Watcher of the Dark: A Jeremiah Hunt Supernatual Thriller (The Jeremiah Hunt Chronicle) (16 page)

As the click of the lock resonated in my ears, I went around the room, turning off the lights and restoring my ability to see.

I walked over to the bathroom and knocked on the door.

“Hey, Bergman! Come on out of there. All I want to do is talk.”

For a long moment there wasn’t any response and then a querulous voice said, “You’d better leave. I’m calling the police.”

I looked around the motel room, noted the cell phone sitting on the little table next to the bag of groceries he’d just carried in, and grinned.

“That’s fine with me,” I said. “Call away. We can all have a little chat together. I’m sure they’ll be more than happy to come down here, especially when they remember that you’re a material witness in the murder investigation of a mayoral candidate and all around superrich dude. This should be fun.”

I walked over to the table, turned one of the chairs near it around to face the bathroom door, and settled down to wait.

After a couple minutes of silence, his voice came through the door again.

“Are you still there?”

I nearly laughed. “Yes, I’m still here.”

“Who are you? What do you want?”

“My name is Jeremiah and I already told you what I want. I want to talk.”

“I don’t believe you. You’re one of Fuentes’s people, aren’t you?”

Now that was an interesting leap of logic. I frowned. I thought I was the only one who’d been looking for Bergman, but apparently that wasn’t the case. I wondered just what else had been going on behind the scenes that I hadn’t been aware of. Did Fuentes have people out looking for Bergman even now? Had I been followed here?

I stepped over to the window and drew the curtain aside a few inches, looking out into the parking lot below. This early in the morning it was deserted; the cars empty and dark.

Relieved, I turned around, only to find Bergman standing in the doorway of the bathroom, the shower rod held over one shoulder like a baseball bat.

“You’d better leave before I hurt you,” he said. His voice didn’t even shake. Much.

I knew that I wasn’t in any danger; even blind I was confident I could take the guy. But I raised my hands anyway, wanting him to understand I really wasn’t a threat.

“We both know you’re not going to hit me with that thing, so why don’t we sit down and talk? That would be much easier on both of us, don’t you think?”

Apparently, no, he didn’t think so, for he gave a shout and charged right at me!

I waited, timing my move for the moment when he was committed to his own, and as he started to swing the shower rod as if hoping to hit a grand slam with my head as the baseball, I stepped inside the arc of his strike, blocked his forearms with one of my own, and used the other to deliver a sharp blow to his solar plexus.

That was all it took.

Bergman dropped like a stone, fighting to suck air into his temporarily paralyzed lungs.

I kicked the shower rod out of reach, grabbed him by the shoulders, and hefted him up and into the seat I’d vacated earlier.

Then I waited for him to catch his breath.

It took several minutes, and a lot of gasping for air like a fish out of water, but eventually he had control of himself. In between his overeager attempts to get air into his lungs, I tried again.

“Look, Bergman. I told you all I wanted to do was talk and I meant it. Why is that so flipping difficult to understand?”

“Fuentes’s people aren’t exactly known for their conversational talents.”

Touché.

“Well, I’m not one of ‘Fuentes’s people.’ At least, not by choice.”

I gave him a quick rundown of how I’d been blackmailed into working for the man and how the last thing I wanted was for Fuentes to come out on top in anything, including his search for Bergman.

“So this isn’t some elaborate set-up to get me to tell you what I know, only to have you cut my throat and leave my body in the Dumpster out back?”

I stared at him, surprised at the utter deviousness that would be required to think up such a plan.

“Do I look like the kind of guy who…” I started to say and then thought better of it. With my messed up eyes, dyed hair, and esoteric tattoos, yes, I probably
did
look like the kind of guy who would do something like that.

I sighed. Decided I’d had enough.

“All right, forget about it.” I pointed at the door. “There’s the exit; be my guest.”

He looked at me and then at the door. You could practically see the wheels turning in the guy’s head.
Is this just trap? Just a way to get my hopes up and then, when I make a break for it, discover he’s got half a dozen other thugs with him waiting to make my life miserable?

I suddenly felt sorry for him. Just what the hell had he been through?

I thought for sure he was going to make a break for it, but it seemed my offer had the opposite effect. For whatever reason, Bergman seemed to relax and settled back in his chair.

“You mind if we turn on some lights?”

“Actually, I do. Sensitive eyes.”

He seemed to take that in without too much fuss. “Okay if I smoke then?”

I realized then how odd this must seem to him; me sitting out here in the pitch dark while waiting for him to come out of the bathroom. Even now, with just the thin strip of light spilling out of the bathroom door, everything else was still pretty much lost in the shadows.

I nodded my head. Then, in case he couldn’t see me, said, “Be my guest.”

He pulled a crumpled pack out of the front pocket of his shirt and shook out a cigarette, which he placed between his lips but didn’t light.

“Trying to quit, but not quite there yet,” he said, in answer to my unspoken question.

He watched me watching him for a long moment.

“
So, Jeremiah
, if that’s even your real name,” he said at last. “What is it you want to talk about?”

21

“Durante,” I said, without hesitation. “Or, more specifically, his relationship with Fuentes.”

I thought getting answers out of him was going to be like pulling teeth, but once he started talking he didn’t hold back.

“Relationship? What relationship?” Bergman asked. “The two of them were like gasoline and fire; if you brought them together things were bound to get explosive.”

“So they were rivals?”

Bergman shook his head. “It was much worse than that. Calling them archenemies might be closer to the mark.”

“Why? What did they have between them?”

“Fuentes was everything that Durante hated: arrogant, self-absorbed, entirely focused on his own wants and needs.”

“So what? There are a thousand people like that within spitting distance of any corner in downtown L.A.,” I said. “What caused the animosity between the two of them?”

Bergman shrugged. “Why do any two people hate each other? They just did, that’s all.”

I could see this was going to get me nowhere fast. It was time to get to the point.

“So it had nothing to do with Durante being a practitioner of the Art.”

It was a reasonable guess and I knew I was on target when Bergman tensed.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said.

I didn’t have time to screw around. The sun would be up soon, and I didn’t want to get caught in the light. Driving back would be difficult if that happened, even with my two pairs of shades. If I got stuck, my options would be severely limited. Calling for help would no doubt endanger Bergman. Even if I made up some reasonably plausible explanation, word would eventually get back to Fuentes that I had to be “rescued” and he’d start to wonder just what I was doing at a rundown motel like this and he’d send somebody, most likely Rivera, to investigate. Bergman would be a sitting duck. Besides, who would I call anyway? With Perkins dead, I didn’t know who I could trust.

My other option would be to call a cab, which would get me back to Fuentes without difficulty but would cause problems of a different sort. I’d have to explain where the car had gone, which in turn would generate questions about what I was doing here, and I’d be right back to where I started.

Neither one would do. I had to get to the point and do it quickly if I hoped to get anything useful out of Bergman.

So instead of arguing with him, I said, “Okay then, let me show you what I mean,” and snatched his sight away from him.

The typical few minutes of fear and panic followed until I told him, in a loud and annoyed voice, to be quiet and gave his sight back to him.

A headache came roaring in to replace what I’d just given back, but I figured it was a small price to pay if my little demonstration got Bergman to open up.

Thankfully, my gamble paid off.

“You’re one of them,” Bergman said, with more than a little hint of wonder in his tone.

I wasn’t certain who he meant by “them” but I ran with it anyway.

“Yes, I’m one of ‘them’ as you so quaintly put it, so how about we drop this dancing about?” A line from an old movie popped into my head and I just went with it. “Help me help you, Bergman. Help me help you and then I’ll be out of your hair.”

The guy must have been a Tom Cruise fan for, to my surprise, it actually worked.

“All right, fine. Yes, the feud between them probably had more to do with Michael’s position as magister than anything else.”

“I’m listening.”

“It started a few weeks after Michael had announced his run for mayor,” he began. “We were at a private function at the 44 when Fuentes and that pet sorcerer of his barged in.”

I didn’t know what the 44 was, probably a restaurant or nightclub, but it didn’t take much thought to determine who Bergman was talking about with his pet sorcerer reference.

“Words were exchanged. I don’t remember them exactly, but there were a lot of accusations on Fuentes’s part that Michael wasn’t fit to be mayor, never mind magister, and that he should simply step down before things got ugly.”

“That must have endeared Fuentes to Durante.”

Bergman shrugged. “Michael was a good man: calm, reasoned. He tried to talk to Fuentes, but every time he opened his mouth the other man would start ranting and raving again. It was embarrassing, to be blunt. Eventually, Michael had no choice but to toss him out.”

I couldn’t imagine a purely mundane security team escorting both Fuentes and Rivera from the premises, so there must have been a bit more to those bodyguards than Bergman was letting on, but that was fine. I could read between the lines well enough.

“After that, things quickly deteriorated. Fuentes began actively campaigning against Michael’s run for mayor. As a ‘leading figure in the Latino community,’ Fuentes made public statements against Michael’s candidacy, but the real war was going on behind the scenes. Rumors were spread to various tabloid papers. Events picketed and disrupted. Allies were threatened or bought off. By the end, the two of them were ready to tear each other’s throats out.”

Something just wasn’t making sense.

“I thought magisters had the power to determine who takes up the mantle after them,” I said. “If Durante hated Fuentes so much, why on earth did he choose him as his successor?”

“That’s just it; he didn’t!” Bergman said heatedly. “He chose Marcus Worthington! I was there when he did it and even recorded the choice in his personal journal.”

I had no idea who Marcus Worthington was, but I wasn’t about to let on just how green I was, so I didn’t say anything. The fact that Durante had made a written record of his choice was interesting, though. “Do you have that journal with you?”

“It was taken from the house the same night that Michael died.”

Of course.

“Marcus had the experience, the vision, and most important to Durante, the moral temperament to fill his shoes as Magister.”

“And Fuentes didn’t.”

“Damn right he didn’t! The man’s nothing more than a thug.”

I couldn’t argue with that.

“So what happened?”

Bergman was quiet for a moment and then, “I can’t prove it, but I think Fuentes had Durante killed.”

No shit, Sherlock,
I wanted to say, but I bit my tongue and waited to hear the rest.

“Michael was tied down, tortured with a knife,” Bergman said. “The authorities didn’t let me in to see him, not even for identification purposes at the morgue, but I had a friend in the medical examiner’s office get me enough of the details. Whoever killed him had been looking for information and the only person I know with that kind of interest in Michael was Fuentes.

“When a magister dies without naming a successor, the decision as to who will fill the position is determined by a vote taken by a council of the seniormost practitioners in the region. Fuentes had been working behind the scenes for months apparently, caging favors and storing them up for when the time was right. By the time Michael was found murdered, Fuentes had either obligated or bought off most of the members of that council so that he was the one and only candidate considered.”

That sounded like the Fuentes I knew. Wait until the time is right and then bend circumstances to best fit your needs and desires.

“So what’s with this Key that Fuentes is after? Why does he want it so badly?”

Bergman shook his head. “I don’t know.”

I stared at him, not saying anything.

Most people can’t stand silence and Bergman was no different. “Really, I don’t,” he said after only a moment or so.

“Come on, Bergman!” I said sharply. “Do I look stupid? You were Durante’s right hand man for how many years? And you don’t know anything about the very thing that more than likely got your boss killed?”

My reluctant companion sighed, hesitated, and then said, “Michael only mentioned this ‘Key’ once and that was on the night he died.”

He was quiet for so long after that that I thought he wasn’t going to say anything more. When he did, it was in a subdued tone, as if the very memory was painful, and I had no doubt that it was.

“I was at Michael’s, waiting for him to return from a meeting with some of his department heads. We were going to go to go out on the boat the next day; we’d both been looking forward to it.