by Grant Pies
He pushed the man’s thumb onto his phone to unlock it. It was bare. No personal information. Only a handful of calls, and one text message, a cryptic string of numbers. For good measure, Carter jotted them down in his notepad. No photos besides the one of Sam. He pinched and zoomed into the photo, checking the background for clues, nothing.
His cut thumb bled down his arm and dripped on anything he touched. He plugged the man’s phone into his laptop. He was sure the man wouldn’t wake up, but he looked over at him every few seconds just in case.
After a few taps of the keyboard, a scan of the man’s phone started, searching for the addresses he was at when he made or received each of the calls in the history. While the computer scanned the cell phone, Carter dragged himself into the bathroom. He rinsed his thumb off, then splashed water over his more-than-likely-broken nose. Crimson swirls filled the sink and spiraled down the drain. He swallowed another painkiller, and went back into the bedroom, wrapping his cut hand in a small cloth.
Just for good measure, Carter checked the man’s pulse one more time. This time, no pulse, and the circle of blood around his head had doubled in size. The pillowcase was just a sopping red pile of cloth.
“Fuck.” Suddenly the room felt empty, like a vacuum, like a black hole nothing could escape from. The computer chimed as the scan of the man’s cell phone completed. There were five calls in total, three made at the same address, but Carter didn’t recognize it. The last two calls were made from one address he immediately recognized. It was the hospital.
Dulce Et Decorum Est Pro Familia Mori
His attacker had driven a dark blue Accenture van to the motel. Carter packed his computer and stolen records into the back and took off for the hospital. The tires screeched as he slammed the brakes in the ambulance bay. He left the van running and jogged into the emergency room.
Pounding on the glass partition, Carter said, “I need to speak to Dr. Abbott.”
“Fill out this form, and we’ll call your name.”
The nurse on the other side of the glass slid a clipboard through a narrow slot. It was the same nurse he’d dealt with last time he came here looking for Sam. She rolled her eyes and pursed her lips at Carter’s demands.
“No,” Carter said, trying to calm himself and hopefully convince her to let him in. “I’m not sick. I’m a friend of Olivia – er – Dr. Abbott. I really need to see her. Please.”
Shaking her head, the nurse said, “No sir. I can’t just let you back here. I’d suggest giving your friend a call if you need to speak to her.” The woman never even looked up at Carter.
Knowing he would never get anywhere with the triage nurse, he ran through the sliding doors just as a patient walked out.
“Hey!” the nurse yelled. “Stop him!”
Carter saw a security guard across the room make his way over. He dodged nurses and raced along the corridor, glancing into each trauma room.
“Olivia!” he shouted. The security guard was just a few feet from him.
“Sir.” He placed his hand on some sort of taser gun strapped on his hip. “Sir, you can’t be in here.”
“Dr. Abbott!” Carter ignored the guard, blood caked in his nostrils and on his upper lip. More blood trickled from the small sutured cut on his forehead. The blood-soaked motel towel was wrapped around his cut thumb. He knew what he must look like, unshaven and bleeding, screaming in the middle of the ER. The guard reached out and wrapped his hand around Carter’s arm.
“Let go of me!” He jerked his arm free.
Most of the nurses and patients were staring now. Another guard came from the opposite direction and grabbed his other arm.
“I need to find Olivia. She may be in danger!” Carter struggled, but the guards held tightly to him and led him back out the door. “Please, just let me know if she is here, and I’ll leave.”
“You’re leaving now,” one of the guards said. The doors to the ER slid opened, and the two guards pushed him through the doorway.
“Okay, okay.” He stopped struggling and shook loose.
“Don’t come back.”
“Shit,” Carter mumbled, straightening his clothes and walking outside. The van was still running.
“You gotta move buddy. I’m calling a tow truck right now!” a paramedic said, hanging out the window of his ambulance.
Carter nodded and waved the man off. He looked down at a growing spot of blood on his stomach where he was shot. The stitches were torn. More of Olivia’s hard work thrown out the window.
“Hey!” a woman shouted. In green scrubs and white shoes, she came out of the emergency room waving her hand at Carter. “Hey!” Once she made it close enough, she said, “I know you.”
“Me?” He stood at the driver side of the van, holding his door open.
“Yeah, I, uh, helped.” She pointed down at his stomach. “You know…”
“Oh! Yeah, yeah. Thank you.”
The man in the ambulance behind Carter laid on his horn. “Fucking move!”
“One second!” Carter yelled back. He turned back to the nurse.
“You’re looking for Dr. Abbott?” She asked, confused.
“Yeah.”
“She didn’t leave with you?”
“No,” Carter said, now just as confused as the nurse. “Why would she leave with me?”
“Well, the van. She left in this van.”
“This van?”
“Yeah … well at least one just like it.”
Carter jumped in the driver’s seat. “Thanks. Thanks for your help.”
“Sure. No problem.”
Carter drove as fast as the van would go, but he had no destination. His mind was jumbled. He found an open parking space along the road and pulled in, slamming the brakes down and throwing the van in park. He ducked his head and moved to the rear of the van. It was just an open space in the back, no seats. The police and sperm donor records had spread and slid all over.
He opened the program used to trace the numbers from the man’s phone. Several calls were made from an address on the outskirts of the city, an industrial hub filled with factories and warehouses. He breathed sharply and looked at his stomach. The circle of blood had grown slightly. Lifting his shirt, he saw about one third of the sutures were torn at one end of the wound.
“Son of a bitch,” he looked around the van for something useful.
For the first time, he saw what awaited him if he hadn’t fought off the man at the hotel. There was a length of rope, a roll of duct tape, a large blue tarp, and some sort of tool kit, all packed away neatly in one corner.
In the tool kit were rags, tape, forceps, syringes, a scalpel, and various vials of medicines. He pressed a rag against his stomach and wrapped a stretch of tape around his body. It wasn’t pretty, or comfortable, but it pressed hard enough against his wound to stop most of the blood. Even though it hurt now, Carter knew that the last dose of painkillers he swallowed would wear off shortly, and the full force of his pain would come into view.
Ducking his head, Carter crawled back into the driver’s seat. He woke up his cracked phone and typed in the industrial address. Fifteen minutes away. Carter pulled out of the parking space and raced down the road, testing the limits of the large van. If the cops tried to stop him, he would keep going. Bring the cops to their door.
Up ahead a light turned yellow, and he pressed the gas down as far as it would go. The boxy van barely sped up, and by the time he made it through, the light had been red for a good three seconds. He swerved and dodged a car going through the intersection. Behind him, he heard the driver laying on his horn. That red light started a cascade of red lights all the way down the street, yellow falling to red like dominoes.
“Fuck!” he yelled and hit the brakes, skidding out into the middle of the intersection, so that cars had to veer to avoid a collision. He tapped his left foot quickly and leaned forward to look up at the traffic light just over his head.
“Come on,” he pleaded. “Come on!”
/>
The light turned green and he jammed his foot down.
The robotic female voice of his GPS spoke too slowly, so without proper warning he had to swerve to take each turn. In the middle of a couple of sharp turns, Carter thought the van would tip over. Trash fluttered up over the hood, and the sun set slowly, fading into the city behind him.
Once in a less familiar part of town, Carter slowed and waited for the GPS to speak each instruction.
“In five hundred feet your destination will be on your left,” the robotic voice said. He crept the van forward, peering through the dusty windshield. “Your destination is on your left.”
Carter stopped. To his left were four warehouses, each with a front office. A dark blue Accenture van, identical to his own, was parked outside one of the warehouse offices. The light was on inside the office.
Carter opened the van door and shut it softly behind him. He crouched slightly, trying to move through the shadows, his feet crunching on the gravel ground. The streetlights hadn’t turned on yet, and Carter was masked by the dusk.
“Your destination is on your left,” the robotic voice screamed from inside his pocket.
“Shit!” Carter muttered, pressing his hand hard against his pocket but the sound was only slightly muffled. He reached in his pocket and silenced the phone before the voice could speak again, then gripped the Smith and Wesson, watching the warehouse office to see if anyone was coming out to inspect the noise. Nothing. He breathed deep.
His hands weren’t shaking so much as his entire body was vibrating from the inside out. His heart beat against his ribcage. With each beat, he felt the fresh wound on his stomach pulse. The silver duct tape squeezed around his torso, restricting his movement as he crept closer to the warehouse. He heard faint voices coming from the building.
“You don’t have to do this.” It was Olivia.
“Shut up!” a man’s voice yelled. “Keep talking and I will kill you!” His voice wavered.
“Okay, okay,” Olivia said. There was a panic in her voice that Carter hadn’t heard before.
Carter peered through a small window in the office door. There was a mattress in the corner with crumpled bedsheets and a flat pillow. A small fridge sat next to the bed. Olivia sat on the mattress with her back against the wall. Her ankles and wrists were bound with zip ties. Carter took a deep breath and gripped his hand around the door knob.
He barged in screaming and pointing his gun at the man. “Get the fuck on the floor! Get down!”
The man wore black, his arms tattooed and twice the size of Carter’s. He turned, gripping a gun in his hand and lifted it halfway up. It was the same model M1911 Carter took from the man in the motel. If he fired now, the bullet would hit the cement floor between him and Carter.
“Drop it!” Carter yelled. “Drop it!” Flashes of the confrontation at Dennis Orcheck’s house erupted in his mind, like bursting fireworks or a camera flash lighting up the darkened memory.
The man didn’t drop the gun, but he didn’t raise it all the way either. He was unshaven, his hair a mess. His eyes were wide, either with surprise, panic, or fear.
“Drop the fucking gun!” Carter demanded.
Shaking his head slowly, the man said, “I can’t.” His tone was matter of fact. Carter could tell this was not the first time he’d had a gun pointed at him.
“Put it down.” Carter tensed his forearm, and hovered his finger over the trigger. Sam’s voice crept through his brain again, this time his words from the diner. You couldn’t shoot him. It isn’t in you to be that person. You may be an ass, but deep down you’re a good person. You’ll do the right thing. Sam saved him at Orcheck’s, but he wasn’t here now. It was only Carter, and he wasn’t sure what the right thing exactly was.
“I can’t let her go. I have a job to do,” the man said.
“We’re not staying here.” Carter took a sidestep towards Olivia.
The man pivoted his arm to point his gun at her.
“Don’t,” was all Carter could get out. He froze. Olivia gasped and shrank her body, clamping her eyes shut.
“Don’t. Please.” Carter’s eyes shifted between Olivia and the man.
His mind flittered through all possible scenarios. He traced each possible move and played out how he thought they would end. Could he pull his trigger before the man got a shot off? How many shots would he need to fire? Would the bullets ricochet? What if the man tried to shoot Carter? Should Carter dodge? Should he keep shooting?
“She’s not involved in any of this,” Carter said, hoping to at least convince the man to let Olivia go. “I’m here. That’s what you wanted, right? Just let her leave.”
The man shook his head. “No. They want you both. I do that, and my job’s done. I’m out.”
“Who? Who wants us? Accenture?”
His eyes were dark, like he hadn’t slept in a couple days.
“Is it Blair? Do you know where Sam is? Sam Murphy?”
“Don’t know any Sam.”
“I can pay,” Carter lied. “If it’s just a job, I can pay. How much are they paying you?”
“You can’t pay what they’re paying.”
Carter’s gun was getting heavy and his palm was sweating. Both he and the man held the same gun, but Carter’s arm wavered, dropping an inch or two every few seconds while the other man held the gun like it had no weight at all. It was still trained on Olivia.
The man shook his head. “I can’t let you leave.” It was his voice, the way the sentence ended so flatly that left Carter with a definitive feeling, like the man had decided and there was no going back. He lifted his gun only a few inches and flexed his finger over the trigger. Olivia shrank even more into a ball. “I can’t,” he said.
Carter pulled the trigger. A loud pop rang out in the warehouse, and the man stumbled back, his arm still stretched out towards Olivia. For the first time, the gun looked heavy in his hand. He pressed his free hand to his stomach where the bullet had hit. Carter knew the feeling.
Maybe to make sure the man couldn’t get a shot off. Maybe to put him out of his misery. Carter fired two more shots into the man’s chest. Pop! Pop! He flinched at the sound and recoil of the gun. The man fell flat to the ground.
Carter stepped forward and stood over the body. His eyes were open but empty. He breathed a few short shallow breaths, and then there was nothing. No movement. No breathing. Just an ever-growing circle of blood leaking out from under him.
“Fuck!” Carter shouted and stuffed the gun into his waistband. “Fuck! Fuck! Fuck!” His hands shook. Two men dead in a matter of an hour. “It was him or me,” he whispered to himself. “It was him or me.” Convincing himself this was the right thing.
He turned to Olivia. She was frozen. Her knees to her chest and her arms covering her face and head.
Crouching down and placing his hand on her shoulder, Carter asked, “Are you okay? Are you hurt?”
She didn’t answer but lifted her head. Her eyes were just as wide and vacant as the dead man’s. Tears streaked through her makeup.
“Olivia?” She was breathing, just not responding. He looked her body over, and didn’t see any gunshot wounds. “Olivia. It’s okay. It’s okay.”
He wrapped his arms around her and held her. She shook in his arms and cried. Carter saw that the zip ties were cutting into her wrists.
“I’ll find something to cut you free.”
He scanned the office, opening each drawer of the desk. A pair of scissors sat on top of a picture. It was of the man he’d just killed, posing with a woman and a young girl, all three of them smiling.
“Here,” Carter pushed the drawer closed, and shook the idea that he’d just killed a family man out of his head. He kneeled back down and cut Olivia’s wrist ties first then her ankles. She shook her hands.
“I’m so sorry,” he said, gripping Olivia’s shoulders.
“You – you killed him.” She looked down at the body on the floor. The antithesis of what she vowed to do
with her life.
“It was him or me … or you.” His new mantra.
“Have – have you ever killed a man before?”
Carter hesitated, then said, “Technically? Yes.” He held her hands and helped her to her feet. “Another guy like him ambushed me at my motel, but it was an accident. He fell, hit his head on the dresser.”
“Fuck,” Olivia whispered to herself. “How – how did you find me?” She was still looking at the man.
“I used the other guy’s phone to back-trace where his phone calls were made. One led to the hospital, and the other back here.”
“Who are these people? Is this…?
“Accenture? That’s my only guess,” Carter said. “But this guy seemed different from the men that shot me. He’s not as militaristic or something.”
“Will” Olivia said softly. “You have to stop.”
“I can’t.”
“But Carter—"
“They have Sam. I can’t stop. Not now.” Carter walked around the office, trying not to look at the bleeding body on the floor. “Maybe something here will tell me where they’re keeping him.”
Olivia grabbed the sheet off the mattress and draped it over the dead man. Carter opened the drawers of the desk again, this time shuffling through the papers in each drawer. Most were just bills from insurance companies and hospitals. The name on the bill was Jake Dawson.
“What do you make of these?” Carter handed the bills to Olivia.
Flipping through them, her hands still shaking, Olivia said, “Hospital bills.” She turned some of them over, then tossed each page on the desk once she was done examining it.
“What are they for?”
She spread five of the bills out on the desk. “Here, this code is repeated. Three times a week for the last six months.” She pointed at a three-letter code ‘DYL’ on each bill.
“Like chemo?” Carter asked, walking around and stepping over clothes and empty food containers. He figured the man had either lived here, or was maybe unemployed and his family didn’t know, and this was where he crashed eight hours a day.