The King

by Steven James

  “So there were two guys down there?” I asked Ralph.

  “Three. One was Tyree. He was restrained in a chair. He was alive, but barely. That dude was not in good shape.” Then he added, with the shade of a grin, “The other two are in worse shape now, though.”

  “You fought off two thugs with only one arm?”

  He held up the arm that’d been bitten and the wound must have ripped open, because it was bleeding heavily through his sleeve. “Turns out I had to get both arms involved.”

  “If the hospital gave out gift cards, I’d buy you one.”

  “Thanks for that.”

  I headed for the stairs. “Let’s see what we can do to help Tyree before the paramedics get here.”

  ++

  A slow dance.

  Tessa rested her head against Aiden’s chest and leaned into his arms. It felt so good to press against his strength, to feel his arms encircling her.

  The music embraced them, and everything that’d been hammering in on her seemed to fade away. The stress of this week, the worry, the difficulties with Patrick, all of it washing away. But halfway through the song, the moment evaporated when Aiden got another text and stepped away from her to answer it.

  That was it. You don’t stop slow dancing with your date just because you get a text, it doesn’t matter who you are.

  When he came back, she said, “Hey, I left my phone at home. Can I use yours for a sec? My dad’s way overly protective.” She shook her head as if she were exasperated at how overbearing he was. “I’m supposed to call. It’s ridiculous.”

  “Yeah, sure.” Aiden handed it to her.

  “It’s too noisy in here.” She nodded toward the hallway to the restrooms. “I’ll be right back.”

  80

  The EMTs took over helping Tyree.

  We located my SIG near Chekov’s body. The gun was charred, but appeared salvageable and I was glad. This baby had been with me a long time. However, I didn’t trust it until I could clean it.

  Ralph joined one of the paramedics in the ambulance to have him treat his arm. He claimed it wasn’t hurting, but I knew he wouldn’t have gone over there unless it did. A lot.

  Just before they left for the hospital he lent me his gun. “There might be more of a mess to clean up,” he said. “I expect that back later tonight.”

  “No problem. Thanks.”

  Fire trucks were on the way to take care of the still-flaming SUV. I filled in the Hostage Rescue Team on what had gone down, then took a seat in my car, where it was a little quieter, and phoned Lien-hua. I told her that Valkyrie, his female accomplice, and three conspirators were dead and that Tyree was in custody.

  “I wish I could have been there.”

  “Next time around.”

  My phone vibrated. I glanced at the screen.

  Headquarters.

  “Just a sec.” I put her on hold and answered the other call. “Pat here.”

  “Agent Bowers,” a female agent said urgently, “it’s Basque. He’s escaped.”

  I blinked. “What?”

  “Two FBI Police officers and one agent are dead.”

  I felt a lash of anger whip through me. “Do we have any idea where he might have gone?”

  “There’s an FBI Police car missing. He got a uniform from one of the officers—”

  “The car has GPS, doesn’t it?” I said. “Track it through that.”

  “We tried that right away. He must have disabled it.”

  I pounded the dashboard.

  He might just try to flee—or he might try to visit Lien-hua and finish what he started.

  I had no idea if Basque might somehow be able to locate my fiancée, but I went back on the line with her and told her to lock down the house, to be ready in case Basque showed up and to call dispatch to get a car over there right away.

  Then I phoned Tessa, who was at prom, and not surprisingly, didn’t answer.

  I left a voicemail, and then texted her as well.

  Then I contacted Metro to have an officer meet her at the school.

  ++

  Tessa checked the text messages on Aiden’s phone and saw a message from Tymber: Sorry I had to work tonite. So, c u after prom? Can’t wait! ;)

  A terrible stone settled in Tessa’s stomach.

  They broke up. They were supposed to have broken up!

  She paced back onto the dance floor, navigated her way through the crowd of dancing students, and held up the phone’s screen for Aiden to see. “What is this?” She didn’t care how many other people heard her. “You’re meeting Tymber after prom? What does she mean—sorry she had to work?!”

  “I—no, no, listen it’s not what it . . . Just let me expla—”

  “Oh.” It hit her. “So that’s why you asked me so last-minute. Because she couldn’t make it? I’m, what, your backup plan?”

  “It’s not like that, really.” But his expression told her it was. “I like you, Tessa—”

  “What would you have replied?”

  “Replied?”

  By then the other kids nearby had stopped dancing and were watching them to see how this would play out. Four of them were filming it with their phones.

  “To her text!” Tessa said. “Replied! If I hadn’t read this first, would you have said you’re gonna meet her after prom? That you can’t wait to see her either?”

  “No. I wanted to—”

  She got in his face. “I can tell when someone’s lying, and you’re lying. Why wait? Go see Tymber now. You wanted to be with her anyway, so be with her.”

  Then she spun on her heels and called over her shoulder, “I’ll find my own ride home.” She lifted both hands and did not give him the peace sign with her fingers. And she didn’t care who was filming it and posting it on the Internet.

  “Yeah, well, you’re right!” he shouted to her. There were barbs in his words. “She couldn’t make it so I had to settle for you. So deal with it.”

  His words shattered her.

  She hadn’t wanted to be right. She’d wanted him to tell her how much he did want to be with her, how he’d chosen her, how he thought she was pretty and smart and there was no one else he wanted to spend the night dancing with—to say all those things and mean them.

  Tears formed in her eyes and she did her best to hold them back.

  She didn’t realize that she still had Aiden’s phone until she was outside the school. There were kids all around the front of the building and in cars, talking or making out, so she walked off by herself behind the gym so no one could see her if she cried.

  A single light on the side of the school cast down a weary glow across the pavement.

  Alone.

  With Aiden’s phone.

  Well, good. She could send a text of her own to Tymber Dotson.

  81

  After sending the text, Tessa stuck his phone in her purse, then fished out her own phone to delete every text she’d ever gotten from Aiden Ryeson as well as the pictures of them from before they went into the school for prom.

  There was a vm from Patrick but she wasn’t in the mood to listen to him checking up on her. However, she couldn’t help but see his text to her: Basque is free. I’m sending an officer to pick you up.

  Her heart seemed to stop cold and dead in her chest.

  Basque was free? How?

  As she was processing that, a cop car pulled up around the corner of the gym. Its headlights were shining right at her and she had to hold up her hand to shield her eyes.

  An officer got out and she started toward him. “Just let me text my dad that you’re here.”

  But first, she tapped at the phone to listen to the voicemail: “Tessa, Basque escaped. I need you to—”

  The officer approached her, but was backlit by the cruiser’s headlights and
she couldn’t see his face. He was less than ten feet away when the rest of Patrick’s message came through: “—be careful. He has an FBI Police car.”

  By the time the message finished it was too late.

  He turned to the side and, though still partly backlit, in the faint light behind the school she saw his face and realized who was coming toward her.

  Richard Basque grabbed her arm and when she tried to pull away, he punched her hard in the face, splitting her lip and sending her reeling to the pavement. Her phone went spinning across the asphalt. He brought a heavy booted heel down on it and then he was on her, dragging her toward the car.

  “Help!” she cried. But everyone else was inside at the dance or farther around the corner of the building or in their cars in the parking lot.

  As she called for help again he punched her in the face once more and she crumpled to the ground, the entire side of her head throbbing in pain.

  “Let’s not make this any harder than it has to be,” he said.

  Her face hurt so badly that she was barely able to hold back the tears, but she didn’t want Basque to know how much it hurt, so she forced herself to. She still had the purse in her hand and swung it at him, but he easily stopped her arm.

  She memorized the license plate number as he yanked her toward the vehicle. She struggled to get away, but he was oppressively strong and tossed her into the back of the squad and slammed the door, almost taking off her foot as he did.

  She knew there wouldn’t be a door handle on the inside of a police car, but instinctively, she went for one. Of course it wasn’t there.

  Basque took his place behind the wheel and turned toward her, his shoulder-length hair flipping to the side as he did. “Hello, Tessa.”

  She spit in his face through the wire mesh cage separating them. One of her eyes was already swelling shut from where he’d punched her. Her face hurt, it really, really hurt, but she willed herself not to cry.

  He drew two fingers across the spittle, then brought them to his mouth, closed his eyes, and slowly licked her spit from his fingers. A few of his teeth were visible. His cheek was stitched up from where Patrick had stabbed him. His teeth were shattered and sharp and uneven and it sent a chill coursing through her.

  Then he faced the front and leaned his head back against the mesh so that he could see her in the rearview mirror. Strands of his hair wavered back through the metal divider, but unfortunately not long enough ones for her to grab hold of or tug.

  “We have a long night ahead of us, Tessa.” To her, it seemed as if each word was a worm dropping from his mouth. “I’m feeling a little adventurous. You never know what the next few hours may have in store.”

  Then the man who’d abducted and killed more than twenty-five women started the car and left the school with his next victim locked up tight in the backseat.

  82

  Tessa still hadn’t answered her text and when I tried to locate her phone’s GPS, nothing came up.

  I peeled away from the marina, called Ralph, and told him what was going on.

  “Where are you heading?”

  “Tessa’s school. I need to find her.”

  “I’m gonna have the ambulance driver take me to my house, make sure Brin and Lien-hua are alright. Call me when you find Tessa.”

  “I will.”

  ++

  This was bad.

  Very bad.

  She was trapped in the back of a cop car driven by a serial killer who wanted to punish her father. By eating her.

  She definitely needed to get out before they got to wherever he was taking her.

  But how do you escape from the back of a locked police car?

  The doors only open from the outside, there was no way she could get through the wire cage to the front seat. The windows were almost certainly reinforced, and what was she going to do anyway, kick her way out with her sneakers?

  But one thing played to her advantage: Basque had been in such a hurry to get her in the car that he hadn’t taken her clutch purse from her.

  He’d knocked her phone away, yes, but she still had Aiden’s cell in the purse.

  Tessa didn’t really think of herself as having very many skills, but she had one: texting without looking down at a phone.

  Fishing Aiden’s phone from the purse, she shielded it with her hand to cut down the brightness, then silenced the volume. She stared at Basque coldly in the rearview mirror so he wouldn’t suspect her of trying anything. Then she let her thumbs find their way across the keypad to contact her dad.

  ++

  I was about five minutes from the school when I got the text from an unknown number: He’s got me. Help me, Patrick! Track this phone.

  Terror shot through me.

  A moment later another text came through as she messaged me that she was in an FBI Police car, and she sent me the license plate number.

  That’s my girl.

  I put a trace on the phone and almost immediately found out it belonged to Aiden Ryeson. Though we still got nothing on the car we were able to get a lock on the phone’s GPS location. They were traveling south along the GW Parkway paralleling the Potomac River.

  I whipped the car around, did a U-turn through a stream of oncoming traffic, and blazed toward them.

  ++

  Tessa wanted to look down at her phone so badly, but she didn’t dare do it for fear that Basque would notice and get suspicious.

  It was possible Patrick wasn’t checking his texts or that he wouldn’t be able to trace the phone.

  Texting him might not be enough.

  She definitely needed to think of a way to get out of this car.

  ++

  I tore down the parkway. I hated high-speed chases, but this was one time I wasn’t going to back off the gas at all.

  I didn’t know if Basque might somehow get to the phone that Tessa had, but since she was texting me I had to assume that she was in the back of the FBI Police car, and that, at least for the moment, Basque would almost certainly be driving, so I used my phone’s voice-to-text function to get her the message that I was on my way.

  If the GPS on Aiden’s phone was accurate, I was about a mile behind them.

  ++

  Tessa emptied her purse on her lap and felt through the items to see if there was anything she could use to get free.

  Some lip gloss and makeup, her cigarettes, the spritzer bottle of perfume Brineesha had given her, her driver’s license, her lighter, a few crumpled dollar bills.

  Not much, but two of the items she could use.

  Oh, yes.

  Her lighter.

  And the perfume.

  Earlier in the week she’d promised Patrick that she wouldn’t set anyone on fire with coffee creamer.

  But she hadn’t promised she wouldn’t use something else.

  83

  Tessa finally looked down.

  In the dim light she couldn’t make out all the words on the tiny label on the back of the perfume bottle, but she could read the first two words, the ones that mattered most: “Caution: Flammable.”

  ++

  According to the GPS location of the phone we were tracking, I was less than a quarter mile back.

  I swerved around a minivan. Sped toward her.

  My car started to drift but I wrestled it back under control as I edged past a hundred on the speedometer.

  ++

  This was where it happened or it didn’t happen.

  The flame might just singe his hair, she wasn’t sure, but it was the only thing she could think of doing at the moment.

  She leaned close to the cage.

  “You told me we have a long night together?”

  Just as she’d hoped, he pressed his head back against the wire mesh to get the angle right to look at her in the rearview mirror.<
br />
  “Yes.”

  “Well, I think one of us is gonna have a longer night than the other one.”

  Raising her hands and holding the lighter in front of the perfume bottle, she simultaneously sprayed the perfume as she flicked on the lighter.

  It worked even better than she imagined.

  Basque’s hair went up in flames. The entire back of his head was engulfed and the fire spread quickly to the front. Maybe he had some kind of product in his hair, some sort of gel or spray that was flammable—she had no idea, but whatever the reason, it had worked.

  She didn’t stop spraying.

  Basque was crying out and slapping furiously at his head with one hand while trying to maneuver the car with the other.

  She popped off the top of the perfume bottle and flung the remainder of the fluid through the mesh onto the fire and it roared hotter.

  The car began to fishtail.

  Tessa frantically buckled her seat belt just before Basque lost control of the vehicle and it careened across the median toward the Potomac River.

  ++

  I saw their car swerve off the road.

  It looked like there was a fire in the front seat.

  A fire?

  The car bounced across the curb, crossed the Mount Vernon bike trail, shot through an opening in the trees along the Potomac, and launched off the bank and into the river.

  84

  When they hit the water, the impact jarred Tessa violently forward. Even with the seat belt on she still felt whipped around like a rag doll.

  Basque managed to get his door open and dive into the river.

  She had no idea how deep the river would be here, but five feet would be deep enough to fill the car with water and she would drown.

  Out! You have to get out!

  ++

  I flew toward the spot where they’d left the road, screeched to a stop, leapt out, and bolted across the road toward the river.

  ++

  The current grabbed the car and began to carry it downstream, a very bad sign, because if it was this strong here it meant the water was probably deep enough to take her under.