“We don’t have any time,” Calhoun said. “They’re going to transport you to Indianapolis for execution on Saturday, in the morning. We’re going to get you out of here before that.”
Parker looked at Castillo and the less than impressive Rodgers. “You’re going to fight your way out with these two?”
Calhoun shook her head gravely. “No, we’re just here to explain so that you’re ready.”
This has to be another trick.
Another attempt to raise his hopes only to have them dashed again. Parker licked his lips and looked into Calhoun’s eyes. That’s why he didn’t see her reach into her leg holster, pull out the SIG Sauer P226, and hand it to him, butt first.
Parker didn’t know what to do, and simply stood frozen before her.
Calhoun put the weapon in his hand and squeezed his palm with her own. “Take it,” she said softly.
Prodded again, Parker gripped the pistol. Calhoun reached into her utility belt and pulled out four more 9x19 Parabellum magazines and dropped them onto the bed. “Hide those.”
“One minute twenty,” said Rodgers. Castillo was shifting nervously from foot to foot.
“If we’re discovered before we get out of this cell,” Calhoun said, “we’re going to shoot you ourselves and tell the marshals you tried to take the guns.”
Parker blinked. “Okay.” He nodded, not knowing what to think anymore.
Calhoun gave Parker a key. “It’s a master. It will get you all the way out of the main block and into the compound. From there, you’ll need to take a truck and bust out through the gates. We’re going to create a diversion.”
Parker knew his face was a puzzle of confusion.
“There will be a riot at 5.30 a.m. We’ve given Kleet a key, like you, and also the code to get into the armory. They will tear the place apart and try to escape at the same time. In the confusion, you should be able to get out by running in the opposite direction of the disturbance. Castillo has made sure the truck in the south compound will have the ignition keys on top of the passenger-side front tire. Got that?”
Parker had no words. The information was coming in a rush.
“One minute forty,” said Rodgers.
Calhoun squeezed Parker’s shoulder. “Make this count, Parker. When you get out there, bring these fuckers down. I’ve followed orders my whole life, and would have continued, but the execution of the civilians turned all our hearts. Officer Rayleigh, too. Get out and make them pay.”
Calhoun turned as Rodgers opened the door, peeked out onto the deserted landing running in front of the cells, and indicated to the others that it was okay to leave. In three seconds, Parker’s visitors had left and the door was locked once again.
He stared at the gun in his hand and the magazines on the bed as he heard their footsteps receding into the distance, trying to make sense of what had happened, and what he should do—if anything.
Sara was dead.
Parker’s name was smeared with pedophilic mud.
He’d read out a message to save Henshaw’s life.
There was no coming back. He had no fight left in him, and he wasn’t the man they thought he was. But Parker did have another chance to escape now… just not in the way Calhoun expected.
Parker took a deep breath, flicked off the safety on the SIG, and placed the muzzle against his own temple.
Ava emerged from blackness like a cork bobbing up through thick oil.
Her head throbbed like it had been trampled, and she couldn’t move her left arm—when she tried, a crackle of pain crunched in her shoulder as if it had been stabbed with a broken bottle. She tried opening her eyes, but the light was too bright. There were low voices mumbling in the distance, too, but the way the sound reverberated told her that she was no longer outside on her trip toward Seelyville, but indoors, lying on a bed.
Ava tried to speak, but her lips were glued together with dried mucus.
The last thing she remembered was the voice of the boy calling for someone named Davy to get a doctor, and the pounding of the horses’ hooves as the stampeding animals had run on.
The urgency of the hoofbeats in her memory seemed to chime with her heart, and suddenly the desperation of her mission flooded back into the hollows of her body that weren’t grumbling with pain.
Ava snapped open her mouth and eyes at the same time, and began to say, “I’ve got to…” but her voice trailed away. Sara was sitting on the side of the bed, holding her hand. Large as life, twice as beautiful. Smiling.
“Am-am I dreaming?” Ava asked lamely. She truly couldn’t think of anything else to say.
Sara shook her head. “Absolutely not. You have a broken collarbone that David has strapped up. Sammi has filled you full of painkillers, and I’ve just got back from rounding up the horses that bowled you over like a tenpin, but other than that, I’m as real as real can be.”
Looking at Sara’s half relieved, half questioning expression made the throbbing in Ava’s shoulder subside. Such a rush of love and warmth filled her that it was as if everything bad from the past months had become a dream, at least momentarily. Having her back felt monumental, and she couldn’t speak all over again.
“Just lie still. You’re safe,” said Sara, and it was near enough the best thing Ava had heard in her life.
Ava put her head back on the pillow and rotated her hand so that she could grip Sara’s fingers and squeeze her hand. “I thought you were dead.”
“Same here.”
Thoughts that Ava didn’t want to be having encroached. “Have you seen the message from the Council about Parker?”
Sara’s face darkened, and she nodded.
“We’ve got to do something,” Ava said.
Sara let go of her hand and turned her head away. Ava reached out haltingly, but Sara shifted out of her reach, still not meeting her eyes.
“Sara?”
Sara got up, and Ava’s eyes followed her to the window of the snug, homely house she’d woken up in. Four people, two boys and what she took to be their parents, sat with two older people. One had a stethoscope around his neck and looked like his whole body, except his hazel eyes, were made from raw exhaustion. He spoke in a low voice to an older woman, wearing a white lab coat, gray curly hair pulled back in a ponytail, and a face that looked like a map of the Rockies. After a while, the woman broke away and went to the window where Sara was staring into the rain-soaked fields through the blinds. Ava couldn’t hear what the woman was saying to Sara, but Sara shook her head and wrapped her arms around herself.
Ava tried to sit up against the starburst of pain in her broken shoulder. She pushed into a sitting position and then moved sideways unsteadily, thinking to get to her feet.
She wavered, but before she could tumble from the bed or attempt standing, the man with hazel eyes was at her side. “Not yet, young lady. You need to rest.”
“Sara.” She shrugged against the man’s hand, but didn’t try to stand again, already having to swallow back nausea from her first attempt. “You know what they’re going to do to him. We have to do something.”
Sara spun around, her face a race of whirling emotions and pain. “The last time I tried to do something, I got everyone killed!”
“Not everyone,” Ava said, pointing at her face with her good hand.
Sara shook her head. “I’m not putting any more lives at risk.”
“He’s your father!”
“And I thought he was dead, and I’ve tried to do something more than just kill people. Working with David and Sammi—it’s making a difference.”
Ava didn’t know what to do with that, she was still so woozy from the pain and the drugs. She glanced sideways to the man she took to be the doctor, and then back to her friend who she’d recently thought dead. Sara had turned back to the window, but not before Ava had noticed rare tears running down her cheeks.
Sara helped Sammi get Ava to the sofa.
Through the window, the storm was building steadily. The af
ternoon light was fading, and shocks of lightning were cracking the sky. Ava gripped her arm and wouldn’t let go.
“You can’t just give up.”
Sara wanted to pull away, but Ava’s desperation held her on the arm of the sofa, looking down on her injured friend. “I’ve not given up, Ava. David and Sammi are fighting back in their own way. Keeping people healthy, delivering babies, giving first aid. How screwed would you be right now if there’d been no one around to fetch us?”
Sara pointed at the family on the other sofa. “If it hadn’t been for Jacob and his brother, Davy, you’d still be lying by the side of the road waiting for the horses to come back and trample you again. Or worse, FEMA to find you! I want to help! I want to do good!”
And she meant it. Parker and ARM had done great things, but it was a war of attrition. You couldn’t go up against the Council. You had to settle for little victories. Victories like mending a broken collarbone.
“You think the Council is going to let you walk off into the sunset and become a nurse? After what happened when we attacked the prison?” Ava pressed.
Across the room, Ralph Prentice’s face came alive all of a sudden. He stood up. Looked at David and Sammi. “What did she just say?”
David’s exhaustion shifted; his eyes looked toward Sara, concern in his eyes. Then he turned back to Ralph, “Oh, I don’t know what the girl’s talking about, Ralph. She’s delirious. Take no notice.”
But Ralph was energized. He stood up, walked to a cabinet set against the far wall, and began opening drawers. Sammi stood and indicated to Sara to keep her mouth shut.
The Prentices’ horses had escaped from their field when Davy had accidentally left their gate open. They’d been spooked by the lightning, crashed their way through the farm entrance, and clattered into Ava—she’d simply been in the wrong place at the wrong time. They’d taken Ava into their house while Ralph had gone to fetch David, Sammi, and Sara. A man of very few words, Ralph used the ones he did speak with true paucity of expression. He’d said nothing other than that the doctor was needed because a woman had a broken shoulder. Now, his demeanor had completely changed at the mention of the prison.
It occurred to Sara that she didn’t have her gun. David didn’t have his shotgun, either, and Sammi’s pistol was back in the Blazer.
They didn’t think about arming themselves while they were treating the sick and injured, everyone was usually so glad to see them.
But now the temperature in the room seemed to have dropped thirty degrees, and Ralph was turning from the cabinet holding a Smith &Wesson .44 magnum. He pointed it at Ava. “Now, you repeat what you said, little lady, or I’m gonna have to make you an extra mouth, and maybe that one will tell me.”
Ava looked down the barrel of the magnum, her mouth sucked clean by a vacuum of dryness. She hesitated, but then responded flatly, “I said ‘You think the Council are going to let you walk off into the sunset and become a nurse? After we attacked the prison?’” The worlds already sounded like those of someone else. She wished she was dislocated from them—had never said them aloud in this room.
Ralph cocked the hammer on the enormous blue-black pistol. His arm and biceps strained under his checked shirt, but the aim didn’t waver. “My brother Tom was a guard at the Terra Haute facility when ARM attacked it. They ran him down at the gate in an armored firetruck. I had to collect what was left of him in two bags!”
Tears squeezed out from the corners of his eyes, and Ava flinched backward into the couch, her eyes on the gun.
“I’m sorry,” she said softly. “I truly am.”
“Ava!” Sara said harshly, grabbing Ava’s good arm as if to stop whatever she’d say next.
Ava looked up, grimacing. “What else am I supposed to say? I can’t rewind time. I said it. He knows.”
Ralph moved the end of the gun between Ava’s forehead and Sara’s chest. As if he was deciding who to shoot first.
“Ralph, come on.” David stepped forward, his own hands raised. “You don’t have to do this. These girls are no threat. Christ, they’re not even armed. You know I’m not. Put the gun down and let’s talk about this.”
The gun moved onto David. “What’s there to talk about, David? Tom’s dead. You delivered his son three months ago. These… monsters…”
“Monsters?”
Ava had flinched at the word, fighting a new dizziness now that the gun had come out, but Sara’s voice had come out strong. Strident. It was as if the old Sara had climbed out of the new Sara like a butterfly crawling out of a cocoon.
“Who are the monsters here, Ralph? Both Ava and I saw people just like you and me being taken to that prison and executed at the gates—executed—only because they tried to get away! Their heads blown open in front of their friends, women and children. What did you expect us to do? We had an opportunity. Should we not have gone? Should we not have tried? Should we have left them all to rot and die?”
The gun swung back to Sara. “My little brother! You killed him!”
Sara shook her head, shifting so that she stood more in front of Ava, who could only look on.
“Maybe I did, maybe I didn’t, and I’m sorry for your loss, but we were trying to do something, Ralph. Something good. I led that raid and, apart from Ava, nearly one hundred of my friends were killed. One hundred, and we didn’t release one person from that place. Not one… We—no, I—failed.”
She stepped forward, putting herself directly between Ava and Ralph. Blocking his shot completely. “And I’m damned if I’m going to lose the last one to you.”
Ralph took another step toward them, and Ava saw his family shrinking against the wall. “You want me to kill you where you stand?”
“Killing me doesn’t fix anything in this broken land.”
“Maybe it won’t!” Ralph yelled. “But it’ll sure make me feel better.”
And then he pulled the trigger.
25
Parker had been holding the gun to his own head for minutes, frozen and trying to figure out what he should do. For himself, but also to honor Sara’s memory. So much of the anger he’d been feeling over the past weeks had drifted away in the face of what Grayland had shown him of her last moments, and what the world thought of him, but there was still some resistance in him. Something keeping him from pulling the trigger. More minutes passed, and he realized it was confusion. The question itself was so targeted that he shifted his grip, loosening his finger on the trigger he’d had readied against his skull.
Why kill Henshaw?
Parker realized he didn’t know Henshaw; they didn’t have a connection. None. It didn’t make sense.
Why tone down the threat level?
The fact that they’d done that suggested they’d had no other cards to play, and their guess had been that anyone would do the trick. But it brought up the question… why hadn’t they waited and killed Sara in front of him? Why, if they needed him to really and truly bend to their will? They couldn’t have known for sure that he’d break because of Henshaw.
In the torturer’s handbook, the way to manipulate Parker was to up the threat level—to torture Sara in front of him maybe, and threaten to make him watch her die… in person. To use his connection to her—father and daughter—to the maximum advantage to exact maximum damage. If they hadn’t done that, and she hadn’t died in the riot, as had been implied…
How could he be certain it was Sara on the film? Film could be doctored; that could have been anyone. And the image had never been all that clear.
Killing Sara gave Parker nothing to live for. And if she hadn’t been killed by accident, in the riot… killing her didn’t make any sense. None.
So maybe Sara wasn’t dead after all. Maybe they’d thought to torture him with the idea that she’d been killed, pushing him to believe it because they had no way to torture him with her death—because they’d never had her in custody. That made the most sense. More sense than killing her out of his presence and taking goddamned picture
s.
Parker lowered the gun. Was he just playing into their hands now? Believing them to such an extent that he’d actually end his own life? Was that why Calhoun had given him a gun? Were they waiting for him to pull the trigger? But no… she’d seemed serious; that mass killing and mass grave had gotten to her. Killing himself might be playing into Spencer’s hands in the end, but he felt pretty sure that wasn’t the case. Calhoun wanted revenge for those innocents who’d been slaughtered. Grayland and Spencer wanted a public execution. His suicide wouldn’t address any of those goals.
A new idea swam around his mind now, like a ravenous shark biting through all the excuses that had made suicide a viable option.
Two seconds ago, he had reached the end of the road. The final solution. The coward’s way out. The ultimate release—whatever you wanted to call it.
Knowing it, he felt like kicking his own ass around the room. He’d taken the most horrific idea which had been offered, that they’d killed Sara, at face value. He’d believed Grayland and Spencer without question. Perhaps because he’d still been suffering the aftershock of addiction and the psychological tortures that had been visited upon him. Spencer had first shown him those photos soon after he’d come off the methadone, after all.
But now he knew. That wasn’t Sara in those pictures, or the video.
She might still be alive. Still out there somewhere. Still fighting.
It hurt his guts to think that some poor innocent woman had been killed to trick him, but nevertheless, he’d finally dug his nails into some ledge of hope.
Parker set the gun’s safety and put it into the band of his underwear inside the jumpsuit. He put a magazine in each of his socks and the other on his hip, opposite the gun.
Then he sat on his bed and waited for the riot.
As she opened her eyes, the stink of a gunshot spiking her nostrils, the first thing Sara saw was that Ralph was on his knees, the magnum spun away, blood pumping from his ruined wrist.
911: The Complete Series Page 67
