Flight of the Scarlet Tanager

by Bevill, C. L.

  “Screw that,” said Teddy. She bared her teeth in a humorless grin.

  There was a gloating expression on the blonde-haired man’s face. He was enjoying the chase, enjoying the challenge, and now that he had met her face to face, he was savoring the last moments of the hunt. “You know,” he said. “I wouldn’t have recognized you with the make-up on. The hair is good, but I really like the nose stud and the eyebrow ring. It really keeps a person from looking at your features. Pretty features, I might add, even with all the make-up you’ve got on. But there’s no way out of this room besides through me and I think I’ve got you beat there.”

  “You think you can rationalize me into just giving up?” said Teddy incredulously.

  “I’d like to think of it as coming to an understanding. I’ve been given a certain amount of leeway in dealing with you,” Gower said.

  “Christ!” yelled the reporter who had been smoking outside when Gower had hurried past. Nemo Hudson had come up silently behind the blonde-haired man in the good suit and saw several things that immediately garnered his undivided attention. One was the dead security guard lying on the shower room floor. Another was the orange-red haired woman with the blood spilling down the side of her face and standing against the shower wall, shivering in a thin hospital gown and robe. The third was the gun in the blonde-haired man’s hand. Almost at the same time that Nemo exclaimed, he also brought his heavy camcorder down across Gower’s forearm and awkwardly knocked the gun out of the man’s grasp.

  Gower didn’t need the weapon to maintain his level of threat. He spun and without as much as an ounce of compassion broke the reporter’s neck. His larger hands gripped the other man on both sides of his cheeks as if he were going to kiss him and his arms flexed, sending the head rapidly to one side. There was a sickening crunch and the other man folded like a marionette without a puppet-master, camera equipment cracking as it spilled onto the hard floor. Gower let him go without a second look and turned back to Teddy and she realized he hadn’t even broken a sweat. In fact, his breath was level and steady, as if he had simply turned to chat with someone else for a moment.

  But the event had unfrozen her. She hadn’t wasted the opportunity. Teddy held the Glock in both of her hands, standing in a standard shooter’s stance, her hands trembling but not enough to disregard the risk. They stared at each other. She moved to one side, keeping the gun trained on him. There was a moment that Gower thought she would fire. Her hands shook and he realized that Redmond was standing behind him, his own gun out and hidden behind Gower.

  Gower said, “There’s no other exit here, Teddy. Do you mind if I call you Teddy? It’s so much easier if I can do that. We can all pretend this never happened. We can simply return you to where you belong.”

  Teddy’s eyes jerked to the side. She didn’t say anything, because that statement was nothing but a bald-faced lie. But suddenly she broke to that side and dived into a shower, not even bothering to brush the curtain out of the way.

  Gower made a noise deep in his throat and stepped forward, until he realized that one of the showers had concealed an exit door to a basement stairwell. A door that he hadn’t seen, but Theodora had from her viewpoint, just before the security guard had startled her. She wasn’t going to shoot him or Redmond but she would run, run where people would see, and would ask questions.

  He thrust the curtain aside and Theodora was wiggling through an opening in the door that had been chained shut. Her wild eyes caught his for a moment and she struggled harder, her hip catching on the door latch on the side closer to Gower. He reached out a hand and caught a piece of material, but she slipped away from his grasp, successfully squirming through the gap.

  When he looked over his shoulder he saw that Redmond was already gone and then he glanced down to see that he held the torn remnants of a hospital robe in his hand. It was pointless to berate himself. He had been so caught up in the moment of finally meeting Theodora face to face that he had lost focus of what else was around him. Expecting Redmond to come up behind him, it had been the reporter instead, and the surprise had nearly undone him. If Theodora had decided to shoot instead of run, Gower knew that the heavy duty Hydra Shock ammunition in the weapon would have taken care of him very effectively.

  Gower held the door open and watched through the gap as Teddy ran across the hospital’s lawn, her gown flapping in the dim light from the parking lot’s streetlights. She still held the silenced Glock in her hand, adept enough to keep the weapon even while she fled. She ran right out in the street without pausing and Gower watched as the driver of an old CJ-7 Jeep jammed on its brakes, squealing and smoking as black rubber tires resisted against asphalt.

  Chapter Seven

  August 15th

  From Boudraux’s Big Book of Birding for Beginners, written by Boudraux Gille, Smith and Sons Publishing, 1987, pg. 128: The Brown-Headed Cowbird, Molothrus ater, is sometimes called a Buffalo Bird, and was associated with large bison herds in the Great Plains region and later with the great cattle herds of the west and southwest. The Cowbird is a bird of opportunity, using other birds’ nests to lay their own eggs in, an exploitative brood practice and the only Native American bird to use such a technique. Consequently, the Cowbird is seen as a cunning avian and parasitic in nature, and a threat to the songbirds whose nests are frequently used for its young, often displacing the songbirds’ offspring in the process...

  Time dragged endlessly when Teddy was halfway through the chained door that led to the basement stairwell, halfway between freedom and a place where two men had just been murdered in cold blood. The heavy chain wrapped around the metal push handles of two adjoining doors, but there was enough slack to open one side about ten inches. She forced her bruised body through the opening and gasped as hips and arm suddenly became caught in metal. Fear and adrenalin cascaded through every part of her body, a raging river of dizzying emotions pitting her physical self against her mental one. She was trapped with the Glock in her right hand on the wrong side of the door. Worse was the dim perception through the roar of the blood thundering in her ears that the tall, blonde-haired man was moving swiftly toward her, his shoes clattering on the gray cement floor. He was about to tear the curtain aside and reach his fingers out to grasp her arm and do to her exactly what he had done to the reporter and the security guard.

  Teddy shoved those fears deep inside her and struggled harder. It was an infinitesimal amount of time that stretched out limitlessly. Gower jerked the shower curtain to one side and there was that iced-over look on his face that frightened Teddy even more than she would have ever imagined. His hand reached out just as she had envisioned and just as his fingers touched the cloth of her robe she felt something give, skin scraped against metal. She yanked for all she was worth and she was free, popping out of the door like a cork in the water. The door shut behind her with a clanging noise and for another immeasurable moment she couldn’t quite believe she was loose.

  Scrambling up the six steps of the half flight stairwell to the ground level Teddy didn’t realize that she had moved until she had another conscious thought, Is he following me? She glanced over her shoulder and saw that the basement door was still shut, the top half of it was visible and it was undeniably closed. The two men would be coming around the front of the building to find her, because they wouldn’t be able to fit through the gap as she had. And they wouldn’t take long to follow her.

  Running was the only option she had left. She was good at that. She had done just that for the last three years. Her feet flew over the moist grass of the hospital lawn and then somewhere in her subconscious she realized she had left the softness of the greenery and was now on hard asphalt, the rough surface harsh against her bare feet.

  Then there was a pair of sudden bright lights coming at her very rapidly and it dawned on her that she had run out onto the street in front of the hospital and that a car was about to hit her.

  •

  Fitch Lee was returning from his day job. It was a
job he didn’t like, working in a law office for a man who was a friend of his father’s. His father, Bishop Lee, as autocratic as the name implied, had informed Fitch that the job would round him, give him a little character, make him grow up. And his father had appended that enlightened directive with a cackle that could have been humor or mockery, “With the added benefit that there isn’t a test tube in sight.”

  “Thanks, Dad,” muttered Fitch as he drove. He didn’t mind living at the beach house. It wasn’t some shack on the edge of the dunes. He didn’t mind being glanced at in the law office like he was a monster. That was more than a little amusing when he caught some of the secretaries whispering about him. Dad had obviously filled in the lawyer bud. The lawyer bud had followed up by filling in the clerical staff. Fitch had played up to the reputation by loudly suggesting that chemicals could easily be readily mixed in any room that had a sink and a counter, for example, the law office’s kitchenette. That had resulted in a request to see the head dude in charge, his father’s lawyer friend from Harvard, a cheerless man named Jack Macintosh, who suggested that in the future Fitch abstain from jokes in poor humor.

  Fitch didn’t even mind the solitude. He could surf in his off time. He could tinker with the Jeep, which always needed maintenance. He could even go fishing, which was something he’d liked since his grandfather had taught him how when he was barely more than a toddler. But he was an official outcast, shunned from the rest of the family. His mother didn’t call because his father had taken the time to give her the low-down on exactly what had happened at the University during the graduate summer session. His father didn’t call more than once a month because he was punishing his eldest son. His brother didn’t communicate with him, having been ordered by the pater. He couldn’t even have his dog there because his stepmother and his father’s second wife, Edana, didn’t want fleas or pet dander at the beach house because she was allergic. He had been formally banished from the Lee family. Hung out to dry. Isolated. Blacklisted.

  “God hates me,” he muttered, hitting the dashboard for the fifth time to ‘encourage’ the electrical system of the 1980 CJ-7 Jeep. The lights fluttered several times in protest, finally coming back to full strength to illuminate the street before him.

  He wasn’t in the best mood, having cheerfully discarded the tie from his work outfit, and having had received earlier the scolding side of one of the lawyers’ tongues for not doing something that he was supposed to have done. There was a certain amount of humility in having to put up with junior partners who were only a few years older than he was, which had intelligibly been part of his father’s intentions. The experience wasn’t going to inspire him to study law at the University when he finally went back. He certainly didn’t want to be a lawyer. But he’d needed a lawyer this year, as Jack Macintosh was wont to remind him on occasion. “Lawyers bite,” was Fitch’s return, which was pretty poor repartee for him, but having made a deal with his father that included employment of Bishop’s choice had put him in an untenable position.

  So after ten hours at the office in Newport, doing work that Fitch wouldn’t have had a first year biology student doing even if he had perfect SATs and twenties on his MCAT, he was released into his own recognizance for the evening. Since it was Saturday, he was off on the ensuing day. He’d made a detour to check out if a girl was available, but she hadn’t been home. And her mother had taken great pleasure in informing Fitch that she was on a date with another man, someone who drove a Lexus as opposed to a dilapidated Jeep.

  “Okay,” Fitch said as he glanced heavenward, gauging the weather conditions. The evening was still in the sixties and the wind had dissipated for the night. It would be like taking a stroll on the waters. Night surfing would be just the thing to revitalize an ostracized child. “Life doesn’t completely suck.”

  He turned onto Memorial Avenue, planning to cut through Lincoln City where they had a killer pizza parlor. A growing guy could get a pizza with shrimp, anchovies, and pineapple without the clerk looking like she might puke at the thought of it. A pizza and a beer. Just the thing to wash away the stench of the lawyers.

  Fitch was just passing the hospital when he saw something off to his right. A little blur of pale green and red. “What the fuck is this?” leaped out of his mouth before comprehension dawned on him. Then he jammed on his brakes, praying that the brake job he and his brother had done last year would hold up, that they had expunged every last bit of air from the brake lines, that the pads would hold, because he didn’t want to hit anyone, even if that person had run out in front of him without looking to see if a car was coming.

  •

  Teddy stopped still in the middle of the road and watched a double set of bright lights coming closer and closer to her. She stopped because she wasn’t quite sure what else to do. There was a squeal of brakes and the smoke that came from doing just that overwhelmed her, the sickening scent of an individual testing the limits of an automobile.

  Closing her eyes she took a breath and wind caused by the car’s movement engulfed her, pushing her hair away from her face. When it died away she opened her eyes again and found the grill of the Jeep just in front of her and beyond that, the angry, yet shocked, eyes of a young man glaring at her from inside the vehicle.

  Teddy looked behind her and saw the blonde-haired man watching from the crack of the door; only his head was visible in the sunken exterior stairwell. It was illuminated by the lights on the side of the hospital and showed his frozen features in the evening. Staring at her, showing her that he didn’t have to run after her. He was going to get her all the same, that she had made a dreadful mistake by not killing him when she’d had the opportunity. Around the side of the hospital the black-haired man charged, a wild animal intent on catching its prey, and Teddy’s head twitched involuntarily. She glanced down at the gun she held in her hand and then back up at the four-wheel drive vehicle in front of her.

  She found some ability deep within her and came around to the passenger side of the Jeep. The rusted vehicle didn’t have doors or a roof. As a matter of fact, it was hard to tell what color it had originally been. Clambering in, she pointed the Glock at the driver and said, “Drive.”

  His eyes dipped down to the pistol, studying it carefully and then went back up to her face. His hands were shaking on the steering wheel and even in Teddy’s quivering state she could tell he was furious that she had run out in front of him. She repeated it louder, even though it hurt her hoarse voice to do it, “Drive, dammit.” She glanced over a shoulder and saw the dark man had cut the distance between them in half. “Drive!” she screamed hoarsely. “DO IT, NOW!”

  The young man threw the Jeep into first gear and popped the clutch. Tires squealed as much as when he had slammed on the brakes. The 4X4 lurched forward and then picked up speed. He moved from first to second gear and then ground the gears as he went into third. Teddy glanced back and found the man with the pitch-black hair standing in the middle of the street staring after them.

  She sat almost sideways in the Jeep’s bucket seat, her knee half under her, the gun still half-pointed at the young man driving the four-wheel drive vehicle. When the Jeep rounded a corner and the hospital and the black-haired man disappeared from view she looked back at the driver and sighed with relief.

  Fitch kept her in the corner of his eye as he drove. He didn’t know what was going on, but normally pretty girls in hospital gowns with a bleeding gash on their forehead didn’t run out into the middle of the street and then kidnap the guy who had almost run her over. She relaxed in the seat after a minute and he minded his speed on the street. It passed out of an industrial area and back into country again. There wasn’t a house in sight, only the blackness of vegetation and trees along the twisting road and the glitter of reflectors, shining back the headlights of the Jeep.

  “Look,” he said finally, all vestiges of anger fluttering away.

  Teddy jerked her head up. She couldn’t afford to lose it now. Suddenly she had gotten
so damned tired. Tired and ready to crash to earth at any second. For a moment she’d almost forgotten that the young man was in the Jeep with her. She looked at him, trying to take his measure in moments, because moments were all she had. Over six feet, even sitting down she could tell, he was healthy and strong. Blonde hair that sun streaked light brown that dissolved into blonde stripes was neatly cut above his neck and ears. Muscles under the white oxford shirt. A physical guy. Not lean, but not a bit of fat on him. Defined features, as well favored as the blonde-haired man named Gower, but in an altogether different way. There wasn’t anything cold about this man, instead he was the opposite, full of heat and apt to do what moved him at the moment. No one would stare at him, but they would keep him in their mind. Not more than a few years older than she was, and from his expression a million miles away in his upbringing. He wasn’t scared, per se, of her. She knew, even as fatigued as she had become. He watched her even as he watched the road. Steady and even, gauging her in the very same manner she had him.

  The Glock in her hand trembled. Teddy put her other arm under the hand holding the pistol to steady it.

  “You’re bleeding,” he said. He reached out with his right hand. Teddy flinched and he stopped in mid-air. “Look, I’m just reaching into the glove box.” He popped the box and pointed inside. There were a couple of shop rags, stuffed into the crammed case, along with various papers and wadded-up, fast food wrappers. “Take one of those and put it to your forehead.”