Griffin's Blade

         Did you ever start at sight of something at the corner of your eye, something that, looked for, wasn’t there? Did you feel the fear, the chill up your spine, the rush of heat at the back of your neck? Why? Nothing was there… was it?
         Those chills are provided courtesy of a million or so years of evolution. We’re too sophisticated to believe in monsters, demons, and creatures from beyond anymore, but our genes remember what goes bump in the night. The fear is baked into us, and for good reason. They view our world as a hunting ground, and in a way, our very sophistication makes it easier for them.
         But they haven’t won yet...

Part I

         Rick Borden turned into the doorway of the rundown hotel off West Fillmore, hands stuffed deep into the pockets of his heavy coat. Winter in Chicago was never any joke, especially not with the Hawk blowing in off the lake making the block walk from the bus stop to the hotel door an exercise in agony. Stopping on the sheet just inside the door, he stomped the slush off his boots and unzipped his coat, shaking the wetness from his shoulders and hood.
         "Good afternoon, Mr. Borden," the concierge, Mrs. Parrish, a birdlike woman in her sixties, greeted him from behind the front counter. "How's the day been treating you?"
         "About like it appears," he replied, brushing the last of the moisture off his sleeves. "Can't wait for spring. How about yourself?"
          "Oh, one day's just like another in this job. You know, Howard and I were just talking about you."
          I'll just bet you were, he thought as he stepped up to the desk while she got his key from the pigeonhole.
          "Oh?"
          "Yes. We were just hoping something would turn out right for you for a change. You're about due for a break. I remember that you almost couldn't make the rent last month."
          "Don't you worry about that, Mildred. I may have to skip a few meals, but I'm not about to move outdoors in the wintertime. Anyway, I'm sure McDonald's will need a manager just any time now."
          "Well, let us hope," she said, handing him his room key.
          "Let us hope."
          Borden slogged up the ancient, creaking stairs to the second floor of the old three-story. Room twenty-four, front of the building, overlooking the street. He felt fortunate; the odd-numbered rooms overlooked the rear parking lot the hotel shared with the greasy spoon and the honky-tonk on the next street over. At least he was spared the nightly commotion.
          He was fortunate as well to have a room with a rudimentary kitchen. Opening the decades-old refrigerator, he took out a TV dinner, poked a hole in the film, and slid it into the microwave with a setting for four minutes. He'd eaten so many of these that he didn't have to read the instructions any more.
          Four minutes on high, stir, recover, and two more minutes. Remove film and enjoy your gourmet meal. Be careful, it's hot!
          As the dinner began to cook he turned on his laptop, allowing the startup procedure to begin, and switched on his small TV. The afternoon news was covering congress in one of their endless shouting matches over bullshit while the country was drowning in life-and-death issues.
          If pro is the opposite of con, is congress the opposite of progress?
          Snorting in derision, he turned it back off.
          "Damned sure is," he muttered. He stirred the reddish glop in the plastic tray and started the second phase of cooking his dinner. YouTube looked like a better bet tonight.
          The computer screen displayed his homepage, and the little red block on the toolbar told him he had six new e-mails. No hurry. Dinner was ready. He peeled the top off his spaghetti with meat sauce tray, took it to the table, and got out some flatware. Sitting down at the table, he clicked on the button.
          "Refresh your summer wardrobe," the first subject line screamed, attached to a clothing company with a hip name and an Asian address. "You're pre-approved for a gold MasterCard." "Would you like to have larger breasts?" "Saw your resume on Monster."
          What?
          Borden froze with a fork of spaghetti halfway to his mouth. He put it back down and with a shaking hand, clicked on the address, The Akuma Agency.
          "Dear Mr. Borden," the missive read, "we read with interest your resume on monster.com, and would like to discuss the possibility of placing you in a position with our firm. Please call [phone] at your earliest opportunity, should you still be interested, and speak to Ms. Grace McFarlane."
          Hands still shaking, he pulled out his phone and switched it on. 3:57 PM. Where was the 619 area code? He had no idea, but it was coming up on the hour, and people might still be in the office. He punched in the numbers and listened to the phone ring once, twice, three times. Thinking he must have missed them, he started to put the phone down.
          "Akuma Investigations, may I help you?" a voice came from the speaker.
          "Good afternoon," Borden said, heart pounding. "This is Rick Borden. I have an email here to call you."
          "Good afternoon, Mr. Borden. My name is Parker Mason. I manage the office here. I'm not involved with your case, so does the email give you any instructions?"
          "Yes. I'm to speak with a Grace McFarlane concerning a job opportunity."
          "Oh, yes, Mr. Borden. My apologies, I should have recognized your name. We've been extra busy this past week, and I'm a bit disorganized."
          "That's quite all right."
          "Well, I do like to be more on top of things than this. Look, Miss McFarlane read your resume. She liked what she saw, and got our director's approval to interview you. I have authorization..." Borden heard paper shuffling and a distinct thump in the background. "Sorry about that. Like I was saying, I have authorization to provide round-trip air fare and accommodation while you're here if you could come in for an interview."
          "Air fare? Where are you?"
          "El Cajon." He pronounced it Ka-hone. "It's a suburb of San Diego, California."
          "San... You want to fly me out to the west coast and put me up in a hotel so I can have an interview? Are you sure? What does Ms. McFarlane say about this? Is she available?"
          "It's just a Motel 6, and she's out on a case and I don't know whether to expect her back in the office today. But she was quite explicit in her instructions. If you're interested in this job, I'm to offer you every assistance in coming out for a meeting."
          "What kind of job is this? Or I guess I should ask, what sort of firm are you?"
          "We're a private detective agency."
          "That's it? And there's no one local you can hire?"
          "The cases we handle are, well, let's say they're sensitive, Mr. Borden, and Miss McFarlane feels that you're the best candidate among all the prospects we've seen. So, would you like to take the red-eye, or shall I get you on a flight first thing in the morning?"
          "You know I'm an ex-cop, right?"
          "That's one of the reasons that Miss McFarlane is interested in you."
          "Then if you could hear the alarm bells going off in my head right now, you'd most likely be frightened by their intensity."
          "I understand there are a lot of scammers out there, Mr. Borden," Mason said with a smile in his voice, "but I assure you, we are not among them. We know that you are a former detective with the Chicago Police Department who recently lost his position to the current recession. We know that you are working the early day shift at the McDonald's on West Allison Avenue, and that you intensely dislike taking orders from your nineteen-year-old shift manager. We know that you are having difficulty making ends meet, and would dearly love to get back into investigative work. With the recommendation your former lieutenant would probably give you, that is most unlikely to happen, except that our lead investigator thinks you are just the man she's looking for. This offer would seem to be the answer to a prayer, Mr. Borden, so I'll ask you again, red-eye, or first thing tomorrow?"
          "Better make it tomorrow," Borden said, head spinning. "That will give me a chance to clean up and pack a bag."
          "A wise choice, sir. Watch for my email. It will have the confirmation numbers for your flight, and directions for your driver when you arrive in San Diego. Have a good evening, sir."

*          *          *

          Gabriel Goldstein returned to a dark house late Sunday evening. He expected nothing else, as he had enjoyed his guilty pleasure, a live murder mystery, at the dinner theater in La Jolla. His wife Jamie had no use for such things, and usually went up the coast to visit her sister in Solana Beach. It was her wont to stay the night, so he had their home to himself.
          Sated and relaxed, he would pour himself a claret, check his mail, and turn in, rising to prepare a fancy breakfast for Jamie in the morning. It was how he paid her for indulging him. Switching on the computer, he went to the wine cabinet and picked out a rather ordinary vintage, a Napa Gallo 1998; no sense opening the good stuff with his wife out of town. He poured a glass and settled in front of the computer. He had just clicked on the mailbox when he heard a distinct clink from the direction of the hall.
          He stopped what he was doing and listened intently for a good minute, but no further sound came. He turned back to the list of messages on the screen, and it immediately came again. Tuned in to hear it this time, he realized that it had come from the display room.
          Strange, he thought, the alarm wasn't tripped.
          He rose from the desk, taking a small Beretta pistol from the drawer. Slipping off his loafers, he padded silently down the hall and stopped outside the display room. He listened for another minute, and hearing nothing, eased the door open and reached inside to flick on the lights, flooding the room with light like the brightest day. No sound came to him of anyone starting or scurrying for cover.
          He eased the door slowly open, keeping the barrel of his pistol aligned with the door edge, covering anything that might be exposed. Several glass cabinets stood in the middle of the room, various art objects resting on custom stands, with more shelves against the walls. There was no furniture for anyone to hide behind. As the door swung all the way back against the stop, it revealed a dark-complected man seated on the floor in the corner.
          "Stefan?"
          "Hello, Gabe," the man said, rising. "I thought you'd never get here."
          "What are you doing here?" Goldstein asked, lowering his pistol. "Why didn't you come to the den?"
          Stefan, his neighbor, was his friend and alternate, possessing the pass key for his security system, which explained why the alarm hadn't been tripped, but why had he waited in here?
          "I wanted to see you in here," Stefan said, making no move to leave. "How's Carol Anne been these days?"
          "How would I know?" Goldstein asked with a puzzled look. "She's your wife."
          "Not so anyone could tell. You think I don't know what's going on when you and her disappear at the same time?"
          "What? What are you saying?"
          "I'm saying that you and my wife have been having a lot of fun at my expense. Has she showed you that little hip-roll yet?"
          "You're talking crazy, Stefan. Make sense, for God's sake."
          "Oh, I'm making sense, Gabe. I'm making sense for the first time in months. At first I didn't realize what was bothering her, but then I started noticing that every time she's gone, you're gone. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to put the two things together."
          "Oh, come on, Stefan. I love Jamie. I've never even looked at another man's wife, never mind one of my best friends."
          "Yeah, keep talking. You know that when somebody's lying to you, they use your name in every other sentence."
          "What?"
          "Yeah. I read that in a criminology article. It's one of the tells the FBI uses. The liar uses your name a lot to try to convince you of his sincerity."
          "Stefan— Look, I don't know what's going on between you and Carol Anne, but there's nothing going on between us."
          "I'm sorry, Gabe, I can't believe you. But you can believe there isn't going to be when I get finished with you."
          "What are you going to do, kill me? You know you can't do that."
          "We'll just have to see about that." From behind his back, he raised a knife with a polished jade handle and a short, curved black blade.
          "Where did you get that?"
          "Why, from your collection, Gabe. Don't you recognize your own property? This is quite a collection of antiquities you have here. A lot of museums would be jealous. Fitting, don't you think, that a man committing a crime older than time should be killed with a weapon older than time?"
          Goldstein raised his pistol, but Stefan was on him with breathtaking speed, deflecting his gun hand upward, directing the one shot he got off into the ceiling, driving the wicked, hooked blade into his chest. As Goldstein's breath exploded and he leaned forward, his inevitable collapse beginning, Stefan withdrew the blade. Smiling into Goldstein's eyes, he drove it into the bottom of his jaw, withdrew it, and drove it into the side of his neck. As Goldstein fell to the floor, Stefan followed him down, stabbing repeatedly, savagely, until there was no life left in the body.
          Panting, shaking with adrenaline overload, he crouched for a time beside the body. Finally, having regained control of himself, he cleaned the knife on Goldstein's pant leg, the only part of his clothing not stained with blood, then he rose and dropped it into his jacket pocket. Slipping off his shoes and walking carefully around the spreading pool, he switched off the lights and left the house as dark as it had been when he arrived.

To be continued . . .