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Above
Faith, Beyond Fear
Chapter 1
TUESDAY, APRIL 30, 3:17 AM
The droning air conditioner blew a steady cool breeze into the
dimly lit bedroom where Detective Andrea Kickerson lay in the
warm embrace of her lover. Their weekend had ended with a sensuous
merging, both drifting off into a satisfied sleep some time past
midnight.
The
detective was dreaming about discussing clues of a recent case
with a group of uniformed officers. Instead of the regular briefing
room at the Sandstone Police Department, Andrea found herself
in front of a blackboard, similar to the one in her office, except
this one was low hung, like the chalkboards in every grammar school
she’d passed through during her nomadic childhood. She
was drawing circles of different colors with chalk that clicked
on the board just like the A.C. unit in the bedroom window of
her old frame house. After Andrea finished, her hands had a dry
powdery feel. She rubbed them on her new dove-gray pants she’d
bought the week before at Learner’s, and then noticed that
what she’d drawn on the board resembled an Olympic logo.
There was a strange noise, like one of the cops had fallen asleep
and was snoring, and when Andrea looked around the officers had
turned into young boys, still dressed in their man-sized uniforms,
and they were all laughing and pointing at her. She quickly glanced
down to find herself buck naked, and while she stood completely
horrified a strange noise signaling recess started up. Snickering,
the child officers quickly shuffled out of the room. As the last
one neared the door he turned and shouted something. By the stern
look on his face it seemed important, but the beeping noise was
so loud that Andrea couldn’t hear him.
“Honey, honey, wake up,” Candace muttered groggily and
Andrea jerked up out of the dream, then grabbed her blaring pager
from the little oak nightstand next to the bed.
The alarm clock glowed 3:18, giving the room a greenish tint,
and Andrea had a sickening feeling in her stomach before she even
glanced at the number in the tiny lighted panel. She picked up
the phone, then touched one of the memory keys while Candace restlessly
turned over.
“Sandstone Police Department,” a familiar woman’s
voice answered a few seconds later, and Andrea nervously combed
her fingers through her short blond hair.
“Yeah, Jodie, this is Andrea. I just got a page.”
“Sorry to bother you, but there’s been another Code
Five. Down on Mills Road, next to the Barclay Grove—”
“Damn,” Andrea muttered as dread clenched in her chest.
“Have you got hold of Billy yet?”
“Just getting ready to page him.”
“Tell him if he gets there first, to make sure no one goes
near the car. Especially the press. OK?”
“I’ll do it, and don’t forget the new clothing
regulation,” Jodie Barnes reminded.
“Yeah, thanks—”
“What is it, Andrea?” Candace sat up as her nude girlfriend
hung up the phone, then went to their closet.
“I gotta leave. Go on back to sleep,” she explained
while sliding the wooden door on its track.
She took out the clothes hanging in plastic bags that she’d
been ordered to wear on cases like this, and then grabbed her
underwear and socks out from the bottom of the antique chest of
drawers. With her arms full, she hurried across the carpeted floor
to their pink tiled bathroom, and Andrea was both peeing and buttoning
her white long-sleeved shirt when Candace appeared in the doorway.
She was wrapped in the Scottish plaid quilt they’d bought
together on their seventh anniversary and she had a worried look
on her face. “It’s three in the morning, for God’s
sake,” the petite auburn-haired woman wearily pointed out
as Andrea tore off the pink toilet paper, wiped, flushed, then
quickly slipped on her French cut panties and her white cotton
jeans.
“I know, honey. Don’t worry. I’ll call you at work.
K?”
“K.” Candace smiled at her girlfriend’s obvious
attempt to placate her with baby talk, then followed the rushing
blond woman back into their bedroom.
Andrea picked up a brush from her dresser, ran it through her
straight hair twice, tossed it back on the dresser, then headed
for the bed. After digging under it for a few seconds she pulled
out her pair of white leather shoes with the “X” cut
into the heels, slipped them on her feet, crammed the shoe laces
down behind the tongue, then kissed Candace before going into
the hall and resetting their alarm system.
As the dead-bolt clicked over on the front door, Candace walked
into their darkened living room and peered through the sheer curtains.
Her green eyes followed the Pathfinder until it was two red specks
which quickly disappeared onto Sikes Avenue, the main road through
Sandstone. Sighing, she went back to bed and held Andrea’s
pillow tightly to her chest. On nights like these, the familiar
scent was always comforting, and Candace was resting peacefully
again by the time her absent lover sped towards the outskirts
of the small city.
“God, help me through this,” Andrea whispered as her
speedometer crept up to sixty.
She’d been praying for weeks, and hoping that her gut level
instinct was wrong about the last grizzly murder and the killer
who had done it. Maybe it was just a one time thing, her mind
had argued. Somebody going off the deep end over a lover or hitchhiker
or something, but she knew about this guy just like she’d
always known about bad people since she was a little kid.
“The Knack,” her dad had called it. “Yeah, my kid’s
got The Knack,” he’d brag to his buddies when Andrea
would tell him what horse to pick for a certain race, which team
would win on a certain day, or the location of the next machine
to make a big pay-off in the Las Vegas casinos.
“The Knack” had kept them on the road for most of her
childhood, milking a gambling area dry until her gut would tell
her it was high time to get out before the men in dark suits came
for them. She’d saved their asses so many times she’d
lost count and made her father thousands of dollars, which he’d
conveniently snorted up his nose or spent on the whores that would
hang off of him like leeches sucking out his very life. As bad
as it was the girl always forgave his weaknesses because something
dark hung over him, some huge thing that had to do with her mother’s
death, and no matter how hard Andrea tried she could not recall
what happened.
“You were too damn young to remember,” her father slurred
one afternoon after she’d gotten home from grade school.
Some kids had been talking about their mothers, and when they
asked Andrea about hers she started crying because she couldn’t
even remember her face. They made fun of her then, calling her
“Cry Baby Andy, Ain’t Got No Mammy,” and left her
alone on the swings.
“But I remember living in Las Vegas and going to kindergarten
there,” the little girl pleaded, her chest suddenly hurting
as she tried to understand why her stubble-faced father was glaring
at her. His bloodshot eyes reminded of her of pale blue ice chips,
cold and uncaring.
“I’ve told you before, she died in a car wreck! What
the hell else can I say?” he yelled from the white leather
couch he always sat on in his underwear, watching TV with a beer
clamped in one hand and a cigarette in the other.
That night he went out and “tied one on,” leaving her
alone in their dirty little apartment near the Daytona Beach Dog
Track until he stumbled in at three in the morning. And that started
his cycle, the cycle of drinking and gambling and leaving her
alone, always alone—the child of a man who owed large amounts
of money to dangerous people. She prayed on her knees every night
that maybe one day he’d stop, but he never did.
She hated the way he made her live—forever on the move, unable
to have any close friends because of her abilities, which for
some reason filled her with guilt every time she used them. Her
stomach would be in knots by the time she got home from whatever
school she was in, dreading the way he’d beg and whine “Just
one more time for Daddy, Andy. Just use The Knack one more time.”
His red-rimmed eyes would be tearing up from whatever buzz he
was on, his rancid breath nearly making her gag. When she’d
finally give in and tell him the flash of a number strapped on
the side of a bounding hound, he’d be gone within moments,
leaving her with that constant fear coiled in her belly like a
poisonous snake, that he would never come back.
It went on like this for years, until the week of her high school
graduation when she came home to find him in the same drunken
position he’d been in that morning. His chin was on his hairy
chest, his body slouched on that old white leather couch she’d
hated since she was fourteen. The coroner said he’d been
dead for twelve hours and that there were cocaine sores big enough
to run pencils through in his nose, but Andrea couldn’t say
anything—not one damn word to defend the man that had stolen
the innocence from her childhood.
She was left with her father’s old Ford van and barely enough
money to cremate him. Within a month of her sad graduation, the
young woman found herself living on the mean streets of Miami.
Not knowing anyone she could turn to, she slept on her old twin
mattress she’d wrestled into the back of the rusted white
van. Everything she owned was strewn in there, which wasn’t
much, and while parked in an alley behind a Coconut Grove deli,
Andrea had a strange dream.
“The Knack” had become something she hated in herself,
something that had destroyed her childhood and killed her father,
but two men in her dream told her that it didn’t have to
be that way. One had brown hair and the other was blond, and both
were wearing plaid shirts tucked into peg-legged jeans. They claimed
they were sent to Andrea and she could use her “gift”
for something good, but she must leave Miami to do it.
Having lived all of her eighteen years in total hell, she didn’t
really believe in anything, especially dreams where strangely
familiar men were telling her what to do, but she sure couldn’t
live her life dining out of a dumpster either.
It was nearly daylight when she sat up and looked through the
dew covered window of the already sweltering van. Her stringy
long hair was sticking to her forehead, and the only thing of
any beauty she could see was some pink packing peanuts skipping
on a humid summer breeze down the littered alley street. The dream
came to her, the voices of the two smiling men as clear to Andrea
as one of her visions of a spinning roulette wheel landing on
a number, or a foaming thoroughbred crossing the finish line first.
“What do I have to lose?” she asked, glancing down at
her threadbare plaid halter top and cutoff denim shorts, and in
that moment Andrea Kickerson decided to change her life.
That bright day in 1978 she drove north on Highway 27, grinding
every gear on the column shift and desperately praying that the
smoking vehicle would get her far away. Four hours later it started
smelling hot and slowing to a crawl. Her sandal-clad foot was
forcing the naked metal gas pedal to the dirty worn carpet, while
passing drivers frantically pointed under the van. Banging her
perspiring palms on the cracked steering wheel, Andrea finally
pulled over and leapt out to find fire licking around the front
fenders.
“Christ on a friggin’ POOL STICK!” she cursed,
while tears of frustration streamed down her cheeks.
She grabbed out her old denim duffel bag, crammed full of wrinkled
smelly clothes, and slipping the worn cloth strap over her bare
shoulder she quickly walked away. Her hands were clenched, as
if she could hold back the emotions that were ripping at her chest,
and she turned once to see the van in the distance, shimmering
in the heat and completely engulfed in flames.
“F-O-R-D—Found On Road Dead—dead you BASTARD!”
Andrea yelled skyward at her father as the anger of how he’d
left her overshadowed the grief of his death.
People were pulling off the highway, and as she turned away from
the chaos a big black car slowed down next to her. The window
lowered with a sweet electric hum, and a smiling thin-haired man
dressed in a dark blue suit waved her over.
“Looks like you’re in need of a more dependable mode
of transportation,” he casually remarked after glancing backwards.
“The name’s Joe, Joe Cable. You gettin’ in or what?”
As she leaned towards the stocky man’s Chevy Caprice, Andrea
felt the cool air blowing from the dash vents. She was emotionally
exhausted, way beyond worry of who or what Joe Cable might have
been, and after wiping her tears with the back of her hand she
nodded her head yes.
Speeding through the night almost eighteen years later, she could
still remember the coolness of those leather seats on her bare
tanned thighs and the relief she’d felt after noticing Joe’s
two-way police radio. It was nearly the same type that was hanging
in her Pathfinder now, and when she reached down and turned it
on, a voice suddenly raged through the speaker, shattering her
memories of the past.
“I don’t care where the hell he is! Get somebody down
here NOW!”
From the Southern drawl, Andrea knew it was her new partner, Billy
Emerson, probably trying to locate the medical examiner on his
cell phone, and totally oblivious to the fact that his mike was
on. Murders still flipped him out, and Andrea could tell by his
tone that Billy was nearing overload on this one. She could see
the flashing blue lights of the police cruisers, eerily reflecting
off the grove trees in the distance; then, for the first time
in years, the poisonous snake that had lain so peacefully within
her suddenly reared its diamond-shaped head, and fear surfaced
in her heart.
ABOVE FAITH,
BEYOND FEAR:
The Case of The Koolsickle Killer
©2005 by Amazing
Dreams Publishing. All rights reserved.
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