The Beast in the Bone

by Blair Lindsay

  “No, I’m good,” Ressler said. “You can carry on. No worries.”

  A cold feeling gripped Decker that had nothing to do with the rain slithering into his collar and down his back.

  No worries?

  Ressler just stared at him, empty face in the headlights, pale eyes on his. It seemed to Decker almost as if he was fighting to suppress a smile.

  Decker glanced down at his phone. The screen was still on, Call Failed still blazing out of it.

  “No can do,” Decker said, turning back to Ressler. “Not yet, anyway. I’m looking for someone. Right here, actually.”

  “Is that right?” Ressler’s voice was cool, detached, like they were chatting about the weather.

  Wrong wrong wrong.

  “Who you looking for?” Ressler was grinning now, his mouth split wide in the rain as if he were hungry.

  “Ash Keller.”

  Ressler laughed and glanced over his shoulder before turning back to lock his gaze on Decker. “Wrong answer.”

  Ressler went for his gun; but even as shock flooded through Decker, instinct took over and he drew his own weapon. It cleared his holster with a wet slick sound, like a knife slicing through flesh. His hand brought the gun to bear on Ressler’s centre mass almost of its own volition.

  He saw the muzzle of the other man’s gun flash an instant before he pulled the trigger.

  Seventy-Eight

  In the checkerboard light from the house shining through the trees, Keller saw her breath as a chill fog in front of her. The rain had long since soaked through her jacket and entombed her in a biting mix of ice water and sweat, and she was trembling hard with cold and adrenalin fatigue.

  She stumbled as Taylor pushed her forward. When she tripped, he grabbed her shoulder, only to shove her onward and off balance again.

  “This is a treat… Never thought we’d be having a wet-T-shirt contest tonight.”

  He mumbled at her constantly like this as he pushed her along. Nothing she really wanted to hear, but that might be the point. You could beat a person down with words as with fists if you had the talent. So… Taylor mused about her ass, her tits, what he would do to her once he had her naked.

  “Fuck you, asswipe.”

  He pushed her harder this time and she fell into the freezing mud. Then he kicked her in the leg.

  It hardly hurt, though. The fentanyl was a rising tide in her again. Not yet at the Cool Smooth watermark, but not far from it. She knew if she didn’t get more Narcan soon—which, let’s face it, looked unlikely at the moment—the drug might still drown her.

  “Get up, you little slut.”

  He leaned over and yanked her hair, and she half-screamed.

  Second time tonight.

  “Shut up.” He growled it and yanked so hard she felt her hair tearing from her scalp, but the pain drove the fentanyl back—a little, anyway. She got her feet under her and managed to stand, and he pushed her stumbling forward again. “You like that? Your hair getting pulled?” He rambled on again, mumbling about all the things he was going to do to her.

  She gritted her teeth and fought to stay steady. Keep thinking.

  He was aiming her toward the main stable. Was that his holding pen for captives? It didn’t seem like the guy had a lot of guile, so it probably was.

  Was Decker in on this too? But she couldn’t make herself believe that. Which meant Decker would get talked into leaving.

  Unless he doesn’t. He seemed pretty stubborn to Keller. So, he’s in danger too. Great.

  “Keep moving, bitch.”

  Taylor shoved her through some close-knit trees, and the melting snow clotting their tangled branches showered over her.

  Hypothermia wasn’t a million miles away, but the shock of the snow wasn’t entirely unwelcome, helping keep her in the land of reality, in the land of Alert and Oriented x 4. But pain or no, cold or no, her time in that blessed land was waning. Oblivion was coming for her.

  Maybe oblivion would be good. Maybe, if she were in respiratory arrest and unconscious and well on the way to cold, cold death, she wouldn’t feel Taylor raping her.

  Silver linings. But that couldn’t be her first choice.

  So… others.

  Run? Running was admittedly a tempting one, but she was still handcuffed, even if the cuffs were in front of her now. And anyone with even passing familiarity with a shotgun could be expected to inflict a mortal wound before she’d taken more than ten steps.

  Scream? Also tempting. Even through the rain, Decker might just be in earshot. But given the violent character of Taylor’s run-on oral ramblings, which ranged from inchoate to explicit sexual violence, she was pretty sure even a scream might earn her a six-inch hole in her torso with her innards scrambled like a bloody pulled-pork sandwich.

  Next, please.

  Next, or maybe more rightly last.

  She looked down at the handcuffs, at the short chain linking them.

  This last choice, this only reasonable choice might not kill her tonight, but it might wind up murdering her six months or a year from now; might kill all she hoped she still was, anyway.

  But she couldn’t see any other way. What she had seen, what haunted her memories, were the crime scene photos her father had shown her of women who’d died because they hadn’t realized or hadn't believed what was coming for them.

  They were climbing a low hill now, headed straight toward the stable or the storage shed beyond it. So, she had her heading. All she needed was a distraction.

  As if on cue, gunshots rang out from the south.

  Decker. But she couldn’t afford to worry, to lose this moment.

  As Taylor turned toward the sound, she whirled and stepped sideways behind him, lifting her arms high and looping the handcuffs around his neck.

  He let out a strangled screech, but before he could react, she leapt up and braced her knees against his spine and pitched herself backward, putting all her weight behind it, dragging him off his feet. They crashed to the ground together, Taylor’s mass crushing the air out of her lungs, her injured rib a black hole of agony in her chest.

  She struggled to stay conscious as he thrashed against the cuffs pulled tight around his neck.

  Seventy-Nine

  Sanders was going to be in trouble, or at the very least have some explaining to do. It wasn’t the first time that had happened in her career, and she knew she had a good solid reason for doing what she was doing, but tonight was by far the most egregious violation of departmental norms she’d ever committed.

  She ticked off the things her supervisor, Rick Kline—or maybe the deputy chief, if the RCMP got really fussy—would be asking her about tomorrow.

  Attending a suspected crime scene outside of jurisdiction instead of first reporting it to the appropriate police force, to wit the RCMP.

  Traipsing through said extra-jurisdictional crime scene, by then a confirmed homicide.

  Finally, and most likely to cause a dyspeptic reaction in her superiors, leaving said homicide scene.

  Initially, she hadn’t intended to leave, per se. Her plan had been to drive only far enough to acquire a cellphone signal, call and update Decker, then return to Keller’s house.

  Her cellphone had showed a sudden surge in signal strength less than two kilometres away from Keller’s house, but the first call to Decker went straight to voice mail and thereafter Sanders was getting the now-familiar “call failed” message.

  Decker was in trouble. Other conclusions might be possible, but no other conclusions were safely possible. So she kept driving, now thirty Ks over the speed limit and the rain pounding hard against her windshield, heading for Decker’s last-known destination, Palomino Palace. What a name.

  At least she had—eventually—phoned RCMP dispatch. Now that had been an awkward conversation.

  Yes, she was a Calgary Police Major Crimes detective. Yes, she had attended a homicide scene northeast of Calgary in the MD of Rockyview. Yes, she’d now left that scene in pursuit of
her partner, who was currently and worryingly out of communication.

  After she hung up, she wondered who else she ought to be calling. This was sticky. It wasn’t as though Decker had sent up a distress call. He’d just gone silent. There were possible explanations not necessarily involving sinister events. Reports of all kinds of mayhem were streaming out of the police scanner—flash floods and multiple vehicular collisions in starring roles—right from Calgary city limits up to Red Deer. The RCMP were busier than bunnies in springtime tonight.

  Even the RCMP dispatcher had told her, after verifying the victim at Keller’s house was dead for a certainty, that the officer originally sent to do a welfare check on Keller had been delayed, though he would be stepped up now because of Sanders’s report.

  If Sanders sounded the alarm on Decker, any officer within a hundred kilometres would drop anything they could and race to his last-known position. Supervisors would get off their butts and hit the road, engines roaring. Off-duty cops would tear out of their homes, half-dressed, and risk their lives speeding there.

  And she’d be taking all those people away from dozens of other civilians who might need them tonight.

  “Shit.” She pounded at the wheel and called Decker again, and once again got the same no-nonsense message.

  Call Failed.

  She jammed her phone back into the dashboard clip and pressed harder on the accelerator.

  Eighty

  Keller took quick, shallow gasps as pinpricks of light appeared and exploded in front of her eyes. Her lungs were empty and every hard-won sip of air was crushed out of her again and again as Taylor bucked and heaved and writhed on top of her, trying to squirm out of the taut hangman’s grip of the handcuffs wedged around his neck.

  The cuffs were cutting hard into her wrists, and her arms were screaming with lactic acid and trembling with fatigue as she used every ounce of her fading strength to draw the handcuffs tighter against the man’s throat. She knew if she eased up for even a second, if Taylor managed to get his hands beneath the cuffs, it would be over and he would kill her.

  Quickly, too—silver lining there? He’d be too angry to keep me alive long.

  At first Taylor tried to bring the shotgun up toward her, sputtering and choking as the cuffs dug into his neck, but he’d soon cast the gun aside. Perhaps he’d realized he might kill them both, or had just become too desperate for air to do anything but claw at the cuffs as Keller held on for dear life.

  Eventually, he must have decided he wasn’t going to get a hand under the cuffs unless Keller loosened her grip because he began firing his elbows back against her chest, but his own girth—the very thing that was crushing the air out of her—worked against him here and few of the blows landed.

  Now he was reaching for her face, trying to scratch at her eyes. Keller leaned back, plunging her head into the chill, wet mud beneath them, turning back and forth to avoid his clawing fingers. She could not feel her hands anymore—a blessing since the rest of her arms felt as if rusty iron nails were being driven into each and every muscle.

  From the road south of her came another gunshot. Ressler or Decker?

  No time to worry about it. Taylor began to lurch from one side to another, hoping to build momentum, she guessed, and rock them both onto his chest, where gravity would be his ally. This might have worked if he’d tried it when he still had most of his strength, but she could feel him weakening now.

  He began to make a low growling noise, like a car with a dead battery, struggling to turn over. A warm bloody spittle erupted from his mouth and ran over Keller’s hands, cooling swiftly in the wind. She bit down hard against her bottom lip to keep a scream from coming out.

  Cool Smooth would be welcome now, but between the cold and the pain, she was stone sober at the moment and knew exactly what was happening, could imagine it in exquisite detail.

  Most victims of strangulation didn’t die because their trachea or larynx was crushed. Cartilaginous structures surrounded and protected the precious passageways to the lungs and some significant force was required to collapse them. Not so the carotid arteries. The brain’s blood supply was double redundant, with large vessels arcing up both sides of the neck, but what Keller was doing was closing them both off at once.

  Neurological tissue was notoriously greedy. It ate oxygen like there was no tomorrow, stored none for a rainy day—or a strangle-y day—and therefore needed a constant supply. Now Keller had deprived Taylor of that precious oxygen for three solid minutes.

  Taylor’s bladder let go. Keller felt the heat of the urine on her leg and smelled the warm acrid scent in the cold air. He gave a few weak kicks and his hands spasmed against hers before relaxing finally, his weight settling fully against her.

  Her arms screamed at her for relief, as though her shoulders and elbows would be torn from their sockets if she held on any longer. But she couldn’t afford to take the chance Taylor was faking unconsciousness, so she looked up at the grey sky and counted slowly to sixty while she let the icy rain fill her mouth. She swallowed, let her mouth fill once more, swallowed again.

  Then she let her arms go slack and felt a tangle of relief and new agony as her muscles relaxed and blood poured again into her numbed wrists, firing twists of barbed wire pain up her arms.

  “Jesus,” she hissed to herself as she unwrapped her arms from Taylor’s neck.

  The cuffs came away with a soft slurping sound and the glimmer of blood on them. Her turn to squirm now. She writhed out from beneath Taylor’s body and levered herself up onto her knees, taking long gulping breaths. Her arms were shaking, almost useless and throbbing with agony, but with an effort she managed to stand.

  Immediately the wind caught at her, a new torturer. She was completely soaked now, with mud, water, and blood covering nearly every inch of her body and she began to shiver uncontrollably.

  Below her Taylor lay unmoving, eyes lidded and mouth slack. There was a swath of blood under his jaw where the handcuffs had abraded through his flesh. Dead. She was numb to the thought. His shotgun lay to the right of his body and she stooped to retrieve it. It was a Mossberg. She located the safety on top of the tang and made sure it was off, but the gun felt like an anvil in her tortured arms and she wasn’t sure she’d be able to lift it, let alone aim it, trembling as she was.

  What now?

  More importantly, what had happened to Decker? She was pretty sure there’d only been the first volley of shots and then the one following after, but her own blood had been roaring in her ears throughout her struggle with Taylor. She might have missed something. Ressler might be stalking her even now.

  Choices…

  The house? There might be a landline there. Even the barn might have a phone. She could run off into the fields too. With the snow turning to rain, there would be no footprints now, but hypothermia might still kill her before she found help.

  Then the choice was made for her. She heard movement in the woods behind her, coming from the road and approximately between where she had last seen Decker and Ressler. There was a grunt of pain and a whispered curse. Ressler’s voice.

  She lurched into a stumbling run away from him and found a wide swath of grass before her suddenly—an area for riding, perhaps. Across the field, lights were strung along the eaves of what seemed to be the stable and she headed for it, keeping close to the trees and skirting around remnant patches of snow, doing her best to leave no trace of her passage.

  Eighty-One

  Ressler retrieved his shotgun from the car and headed into the trees, staying low, head darting back and forth. He looked for any movement, any sign of Decker.

  The cop had been quick, no doubt about it. Very fast to draw his gun on a fellow officer. Had he been suspicious already? He knew Decker had been communicating with Keller. Goddamn Keller.

  They’d both gotten off two or three shots. His first had hit Decker, he was sure, low in his torso. He’d seen the man jolt backward and the blood on the ground afterward, lots of it
. But not him.

  Decker had scrambled behind his car, firing back as Ressler was busy dealing with his own wound for the precious seconds in which he might have finished the other man off. Still, he was lucky. He should’ve worn body armour. Except he was out chasing a broken down addict paramedic, not a criminal, not a cop… until Decker showed up.

  Decker’s second or third shot had scored a hit on the right side of his head. Ressler had dropped to his knees, half deaf in that ear suddenly and so much blood pouring from the wound he’d thought he was going to die.

  By the time he realized all he was missing was a piece of his ear, Decker was gone, had stumbled off into the treed area at the northern part of the Palace.

  “Palace,” my ass. Place is going to be Hunt’s grave marker.

  He’d torn apart a gym T-shirt from the back of his car and wrapped it around his head, staunching the blood flow from his ear, which was still ringing from the gunshot. But no matter how well he bandaged it, he’d be memorable at the airport.

  Damn it.

  He couldn’t wait to see Decker and Keller dead.

  There was no way in hell Ressler could contain this now, which was fine. He’d prepared for the possibility and was tired of this shit anyway. The bug-out bag was secure in his trunk—five thousand US dollars, passport, and credit cards in three different names—and in his head were access codes to the foreign accounts where Hunt deposited his money. It was a thirty-minute drive to Calgary airport. He could be in Mexico by dawn and Costa Rica within twenty-four hours.

  By now, Taylor would already be in the dungeon below the supply shack peeling Keller out of her clothes. Taylor might kill her afterward, or even during—Taylor was a bit of a brute—or he might leave her alive for Ressler. Either way, she would be dead in an hour, and Decker as well. Then he’d be gone and let Hunt deal with the aftermath.