by Steven James
Then Riker came to her, took her hand, and, speaking soft and comforting words, led Tessa toward the bed.
I hurried through the dizzying maze of filtration tanks. I didn’t know if Lien-hua was dead already; I could only pray she was still alive. When we arrested him, Melice had said that she would be his next girlfriend, and I knew all too well what he did to them.
That’s why I was heading for the shark acclimation pool. It seemed like the logical place for him to bring her. And I was close.
Just a few more turns and I’d be there.
Tessa’s heart trembled with exhilaration and fear. The fan’s twitching air brushed across the curtains, they rippled faintly, and Tessa thought that in the dim light, the bluish curtains appeared purple.
And with that thought, Poe whispered to her, his words riding through the centuries, rising from the grave, “And the silken sad uncertain rustling of each purple curtain thrilled me-filled me with fantastic terrors never felt before.”
Fantastic terrors.
Never felt before.
Tessa had never hooked up with a guy. Not like this. It was something her mom had been really intense about, and ever since she died, despite two close calls, Tessa had honored that wish. No.
It wasn’t supposed to happen like this.
Terrors never felt before.
“So, I was thinking…” Riker said. “No.” She pulled away from him but stumbled a little. Off balance. Everything was off balance. “No. I need to go.”
“We just got here.”
She backed away. “I need to go. I have to leave.”
Riker came toward her and grabbed her forearm. “Whoa, whoa, whoa, Raven. Not so fast.” His grip was tighter than it needed to be.
“I said no. Now, let go of my arm.”
No, this can’t be happening.
He held her.
“Let go!”
He let go slowly but stood with arms flexed ready to grab her again. “I’ve been thinking it’s time we made a little trade.”
Terrors never felt before.
“What kind of trade?” She reached for a rubber band on her wrist. Found none.
He let a smile wander across his face, but it wasn’t really a smile.
“You don’t really believe I’d let you have a tattoo like that, five hours of work, for $180. Lachlan’s the best around. You’re wearing over $700 worth of ink and time.”
Though faint, the music was pounding behind his words. A dark heartbeat. “You told him to give it to me.” Tessa was edging toward the door. “To give me whatever I wanted.”
“That’s right. I did. I gave you what you wanted, and now it’s time for you to give me what I want. And the way I figure it, I’ve got at least a couple hours coming to me.”
Her stomach filled with ice. She rushed for the door but was too slow. Riker beat her to it and nailed it shut with one strong arm.
She began to back away from him, toward the window.
It was the only thing she could think to do.
To jump.
Jump.
101
I stepped past the wet suits hanging behind the staircase and saw Lien-hua chained to the bottom of the shark acclimation pool, water to the middle of her thighs. When she saw me I pressed a finger to my lips to signal for her to keep my arrival a secret, and then with the other hand I fingerspelled, “How many?”
With her hand hidden behind her leg she fingerspelled back to me, “One, maybe two.”
I could hear Creighton Melice’s voice. “Do you miss your sister, Lien-hua?”
Sister?
“What did you just say?” she called to Melice, her voice cold, unyielding.
“Weapons?” I asked her with my fingers.
“Gun. Darts. Device,” she signed to me while she stared at him.
“Your sister. Chu-hua. Do you miss her? I miss Mirabelle. It must be different for you, though. I hear identical twins share a special connection.”
Lien-hua never mentioned a twin sister.
“When one twin feels pain,” Melice said, “sometimes the other one does too. That’s what they say. When one dies, the other feels like half of her life is gone. Is it true? I’ve heard it is. I’ve always wondered.” I began to creep up the steps.
Eliminate the greater threat first.
Melice or Shade? “So Agent Lien-hua Jiang,” Melice went on. “How does it feel to know that you’re about to die the same way she did?”
The moment Creighton Melice mentioned Chu-hua’s name, it all came back. The memories, the regret, the terrible images burned in Lien-hua’s mind, they all came howling at her from her past, found the moment, and blistered apart inside of her.
Chu-hua facedown in the pool… Maybe she was still alive…
She might have been… Maybe Lien-hua could have saved her if only she’d tried. If only she’d known how to swim. If only she hadn’t been afraid of the water.
Lien-hua slid her fingertips between the metal bars of the grate and yanked until the metal began to groove through her skin, but the grate didn’t budge.
“You never believed it was an accident, did you?” Melice went on. “That’s what the cops told you, but you wouldn’t believe it.”
He was right, and she hated that he was right. It’s why she’d become a detective, then a profiler, to give others what she’d been denied-the truth.
Pat, you need to hurry.
“It’s too bad we don’t have time for me to show you the footage,” Melice said. “She was my first home movie. My first real girlfriend.”
Creighton smiled. Yes. Shade, his friend, his fan, really had been following his career, really had found the blog entries.
Really had chosen him for a reason.
It was all so perfect.
A complete circle.
“I hadn’t thought of the chain back then,” he called to Lien-hua.
“It’s a lot better this way, though, don’t you think?” The next few events happened in only a matter of seconds.
Tessa backed up all the way to the window. Tried opening it.
Locked.
Riker just watched her. Then he came at her, fast, grasped both of her shoulders, and shoved her against the wall.
“No, no, no.” Tessa felt queasy, tired. Why did she have to have those drinks? It was hard to focus, to know what to do. She tried to kick her knee into his crotch, but he must have been expecting it because he turned his leg to the side, and all she caught was his thigh.
Riker slid his hand from her shoulders to her upper arms and squeezed his right hand into her tender tattoo. A flare of pain sent bursts of sharp light sprinkling across her eyes. She wanted to cry out, needed to cry out, but refused to make a sound. Refused to give him the satisfaction of making her cry. He squeezed harder, and a tear eased from the edge of her eye, but Tessa didn’t let herself cringe.
“I was hoping to do this the easy way.” His voice was low and filled with malice. “But we don’t have to. It’s your choice.”
Think fast, think fast, think fast. “I need to get ready.”
“You look ready to me.”
Stall, Tessa. Stall. “No. I’m serious. I just need a minute in the bathroom, OK?”
“No, you don’t.”
“Shut up. I do. It’s girl stuff. Let go.”
She wasn’t sure he would do it, but at last he slowly released his grip.
Thank goodness. The screaming pain in her arm began to quiet itself.
“All right. Five minutes. Get yourself ready. But if you don’t come out in five, I’m coming in. And I won’t be so gentle then.” Tessa snatched up her canvas satchel, pushed past him, and slammed the bathroom door shut behind her.
Here she could be safe.
Here she would be safe.
She reached to lock the door but found that the doorknob had no lock. She spun around. No window. No other door. No way out.
And then a chill, raw and deep.
“They know me here
,” Riker had told her just after they entered the club. “I come here a lot.”
“Oh, no, please God, no,” she whispered, and as she said the words they became a terrified prayer. “I’m not the first one.”
Now at the top of the stairs.
Go for the greater threat. Look for a gun.
With one smooth motion I stepped forward onto the deck and swung my gun at Melice. “Hands to the side where I can see them, get on your knees.” I didn’t see a gun in his hands, but eight meters away I did see the world’s most perfect assassination weapon device, aimed right at my head. The removable cesium-137 pack was in my car, but I wasn’t sure; the device might still work.
There’s one person, maybe two.
Eliminate the greater threat first.
I put three bullets into it, shattering the device and sending it tottering back into one of the quarantine tanks, where a steamy sizzle of water told me it hadn’t been designed to be waterproof.
“No!” Melice roared. I leveled my gun at him, but I could see I was too late. He’d drawn on me and now fired, a bullet ripped into my left thigh, and the impact sent me sprawling back down the stairs, tumbling, spinning, reeling, crashing to the bottom.
“Raven, I’m waiting,” Riker yelled. Fire had crept into his voice.
“Three minutes.” Tessa needed to come up with a plan.
But she had absolutely no idea how to get away.
I stared at the ceiling, trying to gather my wits and mentally separate myself from the pain coursing up my leg.
I’d been shot, the water was up to Lien-hua’s waist. I needed to save her and I needed to do it fast.
I inspected the gunshot wound. The bullet had entered the front and exited the lateral side of my quadriceps. Missed the bone. Missed the femoral artery. I’ve never believed in luck, but at that moment I was tempted to start. I might be able to walk, but it would be dicey and very painful. I pressed one hand on the entrance wound, the other on the exit wound. You need to find a way to control that bleeding.
“No,” Melice was raging from the deck. I imagined him fondling the shattered device. “No. No. No!”
Good. So he could feel pain after all-the pain of having all of his hope snatched away. I wondered if experiencing pain was all Melice had dreamed it would be, but by his furious cries it sounded like the pain of slaughtered hope wasn’t exactly a dream come true.
It was never pain he wanted, but freedom from a painless hell.
“You’re dead, Bowers!”
My gun. Where was my gun? I’d dropped it. Yes. But where?
You dropped it when you jerked backward. When you hit the side of the stairwell.
It might be on the deck, I hoped not. I scooted around the corner from the stairs in case Melice or Shade decided to come down to finish me off. I scanned the area for my SIG.
Nothing.
Then I looked through the glass at Lien-hua and saw her tugging at the grate, and I realized my gun was lying at the bottom of the acclimation pool. A SIG will fire even when underwater, but it was too far away. She couldn’t reach it. “Hey, Bowers.” A razor blade cut through Melice’s words. “I’m coming for you and I’m gonna kill you slowly, but first I want you to watch her die. That’s your reward.”
Weapon. I needed a weapon.
If only I’d called for backup before I left the hotel!
Assess the situation: I had no phone, no gun, the water would be over Lien-hua’s head in a matter of minutes, and I’d been shot.
Before I could do anything I needed to control the bleeding.
I scanned the area and saw the wet suits hanging behind the stairwell.
Neoprene is waterproof, it’ll seal off the wounds.
If there was a weight belt with the wet suits, I might have a chance.
As quickly as I could, using one hand I dragged myself around the stairs. With every movement deep jolts of pain flashed through my leg. But I kept moving. I had to.
After flipping four wetsuits aside, I finally found a neoprene weight belt hanging on a hook. I dumped the weights from it and cinched it around my thigh, not tight enough to be a tourniquet but snug enough to act as a pressure bandage. The bleeding eased.
I could think again.
I clicked through my options in my mind. None of them were good. Melice has the strategic position. Even if you make it up the stairs, he’ll shoot you on the spot. If you try to get to the car to go for help, it’ll take too long, Lien-hua will drown.
From the other side of the glass, Lien-hua fingerspelled “Hurry,” then flashed the sign for “I need you.”
“I’m coming,” I signed.
I pulled myself to my feet, and, with my leg rebelling against every step, I shuffled through the doorway to the foam fractionator tower that rose past the offices on the deck above me.
Access. There was access to the husbandry area. Then I grabbed the ridged edge of the tower, and with my left leg hanging as dead weight, I began to climb.
“Two minutes,” yelled Riker.
Tessa scanned the bathroom. Toilet paper. Toilet. A single lightbulb in the center of the room. No mirror, why wasn’t there a mirror? There should have been a mirror! Paper towel dispenser.
Toilet plunger. Bath towel draped over a towel rack. She looked under the sink for some kind of cleaning chemicals that she could splash in his face. Nothing.
The ceramic lid of the toilet?
She checked again-a floor-mounted model, no lid.
Wait. Towel rack.
Yes, maybe.
She threw off the towel, grabbed the bar of the rack. Wrenched at it.
But it held fast. It must have been anchored into the studs.
C’mon. C’mon. There must be something. There has to be.
She could maybe hit him with the plunger, but she wasn’t really strong enough to hurt him, so that’d just make him madder.
Tessa emptied her purse into the sink. She had to have something in here that she could use as a weapon. She had to!
So: a stubby pencil, her notebook, a stick of gum, a flash drive, the big bottle of antibacterial soap from Riker, her iPod, some lipstick and mascara, her wallet, some loose change, a small bottle of the lotion she’d been smearing on her scar, a pocket-sized dictionary.
She heard movement from the other room. Maybe he was coming for her.
“I’m not hearing you getting ready.”
Tessa reached over and flushed the toilet. “Just a minute, already!”
She tried to make her voice sound confident.
This can’t be happening. It can’t be.
But it was. I climbed with fire in my fingers and hatred in my heart. I could feel the tangle of rage and fear, the constant struggle. The dark currents welling up, calling my name.
Anything to save Lien-hua. Anything.
Vowing to save her whatever it took, I climbed.
102
Lien-hua kicked with all her might but only managed to gouge the shackle into her Achilles tendon and send a searing clutch of pain rocketing up her leg. The grate didn’t budge, the chain didn’t break.
It wasn’t going to break. There was no way it would.
You’re going to die. Right here. Right now. At the hands of the same man who killed Chu-hua.
Hope fleeting.
Fleeting.
Maybe she didn’t want to live. Maybe it was better if she died.
Freedom or pain?
Pain.
Death.
The two flowers. Lien-hua, the lotus. Chu-hua, the chrysanthemum. Both snipped from the stem by the same man.
Yesterday Lien-hua had told Tessa that she’d seen too much corruption to believe in purity, in enlightenment. And it was true.
We can’t rise above who we are.
“I’m sorry I couldn’t save you,” she whispered to the ghostly memory of her sister as the water rose above her chest. “I was afraid, afraid of the water.”
Bruised petals.
The arran
gement will never be the same.
No, we can’t rise above ourselves.
But what had Tessa asked her? What had she said?
Can someone else lift us? In that moment the question brought its own answer and from deep inside her bruised heart, Lien-hua prayed, cried out to the God she wasn’t sure was there. Begged him to lift her from her past, from herself, from the stinging regrets she’d been carrying since June 17, 1999, when she found her twin sister floating facedown in the family’s swimming pool.
“All right. That’s it,” yelled Riker. “I want to play with my raven now.” And then he dared to quote Poe, “‘Only this, and nothing more.’”
“I’m coming. Just a minute!”
Soap. Plunger. Towel.
Yes, yes. It was the only thing Tessa could think of. She grabbed the plunger and turned on the faucet.
I made it halfway up the tower; saw Melice four meters below me. I gauged how far out I’d need to jump and, relying on my good leg, turned on the tiny lip of a ledge so that I was facing him.
And leapt.
Creighton Melice felt the impact, the pressure of a sudden weight crush him to the ground.
As he connected with the deck, he knew it was Bowers. Somehow it was Bowers. The force knocked Creighton’s gun away, and it went sliding across the deck and landed out of reach in one of the recessed view ports to the Seven Deadly Seas exhibit.
Creighton rolled free.
He rolled free. He was quick. He ran for the food prep area, and I rose awkwardly, painfully to my feet. My left leg throbbed with nearly unbearable pain, and the floor was slick, making it even harder to stand. With the gunshot wound, I wouldn’t be able to chase him down. I glanced toward the shark acclimation pool. The water was up to Lien-hua’s chin.
Air. I needed to get her air.
The scuba tanks were by the wall.
I started toward them as Melice stepped out of the food prep area wielding one of the long, slender skinning knives.
I would need to get past him to save Lien-hua’s life.
Lien-hua took a long sip of air. It would only be a matter of seconds now.
Seconds before she joined her sister.
