Miles Away From Dawn

The first time they reached out, I was laying in bed half asleep around 3am. It was a Thursday morning when I felt the watch vibrate on my wrist. The light from its tiny screen were sun rays scorching my pupils in the midnight of my room. I squinted to put together the words from its startling message. They were pieces to a puzzle which at the time, I didn’t know I’d still be trying to solve 6 months later. The sender, unknown, but the message read,

“The Black Book

Chapter One:

There are wolves that lie in wait,

in wool,

to take their weight in blood,

from sheep in blissful ignorance.

The moon is full,

the night is Miles long,

the shepherd’s eyes are heavy.

Will you keep watch?

Dawn is near….”

“Who the hell is this,” the words crawled out of the grave of my dry throat. I took a sip of the tepid cup of camomile tea next to my bed and wrestled with sleep until my alarm signaled the end of the fight at 6am. I mustered what little strength I had, peeling myself off of the canvas of my mattress. It told the story of a man losing his fight with sleep. I knew that scene well and if anyone looked close enough, they’d see the bigger picture was a man losing his fight with life itself. Though, this was not the time to think about such weighty things. I scrambled to get ready for work and rushed out the door.

I drove my red 1992 Mustang to work. Taking my gun, badge, and chapstick out of the armrest, I walked into the office. “Yo, Davis, you’re late,” Hicks shouted across the floor, loud enough for the entire precinct to cast their uninviting eyes on the black sheep of the force. I shrugged it off, walked to my desk, and found a note that read, “see me in my office.” “Maybe she’s finally letting me go,” the thought crossed the intersection of my mind as a sigh of exhaustion escaped me.

Before I got the chance to knock on the door, “Come in” was yelled from the other side. “Hey Sarge, you wanted to see me,” I said hesitantly. “Close the door behind you,” she said, resting her elbows on the desk, clasping her hands together below her chin, she looked at me intently. The furrow in her brow, signified her utter disgust. It hadn’t always been there. “Detective Davis, I have an assignment for you, it’s a simple babysitting detail. Lunar Pharmaceuticals has asked that we post some officers outside their offices for the next few days while they’re gearing up to release some, new, miracle drug.”

I asked, “but Sarge, isn’t that a job for the unifor-“

She interrupted, “This is a job for the person I have assigned to it and that person is you. Detective work is reserved for personnel that play by my rules and grunt work is for those who find themselves on my shit list. Get your shit together and you won’t have to worry about eating shit, I’ve sent the details and location to your watch, now get out of my office!”

I closed the door behind me, plucked my cup of coffee off my desk and slowly made my way out of the precinct. As I checked my watch for the details for my new assignment, I reread “The Black Book” message from 3am. If I had friends left at the precinct I would’ve asked one of the people from IT to check the message for any information on the number, but never mind that now. The sun was high on my drive to Lunar Pharmaceuticals and my instructions were to be posted there from 10am to 10pm for the next week.

I sat alone in my car for those next few days, stranded on the island of contemplation, surrounded by oceans of regret. I wondered about morality. This gnawing sense between goodness and evil, I wondered why I felt this need to protect the former from the latter. This conviction that had led me down the path of law enforcement at a young age. Who knew years laters it would also lead me to arrest my own partner and serve as a witness against him in his trial for police brutality and manslaughter. Looking at my life now, having experienced the isolation and the ridicule that came with such a decision, “was it worth it,” I muttered in the darkness as I noticed a dark slender figure hit the keypad at the door of the building and walk inside.

Thrusted back to reality by what I had just seen, I shifted my eyes towards my watch and noticed it was just past 12AM. “Who the hell is that and what are they doing here at this hour,” two questions that stopped mattering two hours ago since I was supposed to be gone at 10PM. I thought to start my car and just leave, but there was this feeling that wouldn’t let me put the key into the ignition. This feeling that always creeps up the small of my back at the worst times, signifying that something isn’t quite right. One of my hands clenched the steering wheel, one foot rested on the brake pedal, I stuck the key in the ignition and just as I readied to turn it, a black cargo van rolled in front of the door of the building. It’s lights were off. Three masked figures appeared from within as it pulled away just as silently as it had approached. I strained my eyes from across the street and watched as one of the three hit the keypad of the door and they all disappeared inside. Their flashlights flickered and danced on the giant windows of the glass building as they searched. I watched the show in confusion as they scoured each floor. Time slowed. My mind wondered about whether or not I should insert myself into a situation that had absolutely nothing to do with me. There it was, creeping up the small of my back, yet again. This feeling held me hostage. The lights that slow danced along the windows began to pick up their tempo. The rhythm they now moved to was the frantic beat of giving chase. I saw the slender figure running through the halls towards the stairwell. Floor 3. Without hesitation I left the car, gun drawn, running towards the building. As I approached, the slender figure burst through the front door and transformed into a curly haired woman, who’s brown flushed face glistened golden in the light of the moon. She clenched a small black case in her right hand.

I halted in my tracks and fixed my lips to yell freeze. There it was again, that feeling, as I saw one of the three masked figures raising their gun from inside the windows of the building. The flickers from his gun flashed, a strobe light within this dance club of hysteria that I now find myself a patron of. I couldn’t shoot without hitting the curly haired woman. I was sure she had been struck down by the lightning from the masked person’s gun. A miracle, I thought as she breezed by me, yelling, “they are trying to kill me,” gasping for air with each word. The masked person approached the door. I fired my gun urging them to stay at bay inside the building.

“The red mustang,” I yelled, instructing the woman to correct her direction towards our escape route. The shots from my gun begged the attention of the driver of the black van. It came barreling from behind the building, cargo door positioned ajar, and bullets screaming at me as if they knew me by name. The van halted momentarily to pick the others up from in front of the building. It was in this moment, I emptied the magazine of my Glock, only hoping to hit a tire and hinder their chase. It seems my bullets had other plans. Indeed one did make its home in the front driver’s side tire, but one had runaway, finding itself lodged in the driver’s throat. No time to think about that now. “Get in,” I yelled to the brown faced woman. I started the car as the tires squealed informing the masked figures that we had escaped.

We drove in silence. The roar of the engine matched the intensity of our erratic breathing. Street lights whipped through the windows of the car. They shed light on the beads of sweat on the brown faced woman’s forehead and revealed the shake in her legs as they rocked the black case in her lap up and down. I knew she was nervous. I was too. I asked her name. She answered with a quake in her voice, “Dawn, my name is Dawn Williams and I work, well I worked in Clinical Trials at Lunar Pharmaceuticals.” “Good to meet you, my name is Miles Davis, I work as a Detective,” I said. “Maybe we could stop somewhere and you can tell me what’s going on and who’s trying to kill you, I mean kill us,” I asked, glancing over to see tears cascading down the side of her face as she nodded yes.

We arrived at Steak N’ Eggers, a diner that my partner and I used to frequent. Dawn began telling me her story. She explained how her team had been working on a drug that would help people that struggled with chemical imbalances, which attributed to things from uncontrollable mood swings to the likes of depression and schizophrenia. She explained that the drug was far from market ready for many reasons. The major one being that they discovered a side effect during trials which caused an issue in the user’s blood. It made them very impressionable, almost sheeplike. Dawn shared that after taking the drug, the user's blood became contaminated and any transfer of that blood would produce the same symptom in other people. This drug could be used to control people by the masses. She explained that she had gone there that night to destroy all the samples they had for testing. There was a sheer look of terror in Dawn’s eyes as her words slowed. She whispered, “all I wanted was to help the people that needed it most.” I stopped her and asked, “who else knew about the effects of the drug?” Dawn grabbed my hand, her eyes, daggers cutting clear across the line between good and evil, she said, “there were three of us, but the other two stopped coming to work just last Thursday, the day after they reported the effects of our drug.”

My mind flashed back to the glass that was bulletproof and the masked assailants guns that sang a song of silent death. There it was again, that feeling creeping up the small of my back. It was a knife, stabbing me and betraying my better judgement. There was a cold-sweat on my brow now. It trickled down my eyes as they ran away from Dawn’s and shifted to my watch. It was just a little past 3AM. There was a vibration on either side of the table, emanating from both my wrist and hers. We looked at each other and back at our watches. I began to read out loud,

“The Black Book.”

Dawn’s brown eyes grew twice their size as she joined in, we read together,

“Chapter One:

There are wolves that lie in wait,

in wool,

to take their weight in blood,

from sheep in blissful ignorance.

The moon is full,

the night is Miles long,

the shepherd’s eyes are heavy.

Will you keep watch?

Dawn is near….”

When we finished reading, the black case that she’d been carrying from Lunar Pharmaceuticals snapped opened next to her. Inside was a flash drive, $20,000.00, and a small black notebook labeled “Chapter Two.”