The next sound to reach my ears came from the handset in the form of an agonized scream drilling its way deeply through my inner ear. It was high-pitched and definitely female. The tortured sound was followed by a sharp, thudding noise and then a second pained wail.
“Oh Gods!” I stammered as I squeezed my eyes tightly shut. I balled my free hand into a fist and began thumping it against my forehead in a vain attempt to push the imagined horror out of my head. “Dear Mother Goddess, no!”
The floodgates opened, and my anger spewed forth. My skin grew hot, and my ears began to ring as my blood pressure set a new benchmark for the term hypertension. I brought the handset against my head and shouted, “PORTER!”
There was nothing at the other end. Just a random repetition of hollow clicks that indicated the call had been disconnected.
I swung the handset out and hammered it downward into the base then vented my anger at the first person to enter my sights.
“What the hell was going on?!” I screamed at Mandalay. “Did you know what they were doing?!”
“Calm down!” she shouted back.
“Calm down?” I demanded as I stepped toward her. “Screw you! Don’t tell me to calm down!”
An immense column of Native American filled the space between Mandalay and me as Ben quickly hooked himself around the corner. He planted one large hand against my chest and pushed, thrusting me rearward at an angle until I was backed against the countertop. “Goddammit, Rowan! Settle down!”
I heard Felicity yelp, “Ben!”
“You knew!” I roared, incredulity underscoring my anger. “Dammit you knew what they were doing, and you fucking got her killed, Ben! What the hell were you people thinking?!”
“Rowan, you don’t know that he killed her.” Constance projected her voice over mine as she wedged herself around Ben and into the kitchenette.
“You were listening in!” I spat as I struggled against my friend. “What the hell did it sound like to you?!”
“Dammit, Row,” Ben appealed, his voice a deep boom. “Don’t make me cuff you.”
Hot tears were beginning to roll down my cheeks, a product of both anger and despair. I glared back at my friend, fighting the urge to scream at him again.
“Rowan, please…” Felicity’s voice came from behind him in an anguished appeal.
“Did you even know where he was in the building?” I asked, my voice even but hard.
“Every indication was that you had his attention, Rowan,” Constance explained. “We were just trying to get a couple of men into the building so we could pinpoint him.”
“Yeah,” I shot back. “Well look what it got you. Just what the hell were you doing calling the shots anyway, Ben?”
“Rowan,” Ben said. “Like Mandalay said, it looked like you had his attention.”
“What?” I didn’t want to believe what I was hearing. “You used me?”
“Dammit, Row,” Ben lamented. “It wasn’t my choice.”
“You were our barometer, Rowan,” Mandalay said. “The SAIC made the decision not to go on voice analysis alone. Ben and I were gauging your reaction visually and feeding the information to the scene.”
“I can’t believe you did that,” I said, swinging my disbelieving gaze between them. “Why didn’t you tell me?”
“We couldn’t be sure that you wouldn’t accidentally tip him off,” she explained. “Besides, you were already on the line with him when the decision was made. I’m sorry.”
“It was how it had to be done, white man,” Ben told me, his voice apologetic.
“Well, how it had to be done sucks.”
He continued to hold me against the cabinets, my torso bending back over the edge of the countertop. We simply stared at one another, neither of us quite sure what to say next.
A few steps across the room, the apartment phone began to ring.
An electronic chirp issued a half step behind it, and Constance immediately flipped her cell phone open. She tilted her head and pulled her hair back with her free hand as she tucked the device to her ear. “Mandalay.”
The bell jangled again.
“It’s him,” Constance stated as she looked at me then cocked her head toward the phone on the wall. “He never actually shut the phone off, and they tagged him as soon as he dialed. They want you to go ahead and talk to him again.”
Ben looked me over and apparently decided that it still wasn’t safe to leave me unrestrained. He twisted at the waist, keeping one hand firm against my chest while reaching past Felicity with the other and snatching the phone out of the cradle.
He held the handset in front of my face, and I took it from him wordlessly.
There was no way to put my rage in check, so I skipped the initial phase of my plan and went straight for voicing my disdain.
“What do you want now you sorry bastard,” I snarled.
“Don’t let that happen again!” Porter demanded.
“Go screw yourself, Porter,” I fired back.
Silence interrupted the flow of the short exchange as he fell mute. I listened carefully, searching for any ambient sound I could identify—any indication that Millicent Sullivan was still alive.
“I see you’re back to your old self,” Porter finally spoke, his voice suddenly far calmer than it had been ten minutes ago. Apparently, my idea was correct.
“So glad that you’re pleased,” I chided. “So you must not have killed her.”
“What makes you think that?”
“Simple, Eldon,” I explained. “You wouldn’t have called back if you had. If you kill her, you no longer have a hold on me.”
“So you have decided to admit that you need her soul?”
My fear ebbed, but the dip was shallow. I harbored no illusion that he hadn’t at least done something to her that was too horrid to consider.
My tone remained sharp. “Yeah, sure, whatever, Eldon. Now, let me talk to her.”
“I’d love to put her on, Gant, but she seems to have passed out.”
“What did you do to her, you sick fuck?”
“And thine eye shall not pity; but life shall go for life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot.”
CHAPTER 29:
The quote from Deuteronomy was a verbal harbinger of things unimaginable. Unfortunately, I knew how literally Porter interpreted the Bible. I shuddered with the fear that he had in fact made one of the aforementioned choices and that it was more than just a recitation of chapter and verse.
My mouth began to water as my stomach convulsed, working into a knot, and then slowly unraveling. The acrid bitterness of bile singed the back of my tongue, and I swallowed hard to force it back down. The breadth of his cruelty should have been no surprise to me by now, but this was getting to be more than I could take.
When I finally responded to his pointed selection, my voice was cold and hard. “Skip the verse, Eldon. Just tell me what you did to her.”
As he had done earlier in the day, he seemed to be taking morbid pleasure in the horrors he was committing. His personality had made another one-hundred-eighty-degree shift, and even though he was trapped with no means of escape, here he was gloating. Flaunting what he perceived as his newly found control over me.
“You wouldn’t happen to know whether or not she is right-handed or left-handed, would you?” he asked.
“You son-of-a-bitch,” I muttered. “If you cut her hand off, she’s going to bleed to death.”
“Son of God, Gant.”
“Not of any God I know,” I spat. “How badly is she bleeding?!”
“Oh, calm down,” he chided. “She’s fine. She even still has both of her hands.” He paused for a beat then added a sinister, “For now.”
“Then what did you do to her?” I repeated the question with added hardness.
“Nothing yet.”
I knew he had to have done something, or she wouldn’t be unconscious. I wanted to press him for an answer but wasn’t sure if that would
just set him off again. I decided my best bet would be to take a different approach. “So why did you bother calling me then?”
“To find out if she is left-handed or right-handed.”
“I really don’t know, Eldon. Why?”
“Oh well, it doesn’t matter all that much, I suppose,” he spat. “When the time comes, I’ll take her left, just like you did to me.”
I closed my eyes, and the memories flooded in. Things I thought I had finally come to terms with bored into my skull and re-awakened my own viscid fear.
I could almost feel the cold and even the dampness of the fog. The forlorn sound of violins filtered into my ears from somewhere above me, straining out a lament as only they could. I stood there motionless as I felt my own arm going numb.
Mentally, I was once again dangling in the chilled air with a thin, nylon rope twined tightly about my forearm, suspended precariously over the side of the Old Chain of Rocks Bridge. A raving madman, bent on ending my life had his bony hand wrapped around my throat and was squeezing. My consciousness was fleeing in panic, and I was all but prepared to join it.
It didn’t matter that this was only in my head because it had once been all too real, and right now, the high definition memory was making my heart race all over again.
I pushed my still shaking hand back up to my side then thrust my thumb beneath the nylon strap and pushed outward. With a dull pop, it released, and I immediately wrapped my hand around the grip of the pistol.
The miniscule piece of breath I’d been able to grasp was failing quickly, and my vision was darkening as my eyes started rolling back in my head. The abbreviated lesson in the use of the pistol flashed through my mind as just so much jumbled nonsense. I could find no way to apply the instructions to my present situation.
Being unable to aim, I centered on what was left of my strength and pressed the gun upward at an angle across my chest until it met resistance.
The panicked voices of various stringed instruments blended to a thick, disharmonious crescendo in my ears…
For a brief instant I considered the fact that my left arm was now completely numb, and I silently begged for the resistance I found to be his arm and not my own. Then, tensing my body, I pulled the trigger.
The muzzle flashed.
The explosion reported deafeningly in my ear.
The spent shell ejected directly toward me and transferred its searing heat to my cheek.
Thick blood spattered like heavy rain across the side of my face.
The cold fingers snapped open.
Something thudded heavily against me and fell away.
A tortured scream faded into the distance below.
A single violin cried into the night, fading with sorrowful purpose toward silence…
Everything went completely black.
I was on the verge of hyperventilating when I opened my eyes. The torturous snippet of my life was well over one year old, but it had impressed itself upon me with the clarity of here and now. Each detail was as crisp and terrifying as it had been then.
As it continued to replay in my head, I fought to focus on the situation at the other end of the line.
“So I took your hand?” I retorted, finding a morbid solace in having caused him harm. “I guess that’s one for me, then.”
“You shouldn’t have done that, Gant,” he snarled.
“You were trying to strangle me, Eldon,” I said. “Just exactly what did you expect me to do?”
“Accept your sentence,” he returned.
“I don’t accept the judgment of a lunatic.”
“Whether you accept it or not, Gant, you can’t deny your guilt. You have admitted it freely.”
“So why take her hand,” I asked, trying to push past this point of contention. “Isn’t it mine that you want?”
“Oh, Gant,” he replied. “You know what I want from you.”
“So, why her then. Do you intend to torture me by proxy?”
“Like I said, your sentence has been pronounced,” he replied. “Don’t you remember?”
He was intent on reiterating my sentence, most likely for those I am sure he knew were listening. It didn’t matter what I said to him, he was going to bring it all back around to this.
“I wasn’t paying that much attention to you, Eldon,” I said with a note of impatience. “But I get the feeling you want to remind me.”
His speech became measured and almost theatrical. “By this our definitive sentence we drive you from the ecclesiastical court, and abandon you to the power of the secular court, that having you in its power now moderates its sentence of death against you.”
“Yeah, sounds vaguely familiar,” I retorted. “But let’s get back to reality here. What makes you think you’ll be able to execute that sentence?”
“I almost did that night,” he answered. “Now I’ll finish what I started.”
“Bullshit, Eldon,” I retorted. “You made a feeble attempt and ended up losing a hand in the deal. And now you’re hiding in an abandoned building that’s surrounded by police. Give it up, there’s no chance.”
“Yes there is.”
“How so?”
“Because I have this woman, and you can’t bear to lose her soul,” he stated without hesitation.
I steeled myself for what I was about to say and tried to sound convincing. “You can have her. I’ll get another.”
“No you won’t, Gant,” he said. “I know you better than you think I do.”
“If you know me so damn well, then why don’t you just tell me what you want and get it over with,” I demanded.
“A deal,” he replied. “Your life for her…”
The telephone made a grating, double click, then fell silent.
“Eldon?” I queried into the handset.
My ear received only a thick silence in reply, but it was different from the times before when he had hung up on me. There were no clicks in the background and no empty hollowness to echo back. This time the phone seemed to have literally gone dead.
“He hung up or something,” I stated aloud, looking at Ben and then Constance.
Ben took the phone from my hand then turned and slid it almost gently into the cradle. As he did so, he slowly relaxed his hold on me.
“He didn’t hang up,” Constance said carefully.
Ben had turned back to face me, and he seemed to be waiting for something. I glanced over at Constance; suddenly perplexed by the way both of them were acting. “What’s going on?”
“Now listen to me, Rowan,” she began, maintaining her calm tone with an obvious degree of purpose.
“Oh Gods! What did you do now?!” My voice inched up the scale as I felt my anger swell once again.
“Shut up and listen, Row,” Ben barked.
Something about the way his voice was edged made me take immediate notice and fall quiet.
“The line was interrupted by the hostage negotiation team,” Constance continued her explanation. “They are taking over the contact with Porter.”
“What?” I shook my head in disbelief. “Why now? I had him talking.”
“You did great,” she replied. “No one is saying you didn’t, Rowan. However, where the rules of hostage negotiation are concerned, they had already blurred the lines a hell of a lot more than I’ve ever seen them do before. The only reason they let him talk to you for so long was so they could gather information and get SWAT into position.”
“Dammit!” I yelped. “If they try to go in there again, he’s going to kill her!”
“They know, Rowan, they know.” She held up her hands and motioned me to settle. “Believe me, that is the last thing they want.”
“Well, he told me what he wants,” I returned. “Me for her. Why don’t we…”
“Not happenin’, Row,” Ben announced in a stern voice, verbally inserting a period into my sentence well before I had planned to be finished with it. “Just forget that crap right now.”
“That’s one of th
e reasons the line was terminated when it was,” Constance told me, adding a shake of her head. “He started to negotiate a deal with you, and that is something the HNT is not going to let happen.”
“It’s one of the commandments in the hostage negotiation bible, white man,” Ben told me. “Thou shalt not trade one hostage for another. No ifs, ands, or buts.”
“So where does this leave us?” I demanded. “He’s just going to escalate if they cut him off from me.”
“You don’t know that, Row,” Ben replied.
“The hell I don’t!” I said. “I’ve talked to this sonofabitch more than any of you. I’d really appreciate it if everyone would just stop telling me what I do and don’t know!”
“Rowan.” Felicity’s voice hit me at the same time she slipped around Ben and came into my view. Her eyes were damp with the tears she was fighting hard to contain. “Let them handle it. Please?”
I leaned back and closed my eyes. My headache was back, and it was hammering away with a vengeance, all the while making sneak attacks on parts of my brain I didn’t know I had. Something—or someone—was still knocking around at my ethereal perimeter, relentlessly looking for a way in. My best friend was willing to handcuff me to something stationary in order to keep me out of a mess that, whether he liked it or not, I was already at the center of. I couldn’t remember everything I had shouted at Constance, but I was betting I owed her an apology. Finally, and worst of all, my wife had every reason to believe that left unchecked, I would make her a widow.
Actually, I take that back. The worst part was that she was probably correct.
I don’t know if I had left anything out, but the laundry list was already several items too long for me to be comfortable with, so I was in no hurry to add to it. I knew for a fact that I had definitely been on the receiving end of better days than this, and I was longing for one of them right now.
I heaved out a sigh and reached up to massage my temples. “Look, all of you, I’m sorry,” I said. “You’re not exactly getting to see me at my best.”
“S’alright, Kemosabe,” Ben replied. “We know you’re under a lotta pressure. That’s pretty much why I haven’t decked your ass yet.”
The Law Of Three: A Rowan Gant Investigation Page 24
