Chapter 2: Life is Worth Kidnapping
Six years ago, I had been shanghaied out of my nice, cozy job with the NYPD to be part of the Joint Supernatural Taskforce with the Feds. My son had set it (and me) up. Being a local cop, I was about as interested in working with the feds as anyone else. It was unavoidable, largely due to an incident a dozen years ago, involving a demon manifesting in the form of Tiamat off the coast of Massachusetts. It had been so big, every government on the planet with a spy satellite knew Something Was Up.
That Something had led my son Jeremy and my ward (now daughter-in-law) Lena to be recruited for the Central Intelligence Agency. The Agency needed people who had experience with the supernatural. Jeremy had been held at knifepoint by a possessed serial killer and kidnapped as a sacrifice for a death cult before he hit puberty. Lena was telekinetic and had been kidnapped by a succubus in her native Poland. So they had some experience.
Both of them have told me that they are not typical CIA agents. Not because of their field of expertise, but because they weren’t overseen by some bureaucrat who had been in place for forty years. Those types lacked the mental toughness to handle what Jeremy and Lena dealt with. One Agency bureaucrat who tried rifling through their files had been carried out of the building, gibbering like a loon. After that, only two types of people talked to them—people who dealt with raw, unfiltered intelligence who thought something might be up their alley, or other operatives.
After two cases involving the same supernatural terrorist crossed our paths, Jeremy had made a case for the creation of the Joint Supernatural Taskforce. Our official designation with the FBI was JSTF, but we called it JST or “Just.” The “Joint” part was theoretical. Jeremy and Lena represented the CIA. I represented the NYPD. Occasionally, an FBI agent would drop in for a week or two. Funny enough, the first whiff of the supernatural sent most Federal agents to run screaming for the hills. In the six years that JST had been active, the FBI had allowed us access—to their databases, AFIS (for fingerprints), PERT (physical evidence recovery team), the FBI labs—but they didn’t send us many agents. My son figured that the supernatural wasn’t something the FBI could put into a press conference, so why bother?
I figured that not many people wanted to run into demons from Hell. But that may have just been me.
Not to mention that our office wasn’t in prime real estate. We were in Queens Village, on Jamaica Avenue. For those of you needing to keep track of the geography, Queens Village was the last stop, going East, before crossing the border into Nassau County, Long Island (the political designation in the Eastern half of the physical island), and out of New York City proper.
If you’re wondering why weren’t based in Manhattan: the FBI kept its distance from us, and I lived down the street from the office. We didn’t need the overhead of Manhattan real estate. All we needed was to rent office space on the top floor of a commercial building, a gray concrete bunker that lacked all ornamentation and could have doubled as a pillbox machinegun emplacement. It also hosted lawyers, dentists, et al.
A little “JTTF” logo adorned the front of our glass office door—we didn’t have an official emblem, because no one wanted to advertise the real name of our taskforce. The glass itself was really two panels of bullet-resistant glass with a fine (silver) wire interwoven throughout. The first thing that punched through the door would be caught in a fine, sharp web that would cut up most humans and burn most monsters.
That Tuesday morning, I had taken Mariel to church; in part for the good of my soul and to keep Mariel’s mystic artifact charged and her alive. The ring on her finger was made from something called the Soul Stone. The ancient antediluvian artifact was charge by human emotions: place it in a church, you can use it to heal, but live in a city of riots, your city may explode. She had a piece of the Soul Stone in her ring, I had a larger one in the hilt of an old tactical baton that made the angelblade.
As much as I would have liked to have stayed with Mariel for the Adoration of the Blessed Sacrament of the Eucharist (a.k.a. “bread worship” to my atheist friends) after Mass, I had to get into the office.
Our office was an open floor plan. The front desk was on one level, and two steps up were the desks of our agents and consultants.
At the front desk was Alex Packard, a friend and my former partner in the NYPD. He was seventy, but he hadn’t aged that much since his retirement years ago. He had two responses to that, which amounted to either “A rumpled bed never ages” or “Alcohol is a preservative,” despite having been sober for decades. Alex was a tall, skinny fellow, bald with a gray handlebar mustache. His gray tweed was, as always, a size too large for him—it was as small as he could get before going to specialty stores for a size zero.
Alex looked up from his paperback of War Demons and gave me a brief nod. “Morning. How’s Mariel?”
I gave him a weak smile. “She’s okay.”
Packard nodded slowly. His face was carefully formed so he didn’t betray what he really thought. The tumor had lingered for three years. Mariel and the Soul Ring, had been holding up against it for just as long. After the first year, it had been clear this tumor was here to stay. I had used the ring to heal myself from numerous battlefield injuries, as well as facing down the forces of darkness. That it hadn’t already shrunk the tumor to nothing already was worrisome.
Alex shrugged. “So, you have visitors coming in from Texas today.”
My brows shot up in surprise. “We do? Do we know who?”
Alex scoffed, amused. “Search me. Apparently, we have two Rangers en route. Why? Do you know any?”
I nodded, thinking back years. The first case I’d worked with Jeremy and Lena was one I had also worked with a Texas Ranger, Lloyd Lermon. “Only one. We haven’t kept in touch. So who knows? Let me know if they send us more information, or if they show up.”
I stepped up a level for the desks. Several were empty, but they were for people who consulted or worked with us regularly. Father Richard Freeman, PhD, occasionally dropped in when we needed extra Church firepower.
There was a desk for the District Attorney, William Carlton. Sure, he was the Manhattan DA now, but he could cut through legal and red tape like a lightsaber when needed. He hadn’t wanted to run for DA, since it was a lifetime position (yes, he campaigned, but look up the history of the Manhattan DA—once someone held the position, it’s theirs for as long as they liked), but he had been dragged into it after his boss finally died at 96. I knew the feeling.
There was another empty desk for our Medical Examiner, Doctor Sinead Holland, who also had a day job. And there were two empty desks “for the FBI” but which were really a convenient flat surface to drop papers and packages.
Really, the only people who worked in the office on a regular basis were me, Jeremy, Lena, and Packard. Despite the massive implications of the supernatural having been proven real, the threats were relatively rare—or just well hidden.
We usually took on a case every month. But only six of them were supernatural—evil smells like evil, whether it was a psychopath who enjoyed killing or a straight-up demon. Each of those cases had been relatively easy...for people who knew what to do with those threats. I could only imagine regular police officers would have been quickly dispatched if they didn’t go in knowing about the miscellaneous crap that lingered in the dark.
“Enjoy your paperwork,” Alex called out to me as I walked into my office.
My office was the only one separated from the rest of the bullpen. We had an interrogation room, an observation room, an arsenal, and my office. I had a broad desk, which only served to pile more crap onto it. It felt like I had more paperwork on it than I had filled out in my entire time in the Department.
I thought about it as I sat down, and chuckled. Alex had taken over most of my paperwork while we were partners. Because things like “possessed serial killer” and “zombie with a machinegun” didn’t fit neatly into a daily report. Alex was a much better liar than I was.
I turned on my computer so I could open my email. After scrolling through the miscellaneous junk that came with bureaucracy, I found the notification. It gave me no new details on the Rangers coming our way, but it did tell me what they were coming here for.
A priest had been kidnapped out of Texas. For reasons, they suspected he had been transported to New York, for delivery to someone else.
My left eyebrow shot up at that last clause: “Delivery to someone else”? Really? Someone had commissioned a kidnapping? Going from Texas to New York seemed like piss-poor management if they wanted to get him out of the country. Wouldn’t shipping the kidnap victim straight to Mexico be easier? Put him on a boat from there, he would never be seen again.
Then again, if the people who commissioned the kidnapping were already in New York, that was a different conversation.
There wasn’t anything more on who the priest was, or why it was suspected that he had been brought to New York. More importantly, there was nothing on why we were being brought onto the case.
I smelled coffee rolling in from the office. It wasn’t any scent that we’d had in our office. Besides, we had a Keurig, and I’d smelled all those flavors before.
I smiled and concluded that our Ranger guests had arrived.
I opened the door to my office and found the source of the coffee smell.
Ranger Lloyd Lermon was a big man—even taller than I was. He was Caucasian, with a close-cropped black beard. His garb looked like something the local highway patrolmen wore in my state. The hat was obviously more cowboy, and made of white felt. He wore a solid dark-blue shirt and a blood-red tie. His sports jacket was dark brown, adorned with the traditional cinco peso badge of the Texas Rangers. He had dress jeans that matched everything else. His cowboy boots were relatively well polished. There wasn’t even dust on them this time.
Unsurprisingly, he had a big black travel mug of coffee that was the size of his head.
I beamed at him and stepped over, offering him my hand. “Lloyd!”
Lermon smiled, grabbed my hand, and pumped it firmly. “How you doing, Lieutenant?”
I slapped his arm as we shook hands. “Seriously, call me Tommy. Come into my office. I was told there would be two of you.”
Lermon nodded. He jerked his head over his shoulder, back the way he came. “He’s an older guy. Taking the stairs slowly.”
I rolled my eyes. “Yeah. I know. A few years back, I thought it would be a great idea for us to walk up seven flights of stairs every morning. It would be a way to get us to exercise. Nowadays, a building with an elevator would be nice, but I don’t think it’s worth it to move us.”
I opened the door to my office and let him in. We both sat while we waited for his partner to show up.
Lermon asked, “Whatever happened to that partner of yours? The bokor?”
I sighed. “Baracus. Yeah. Well, he died. Again. For keeps, this time.”
Lermon winced. “Sorry, man.”
“Don’t be. He was already dead. He was just working off terms of a deferred sentence. He’s in a better place. And he died taking out Bergolio.”
Lermon growled, baring teeth. “That guy. Good to hear he got what’s coming to him. I guess if Baracus had to go, there’s worse ways of going out.”
“True. Oddly enough, Bokor willed me his bank balance.” I waved around the office. “And it pays for a lot of this.”
Lermon blanched, taken aback. “Yikes. That’s got to be a lot of cash. And you’re still on the Job?”
I blinked, confused. I thought over his question a moment. “Why? What else would I be doing?”
He chuckled. “Partner, have you ever realized that there are basically professional rich people out there?”
I shrugged. “Yeah. But who else is going to do what we do?”
He raised the coffee to his lips and took a long slip. “Jeremy and Lena?”
“Uh huh. And who else?”
Lermon frowned, and let out a slow breath. “I see your point.” He rolled his shoulders. “I heard something about gunfire around the Vatican a few years ago. Was that you?”
“That was more Bergolio’s last stand.”
He grinned. “Good. I’m glad you were there at the kill. I was a little worried to see if we’d get more of his type in our neck of the woods. But we haven’t been hit with anything too hard just yet. We haven’t had a major increase since Bergolio went down.”
Texas apparently had a lot of dealings with the supernatural. When I had first worked with Lermon, we had been invading a terrorist compound an hour outside Dallas. While it had been a surprise when the terrorists used ectoplasm-powered armor, no one was too disoriented by their attack—not many of them even asked me or Baracus about our own supernatural tools and abilities.
Arturo Bergolio, supernatural terrorist and arms dealer, had been behind the terrorist camp that Baracus, Lermon, and I had taken down, as well as other incidents that stretched across the world. Funny enough, Bergolio hadn’t even been a major villain in his own right until his mentor, George Matchett, had died. Matchett had possessed a library filled to the brim with horrors that would have made HP Lovecraft blanch. All of that darkness had passed down to Bergolio, a pagan who had been a deep-cover operative within the Catholic Church, before I had exposed him trying to assassinate the Pope. It had taken another six years of hunting him down and dismantling his organization before we had finally killed him and disbanded his followers.
Unfortunately, the way Lermon phrased his statement caught my attention. “I thought you said it was already on the rise when we met. You mean it’s still going up, just not as sharply?”
He nodded. “Yessir. But I’ll take a gradual increase instead of a sharp one. We’re getting better at recruiting. Granted, we’ve had to keep it under the radar. Our new chief is an atheist.”
I blanched. An atheist directing cops against supernatural forces would be on par with a psychologist trying to fix a ruptured spleen. “How did that happen? I expected Texas to be a little more ... religious? Even spiritual.”
Lermon shrugged. “Right now, we’re able to deal with it because he’s convinced himself that we’re actually fighting...” He frowned and considered it a moment. “To be fair, I’m not entirely certain what he thinks we’re fighting. He lost me somewhere around interdimentional aliens. Couldn’t rightly tell you if he thought we were fighting ET or illegal immigration from Mexico.”
I scoffed, amused, and deadpanned, “Going by the History Channel, it might be both. I forget, are aliens supposed to have built every interesting architecture in the Americas?”
Lermon laughed and shook his head. “Man, don’t even get me started on those idiots. I have enough of my own.”
“Indeed,” I concurred. “How did your new Chief even get his job?”
Lermon shrugged. “What else? Politics?”
I winced at the idea of politics in police work. But I couldn’t deny that it was more of a factor than I wanted to admit or acknowledge. Some of it was networking—or “having a hook” in the upper echelons so you can climb through the ranks. Some of it was just making the right speeches for the right political hacks. I knew people like that, and I didn’t much like any of them. Okay, if you twisted my arm, political cops were a pet peeve—they weren’t necessarily bad cops, but I wouldn’t place money on any political cop being a good cop.
No, I am not saying bad cops were a pet peeve. Bad cops are an anathema; but political cops are as useless as mediocre cops—one never knows exactly when either would decide to actually do the job they were sworn to do.
“My only question is, is this guy a political cop, or is he a bad political cop?”
Lermon shrugged. “That part I can’t tell you. If he’s good enough at the politics, he could have hidden the bad. And this guy is good at the politics. He’s not even from Texas. He’s from Chicago. Actually, he’s from a few places.”
My jaw dropped. “Are you telling me your chief is a carpetbagger?”
Lermon nodded as he had more coffee. “Far as I can tell.”
I blinked hard, trying to reconcile a political cop who jumped from jurisdiction to jurisdiction, state to state, chasing the next promotion, and then imagining this political animal joining the Texas Rangers.
Lermon read my expression and added, “Remember. The Rangers are based out of Austin. It’s basically San Francisco East. It’s not only run on politics, it’s run on politics above policing.”
“Is that why you’ve got a babysitter?” I asked. “I’m more used to the ‘one riot, one Ranger’ policy.”
“It’s why my babysitter is the chief.”
My eyebrows shot up. That was on par with the Police Commissioner going out on a case with the lead detective. But leaving the state to chase it down? “What the Hell sort of case is this, Lloyd?”
“Let’s go into the office, and I’ll tell y’all at once,” he said, rising.
As Lermon opened the door for me, I was suddenly hit with a new smell. It was the scent of sin and evil, but not as bad as some crime scenes. It was just enough for me to be alert.
The door to the JST office opened, admitting another Ranger. He was tall, but not as tall as I was. He had bulked down since I had last seen him. He was old and thinner. His brown mustache had gone gray, and his face had become craggy.
It was a man who I hadn’t seen in decades. Not since I had held his own gun on him. I had deliberately fired a shot with the muzzle next to his ear—the ear that now had a hearing aid. At the time, the noise had hurt enough to disorient him before I had swung the Buntline Special against his skull.
I had jammed a good part of the barrel into his mouth and down his throat and told him to mend his ways or else. I had never known if it had been the precarious position of the weapon that convinced him or my tone of voice.
But he’d never laid a hand on my mother again.
Lermon said, “By the way, how come you never told me your dad was a Ranger?”