogul some call the Japanese Donald Trump? And you sue
him for divorce and child support? Get real."
Aurelia knew she'd never see a dime of child support or alimony
from the cheating bastard and consummate liar. He had an army of lawyers
arrayed against her.
Sure, the dream was compensatory, reflecting her current life and
its overwhelming problems. An idyllic comfortable lifestyle gone, replaced by
an uncertain future.
This satanic takeover of the green garden–certainly it could all
pertain to the war going on within her deepest psyche, the war that had sent
the demon in her life, Tomi, on the path to destroy her. The very person he
once proclaimed his one true, undying love–along with Nia, their daughter.
She desperately tried to piece the dream and the reality together,
starting with the question of how Tomi had first become estranged, then
verbally abusive, and mentally cruel to only graduate to open physical abuse
that began with breaking and throwing things, and evolved into wanting to break
or throw her. Painfully, she had not seen it coming. And she had not predicted
his having gotten involved with other women. Yet she called herself a
clairvoyant, a seer, a medium.
Her marriage ended one night in a spat of fighting and with her
sending Tomi packing at the point of her Smith and Wesson FBI .38 special.
Sure, the children with angel wings must represent her and her
daughter Nia. Like the angels, Nia's brightly painted world had become utterly
desolate and grim, thanks to a faceless, nameless force that had taken up
residence in her father. Tomi, who'd once been a loving, caring, tender man.
Yes, this made sense now. Her dream was exactly what Dr. Polkabla
said: "A dream that compensates for
what's going on in your waking life, Rae. Your unconscious attempting to deal
with your conscious decisions and choices–good, bad and misguided."
One of the children dying alongside her and the other children in
the dream park kept pointing an accusing finger. Nia, she imagined. Her once
loving daughter, so filled with an unconditional love before now…now blamed
Aurelia for the loss of her father. The poor child had witnessed the ugly final
fight, and she'd seen the gun her mother had wielded at dear old Dad.
Aurelia accepted what her mind told her about the images now in
relentless pursuit of her. "It has to be what Dr. Polkabla says," she
whispered to her image just to hear herself again.
Then she heard a noise in the house that had its share of things
that went bump in the night. But this…this was something new. She'd bought the
old place in a rash moment of "smart" investing with the nod of her
financial advisor as a write off and a future for Nia–under the mistaken belief
that payments would coincide with alimony installments. It was to've become a cash cow for Nia when she was old enough to
take it over. At the back of the plan, also, lie the fear. A recurrent fear
that one day Nia would be left alone, that Aurelia would die in the line of
duty.
"In my line of work," she'd told Nia on more than one
occasion, "anything can happen."
But the old bed and breakfast, her 'cash cow' had already become
the ugly 'heffer'–a complete money pit! It was an
exceptional day when the old place didn't demand attention and repair or
announce another problem in the form of a groan or a squeal.
Rae slid from beneath the sheets and out of bed, and silently
found her bedside weapon of choice, a heavy Glock 9 millimeter.
She inched toward the door, down the corridor, looking in on a
sleeping Nia for a moment. Knowing there were no guests in the old bed and
breakfast house until tomorrow, knowing too that her live-in maid Enriquiana
had the weekend off to visit her mother in
She held the huge firearm ahead of her, prepared to fire, capable
of it, trained to it. Again, more noise. The source, the kitchen. Someone
coming through the sliding glass doors in there.
She tentatively reached out for the light switch, an image of the
satanic beast of her dreams coming through her back door, and she hesitated
turning the light on. What if she were confronted with the very demon of her
nightmare–Tomi Yoshikani doing some sort of O.J.
number, coming at her like a Ninja in the night?
At the instant she turned on the light, a toaster fell to the
floor with a rattle, and she shouted, "Freeze or I shoot!"
The dark shadow screamed in the same instant, "Geez, Ma! Don't
shoot! It's me, Nia!"
Aurelia stared at her fully clothed daughter sneaking back into
the house from a night of partying with God knows who and God knows where. Meanwhile,
Nia shook, obviously terrified that in the next nanosecond a bullet would rip
through her insides like they'd seen so many times on TV and in the movies.
"I can't believe you were going to kill me!"
Aurelia looked at the gun in her hand and put it on the kitchen
island beside the knives, pots, and pans. "Damn it, Nia, I might've killed
you! Are you crazy? I went by your room. Who's in your bed?"
"Pillows McGee."
A stuffed toy the size of a
"Geez Zeus! Where in the name of heaven've
you been? And how long've you been sneaking out this
way?"
"I wouldn't have to sneak out if you'd just let me be."
Nia, still shaken, pushed past her mother, going for her room.
"Stop," Aurelia ordered.
"I just w
"After one thing."
"What?"
Aurelia stepped up to her daughter and threw her arms around her,
tears freely flowing now from both. The long, heartfelt, quaking continued
along with more tears welling-up. Mother and child hug lasted an entire minute.
It'd been a long time since they'd been so intimate, and it felt good. Too bad
it had taken a just-averted tragedy to come to this embrace.
"Sorrry…I'm so sorry," Aurelia
repeatedly said.
Nia took up the mantra. "Me, too. Sorry… sorry…sorry."
"I thought you were a burglar."
"And you've got to stop going for that damn gun every time
you hear a board groan in this old house."
Once more, they found refuge in the word sorry, which erupted
repeatedly from each, filled as it were with meaning far greater than this
incident.
Tearfully, Aurelia said, "Nia…what's become of us?"
"Whataya mean, Ma?"
"This sneaking in and out like a stranger. The lying."
"Lying? I never–"
"Nia, a stuffed toy beneath the sheets as your decoy? Come
on…. I might well have killed you!"
"Maaaaaa, it's all right! Nobody
was killed. You're a trained marksman."
"All right? It's hardly all right! I could've killed you,"
Rae repeated.
"Sit down, Mom. You want something for your nerves?"
"Nerves? I ought to have my head examined. Should've sent you
to that camp we talked about!"
"I'm screwed up enough, Ma. I don't need Shrink Camp! It'd
only make things worse, and you can tell your shrink Polky
or whatever her name is the same!"
Aurelia gritted her teeth and found a seat. Her knees did feel
weak. "All right, I want to know exactly where you've been and with whom?"
"I was just out with Trudy and some friends is all."
"How long've you been sneaking out
this way?"
"I wouldn't have to sneak out if you'd treat me like an
adult!"
"Do you call this adult behavior?" Rae fired back.
Nia pulled away and rushed for her room, Aurelia in pursuit, but
Nia was quicker on the stair, and she slammed and locked her door before her
mother could put a foot in it. A person's room was sacrosanct in this household,
a place of refuge, and a closed door stood…respected…as hard as that was at
such a time.
She stared at the door as if her eyes might penetrate it, and she
imagined Nia inside softly crying, leaning against the door. They had grown so
far apart, and for that brief moment in the kitchen when they held onto one
another, it was like Nia had reverted to a good place, as when younger and
accepting of her own vulnerability and needs. Now this.
"She slams a door in her mother's face, going back to the
offense-defense strategy taken for almost a year now. Damn it," Rae said. Her
words and her groan could be heard through the door, but she got nothing in
return from the other side. But from the other-other side–Aurelia's Gaelic
mother's voice wafted through her mind as if her ghost meant to continue
helping raise Nia, but Mother's advice proved useless: "She needs a good talking to from your
father. Ten minutes with him'll set anyone straight."
"You think so, Mother? Too bad he's no longer with us any
more than you are."
"Hey," replied the ghostly voice from within, "life
has a way of working out…and remember 'When one door closes, another one–"
"Opens, I know…cute, Mother. We did put it on your tombstone
like you asked."
"Who are you talking to?" It was Nia, curious. She'd
pulled the door open as Rae started back toward the kitchen to retrieve her
forgotten Glock and go back to bed.
"Ahhh just to myself, Nia. Just talking to myself."
"You're so strange, Mother. No way I can ever have a normal
mom is there?" Nia slammed the door closed again.
Rae dropped her head. "No, sweetheart," she shouted at
the door. "The Greenbrier High