Run the Risk

by Scott Frost

  Press it, I thought. Pick away at his fiction.

  “I know about France,” I said. “I know how you killed. You’re not a terrorist. You don’t believe in anything, you’re not fighting for anything, there’s no cause. You kill because you’re sick and twisted and crave control. You’ve crawled out of some dark hole and need to be put back.”

  The soft fall of his footsteps stopped behind me and didn’t move. I tried to take a breath, but it was as if the air in the room had vanished. Had I gone too far? How far could I push it without unleashing the madness inside him?

  His breath fell on the back of my neck, and every muscle in my body tightened in anticipation of another strike. Nothing came. In the darkness his breathing took on the sound and feel of an animal’s. Primitive, atavistic, hiding nothing. Fearing nothing. The top of the food chain. I felt like prey dragged back to a den.

  “You think you know me?” he whispered.

  “I know you’ve never killed a woman. Why is that?”

  He started to laugh. “You don’t know me.”

  “I know enough—” I started to say.

  “I killed my mother. I cut her throat.”

  His fingers brushed my hair away from the side of my face. A new wave of panic coursed through my body as I replayed his words in my head. “I killed my mother. . . . I killed my mother.”

  “You didn’t—”

  “You will never know me,” he said in my ear.

  “What did she do to you?” I said weakly.

  “Everything,” he whispered.

  I tried to fight off the fear and keep talking.

  “You—”

  “Can you feel the weight of the vest?” Gabriel said.

  A chill of fear flushed through my body. I felt a presence on my shoulders that I hadn’t noticed before. Like the grip of hands. The weight bore down and seemed to encircle me. I took a deep, cautious breath, afraid the air might reveal more than I was prepared to know. The vest pressed tightly against my chest. The bulk of the explosives felt like blocks of clay arranged in a neat row. Below the explosives were small pockets of sharper objects that pressed against my flesh as I breathed. Nails. Shrapnel. The rest was obvious. I would be a killing field.

  He was right. I didn’t know him, couldn’t. I had just stepped fully into his nightmare, and his world was unrecognizable. Not the evidence of his cruelty or even the taking of my daughter had prepared me fully for where I now sat. My throat quivered with fear as I forced myself to breathe. I had to fight the urge to take refuge in the panic pumping through my body with each beat of my heart. It would be so easy to give in to it and retreat.

  “Lacy,” I silently whispered. “Lacy, Lacy, Lacy . . .”

  She was my beacon. Bring me back. Help me.

  I heard a quick pop and the bright flash of a camera dulled the darkness for a brief second under the blindfold. He took another shot, and another, and with each flash of light my breathing quickened and became less controlled. What was happening now was . . . I was becoming another piece of his collection.

  I tried to find some foothold from which to fight it, to push away the panic.

  “You needed someone to bring in your explosives across the border, that’s why you got involved with the florists Breem and Finley. And you needed someone who could walk through police lines at the parade with your bomb, so you took my daughter, to get to me.”

  “I took your daughter because I like the sound of her voice.”

  “I won’t kill for you.”

  “Mom,” my daughter said.

  Her voice was trembling. She had probably thought I would be here to rescue her, and now look at me.

  “Lacy,” I said, my voice breaking as tears welled up in my eyes. “Are you all right?”

  “That’s up to you,” Gabriel said.

  A high-pitched whimper of pain pierced the darkness and then opened a wound in my heart as cleanly as a scalpel.

  “You son of a bitch!” I yelled, straining against my bindings. “Leave her alone!”

  She cried out again. “No!”

  “Stop it, stop it!” I screamed, my tears soaking into the cloth of the blindfold.

  “No, Mom, no!” Lacy yelled. “Fuck him!”

  He was turning me into a victim, methodically, step by step, as if I were a piece of machinery he was deconstructing.

  “Please,” I begged.

  Across the room Lacy’s cries had become nearly silent.

  “I’ll do whatever you want. Just leave her alone . . . just leave her . . . I’ll do whatever you . . .”

  My chin dropped to my chest and my voice failed.

  “You are just like all of them. Weak. You always surrender. You’re nothing.”

  He was rubbing my face in it, having his moment of control. I took a breath, holding it just long enough to slow my racing heart. Then I took another and another, trying to find my way back. A faint voice called to me from what felt like another lifetime.

  “Work it.”

  At first I didn’t hear it or wasn’t capable of hearing it, then it called to me again.

  “Work it.”

  It was Traver’s voice. Big Dave, Lacy’s protector.

  “He doesn’t know what you know. Work it.”

  “Okay,” I whispered.

  A door opened and then Lacy desperately called out, “Mom!”

  She was fighting it, kicking him as he dragged her unwillingly across the floor.

  “Lacy!”

  “You fucking asshole!” she screamed.

  Her defiance jolted me the same way her infant cries did the first night home from the hospital. I was instantly ashamed of my own weakness. She had been captive for nearly forty hours and he still hadn’t been able to steal her strength.

  “You fucking tell him, Lacy!” I yelled.

  The door slammed shut and her voice trailed off. The sounds of her struggling against him lasted another few seconds, and then she was gone.

  “Lacy!” I yelled.

  The silence closed around me as if it were one of Gabriel’s weapons that had to be fought before it seized the advantage.

  “You’re going to be all right, Lacy! You hear me. You’re going to be okay!”

  My heart pounded audibly against the explosives around my chest. The pockets of nails dug into my waist like claws.

  The door creaked open and I felt his presence reinvade the room.

  “He doesn’t know what you know,” Traver whispered.

  Gabriel moved slowly around behind me like a stalking cat.

  “When I know my daughter’s safe, I’ll do what you want,” I said.

  He replied with silence that was as unnerving as a scream.

  Was this part of his plan? Was I walking into the thick of it, exactly where and how he wanted me to? Had I just dug our hole even deeper? How could I know? Was Harrison reading what was about to happen and saying, “No, no, no”? How could I know? I couldn’t. Screw it.

  “You don’t like it, kill me now,” I said.

  He exhaled heavily with several quick breaths, sounding like a woman in labor.

  “You wouldn’t like that, would you? You kill me now, there will be no parade. And that’s what you really want, isn’t it? To feel that power. To have two hundred million people around the world watching your work. Feeling your terror. Thinking that every time they pass a stranger on the street at night it might be you.”

  I pressed it.

  “If you don’t let Lacy go, then everything you’ve done will have been for nothing.”

  The floorboards behind me creaked under his weight.

  “It’ll be like you’ve never existed. No one will care. You’ll be just another killer, nothing, something to be forgotten with yesterday’s news.”

  He took two more quick animal breaths and then fell silent. His shadow seemed to pass over me, raising the hair on the back of my neck.

  “That’s the deal,” I said.

  The blade of a knife pressed ag
ainst my throat. The steel was warm, as if it were an extension of his hand. I felt the sharp sting like the edge of a piece of paper being drawn across my finger. I closed my eyes.

  “I love you, Lacy,” silently crossed my lips.

  The blade began to press harder against my skin. I opened my eyes, staring at the tiny specks of light through the blindfold as if they were all that was left of the world.

  He pressed it against my throat, forcing my chin up. I closed my eyes and saw Lacy standing among the giant sequoias. Free, perfect.

  I felt a slight quiver on the blade of the knife as his hand began to shake, and then it slipped silently from my throat.

  “You’re going to walk down Colorado Boulevard,” Gabriel said, breathless as if winded from a run. “And disappear in a flash of creation.”

  24

  THE DAWN HAS A SOUND. In my blindfolded darkness I could hear it inching over the mountains and then sliding down into the basin. It came in the sudden silence of crickets, the shouting calls of mockingbirds and crows, the slap of a newspaper hitting pavement, and the faint, distant hum of cars, at first few, then gradually more and more until the white noise rose like an incoming tide.

  “He’ll be coming soon,” Traver whispered in my ear.

  I reached out for him as if he were in the room.

  “Tell me about where you are,” he said.

  It was a line I had used on him when he was new to Homicide, a training device to recognize the things in a crime scene you hadn’t realized you’d seen.

  I tried to build a picture of my surroundings from the sounds I had heard.

  “A room of ten by twelve, a window over the street looking south toward the freeway, no dogs barking, it’s not residential, a low-rent, commercial street.”

  “What about smells?”

  I took a deep breath through the blindfold. There was a faint odor in the air. It wasn’t a flower. The sweetness carried in it was sharp, like the first time you smell day-old death.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Yes, you do. Work it.”

  I took in the air, trying to imagine the smell as if it had color.

  “It’s bright, strong.”

  “And . . .”

  “Animal fat,” I whispered. There was something familiar in it that I wasn’t recognizing.

  “Break it down like a crime scene,” Traver said.

  “It’s New Year’s,” I said.

  “What happens on New Year’s?”

  “Parades . . . football . . . but that’s not it.”

  “No.”

  I pushed against it as if it were one of the bindings around my legs and hands, but I failed to make a connection.

  “I don’t see it.”

  “Yes, you do.”

  “How?”

  “Work it back.”

  “I don’t know how far.”

  “It’s obvious.”

  “New Year’s Eve.”

  “Yes.”

  “The morning after.”

  “Yes.”

  “Hangovers.”

  “Yes.”

  I shook my head. “I don’t see it.”

  “Yes, you do.”

  “Hang—Menudo, someone’s cooking tripe.”

  I listened for a moment and heard a sound I had been missing, faint but still there.

  “An exhaust fan.”

  “Good,” Traver said.

  “I’m near a Mexican restaurant.”

  I looked into the darkness of the blindfold and began doing the math. The brief rush of discovery faded.

  “Who am I kidding?” I whispered.

  Every Mexican restaurant in town would be cooking menudo.

  “That’s not enough,” I said angrily.

  “Tell me about Gabriel.”

  I thought of his hand holding the cloth against my mouth and tried to build a picture.

  “He’s strong, about six feet, right-handed—”

  “You’re not telling me what’s important.”

  “The lives he takes are nothing to him, they’re just characters, they’re not even alive until he creates them.”

  “Not his mother.”

  The thought alone was enough to sear every nerve in my body. He had cut his own mother’s throat.

  “No, that was different.”

  “How?”

  “She was alive to him.”

  “Why did he kill her?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Rage?”

  That wasn’t it. I hadn’t seen anything resembling rage in Gabriel.

  “He was saving her.”

  “From what?”

  “Herself—her imagined crimes, her real ones, God knows.”

  “And after that?”

  I thought for a moment.

  “After that was when his life began. Reality becomes what he creates on his stage. Everything else, every life, is a lie.”

  The sound of footsteps outside my door silenced Traver’s voice, and I plunged back into the isolation of the blindfold. The door swung open and Gabriel stepped inside.

  “It’s beginning,” I whispered.

  He silently moved behind me. He had showered. I could smell the scent of shampoo on him. And there was coffee on his breath, strong and laced with sugar.

  “If you try to remove the vest it will explode,” he said. “If you try to run from a crowd of people, a motion device will set it off.”

  “Like Philippe,” I said.

  I heard a short puff of air through his nostrils. He was smiling, laughing at the thought.

  “If Harrison tries to disarm this, he’ll fail and you’ll both die.”

  “I won’t be able to get close to the parade with this vest on.”

  “Your jacket will cover it. There’ll be no scent for the dogs. And you’re a policeman. Who would stop you?”

  I remembered about the Israeli explosives that had no scent—the perfect assassination tool.

  “I like you, Lieutenant, I feel like I’m part of your family. I like that you understand what I’m doing. You understand power. When I kill you on Colorado it will be the most watched murder in history. Can you imagine all the families gathered around the television, all around the world, to see a parade of roses, and in a flash, I’ll be in all their lives, in all their homes. I’ll be what they fear when they close their eyes and try to sleep. I’ll be walking behind them when they hear a car backfire and think it’s an explosion. I’ll be everywhere, because you’ve made me the portrait of fear. That will be your last gift to the world, Lieutenant, the thing you’ll be remembered for—me.”

  “You sick bastard. I’m going to kill you,” I said.

  He ignored my words as if I hadn’t spoken.

  “When the parade begins, and the first band starts down the street, you walk out onto Colorado and join them. When I see you, the phone in the pocket of the vest will ring and your daughter will tell you that she is free.”

  He untied the restraints holding my arms to the chair, leaving my wrists tied together behind my back.

  “And then you’ll feel the spark of ignition, a brief flicker of heat above your heart. The smell of carbon.”

  “And if I say no?”

  “Then I remove your blindfold, and you watch me slowly cut apart your daughter like a butchered calf while you listen to her screams.”

  Just that quickly, he had control over me again.

  “I want to see her—”

  “You’ll see the last beat of her heart as she looks into your eyes.”

  “Stop—”

  “If you’re late, she dies. Change anything, use the phone in the vest, she dies, and I still detonate the bomb. Do you understand?”

  “Go to hell—”

  His hand closed around my throat.

  “Say yes,” he commanded.

  I felt his nails begin to press against my skin.

  “Yes,” I said weakly.

  “Good.”

  His hand then cove
red my mouth, and I detected the same bitter scent I had smelled before.

  “We’ve done this before . . . breathe.”

  I instinctively resisted, refusing to take a breath. He wrapped his arm around my neck and increased the pressure.

  “You’re wasting time you don’t have.”

  I shook my head and he hit me in the stomach with his free hand, forcing the air out of my lungs, leaving me gasping for breath. I took the ether deeply into my lungs as if it were bottled oxygen.

  “Do you remember everything I told you?” he whispered in my ear.

  The fumes bit into the back of my throat, and then a chill began to move through my chest to the rest of my body. My fingers felt numb. I tried to speak but I couldn’t make a sound. I began to slip back into the fog of the drug. Out of the darkness a kaleidoscope of colors began to rush toward me through the fabric of the blindfold.

  “Make a mistake, she dies.”

  I shook my head, or believed I was shaking my head.

  “If you’re late . . . she dies.”

  Gabriel’s words began to stretch and lose their shape as if they had a physical presence.

  “If you fail me . . . she dies.”

  The words dissolved, then briefly took shape, then were swept away into the stream of colors.

  25

  I WAS MOVING AGAIN or had been moving. Through the haze of the narcotic, I couldn’t be sure. Time seemed to bend back on itself then spring forward in jarring leaps. The present drifted into the past. One moment I was lying down, the blur of road noise sounding like a distant jet. The next I was watching my partner Traver, holding his twins in his arms. The next I was in a room with all of Gabriel’s victims staring at me, their eyes asking for help.

  There was traffic noise now, enough so that the cadence of tires was lost in the collective din of hundreds of vehicles. I tried to focus on a single sound, hoping it would be a stepping-stone back to consciousness, but there were so many. A whistle was blowing in short, quick bursts. A car horn sounded. I heard voices edged with excitement but couldn’t make out the words. And there was music in the distance, random and dissonant as if the notes had been swept off the sheet music and tossed into the air.

  And then nothing. The sounds fell silent. The movement stilled. I tried counting my breaths to hold on to consciousness: one . . . two . . . I began to drift . . . three . . . three. I was standing over the open grave of Lacy’s father. Then I felt myself falling as if in a dream where you tumble, flailing at the air. And then it stopped abruptly. I felt his hands reach under my arms and pick me up. Then the pressure of the blindfold slipped from my face. Light appeared as if a set of curtains had been opened to a gathering dawn. Patterns of grays and whites shifted in my field of vision, but I couldn’t make out any detail.