Chapter 4

The ring of the phone brought me out of my daydream. I answered it, wondering why the receptionist hadn’t buzzed me on the intercom before forwarding the call through to me, as she usually did, to see if I wanted to talk to the person, but as I answered the phone, I realized that it was my personal line that only a handful of people even knew existed.

“Josh, this is Darryl Games down at the police department. I just wanted to let you know what we found out about the man that attacked you the other night. We have run him through all our computer networks and so far nothing, but we are still waiting to hear from Interpol.”

I wondered for just a second if my life could get any more complicated and then it did.

“However, the really strange thing is that one of our trainees dusted your friend Jonathan’s car the other night for practice, and she was running the prints through the computer and one of them kept drawing a blank. But then yesterday, she got a match to one of those men from your place.”

He paused for a second, as if unsure of where he wanted to go next, or maybe to see if I would say anything, but when I volunteered nothing, he decided on a straight tact.

“Josh, I don’t mean to be rude, but were you and Jonathan working on anything I should know about. I mean this just doesn’t make any sense.”

Darryl had been a good friend to me for several years, and lying to him was not something I prided myself on, but I just couldn’t bring myself to tell him the truth, something warned me not to get anyone else involved. Darryl was probably already in more than he needed to be and until I found out some more answers I was going to try and cut my losses.

“Darryl, I wish to God that I was up to something,” I began, already feeling lower than a snake’s belly for lying to him, “if I were up to something this thing might make sense at least to me, but I am just as baffled as you. With this latest bit of news, I don’t know what to think.”

Now for a little misdirection, “Maybe Jonathan was working on something and, whoever that was from the other night, thought that he had told me something. But Darryl, that is just a guess, I really don’t know what is going on. I was hoping that maybe you would be able to tell me.”

“Now Josh,” Darryl began, “don’t you worry about a thing. We’ll get to the bottom of this. We are re-opening the case on your friend and I’ve already got people working on the line you just gave me. You just watch your back for a few more days and we’ll have this thing wrapped up, you just wait and see.”

I laughed, sort of nervously. Darryl had such confidence, and a trustworthy soul, that he could put almost anyone at ease, even if they were in the trenches about to make a charge. I wanted to believe him, but I knew that I couldn’t.

“Well Darryl, I hope that you do because this arm hurts like hell when I move it. I’m getting too old for this sort of thing. Maybe I ought to move out to the suburbs and open a clinic, what do you think?”

“I think you’d be bored, miserable, and rich in a few weeks and come right back down here. But just to be safe, Josh, I’m going to assign a car to you for the next few days. They’ll just be around outside the clinic and across the road from your place at home in case anything else strange happens.”

“Really, Darryl,” I began. The last thing I needed were two more sets of snooping eyes following me around. “That is very nice, but I really think I’ll be fine. I’ll just be more careful for a few days until you figure this thing out.”

“Well alright, but if you change your mind, let me know and they’ll be right there.”

“Now Darryl, you know your boys couldn’t keep up with me anyway, so why waste the manpower,” I laughed. Darryl knew of my little bet with the highway cops and I knew that he was itching to take a try at me himself.

“Yea, I heard that about you. One of these days it’s going to be me in that patrol car and we’ll see if you can outrun a pro.”

“It’s a deal Darryl. Thanks a lot for calling. I’ll be seeing you on the roads then.”

With that we ended our conversation. The nurse was standing at the door and she told me that we appeared to be done for the day and that she was taking off for the night. I thanked her for her hard work, and she seemed to want to say something else, like, ask me what was wrong, but she must have thought better of it because instead she simply waved and walked out the door.

I leaned back in my mind and tried to piece together what had happened over the last few days, to try and see if there was anything that I had missed, a clue perhaps, to why all of this was happening to me and how Jonathan fit into all of this.

Sunday night was the night that I had been shot at by the unknown assailant and then drugged by Lyssa who had earlier saved my life.

Monday, I had woken from a very deep, but troubled, sleep about strange plants and beautiful women who were killing them. I had a terrible hangover, probably a side effect of mixing pain killers, alcohol, and whatever Lyssa had used to drug me.

I was lying in my bed, tucked in snugly and there was no sign of Lyssa anywhere. All signs of her presence had been wiped away very carefully. Glasses had been washed, as had all the equipment she had used to suture my wound, during the night.

The only two signs that something had happened last night were the presence of a body in my woods and a nasty looking, and very sore, wound on my arm.

I had called the police to report what had happened and then my partner to let him know that I would be late coming into the office. When the police arrived, I told them a partial truth, simply leaving out the part about knowing who had killed my assailant, saying instead, that he had simply dropped and quit shooting at me and I had found him like this a few minutes later.

When they had asked me why it had been several hours later before I had called them, I again stretched the truth saying that I had miss judged how much blood I had lost, and how much pain killer to give myself, and had accidentally knocked myself out overnight.

Darryl had seemed a little reluctant to believe this, but when I showed him the wound and had convinced him that I had sutured it myself, he quickly shut up and nodded at his deputies to hurry and finish working up the scene.

When they had left with their little bags of bullets, dirt, and blood samples and pictures of everything, from the moss on the trees to the teeth of the lads, I had returned to the house and fixed myself a nice breakfast and eaten it slowly, while trying to relax and clear my head from the pounding headache that had set up residence there.

Over the next few days, I tried to follow up every lead that I had managed to find out about John Doe or about Lyssa.

First, I reviewed everything I knew about John Doe. It was really a very short list. He had been abandoned, he had seemed to want to die, and he had of natural causes. I thought he had been wearing a strange leather pouch that was marked by some strange symbols, whose meanings I had only begun to understand, and had contained a strange herb that now seemed to have cost Jonathan his life, and almost mine.

I had decided that the attack at the club had either been aimed at Lyssa or myself, and I had then been kidnapped and rescued under the most bizarre of circumstances.

And then I had been attacked, wounded, and then saved under equally bizarre circumstances, all by a mystery lady of whom I could find no trace. I had called the university where she had claimed to work and no one there had ever heard of anyone named Lyssa, and the same thing happened again at the apartment complex where she had taken me. That particular apartment had been leased by a flight attendant who had been in Europe for the last three weeks.

Likewise, the police had found only two casings that matched the two holes that were in my attacker, but no fingerprints, and no distinguishing marks on them, just ordinary 9 mm casings that could have been fired from any of a thousand guns.

The only two leads I had left were the leather pouch, which I had hidden safely away in the house, and the strange herb that was inside the pouch. Everything else had panned out. Even the shipyard where I had been held prisoner had nothing to yield. The shootout there had been billed as an act of terrorism and nothing had been said about anyone being held hostage there.

Somehow, I had involved myself in something that seemed beyond comprehension. It was as if someone wanted to prevent me from finding out anything else about my John Doe, or his mystery packet. And all of this had happened just because I had tried to follow up on the one clue that I had to a possible cause of death of one of my patients.

If I had been most doctors, or had just followed human nature and let sleeping dogs lie, none of this would have happened. But once again, curiosity was trying to kill the cat and doing a damn good job at it.

It was nearly seven when I noticed that I was still sitting at my desk, staring at a blank wall, and listening to the sounds of a city winding down for the night. Everyone at the office had left over an hour ago and I hadn’t even noticed that the office was now quiet.

I quickly packed up my briefcase with work I probably wouldn’t do at home. I often wondered why I went through the motions of carrying work home, but I still did every night, probably out of habit more than anything else.

I had to fend off two bums as I walked to my car and for some reason that seemed to put me on edge. I had noticed that since Sunday I had been much more distrustful of people. Even though I usually doubted every sob story that I heard, lately, I had been wondering if everyone around me might have some extra motivation for trying to get close to me.

As I cranked up my car and headed off for the expressway, I thought back to the last few words that Lyssa had said to me, before the drugs had put me to sleep. ‘I have to try and let you survive this on your own,’ was what she had said. As if her presence was endangering both of us.

What had really thrown me for a loop over the last two days, though, were her last words, words that I wondered were perhaps just a dream rather than true. ‘I love you,’ was what she had said and the more I thought about it the more I knew that it wasn’t just a figment of my imagination, for the memory of her kiss had returned to me as a very vivid memory.

Soon, without a second thought, I was on the expressway heading for home, dodging in and out of traffic as I usually do, losing myself in the thrill of trying to find the fastest lane, to avoid the idiots who plagued the roads, to feel the thrill of pushing at the edge just a little.

However, today, I noticed that there was a car that was keeping up with me. At first, I thought that maybe it was Darryl who had decided to try his luck on the roads, or maybe, some of his boys, whom he had decided to put on my case even if I had politely declined.

Instead of worrying about who it was, I decided to lose them and just to make it interesting, so I decided to take some of the back roads home. It was getting late, most people should be off those roads by now and it would make it easier to lose them if I could make some unexpected turns.

The next exit was a few hundred yards away and we were both in the left lane. I positioned myself so that I could make a last-minute dash for the exit ramp, and when the time came, I swerved, almost caused a huge wreck, barreled down the exit ramp, and laughed at the poor saps who were trapped on the expressway.

I slowed, signaled my turn, and was shocked when I saw the car heading up the entrance ramp straight towards me with a rifle pointing out the window right at me. I immediately floored it and heard the cold sound of a bullet hitting the side of my car.

That ticked me off! I didn’t care who the hell these people were, they couldn’t just go around and shoot at people on the expressway. I decided right then and there, that simply losing these assholes wouldn’t be enough, and that they would have to pay for what they were doing.

In a few seconds I was doing close to a hundred down the twisting and curving country roads. They were deserted and the sun was starting to set, casting shadows, that sometimes blurred the highway, making the driving even more exciting.

The car behind me was still there, I hadn’t put any extra distance between us, but at least they had put the rifle back inside and were no longer shooting at me. Whoever was driving that car was certainly good, but hopefully, they wouldn’t know the roads around here as well as I did, something I hoped to turn to my advantage.

Around the next corner I knew was a long straight stretch of road lined by woods that would be dark this time of night, so going into the corner, I geared down, doused the car lights, and prayed that I had remembered correctly.

The first part of my gambit appeared to have worked, for they weren’t expecting a long straight stretch and therefore, weren’t geared correctly to accelerate coming out of the turn as I had. Also, I think they lost me for a second and slowed to see where I had gone.

That had stretched the distance between us by several car lengths, hopefully enough to give me the time I would need for my next gambit.