Page 31 of Nightcrawler

Raven reached across the Formica table and held out his hand. I took it and he squeezed. “Thank you for telling me something so personal, Miguel. I know that couldn’t have been easy.”

I took a shaky inhale of breath before letting go of his hand. My phone vibrated and I dug it out, recognizing the email address. I glanced up. “I’ve got some work to do, and you need to lie down for a few hours. You look dead on your feet.”

“I think I’ll do that. Feel free to have the run of the house. Ned has a room beside my Nana’s so if you need anything, ask him. He’s obnoxious but he knows now that I won’t let him push you around. My room’s at the end of the hall. Make yourself at home.”

I nodded. “Thanks, Raven.” I stood and picked up the dirty dishes, depositing them in the sink as Raven left the kitchen. After cleaning up, I felt better. This time when I glanced at the china in the cabinet, happy memories of my mom and dad filled my thoughts and I hurt just a little bit less.

Chapter Eleven

MIGUEL

I stepped out onto the back patio and took in the view, determined to get the death of my parents and the horrible images out of my head. Raven had gone off for a nap and I knew I had a couple of hours to kill. I walked to the back of the property which was larger than I would have expected. The house sat close to the street as a lot of these hillside homes did, leaving most of the yard out back. What I found was a lush garden of flowers that were surprisingly well-tended, with walkways of bleached orange flagstones meandering through them. At the very back of the property was a set of four Adirondack chairs situated around a firepit which overlooked the entire city. The views during the day were spectacular. I couldn’t imagine how gorgeous they’d look, all lit up with a million tiny stars at night.

I settled into a chair, pulled up the file Jamie had sent over, and did some preliminary research on Connor Ray Howell Jr., the longshoreman I was going after as soon as I got my truck back. The file read like I’d expected. Howell hadn’t checked in with his parole officer for more than three weeks. He’d done thirty-nine months in Corcoran prison up north, housed with some of the worst criminals in the California penal system. He was a hardened criminal with a rap sheet a mile long.

His crimes began in his early teens, getting worse as time went by. After the shoplifting and petty theft busts as a juvenile, he’d been busted for numerous drug offenses and assaults,culminating with his last conviction for a beating where he’d put a drug dealer in the hospital after raping the dealer’s girlfriend. He’d done less than half his sentence of nearly eight years, three for the first time rape conviction with an additional five tacked on for beating the girl so badly, she’d lost most of her teeth. I’d given up trying to understand the penal system in California a long time ago. Being paroled at the halfway point of a criminal’s sentence seemed commonplace regardless of how violent the crime was but then again, California prisons were overflowing with violent predators. Howell was just one of those fuckers who fell through the cracks after being deemed a “model” prisoner while doing time.

Having him on the loose in a city the size of Los Angeles with all of its drug problems seemed ill advised, but he was out there working as a longshoreman under the assumed name of Carl Hopkins, no doubt back to his old ways, using and out of control when he wasn’t working. Hell, before prison, this guy had been fired off a half dozen jobs for testing dirty on the job which meant that he’d used while working as well. Maybe he’d straightened up but I doubted it. I looked at his sheet for way too long, trying to find a pattern as to where to find him. According to Jamie—whom I trusted to uncover all his haunts—he’d traded up since coming out of prison, going to different bars, probably buying from new dealers, perhaps because the old bars had closed and never reopened after the pandemic, or just trying to avoid people like me.

I decided the best way to grab him was to approach the foreman at the Long Beach terminal where he’d been spotted. His location had been leaked anonymously, but I was sure it must have been someone down at the port who didn’t want him there. His long list of violent crimes attested to his bullying nature as I’d read in the short brief Jamie always put up whenmaking the job available to his recovery agents. If the foreman down in Long Beach wasn’t aware of who Howell was then, by now, he’d most surely know what kind of individual he was. If I was lucky, he’d be willing to help me enlist the services of some of his guys who wanted Howell as far away from their workplace as they could get him. I sincerely doubted I’d be in competition with any other bounty hunters for this bastard, not unless they were geared up for a real fight…because I knew it would be just that.

I closed the file, checked my watch, and looked back out at the view. It wasn’t even noon, and I had time to kill, so I opened my favorite review site, immediately smiling as I spotted a review I hadn’t seen from Nightcrawler.

Book title: The Grapes of Wraith

Author: Miles Stanford

Publisher: Self-published

Genre: Paranormal/Horror

Review/rating by Nightcrawler: 2 stars

Synopsis:

This is the fictional story of the Hobson family, displaced farm workers who are forced from their tiny plot of land in the dustbowl of Oklahoma during the Great Depression. The family travels across the country to California to find work in the fields harvesting grapes, encountering challenges along the way. Here they quickly learn that their hard work to scratch out a living in the fields, is hampered by their mysterious ghostlike appearance on payday when the foreman cannot see them.

My Review:

PUH…LEEZE.

This book started out okay but very quickly became hard to read. Now, I’m the first person to tell you when I like something, a modern take on an old classic is something I thought I’d really enjoy. The family of wraiths—mother, father, two brothers, and three sisters—are all hard-working people…er…creatures, but that’s where things get tricky. The author decides early on that he would give his story a Supernatural twist and make it a paranormal thriller.

The wraiths were denied their pay after a week of being bent over, picking grapes in the sweltering fields of Modesto, California, mainly because their employer cannot see them. They go on a murderous spree, killing other farm workers to eliminate the competition for their jobs. Here’s a snippet from the book because trying to describe the scene is beyond even my writing ability, dear readers:

“Dobby stood in line to collect our pay for hours but kept gettin’ ignored by the greedy overlords who doled out cash to everyone else. When they done closed that money box holdin’ our pay, Dobby went cray-cray, tearin’ off his head. Blood spurted all over the damned place, makin’ the rest of us fall upon the ground with peals of guffaws.”

Peals of guffaws? Fuck me sideways.

I have to say here, the story held promise until it came to the point when I could no longer ignore the stupidity of the way the wraiths behaved. Not that I know howmysterious, translucent, ghostlike beings should behave when being denied their hard-earned pay, but the murder of all the farm workersandall the bosses seemed a bit much. I mean who was supposed to be left to pay them?

I gave the book a generous 2-star rating mainly because I liked the beginning of it where the family made the difficult decision to pull up stakes and move across the country, and the trials and tribulations they endured. Maybe I’m missing something but the concept of ghosts expecting to be seen, heard, and in this case, paid for their hard work on payday, was ludicrous. Why do ghostlike wraiths need money? And wouldn’t the coins slip through their ghostly appendages since they have no corporeal form?

In conclusion, I think it would only be fair for the Hobsons to be expected to collect Stanford’s book royalties.

I laughed. Nightcrawler was eloquent and he always managed to take me out of my funk. I shut down the site and looked back out at the view. It was beautiful. I let my mind wander to the man asleep inside the house, realizing I’d really misjudged him. Raven Mathis was kind of great. The way he’d realized I was having a meltdown in the kitchen based solely on the expression on my face, was pretty observant. His strong arms had given me strength when I’d been about to lose my mind.

I thought of my parents often; the few mental pictures I had of them were disappearing along with the memory of my mother’s favorite perfume or my father’s sweat after he’d put in a full day of work as a building contractor. The happiness on my mother’s face when she danced to the Bee Gees or Donna Summer.And the deep laugh my father reserved only for her, when she grabbed a pretend microphone and hammed it up, singing along with the lyrics, stayed with me…but they were fading. As a little boy, I’d jumped around and danced right along with them. As a teenager, all I wanted to do was hide my head in embarrassment if a friend or I walked in on one of their jam sessions. As the memories of them began to fade, I felt sick.