The Scream Catcher

by Vincent Zandri

  Pulling the tube from his nose, he yanks out the intravenous, yanks off the heart monitoring clip. Sitting up, he throws off the blanket, swings his legs around.

  “What the hell are you doing, Captain?” barks Lino. “You can’t…”

  “Get me my goddamned clothes, Daniel. You’re gonna escort me out of here.”

  Lino throws out his arms, leans himself down onto the bed, positions himself directly beside Mack—so close to the old Captain’s pale face he can smell the sour breath.

  “You walk out of here, you’ll bleed to death.”

  Mack peers into the Lieutenant’s eyes.

  “When there is any doubt,” he says. “There is no doubt.”

  Lino scrunches his brow, cocks his eyebrows.

  “What’s that mean?”

  “It means that despite the bullshit you just fed me about Trooper roadblocks and helicopters, I doubt that any cop organization is going throw everything they have into finding Lennox or my son. Not in this blackout. So I have no doubt that you’re a liar.”

  Lino exhales, bobs his head.

  “Cops always help their own,” he says. “No matter what.”

  “By the time something gets organized, it’ll be too late. The Staties will leave the whole show up to the FBI.”

  Lino thinks about it. The Captain has a valid point.

  With an overtaxed State Police force trying to deal with the blackout chaos, the FBI would be the natural choice for hunting down Lennox. The FBI and the US Marshals. But then Lino hasn’t heard word one from the Feds.

  “Say I help you out of here, Captain? What makes you think you’re not just going to slow things down?”

  “What fucking good can I do from a hospital bed?”

  Lino purses his lips, pulls himself back up, throws his hands in the pockets of his suit trousers, turns and looks out the window into the black night.

  “All I need is a location, Captain, and I will personally nail Lennox myself.”

  Mack slides off the bed, stands unsteady and lightheaded. But determined still.

  “Lennox is here, in Lake George, right under our noses. I can smell him. If it’s a matter of uncovering a specific location—of finding out where he’s playing the kill game, you’re going to need my help.”

  Lino about-faces from the window.

  “So what is it you’re suggesting?”

  “That we stop leaving things up to fate and go find the son of a bitch ourselves.”

  Warren County Courthouse

  Friday, 5:10 A.M.

  Lennox’s tone is surprisingly matter of fact.

  “The human heart averages one-hundred-fifteen beats per minute,” he states from outside the open cargo bay door. “In the final kill game level, the faster the Player’s heart beats, the faster Lake George goes boom.”

  “Save my son,” Jude whispers, eyes volleying from his boy to his wife, back to his boy again.

  The black-faced beast attempts neither smile nor frown. Not with bruised lips and broken front tooth. In deadpan, high-pitched voice, he takes his own sweet time to inform Jude that less than thirty minutes of computer-programmed fuse is available to work with.

  “But here’s your challenge: if the Player remains calm—if it maintains a calm pulse of one-hundred-fifteen beats per minute—it might manage to turn thirty minutes into forty-five. That should afford the Player plenty of time to free itself and diffuse the I.E.D.”

  “Spare my boy.”

  “On the other hand, if the Player panics—if it struggles with a heart at full gallop—then fuse time will be cut in half.” Squinting his eyes to further stress the point. “Fifteen minutes will not be enough time to save itself, its child,, and its wife. The Player will have to make a choice…Sophie’s choice.”

  Bound with duct tape and to the lives of his family, Jude has no other option than to sit as still as possible on the ribbed metal-pan floor and listen to this crazy killer ramble on about motion sensitive detonation devices and the trickery he’s invented for setting them off. If such a thing is even possible.

  “Lake George goes boom” . . . Is it likely that Lennox has rigged not one but a series of I.E.D.s? Set them throughout the village? Is a series of explosions set to go off the moment the van bomb explodes? Is Lennox about to wipe Lake George off the map?

  From where he sits, Jude can’t help but spot Jack’s Converse-sneakered feet dangling from the up-front passenger seat. The feet scream, save me! It’s precisely because of those feet that his pulse rate has no chance in hell of slowing down. The pulse rate has only one direction to go.

  The now silent Lennox reaches into his pocket, pulls out his iPhone, aims the speaker in the direction of Jude.

  He releases a giggle. “Do. Not. Scream. For. Me…Get it?”

  Laughing, he takes a step back away from the van, enters into an emerging dawn over Lake George. At last the rains have abated, the morning sun already burning away the storm clouds.

  “For God’s sakes!” Jude shouts. “Spare my family!”

  But Lennox makes no further comment. He pockets his phone, cocks his head over his left shoulder, issues his Player a curious glance. He scrunches his black-painted brow and for the first time since they arrived at the Warren County Courthouse, reveals just a hint of a broken tooth smile.

  Stepping away from the van, the Black Dragon slams the cargo bay door shut.

  Glens Falls Medical Center en Route to Glens Falls

  Friday, 5:56 A.M.

  It’s not difficult making it past the nurse’s station.

  In the blackout, the facility operates on emergency generated power. The place is cavernous and half-lit with wall-mounted, battery-operated fixtures. Because of the sudden overload of patients (accident victims mostly), every available nurse occupies him or herself by attending to the sick and injured. Which means that once past the nurse’s station it’s a simple matter of descending the rear stairwell, then down into the two-level parking garage where Lino has parked his personal ride.

  Not long after, the black Chevy Suburban pulls up outside the second of Wild Bill Stark’s commercial establishments—what should be a bright, neon lit Wild Bill’s All Day/All Night-II video game arcade, but that now appears to be just another darkened storefront inside the downtown Glens Falls business district.

  As the dawn looms east of the lake, a bleeding Mack stares out the passenger-side window onto a dozen or more kids drinking beers, tossing empties into the road, battery operated boom-boxes blaring bass pounding hip-hop.

  “You think he’s here, Captain?” asks Lt. Lino, heart still beating from having revealed everything about his inspection of the Parish 23 Assembly Point home earlier that night.

  Mack groggily looks through the crowd till he spots a tall, slim young man with a blaze orange skull cap pulled far down over his head. The kid is dressed in silver Nike sweats, running shoes with bright yellow shock absorbers for heels.

  Mack is thinking, Yup, kid is exactly where I thought he’d be.

  But then he is also wondering if he made the right decision in sneaking out of the hospital. His right shoulder is leaking blood while his arm feels like it’d been sawed off at the rotator cuff.

  But then, no point in rehashing what I should or should not have done . . . The lives of my family are at stake here.

  Mack asks Lino to get out, snag the kid, drag him into the Suburban. Without a word the Lieutenant exits the vehicle, snatches T-Bred from the sidewalk, pulls him into the back seat.

  “I gave you what you wanted three days ago,” he snaps, voice a strange mixture of whisper and scream. “I think Wild Bill is getting suspicious. You know what he’d do to me he knows I work for you?”

  “Fuck Wild Bill,” Mack shouts, painfully shifting in the seat to get a better view of Thoroughbred. “This isn’t about him now.”

  “Then what is it you want from me, Captain?”

  “Lennox is loose. I believe he’s playing a kill game with my family. He’s pr
obably catching their screams right now. This very fucking minute. I need to know where I can find them before he does something terrible.”

  T-Bred rolls his eyes, stares out the window. It’s all he can do to keep it together in front of the cops. He can hardly think. Brain is buzzing with adrenalin, stomach queasy from the sight of all that blood. Fuentes’ head in his hands, and the blood, and his own vomit all over the forest floor.

  Did Black Dragon know that eventually the cops would come looking for me? Is that why he sent me back here? Was maintaining my relationship with the cops a part of my initiation?

  Maybe he’s taking way too long to answer, because Lino flings himself into the back seat, grabs the kid by the neck, draws his service weapon, presses the barrel to the temple.

  Thoroughbred raises up his hands in surrender.

  “What do you wanna know, Captain?” he swallows.

  Mack inhales as if to calm himself while Lino slowly slides himself and his automatic back into the driver’s seat.

  He says, “So far Lennox has played kill games inside an abandoned factory, at a river, and a gravel pit. He’s invaded my son’s house, abducted his family. I have reason to believe he took Ray Fuentes along with them.”

  Do they already know about Fuentes? Have they made a connection between the old cop’s death and me?

  “If you were playing a video game that started in a house,” Mack grunts, “where would you go to next?”

  “Whaddaya mean where would I go to next?”

  “There’s been a factory, a river, a gravel pit, a house. You’re a video game addict. There must be a second and third level of play. Something to raise the ante. Something more challenging than the first level. Something more exciting, more inventive, more risky.”

  Lino, pistol in hand, dark eyes wide inside the rear view.

  T-Bred leans back in the seat, runs his hands over his face, but regrets doing it immediately. The hands still smell of blood. Fuentes’ blood. Still, he has no other option than to try to think. He contemplates a dozen possibilities, searches for something the two cops might buy so he can get the hell out of that Suburban before he shivers his way out of his own skin.

  Factory, river, gravel pit, home . . .

  He tries to put his mind to work.

  But the brain is still speeding like a hurricane inside his skull. Whenever he tries to think, all he can come up with is the feel of the blade against Fuentes’ neck, the feel of it entering through the skin, through the rigid bone and cartilage of the windpipe. There’s the blood that spurts out from the severed carotid and the high-pitched, almost child-like, scream of the cop as the knife sawed, entered deeper . . . He thinks about how he was forced to record that scream. Now he can’t get it out of his head.

  “Black Dragon could have taken them anywhere,” he whispers after a time.

  But that’s when the lights go on in Lino’s head. Call it intuition or a sudden opening in the clouds. But he reaches into his right-hand pocket, digs for the little piece of paper he picked up in the gravel driveway outside the Parish home. He stares down at the paper, discovers it for what it really is: a driving access ticket issued at a New York State Park. Tongue Mountain State Park to be precise, one mile west of the village.

  Lennox must have dropped it in the driveway during his abduction of the Parish family . . .

  “Wilderness,” Lino chimes in.

  Mack turns to his second in charge. “What did you say?”

  Lino says, “What if he took them up on Tongue? From what I’m told, no one goes up there this time of year when the rattlesnakes are migrating. For Lennox, the challenge would be a new one, a chance to test himself and the kill game in the wild.”

  Mack feels sick to his stomach. It has nothing to do with the bullet wound.

  Turning back to Thoroughbred.

  “What do you think, T-bred?”

  Kid bobs his head, like, Yeah, that’s a definite possibility.

  “But where do we start?” Lino asks.

  “There’s got to be five-thousand acres of state forest out there,” Mack comments. “Not to mention the drive up its base road, then the climb to the summit.”

  “We need a topo map,” Lino points out.

  The Suburban goes silent while the kids outside the van drink, rap, try to get a look inside the tinted windows.

  “Can I go now?” begs Thoroughbred. He’s convinced he’s about to throw up.

  “Let him go, Danny.”

  The Lieutenant turns, faces the snitch, cocks his head towards the door.

  The kid opens it.

  “Wait,” Mack says. “Give him twenty.”

  Lino shoots the old Captain an upturned brow look like, you serious?

  But then he knows the deal, knows how it works between a snitch and a local P.D. You’ve got to pay for your information, even if the information is coming from an untrustworthy, sell-out punk like Thoroughbred.

  Lino pulls a twenty from his pocket, hands it over.

  T-Bred takes it, stares at it for a minute, then gives it back.

  “This one’s on the house,” he says.

  “Okay,” Mack painfully nods, a little surprised at the move. “I’ll be in touch.”

  “Get out,” Lino grouses.

  T-Bred bolts from the Suburban, slams the door shut.

  “Now what?” the lieutenant exhales, re-pocketing his money.

  “Take me back to the village,” Mack insists. “Let’s pull out a map, gear up Glens Falls SWAT.”

  Warren County Courthouse

  Friday, 5:56 A.M.

  Drowning in panic, Jude proceeds to do exactly what Lennox instructed him not to do.

  He struggles.

  Struggles to free his hands of the duct tape that binds them to his hips, twisting his bruised body, contorting it inside the van’s cargo bay. He has no other option but to use all the force he can muster to free his hands and legs while, at the same time, attempt to avoid thrashing about, doing anything that will trigger the explosive.

  He’s fighting a losing battle and he’s quite sure Lennox has planned it that way. He has no way of disarming the bomb. His wrists and hands are too tightly secured at the hips to ensure no interference with the I.E.D. wiring system.

  Rosie remains laid out fetal beside her husband. She too struggles to free herself from the duct tape. As for Jack, his feet continue to hang off the front passenger side seat, bobbing up and down in his own fit of panic.

  “I’m going to free us!” Jude shouts. But he knows that shouting will not do his wife or child any good. Shouting will only make them more frightened. But then that’s when it dawns on him that he has the ability to shout. Maybe it wasn’t Lennox’s intention, but before he slammed the van door closed, he did not replace the duct tape gag across Jude’s mouth. Maybe it was a mistake or perhaps it was an entirely scripted component of the kill game. But for Jude, the freedom of an uncovered mouth represents an opportunity. Now if he can only figure out a way to make use of his teeth, he might be able to cut the tape that binds him. The question is not only how, but where to start gnawing.

  Moving his arms is an impossibility, much less his legs.

  But then there is one possibility. While his knees have been taped tightly together, he can still raise and lower them. If he can raise them high enough, he can press them up against his mouth. If he can manage the maneuver without upsetting the wires that extend from his neck and chest directly to the timing device, he might have a chance.

  Inhaling a deep breath, Jude empties his diaphragm. He takes a good look at the computer screen and the white-digital seconds and minutes that rapidly count down against a backdrop of fire engine red. The minutes are fading faster than a normal sixty-second minute should.

  Lennox wasn’t lying.

  The faster Jude’s heart beats, the faster the time fades. According to the computer readout, he has only fifteen minutes left to get himself and his family to safety. Fifteen partial minutes to accomplis
h the impossible.

  With lungs emptied and diaphragm flattened, Jude raises knees up to his face. Close enough to press the tape that surrounds them against lips and mouth. He grinds his teeth into the tape, tearing and biting away at it like a rabid animal. The tape does not give way easily. It’s thick and sticky against his lips, teeth and tongue. It has a strong, fibrous toughness to it. The taste is toxic, sickening.

  He has no choice but to chomp away at it until he finds himself halfway through the first few layers. Then more than halfway. Until it is finally possible for him to pull his knees apart, splitting what remains of the hold.

  In that manner, Jude manages to free his knees.

  Eyes locked on the computer screen, he can see that hardly ten minutes remains.

  Ten minutes and counting.

  Time dwindles at many times its normal speed. At this rate, they will all be vaporized by the explosion.

  No time for thinking.

  There is only the tape that still binds Jude’s wrists to hips.

  He looks for an object with a sharp edge. A frantic survey of the cargo bay reveals nothing. Other than the bags of fertilizer and the computers, the space is empty.

  Six minutes-thirty . . .

  He lowers his head and shoulders, spins himself around on his back making sure to avoid kicking the I.E.D. wires. Until he faces the two side by side windows embedded into the double van doors. Raising up his right leg, he kicks the right-hand glass panel using his boot heel as a ram.

  The safety glass doesn’t budge.

  Cocking his leg back, he slams it again. This time the heel makes a spider-veined dent in the glass pane.

  Jude swallows a breath, lets loose with the boot heel one final time.

  The glass panel blows out. Bringing himself around to his knees, he makes another time check.

  Four minutes . . .

  Minutes flying by like seconds.

  He throws himself at the broken glass panel and raises up his taped hip as high as it will go. He sets hand and taped wrist over the sharp vertical edge of the broken glass. He begins to make a sawing motion, running tape over jagged-edged glass.