Ransom X

by I.B. Holder

  Chapter 57 Sex Talk, Part Two

  Chess was ready with her answer, but they’d decided, well, she’d decided that they had to meet on neutral territory. She suggested the kitchen. Legacy had countered with the breakfast nook, trying to make his mood into something a shade more playful than the grey detachment that seemed to hover between his lips, coloring even joyous words with whispered despair.

  They sat at the kitchen table, neither wanting to bring up the past or future. But after a half cup of cocoa the future seemed easier to bridge than looking back. Chess carefully chose her words, letting her father make as little or as much of her complaint as he wanted to.

  Legacy surprised himself by smiling. She would make a wonderful fencer. She sat there smiling back at him.

  Legacy spoke, “All you’re asking - you want me to change. Be a more regular dad?”

  “No, dad, I want you to let me be a regular teenage girl.”

  “Correct me if I’m wrong, but there’s some crossover there – I mean if you’re going to be living a regular life –”

  “I concede there is overlap, you’ll have to seem regular in some circumstances. But you also have the freedom to be what you’ve been since I was a little girl.”

  “An enigmatic pain in the ass?”

  “No, my hero. And that’s all you, you can’t fake that kind of stuff. But you’re not my hero right now. Because you’re letting everyone else suffer for my sake, then expect me to – to”

  “Love me?” Legacy’s pulse jumped, he realized that whatever Chess said next would be in his engraved in thoughts for years to come.

  “Forgive myself.” He looked at the guilt in her eyes, it was a family trait, or so he guessed. “Or you.” She added she cinched up her nose like she used to do as a baby when she didn’t like something, but hadn’t the words yet to express her feelings.

  The phone rang, and Legacy reached across to answer it, his eyes never left Chess, however. She perked up as his hand crossed her field of vision.

  “You’re going to answer the home phone?” She asked incredulously.

  “On occasion, whenever things overlap.” Out of nowhere, Chess’ lips were on his cheek marking a spot with gloss, arms around him digging into both arms and rattling the receiver on his way to his ear. That moment didn’t last long though.

  The minute the phone made contact he was pulled into another world. It was a hollow place of uncertain rewards and distant voices crying out for help. Legacy never wanted these voices following him home, but now, he realized that silencing them through action was the only way of keeping his new life in balance.

  “Legacy I have something on that medical condition - “ Brent’s voice a clinical monotone. He sounded a little like a doctor himself. “I wanted to share it with you.”

  Legacy knew immediately that he was trying to hide something. The word share is often used to conceal something else.

  “I have an outpatient in Humboldt County, Colorado.”

  Legacy put the phone to his chest and spoke to Chess. “Can you pull up a map of Colorado on the internet?” Chess saluted, rushed out of the room.

  “Just one?”

  “There are only 17 cases in America, only three that match gender and age range. This one was the most promising, he has no listed address, prescriptions dating back to August of 2000.”

  Chess came back into the kitchen carrying a snow-white laptop displaying the political boundaries of Humboldt County. It was a neighbor to the county Wagner mentioned in her message. It couldn’t be coincidence, this was the guy. He looked up at Chess’ beaming helpful face. Wagner was heading into trouble.

  “What did Wilkes say when you brought this to him?”

  There was silence on the other end of the phone.

  “I mean, I’m not the first person you came to with this, am I, agent?” This was the part of the conversation Brent had expressly attempted to avoid.

  “He wants to trace the bike, and the van. He wants to follow the evidence we have, not open up a new front to the investigation.”

  “Especially since it builds on evidence coming from me.”

  Brent flashed back quickly “I don’t think so, sir. Blue posted a schedule on the website, and it’s thrown everybody into frenzy.”

  “He posted a time – for her execution.” Legacy said with grim finality.

  Brent was taken aback by Legacy’s proclamation, not because he was right, but because he sounded almost upset. It was like the echo of a deep anger found its way to the surface. Brent corrected Legacy, it wasn’t a set execution time, Blue promised his audience of millions an initiation tonight at nine, or an extraordinary finale with Laura. The statement promised a full hour of entertainment either way.

  Legacy felt the transformation coming on, in the walls around him and the floor beneath his feet. Everything slipped away in pieces like colored sand draining out of an unseen hole below him. He was back in Blue’s studio, watching Laura enter the room. She was flushed, sweating like she’d just been drug out of a sauna. She glowed with a visual sensuality, ripe and swooning, it was the work of an artist. Legacy never stopped to ask if he were driving the fantasy, or if his close contact with the killer drove a parallel set of impulses that existed inside Legacy, but were not him. He would want to believe the latter. He held the phone to his ear still, even in the fantasy.

  He spoke to Brent, narrating what he saw transpire in front of his very eyes.

  “He’ll play a game, gaining her trust then attacking her according to a strict schedule in his head.”

  Blue had Laura tied facing away from the control room, blinders on, prohibiting her from seeing behind her. He kept leaving her field of vision then waiting silently behind her. At a certain click of the clock he inserted a razor thin stiletto into her back and leaving the handles protruding. Each time he would rush back to her and mime his complaints to nonexistent attackers behind her. Each time he’d regain her trust only to slip away again, repeating the torture.

  His voice rang hollow and distant even for a telephone, “The death blow will come exactly sixty minutes into the session, and it will be at the moment she feels safest and most secure. He’ll build his deception like an orchestral piece, layering until he gains her trust. That is when he will tell her it’s over and she can go home, then he’ll slip in the blade. He’ll want to be eye to eye when she realizes that she’s been alone with him the whole time.”

  “Oh God.”

  Chess’ voice called him back to reality. She stood, her eyes fixed on her father, filling with tears. For a second Legacy was worried that his own daughter thought him a monster for the scenario that he’d laid out in his trance-like words to the agent. But her shaky voice actually gave him strength. “Catch him dad. Catch him now.”

  Laura’s death was five hours away.

  “Why didn’t you call Wagner?” He knew that Brent liked and respected her. It was one of the reasons that he listened to Brent, even though his attention to Wagner didn’t seem strictly professional. It was the reason he hadn’t immediately informed him that Wagner was heading in the direction of his patient.

  “I can’t get a hold of her.”

  Commercial air was far too unreliable to meet the literal deadline that Blue had posted.

  “Get us a plane. Bend the rules, go military.”

  Thirty minutes later, Legacy was standing on the tarmac.

  No flight plan had been filed, a maneuver that Wilkes was going to pay for when the homeland security division audited his authorization of the mission. Legacy called the need for secrecy a “habit,” and Wilkes read between the lines; Legacy didn’t want anyone to sabotage his work. The only thing that Wilkes had denied was the request that Legacy pilot the plane himself, a task that he was more than qualified to do. Wilkes noted colorfully that Legacy had better things to do than jump a ten million dollar plane into the side of an arguably priceless mountainside. He called it fiscal respo
nsibility. At any rate, he had a volunteer who wanted some flight time, and loved mountain air.

  Agent Brent sat at the controls of the sleek jetliner as it sheered free of the black asphalt of Riley Metro Airport near highway 72 on the outskirts of the old part of Alexandria. Agent Brent had been flying planes since he was twelve; his father was the manager of a rural flight school and airstrip. He’d trained in hopes of joining one of the traveling air shows that came through town twice a year. He remembered the stunt that brought the FAA agents to his house. When he was fourteen, he’d TP’d his principal’s house in broad daylight, from about seven hundred feet. It was an incredible feat of flight, getting that second gable that hovered just behind a tall crabapple tree in the back yard. It was the development of skills like this that got him noticed by the federal government.

  Brent wasn’t performing air show acrobatics today, but a seamless transition game. The plane had barely dropped down out of the sky for moments, hardly time for it to lay down blocks after a sprint landing and before the engines flooded with fuel for take off. Legacy met the agent with a nod at the cabin door, and then sunk into one of the seats in the back. No small talk, no “Are you sure you can fly this thing? Or where’s the stewardess?” banter. They were committed to averting a murder. It was the first time ever for either agent to know down to the sweep of a second hand, exactly when a crime was going to happen. Racing the clock is part of any law enforcement officer’s daily routine, however the exact moment where abduction becomes murder is usually hidden from them. In this case, knowing when that line would be crossed kept the cabin shrouded in silence.

  Legacy sat and pretended to read the documents on the doctor treating Cory Benoit for his illness. He didn’t need to go past the cover of the documents to know that this was his man. The picture inserted in the cover under a thin film of laminate showed a man leaning on a motorbike, his muscular arms crossed over a sunken chest leering at the camera. The history that they had on him was going to be useless. A man this ruthless in the way he secured his business wouldn’t let any information about his life slip into the hands of the government. He was the kind of person who would flood his own file with misinformation simply to control the kind of crimes he would be suspected of by the novice agent. It was in fact true. Blade had stuffed his file with reports of criminal activity ranging from wire fraud to espionage. It wasn’t hard to get one of his low-life friends to implicate him in nearly any crime that Hell’s Angels, or Thunder Mafia, or Los Caminos Roja had ever come into contact with. That was a lot of felony material from which to cut an ill-fitting criminal suit.

  In the end, his file looked like such a patchwork of hearsay over such a wide variety of criminal activity that he became a forgotten legend. He fit no investigation perfectly because he was like no single criminal. The only thing that Legacy could tell for sure from a brief skimming of the documents during landing was that Blade had a substantial reputation. His specialty was enforcement for the highest bidder- and he threw in a special brand of cruelty for free.

  All of the people in his line of work had an advanced degree of cruelty so becoming known for finding ways to surpass his peers was notable. It was like being known for being racist in the KKK, dressed garishly at a rap concert, or fat standing in line in a Costco snack line. It was a distinction not easily achieved.

  The wheels skimmed the earthen landing strip stirring a puff of red-brown dirt billowing behind the plane; some of the air being sucked back into the engines like the exchange of smoke between nose and mouth in the French inhale of a cigarette. The commercial flight would have taken three hours, and his watch showed less than an hour had passed. The front wheel touched down. Legacy started. It was like the solid ground had brought him back to solid thinking. He recalled Chess’ face at the door, beaming pride as she promised to lock the door after him.

  He thought of Wagner’s last exit from his office, ashamed and defeated, but willing to do anything to avoid being taken off the case. Even if that took going to the ends of the earth, ironically. Now she’d ended up on the verge of cutting in on the marathon dance that Blade was distributing to the world.

  Legacy knew that she was getting close, because anything less than full engagement with the enemy would have brought Wagner to a land line to report her position. She was a smart agent, and she knew that going it alone risked Laura’s life. Still he wondered if she wouldn’t get wrapped up in the discovery and follow it past the point of no return.

  “The doctor lives about twenty miles down I-70 in a town called Rugger.” Agent Brent said as they walked across the landing strip to an awaiting car.

  Legacy smiled, “Go talk to him if you like. I’m going to the county courthouse.”

  Agent Brent looked him up and down, “I'm with you.”

  They pulled up in front of the courthouse fifteen bumpy minutes later. The sedan that had been brought up from the office in Colorado Springs didn’t take to the ill maintained roads of Hammet County. The spring thaw chipped away at the edges of the concrete roads, making every internal crack into a tire swallowing chasms.

  “Leave the equipment in the car.” Legacy ordered. “I don’t want you looking like an FBI agent.”

  Brent wore a utility vest that announced his occupation to anyone who had watched television depictions of federal agents. He swung his automatic weapon from a secret compartment his hip pack and put it into the trunk. He dropped the vest in afterwards then turned to Legacy looking for approval.

  Under a dark tank top, muscles rippled from repetitive use in the gym, all groups equally toned. Legacy thought that there must be some compulsive disorder to explain the uniform build. That moment Legacy felt himself turning an imaginary corner with Agent Brent, the discovery of an affectation was the first indication of common ground between the two men. Actually the second, he thought, they also both shared a concern for Wagner. The sudden realization brought his breathing to a halt for a moment.

  Agent Brent took the pause as an offense, he held out both arms, imploring him to verbalize what wrong with his appearance. Legacy nodded, even though Brent stuck out both in dress and stature like he’d stepped out of an early film by Marlon Brando onto the modern streets of Manhattan. “Not much better.” It was the nice version of what Legacy was thinking.