Rite of Passage, page 1
Copyright © 2023 Tim Rangnow
All rights reserved
The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.
No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.
ISBN-13: 978-1-952412-30-1
Cover design: 100Covers.com
Published By: Vagabond Publishing
Printed in the United States of America
RITE OF PASSAGE
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-One
Chapter Thirty-Two
Chapter Thirty-Three
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About the Author
RITE OF PASSAGE
Author’s note:
The characters in this book first appeared in Rising Storm, book 8 of the Jack Dahlish series, and in the short story that was included at the end of the book. It’s not imperative to read either to understand this story, but it might help to give perspective for how the Watchers work.
Enjoy.
Chapter One
The non-descript beige sedan pulled to the curb in front of the Colorado Springs courthouse after navigating streets filled with lunchtime traffic. Alison Pearson turned the key to kill the engine and closed her eyes to enjoy a few peaceful moments of warm sunshine on her face.
“Hey, let me out of here!”
She was jostled when a foot viciously kicked the back of her seat. With a restrained sigh, she clenched her jaw and turned to the impossibly young man sitting beside her. He looked like he was barely out of high school, but he was in his mid-twenties and had graduated from Colorado State University the previous year. This was his first month working with the United States Marshals Service, and she’d been saddled with him as a partner on a fugitive recovery job.
“Damnit, I said let me out of here! I got rights!”
Alison was thrown forward when her seat was kicked again, harder this time. Her eyes drifted up to the rearview mirror, where she saw the filthy specimen that she’d spent the last three days tracking through small mountain towns and forested country. There were still leaves and twigs stuck in his shaggy hair and beard, and his face was so dark with dirt that he could have blended into shadows.
“This is unconstipational! I want my lawyer!”
She squeezed her eyes shut, wondering how anyone this stupid had managed to evade capture for more than a month. If it weren’t for the fact that he’d restrained from hurting or killing anyone during that time, the manhunt would have involved more than a single pair of deputy marshals.
The young man sitting beside her cleared his throat. It was a quiet sound, but she knew it was his non-confrontational way of trying to give her a nudge. In the time they’d been working together, he’d rarely said anything but “yes, ma’am” and “no, ma’am”. He was polite to the point of being annoying.
If she were honest with herself, though, she knew he mostly annoyed her because while she was stuck with him, she was kept from doing the jobs she really enjoyed. Jobs that were off-limits until this little partnership was completed.
“I’m gonna call the Supreme Court on your ass!”
Alison pinched the bridge of her nose and squeezed her eyes tighter. Their fugitive, Henry Walker Wallace, had been shouting idiocies like that for the entire two-hour drive from the campground they’d finally tracked him to. He’d been kicking the back of her seat like a toddler the entire way, also. She knew she wouldn’t be able to restrain herself from lashing out if she were the one to take him inside.
She turned to her young partner. “You know where the holding cells are?”
He nodded. “Yes, ma’am.”
“Good.” She jerked her head toward the backseat. “Take this one and get him booked in. Prison transport should be by tomorrow to take him to county lockup until his trial is underway once more.” Wallace had escaped while being transported to the courthouse for the third day of his hearing, where he was accused of burglary from two dispensaries and aggravated assault on a few of the workers. He’d been looking at a few years behind bars if convicted, but his escape would double the sentence at the very least.
The car shook as her young partner pulled the prisoner out of the backseat, a process Wallace fought just as hard as he’d been yelling to be let out. Alison had met his type before, the kind of people who were hell-bent on making life as difficult as possible for anyone unlucky enough to be in their orbit. She pitied whoever got stuck escorting him to and from the courthouse for his trial appearances.
Her finger found the window controls, which whirred as all four windows rolled down as far as they could. The air that blew into the car was filled with the smells of exhaust and tire rubber, but it was infinitely more pleasurable than the foul body odor and rotting teeth smell of the fugitive. Alison let her eyes drift closed again, and a small smile spread across her lips as she absorbed the warmth of the day in blessed silence.
“Hey, chica. I don’t think you can park there.”
Laughter bubbled up from her chest as she opened her eyes and looked at the man bent down to peer inside the car. His radiant smile made her shake her head. “Benny, if you call me chica one more time, you won’t like the way that conversation ends.”
A mischievous glint in his eye told her he was tempted to do it and find out what she might do. Wisely, he restrained the impulse. “I saw the kid taking a walking bush into the courthouse. You caught your fugitive?”
“Finally,” she said with a nod. She smirked at how Benny had referred to her temporary partner as a kid, considering there were only a few years separating them. The difference was that Benito Herrera had gone straight from high school into the Army. After a brief stint in the desert, he took his first opportunity to exit the service and wound up working in the Chicago P.D. He’d been recruited into the organization she worked for a little over a year ago, after a tragic event took away his wife. “What brings you in?”
Benny shrugged. “Not sure. Mr. Olsen called and told me to get my butt off the couch and report to his office after lunch.”
Alison felt a smile tugging at the corners of her mouth. Greg Olsen was her direct superior for the Marshals service, and he also happened to be the handler for her other job. The one that few people were aware of. The one she looked forward to working again soon. If he’d called Benny in, then she wondered if the rest of her team had also been summoned. Perhaps today was starting to look up.
She pushed the car door open, stretching sore muscles as she stood on the sidewalk. “What are you waiting for?” she asked Benny, knowing from his smirk that he was about to make a crack about her age. He was a good teammate, but his mouth had a habit of moving before his brain was in gear. “Get in there and head to Greg’s office.”
“Yes, ma’am,” he said, grinning at his imitation of her current young partner. “Am I going to see you in there?”
“Maybe.” Hopefully, she thought. “I need to check on the booking process for our fugitive, and then I’ll be reporting to Greg to tell him the hunt was successful.”
Benny nodded, understanding the hopefulness she was feeling. Unlike her, he didn’t have a position with the Marshals to keep him busy between assignments for their other job. She had no doubt he’d grown tired of hitting the gym and lounging around his one-bedroom apartment on the outskirts of downtown. He was halfway up the courthouse steps when she called out. “Tell the others hello if you see them before I do.” He waved over his shoulder before disappearing through the doors.
She stared after him for a moment, fighting the desire to skip procedure and head up to her boss’s office right away. The experience of two decades as a deputy marshal quickly squashed that impetuous thought, and she turned her steps toward the side of the courthouse. Prisoners were always brought in through a side door, one that had a permanent guard stationed just inside to hinder any escape attempts.
The stone steps that led down to the door halfway below street level were black with grime and dirt. They’d been that way since she transferred to the Colorado Springs office a couple of years ago. Sometimes, she wondered if the grime was designed to keep nosy people from trying to enter through this secured door. Alison pressed the buzzer beside the steel door and flipped open the leather wallet holding her credentials so they could be seen by whoever was monitoring the security camera above it. A loud buzz sounded a few moments later, and she pulled the door open.
“Afternoon, Ms. Pearson.”
“Henry, good to see you.” She gave the grizzled old veteran ensconced behind thick glass a smile. He was one of the few people in the courthouse that she’d come to know in her time there. “Did my partner sign in with our fugitive?”
“He did.” Henry turned his swivel chair to look at a bank of monitors. A thick finger tapped one of them. “Looks like they’re finishing up with the paperwork right now.”
“Great, I’ll head down and look it over. Thanks!”
“Not a problem, Ms. Pearson. Have a good one.”
She strolled along the bland beige corridor that led deeper into the basement complex. The linoleum floor was decades out of date, but it was easier to clean and repair when convicts and detainees got out of hand. She shuddered at the thought of someone running a black light over the floors and walls around her. Glancing up, she thought that even the ceiling might not prove to be safe to look at in such conditions. Far too much bodily fluid of every description had been shed in that corridor through the years.
Henry Walker Wallace was still shouting about his rights, and she heard him long before she entered the tight confines of the room where he was being processed. Alison glanced at him and started to chuckle when she realized Benny’s comparison of him and a walking bush was more apt than she’d expected. With his shaggy hair and beard, not to mention the leaves and twigs still stuck to different parts of his body and camouflage clothing, he could have squatted next to a bush and almost disappeared. That was probably what he’d intended, but they’d found him inside a sleeping bag in the tent of a couple who had gone out for a morning hike. She pitied the mess they’d find when they returned to their tent, and hoped they’d call the number on the card she left so the Marshals Service could reimburse them.
“There she is!” Wallace yelled, his crazy eyes staring right at her. “That’s the woman who violated my constipational rights. You should arrest her!”
The middle-aged officer trying to make the fugitive stand still for photos nodded a greeting with an exhaustion she shared. A few minutes of dealing with Wallace drained a person of all their goodwill toward humanity. It didn’t help that the fugitive kept moving around erratically at the moment each picture was snapped, almost as if he was intent on not being photographed.
Alison reached for her shirt pocket, sighing when her fingers felt only cloth. The blue-tinted spectacles she normally carried there had been checked in to the local Archives before she started this assignment, to ensure they were kept out of the wrong hands. The glasses were a Relic that enabled the wearer to see through the human masks the supernatural Nox could project, which allowed them to live unmolested in a world full of humans who had long ago turned against anything different than themselves. With them, she could have verified whether her hunch about the prisoner were correct.
Even if Wallace were a form of Nox, it wouldn’t change anything. Had he been deemed too dangerous to be kept among normal humans in a prison, he never would have been on the Marshals Service’s radar. The assignment to capture him would have come through her other job.
“Ma’am?”
Alison turned to look at her young partner with a barely restrained sigh. “What is it, Trent?”
He held out the pages of forms that had to be filled out for each fugitive brought into the courthouse holding facility. She noted his handwriting was as precise as he was polite, a far cry from her own barely legible chicken scratch. She couldn’t help wondering if that were his natural script or if he’d spent years practicing it.
She flipped through the pages, scanning each line. There were only a few places in need of improvement, and none of them would have been cause for alarm if she hadn’t found them. Trent might look like a wet-behind-the-ears teenager, but his college training shined through when it came to learning the ropes. “Looks good,” she said, gracing him with a tight smile. “Once you finish up down here, type up the report about the last three days. Make sure you have it on Chief Deputy Olsen’s desk by end of day.”
“Yes, ma’am,” he said, reaching up as if trying to tip the brim of a hat. She sniffed, easily imagining him in a cowboy getup. He probably considered it relaxed wear when he was off duty. She’d checked into his background when she’d been saddled with him and found out his family owned a couple hundred acres in the foothills of the Rockies. No doubt there was a nice herd of cattle on that land, which he spent weekends tending to.
As she rode up the elevator to the floor where the Marshals Service had their office, Alison reflected that Colorado Springs was a different place from her last posting. St. Louis was still considered Midwest by some, but it was closer to the densely urban areas in the eastern part of the country. Colorado Springs was surrounded by mountains and vast stretches of open country. Inside the city, one could feel like they were in the hustle and bustle of any metropolitan area, but a few miles outside of town and it was easy to see the wild charm that had attracted the sorts of characters who had called this place home back in the days of the Old West.
The elevator doors opened onto a buzz of noise. The Marshals Service office was what developers these days called an “open floor plan”. Basically, it meant they were all shoved into tiny cubes with zero privacy. Too many times, Alison had been forced to listen to those sitting around her talking to spouses or dating partners, and she knew far more about some of their love lives than she’d ever wanted to.
Her cubicle was almost in the center of that open area, the least-desired location in the office. She’d been given several reasons why it was assigned to her, but they basically boiled down to the fact that she was often gone for long stretches during assignments on her other job. Part of keeping that secret meant making everyone else in the office think she was being punished by having to work the jobs no one else wanted. The kinds of cases that were seemingly never resolved while dusty case files stacked up on the edge of a desk for years on end.
Alison flashed a smile at the large woman who occupied the cubicle on one side of hers, receiving a disdainful frown in return. That bloated creature had been the bane of her existence since she’d transferred to this office. On her very first day, the woman had started rumors that Alison was forced to leave St. Louis because she’d been sleeping with her boss there. If anyone had bothered checking, they would have known that her previous boss was a gay man in a happily committed relationship with a bench-sitter for the Cardinals.
She hung her windbreaker over the back of her chair, so that the blocky yellow US MARSHAL lettering was visible to anyone approaching her desk. There were several sticky notes attached to her monitor, all of which were messages to return calls. Every single one was from a lawyer representing the accused criminal in one of her other fugitive retrieval cases, so she tossed them in the trash can. They would have called Greg when she wasn’t available, and he was more than capable of answering any of their questions. The partners she’d been stuck with on each case would be the ones showing up to testify in court when necessary. It was part of the reason she never worked a Marshals case alone. She was almost guaranteed to be out of town and unavailable when such duties were required.
While she booted up her computer, she raised her head above the level of the low cubicle walls. She scanned the room, looking for Benny but unable to find him. Hopefully, that meant he was in with Greg already. Alison knew the youngest member of her team well enough to suspect it wasn’t outside the realm of possibility that he got distracted by a pretty woman in the elevator on the way up.
She chuckled over that image as she logged on to the computer and began the process of closing out the Wallace case file. Trent would type up a more detailed report than she ever could, but she made sure the system would flag it and send her a copy when it was submitted. She’d had more than one partner who tried to relegate her role in the report to sitting in the car while they did all the work. Trent didn’t strike her as the glory hound type, but that shy politeness could be hiding any amount of alpha smugness.
Almost as if he’d been watching and waiting for a sign that she had returned, her boss’s voice bellowed out from his office. It was loud enough that everyone on the floor could hear it, and she winced as the hum of conversation dipped noticeably while heads turned in her direction.
