by Laurel Dewey
Harlan still appeared as if he was in an altered state. The longer he stared at the bartender, the more confused and frightened the bartender became.
“How ya doin’?” the bartender asked Harlan with tension lacing his voice.
“How do you think I’m doin’?” Harlan replied, his voice sharing another’s.
The bartender cheated a glance toward Jane who never took her eyes off him. “This is a new twist. How come I wasn’t informed?”
Jane realized that this was not about identifying Harlan Kipple. She waited for Harlan to speak but when he stayed silent, she piped up. “It’s on a need to know basis only.” She was shocked at how genuine her words sounded, even though she had no idea what in the hell was she was talking about. Waves of apprehension swept between the bartender and Jane. “So,” she offered, “you got something for us?”
The bartender creased his eyes just enough that she could tell this wasn’t the way it usually worked. His anxiety level decreased slightly but was still apparent. “Yeah. Sure. Of course, I do. Give it thirty minutes.”
Jane’s heart began to race. Was there something in the special bottle of cheap whiskey that would take effect in thirty minutes? She suddenly felt trapped and realized there was no way out of this scenario except to play it out to its conclusion.
The bartender stepped away from the bar and leaned against the shelves of booze. The only time he took his eyes off Harlan was to quickly take a probing look at Jane. She felt like they were caged zoo animals that just showed up from the jungles and the zookeeper didn’t know what to do with them. She watched the clock and when thirty minutes passed and nothing happened, her nerves took it up a notch.
“It’s thirty minutes,” Jane announced. She turned to Harlan who seemed to be blissfully lost in his own world as he stared straight ahead. “I’m not waiting any longer.” She started to get off the barstool.
“Give it a couple more minutes,” the bartender said, swallowing hard.
“I know a trap when I smell it,” she said, her courage re-emerging. She turned to Harlan. “Come on, we’re leaving.”
But Harlan didn’t budge.
“Seriously,” Jane stressed, wrapping her hand around as much of Harlan’s large arm as she could. “Let’s go.”
“Where you goin’?” the voice asked from behind her.
Jane turned to find a wiry fellow standing there. His brown hair was cut into a sharp, military buzz that made his lucent light blue eyes appear peculiarly intense. He wore black jeans and a plain blue t-shirt under a black leather coat that looked like it’d been pummeled under a desert tank. His mannerisms indicated a guy who thought he was extremely valuable. But Jane could easily see behind his façade. To her, he was a borderline idiot, an elevated water boy, a guy with more muscle than mental acuity and someone who shot before he thought. As far as Jane was concerned, these were some of the more dangerous individuals because their lack of intelligence blended with their puffed up self-importance made them impossible to reason with.
She positioned herself in front of him to show a modicum of dominance but not to overwhelm. “You’re late,” Jane said to him with false bravado.
He glared at her. “And you’re unexpected. So, shut the fuck up.”
This wasn’t a game. Jane could see the focused intensity and irritation coming from the guy. Whatever mess Harlan had “initiated” would likely open a few windows into the hidden world of Gabriel Cristsóne.
The guy turned around, and then back to Jane and Harlan. “You comin’?” he asked forcefully.
Harlan swung his large frame off the barstool and walked over to the guy, casting a long shadow over him. Jane followed behind them as they walked into the parking lot. It was just past 12:30 and the stillness in the cool air lent an added precautionary flavor to the moment. They approached a black SUV with smoky windows. The guy opened the back door. Harlan walked up to him and the wiry fellow grasped the back of his neck. But a look came over the guy’s face that suggested something wasn’t right. Harlan crawled into the back of the SUV. The guy looked at Jane and she stepped forward. He repeated the identical neck grab with her, along with the same perplexed look. She stepped into the backseat and sat wedged next to Harlan. There was nobody else in the SUV. The guy got into the front seat and closed the door. He sat there motionless for about a minute, occasionally checking Harlan and Jane out in the rearview mirror. Jane could almost hear the wheels turning in his head, and in her opinion the wheels were in desperate need of oil. She could engage him in witty repartee or suffocate him with ego-vaulting compliments but she knew it would be useless. Why bother? It would be like giving Stevie Wonder a flashlight. It’s a nice gesture but what’s the point?
The guy reached across to the glove compartment and removed something but Jane couldn’t detect what it was. He held the item in his lap for about fifteen seconds before he quickly turned around and pointed two targeted beams of red light at Harlan and Jane. The last thing Jane remembered was the sense of falling down a dark hole.
∆ ∆ ∆
There was a stony silence. Everything around her was out of focus and she knew she was unconscious. She willed the scenes around her to become clearer. And as if her thoughts had a voice, the people and places sharpened until she could clearly see everything. The first image was the man she witnessed Gabe killing in the darkened house. He was very much alive and bent over a long wooden desk in his study, coolly studying what appeared to be medical books. Jane caught quick glimpses of illustrations in the book that looked like the brain. She moved toward him and he turned as if he sensed her presence. Jane peered over his shoulder and saw a clear drawing of the cranium split in two pieces. The distant sound of tribal drumming was heard coming from the other side of the office door. Jane turned to a door and opened it. Walking across the threshold, she was thrust into another country. Dry grass crunched below her feet as swirling globes of dust and dirt spun around her. The drumming intensified and she calmly walked toward the syncopated, pounding sound.
It was an African village and the elders sat in a circle on the ground, beating their drums in unison. A huge fire burned in the center circle. A windstorm swept through the village, kicking up dust and debris. Jane heard the sound of young children screaming in the lattice-roofed mud huts around the periphery. She ran toward one of the huts but the second she crossed the threshold, the scene changed dramatically. Suddenly, she was back in the old man’s office. The floor of the office was covered with hundreds of plastic syringes, all filled with a golden serum. The old man stood at his desk, facing Jane and holding the white binder with the stark IEB written in bold red ink on the cover. He placed his hand over his heart and then rested it across the top of the white IEB binder. He then placed his index finger on his forehead, holding it there for a few seconds, before lowering his finger to the floor and pointing to the hundreds of syringes. “The heart and the mind,” she heard him say without moving his lips. “Are you hearing this, Jane?” He then held out the white binder to her, encouraging her to come forward and take it. She kicked the syringes out of the way to make a path, but the closer she moved to him, the farther away he appeared. Jane reached out to grab the binder but it was always inches from her grasp.
The smell of moist dirt in an old shed surfaced. She immediately recognized the nauseating aroma and was catapulted back to her father’s workshop twenty-three years ago. The throbbing pain in her stomach felt acutely fresh. She could feel herself back there again as if it was happening at that very moment, laying on the cold, damp dirt, feeling the sticky blood flow from the repeated blows. She knew if she opened her eyes, he’d be standing over her, waiting for her to show the first sign of weakness. So, she gathered every ounce of strength and promised herself that when she opened her eyes, she’d fight back. Jane counted, preparing herself for the violence. One, two, three…
She opened her eyes. Hovering over her was
the buzz cut idiot that came to the bar and escorted Harlan and Jane to the SUV.
“Wake up!” he demanded, kicking her hard in the thigh.
Jane winced. Her hands were tied with rope behind her back and her face was half-planted in the sandy dirt. Scanning the area with one eye, it looked like a cement-lined storage container that could accommodate a large truck. No windows. One door. And it smelled moldy and dank.
∆ ∆ ∆
“Well, looky what I found in your waistband?” the guy announced, producing Jane’s service weapon. He pointed it toward her face. “Ya know, ya really need to holster these things.”
Jane turned slightly on her back, stealthily checking whether her Ruger was still holstered to her boot. From what she could tell, it was still there. “Where’s Harlan?” she asked, her voice sounding raspy and tired.
“Where’s Harlan?” he said in a mocking tone. “I bet you’d like to know that.”
Jane may have been just coming to, but her attitude was fully present. “That’s why I asked you, you fucking moron.”
His countenance darkened and before she could protect herself, he slapped her hard across her mouth. “You shut your mouth, bitch!”
“Where is he?!” she screamed, undaunted by him.
He slapped her even harder across the mouth, this time breaking her lip open. “I told you to shut the fuck up! Who’s the stupid one here, huh?”
Jane licked the blood off her lip and stared at the fool.
“That’s better,” he said, all puffed up. “You do what I tell you or I’ll kill you with your own gun and everybody will think you offed yourself when they find you on the road with a bullet in your brain and your gun in your cold, dead hand.” He let out a weird celebratory hoot.
“When you do that,” Jane stated, feeling her lip throb, “make sure you put in my left hand.”
He looked at her with a quizzical expression. “I don’t get it.”
“That’s a shock.”
He grabbed her by the hair and pulled her head off the ground. “What’d you say, bitch? I can’t hear you! You think I won’t shoot you?” He pressed the tip of the Glock into her cheek. “I’ve kilt lots of people. You’d just be another notch on my bedpost.”
“You mean belt,” she said, grimacing.
“Oh, somebody in this room thinks they’re really smart, don’t they?” He let Jane go and stood up, straddling her body. “I let my gun do my talkin’.”
Jane figured that was probably a wise idea since this inbred jackass couldn’t string together a single intelligent sentence.
Hovering over her in an intimidating stance, he pointed the tip of the gun at her head. “Hell, I was born with a gun in my hand!”
Jane looked up at him. “Is that right? So, I guess that means you were a C-section?”
“Huh?”
It was the answer she fully expected. Pearls before swine. “Never mind.”
“You mockin’ me?”
“Nah. I bet you’re hung like Einstein and smart as a horse.”
He smiled broadly with pride because he stopped listening when he heard the word, “hung.” It was like having a heart to heart with a squirrel. You want to believe they understand you, but deep down, logic tells you that it’s jetting over their heads. She looked up at him, so full of himself, and she wasn’t scared one bit. The thought crossed her mind that there was an up side to growing up with the devil in her house. She knew what true evil looked like and it sure as hell didn’t resemble this freak. This jerkoff was just another fucker with a gun. She’d put book on it that he didn’t live to see his thirtieth birthday. Jane could always determine the people who were destined to have a short shelf life. Somebody with a few more brain cells would cap his ass. And when the cops come to scrape his body off the pavement, they’d be chatting about whatever game was on that night or who got traded to another team. He’d get shoved into the drawer at the morgue with a toe tag that said John Doe. And when they looked in that drawer at him, they wouldn’t see a tough guy. They’d see just another fucking asshat who rose to his level of incompetence right on schedule.
He continued to straddle Jane, pointing the gun at her the entire time and making threats, each one sounding more insane than the last. Finally, Jane had enough and piped up.
“Hey, you get off on Oxies?” she asked him.
He shut up and stared at her with his tongue slightly dangling from his mouth, like a dog waiting for his dish. “Yeah…Why come?”
“Well, I’ll tell you why come. I got me a full bottle in my jacket pocket. You can eat ‘em or you can sell ‘em. Either way, it’s gonna be a lucky day for you.”
He let the gun lazily fall to his side. “You pull out the bottle first,” he instructed her, thinking he was quite savvy.
“How can I do that? My hands are tied.”
He stared at her, licking his lips with anticipation. “Oh, yeah.”
“It’s in my right pocket. Go on.”
With his mouth slacked open, he gingerly patted her jacket pocket and smiled when he felt the prescription bottle. Reaching in, he brought out the orange container and stood up, still straddling Jane’s body. “Whooo-whee!” he whooped.
“Yeah!” Jane said, eyeing him carefully. “Hillbilly heroin, huh? That should kill the pain, right?”
“What pain?”
“This pain.” Jane drove her cowboy boot into his groin.
He fell backward, grabbing his jewels and sending her service pistol to the side.
Jane rolled herself up to a standing position and moved closer to him. “Where in the fuck is Harlan?”
He tried to stand up but the pain was too much. “I’ll cut your throat!”
“I thought you were gonna shoot me in the head. Make up your fucking mind!”
“Fuckin’ bitch—” he started toward her face when the door opened.
Jane turned around just in time to see a looming figure come toward her. He’d swept up her discarded Glock and before she could react, he had her in a firm chokehold.
“You try one fucking thing and I’ll kill you!” the man said with a thick cockney accent. He turned to the idiot still nursing his testicles on the dirt floor. “Get up, you fucking shit-hawk!”
He struggled to his feet, sweating and trying to get his breath. “She’s a mouthy bitch!”
The other man swung Jane around to face him. Looking up at him, this guy was a whole different ball of wax. He towered over her with his imposing, six-foot-three-inch frame. Jane factored he was in his late sixties and had led a brutal life. Craters of pockmarks filled his ruddy face. His deep-set black eyes held decades of rage and bloodshed. His crown was cleanly shaven, adding another level to his sadistic appearance.
“Who in the fuck are you?” Jane asked, undaunted.
“See what I mean?” the imbecile added.
“Shut up!” the man ordered his minion.
He shoved Jane out of the cement building. It was still pitch black outside as the three of them walked through the cold night air, down a gravel path, around a corner and into a house. The one-story house had an open floor plan, making the fifteen-hundred-square-foot space seem cavernous. Against the far wall was a kitchen set up, to the right sat a few couches and chairs and to the left was an elaborate bank of six computers scattered atop tables that looked like they’d been purchased at the Salvation Army. Two chairs faced each other in the center of the room and Jane’s ass was firmly planted in the one with the rickety leg that forced her forward. It was the oldest trick in the book, she recalled from her early days on the force. You bring in a scared perp to the interrogation room and put him in a chair that has one leg shaved down just enough to give him the perception that he is off balance. But Jane knew how to shift her left foot in front of her to steady the chair so that she didn’t fall flat on her face.
�
��Where’s Harlan?” she asked in a demanding tone.
“Turn around.” The man instructed her as he sat down across from her.
With her hands tied behind her back it wasn’t easy, but Jane twisted her body and saw Harlan lying on a futon in the corner of the large room.
“He won’t come to,” the man declared. “Nothing I’ve done brings him out of it. So, I know you’ve got the fucking codes. Give me the one that wakes him up.”
This was different, Jane figured. Suddenly she was Harlan’s handler. Checking out the vibe between the guy seated across from her and dimwit standing next to him like a Labrador on point, she factored that their relationship was akin to master and slave.
“Untie me,” Jane demanded.
He leaned forward in a menacing stance. “I’m not fucking around here! Give me the code!”
“Are you gonna untie me?” she asked again, echoing his intimidating posture.
He sat back and observed Jane. After a long minute, he lurched toward her and then quickly stopped but Jane didn’t flinch once. Just inches away from her face, he stared into her eyes. His stale, toxic breath was overpowering. But she was unmoved. Jane steeled herself the way she’d taught herself to do when she was a kid. When you’ve experienced the worst, everything else is a cakewalk. Evil didn’t inspire her to fall into the vacuum of fear. She saw the beast for what it was and understood that all monsters have their weaknesses that a trained eye can exploit. All she had to do was pretend that she wasn’t afraid to die and keep the conversation going for as long as necessary. He brought out a long knife and quickly cut the ropes, freeing her hands. Sitting back in his comfortable chair, he observed Jane a bit more before he tipped his head to the side.
