by K. T. Tomb
“Sounds like a plan,” I said tersely. I just wanted this thing over with so I could relax again. Mark and I settled down to wait. We didn’t say anything else, each of us wanting to be alone with our thoughts before we faced Adam down. A man like that might become desperate and try something crazy.
BZZZZZT. BZZZZZT. BZZZZZT.
“Mark, answer the goddamn phone,” I said as Mark’s phone continued to vibrate. “It’s still early—he’s not coming home this time of day.” It was already after noon, but Mark and I hadn’t bothered to watch the clock. This was officially a waiting game. We knew he would come, just not when.
“Yeah, this is Mark,” Mark said into his phone. “What? What do you mean? Really? No, neither of us said anything about you to anyone. No, I swear we didn’t. We wouldn’t want you in trouble. Well, that’s good. okay. okay. Yup, bye.”
“What’s that all about?” I asked him.
“You remember your girlfriend from the rental car place?” he shot back.
“Yeah, I remember,” I said.
“Ah hah! Knew she was your girlfriend. Anyway, she got my number off of my website and she called to say that she just had a ‘performance review’ with Adam. He was asking her all kinds of questions about us from yesterday.”
“Oh, shit,” I said.
“Well, she doesn’t know if the situation is bad or not. Seems like he just asked a few more in depth questions, but she’s getting a raise,” Mark said.
“Mark,” I replied. “You and I both worked part-time through college. Did you ever have a ‘performance review’ that actually corresponded with a higher level of pay?”
“No,” Mark said. “I don’t think that ever happened to me once. And you know what, it’s probably just a bit of a busy financial time for them.”
“I’m pretty sure that even in our busiest times at the movie store, no matter how good we were on all our numbers, we never got a cent. So if she’s getting a raise, it’s probably because Adam doesn’t think she will be around for much longer. So what do we do now?” I asked.
“I think we have to go pick this chick up,” Mark said. “We can’t just leave her somewhere this creep can get to her.”
“Okay, then let’s go play bodyguard.”
Chapter Seventeen
We pulled back into the Enterprise lot at about quarter after five p.m. and hurried to the front counter but Emily was not there.
We asked the person on duty and we were told how to get to the employee parking area. We knew she was headed that way and it was right along the path where Adam murdered his wife. If it was such a secluded area, we knew that she might face the same fate as Carrie had. We could only hope that she would not be forced into any sexual activity. The image of Adam forcing himself on Emily was too much—I couldn’t handle it and I sprinted ahead of Mark. As I rounded a corner coming into the enclosed parking area, I saw two figures ahead of me. The first, and the closer of the two, was clearly male—I could tell from the purposeful way he was moving to close the gap between himself and the female figure ahead of him that it was Adam and Emily.
“Hey!” I shouted. Both figures turned and look my way. Emily saw me, and took a couple steps toward me, and then realized she would have to make it around Adam to get to me. Adam turned faster than I expected he would, and on seeing me, he smiled.
“Well, seeing as how this whole thing is going to backfire on me anyway,” he said loudly enough for me to hear most of what he says. Then Adam raised his arm toward me. I see a brief burst of light, and then pain exploded in my shoulder. I felt the hot spurt of blood as the bullet buried itself in my shoulder. When the bullet stopped tearing and burning, I could feel it lodged against the inside of my shoulder blade. Moving my arm brought me excruciating pain.
Emily was dumbstruck. She had no idea what to do. Adam was closing in on her, fast.
“I’m really going to enjoy the time we spend together today. You probably won’t,” Adam said as he got closer to the doe-in-headlights that was Emily. She turned to run, but Adam was too fast and he shouted, “If you run, I will shoot you. It’s a top of the line piece and top-end rounds. This bullet will kill you.”
Emily stopped dead in her tracks.
Mark still hadn’t caught up. I was making an educated guess that Mark would be covering the exit from the building on the other side.
“Stand right there,” he told her. He walked up to her and grasped her arm. I could see the physical dislike for Adam in her eyes, but there was nothing I could do. I felt the blood draining through the hole in my shoulder. He frog-marched Emily over to me, and I figured that this would be the end. He'd shoot me.
“You couldn’t leave my wife alone, huh?” he accused me. “You had to take the one great thing about my life and make it a world without. I’m working here to cover a mortgage and loans. I hate my job, but I hate you more. Now, you die.” And with that statement of finality, he stood over me and pointed the gun at my head. I was in so much pain, and hoping he would shoot me just for the respite of death. As I stared up into the barrel if the gun, I saw over Adam’s shoulder another person was sneaking into the building. In order to give Mark time to set up his shot, I tried to sit up straight again, but Adam pushed his heel into my wound.
“What do you want from me?” I asked him, gasping for air. Like I said, the bullet did a number on me.
“I just want you to die now,” he told me. With a sick smile, he looked at Emily.
“You and I are going to leave right after, and we’re going to a private spot I know,” Adam said to her. “Once we’re there, we’re going to have all kinds of fun before I kill you too,” he said, his derangement evident in his voice. He leveled his gun at my head again, but before he could pull the trigger, I heard the SNAP of another pistol going off. I knew it was Mark’s. He missed and the bullet took a chunk out of the wall. Adam turned toward the source of the shot and sent a few of his own rounds toward Mark. Mark was good, though—he had enough cover and he ducks down. The bullets zipped by relatively harmlessly.
Before Mark could manage to fire off another shot, Adam grabbed Emily and dragged her into a car. He peeled out of the parking stall. Mark sent a few shots toward the car as it drove out of the lot.
Mark rushed over to me, took one look and told me to hang on tight. He helped me into a sitting position and I told him to follow the car as best he could. Mark stood up from my side and sprinted toward the nearest car. Somehow he got the car moving, but I did not think there would be enough time for him to catch Adam’s lead. Especially since we did not know where he was going to run to. Mark also called an ambulance.
He took off after the car Adam got into, and I laid on the ground, waiting for help or another person to come by so that I could get to a hospital. Then not three minutes later, Mark drove back up. He had Emily in the passenger seat of the car with him.
“How did you get her back?” I asked him.
“She pulled open the passenger’s side door and rolled out. She says Adam didn’t stop to try to re-kidnap her.”
“Does that mean like… I’m your guys’ hostage or whatever?” Emily asked.
“No, it means you need to get out of here because we’re going after him,” I said with more bravery than I actually felt at that moment.
“The only place you’re going, kid, is to the hospital,” Mark told me firmly. “Don’t worry, we’ll get him.”
Mark sat with me while we waited for the ambulance. While we waited, Mark called in a couple of favors with his cops at most of the local area precincts. Nobody gave him too hard of a time, and most of his friends were happy to be on the lookout for the car and the man he described. He also gave them the address from the house and asked them to send someone down there to intercept in case he came that way too. Finally, the ambulance arrived. They put me on a stretcher. I had no idea how comfortable ambulance stretchers could be. Mark took off, leaving me with Emily.
“Where did Mark go?” Emily asked.
> “He went to go check on someone who has been helping us with this case all along,” I explained to her. “We know that this guy does not like us, and we don’t want anyone else getting hurt,” I said as the morphine from the ambulance was making me feel great.
“I’ll be gone once you awake, so I just want to say thank you for protecting me and doing your best to make sure nothing happened to me. I really appreciate it,” she added. “Now if only we knew where he was headed, we could for sure catch him and put him away for a good long time like what happens in the movies.”
“Don’t you and I both wish that,” I said to myself.
Chapter Eighteen
Mark hung up the phone for the third time in a row.
Alex was a tough person to get a hold of apparently. He had been trying to call her to warn her that Adam was on his way. How he knew this, Mark could only describe as police instinct. He had not mentioned to me that first night that he thought we had had a tail. He was not at his best and he did not want to jump to conclusions, but in thinking about it, he was pretty sure that someone had followed us that first night we discovered Carrie’s body. If Adam was heading for Alex’s office, then she needed to know sooner rather than later.
Mark tried calling her again. It just rang. He put his foot down on the gas harder. He hoped he would not get pulled over. That would be too ironic. Trying to stop a bad guy, get pulled over by a cop, and have to explain the situation. He called the closest precinct and identified himself. He proceeded to tell the dispatcher his license plate number and asked for an escort if they felt there was a danger to the public due to reckless driving.
Finally, Mark’s exit appeared on the right. He turned off the highway, flying, pushing the car to its very limits. He raced through the city and almost flipped the car, making a hard turn into the parking lot for Alex’s building.
“Shit,” he said to himself, seeing her car, he knew that Alex was still at the office. He also saw that the car Adam stole was parked in the lot. This building held enough twists in the hallways that Mark was sure that Adam would be hiding and laying a booby trap for him. Mark jumped out of the car and pulled out his gun. He loved the weight of his 9mm in his hand. He typically was a very good shot. I do not know why or how he missed at the Enterprise lot, just that he did. If anyone was not going to miss that shot, it was Mark. But every once in a while, we all miss something we should have made.
He slowly approached the entrance to the building, being careful not to present himself as a large target. He moved toward the door with his body at an angle so that there would be a slimmer view of him for anyone hiding within. He made it to the doors, which opened automatically for him. He systematically began clearing rooms of people, sending them out into the parking lot. He told them it was an issue of national security. Finally, he came to the end of the corridor where Alex’s office was located.
He knocked on her door.
A male voice answered. “Put down your gun and you can come in,” the voice said.
“I’m not going to do that,” Mark said right back, his police training kicking in immediately.
“Well then you’re not coming,” Adam replied. “You can just stay out there,” he added.
“No, I can’t do that either,” Mark said calmly. “You have someone in there and you have a gun to their head. I can’t let you walk away from this, Adam. But I can make sure that if you cooperate, then the law will go easy on you for this one.”
“Ha ha.” Adam laughed. “The law will go easy on me? There’s not a chance that’s true. Two murders, a kidnapping? No… I’m going to straight to hell. No question about it. And you don’t need to worry—it’s where everyone else will end up too.”
“Now that’s a disappointing thought,” Mark said through the door.
“Well, then it seems like tonight is a night full of disappointments,” Adam shot back.
“Look, Adam, there has to be something you want, right? Look, we’re gonna be here a while. You took a hostage and things could get complicated once the police come in and work with you on resolving this situation, but I haven’t really eaten the whole day. So I’m gonna go get some food. Do you want anything? I can bring you soda, food, whatever you might want just lemme know and then I’ll dig around until I find somethin’, then I can bring it back for you.”
“The only thing I want is helicopter to take me somewhere the US does not have extradition agreements with,” Adam told Mark through the door.
“Well, that is not going to happen either,” Mark said to him. “So it looks like for now, we’ll just chat right?”
“Okay, fine,” Adam said. “We’ll just chat.”
“Why us?” Mark asked him. “I mean, I understand the pissed-that-your-wife-cheated idea—that I really do understand. But why go after me? Why not just Jupe?”
“You really want to know?” Adam asked Mark through the door.
“Yes, I really do want to know,” Mark replied. He was trying to build rapport, convince Adam to trust him and maybe, just maybe, we could pull this thing off. Get everybody out safe.
“Fine. So it’s like this. About two years ago, Carrie started getting really weird on me, right? She starts coming home late. She’s got more and more work dinners and functions that she just can’t miss, and that you don’t bring a spouse to. So here’s me, sitting home alone most nights. And I start to think that she’s fooling around behind my back. So I hire this guy to look into it. And he botches the job up real, real bad. He isn’t half the PI you are, Mark, I’ll give you that. So she sees this guy following her around, and it gets her all suspicious. So she accuses me of not trusting her and things go from bad to worse. I see her maybe six, ten hours a week. She spends hardly any time at home at all. I can’t figure out what I did wrong, why she, all of a sudden, stops wanting to be with me. So finally one night I tell her, ‘I really need you to come home tonight because I really need to talk to you about our marriage.’
“So I make this really nice dinner, I open a fancy bottle of wine, who knows what I’m thinking. I thought maybe we’d talk, she’d listen for once, we’d cry together, and we’d get things back on track. And don’t get me wrong—if she really had been working, then there wouldn’t have been an issue. But see, my ol’ man fooled around on my mom. And I know what that looks like and here I am reliving a childhood nightmare. So I’m trying to figure out what to do and how to handle this whole thing, and I’m doing it on the fly right?”
“Okay,” Mark said. “I’m with you so far.”
“Right. So me an’ the ol’ lady sit down. I tell her how much I love her, how much her not being home is hurting me, and she has the gall to accuse me of fooling around on her. Can you believe that shit? She was batshit loco, man. So I’m trying to figure out how things got turned on their head. Finally, I get her to confess that she’s been seeing this guy. And this guy is great in the sack. And she’s going on and on and on about how much better he was than I am in bed and at all these other things. And I’m starting to realize that she’s paying for a male escort. Now sex is always ‘consensual’ in those situations so I can’t say rape. Well, here’s the ironic thing right? My wife is paying this person—this other man—for sex. And she’s falling in love with him in a way she has never fallen in love with me, or at least that’s how it seems. We got some counseling and it helped a bit. So we got some more, and it helped some more so we’re starting to really patch things up. Things are starting to really take some leaps and bounds in the right direction as far as I was concerned. But, throughout this whole thing, she’s still seeing this guy.”
“How do you know that?” Mark asks, fearing the answer.
“As part of the counseling, it came out that we keep some of our finances limited and when I’m over my limit for my ‘for fun’ spending, then I’m over and I don’t get anymore. Well, she’s fighting to increase her spending amount and I keep asking why and she says because she hasn’t quit seeing the guy she’s been having an al
most one-year-long affair with. And she won’t give him up for me, her husband. She would rather pay for sex and companionship than try to have that with me, the person who told her that’s what I wanted to be for her for the rest of our lives together. So that’s the background story for you.”
“That’s pretty brutal,” Mark admitted to him. “But you still didn’t answer me—why did you include me in what you were trying to do to Jupe?”
“Here’s the genius, Mark. The true genius of the plan. You remember that case you were working on before you quit the squad?”
Mark’s heart skipped a beat. He was referencing the Mendes case. It was the one he never closed. Everything had been neatly trimmed off, tied with a bow and hidden in the knot on that one. Mark would get a lead, think he was starting to do some unraveling, and everything would go cold. But the killer was very, very good. The Mendes woman had had sex right before her killer put a bullet through her forehead, moved her, and hid her, ironically enough, into a cop’s car.
“Yeah, I remember the Mendes case.” It would have been on some of the local news stations, but certain specifics had been left out on purpose. “It was pretty brutal on my family and me. I was working long hours, no time spent at home at all. Well, the wife got fed up with it and she was gonna leave. So I gave it up and ended up starting my PI firm. It was the one case that really, really got to me,” Mark replied. “What about the Mendes case?”
