THEN...

The rain fell cold onto his feverish face and against his eyes as he looked up into the sky. The intermittent breeze rushing across his body made the evening feel cooler than it should, yet a sickening heat suffused his body. He was hurt. Bad. He was lying on the wet ground and he felt hard grit and stones under his back. The night sky was blurry, swimming with dark spots and flashes of white and red and he knew that the onset of awful pain was only a heartbeat away.

He wondered how many times he had been shot.

A pair of faces came into view from his dwindling peripheral vision. Male faces, possessing very similar features. Hardened faces reflecting the animal natures of the men standing over him.

His killers.

Damn. He wasn't going to make it this time. His luck had run out.

Hazards of the trade...

"You can take this as personally as you'd like," one of the men said harshly. "You were an arrogant, disrespectful, elitist shit and how the Mustached Petes ever put up with your crap for as long as they did amazes me. You're talented, but not that talented. Personally, I think this was long overdue. You had it coming..."

Marcus, he thought dizzily, that was Marcus. The control freak, the ambitious one, the brains.

"Well, I'm not one to speak ill of the dead," the other man said. The speaker was Marcus's brother. It was getting harder and harder to concentrate ... his focus kept drifting to other days, other times. What was the man's name again? Oh yes, it was Carmine. A classic crime boss name. A cliche. Carmine was the aggressive one, all anger, street hunger, and pride. Macho asshole. Born to be a triggerman. Carmine's oily baritone broke into his jumbled reverie. "Times are changing and the old order is no more. There's a new kingdom being built now, our kingdom, and you should have shown more loyalty, should never have gone behind our backs. You thought you were untouchable. You know better now, don't you, bitch? Frankly, watching you bleed is the most fun I've had all week."

Their voices began to fade. Time felt like it was slowing to a crawl.

A shock ran through his mind as he realized he couldn't feel his body any more.

"We'll leave you to your dying now," Marcus sneered. "And after that, we'll have some of the boys clean up your mess. No more police, no more district attorney, no more of this turning state's evidence bullshit. We'll get back to business without any more interference from you."

Carmine leaned in closer and his face loomed as large as a mountain, yet the man's features were gray and indistinct. Damn, it wouldn't be long now....

"When you wake up in hell, tell Lucifer he's behind on his payments and the Rodriggo brothers want him pay up. Hell ain't his anymore. It's ours, it's all our territory. Tell him to drop off what he owes here, in Mandrill Park, the last place you drew a living breath. You think you can do that, you disloyal jackoff?"

Marcus snickered and said, "Let's go. He's almost gone. Hey, asshole, have a nice death."

And so, without another word, they left him there to die, in the mud and the litter and the rain in Mandrill Park, on the edges of Ninjatown.

Punk assholes. They got lucky with the ambush. Neither of them had the talent or the stones to face him one-on-one. They'd never have taken him if they hadn't been such sneaky, lying pukes. Lousy pack animals. Needed a small army to bring him down. Cowards.

When his heart thundered its last sluggish beat, he thought: "No way I let them get away with this. No way."

And then there was an eternity of cold pain that stretched into a silence filled with lightning.

                                                                        * * *

METROPOLITAN CENTRAL POLICE INTERVIEW FORM 1220 LE-128A

Rubicon, California

Division 11 // Transcript 2

03/09/05... 9:45pm

IN ATTENDANCE:

Detective Lt. Michael Pascabian, Interviewer

Sgt. Shirley Innes, Homicide Investigations

Rowena Lambert and Barton Merryweather Dean, District Attorney's Office

MASON ZERENICK, criminal event interviewee-deposition

*** Transcript begins—

Zerenick: You really want to know about this? This isn't going to go the way you think it is, you know. This is going to sound like some crazy shit.

Det. Lt. Pascabian: Why don't you let us be the judge of that? What we want to know is why there are four dead bodies in the street just outside Mandrill Park, all with .45 caliber bullet holes in them, and why Salvatore Appelanno, the longtime house boss for the Cavecchio crime family, was carted away drooling and pissing himself, 51/50ed in a straightjacket....

Zerenick: Man, what you don't know would fill an encyclopedia, you know that? There's stuff going on in this burg that would scare a funeral director.

Pascabian: Look, you want to drop the Rod Serling act and get to the facts already? Who were all of you shooting at, and who shot back at you in that damn park? Was this a turf war thing? Someone moving in on your territory? Or was this a hit gone sour?

Zerenick: Turf war? Hit? What the hell are you on about? Listen, ya self-righteous boyscout, I'm just a business man, imports and exports, a little entrepreneurial loan investing on the side. I move paper. I'm no gangster and neither were any of the men with me ... you been watching too many movies.

Pascabian: Yeah, yeah, yeah. That explains your prior four-year stint in Chino for armed assault. Not to mention two different indictments for criminal conspiracy in a five-year period. You and your friends sure do carry a lot of guns for just paper-pushers.

Zerenick: Typical cop attitude ... Yeah, I did some time. What the hell has that got to do with this? That's ancient history.

Pascabian: What happened in Mandrill Park, wise-ass?

Zerenick: Fucking Judgment Day.

Sgt. Innes: Say again?

Zerenick: Clean out your ears, lady, I said it was fucking Judgment Day, as in thunder from on high, as in you can't escape your fate, as in sowing the wind and reaping the whirlwind. Major fucking Day of Reckoning shit.

Innes: You mean someone you had done wrong caught up with you all. It was a vengeance hit. Vendetta.

Zerenick: Something like that. But it wasn't no hit.

Pascabian: Well, then, what was it?

Zerenick: The Hand of God. Or maybe it was the Devil. I don't know. But it sure wasn't no contract hit. More like an old fashioned Reckoning.

Innes: A reckoning. Okay, then, let's start with something a little less spectacular. How about this: what were you doing in Mandrill Park, and save the 'it's a public place' crap.

Zerenick: We, meaning my associates and myself, each got a call to go there for a meet. We were invited to participate in an unofficial discussion about new business opportunities. Off-the-record stuff, just between friendly businessmen....

Innes: What kind of business?

Zerenick: Supposedly it had to do with real estate development in that industrial park just outside town. An opportunity to get in on the ground floor as backers for a lucrative deal with a chain-supply outfit putting their headquarters in at the new development. Nothing illegal about that....

Pascabian: Okay, okay. Spare us the boring details. So what happened that turned the meet into a battle zone?

Zerenick: It, or maybe I should say 'he,' I'm not sure, was waiting for us. Everything looked normal at first, you know, just the park at night. Then there were these weird lights in the trees, the sound of music coming from nowhere, not like anyone had brought a radio with them, and it was like a tune you can't quite remember from a dream. We weren't really sure we were really hearing it. 'Ghostly,' you might call it. We'd all gathered at the prearranged spot and we waited for the guys who'd put the meeting together to show up and instead all we found was this guy, sweaty, shaking, eyes wide as dinner plates, his hands folded over his stomach to keep his intestines from falling out the hole ripped in his gut ... looked like he caught a blast from a Magnum bullet. He was wheezing and coughing and he kept saying, "I'm sorry, I'm sorry," in this weepy-like voice until he caught sight of us and then he just shouted "Chrissakes, RUN!" One of my ... associates ... recognized him as Jimmy Tretteriano, owner of a string of local pawnshops. Anyway, we didn't have much time after we saw Jimmy staggering around, because that's when it all hit the fan.

Pascabian: And why is that?

Zerenick: 'Cause after he shouted 'RUN!' someone shot him and blew the top of his freaking head off ... We didn't investigate the scene any further after Jimmy's cabeza blew open.

Pascabian: Oh yeah? And why not?

Zerenick: Because right after then me and my men were being shot at by a ghost with twin nickel-plated .45 automatics.

Innes: A ghost?

Zerenick: Yeah, I said it, and I know it sounds crazy, but it was a ghost, a spirit. Don't give me that look. It ain't like you haven't heard this story before, or are you saying that what happened to Paulie Fandricorso and Louie Beggatoni last year in Mandrill Park was just a coincidence? You know what's going on. You just don't want to admit it. It was a ghost, goddamn it.

Pascabian: You and your guys got into a shootout with a ghost?

Zerenick: You bet we did. And I got dead men you carted away and another man with his mind melted to mush in one of your damn asylums to prove it.

Innes: Mr. Zerenick, you know that this doesn't make any sense.

Zerenick: Bullshit it doesn't. It makes all the sense in the world...

                                *** Transcript interrupted.

END OF EXCERPT

                                                                                * * *

NOW...

Barton Merryweather Dean swallowed the last fiery bitterness from the glass of scotch he'd been nursing the past half hour after the visitation.

His hands still shook.

Goddamn him for choosing Rubicon, California, as the place to pin his hopes for his political future.

He looked around his office, past the rippling interplay of light and shadow draping the inside of his plush office, moonlight and streetlamp-light streaming in through the latticed frame of a floor-to-ceiling, rain-streaked window, and he watched for telltale signs that his visitor was still with him. Nothing. He was alone now.

He knew that The Others would be waiting for him, waiting for him to join their little twilight conclave as they waited for the inevitable to happen. It was the time of the annual deathwatch. Well, they could just keep waiting. He wasn't going to join them.

The Revenant had been here, with him, in this room, and it had spoken to him in graveyard tones that had assaulted his ears like fingernails down a slate chalkboard. He could still hear it echoing in his mind, a loop of recent memory that would not fade. A voice that was a nasty, insistent, insinuating sound that imitated human speech, but originated from the throat of a creature that was not truly alive.

He hadn't truly believed the tales until today. He'd heard the story many times, told in many different ways from many different sources, but he'd never really believed there was any way such a thing could happen.

He believed now.

All the chickens were coming home to roost tonight. A decade-old story of injustice and vengeance was going to play itself out, and he was one of the few people who had always known that it was coming, even if he had never allowed himself to consciously admit it. He'd known. He'd always known. It was all on the wheel. Deep in his heart, he'd known that such things were possible, that Justice was a harsh, mean-ass bitch who never let things slide, never let the scales stay unbalanced, who always made sure that, somehow, someway, the wheel always came 'round ... Things weren't random. Like Mason Zerenick, he'd become a convert to the power of the forces of the supernatural.

As of this evening, he now believed in ghosts.

He could still hear that spectral voice speaking...

"The brothers are back. They had to come back sooner or later and now they have. You know what has to happen. You know how this all has to end. Keep away. Stay out of it."

That was it. Just those words and nothing more. And the image....

At first he didn't think he'd seen what it was that he was looking at, and then he'd realized that it was real. A chill had seized him that ran through him on a primal level. A tall man dressed in fashionable gray, a picture of sophistication, holding a pair of shiny, nickel-plated .45 caliber automatics in each gloved fist. The image faded in and out from crystal clarity set against the background of his office's bookcase. A picture, there and not there.

A ghost... The Revenant. Where else but in Rubicon, California, the place known as 'the Wraithwell'?

He needed another shot of scotch.

And as for The Others, let them wait....

                                                                                * * *