Steel Breeze
Authors: Douglas Wynne
Steel Breeze
By
Douglas Wynne
JournalStone
San Francisco
Copyright
©2013 by Douglas Wynne
All
rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means,
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or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission
of the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical
articles and reviews.
This
is a work of fiction. All of the characters, names, incidents, organizations,
and dialogue in this novel are either the products of the author’s imagination
or are used fictitiously.
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disclaims any responsibility for them.
ISBN:
978-1-936564-84-2
(sc)
ISBN:
978-1-936564-94-1
(ebook)
Library
of Congress Control Number:
2013936498
Printed
in the United States of America
JournalStone
rev. date: July 19, 2013
Cover
Design and Artwork Jeff Miller
Edited
By: Dr. Michael R. Collings
Endorsements
"Douglas
Wynne's
Steel Breeze
is my kind of thriller, fast-paced, peppered with
some well-handled guts and gore, and told by characters buried under crushing
layers of paranoia and pain and fear. Douglas Wynne develops this
terrifying and violent crime novel with the sure hand of a seasoned
craftsman." –
Joe McKinney
, Bram Stoker Award-winning author of
Flesh
Eaters
and
The Savage Dead
"Steel
Breeze is intense at almost every moment. It's unpredictable and well written
and defies you to put the book down. I cannot recall a thriller in a long time
that had me so captivated. Douglas Wynne is the real deal and I'm certain we
will be enjoying his books for a long time to come."
–Benjamin Kane
Ethridge,
Bram Stoker Award Winning Author
of
BLACK & ORANGE
and BOTTLED ABYSS
For River
When
you wield a sword, if you are conscious of wielding a sword, your offense will
be unstable. When you are writing, if you are conscious of writing, your pen
will be unsteady.
—Yagyū Munenori
The Book of Family Traditions
on the Art of War
It is crucial to think of
everything as an opportunity to kill.
—Miyamoto Musashi
The Book
of Five Rings
Chapter 1
There were at
least three good playgrounds within a short drive of the Ocean Road apartment,
but on the day Desmond Carmichael lost his son for a terrifying ten minutes, he
had chosen one farther away, the one they called the Castle Playground. It
wasn’t Lucas’s favorite, but the days when the boy would argue for a favorite
anything were behind them by then. Desmond figured that when a child loses his
mother at the age of three, pretty much every other preference takes a back
seat. He knew that
he
wasn’t Lucas’s favorite either.
Desmond
parked the car in the jam-packed lot and at the last minute remembered to rub
sunscreen into Lucas’s cheeks and arms before popping the latch on the car-seat
harness. It was best to get the lotion on while Lucas was restrained because
once the straps were loose, he’d be off like a greyhound out of the gate, racing
past the wooden castle toward the sandbox or the climbing tree.
Click.
And
there he went, sliding down the seat and out of the SUV, then vanishing into
the crosscurrents of running children while Desmond rubbed the excess lotion into
his forearms.
It
was a Thursday in July—one of the first really nice days of summer after all of
the rain they’d had in June—and the good weather had drawn a bigger crowd than
usual. He capped the sunblock, slung his laptop bag over his shoulder, and
plucked Lucas’s sweatshirt from the canvas bag where he also kept the wet wipes
and snacks, just like Sandy used to. The sweatshirt had been an afterthought. Even
though the park was inland and sheltered from the sea breeze, he knew from
experience that if one of those majestic white clouds trailing tendrils of gray
way up high in the blue drifted across the sun, the temperature was likely to
drop ten degrees in an instant.
The
Castle Playground was almost always bustling at mid-day, but Desmond didn’t
choose it for the children or the mothers; he chose it for the sandbox where he
could count on Lucas staying put for a little while, and for the bench in the
shade beside it where he could work from his laptop. It was the only playground
they frequented where he felt comfortable focusing on work while Lucas played. There
were so many extra eyes on the kids and even a wooden fence to keep them from
straying out of bounds.
He
knew that some of the other parents judged him for working when he should be
watching his son—he’d caught the dirty looks. Let them judge. They didn’t know
what he was up against. At least he wasn’t taking the kid to a bar. Sometimes
he didn’t know which was worse—the dirty looks or the whispers of the ones who
pitied him.
Don’t you know his wife was murdered? It was all over TV. Cut
him some slack.
Whenever he heard one of these rare defenders, he tried to
remind himself that it was some kind of credit to the town that not everyone
thought he did it.
On
a good day, a day without whispers, he could get some writing done while Lucas
played. He had calculated the risk of divided attention and had decided it was
minor. That was what he thought until the day of the ten minutes of terror, the
day when the man in the indigo hoodie took Lucas on a nature walk.
Scanning
the mayhem, Desmond saw that Lucas had reappeared at the front of the car, a
serious look on his face. “My dump!” he said. “Daddy, get my dump.”
“How
do you ask for things?”
“
Please
get my dump.”
“Okay,
buddy.”
Desmond
reached over the back seat and retrieved the toy dump truck. He squatted to Lucas’s
height and set it down on the gravel. As Lucas bent to pick the toy up, Desmond
brushed his son’s longish brown hair aside and planted a kiss on his forehead
before Lucas could spin and take off again. His knees crackled as he came up
off of his haunches. He shielded his eyes from the sun with a saluting hand and
followed the boy into the noisy scrum.
The
cheerful cries and delighted shrieks, brazen shouts and dramatic sobs all
clashed and rebounded in the warm air above the wooden castle like the raucous
chatter of tropical birds in a rain forest. Such familiar sounds to a father. And
that was the other thing that excused the laptop he now hugged under his elbow as
he clicked the key fob and trotted toward the sandbox: even with eyes averted,
a parent could hear the difference between these sounds and some vocalization
truly worthy of alarm. Like the crying fit emanating from the eastern quadrant,
over by the swings. It wasn’t his own child, but Desmond knew the pedigree of
that particular cry and that it wasn’t the sound of authentic pain. He shot a
glance in that direction and saw a mother in big sunglasses and white Capris
holding a sobbing, squirming toddler to her breast while bouncing gently on her
heels and offering a spurned sippy cup with her free hand.
Desmond
sat down on the bench, took quick inventory of the toys that littered the tiny
dunes in the sandbox, and did a rough calculation of the territorial politics
currently in play. The box was crowded with three boys, besides Lucas, and a
girl. Lucas was clinging to his dump truck for fear that someone else would
touch it, the girl was piling scoop upon scoop of sand atop her own buried
foot, and the oldest of the boys was flinging sand in the air with a plastic
shovel. Desmond looked around to see if he could figure out which parents
belonged to these kids, but to no avail. He thought of telling the boy with the
shovel to stop throwing sand, but it wasn’t being thrown
at
anyone for
now, so he let it go and flipped his laptop open.
The
Word file
Orpheus
was still open from the morning’s predawn composition
session. He reread the day’s pages, fixing a few typos as he went but resisting
the urge to rewrite. With the scene fresh in his mind, he closed his eyes for a
moment and watched events move forward, then opened them and began to type. He’d
only written a sentence and a half when he heard Lucas’s voice rising above the
din with the closest approximation a toddler could muster to a steely edge: “We
have to
share.
”
Desmond
looked up and saw that Lucas was issuing this ethical commandment to one of the
younger boys while dragging his dump truck away from the kid. Scanning the
screen, he said, “Lucas, sharing means letting other kids play with your stuff
too sometimes.” He watched Lucas grudgingly release the toy. Desmond sighed and
tried to bring the story back into focus. The playground was better for Lucas
than being in front of the TV, but it was a compromise for Desmond. Here, the
noise could really fuck with his mental Wi-Fi link to the land of Make‐believe.
He
heard the shouts of children, the murmur of mothers, the drone of passing cars
and planes, and the crackle of the flag beside the baseball field. He tried to
dial down the environmental noise and increase the brightness and contrast of
the image in his mind’s eye, but with eyes closed all of the other senses
competed to fill the void. Now there was a scent to distract him—a strange
perfume on the wind, smoky and sweet, like incense, and strangely familiar.
He
opened his eyes and looked around for the source.
Maybe
it
was
incense drifting from the open window of a nearby house. But why
was this particular scent familiar? He’d never used the stuff, never gotten
into yoga like some of his friends, and Sandy had been more of a Lemon Pledge
kind of girl. Desmond’s gaze lighted on an old Asian man sitting on the bench
opposite, smoking a cigarette, and his breath froze in his chest.
The
man looked like a statue, like one of those sculptures of a park bench complete
with a bronze man reading a bronze newspaper. Desmond had seen something like
that in a city one time. Had it been New York or Boston? The man was sitting
perfectly still. Desmond’s eyes fixed on the cigarette tucked between the man’s
fingers where they lightly touched the bench seat. A curling wave of smoke wafted
up from those fingers for about nine luxurious, milky white inches before it
was torn asunder on the breeze. The smoke and, he now noticed, the man’s eyes
were all that moved. Everything else about him was somehow still, but not
rigid. Not like a bronze statue at all, he realized as he tuned in to the odd
figure. There was a deep sense of relaxation about the man. It was an odd
thought to have about a person, but when Desmond tried to articulate to himself
what he was observing, his first unrefined shot at description was that the man
looked as relaxed as a willow tree. Just perfectly balanced in the way that a
thing rooted to the same spot for centuries would be. Unmovable, yet flexible,
with limbs hanging down in perfect relaxation.
Desmond
caught himself drifting into a reverie and snapped out of it. He wasn’t getting
any work done by musing on the old man. And he
was
old. Ancient wasn’t
far off. The man was dressed in khakis and a black polo shirt. His muscles were
atrophying, and he had a bit of a paunch, but it was obvious that he had been
strong in his youth. His hair, cut to a single length just short of his collar,
was swept back, streaked gray, and possibly oiled. Desmond wasn’t great at
differentiating the features of Asian people. The man could have been Nepalese
or Vietnamese. But no, he thought, those eyes must be Japanese, and a deep
coldness coursed through his nerves when the man gazed at him and their eyes
locked.
The
man on the bench raised the cigarette to his mouth, the hand drifting up like a
helium balloon. He took a drag, all the while watching Desmond, his expression
unchanging. Then he turned his head toward the baseball field and exhaled a
plume of smoke, and Desmond suddenly knew why the scent was familiar. It was a
clove cigarette. He had once dated a girl who smoked them, and ever since they
reminded him of warm summer nights in Boston. Before Sandy, before
responsibility, before tragedy. He’d never liked to smoke them himself, had
tried one and found it too pungent to take directly into his lungs, but on her
lips the flavor had been sweet and exotic.
Long
ago that had been. You seldom saw anyone smoking in public anymore. Even more
rarely at a children’s playground. Desmond scanned the grounds again, this time
looking for an Asian child. The man had to be a grandfather.
There
were too many kids in motion to make out their features at a glance, and no
doubt many more who were presently obscured by the wooden castle walls and the
plastic tunnel slides. If you were tracking your own kid’s progress through the
structure, it was never more than a few feet before a gap between the planks or
a diamond-shaped window into the labyrinthine crawl spaces gave you a view of
the interior, but to see all of the children at a glance? Impossible. After
casting his gaze over the wider area, he settled it back on the sandbox.
Lucas
was gone.
Desmond
stood up and snapped the laptop shut. He had just taken stock of the entire playground
and hadn’t seen Lucas, but now he did it again, looking for brown pants and a
green sweatshirt. The dump truck was lying on its side, a full load of sand
trailing out of its bucket, the other boys ignoring it now that it was no
longer the coveted possession of the boy who was no longer there, the boy who was
gone.
Gone.
Desmond
could have quizzed the kids, but he knew immediately that it wouldn’t be worth
the time it would take. All they would know was that Lucas went “that way” or
something. And the direction would already be irrelevant in a sprawling layout
like this one in which streams of running children crisscrossed like ocean
currents, knocking small vessels off course or sweeping them along. There was
no way of knowing what distraction had drawn Lucas away from the sandbox in the
first place or what other diversions might have attracted him since. The best
bet was to go for maximum coverage.
Desmond
ducked under a wooden arch and trotted up a ramp to the castle’s upper level. He
had seen other dads occasionally climbing as acrobatically as their
children—sliding down the fire pole, or jumping from low risers, finding
footing in the gaps between planks. Younger men, thinner, too. This was his
first time on top of the structure, and he felt like an oaf, but he discovered
that the upper passageways were wide enough for him to get around on. He had to
put his hands out once or twice to keep running kids from crashing into his
legs, but most of them registered the desperation on his face and gave him a
wide berth as he made his way to the highest point he could reasonably reach. With
a bird’s eye view of the park, he rotated, shading his eyes with his hand,
searching for Lucas.
He
didn’t call out, not yet. He looked at his watch and realized that he couldn’t
recall when he had last checked it, but it couldn’t have been more than three
or four minutes since he had last seen his son. How far could he have gotten?
But
he’s fast. Short legs but so very fast when something gets his attention.
Desmond
shuffled across a narrow bridge to another tier of the structure and peered
through parapets at the woods. A few boys and girls with a young woman
chaperone were gathering acorns and pinecones by the tree line, probably part
of a school trip. He turned to face the opposite direction, where the parking
lot lay, and found his blue SUV. Lucas wasn’t near it. Where the hell was he
then? Had to be down below in the passageways, obscured by the planking.