No Human Contact

Donald Ladew

Description

Vincent Vankelis has no family, none. He visits families but is never seen doing so. It is a solution to loneliness. It all changes when his "visit" is ruined by a meeting of criminals nearby.

And again it happens when he is seen by a Sgt. Teresa Keely of the Burbank police "visiting" another of his families.

Vincent and Teresa, diametrically opposite, become entangled, both by their interest in each other and an evil man who impinges on both their lives.

Violence leads to violence as Teresa discovers that Vincent is more than a wounded man trying to live with his personal demons.

It takes all of their efforts to resolve issues that are far outside their day-to-day lives.

Sujets

• Thrillers
• Fiction

Informations

• Publié par: eBookIt.com
• Date de parution: 31 juillet 2016
• Nombre de lectures: 1
• EAN13: 9781456603021
• Langue: English

Extrait

No Human Contact
 
 
 
 
A Novel
 
By
 
Donald P. Ladew
 


No Human Contact
 
Copyright © 2011 Donald P. Ladew
All rights reserved. No part of this book
May be reproduced or transmitted in any
Form or by any means without written
Permission of the author.
 
Published in eBook format by eBookIt.com
http://www.eBookIt.com
 
ISBN-13: 978-1-4566-0302-1
 


 
 
 

This book is dedicated to my brother Robert Edwin Ladew

 
PROLOGUE
SAN FRANCISCO WATERFRONT - 1949
The Sisters of Mercy, Agnes and Catherine, scurried along the Embarcadero, their shoulders swaying like Emperor Penguins on a long journey to the sea. It was 3:00 AM in a bone-chilling fog and light rain; typically San Francisco in the Fall.
It wasn’t a mission of mercy. Fifteen years at the Mary Magdalene Catholic Mission annihilated mercy. Working the mean hours of the night, witness to every kind of human misery, only habit and ritual remained.
“Go to the Rubicon Boarding House; attend the dying woman,” the message said. Another variation on a theme of tragedy; the irony was lost on the Sisters. Their Rubicon had come and gone many years before.
A single light above the entrance revealed the faded letters, R U B ...N’. They were met in the foyer by a grossly fat man in a greasy shirt and suspenders, four inches of hairy belly exposed where his sweat-stained shirt fell short. He jerked a thumb up and mumbled a room number.
The stairs were littered with trash. The Sisters stepped around a rheumy-eyed drunk sprawled on the fourth floor landing. They showed neither distaste nor interest.
The message said room 512. A single bare bulb, a broken dresser, a narrow bed in which a young woman lay dying. She lay with the utter stillness of the terminally ill. Her curly hair, matted by perspiration, made a stark contrast against unnaturally pale skin. The smells in the room were indescribable.
The Sisters moved to the woman’s bed side and stared, showing no emotion, only impatience. A glance at each other, a shrug— indecipherable communication.
Sister Agnes’s hand appeared, white, unadorned except for a simple gold band signifying that she was a bride of Christ; blue veins stark against pale flesh. She reached out to the woman on the bed and squeezed the sick woman’s shoulder.
The woman on the bed opened her eyes immediately. They were large and dark blue. The Sisters did not see despair, pain and resignation. Who sees the ordinary?
“What is your name, my child?” Sister Catherine asked.
The ultimate irony from an arid eunuch only five years older than the woman on the bed. The religious equivalent of calling a middle-aged black man, boy; vast, thoughtless arrogance.
“Mary...” a whisper.
“Your full name, please?”
Mary’s head turned feebly toward the other side of the bed..
“...in the box...my baby.”
Sister Catherine walked to the other side of the bed. On the floor next to the bed, a card board box stuffed with dirty blankets. Barely visible among the folds, a baby’s face: serious, silent, startlingly clean. The mother’s last act? The baby frowned. Did the tiny creature know what lay ahead?
The child in the box finally produced a reaction from the sisters.
“It’s a baby, Sister Agnes.”
“Alive?” Sister Agnes asked.
“Yes.”
Sister Agnes knelt close to the woman in the bed. “Are you a Catholic, my child?”
“Yes, Sister.”
“Shall I send for a priest?”
“No...no time.” She reached out, clutched Sister Agnes’s arm with unnatural strength.
“Take my baby.” She panted with the effort. “His name is Vincent Andreas Vankelis.” She spelled the names slowly. “His father...”
Her voice faded entirely. She shuddered and sank back on the bed, eyes closed.
Sister Catherine hesitated, reached out and pulled the blanket away from the woman’s body. The Sisters stood mute, rigid, trying to comprehend.
She wore nothing except cheap cotton briefs. Every inch of her pale, pale body had been beaten: narrow shoulders, flaccid breasts, scrawny ribs, slack belly, thighs, all covered with terrible yellow and black bruises. Some of the blows had broken the skin and still bled.
While the Sisters stared in stunned silence, Mary, who would give no last name, loosed a faint sigh and stopped breathing. The nuns made no effort to intervene.
Sister Catherine reached out and pulled the blanket over Mary’s body and face.
“Better this way,” she murmured.
The Sisters crossed themselves and muttered meaningless Latin phrases, rhythmic, and hypnotic. The creators of those phrases knew power and control the way Mesmer knew the flesh.
Sister Agnes moved around the bed without a glance at the woman beneath the sheets. They stood together and looked down at the makeshift bassinet. Where was the humanity, the affection, the love women give so naturally to small babies?
Sister Catherine and Sister Agnes hesitated. Who could know why? Who would want to know where their thoughts traveled, what internal arguments were brought to bear.
Sister Agnes reached down and took the box in her arms. “We will take it to the orphanage. See if the woman has any papers, anything we should keep.”
Their bloodless response made nothing of tragedy. Where were the dead woman’s people? A family, a father, someone? She was utterly alone. A terrible violence had been committed. Had she known love? Did she have a life? It didn’t matter. No one asked.
Chapter 1
LOS ANGELES 1997 THE SUBURB OF SUN VALLEY
S unland Boulevard rises out of a Hispanic ghetto east of Burbank into ochre, sand and olive-colored foot hills. A left over suburb from an earlier Los Angeles, a place for horse owners needing larger lots.
Among the slopes and folded hills shabby developments with meaningless names like Ocean View and Sienna Village spill over the sere hillsides as they do everywhere in Los Angeles. Real estate people ran out of interesting names in the 20’s.
Jesus said, “In my father’s house are many mansions.” It is doubtful that Jesus had Los Angeles in mind.
Halfway up Sunland, between the hills, an open area of fields covered by buffalo grass and fruit trees surprise the driver heading up the canyon to Tujunga. Los Angeles is a city that seldom leaves open ground undeveloped. A ten foot brick fence with a plain metal gate separated the fields from the road front. There was a mail box with a number but no name next to the gate,
The house wasn’t visible from Sunland. It perched a top a second hill behind a smaller hill closer to the street. The house didn’t fit any of the cute real estate jargon. It was part Moorish, part medieval, and part Mediterranean.
A large, six-sided tower in the center rose three stories above the rest of the structure. The roof of the tower and the rest of the house was covered with Mexican tile the color of creamery butter. The stucco walls were painfully white in the spring sun.
Three low arms fanned outward from the center and dropped in pleasing steps away from the top of the hill. A large flagstone patio around the sides and rear of the house reached across half an acre of ground to a four car garage with attached work shop.
The hills and area around the house were covered with flowers and trees. Red velvet Don Juan roses surrounded lush banana plants. Patches of apricot-colored California Poppies were spread among more roses on trellises amid the fruit trees. It wouldn’t make Home & Garden; it was far too eclectic, too whimsical.
The house looked deserted. The only sounds were bees, birds and the wind in the buffalo grass. Around the back, a heavily-furred, gray cat scratched at the door. The door opened a few inches and the cat went inside.
 
 
F ive miles away in Pacoima on San Fernando Boulevard, a seriously mean street, a black & white pulled into a Taco Bell fast food stand. Sergeant Teresa Keely, the youngest sergeant on the Burbank police force, stepped out. Even in shapeless blue serge her physical beauty captivated men and women alike.
The men on the force called her, ‘Viking’. She stood five ten, had masses of pale blonde hair in tightly coiled braids, a classic face matched to a voluptuous body. She destroyed utterly and forever every dumb-ass male notion that female officers are all repressed lesbians with more facial hair than a Greek sailor. She would have stood out in whatever world she chose to live.
She slipped her nightstick into a belt loop and strode over to the take out window ignoring half a dozen slack-jawed stares. She’d been seeing those looks since puberty.
She ordered two burritos, two tacos and cokes. In the black & white, officer Jaime Sosa slumped in the passengers seat and read the sports page. He muttered with disgust.
“Goddamn Dodgers! Manager? Right, couldn’t find his ass with both hands in broad daylight.” Another disappointed die-hard Dodger fan.
Where Sergeant Keely was tall and extraordinarily beautiful, Sosa was short and homely. Sosa’s people emigrated north from the Yucatan at the turn of the century. His Mayan heritage showed in his square, high cheek-boned face and liquid brown eyes, but his soul was pure Angeleno.
Keely brought the food back to the black & white. Sosa suffered with the trials of the on-again, off-again Dodgers.
“Hey, Jimmy, wake up in there.”
He reached over without looking and opened the door.
“Here take these damn things.” She handed him the Burritos and coke. “You eat this shit, you’ll really have something to complain about,” she said with disgust.
“Look at this,” Sosa shook a burrito filled fist, drooling green chili salsa on the newspaper. “Goddamned idiots, look at this! Dipshit trades away every good player on the team!”
“Sure, Jimmy.”
He looked at her with disgust and pulled the paper away. “You’re un-American, Viking. Baseball is serious.”
“Don’t call me, Viking, you bald-headed dwarf.”
“Nice talk, Teresa. Okay, how about, Freya,” he grinned slyly, happy to get a rise.
Keely shook her fist in his fac