Chapter 43
Before following Oscar to his car, Ashe made the detective pause while he grabbed an item from his own Mazda. The dream journal. Ever since he stumbled upon the spiral notebook, it had been given Ashe a headache, taunting him with vague, abstract visions and images, ones documenting Scott’s dreams. Dreams were nothing more than shadows of the day’s happenings, images and ideas left over once consciousness had ceased.
However, the conversation between Ginger, Oscar, and himself had brought his mind back to the journal. The black and gold container had held a vital clue, a pivotal piece to the scattered puzzle that Scott had left in his wake. Understanding the drug, its effects and its implications along with other crimes where the black and gold container had made an appearance, had been a leap for Ashe, bringing him closer to the truth, closer to completing the puzzle.
And there apparently were two more clues.
Ashe could not for the life of him comprehend what Scott had believed the so-called clues would achieve, as if everything that was happening was part of a novel or the script to a tight lipped mystery movie, where detectives follow a line of clues in order to find the bad guy and save the innocent people. But true life was never that neat. Clues rarely lined up straight, creating a neat path from beginning to the end, from the act to the arrest. It just never went down that way.
Yet, the container had worked as a clue. Ashe couldn’t help but to wonder what the other clues may hold for him, which caused him to give the dream journal another chance. He would have to suffer the dreams in order to find what Scott had intended him to discover. Inside the pages, somewhere in the words, was another piece of the scattered puzzle.
Tucking the journal beneath his arm, Ashe followed his old friend to his car. He got inside and buckled himself in tight. It would be around an hour to drive up to the new crime scene and he would have plenty of time to scan through the rest of the notebook.
Oscar entered the car and immediately asked about the notebook. “What do you got there? Feel free to doodle during the drive up. I will listen to the radio.”
“It’s not for doodling,” Ashe replied.
“Sudoku?”
“Nope. It’s something else that I stole from your crime scene,” Ashe blurted, trying to add humor to the self-incriminating words. “Want to arrest me now?”
“For stealing class notes from a college student? I will pass,” Oscar replied, before igniting the car’s engine.
“It’s not exactly notes,” Ashe told him. “It’s a dream journal.”
“If you say so,” Oscar said. He put the car into drive and began the trek up north, toward Lake Erie and the city of Cleveland.
“Are you playing dumb, now?” Ashe said and laughed. “Scott did learn a few things from his old man, Oscar. Dreams can be important when dealing with a person’s inner thoughts and fears. It can show what that person is dealing with in their lives at the time of the dream. If someone is dealing with overwhelming anxiety, documenting their dreams might show the root of that anxiety, like a bad boyfriend or stress at their job. Scott enjoys putting down his dreams, especially ones that occur over and over. Let me ask you something. What do you dream about? And when you wake up in the morning, how long does it take for your dreams to fade?”
“Not long,” Oscar replied. “If I remember what I dream at all. Sometimes I don’t think I do dream.”
“That is probably because you never sleep,” Ashe told him.
“That could be,” Oscar groaned. “When I do dream…it is never a pretty sight. I never get to dream about fluffy things like clouds and youth. Only ugliness.”
“That is because your daily life is filled with ugliness,” Ashe replied. “Ugliness begets ugliness.”
Oscar nodded. “Why do you think that that journal is important?”
Ashe explained. “I’m still convinced that Scott saw something…or believed that he saw something. A hallucination due to the pill. I just don’t know what. But he pointed out this journal when he called me, calling it another clue. It’s filled with images. Incoherent, mostly. Maybe he wrote down his hallucination in here somewhere. I haven’t been giving it the attention that it deserves…or that I hope it deserves.”
“Clues!” Oscar spat. “You can have your journal of dreams. The only clues I am interested in is this new scene and the bleeding man Scott left behind. Maybe this guy has some information for us…if he doesn’t die before we get there.”
“Any chance of him dying?” Ashe asked.
“Not sure,” Oscar answered. “The boss didn’t give me a lot of details. We will find out when we get there, I figure.”
Sometimes Ashe forgot that Oscar had a boss too, someone watching down on him, picking apart everything that he did and didn’t do. Maybe it was because Oscar always appeared to be in charge, absolutely and completely, as if the only person above him, when it came to catching killers, was God himself. But, as Ashe should already know, everyone has a boss. Perhaps even God had a boss, someone to judge and punish him when things went wrong.
“So,” Oscar continued, “you can have your little dream journal and I will focus on the blood stains that I can see and touch.”
“I think that was exactly what Scott had in mind,” Ashe replied. “You focus on the bullets and I will analyze the dreams. Ying and yang. Tit for tat. Man of science. Man of faith. As it always should be.”
“If you say so,” Oscar said. “I have missed you too…partner. I can’t stand working with Geiring one more day. Asshole.”
“Fucking asshole,” Ashe added, smiling. Part of him had missed riding with Oscar, heading toward a fresh crime scene, even if he hadn’t realized it. He just wished the scene was going to be different and the suspect was not his own son.
Oscar leaned forward and turned on the radio. Latin music spilled from the speakers, giving Ashe his cue to dive into the dream journal.
Even though it was technically day time, the world was dark, forcing Ashe to bring out his cell phone so he can once again use its light to see. He thought about asking Oscar to use the light from the visor, but decided against it. The cell light was lower and dimmer and wouldn’t distract the detective, who had become entirely focused on the road.
Instead of turning the page he had previously ended on, Ashe did something that he should have done in the first place. He opened the notebook and flipped to the last written page, because he was suddenly certain that the change in Scott was not gradual but sudden. It was a drug induced reaction to the mystery pill. And the final entry, the final words, would best reflect the shift in his mind, the change from normal to paranoid.
Possibly.
Ashe hoped that he was right, but knew that he was heavily relying on Scott’s claim that the journal was one of the so-called clues.
Finding the most recent entry, he began to read. His eyes fell upon the first word on the page and his heart stopped. A clue indeed, he almost said out loud. The page must have been added either the moment Scott had decided to kill Owen or immediately after he shot his roommate. Either…or…he knew the following paragraph had been written for him.
Dad—I know that you must be confused but I swear to you that I am not out of my mind or crazy. And, even though this is a dream journal, that it was not some dream, because dreams are fiction and what I saw was real and going to happen. So I had to stop it from coming true. It was a vision. I don’t know where the vision came from, but I cannot believe it was anything other than a prediction.
I took the pill. I shouldn’t have but I did. I can’t say for sure why.
I don’t think that I passed out because Bam had said that I never fell over. I just left the world, floated away in a blinding white light. I had no body or matter of any kind. I was a ghost, flying away. Into the light. And when I came back to the world I was back in my apartment. I was in the kitchen. There was someone else in the kitchen an
d I don’t believe they could see me or tell that I was floating right behind them.
I never landed. Not completely. At first I didn’t know who the person was because I could only see his back. But it didn’t take long before I knew it was Owen. He glanced around the kitchen and I could see his face. It was sweaty and his eyes were wild, like he gets when he is out of his mind high. I could smell the sweat.
Owen was holding a handgun. I could smell the gun powder or what I thought was gunpowder. He looked freaked out. Strange. I didn’t know why. But then I smelled the blood. It was a rotten smell. When I smelled the blood, I forced myself to float higher so that I could see over and around Owen.
There was a body.
It was horrid.
The dead man had been shot in the stomach. Blood pooled beneath him. It almost looked like wings. Like a death angel. I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. The dead man’s face was my face. It was me. I was dead.
While I floated there, Owen turned back to my dead self and fired another shot. The bullet hit me in the forehead, the dead me. It was just wrong. More blood. There was more blood. The blood made Owen sick too. He threw up next to my body.
I went back to my real body. Bam was staring at me. I didn’t know what to tell her. I don’t understand why. You need to help me. I don’t understand it. And you can help me find the truth. Please, dad.
“Jesus Christ,” Ashe said when he finished reading.
The light curse caught Oscar’s attention, drawing him away from whatever deep thought that he had plunged into. From the corner of his eye, he gave the psychologist a brief glance. “Why are you using my lord’s name in vain, Ashe?”
“Scott,” he mumbled. “It might be worse than we had realized.”
“How do you mean?”
“I was right about the hallucination,” Ashe continued. “Only…Scott doesn’t see it as a hallucination. He sees as something else, something more concrete, something a lot more dangerous.”
“What did he see?”
“He thinks that he saw…” Ashe began but paused. “Scott thinks he saw his own death…by the hands of Owen. The only problem is…that he doesn’t see it as a drug induced symptom, even though he knows that the pill had caused what he saw.”
“What the hell does he think, then?”
“He thinks it was prophecy,” Ashe told him.
“Jesus Christ,” Oscar exclaimed.
“This type of thinking, Oscar, can be pretty serious,” Ashe said. Scott had had run-ins with Owen, in which Owen had threatened him while on drugs. The events must have stayed with Scott, kept somewhere in the back of his mind. When Scott took the mystery pill, the drug used that incident and conjured some kind of image or images. “This type of conviction is hard to sway. He is certain that he caught a glimpse beyond the veil, if you know what I mean. There is a reason why more blood is shed because of religion or religious interpretation than any other reason in history. Religion is built on faith and conviction. Scott doesn’t mention God, but his beliefs follow the same idea. He thinks that someone or something has shown him his own death…and he believes that he had stopped it by killing Owen. Self-defense. Just like the guys in the park.”
“Just like the titan Cronus,” Oscar said and surprised Ashe.
“Cronus?”
“It was prophesized that one of Cronus’ children would kill him,” Oscar continued, “so he ate them one by one. It was his wife that had saved Zeus, replacing him with a rock when Cronus came for him.”
“Insightful.”
“Thank you. What about the scene we are heading for?” Oscar asked. “What does kidnapping have to do with what he saw in his vision?”
“I don’t know, yet,” Ashe admitted. “I need to know more about who was involved. Who was taken?”
“I wasn’t told,” Oscar replied. “We have to wait until we get there to see. If they even know at this point. Hard to tell.”
Ashe nodded. He began to watch the outside world beyond the car’s windows. Everything appeared to be wet and covered in a gloomy shade of gray, a color that mirrored how he was feeling inside. It was a cliché, but he didn’t know how else to describe his mood.
Gray.
Dreary.
“Things are becoming complicated,” Ashe said aloud. “Aren’t they?”
“I have a feeling they are only getting started,” Oscar replied. “I’m sorry, Ashe. But Scott might be too far gone for us to bring back.”
“Yea,” Ashe concurred. “But I have to try.”
Oscar concurred with a grunt. “Sins of the father.”
“More than I realize.”