“Now? Sleeping?” My heart jumped in to my throat. In the last two days I had actively avoided thinking about Eris. I wasn’t mentally prepared, and now there was no time. “Does it have to be now?”
“Well, I have gone to a lot of trouble preparing things just as you want. You could just hang up the phone and go back to sleep, but I would be remiss if I didn’t tell you that Eris is at this very moment about to add to his collection in a most brutal manner.”
I started to run from the bathroom but caught my foot on Leah’s grease-stained blouse. She had thrown it on the floor earlier, and now it wrapped around my ankle. I shook it off and bumped into the bathroom door. It fell open and I nearly fell to the floor. I glanced at Leah after regaining my balance, and she continued to snore, blissfully unaware. I quietly ran to the kitchen counter and Leah’s Sig and paused just for a moment. The house was completely silent. I ran to Mia’s bedroom and found her asleep, wrapped in a tangle of pillows and blankets. I ran upstairs and Tom was equally asleep and safe.
“Everything where it should be?” Sida said after I raised the phone back to my ear.
“Yes,” I said a little breathlessly. There was no point in trying to hide the fact that Sida could make me dance around like one of his puppets on a string. Ready or not, I really had no choice in the matter. “I need some things from my office.” Being a physician has its advantages in securing medications and surgical instruments.
“Well, that poses a bit of a problem for the Hancocks, because if I don’t miss my guess Eris is going to be inside long before that.”
“You fucking bastard!” I sneered.
“I understand that Mika is having a sleepover. That girl. She is quite a pistol. I’ll bet she gives Eris all he can handle.” He chuckled in his mocking fashion. “But,” he said loudly, “all is not lost.”
I felt a rush of wind blow across my body, and suddenly I was not alone. A man of my height, wearing a flannel shirt, stood next to me. I dropped my phone. Sida did the same.
“Remember? Adis told you how we get around. It’s a little like Harry Potter. Take my hand . . .” He looked at how I was dressed in a simple pair of shorts. “On second thought, run and get some clothes.”
I stared at him. I have never really liked the word dumbfounded, but that was how I felt. I ran back to the bathroom and quickly donned a pair of running shorts and a T-shirt. I started to run back, but when I turned he was standing behind me. He picked at my sleeve and gave me a look worthy of Leah.
“I guess it will have to do.” Before he finished the last word we were three blocks away, looking up at a dark two-story contemporary home. There was no spinning. No sensation of movement. Just as Adis had said, it happened in the blink of an eye.
The Hancock’s home looked different at night, and it took me a moment to regain my bearings. Adis pointed at a dark figure slipping into a side window. “Oh dear, he’s moving faster than I thought,” he said, and again I found myself translocated or disapparated, this time into the living room of Patrick and Kelly Hancock’s home. I lurched forward. Maybe Sida misjudged the landing a little, because he slipped as well. “Sorry about that; it’s a little tricky with two people.”
He spoke in full voice, and I jumped. I raised a finger to my lips to admonish him to be quiet, but he only laughed.
“He can’t see or hear us unless I want him to. We aren’t quite synched in time. We are just a millisecond or two ahead of him. It’s not much, but it’s all that’s needed to create a separate reality.”
Eris deftly walked around the messy family room. He was quiet, but not completely silent. “How come we can hear him?” I still whispered.
“Interesting, huh? Time moves in only one direction. Forward, never backward. When he makes noise, it moves forward through time and we hear it a moment or two later. The sounds we make also move forward through time, but the difference is that he will never catch up to them.”
I nodded as if it all made sense, which it didn’t. I guess I hadn’t watched enough Star Trek. Sida walked into the family room and I followed, not knowing if it was the right thing to do or not.
“Now.” He turned to me once he had advanced within feet of the dark figure, who seemed to have been frozen in place. The grandfather clock that had been ticking ever so softly also stopped. “I’ve sped us up a little, which has the effect of slowing everything around us down. I want to make certain that we are in complete agreement. I don’t want there to be any misunderstandings.” I could see Sida much better than Eris, who despite being only inches away remained dark and indistinguishable. “I will deliver him to a suitable location, and when you have all the information you require, you will end his life. I will take care of the rest. Agreed?”
I nodded.
“No. You say it out loud so I can hear it,” he demanded.
“I agree,” I said in full voice.
“Excellent.” Now he smiled. He had the look of a man pausing to savor the moment just before biting into his favorite dessert. “Ready?” Just as I had begun to nod, the lights of the room switched on, temporarily blinding me. I bumped into a dining room chair and saw a form that could only be Eris fall back into the couch. After a second I could see, and the first thing I could make out was the smirk on Sida’s face. His head swiveled between us. “Surprise!” he yelled. “We’re all synched up again. Say hello to Eris!” His voice boomed through the house, and I heard movement on the floor above us.
Eris’s hood had dropped and I recognized him as the twenty-something reporter who had asked Mika about our dog. The one she had so effectively brushed off. For a moment I was stunned, not by who Eris was in the sunlit world, but by the fact that Adis had misidentified him. Eris wasn’t a member of the FBI or the APD. He didn’t carry a badge or a gun. He was just a reporter, and judging by his age I wasn’t certain he was even a full-fledged reporter. I was at first shocked, then disappointed. This is the guy who has caused us all the heartache? I asked myself. I looked at Sida with that question written across my face.
“Meet Eris. Born William Hartenstein on June 2, 1989, in Georgetown, Texas. Son of Abraham and Lucinda Hartenstein. Graduate of the University Of Texas School of Journalism.” Sida had slid across the family room and put his left arm around Eris as if they were close friends.
I’m pretty sure that my mouth was hanging open, but emotions quickly took over. Anger, rage, and fury replaced disillusionment. A sudden realization filled my mind. “You knew Mika was here, didn’t you?” I started to rush the bastard.
Sida raised an open hand to stop my advance. “No. Nothing happens here. We must do this correctly.” He used an affectation when pronouncing correctly. He gave Eris’s shoulders a squeeze. “Answer the man.” Eris tried to squirm away, but Sida simply increased the pressure. Two syringes, each filled with a white fluid, dropped to the floor. “Whoops,” Sida said. “Did you bring enough for everyone?” He shook Eris playfully.
I realized that Sida was enjoying this way too much, but filed that thought away. I heard multiple footsteps on the floors above, and then on the stairs behind, but I filed that thought away as well. A series of images began to form in my mind, all courtesy of Sida. I watched as Eris’s plans for my daughter were acted out. Her punishment for embarrassing him, her violation, and finally her murder. Then, as the four of us grieved Mika’s loss, Eris would come for our youngest daughter. “What are you doing,” I asked Sida.
“Knowing what he had in mind is one thing, but seeing it is entirely another.” He became serious. Sida continued to fill my mind with scenes that I won’t relive or relate here. It was all too much, and I tried to close my mind as a wave of nausea bent me over.
“Who the hell are you?” demanded Patrick Hancock. The room was silent for several long seconds. Eris was incapable of answering, as Sida’s grip was squeezing the air from his lungs. I was incapable of answering, as my mind was trying to squeeze dinner from my stomach, and Sida just smiled up at the man. “Answer me!” Hancoc
k screamed.
“Dad?” I heard Mika’s voice from the second-floor railing.
I managed to stand straight and said a really dumb thing. “Mika, we’re a little busy here, can you go back to bed?” I looked up at Mika, and then at Patrick Hancock and the handgun in his right hand.
“We’ve called the police,” Patrick said as he took two steps down the stairs.
“Good,” I said. I wanted to say more but suddenly found myself on the set of Dexter. Sida stood opposite me, a table between us. He had recreated the kill room perfectly. Plastic sheets hung from the ceiling and covered the tiled floor. Two surgical stands, each covered in green towels, flanked the table.
Eris was lying naked on the stainless steel table. Clear duct table bound every part of his body except for his face. He was awake but confused. “What are you doing?” His eyes shifted to Sida.
“What I promised you at the beginning.” He reached down and touched the tip of Eris’s nose. “Consequences,” he sang. He looked up at me and assumed a formal and dramatic pose. “Would you like me to read the charges?”
I was still adjusting to the rapid-fire scene changes. “What?” I returned his stare. “None of this is funny,” I said after re-establishing a degree of mental equilibrium. “It is the unfunniest thing that could possibly be.”
Eris said something that was immediately stifled by the rag Sida stuffed into his mouth. “I think it’s important to enjoy your work,” he said with mock sincerity.
I waved a hand at his inanity and stepped towards the bound man. Thoughts and images from Eris’s sick imagination still assaulted me, and they hadn’t dulled an iota with the change in our location, or with the change in his condition. I turned to Sida and was about to tell him a second time that I needed some things from my office when he slipped a sheet off the stand next to him and there was everything I needed.
I looked into the eyes of Eris, and his lingering confusion, mixed with disbelief, a sense of betrayal, and fear, made me smile (in truth I probably imagined most of this). I pulled the rag from his mouth. “Tell me everything,” I said, inches from his face.
“No,” he sneered. “I’ve watched you for months. You don’t have it in you.” He tried to turn his head towards Sida but the tape across his forehead prevented it. “And he can’t touch me.” He tried to spit but the spittle only fell back onto his face.
In my entire life I had never experienced such a hatred for anything or anyone. I was determined to make him suffer for as long as he had a pulse. I walked around the table and found everything that I needed to start an IV line. I jabbed his cephalic vein with a 16-gauge needle (trust me, this is a big needle, and no, I did not swab the site with alcohol first) and threaded in the silastic catheter. I started an intravenous drip, and when it was running nicely I taped the line to his arm. “I was going to just give you a little cocktail to lower your resistance, but now I’m having second thoughts.” Visions of both my daughters having their innocence and lives ripped from them pulsed through my brain. It took everything I had not to beat or stab him to death. I created my own visions of unrestrained violence with Eris as the star, and they competed with the vile images of my daughters.
Just for a moment, I’m going to interrupt my story. One of the most disturbing and interesting movies I have seen in the last twenty or so years was Man on Fire. Denzel Washington plays the part of a little girl’s body guard, and after she is kidnapped and presumed killed he goes on what is described as a “masterpiece of death.” I’ve watched this movie a number of times and with a number of different people, and inevitably the post-movie discussion turns to whether we could do that. Could we go on a cold, merciless crusade of killing, the only point of which is retribution? I have always answered yes, believing that anyone, no matter how pious, could be maneuvered into a situation in which they could kill. Obviously, to that point those discussions had simply been hypothetical. Now it was real, and suddenly those earlier declarations seemed embarrassingly foolish.
At some point I had picked up a trocar (basically a sharp, pointed metal stick). I spun it in my right hand and imagined plunging the instrument into Eris’s chest. I could almost feel the rush of exhilaration that would come when his face registered that he had been wrong about me. I found myself at the edge of the table, picking the perfect spot.
“Are you sure you want to do that right now?” Sida had switched sides and was again opposite me. ”Don’t you need something from him first?” Sida reminded me of my chief reason for being here.
Some of the murderous fog lifted in my mind, but enough remained for me to wonder if I was quick enough to bury the trocar far enough into Sida to eliminate the chiefest of my calamities. After a moment I pushed away from the table. He gave me a smile.
“Kill the son of a bitch! Now!” Eris screamed.
“Which son of a bitch?” I said, turning back to my immediate problem.
“You fool. No matter what he’s promised you, he will fuck you over.” I reached for the rag to ram between his teeth, but paused.
“He promised to deliver you.” I patted his cheek, and my murderous desires moderated to sadistic desires.
“You are such an idiot. You don’t get any of this do you?” The stress in his voice was like music to my ears. “Haven’t you wondered how I could do what I did? Did you ever ask yourself why he wants you to kill me? Why he set this whole thing up in the first place?”
Only about a thousand times, I answered to myself. “The only thing I want to hear from you is where you have taken the children you kidnapped. And my dog.”
“Your dog?” He laughed. “You want to know where your precious Nitrox and all the children went? Ask him.” He tried to nod toward Sida. “He’s got them.”
There are a lot of times when I am pretty dense, but this wasn’t one of them. My heart may have been pounding and my brain racing, but I knew the truth when I heard it. “You have them?” I looked at Sida.
“Do you have what you need?” Sida was completely unfazed by Eris’s revelation.
“Did you take them?” I shifted back to Sida and demanded an answer.
“I haven’t touched a hair on their heads. Mr. Hartenstein did that all by himself. Isn’t that right William?” Sida had discarded his jovial, hypomaniac persona in favor of his more natural menacing persona.
“Fuck you!” William screamed.
“The children have been removed from William’s care and are for the moment safe and secure.” He placed emphasis on his last word. “Let me remind you that we have an agreement, and I expect you to meet your responsibility.” He had taken half a step back from the table and rose to his full height. “If you are thinking about testing my resolve I would suggest you talk with Mr. Hartenstein.”
“Do it!” Eris screamed.
For a second my attention was so focused on Sida that I had no idea what Eris was talking about. Then I began to register the weight of the trocar in my right hand. Sida was just within my reach. If I was fast enough, accurate enough, and lucky enough, I could sink the trocar in his chest. I considered it for only half a heartbeat and then took a step back from the table. The probability of missing was near one hundred percent, and the consequences of missing would be incalculable. “No. Adis will take care of you. I’m not playing your games anymore.” I glanced down at Eris. We weren’t allies except against Sida. “The police can take care of you.” I turned around and tried to push through the vinyl sheets hanging from the ceiling and immediately knocked my hand against a solid wall. I followed the wall around the circumference of the room. I began to tear down the sheets and found that we were in a square room with four solid cinder block walls. There was no way out.
“You can leave when he is dead,” Sida said.
“Do it yourself,” I screamed at him, frantically looking for something Sida had overlooked.
“He can’t, it’s—” Sida stuffed the discarded rag back into Eris’s mouth.
“That is the last we will hea
r from you.” Sida had leaned towards Eris, and then turned back towards me.
“This is not what we agreed to,” I said after giving up my search and returning to the small room’s focal point. Sida was standing boldly in the light, his smirk bordering on a laugh. I squared my shoulders and faced him.
“I agreed to deliver this man to you. Here he is.” Sida pointed at the struggling Eris. “You promised to take his life after you had everything you needed from him. Do you need more time to question him?” He was now mocking me with pseudosincerity.
“What about the children?” I yelled, but my voice seemed to be absorbed by the solid walls.
“The only children you should be worried about are your own. Destroy him and they are safe.” He leaned across Eris, tantalizingly close to the trocar in my hand. “Fail to do so and I will make the same promise to John and Brittany Dale. If they fail, I will move on to Yasmin Highton.”
I was trapped in more ways than just one. Even though I hadn’t met the Dales or Yasmin, I had no doubt that to recover their children they would gladly thrust a trocar into Eris’s chest, leaving my children open to Sida’s retribution.
“You are a son of a bitch,” I said to Sida.
“It’s possible.” Playful Sida had returned now that he knew he had me right where he wanted. “Take as much time as you need.”
I slid up to the top of the table and pulled the rag from Eris’s mouth. I had not a shred of pity for the young man. He had murdered Jim and Kim Lee without a moment’s thought (in reality I had no idea how much thought he had put into it). He had stolen four children, and with it a good deal of their innocence. He had turned our lives inside out. He had taken my dog!
“Stop! There are things you don’t know.” He was scared now, maybe not as much as I wanted, but it was a start. For a while, I let him talk.
The Unyielding Future Page 22