The Perfect Soldier

by B D Grant

  Two hard bounces had slammed them around inside the car like they were on a roller coaster. They had to stop as soon as they made it onto the left shoulder of the interstate thanks to the traffic. That’s when Susan noticed that the blue lights were no longer heading in their direction. Bill had noticed too. He drove a short distance on the shoulder of the road driving opposite the flow of traffic until they got to an eighteen-wheeler that had enough room between it and the van ahead of it that they could cut across the outside lane. Once on the other side of the traffic, they could see smoke from all of the brakes locking up as the police cars stopped in a cluster off to the right side of the road several hundred yards from them.

  They couldn’t keep driving. The road had been torn up on the other side of the cones just ahead of them leaving more than a two-foot drop straight down where the cement had already been sectioned, crushed, and hauled off. There was no way their car could make the drop. Bill threw the car in park.

  Construction workers who had already stopped what they were doing to turn around and watch the police lights coming up shouted at Bill and Susan as they exited the car. “Hey, Come on! We gotta work here!” Neither of them bothered to respond taking off in a run as soon as their feet hit the interstate.

  From a good hundred feet away, Susan had been able to make out what looked like the back end of a light colored sedan sticking out from the tree line next to the interstate where all of the police cars had stopped. With a hoard of cars involved in the chase by the time Susan and Bill arrived it was hard to hear what was happening over the sirens left blaring on the side of the road. Susan and Bill had needed to shout their questions as they got close to the scene. A few of the officers were by their vehicles figuring out the traffic situations, while some were trying to shut off the sirens. From the distance they had to run to get to the scene, Bill was yards ahead of Susan. The officer nearest Bill turned toward him, and then step directly in his path, waving his arms at him to stop. As Bill was forced to stop and pull out his identification Susan veered off the road to avoid being stopped. A sheriff’s deputy standing off from the crash talking on his walkie saw her coming. He jogged over and jumped over the ditch as she ran up. She pulled her badge out sticking it in his face as she looked around him to see the mix of deputies and police officers around the trees and back of the sedan.

  “I’m working an active case on a terrorist cell. We believe the man you all were chasing is part of the cell.” She looked the officer straight in the eye. “Tell me my suspect is still alive.”

  He placed a hand on Susan’s badge to get a better look before answering. “He’s still breathing,” he’d said after letting go of the badge. Susan shoved it back in her pocket. He nodded for her to follow him. “I was the second car in the pursuit. The car matched a BOLO we have out, but he refused to pull over. Over here,” the deputy told her, motioning at the ditch a little farther down from where they were standing. He directed her to a less muddy section to cross. He was courteous, she liked that. “We were coming up to this traffic,” he said pointing his thumb over his shoulder at the road construction. “It’s been congested like this for the past two days thanks to the road work. As soon as the line of solid, red brake lights were visible the suspect turned off the road. It was crazy, he didn’t even slow down.” Susan watches as one of the cops shatters the back glass of the car. “He ramped the ditch, and went head long into that cluster of trees,” he said, pointing ahead of them at the tree line where the backend of the sedan was sticking out.

  One of the smaller officers climbed on top of the trunk of the car and carefully crawled into the backseat. A deputy was leaning around the tree on the driver’s side, talking through the shattered front windshield. “Sir, we’re going to get you out. Can you tell me your name?” A groan from the front seat and Susan felt instant relief.

  Her suspect was still alive.

  He was barely moving. His hair was damp, both on his face and on his head. From where she stood at the back rear, driver’s side tire where the heavy foliage blocked her from going any farther, she couldn’t tell how badly he was injured. He had ran the car into the trees going fast enough that he’d pinned the car between two medium sized trees. A third, smaller tree a couple feet back between the two medium trees had effectively smashed the front end of the car.

  Susan went back to the trunk of the car as she’d seen the officer do and climbed up on the back of the car. Glass covered the inside of the car. There was a crunch of glass as she stepped onto the backseat. The officer perched on the center console turned to give her an inquisitive stare, probably not expecting to see someone in civilian clothing. The officer had his left hand balled up to his chest. “I’m with the FBI,” she’d told him.

  “Careful,” he’d warned as she moved closer to him, reaching his right hand out for her to grab. “There’s glass everywhere.” He helped her step off of the backseat and onto the floorboard.

  “Is that his blood or yours?” she’d asked, seeing the blood smeared on the bottom of the hand at his chest.

  “The glass got me when I pushed the debris off the console before I sat on it. It’s not bad,” He’d said, opening his hand to look at it, and then quickly closing it as more blood rushed from the gash on his palm. “I should probably get it checked out.”

  “Yeah, I think so,” Susan had said, moving the best she could out of his way.

  “Try to get him to keep his head still,” he told her as moved out of the spot between the driver and passenger seats. “He’s too out of it to tell me what’s hurting.” She did her best to help the officer climb out of the back window before taking his spot on the center console. Like the officer, Susan had to squeeze into the tight space. She hadn’t considered the officer to be that much smaller than her until she realized that only one hip would fit.

  The deputy that remained at the front left side of the car pointed out to her that the smaller tree in the middle of the other trees that smashed in the hood had also demonstrated its sturdiness by pushing the car’s engine in on its self.

  Susan was impressed by how much damage occurred inside of the car. The engine was now partially in the car where it had been shoved through the front floorboard pinning the suspect in the driver’s seat. The once-spacious driver’s seat was now a compacted, twisted heap of metal around the man. The larger tree on the front driver’s side had left its mark down the hood of the car where the deputy, having seed that the officer had cut himself, was reevaluating his spot on the edge of the sharp, bent up hood.

  “My name’s Detective Susan,” she said her suspect stuck in the driver’s seat. He’s glancing around but the confusion and emptiness in his eyes when he looks at her let’s her know that the deputy is probably the only one who heard her. “I need you to keep your head still.” She lifts her right hand to help direct him to rest his head back on the headrest, but thinks better of it because of all of the blood on his face and beard that’s trickling from his nose. “Can you rest your head back?” He leans his head back making gargled attempts to speak but she understands none of it.

  “The ambulance is here,” the deputy tells her moving from the front of the car to find his way around the trees and thick underbrush to assist them. As he walks around the car, Susan asks the driver, “Do you know your name?” No answer. “Why were you running from the cops?” Susan doesn’t give him to not respond. “When did you last see Pastor Dave?” He had said nothing. “Are you a member of Good Faith Fellowship?” Directly in front of the center console where she was seated the hood was bent in blocking part of her view into the woods.

  Susan opens the bottom drawer on the right side of her desk. Taking the top folder, she pushes her chair back and stands. The folder’s papers are jumbled, filled with words that her eyes keep jumping. She turns away from the drawer preferring to watch the door, willing it to open. Nothing. She has so much to wrap up, but she doesn’t want to start getting everything together until she knows what’s going on in the o
ffice. She takes her cellphone out. No calls from Lane or Ash, so frustrating.

  The suspect trapped in the car had been pretty frustrating too. She didn’t want these precious minutes alone with her suspect to be a waste. It wasn’t until Susan had closed the space between her and the injured man and began whispering to him about what Pastor Dave’s corpse looked and smelled like that she began second guessing her technique. “His skin was pulled so tight that when the coroner turned him on his side the skin on Dave’s back split. The liquids that poured out was brown and chunky.” Susan hadn’t really been there when the coroner was collecting the body. She’d been with the landlord, but he wasn’t a Veritatis so he didn’t know any of that. And, it worked to some degree. He’d gagged, which turned into a cough that led to him grabbing at his stomach. He let out a groan.

  Was she being cruel? Had he lost someone he cared about when the pastor died?

  She had stopped her corpse talk to gently wipe the man’s forehead with the cuff of her jacket where blood from gash on his forehead was on its way to trickling into one of his eyes. She just needs to find out if any more Seraphim are in danger. It’s not written down anywhere that she has to make him more miserable in the process.

  When Bill finally joined her as the paramedics were rolling a gurney off the interstate and onto the grass, he took the path the deputy did around the crash and heavy underbrush to get to the front of the car. He craned his neck looking through the broken front windshield to examine the suspect, he confirmed that the man was a Seraphim. The suspect barely acknowledged his presence, glancing up at him only for a split second before going back to groaning with his arms wrapped around his stomach. “Definitely a Seraphim. Tempero, like we thought,” Bill had told Susan. It’s easy to get a little jealous of that sometimes, if she’s honest. She wonders what it’s like to have that Sensaa feeling. She’s never felt anything when she sees another normal, run-of-the-mill human being. In fact, she usually tries to make as little eye contact with people as possible so as to not encourage conversation. If she starts talking to a stranger long enough she begins imagining all of the crimes they’ve committed throughout their lives.

  But still, she admits, the ability for Seraphim to recognize another Seraphim had been useful. It took the deputy returning with the emergency medical technicians pushing the gurney for her to notice just how effective the Seraphim was using his ability. The deputy starting rubbing his eyes hard and fast as if trying to stop from crying. Even Bill was showing signs of the Tempero’s work as he moved around, trying to find enough room to lean in and physically check on the man. She watched as the Tempero used his ability to heighten everyone’s natural instinct to help him.

  “How bad is it?” Bill asked.

  “It’s bad.”

  He had nearly killing himself ramming that car into the trees. Susan could feel that he was continuing to use his ability on everyone near the crash as they hurried to find a safe way to extract him. It was an overwhelming, relenting need to care for him that Susan wouldn’t normally feel to such extent under those circumstances.

  “Here,” Susan said to the paramedics, moving off of the console. “You can reach him in here.” Out of the two paramedics it was the guy who crawled into the car. The female paramedic was too overweight to crawl in after him even if Susan would have gotten out of the car so she had a cop break the back driver’s side as Susan and the male paramedic covered their eyes. The paramedic used the broken window to pass supplies in to her partner. He wasn’t answering any of the paramedic’s medical questions as the neck brace was placed. “He hasn’t answered anyone’s questions,” Susan told him. She stayed in the backseat to act as the middleman passing the supplies back and forth to hear if he could get her suspect talking. “He’s been holding his stomach and moaning, but that’s about it.”

  Once the jaws of life were carried up by one of the fire fighters, Bill helped Susan out of the back to give the paramedic more space. The female paramedic stepped back as the decision was made to try the back driver’s side door first. Two different fire fighters tried their hand at prying open the door. When it became clear that the door wasn’t going to open the Tempero hit everyone with agitation.

  “Can someone please do something!” the male paramedic started screaming from inside the car.

  The female paramedic hauled a body board around to the front of the car next. Susan followed the first responders around to the front of the car to watch. Her suspect let out a loud moan as firefighters climbed on to the remains of the front hood and leaned in to grab him. Bill was on his phone standing off to the side, most likely talking to Doherty.

  It wasn’t until the others tried to lift the man that she’d realized how badly he must be hurt. He let out a cry that was so primal it sounded like it came from a wild animal. Even the police officers on the road directing traffic recoiled.

  “There’s a piece of metal,” the paramedic inside the car told the fire fighters trying to move the man, “it’s bent into the left side of his abdomen.” The only option they had was to cut the piece of metal. “Get the cordless angle grinder,” the fire fighter closest to Susan and the female paramedic called to the group of people at the back of the car waiting to see if they were needed. The request was shouted across the ditch to the fire truck. Moments later, a grinder appeared. A cop climbed on the back of the car to hand it to the paramedic. The fire fighters directed the paramedic on how to use it as he lined the grinder up a foot from the man’s stomach.

  By the time he was pulled from the car and loaded onto the body board, the suspect was totally unresponsive. His eyes were shut and his mouth was gaping open as the fire fighters helped the female paramedic haul him to the ambulance as her partner crawled out of the back window. Susan wasn’t feeling angry or anxious anymore. The Tempero was no longer causing the inner tension she’d been experiencing while she was questioning him.

  Bill was allowed to ride in the back of the ambulance after Susan had a brief discussion with the paramedics about their suspicions—it wouldn’t hurt to keep an eye on him, just to be safe. Though she wouldn’t say it to Bill, the idea of being alone with someone who could control her emotions was unnerving. She used her clout to get a police officer to drive her to the hospital since her car was parked so far away and didn’t know where the hospital was where they were going.

  When she arrived, Bill had been waiting for her outside of the back of the ambulance. He jogged over to her when he saw her in the passenger seat of the cop’s car pulling in behind the ambulance.

  “His heart stopped,” Bill said as she jumped out and shut the car door, his breath short. “As soon as we pulled away from the wreck.”

  “What?” Bill started towards the ambulance.

  “They’ve got him strapped to a machine. Chest compressions.”

  “So he’s not—”

  “It doesn’t look good for him.”

  Susan couldn’t look at the emergency room physician as he was speaking to them. Bill was kind enough to hear him out. Their suspect coded in the emergency room without regaining consciousness. She’d gotten nothing from him, not even his name. She was silent in the police cruiser on their ride back to the crash site to pick up their car.

  The traffic on interstate 80 was backed up on both sides thanks to the rubberneckers checking out the crash. Investigators were still working the crash sight when they arrived. Bill had asked the officer driving them to stop at the site instead of taking them all the way to their vehicle. She was over it by then. She got the car keys from Bill and hit the pavement as soon as the police cruiser parked. She had failed.

  Dwelling on her failure, she hadn’t seen Bill walking up to the car from the crash site. It wasn’t until she could hear him whistling from inside the car that she had lifted her forehead from off of the steering wheel to see him beaming at her as he walked up. In his hands was a cardboard box the perfect size for moving.

  Back at the station they ran their second suspect�
�s fingerprints and found that he had a record two decades old. One of the aliases attached to his record caught her attention: Andre Heincliff. Doherty would definitely like that little nugget of info. From McBride’s raid on the Rogue school, they already had one Heincliff in custody, but her boss didn’t think that Lia Heincliff was her actual name. Well; it’s at least somewhere to start.

  Doherty’s office door opens. Susan slaps the folder in her hands shut. Finally, Bill steps out. He had turned the day around for her after the car crash turned their second suspect into their second body. The cardboard box found by the crime scene investigators in the trunk of the car didn’t give them all of the answers they were searching far, but it had linked them to the attacks.

  Susan forces herself not to look so nervous, crossing her arms as she waits for him to walk over to her.

  Bill walks up to her with a stupid smirk on his face. He can tell she’s annoyed. “She wants to talk to you about the Wyoming magic trick,” he says.

  That’s what the two of them had been calling their trip up north since they were able to get both bodies sent straight to their coroner on top of the evidence collected from the crashed car, no hoops to jump through, no paperwork to file. By the time they were finished in Wyoming, the Laramie Police Department was nearly throwing the two corpses out the door with them for reasons they’d brag about in retirement, but had planned to skip when they had made it back to headquarters for debrief. Susan’s eyes narrow. “She wants to talk?”

  Bill lowers his voice. “She’s Doherty’s new boss.”

  Susan eyes Doherty’s office suspiciously wondering if he’d call her Doherty’s boss if she were just part of the Supreme Council or if this woman really was the person who has been overseeing Doherty’s investigations. Susan knew of course that her boss had his superiors, but she’d always pictured older James Bond types dressed in sharp suits who only used code names.