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  The Duce of Pentacles by S. A. Gorden

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  Copyright (c)2004 by Renaissance E Books

  Renaissance

  www.renebooks.com Suspense

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  NOTICE: This work is copyrighted. It is licensed only for use by the original purchaser. Duplication or distribution of this work by email, floppy disk, network, paper print out, or any other method is a violation of international copyright law and subjects the violator to severe fines and/or imprisonment.

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  THE DUCE OF PENTACLES

  A Paranormal Thriller By

  S. A. GORDEN

  A Renaissance E Books publication ISBN 1-58873-468-4

  All rights reserved Copyright (C) 1997, 2004 by S. A. Gorden This book may not be reproduced in whole or in part without written permission.

  For information contact: [email protected] PageTurner Editions/A Deerstalker Classic ––—

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Special thanks to Granny for the great job editing. Couldn’t have done it without her. And Linda, Ben and Sheena deserve praise for living in the same house as this crazy writer.

  Illustrations from the Rider-Waite Tarot Deck (R), known also as the Rider Tarot and the Waite Tarot, reproduced by permission of U. S. Games Systems, Inc., Stamford, CT 06902 USA. Copyright (C) 1971 by U. S. Games Systems, Inc. Further reproduction prohibited. The Rider-Waite Tarot Deck is a registered trademark of U. S. Games systems, Inc.

  ––—

  PROLOGUE: The Opening of the Deck In the darkened room, a click is heard. A high intensity desk lamp turns on. A figure shrouded in shadows places a new deck of cards on the table. The words Rider Tarot Deck can easily be read on the box. Bone-white hands, disembodied by an oval of light illuminating only the tabletop, break the seal on the deck. The deck is placed so a card can be seen.

  A robed figure stands behind a table with a disk inscribed with a pentagram, a sword, a cup, and a green stick. The figure’s right hand is raised with what looks like a small white wand of unknown substance. His left hand is pointing to the ground. Over the figure’s head, two circles twisted and joined, forming infinity. The card is arrayed with a garden of flowers that overflow its sides.

  After a pause, the deck is turned over. The cards shuffled and cut, shuffled and cut, shuffled and cut. The deck is then placed in the middle of the table and the top card is removed and placed face up next to the deck.

  A man leaning on a green staff, his head bandaged, appears on its face, and behind him stands a row of eight more green staffs in a barricade. The man has a vaguely lost, melancholy look as he gazes off to his right.

  A noncommittal, “Humfff” comes from the figure cloaked in darkness.

  The hands reach up, a click , and the room plunges to black.

  ––—

  CHAPTER 1: The Nine of Wands

  His name was James Makinen. He was cleanly dressed but appeared slovenly. His appearance had declined over the last five years when his marriage started to come apart. James’ disintegration accelerated when three years ago he had stopped by his old house to pick up his two kids for the weekend and discovered his wife had left for California with both children.

  After spending all the money he had left after the divorce in court trying to get his kids back, he gave up. His despair and lack of money accounted for most of his disheveled looks. The rest of his looks came mostly from his genetics.

  James had thin, wispy, light caramel-colored hair and slightly tarnished wire-rimmed glasses. His fair skin had a tendency to break out at the least excuse. He had the overweight look of middle age. With his pale skin and pudgy appearance, everyone considered him as sickly. Healthy by current standards was a bronze complexion, broad chest and thin waist, the exact opposite of his looks. No one believed that he had never missed a day of work for sickness in the last ten years. His current health had less to do with care and more to do with depression. After his wife and children left him, he would lay in bed for hours unable to sleep. Six weeks after being served the divorce papers, he had tried to exercise instead of tossing back and forth in bed. After an hour of push-ups, sit-ups and jumping jacks, he had slept. This went on until he discovered T’ai-Chi and the other forms, or katas, of oriental shadow boxing. Now every night he would spend hours practicing the different forms and designing his own. In complete exhaustion, he would crawl into bed and the oblivion of sleep.

  When the clock’s alarm rang in the morning, he would climb into the first clean clothes he found in his closet, check his face in a mirror to see if he had to go to a barber, eat anything he found in the refrigerator that hadn’t turned green yet, and drive to the high school to teach. With everything that had happened in his personal life, you would think that he had become a bad teacher. He had been a great teacher, spending hours before and after school to supplement the course work. Now he just put in his time.

  However, since he had been great, his marking time was better then most people’s best.

  Every day Makinen had hall duty during the lunch hour. The school had a large open commons area where the kids would mill about while waiting for their fifth-hour classes to start. He stood on the second floor balcony looking over his right shoulder at a group of girls. Most people thought of teenage girls as pretty and sexy, but although he considered them pretty, he was repulsed. When he was younger, he’d had a large fish tank. The tropical fish would form up in schools. They would swim back and forth through the water ignoring the other fish with their strength of numbers. A fish would dart from the school and nip the fins of a lone fish swimming by itself. As if this was a marking of a victim, the other fish in the school would take a turn harassing the marked fish. It would take days but finally he would find the fish in the tank, floating belly up with a hole eaten halfway through its belly and the school pecking at another fish.

  Today James watched a girl leave her clique, make a remark to a friendless girl, and leave her in tears. He knew the others in the clique sensing blood would soon join in the game. In a weariness that soaked through his bones, he eased himself away from the railing to break up the group. He was too late.

  The new history teacher, Lori Waithe, moved the girls along. She had graduated five years earlier from this same school. James remembered her in the vague way he remembered the hundreds of other former students. But now it was different. She wasn’t a member of some girlish clique anymore, but an individual, a woman. She had graduated from the school, the clique, to become an individual to be admired and appreciated. He watched her move, studied her profile. His eyes followed the clean smooth lines of her body until he got to the curve of her butt. That had always been his favorite part of the female anatomy. The only thing he could still remember without anger or remorse about his former wife was tracing the curve of her buttock with his fingertips after lovemaking.

  From the other end of the commons another person watched. The softening look on James’s face made it obvious what he was thinking. The watcher followed his gaze to the group of girls. Anger flared. The watcher lusted for one in the group. Since the watcher lusted, so must the teacher on the balcony. The teacher must be destroyed.

  Click. The light turns on. Hands reach for the deck of cards, pick the top card and turn it over.

  A crowned man sitting on a throne, holding a sword is on the card. But the card is upside down…

  The hands seem to hesitate for a time, then they reach up to turn off the light.

  ––—

  CHAPTER 2: The King of Swords reversed

  Jefferson William Shermon considered himself a genius and knew he was a sadist. He decide
d to become a school superintendent while still in grade school. It had occurred while he was waiting in the principal’s office with three of his friends. They had been caught smoking in the bathroom. Although he was afraid, he reveled in the fear being generated by his friends as they were called into the office one at a time. Jefferson loved the fear so much, he became the school informer. Always careful to avoid being caught tattling, he would turn in a student and covertly watch their anguish as they were brought to the office. He became skilled at setting up his friends and enemies.

  The more he learned about his chosen profession the more he loved it.

  The only group that could wield as much power as he could were the teachers, and they were on the defensive. It had started years ago when some bright authors with an axe to grind started to pick and choose educational statistics. Who cares if most of the world envies our education system, you can always make it look bad. Sure we graduate a much higher percentage of students than the rest of the world and still are only a couple of percentage points off the best scores but you can always point out that there are a half a dozen countries that rank higher in those few percentage points. If the ratio of failing students goes down in one area, you can point out that raw numbers of failing students are going up and just neglect to point out the student population increased as well. Besides, there is always a survey done somewhere that points out a problem. By the end of the Reagan administration, the myth of massive numbers of bad teachers and bad teaching had become an accepted fact. The politics of destruction dictated that the people put in charge of education had to be chosen by how much they wanted to destroy the current system. The current mythology had even penetrated the educational system itself. It was an accepted axiom of all education administrators that a bad student is always the teacher’s fault, even if the student is a Charlie Manson or a Ted Bundy.

  When Jefferson was taking his graduate courses to become an administrator, he discovered a study buried in the literature that showed huge increases in student performance. Out of curiosity, he looked further and found the study had been done over and over again showing the same results. At first, he didn’t understand why the studies had been buried. When he finally realized why, he became even more proud of his chosen profession.

  The studies showed that the smaller the class size the better the students did, no fancy teaching scheme, no miracle system, just more teachers.

  Over the last few decades, the money and power in the schools had shifted dramatically to the administration of the system. Smaller class sizes would mean more teachers. More teachers would mean less power to the principals, superintendents, school boards, etc. Better to attack the teachers’ unions and try to privatize education then to let the reins of power go. Privatization had never worked and never would, but the breaking apart of the current public education system would mean even more power to those controlling the flow of money, the administrators. By the time Jefferson got his first job as a principal, his pride in the deviousness of his job knew no bounds.

  The day was going great. He sat in on a review of the new history teacher with the high school principal. By the end of the review he knew that his principal, Joe Kawalski, would try to pressure her into bed before she got her tenure. That excited him because he would then be able to blackmail her into bed himself. The sex didn’t excite him as much as forcing her and seeing Joe’s face when he let him find out about it.

  Right now he was going through his one-hour preparation for the monthly school board meeting. His school board was in many ways a standard small town board. A retired teacher and one smart mother-he enjoyed thinking of her in that way-were the two troublemakers. The remaining board members were easily controlled. The third member was the twenty-seven-year-old son of the local banker. His father wanted him in state politics and ordered him to run for the school board as a starting point. The fourth board member was a local doctor.

  He felt he should be on the board as his part of community service but was so busy with his own work he just rubberstamped whatever Jefferson wanted. The fifth member had been on the board so many years that he had grown senile. The sixth member was a mother who had five children. The oldest, a nineteen year old, had just been sentenced to twenty years to life in the state penitentiary. The mother blamed all her troubles on her children’s teachers.

  In order to get Them, the teachers, she convinced her church, a strict fundamentalist denomination, to back her election. The seventh and last was a wife of a local hardware storeowner. She was dumber than the doorknobs her husband sold but she worshiped strong people. She would look at Jefferson with those big doe eyes your hear about but seldom see.

  The only way the day could get better was if he had an excuse to fire a teacher. He always thought it was funny how the politicians would, during their campaigns, complain how you couldn’t fire a bad teacher because of the union-backed tenure laws. You could always fire a teacher if you had an excuse. You just had to do your job. All teaching contracts had simple procedures that could be followed to fire a teacher for cause. Jefferson was always disgusted by the superintendent or principal who couldn’t follow the rules and fire a teacher. He voted ultra-conservative Republican because he wanted to be able to fire a teacher for fun.

  Jefferson fantasized for the next few minutes about being able to walk down the hall and into the teachers’ workroom and fire a faculty member one month before his retirement benefits started. The smile was erased from his face by the knock on the front door.

  “Thelma, I told you no disruptions before the board meeting.”

  “Sorry, Mr. Shermon, but two sheriff’s deputies are here. They want to talk to you about a complaint they received about a teacher.”

  Thelma missed the smile that erupted on Jefferson’s face. By the time the two cops entered the room, all that could be seen on Jefferson’s face was a scowl of great concern. Jefferson was barely able to control his glee when he heard the name James Makinen. He knew that after the divorce, James had nearly broken down. If he handled the allegations correctly, he should be able to completely destroy James. He had only completely broken one other person before, and he still relished the look of abject despair on his former girlfriend’s face those twenty years ago the night before her suicide. Tonight after the board meeting, he would use the leather straps on his wife. His wife’s face twisted in pain would be the jewel crowning the best day so far in his life.

  James lived on a three-acre plot he purchased on the corner of his cousin’s farm. He had pulled onto the lot a rebuilt fourteen-by-sixty trailer house. The land and trailer had been purchased using a loan his father had given him after his ex-wife had left for California. The payments to his father and the utilities, child support and food bills left him the grand total of seventy-five dollars per month for luxuries such as furniture and clothing. The trailer had been delivered with a complete kitchen and built-in closets. In the living/dining room, he had a used 19-inch TV and VCR on an old coffee table, a frayed recliner and three mismatched wooden chairs.

  Originally, the trailer had three bedrooms. He had a mattress in the largest bedroom, nothing in the second, and had removed the wall from the third to add its space to the living room. With all that empty space, he was able to do all his katas and T’ai-Chi without bumping into walls or chairs. The only other piece of furniture in the whole house was a barstool for the counter in the kitchen. He ate his meals at the kitchen counter sitting on that ratty old barstool.

  James had been working on his T’ai-Chi for an hour and was just about to change to a kata when the knocking on the front door interrupted him.

  The light switches on. The shadowed figure reaches to the deck and turns over a card.

  On the card face, a young man caught in mid-stride is holding a sword aloft.

  The hands lightly tapped the table in curiosity before turning off the light. Steps are heard followed by the creaking of a door hinge.

  ––—

  CHAPTER 3: The
Page of Swords

  Al Gallea squirmed in the seat. His first time out on an investigation!

  This was why he left the police force in Minneapolis to join a county sheriff’s department. If he had stayed in Minneapolis, it would have been about five more years before he would have gone out on an investigation.

  Although he took notes, he could not remember any of the details of their conversation with Jefferson William Shermon, other than the man’s name.

  He was that excited. He did get the impression that the superintendent thought that the suspect, James Makinen, had at least fondled the girl if not actually having had intercourse with her. Al’s hands tapped nervously on his notebook as he thought about their upcoming interview with Makinen.

  Deputy Sheriff Henry Hakanen, Al’s training officer, interrupted his thoughts. “Well, Al, I know James Makinen. I want you to just listen. I know you are hot to trot this being your first investigation and all, but James won’t be handled like you learned in training school. Just try to remember everything you see and hear, and don’t muck anything up by talking.”

  Gallea’s anger flared. He’d always thought of the overweight Hakanen as a joke. He never had understood why the other officers always stopped and listened to Henry when he talked. He said to himself, “Fuck it. This is a simple case. I’m going to handle it and no God damn overweight, over-the-hill fart like Henry is going to stop me.”

  Before Gallea could form a retort in his mind, Henry pulled the car off the road and in front of an old trailer. Somehow, the overweight Henry was out the door, up the wooden steps and knocking on the trailer door before the increasingly flustered Gallea untangled himself from the seat belt and the files he had on his lap.

  The door was opened by a middle-aged man in a ragged, sweat-stained workout suit. He whipped his face with a towel and said, “Hi, Henry. Haven’t seen you for a while. Come in and sit. I’ll make coffee.”