Free The Skinwalker Conspiracies - 02 by Jim Bernheimer Page B

book. Maybe it was my exhaustion and superficial injuries talking, but doctors, in general, were starting to climb up my list of professions that I hated.
    The old preacher was looking at me. Other than ghosts, I’m the only other thing he could see. It was pretty disconcerting, but I was used to it. Silas sighed and scratched the coarse white stubble on his neck.
    “Mike,” he said. “This man ain’t no Colonel Strong Vincent. Everything you’ve told me so far shows how disturbed Oswald is. Is his help worth having to watch your back?”
    “You think I should turn him down? We can always head for Amarillo and see if Eckels is there, but if this De Soto really is the guy driving around in my dad’s body, I might need him.”
    “Back in ‘Nam, we had this crazy Filipino kid in our unit. His name was … hell, I must be getting old if I can’t remember his real name. It don’t matter. Either way, we called him ‘Pit Viper’ after the snakes you could find in the Philippines. He was real small, just a gnat’s hair over the size you could enlist. Looked like a strong breeze could knock him over and a rainstorm could drown him. Tell you what though … that boy could clean out a tunnel like nobody’s business. He liked killin’ a bit too much. The lieutenant spotted it and was going to send Viper to get checked out by one of those head doctors you’re always going on about.”
    “What happened?” I had a feeling that whatever it was, it wasn’t good.
    “He caught wind of it and snapped, shot two of the guys in the unit and went running toward the jungle, straight through a minefield. Didn’t get very far.”
    “What about the two guys he shot?”
    Silas paused. “One died from his injuries and the other just had a flesh wound on his leg. He recovered from that one, but was later blinded and sent home. The moral of that story is, Oswald might be someone you’d want going into a tunnel, but what’re you gonna do when there ain’t no tunnels around?”
    I was about to answer when my friend’s cell rang. He reached into his jacket and pulled it out. “Hello. Oh yes, Karen. No, Michael is fine. He just had a run in with a very powerful spirit. I’ll put him on.”
    “Hey Mom,” I said. “How are things?”
    “Mike,” she said in a panicked voice. “I got home and the ghosts left notes saying that you were in trouble. What happened?”
    You could go on the internet and look up haunted places in Maryland and find museums and battlefields. One thing you won’t find is a nondescript one level house constructed in the early seventies in Gaithersburg, Maryland. Anywhere from two to as many as ten ghosts are in it at any given time. The Ross family residence is an “outpost” for Strong Vincent’s modest empire which runs from Rockville west to the Antietam battlefield and then north to Gettysburg – a substantial chunk of real estate that I helped him take by force. In return, he has his ghosts guard my mom and watching over her house.
    We had a bunch of those magnetic letters on the fridge, just like most parents with kids do at one point or another. It was the easiest way for the ghosts to communicate with her by moving the letters around.
    “I’m okay,” I replied, wanting to avoid going into all the details. This obviously meant that Amos had made it back to his anchor in Gettysburg and sounded the alarm. “Turns out the ghost I had a misunderstanding with was Lee Harvey Oswald.”
    To put it mildly, Karen Ross was more than a little skeptical of my talents and associates. “Yeah right, Mike.”
    “No, it’s the truth.”
    “Really?”
    “Yup.”
    “Okay then, did he really do it?”
    “Sort of, he was possessed at the time,” I answered. Mom had seen what I was like in the brief minutes that Don Hodges had possessed me.
    “Still doesn’t excuse him for killing the president,” she said after a pause. There’s that old question that people in Mom’s generation always ask about