Tears in the Mist (eBook)

B.G. Koch (Autor)

eBook Download: EPUB

2024 | 1. Auflage
440 Seiten
Bookbaby (Verlag)
979-8-3509-7308-2 (ISBN)

Infos

Childhood friends and newfound loves, Conner and Akiko, find themselves wrenched apart by the cruel hands of fate. After a brutal attack and a failed rescue, they each go their separate ways to pursue their own dreams. Despite the pain, the loneliness and the heartbreak, they both refuse to give up on their love. When they both honor an earlier pact to meet in Paris years later, their midnight rendezvous is threatened by terrorists targeting hundreds of innocents including CIA Special Agent Conner and international singing star Akiko. Can Conner redeem himself and rescue his one true love? Will fate give them this one last chance at life and love?

B.G. Koch grew up in the Midwest. After high school, he served in the United States military and later earned two separate college degrees in Criminal Justice. He also earned a Post Baccalaureate in Education. He worked the streets as a police officer in a large urban department for approximately 12 years, where he was awarded two Citations for Valor. He was then hired by the United States Department of Justice as a Special Agent. He spent most of his career on the streets of Southern California, from the Greater Los Angeles area down to the San Diego Southwest Border. He enjoys traveling, reading, writing, and volunteer work.

Textauszug

1

The night is dark and the road is long. My journey is almost over. The room is colder than I remember and the harsh light exposing the truth is unforgiving. I put pen to paper. Just one more task.
My name is Conner and this is my story.

October 23, 1986

It was an unusually cold and wet day for October. The air resonated with an icy silence. The calm and quiet was broken only by the soft padding of rubber soles on hard pavement. The two youngsters were wrapped in warm, heavy, wool winter coats.

The boy was wearing a green and gold stocking cap. A checkered orange and blue scarf was draped around his neck. His best friend’s mother had knitted both for him. He had a worn-out black woolen glove covering his left hand.

The girl was impeccably dressed in a three-quarter-length navy blue coat with two matching rows of gold buttons running vertically down the front. She wore a knitted pink glove on her right hand. Her short-cut black mane swayed back and forth at the mercy of the chill wind. A red and pink hair ribbon clung desperately onto a few strands of loose hair.

The boy and the girl were holding each other’s ungloved hands. The warmth and comfort they realized from touching palms and intertwining fingers was a gloriously simple gesture and it represented their budding love for each other. A light mist of rain fell softly around them, creating small pools of water that the fifteen-year-old teens vigorously tramped through.

The casual passerby glancing in their direction would have surmised the two young figures were walking home after finishing their day at school. Horace Mann Public Elementary had dominated the residential Wisconsin skyline of this tightly knit German-Irish-Slovakian neighborhood for almost sixty years. The four-story building sat, forlorn and stoic, like a grand ole dame… watching and guarding.

The old lady was perched at the intersection of 62nd Street and Lapham Boulevard. If nothing else, she was a testament to what the fathers and grandfathers in this tough neighborhood could accomplish… courtesy of grit, grime and gristle.

She’d been a beautiful woman in her time, but these days… well, let’s just say that it would behoove her to stay away from mirrors. Her previously unblemished complexion was now scarred with multi-colored local gang signs and graffiti.

Now, that same passerby may have wondered why the two youngsters were plodding briskly through the secluded narrow alleyways. These alleys paralleled the well-beaten track of safe sidewalks and driveways. That was where the neighborhood mothers usually stood and waited for the children in the lower grades to arrive home safely.

The thought of arriving home safely was on the minds of both Conner and Akiko as they subtly quickened their pace together. It was as though they shared a singular purpose and the whole of their individual beings were now entwined with just one goal—the goal of getting home safe and sound.

Their path this day had been a risk, but it was a calculated one.

Conner looked over at Akiko. He had held her hand walking to school ever since they were in the fifth grade. It was more natural to him than breathing. He wasn’t sure what love was or what love meant, but he knew he felt it somewhere deep inside his core every time she was close.

Akiko knew Conner as her best friend, protector and confidante. She felt the safety of his arms when they hugged each other after each walk home. She also felt the safety of sharing her thoughts, whims and feelings with him. It was as if they shared a single soul or tamashii.

Neither one had spoken to the other about what transpired that morning on the steps of the school. They had both repeatedly suffered in silence all the harsh words, the racial slurs and the threats leveled towards them from some of the other kids. Neither one of them had paid any attention or heed in the past, but today was something different. Today, the words from their tormentors seemed more serious and threatening than ever before.

It was hard to explain, but the fear instilled in them this time… wasn’t a transient or passing emotion. This time it had stuck to them like a black muck, a glutinous gel, and neither of them really knew why.

Jimmy Kornack and his fellow middle-school Neanderthals never needed a reason. He would hit you one time in the back of the head and then all of them would pile on top of you. Before you knew it, you couldn’t breathe under a mass of human flesh. They would start to pummel you with kicks and fists for the simple primordial rush it gave them.

Jimmy was the fattest, meanest, ugliest kid in Mrs. Weyers’s middle-school class. Conner thought maybe those were the three things that made him do what he did and maybe he cried himself to sleep every night because of it. Conner still thought he was an asshole.

That was, when he gave him any thought at all.

Right now, he looked over at his best friend. He squeezed her hand tighter as they both, almost in a drill like fashion, hastened their stride. Conner gave Akiko a big smile. That, by itself, usually assuaged her immediate fears. He wondered if it would work this time.

She had been his best friend as long as he could remember. He had always been hers. He would always and forever be hers.

He lived farther away from school, so he always started walking about ten minutes earlier. He would arrive in front of her house at 7:15 AM and would dutifully stop and wait. Akiko lived with her father, mother and auntie. Conner would look up to the massive plate-glass window on the second floor of the duplex, in the hopes of seeing her.

More often than not, he would get a glimpse of Akiko and her mother. They would both wave and he would wave back. Conner would usually see Mama Nogami in the window, fixing Akiko’s hair. She would comb it through and, much like a birthday present, always add a small bow as a finishing touch. Akiko would be pulling a scarf tightly around her neck or executing last-minute touch-ups to make herself look presentable.

Conner however, thought Akiko looked more than just “presentable” every morning. He thought she looked beautiful. Years later he would remember her face and think to himself… I’ve never seen anyone more beautiful. What in God’s name and in all of creation did he ever do to deserve Akiko in this life? He would never know.

Looking back, he’d never been able to fully appreciate the magnitude and strength of that purest of beauty… the beauty and innocence that was Akiko. It had given him purpose and resolve, even though he hadn’t yet realized it.

The alleyways between school and home were faster to traverse, but they had an ominous and foreboding feel about them. The entire way held a minefield of half-filled, liter bottles of soda, sandwich wrappers, peels and rinds from rotten produce, newspapers and used diapers. The refuse was strewn all around.

Long forgotten rusted-out cars sat up on concrete blocks. All of this was the garbage and detritus of the poor. Conner looked ahead at the route they had chosen. Hovering two thousand feet above them in the sky were the rain clouds. They had managed to complement the prevailing mood… dark and sinister.

Conner tugged at Akiko’s arm. She turned to him and he noticed a trickle of tears cascading down the left side of her face. He stopped. He put his arms around her shoulders and hugged her tight. She hugged him even tighter. After what seemed to be a veritable infinity of time, Conner released his hold and took her face in his hands.

“Forget what those jerks were saying. They’re just a bunch of jerks and that is exactly what jerks do. They say a bunch of jerky things and then they go back to their jerk lives.”

Akiko smiled through her tears. Conner always had a strange way of piercing the veil of sadness she could shroud herself in. He always knew what to say and more importantly what not to say.

“I know,” she replied, “and next year we’ll be in a new school and won’t have to deal with this anymore.”

Akiko was born in Osaka, Japan. Her father was a Captain in the Marine Corps when he married her mother, Fumiko. They lived in Osaka for almost nine years before they picked up and moved to the United States. “Her father, Captain Kato Nogami (or Captain “K” to his friends) had been born in the United States and had joined the Marine Corps when he was eighteen. After boot camp, he was assigned to the marine base in Okinawa, where he met Fumiko. After several tours, the family transferred to the Great Lakes Naval Base in northern Illinois, where he was offered a position as a flight instructor at their adjacent Glenview Air Base.

Fumiko had been a Professor of Economics at Osaka University. Anyone who knew the Nogami family also knew that Fumiko had always been the brightest light on Akiko’s horizon. She was the driving force that kept the family together. Akiko took all her life cues from her mother. She had learned that hard work usually paid off, and character and honesty always paid off.

Her mother also inspired her to appreciate music and dance. Fumiko had been a ballerina with the Tokyo Ballet Company when she was Akiko’s age. She never forgot the joy it gave her. She passed this particular joy onto her daughter by sending her to some of the finest dance schools in Japan. Now that they were in America, she tried to squeeze in classes when she could, but academics took up most of their...

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 21.10.2024
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Literatur ► Romane / Erzählungen
• ISBN-13: 979-8-3509-7308-2 / 9798350973082