Purgatory (Jon Stanton Mysteries Book 11) Read online

  Stanton put his hands in his pockets, fully aware that he had forgotten to take off the badge clipped to his belt. He made sure his jacket covered it.

  “I… ah, appreciate your time, but maybe this isn’t for me. I better go.”

  “No way,” Dane said with a grin. “You got a lotta pain in you. And I’m not talkin’ about the dark circles under your bloodshot eyes, or the pale skin, or none of that. I mean inside you. It… radiates off you.” He motioned with his hand around the church. “This is a place of healing. The church is for the sick, not the well. And you’re sick.” He put his hand on Stanton’s shoulder. “Come by at five. I promise you’ll like it.”

  Stanton nodded. “Okay. I’ll be here.”

  39

  Stanton pulled his jeep away but parked again up the block, keeping an eye on the church. When he’d driven by it he hadn’t seen a lot in the back, so they would have to park on the street. Right in front of the church was another jeep.

  He turned on some soft jazz. The music reminded him of rain in Los Angeles. The first time he had heard jazz—Miles Davis—it was in a restaurant in Los Angeles. He and Melissa, his wife at the time, ran in the rain to get inside, holding hands. They sat at a table by the windows and ate as the rain pattered next to them. There was a candle on the table as Melissa sipped her wine. He remembered her smell that night, and it saddened him.

  He hadn’t heard from her in over a year. She was remarried, and he’d heard two different stories: one was that she was happy and the marriage going well, and another that they had already divorced. He never asked his children about it, and they knew not to bring it up.

  As he thought of his boys, he took out his phone to call them but then caught sight of people leaving the church. He put his phone back and watched.

  It was Dane and two other men. One of them had something under his eyes, some dark mark, but Stanton couldn’t see if it was a red drop or not.

  All three of them piled into the jeep and pulled away. Stanton followed.

  He had been taught tailing techniques by an ex-CIA operative who had taught a law enforcement seminar in Las Vegas. The best technique involved several different cars, so that the subject never saw the same car behind him for long. Without that option, Stanton made sure he was on Dane’s passenger side one or two lanes over, with at least two cars between them—the same tactic highway patrol troopers used when they were running a license plate before pulling someone over.

  The jeep took the freeway for about ten minutes and then an exit leading to a beach. Stanton watched them as they pulled in. The three of them jumped out and ran over to a board shop. They came out a little later with boards and wearing wetsuits. Board shops didn’t rent wetsuits and theirs didn’t look new, so they either had lockers there or they were allowed to store their things there. Stanton made a note to speak with the owners and see if they had any information about Dane and his men that could help.

  The three of them ran toward the water like children. Stanton tapped his steering wheel. His two choices right now were to drive away and keep attending Dane’s church meetings, hoping he wasn’t on the wrong track… or go farther.

  He pulled his jeep into the spot next to Dane’s. The three men were in the water discussing something before they began paddling out. Stanton beelined it for the jeep.

  He glanced around before digging through some clothes in the backseat and checking the glove box. There was nothing there but a few papers and old protein bar wrappers. He went to the back. A black cloth covered a steel lockbox.

  The lockbox had an industrial lock on it. Whatever was inside, Dane didn’t want anybody else to see. Stanton ran back to his jeep.

  In his glove box was a lockpick set. It looked like a small screwdriver case, but inside were five lock-picking tools called slims that could open ninety percent of all the locks in the United States. Stanton had only used it twice, as far back as he could remember.

  He hurried over to Dane’s jeep and checked the size of the keyhole on the lock. He got out his number three slim and glanced around again. A couple of teenage girls were walking by but didn’t even bother to look up at him.

  Stanton slid in the slim, then the tension bar, and had to play with it for a long time. Years ago, he used to practice this on a transparent lock, but he was out of practice now. He didn’t know if he could get it done in time.

  The three men out on the water were now drifting a hundred feet or so off shore, waiting for their wave.

  The lock clicked open. Stanton held his breath as he opened it.

  Inside were three masks. The top one was a werewolf.

  40

  Stanton quickly relocked the box and went back to his jeep, pulling away from the beach and heading to the station.

  The masks were unusable: he didn’t have a warrant, and they had so little evidence on these guys, he didn’t even have probable cause to get one. He could have a uniform on patrol pull them over for some traffic violation and force them to open the box, but Dane might try to shoot his way out. Stanton couldn’t live with himself if someone lost a loved one because he didn’t follow procedure. The only option, he decided, was to get close to them, get information, catch them with evidence, and call out the cavalry to nab them in the act.

  His head spun, and he felt faint. He pulled over to a juice bar near the station and got a carrot-and-apple juice.

  The station was buzzing with activity when he walked in. Laka sat in the bullpen, laughing with some other detectives. She saw him, and though he tried to smile and appear fine, her face dropped.

  She pulled away from the group and took his arm. She led him back away from the other detectives to a corner near the office of the captain.

  “You can’t be here.”

  “Why?” he said.

  “Because you look like death.”

  “I’m fine, I told you.”

  “Jon, if Kai sees you like this…”

  “I talked to him the other day, and he didn’t say anything about me taking leave. It’s fine. I’ll just say I had the flu, if anyone asks.”

  She folded her arms. “Forget them. What about you? You really think you can function? When was the last time you slept?”

  He shook his head. “It doesn’t matter. I told you that I’m going to take time off when we’ve got a collar on this case.”

  “I think you give this shit back to Nate. Fuck his vacation. You look like you’re about to pass out.”

  The truth was, he felt like it, too. “I’m fine,” he repeated and went to his desk. He sat down and leaned forward on his elbows as he logged into the computer and searched for Dane Abbott.

  Almost nothing came up; nothing but a driver’s license and social security number, which he guessed were probably fake. Dane was running from something. Stanton didn’t want to think about how many people a dedicated, smart sociopath with the ability to clean up after himself could kill before he screwed up enough to get caught.

  Stanton called the Social Security Administration. After being on hold for nearly twenty minutes, he connected with the law enforcement liaison and asked for a check on Dane’s social security card. As he’d figured, it was a fake number. The address on the driver’s license was fake as well. No credit cards, no utility bills, no loans. Dane Abbott was a ghost.

  Stanton checked the clock on his phone. He still had a few hours before he had to go back to the church. He unclipped his shield and put it in a drawer. With his mental state, he was bound to screw up and reveal it at some point.

  “What’re you doing?” Laka asked from behind him.

  “Nothing.”

  “You put your shield in the drawer.”

  “I do that sometimes.”

  She sat on his desk. “Don’t lie to me. What’ve you gotten yourself into?”

  “Just following up on some leads,” he said with a sigh before closing the two windows on his computer. “I’m going to go home and rest for a bit. Call me if you need anything.”
>
  He got out of there quickly, before she could follow up with anything. Laka cared about him, and it was endearing, but when he was trying to keep private just how much he had broken down, it became aggravating. He had no doubt that if she knew the muddle that his thoughts had become, she would go straight to Kai, who was her uncle, and forcibly put him on leave. He didn’t want that, not yet. Not when he was this close.

  There was a bookstore not far from the church, and Stanton went inside and sat down in the café. He used to come here to read, mostly because of the quiet, and decided he needed that now. He grabbed a book by Upton Sinclair and read quietly at the table.

  Out of the corner of his eye, he saw a bug on the table. A cockroach. It disgusted him, and he went to flick it off when he saw one on his arm. He brushed it off, but it didn’t budge. His hand simply went through it.

  Another one appeared and then another. His heart raced as he scrubbed at his arm before he closed his eyes and realized it was only a hallucination. Just a figment of his mind trying to cope with no sleep. Still, he could have sworn he felt the bugs crawling on him, their feet slightly sticky as they moved up his arm to his shoulder.

  Unable to get enough air, he thought he might pass out from hyperventilation as he sucked breath like a drowning man.

  “You okay?”

  His eyes snapped open and saw a woman standing in front of him.

  “I’m fine, thanks.”

  She gave him a quizzical look as she glanced at his arms. When he looked down, he saw blood. He had scrubbed so vigorously that he had peeled some skin off. He rolled down his sleeve and pretended to go back to his book. When the woman left, he got up and went back out to the jeep.

  41

  When five rolled around, Stanton was already at the church. He waited until he saw Dane and his two-member crew enter the building. Mackie didn’t look like a man who would belong to a church. It wasn’t the tattoos from head to toe or the rough appearance—Stanton had seen plenty of devoted theists who looked like that. It was something about his eyes. Now that Stanton could see them closely enough, he saw someone who was deranged. He had some kind of disconnect between his conscious thoughts and reality.

  He debated whether to go home and get his firearm but decided against it. If someone saw it, it would raise more questions than it was worth. If things went south, he would just have to get out of there as quickly as possible.

  Stanton went inside. A few other people came in after him. He didn’t see Dane, so he took a seat at the front. Mackie was at the far end of the church and saw him. The two men stared at each other a bit too long before Stanton looked away.

  Mackie came over, and Stanton smiled.

  “Who are you again?” Mackie said.

  “I’m, um… Dane asked me to come by at five? Is he not here?”

  Mackie took a second to answer. “No, he is. I just don’t remember him saying anything about inviting anyone else.”

  “Mackie,” Dane said, coming out of a door near them. “This here’s a friend. I invited him.”

  Mackie nodded. “Just makin’ sure.”

  Dane smiled and offered his hand. “Never caught your name.”

  “Jon.”

  “Thanks for comin’, Jon. I wasn’t sure you’d show.”

  Stanton shook. “I’m not committing to anything. Just curious.”

  “A cautious man. I can respect that. I don’t need commitments. I just want you to sit and meditate with us.”

  “I didn’t think sitting cross-legged and meditating was what people do at church.”

  He grinned. “Only the people truly devoted to God. Why would you want to hear a sermon? That’s someone else’s interpretation of what they think God wants to tell you. You meditate, which really is a form of prayer, and you touch God. Come on, I’ll show how.”

  Stanton slipped off his shoes and put them against the wall in a cubby like everyone else had done. He followed Dane to the center mats and sat next to him. Dane sat cross-legged with his back straight and said, “Just do everything I do. Press your tongue lightly against the roof of your mouth. Just keep it relaxed. And when you breathe, breathe from your belly, not your chest. If you watch a baby breathe, they do it with their belly. Like almost everything else in this world, we take what’s natural to us and make it worse.

  “Now move your hands to your thighs or knees, whichever is more comfortable. And then close your eyes. Let your mind empty. When thoughts come, let them drift by like clouds. Breathe in through the nose and out through the mouth.”

  Stanton felt other people come sit near them, and soft music began to play through speakers in the walls. He opened his eyes and glanced around, but his eyelids felt so heavy, and the music was so relaxing, the church warm and smelling of incense. His eyes naturally closed again, and he wondered if he would fall asleep right there on the mat.

  Stanton let his mind drift. He saw his boys, and Melissa, and his ex-fiancée Emma, who he had heard was married now and living in Santa Monica. The thoughts were comforting, and he felt his heart slow.

  He remembered running into Emma once at a coffee shop. She told him her father had died, and he wanted to hold her, to tell her it would be okay, but there was another man there with her. The other man held her hand and gave her a kiss on the cheek as she told Stanton about her father’s death. He left with a heavy heart, even though he knew the relationship was over. Maybe he always held out hope that relationships never really died, or maybe people in general did that. He didn’t know, so he took Dane’s advice and let his mind drift.

  Then something dark began creeping around the edges of his mind. It was a familiar dull sensation that worked its way forward, something that had always been with him.

  In that darkness, he saw Eli Sherman. He saw the girl with no eyes. He saw Nehor Stark. He saw every person he had ever killed or almost been killed by. They were there in that darkness, rolled together into one entity. The entity itself, he knew, was part of him, and it seemed to drip down his body like black ink and touch his own heart, cover his organs, suffocate him.

  He noticed sweat trickling down his neck and forehead. He tried to open his eyes but couldn’t. No matter how hard he strained, his eyes wouldn’t open, and he thought that they might be closed the rest of his life, that the darkness had blinded him. And out of the darkness, a black hand suddenly burst forth, reaching for him…

  Stanton jumped and crawled backward on the mat, hitting the person behind him. They bumped heads, and he felt the sting as he crawled over someone else and ran outside.

  He stood on the sidewalk and vomited into the gutter.

  42

  Stanton saw a water bottle in his field of vision. He looked up to see Dane standing there, the same calm expression as always on his face. No sense of panic or concern.

  “That happens sometimes,” he said.

  “What does?”

  “Purging. You confront your own mind in there, and sometimes it makes us sick.”

  Stanton shook his head and spat. “I was only meditating for a few minutes. Must’ve been something I ate.”

  Dane chuckled. “Few minutes, huh?”

  “What?”

  “It’s past six, man. We’ve been meditating for over an hour.”

  Stanton stared at him a second, took out his phone, and checked: almost six thirty.

  “That doesn’t make sense.”

  “Sure it does, man. You were trapped inside yourself and lost time. Happens to all of us. Though for us, it takes years to get to that state. I don’t know how you got to it on your first try.”

  Stanton spat again and leaned back on his hands. “Just lucky, I guess.”

  Dane joined him, and they both stared at the passing cars in silence for a long time.

  “I know what you feel,” Dane said. “I know it as surely as I know anything. Because I have it, too. That gloom inside. That gnawing anxiety; the feeling that you’re never good enough and that something dark is going to overp
ower you… and you’re helpless to fight it. It’s like being bit by a snake, but you’re able to feel the venom in you, slowly coursing through you.”

  Stanton watched him. Dane had a face that you’d see on the cover of some surfing magazine, along with the tangled hair that reached down to his shoulders, the taut muscles, and the dark tan visible everywhere but his palms and the soles of his feet. But there was something else to him, something Stanton had, too. Whether it was the gloom he was talking about or something else, Stanton couldn’t tell.

  “You surf?” Dane said.

  “Used to. Not much these days.”

  “Well, you need a few good sets after this. Wait for me here.”

  Before Stanton could object, Dane disappeared inside. He came out a moment later dressed in board shorts and sandals.

  “I really don’t feel like it right now, Dane.”

  “You’ve had a serious purging, my friend. You gotta do something transcendent now, replace that spiritual energy you lost. I can’t let you go home after something like that with no one around. You’re not married, right?”

  “No. I have a fiancée.”

  “Yeah? She know about that dark shit inside you?”

  Stanton didn’t like that Dane was so casual with it. It was Stanton’s weight to bear: that the darkness had to be fought back every day and that he caught himself thinking thoughts he didn’t want and couldn’t control. To bring it out into the light so coolly gnawed at him.

  They began walking toward Dane’s jeep, and Dane climbed into the driver’s side. Stanton hesitated a second and got into the passenger’s seat. He couldn’t leave now. He was building trust, and it was working. Some other way would have to be found that led to the discovery of those masks. It might just be that he got to know them and Dane opened the box willingly.