Part Two

Welcome to the Jungle

 

Chapter Eighteen

Gravel crunched beneath his feet as Cal launched from the footpath and cut across the grass, aiming himself right at the two thugs.

They saw him coming and then exchanged a hesitant glance.

Cal brushed between them a moment later, his shoulder sending the short one with glasses spinning.

"Assholes!" he said as he passed.

He waited three strides and turned around with his arms spread wide in a come get some gesture before showing them his back again and continuing around a bend in the path.

He didn't want to brawl with French thugs in the middle of a public park, but he was ready if it came to that. He counted to ten in his head before looking back again, just in time to see the pair of bad actors rounding the same bend in pursuit.

Let them.

His plan was to lead them away from Eeva and give her a chance to escape the hill. Frank was also on his way up, and if Cal could string these two along for a few more minutes, he might be able to circle back, connect with Frank, and then it'd be two against two, and with Frank at his side, Cal liked those odds. They'd been in a few dust ups together as young men, back-to-back and side by side, and Frank could handle his own. The bullies back in Heartland, Florida had learned that the hard way.

Cal's heart was pumping hard and strong. Yes, he was getting old and fat, but he wasn't completely out of shape. Lead by example was a coaching commandment, and even if he hadn't been running wind sprints with his players, he at least joined them for laps around the field. Besides, after almost a month of walking around Nice, he wasn't as fat as when he'd started.

His cellphone vibrated in his jacket pocket, that familiar guitar riff echoing.

"Frank," he said into the phone as he walked.

"Not Frank!" barked a familiar voice, but not the one he expected. "It's your other friend, the one trying to keep you permanently out of jail if you ever hope to step foot back in Florida again. Cal, you may ignore my messages, but that doesn't change the fact that you have exactly three days to appear before Judge Hoffer before he holds you in contempt!"

"Not now, Arthur!" Cal said between breaths before he hung up and stuffed the phone back in his jacket pocket.

A quick glance behind him showed Cal that his pursuers were still on his tail. That was good. What was not good was that he was running out of park.

The trees thinned until Cal arrived at the edge of the plateau, marked only by a short iron fence. Red roofs and green hills filled the distance with a pale blue sky overhead, both earth and sky continuing on forever. Wisps of white clouds created a ceiling far above him and Cal felt very small on top of that hill under a dome of the heavens. The Ancient Greeks had settled that hill more than two thousand years prior and he wondered if their gods still looked down from Olympus laughing at the folly of man.

At his folly.

Cal turned away from the view and stepped onto a white gravel path that paralleled the hill's edge, hoping it would circle back and he could meet up with Frank. A quick check confirmed that the thugs were still behind him, and now Cal hesitated. He'd successfully led them away from Eeva, but also from the eyes of other tourists. If they were to jump him now, on that white gravel path at the edge of the hill, there would be no witnesses, no public intervention, and Frank was nowhere to be seen. Cal would have to fend for himself.

He pulled his phone from his pocket, walking quicker now, and dialed Frank.

"Where are you?" came the answer on the other end.

"I lured them away so Eeva could escape."

"She's with me now. Where are you?"

Cal relaxed with relief. Eeva was safe.

"I'm on a white path walking towards—shit—I think this is a cemetery."

"What?"

Cal passed a sign and read it aloud into his phone: Le Cimetière du Château.

It was a forest of tombs and monuments, perched at the edge of Castle Hill, the red roofs of the city spread out far below. Cal plunged onward, into a necropolis and he again thought about the Greek gods laughing from above—or maybe—from below. He was in Hades's domain now, the land of the dead.

"Stay on the line," Frank said in his ear. "I'm bringing up a map, and I'll meet up with you. Stay ahead of them and you'll be fine."

"Roger that."

Dozens of large granite crypts obscured Cal's field of vision and the white gravel crunched beneath his feet as he passed. Angels and cherubs gazed at him mournfully from all directions, their white faces stained and mottled from years of rain and exposure, their eyes unblinking. Granite flowers and ivy adorned the tombs in a false life, immune to the passing of seasons. Stone slabs filled the spaces between the crypts, hundreds of them, flat on the ground like coffin lids, and beneath them the patient dead laid in wait, the inscriptions on their graves blurred by time, their names forgotten. The past was buried here, and the gravel path at his feet was the River Styx.

There were stone crosses, here too, attached to every tomb, and their lines and right angles stood as dark silhouettes against the bright sky all around. Flashes of the past came to Cal, not images, but remembered feelings of churches, funerals, and weddings and for the briefest of moments his spirit was calmed. If he were to die on this hilltop cemetery with only the blue sky above him, he thought then at least he was closer to the Christian heaven for which he was baptized all those years ago. It would be a short trip, indeed, from this lofty graveyard, straight up, metaphorically at least, to where God and his wife were waiting.

Cal smiled. He didn't feel quite as alone.

 And then, suddenly, he wasn't.

A large man with muscled shoulders and a thick neck stood in the gravel path. His hair was buzzed down to almost nothing, like a soldier, and he had a flat nose and smirk on his face. Cal recognized him instantly as Zebra Crossing, according to Niles's Cockney rhyming slang. Zebra, the boss. He was younger than Cal, late middle age, and every one of those years were etched in his face, telling a story of violence and hard living. A tattoo slithered up from the collar at his neck, but it wasn't a snake. Wings, maybe? Flower petals? Cal's eyes were drawn instead to Zebra's menacing glare as the big man stalked towards him.

"Cal MacIntyre. You've been bad boy."

Zebra knew his name. That wasn't good. His voice was deep and thick with a Russian accent, like a goddamn villain from a Hollywood movie. How could he know Cal's name? He remembered Frank on the other end of his phone.

"Butch, I got company. Zebra's here. Fucking hurry, will you?"

"Hang on, Sundance, I'm—"

But wherever Frank was, Zebra was closer and a muscled arm reached up and grabbed Cal's phone with a meaty hand, trapping Cal's own hand between.

Cal punched him without thinking, a strong right cross aimed at the chin.

But Zebra was a fighter and leaned into the punch so that it clipped his shoulder instead and bounced off the meat there harmlessly. In an instant, Cal's punching hand was in Zebra's other hand, and the man was strong. They locked in a grapple, Zebra's unrelenting grip like a pair of manacles around both of Cal's wrists.

Cal's phone dropped to the gravel path.

Then Cal watched it happen in slow motion: Zebra releasing his grip on one of Cal's hands, only to secure his other in a double grip, Cal punching futilely at Zebra's head with his off hand, his strikes partially blocked by Zebra's arms and shoulder, and then Zebra slowly bending Cal's pointer finger backwards until there was a pop and the finger pointed directly backwards at Cal as if in shame.

"FUCK!"

The pain was incredible. It filled Cal's mind like it was the only thing that ever existed and would ever exist. It was the Big Bang and the End of Time: a universe of pain that endured forever trapped in a single moment.

Zebra released him just as Hoodie and Goggles arrived from behind to keep Cal from falling to his knees. They grabbed him and held him up at his shoulders and Cal couldn't resist and was only dimly aware that his ballcap had fallen to the gravel next to his phone. Cal cradled his injured hand against his chest, the finger still pointing backwards at a violent angle. It burned with electric pain, but the rest of his body was frozen like he'd been plunged into a tub of ice water. Memories of his childhood baptism at Heartland Presbyterian flooded his mind even though he was an infant and shouldn't remember it.

Zebra stepped close and analyzed him with dark eyes. Cal met his gaze without flinching. Zebra nodded once then, as if he approved, and then gave his body a once over, inspecting.

"Nice watch."

He struggled and squirmed, but with two men holding him and a broken hand, Cal could not stop Zebra from unclasping the Bell & Ross from his wrist before it disappeared into the larger man's pocket like a set of car keys.

Cal erupted in a fit of fury, except his limbs were frozen with shock. His finger pointed back at him and the blood racing through his veins was like ice water one moment and molten lava the next.

He couldn't even speak.

Zebra guided them between two tombs and towards the edge of the plateau where the open sky waited. Cal tripped over a low granite slab, but Hoodie and Goggles held him up and dragged him forward, scraping his shoes across the stony visage of a woman looking up towards heaven where Molly waited. Then there was only the low iron fence before him as the angels and cherubs watched silently from the tombs.

"Tiens-le en état!" barked Zebra and Cal got the gist. They were going to throw him over the fence and down the cliff to his death.

Cal shook and bucked against his captors, but Zebra added his weight and muscles to the procession and Cal was suddenly horizontal and staring over the edge. The wind hit his face like a greeting and invited him to come closer; to fly.

In all his life, Cal had never been afraid of heights. He realized then that his sense of courage was only due to a life spent in Florida, where the land was mostly low and flat like the Everglades, and any real elevation had been viewed from behind the safety glass of buildings and airplanes. He was not a brave man now, looking down the steep, rocky slope that would send his body bouncing down forever like a dropped penny.

If he weren't in shock, he might have screamed. If he weren't in shock, he would have fought back. It wasn't fair. He ought to at least have a chance to say goodbye to MJ. A chance to explain.

It would be up to Frank to explain how Cal had ended up like a twisted pretzel at the bottom of a hill, but there was no way Frank would admit that a compulsion to investigate, an addiction to adventure, his inability to just leave things alone . . . had gotten his best friend killed. Frank would drink himself to death before he'd ever admit something like that. Hell, he was halfway there already.

Jesus, would Frank claim it was a suicide?

Cal fit the mold: a lonely widower forced into retirement, facing legal trouble back home and isolated in a foreign country, drinking too much cheap wine when all he wanted was a good American beer.

No wonder Cal had jumped

Except he wasn't jumping, he was being thrown down a hill by three goddamn thugs he'd pissed off by following them around and recording their every move. Cal almost couldn't blame them. He'd have thrown himself down the cliff, too.

Where the fuck was Frank?

If Cal somehow got out of this, somehow survived the fall, he was going to heal up, track down fucking Butch, and beat his ass! And if Cal didn't survive, he was going to come back like some revenant and take revenge on everyone who'd wronged him: Hoodie, Goggles, fucking Zebra, and saving the worst for last: goddamn Frank Fumagalli.

His phone rang in the gravel at his feet. It blared his default ringtone: Guns N' Roses' Welcome to the Jungle, that gritty rock anthem from the summer of 1988. It was his walk-on song when he started baseball as a freshman at FSU, and he had earned the right to claim it by hitting a homerun in the season opener. The memory flashed through him, and it was a second before Cal realized someone was calling him during his last moments.

"FRANK!"

Cal bucked and squirmed harder than before as Axl Rose screamed in defiance. One of his captors lost his grip and Cal sank sideways like a listing ship and his leg hit against the iron rail of the fence. The other thugs lost their grips one at a time until Cal fell to the ground on the safe side of the fence. He wrapped his arms around an iron post and yelled.

"FRANK!"

Zebra loomed over him instead.

"Enough!" he commanded and Cal froze. "Cal MacIntyre. Tell your masters to stop. Stay away from Kosatka or we take you aboard and drop you in middle of sea."

Zebra shook his head seemingly with pity at the scene: the scattered gravel, the discarded phone, and Cal clinging to the fence with a broken hand. The big Russian kneeled close and leaned closer.

"Thank you for nice watch," he said almost softly. "In exchange, I give you your life. Every time you check for time on empty wrist, remember my gift."

Cal squeezed his eyes shut. He'd never felt so helpless. The thugs' laughter faded as they left, mingling with the sound of their retreating footsteps crunching over white gravel, quieter and quieter until Cal was alone.

Torrents of pain shot down his arm. Stone tombs and crypts crowded the level ground before him, angels and cherubs staring mournfully. Axl Rose's wailing crescendo echoed again between the tombs, but Cal hadn't joined the dead in their cold, granite houses.

Not yet.