Extreme Justice (4 page)

“Oh, not at all. Just bein’ a good neighbor. That’s what it’s all about, right?”

The man watched as Chuck lumbered back to his own domicile. That good neighbor would never know how close he came to being a dead neighbor.

He closed the back of the van, slid into the driver’s seat, turned over the ignition, and switched on the tape deck. Dr. John’s
Gris-Gris
. It had some moving parts. The good doctor was not bad at all, for a white boy.

He smiled contentedly as he pulled into the street, pounding the steering wheel in time with the pulsating jazz rhythm streaming out of the speakers. Almost showtime!

S
OME TIME AGO
, Christina had discovered that an access panel in the closet of Ben’s bedroom opened up onto the roof. Many a day, and even some nights, they had crawled up there to get away from it all, to find a quiet nook to talk or just relax. And on one occasion, the passageway had saved her life.

Ben was stretched out on one end of a flat narrow section of the roof wedged between two gables. Christina was on the opposite end, sitting in the lotus position, catching the setting sun directly in her face.

“Are you meditating?” Ben asked.

She hesitated a moment, eyes closed, as if deliberating whether she really wanted to answer. “If you must know, I’m communing with my angel.”

“Oh, please.”

She opened her eyes. “What? What’s so unbearable about talking to angels?”

“Honestly, Christina. Do you have to jump on the bandwagon for every New Age fad that comes down the pike?”

“Angels are not a fad.” She closed her eyes and turned away. “You can be so intolerant.”

“Intolerant? I don’t think so. I tolerated your digression into past lives. I made no comment when you plunged into the wonderful world of crystals. I remained altogether silent as you charted your course through holistic medicine and when you read
The Celestine Prophecy
eight times, marking key passages with a yellow highlighter. But
angels
?”

“Angels are not a fad,” she repeated. “They’ve been around forever.” She looked down her nose at him, which was quite a trick, since her eyes were still closed. “They’re in the Bible, you know.”

“Actually there are only four angels mentioned by name in the whole Bible, and one of them is Lucifer. I assume you’re not communing with him.”

“Angels aren’t just guys with wings and harps,” Christina informed him. “Angels are all over the place. Some of my best friends are angels.”

Ben raised his eyebrows. “Am I an angel?”

“I’d have to say you are at best an angel in training. Still trying to fight your way through cynicism and a sort of neurotic crabbiness so you can earn your wings.”

“Shades of
It’s a Wonderful Life
.”

“But the good news is, you don’t have to do it alone. You have a guardian angel, you know. We all do.”

“Mine must be on vacation.”

“Don’t joke. It’s true. Your angel is always watching you.”

“Like, when I’m picking my nose? Going to the bathroom?”

“Would you be serious for a minute? If you communed with your angel on occasion, you’d be better off.” She raised her head, letting the bright rays beam down upon her. “Do you miss him?”

“Miss who?”

“Oh, stop pretending. You know perfectly well who. Joey. You kept him for almost six months. Your life must be a lot different now that he’s gone.”

“True. I only go to bed once a night now, as opposed to six or seven times. I haven’t had to mind-read what a crying baby wants. And I haven’t had the supreme thrill of changing dirty diapers.”

“Once again, you’ve skillfully managed to avoid the question. Don’t you miss him?”

Ben shrugged. “Now and again.” He shook his head. “Julia doesn’t deserve a kid like Joey.”

“Face facts: parenthood isn’t a merit-based appointment. Heard anything about him?”

“You know how things are between Julia and me. She’s not likely to phone with an update. Especially after all those nasty remarks she made when she took him away.” He paused. “I don’t know how these things happen. There was a time, when we were little …” He let out a slow sigh. “I remember when Julia and I were the best two friends in the world. When she—” He stopped abruptly. “It seems like only yesterday.”

Christina laid her hand gently on his shoulder. “Did I tell you your mother called?”

“What?
Mother
?”

“Would you stop acting like that’s so bizarre? Mothers have been known to call their sons on occasion. Especially when their sons have a tendency to forget to call them.”

“What did she want?”

“Apparently she read about tonight’s anniversary show in
The Daily Oklahoman
.” Ben’s mother lived in the upscale, elite Nichols Hills section of Oklahoma City, about two hours from Tulsa. “She was thinking about coming down.”

“Why?”

“To see you, you blithering idiot. It’s not like you ever invited her to come hear you play.”

“My mother doesn’t know anything about music, much less jazz.”

“That’s beside the point.”

“She’d be miserable.”

“I doubt it.”

“I hope you didn’t encourage her.”

“No, but I did give her directions.”

“Christina!” Ben rolled over on one side. He wanted to complain, but what was the point? Christina obviously did what she thought was right; nothing he said was going to change her mind.

After several minutes had passed, Christina broke the silence. “I’m sorry the audition didn’t go better.”

“How did you know?”

“If you’d gotten the gig, you would’ve mentioned it already.”

Christina had a habit of startling him with her understanding of matters she had no business understanding. Her instincts were uncanny. It was almost as if she were a mind reader. Which, given all the other weird stuff she was into, was not altogether impossible.

“You must be disappointed.”

He shrugged. “Not really. I never expected to get it. I’m all right playing with other musicians—Mike when we were in college, the guys in the jazz band these past months. But I’ll never cut it as a soloist.”

“Don’t sell yourself short. You’re the best pianist I’ve ever heard.”

Ben laughed. “Remind me to take you to a Van Cliburn concert.”

“But I don’t think jazz is your forte.”

“Yeah, well, people expect folk music to come from a guitar, not a piano. And there aren’t a lot of folk music clubs in town.”

“Maybe you should start one.”

He laughed again. “You’re dreaming.”

“True. Wish I could get you to do the same.”

“You can’t start a club playing music people don’t want to hear.”

“Ben, do you know what your problem is?”

“I suspect I’m about to.”

“You always try to please other people. Which is commendable, but there are limits. You don’t start playing a kind of music just because that’s what other people want to hear. At some point in your life, you have to be who you really are.”

“You know, this is the second time today I’ve heard this speech, and frankly, I’m tired of it.”

“Then listen for a change!” Her words poured out with unexpected force. “Do you think I’d be telling you this if it wasn’t true?”

Ben turned away. “I don’t need other people to tell me who I am.”

“Evidently you do!” She threw up her hands. “And this is all a symptom of this ridiculous business of pretending you don’t want to be a lawyer anymore.”

“I don’t.”

Christina didn’t respond.

“I said, I don’t.”

She remained silent, impassive.

“I
don’t
!”

She turned her head slightly. “Methinks he doth protest too much.”

Ben rolled his eyes and edged toward the access panel.

“You know, Ben, just because your last case turned out badly—”

“I do not want to discuss this!”

Christina drummed her fingers. “I stopped by to see Jones and Loving today.”

“Please don’t start with that again, all right?”

“They need you.”

“They do not. Jones is a top-notch legal secretary and office manager, and Loving is a relentless investigator with great business connections. They don’t need me for anything.”

“They feel abandoned since you closed your law practice.”

“I didn’t close my practice. It was blown to smithereens.”

She made a tsking sound. “Excuses, excuses. Think of all that time you spent at OU getting your degree.”

“So what? Is it written somewhere that I have to be a lawyer forever just because I spent three years at the best law school in the state?”

“Tulsa has a perfectly good law school,” Christina interjected.

Ben stopped. It was true, of course, but since when did she become the defender of TU’s law school? “The point is, I don’t have to be a lawyer. I’m doing just fine.”

“Right, living off the proceeds of your big case. It won’t last forever, you know.”

“I make an income as a musician, too.”

“Not enough to pay the rent, but money isn’t the issue. I know you’ll eventually learn to be who you really are.” She paused, staring up at the sky. “I’m confident you will. In time. I just get tired of waiting. So do Jones and Loving. They need you.”

“Oh, would you stop with the guilt trip already? They do not need me. I’m sure they’re staying perfectly busy on their own …”

Jones leaned back, aimed carefully, and propelled another wad of paper toward the trash can. It came in high, bounced off one office wall, ricocheted off the other, and dropped just outside the rim.

“Blast!” Jones said, swinging around in his black swivel desk chair. “I had eleven baskets in a row and I blew it!”

“That’s so excitin’,” Loving said, looking up wearily from his magazine. “I’ll alert the media.”

“Yeah, well, at least I’m not wasting my time reading some idiotic magazine for the third time through. What is that, anyway?” Jones walked over to Loving’s desk and snatched the magazine out of his hands. “
UFO Newswatch
?. Give me a break. How can you read this junk?”

“It ain’t junk,” Loving said, snatching it back. “It’s serious journalism.”

“This is one step removed from the
National Enquirer
,” Jones replied. He scanned the cover of the magazine. “ ‘What Really Happened at Roswell? What—or Who—Is Hidden in Hangar 18? Elvis and JFK Alive in Andromeda?’ Sheesh.”

Loving jumped to his feet. “You shouldn’t make fun of things you don’t understand.”

Loving was a huge man, muscled from head to toe, and he outweighed Jones by about two hundred pounds. Jones, however, knew him well and wasn’t intimidated in the least. “Don’t you think if aliens had really landed it might have made the front page of
The New York Times
? Or at least the
Tulsa World
?”

Loving slapped the cover of his magazine. “These guys print the news the surface media is afraid to cover.”

“Afraid?”

“Everyone knows there’s been a cover-up. Vested interests are makin’ sure the truth don’t come out. People in the know know aliens have been abductin’ earthlings for decades.”

“Is that right?” Jones said, heading back toward his desk. “I guess that’s what happened to all our clients.”

Jones scanned his calendar, mulling unhappily on all the empty untouched squares on the Day-Timer. When Loving first opened this office in Warren Place, using his share of the loot Ben made off his last case, Loving had a stream of clients who needed his private investigator services. After about two months, though, the work had dried up. With some reservations, Loving had asked Jones to share the office space (and the rent), and Jones had agreed. Unfortunately they’d both been virtually idle ever since. Although they had enough in savings to hold out for a few more months, they both knew they couldn’t last forever without more business.

“Have you heard anythin’ from the Skipper?” Loving asked, his face buried in the magazine.

“No. Christina keeps saying he’ll come back.”

Loving grunted. “Wish he’d hurry.”

“Yeah, well, you know how he is.” Jones put a goofy expression on his face and raised his voice an octave. “ ‘Yes, I could practice law, but should I? Is it the ethically appropriate thing to do? Is it the best use of my journey on Spaceship Earth?’ ”

Loving dropped his magazine and guffawed. Jones was a talented mimic. He could do dead-on impersonations of other people’s voices, even after having heard them for only a short time. And of course he had heard Ben Kincaid’s voice a lot.

“Well, this is incredibly boring,” Jones said, returning to his own voice. “I’m going online.”

Loving shook his head. “You’re gonna go broke on that Internet crap.”

“Brilliant minds crave stimulation,” Jones replied, as he triggered his modem to connect. “Sherlock Holmes had cocaine. I have the Internet.”

There was a short succession of beeps, then a growling mechanical hiss that told him he had connected with his Internet carrier. He clicked on his desktop icon for Netscape and started browsing the Web, but it didn’t hold his attention for long.

There had to be something more stimulating.

He glanced over his shoulder. Loving was back in his magazine; he didn’t appear to be paying any attention.

Quietly Jones closed his web browser and clicked the icon to open his IRC client software. He chose the University of Oklahoma’s undernet site and logged on.

A moment later, a blue-bordered window told him he was connected. A click after that, the program began scanning and automatically listing the names of all the chat rooms.

Once again, Jones marveled at the vast array of chat rooms—over three thousand, according to the toolbar at the top of the screen. And for some perverse reason, the program always loaded the ones whose names began with exclamation points first. Exclamation points were a tip-off that this was a chat room your mother wouldn’t want you to be visiting, like
!nastytalk
or
!!!perversex
or
!!!!!!!!!barnyardfun
.

Well, it was a little early for that sort of thing. Jones drummed his fingers and waited patiently while the rest of the channels loaded.

He knew many of the rooms would be empty this early (before midnight), but there were some exceptions. There were a few chat rooms in which participants played quiz games, but he wasn’t in the mood to display his superior intellect. There were always stacks of people in the rooms to discuss sci-fi shows like
Star Trek
or
Babylon 5
. But he needed something more challenging to liven up his dull existence.