EAR OF GOD

So young, so deadly…

“Remmie, look at me. For God’s sake, look at me!”

Seven days to live. Only one way out.

It was supposed to be a routine ransom drop. Dump the money, collect the kid. The sort of case FBI agent Ishmael Soul has seen a thousand times in his big, bad life.

But kidnappers make their own rules. When things go horribly wrong, Dr. Soul—an expert on the occult and psychic phenomena—wakes to find himself locked in an underground bunker with only one chance for survival.

Shackled, tortured, and starved, the great sleuth must now enlist the help of his fellow captive—a very unusual child. A boy with extraordinary powers that Soul can’t begin to fathom.

Dr. Soul has spent his life studying gifted people called *thinks*. But how do you connect with a sweet, innocent think who cannot look another human being in the eye?

As the deadline for death creeps closer, can Soul work his magic in time to save both their lives?

Ear of God is the second in the spellbinding Mesmerist thriller series, known for psychic phenomena, page-turning suspense, and heart-pounding action.

If you’re a fan of occult detectives, horrific paranormal happenings, and diabolical twists and turns, you owe it to yourself to check out Ear of God.

Don’t even think about it. Get it today!

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Read an excerpt of Ear of God

Chapter 1

I watched the FBI agent walk down the fifty-yard line of the football field on a crisp day in November. Dangling from his right hand was a blue-and-red Nike duffle bag containing a quarter of a million dollars.

I was sitting in the passenger seat of an Oldsmobile across State Highway 17, tucked into a strip mall whose anchor store appeared to be a sewing machine repair shop. The man on my left, sitting behind the wheel, was an agent with old-man eyebrows named Russell Clay. His conversation waffled between discussing the current operation and the hilarious jackanapes of his three-year-old granddaughter.

On that occasion I was just a city cop acting as an unofficial consultant. I’d known Russell for less than forty-eight hours. He struck me as honorable but clueless. He had no idea how his choice of conversation was stoking the already frazzled nerves of our backseat passenger—the aunt and legal guardian of the kidnapped boy.

I focused my binoculars on the scene before me. The football field was located in a dinky town in upstate New York. The municipality may have been small, but the town fathers had their priorities straight. You could not have asked for a more beautiful setting to play the most red-blooded of American sports. The park was nicely manicured, the turf still green though daily temperatures in that neck of the woods had started dropping nights into the thirties. Two sets of aluminum bleachers rose at the far end of the field against a line of trees whose foliage had reached peak days ago and was fluttering to the ground at the merest whisper of wind.

Behind the trees rose the first glimpse of the Catskills I’d seen in years. I’d known the region well as a boy, but the man I was now had shunted aside sweet memories to focus almost exclusively on painful ones.

It had been one of those years when everything felt like it was going to shit. Unemployment was high, inflation was high, and everyone hated politics. Only days ago We the People had voted the peanut farmer out of the nation’s highest office and replaced him with an actor. We had no idea what we had signed up for, but we knew things would be different. Maybe that’s why the sight of those mountains rising over a park where families came together put me in a hopeful mood. It was close to eight on a bright, sunny morning after a week of ceaseless rain, and I was certain everything would turn out okay.

I watched groundskeepers rake leaves over by the field house. I watched cars shoot past on Highway 17. I watched a guy mend a fence in front of one of the baseball dugouts. I watched and waited. 

On the dashboard, the radio crackled with the voices of other agents stationed in the vicinity. Russell barked at them all one by one, hung up the mic, and went back to staring through the windshield.

“Does anyone see my boy?” said the woman in the back. “Does anyone see Remmie?”

“No, ma’am,” Russell answered. “But we wouldn’t. Not yet. Like I said, it might be several hours before they release him.”

She bit her lip and considered his words. She was a handsome woman in her thirties. Hispanic. Thick, dark hair. A little heavyset. (Not unlike yours truly.) Sunglasses to hide her red eyes. A crisp white pantsuit with a blue-and-white Hermes scarf at her neck.

“Hours?” she asked. Her voice drifted off, absently, “Oh. Right. Hours.”

Between the mountains on the far side, and the trees and bleachers on this side, was the Beaverkill, a storied tributary of the lordly Delaware where over-equipped dry-fly fisherman had matched wits with a specific pea-brained species since the days of the Headless Horseman. From where I sat in the Olds, I could barely see the water, but I didn’t have to. The waterway would be studded with giant boulders that moved for nothing but glaciers. There would be swift eddies carrying brown clumps of swirling foam, and fleeting ripples that hinted of skittish trout sipping flies from beneath the surface. For miles along the river’s forty-four-mile length, its incessant babbles and purls would cradle your soul more surely than the waters of baptism.

I guess you could say that I didn’t think of the river that morning because I carried it with me. I knew it well enough to forget it, and that would be my mistake.

The man carrying the duffle bag across the field was my friend, my colleague, my tutor in all things unholy and weird, who bore the unlikely moniker of Ishmael Soul. He was taller than six feet, lean, hard, and brown. By choice he kept that genius head of his completely hairless, the first voluntarily bald man I’d ever known who was not facing an indictment. As I watched him stride away in tan cargo trousers and a leather jacket, I could not help noticing how much the top of his head looked like a bullet.

We are sending firepower into their midst, I thought. They better watch out.

But that was a foolish sentiment. We wanted no violence today. We had to play it by the book. The kidnappers had had the boy eight days, yet the ransom demand had come only forty-eight hours ago. Which is late in the game if you’re a professional, but how many of them ever were? The logistics were also curious. They’d snatched the boy from the front of his private school on the Upper East Side, but later specified a drop location two hours and a hundred twenty miles north of Manhattan, in the middle of nowhere.

“Gentlemen,” I heard Soul’s voice say. “You read me?”

I grabbed the mic. “I’m here. Go ahead.”

“We have a problem, Fisher.”

I was watching him through the windshield. He had reached the end of the fifty-yard line and was standing in the gap between the two bleachers. Just him, the bag, and God’s green earth.

“What’s the trouble, kid?” Russell said. I had to bite my tongue to keep from laughing at a guy who thought Soul fit the description of a kid.

“They said in the trashcan,” Soul said. “You see a trashcan over here? Fisher, you see one?”

Without looking in our direction, he moved to the right. He was correct. The gap between the bleachers was completely empty.

“There’s a trashcan way to his left,” Russell told me. “It’s right next to the sidewalk that leads to the tennis courts. Tell him to look.”

“They didn’t say that,” Soul said.

“Tell him don’t overthink it,” Russell said.

In the backseat, I heard the woman’s sharp intake of breath. “What’s wrong?”

I held up a hand, signaling her to shush. I needed to focus. And I needed her to stay calm. Three adults sitting in a car for any length of time was strange enough. I didn’t want to call any more attention to our location than necessary.

“Russell, they were very specific,” Soul said.

“He’s right,” I said.

“Trashcan in the middle of the goddamn bleachers,” Soul continued. “If there’s not one where they said there would be, we need to reconsider.”

The woman leaned forward and rested her hands and face on the seat between Russell and me. “It sounds bad. Is something wrong?”

Russell struggled momentarily to shift his paunch around the steering wheel and face the middle of the dashboard. He motioned for me to hand him the mic. “See? We should have sent one of my guys. Woo-woo’s going to screw this up.”

Woo-woo was his nickname for Soul, probably because Soul was the only special agent in the Manhattan office still in charge of unusual cases.

“They specifically asked for Dr. Soul,” the woman said. Her head and shoulders rose until she was leaning over the seat, yelling into the receiver. “You have to give them the money! If they don’t get the money, they’ll hurt Remmie!”

“Lady, please,” Russell said. “Fisher, gimme the damned mic!”

Soul’s voice crackled. “I suggest aborting.”

“Gimme that,” Russell said, reaching.

The boy’s aunt got to the mic first. Her fingers fumbled with the lever. The cord stretched between me and Russell. “You can’t do this, Dr. Soul,” I heard her shriek. “This is our only chance! They will hurt him. They will hurt my baby boy.”

Commotion now in the car. Grandpa struggling to get his fat ass into a position where he could most easily deal with the distraught woman. His hands flailing. Her free hand swatting him away. Me urging them to shut the hell up so we could hear—

“Something’s off,” I heard Soul say. “What the—!”

His mic squealed. I looked. He was on the field, struggling with four men. They were dressed in jeans or slacks, work boots, and slick black windbreakers. Soul elbowed one, but the others pinned his arms to his side and knocked him off balance.

I cracked the door of the car. I heard Russell, “Lady, give me the goddamn mic! All agents! All agents!”

By then I was dodging a honking Chrysler Polara as I ran across Highway 17. I didn’t bother withdrawing my weapon. I had at least fifty-three and a third yards ahead of me.

I ran like a beast, sucking air that chilled my nostrils and throat. I could see agents running now from every corner of the field. The dugout guy. The leaf rakers. The guy on the John Deere mowing the soccer field. All of us converging on the spot where four white guys in bland haircuts were taking on the monster man with the outdated Fu Manchu mustache.

I couldn’t see Soul’s face anymore. They’d clapped a black bag over his head.

Okay, I thought, they’re pros.

Where the hell were they taking him? Where could they possibly go? We had them surrounded. The only way to the highway was the direction I’d come—

And yet, even as I was thinking this, my gut had comprehended the logic and was trying to beat it into my dumbass brain.

Think, idiot! How did they get to him in the first place?

Soul’s feet kicked, then went limp. The first two men disappeared behind the bleachers. Then the next two, bearing Soul’s legs between them.

I opened my mouth and screamed across the field to the agents. “The river!”

They were closer than I was, all of them with weapons drawn. I knew they would not be so stupid as to shoot. Their long training counted for something there.

What the hell was the kidnappers’ plan? Who snatches the guy dropping the ransom? What was the point of that?

I sailed across the lawn, legs pumping. My peacoat was so thick I knew I should have ditched it. But I didn’t have time now. I came up on the bleachers so fast and so close that I nicked my hip on one of the seats. I pushed past the pain, shot through the gap, and crashed through the brush on the other side.

That’s where I met the other agents. All of us half-sliding, half-falling down the riverbank. It was all in vain, and I knew it as soon as I heard the outboard motor roar to life and the puff of black smoke that tainted the autumn air with the stink of gasoline and motor oil.

I clattered downhill, sinking into mud at the water’s edge. I broke my momentum slamming into a massive rock. The five of us stood watching as two inflatable pontoon boats—one bearing my friend—shot up the river and disappeared.

BUY EAR OF GOD