by Roger Hayden
Standing in the dirt only a few feet away, she saw a pair of boots that began casually walking toward her. She lifted her head as tears streamed down her cheeks. A man in a black robe strolled closer, holding a shotgun pointed in her direction.
Air entered her lungs. She screamed out in pain, struggling to regain her balance. The dual blast had immobilized her.
“Sorry, señorita,” G said from behind her. “You just got a little too close to the flame.”
She couldn’t muster the strength to turn around. Her pistol lay just out of reach. She held her arm out, but the effort caused excruciating pain. Her fingers trembled inches from the pistol handle. A boot came down in front of her face and kicked the pistol away.
She cried out again, looking up to see the man pointing his shotgun in her face. A gloved hand went up to the hood, which hid his face. When he pulled it down, he exposed deeply burned features so scarred it was hard to look at him. Nothing about him looked familiar except his startling blue eyes.
“Hello, Miriam. Nice to see you again,” he said with a twisted smile.
Holding Cell
Miriam woke in a darkened room, lying on a single, bare mattress. The air was stale, and there wasn’t a window or any light except from a dim, battery-operated lantern sitting in the far corner across from her. Her chest throbbed with pain. Her left arm felt heavy, and when she moved it, she felt a metal clamp around her wrist and a heavy chain hooked into the wall.
She had little memory of what had happened or how she had gotten there. But a sickened feeling in her gut told her that she was in the worst kind of trouble.
It still hurt to move. Then a rush of memory came back to her. She had been shot, and for a moment, she wondered if she was dead. She felt her chest. Her ribs were sore and her breasts hurt, but she wasn’t bleeding.
There were no gunshot wounds—amazing when she recalled feeling the pelt of a shotgun blast. Whoever was behind the trigger must have used bean bag rounds. She was familiar with those types of rounds, which were traditionally used in riot control.
Suddenly a voice spoke to her from the shadows.
“The problem today is that it’s hard to find someone to trust.”
“Who’s there?” she said in a hoarse, desperate voice.
The man continued. “But something I’ve learned from experience is that everyone has a price.”
The man got up and approached her from the corner, then came into view—bald and stripped of his eyebrows and facial hair. His pinkish face was leathery and scarred. He wore a black robe with the hood tossed back. Phillip Anderson stood before her, disfigured, but recognizable enough. His mere presence shocked her.
“So, that’s my question to you, Miriam. What’s your price?” he continued.
“What are you doing here?” she asked between labored breaths.
“I’m the man you’re looking for,” he answered. “The one Guillermo told you about.”
She yanked on her chain and tried to sit up, but the pain was too much. “And you have Sarah?” she asked, eyes darting around the room.
“I do. The congressman’s daughter will make a nice addition to my collection.”
Miriam gasped in fear. Her desire to find the kidnapping madman had led her straight to Phillip Anderson and back into the recurring nightmare she could not wake up from.
“What collection?” she asked, not fully prepared to find out.
“I’m glad you asked,” Phillip said, kneeling down next to a single bucket in the otherwise empty room. He reached inside and pulled out a decapitated head.
Miriam gasped at the horror of it. She squinted, trying to see more clearly in the darkened room. When her eyes adjusted a bit more, she could see that it was not the head of just any man—it was Guillermo.
She recoiled against the wall and closed her eyes as Phillip stepped forward, dangling the head in the air close to her face, taunting her.
“I’m surprised at you, Miriam. I thought you’d be happy. He betrayed you, so I decided to repay the favor.”
She opened her eyes and stared back at him with absolute contempt. “I always knew you were a sick man, but a full-blown psychopath?”
“Not entirely. I’ve been very patient.” He lowered the head back into the bucket, where it emitted a stomach-churning dunking sound. Miriam was relieved that she didn’t have to look at it anymore.
“You followed me here? All the way to Arizona?” she asked, stunned.
“Of course,” he answered. He sauntered in her direction in the same laid-back, casual stroll he had exhibited after shooting her with the bean bag rounds.
“You must be in some real pain right now,” he continued, pointing to her chest. “But I had no choice. I know you’re a quick draw, and I had to immobilize you somehow.” He tilted his mutilated face back and laughed. “That would be the second time I got the drop on you. Imagine that.”
He reached into his robe near his chest and pulled out a Magnum .45 revolver—the size of a cannon, it seemed. Miriam curled into a ball and pressed her back against the cold concrete wall as he extended his arm toward her, pointing the gun at her head.
“Shall we go for a third time?” he asked, exposing blackened teeth in a sinister grin.
Miriam wanted to tell him to just do it and get it over with but then thought of Ana. She couldn’t leave her daughter. That was out of the question. Detective Keely’s words came back to haunt her. She shouldn’t have gone alone. She’d gotten too eager. But with any luck, they would search for her. Her colleagues were good detectives, and the closer they got to Miriam, the greater the chance, she believed, they could rescue Sarah.
Phillip found amusement in Miriam’s wincing as she shielded her face with her hands. Satisfied enough, he lowered the revolver and stuck it back into his robe. “Your time hasn’t come yet,” he said. “Soon, but not yet.”
He pulled a stool from the shadows, dragging it across the ground, and set it right next to Miriam’s single mattress. He sat atop it and looked down on her. “This must all look familiar to you. The set up, I mean. This is exactly how I had your little Ana. No chain though. Wasn’t necessary.” He sighed and cracked his knuckles. “Maybe I’ll pay her a visit too.”
Miriam glared at him with her teeth clenched. “You stay away from her, you sick, twisted son of a bitch!”
Another crooked smile flashed across his scarred face. “I sure know how to push your buttons.” He crossed one leg over the other and leaned closer to her. “Miraculous that I survived an explosion that killed five other people. Even crazier that everyone thinks I’m dead. And best of all, my assets went to my parents.” He paused and lowered his head in sadness. “Real shame, though. They passed a few months ago. Everything that had happened to them and their business, it was just too much. Dad had a heart attack. Mom followed with a stroke. I think losing him did that to her.”
He lifted his head, which had a brighter expression now. “You see, my parents were old fashioned. They worked for every penny, and built Anderson Auto out of nothing. I wanted to help them, show them that we could have even more. So I took the initiative. Cut corners. Started new endeavors. Drug distribution. Gambling. Money laundering. Racketeering. You know, like how the mob stayed in business after the end of prohibition. And before the feds could take all of what we had built together, my parents took every cent I gave them and buried it. And only my younger brother, Walter, knew where it was.”
As his story progressed, Miriam’s examined the room in desperate search for a way to escape.
“See, Walter kind of had this crazy idea that I brought down our entire family,” Phillip continued. “When I came to see him, looking like this, he told me to get out of his life.” Phillip suddenly turned solemn. “Told me that he wished that I was dead. Wouldn’t even tell me where all the money was. My money. So I had to add him to my collection.”
Miriam gasped and covered her mouth as he stared at her with cold, steely eyes.
“You
see, I believe that I did die in that explosion… but then I reemerged. I was… reborn. I serve a higher power now. And for every head I collect, I get that much closer to immortality.”
Miriam was beside herself listening to his horrific ramblings. “What in the hell are you talking about?” she shouted, clutching her chest.
“There was a reason I came back—to inflict as much pain and damage on this world as possible.”
Miriam tugged on her chain, mustering all the strength she could. Phillip leaned back on his stool with his arms crossed, observing her like a studious professor.
“What are you going to do? Pull the chain out of the wall?” He laughed again. His gravelly chuckle sent shivers down her spine. “I’d like to see that,” he continued.
She didn’t see any point in pleading with him. Her desperation would just generate more amusement. Instead, she decided to engage him while continuing her search for any possible way out.
“Why did you have Guillermo tell me about you? Why the blue van?”
He replied seamlessly. “Because you’re a good detective, but you’ve grown content. Bored even. I wanted to give you a case—something to make things interesting. A challenge.” He stood up and kicked the stool back onto the hard floor. “Then I wanted to take it all away from you.”
Miriam searched her mind for something to dampen his confidence. “My partner knows where I went. He knows everything. They’ll be searching for me, so it’s only a matter of time.”
Phillip took a long pause while caressing the blistered scars on his face. “That’s interesting. But do you want to know something even more interesting?”
Miriam didn’t answer as her eyes looked beyond him, trying to make out the size and scope of the room she was being held in.
He leaned down and pulled Guillermo’s head from the bucket again. The eyes were rolled upward and the emotionless mouth open, frozen like a statue. Phillip pointed to the head as he clutched it by the hair. “I kidnap a congressman’s daughter and the entire city goes crazy. I murder a low-life miscreant, and it doesn’t even make the eleven o’clock news. No one will probably ever know. Where’s the justice in that? Why is the girl so much more important than this man?”
His fingers released the head as it dropped back into the bucket with a sound that made Miriam’s stomach plunge with sickness.
“What do you want from me?” she asked as though there was an answer.
He thought to himself, nodding. “Before I reemerged from the explosion, I couldn’t shake this feeling that I was someone else. Many different people, actually. Nonetheless, I had a weakness. Children. Young girls. I want to be their friend. Maybe my need for acceptance started when Betsy Claremont screamed and turned away from me in second grade when I tried to kiss her. The urge only grew as I got older. I took those girls and kept them in an underground lair, as you well know.”
Miriam couldn’t take any more of his poisonous words. She covered her ears with her hands and clenched her eyes shut. “Enough, you sick bastard! I don’t want to hear any more.”
Phillip stopped and placed a gloved hand over his chest, feigning shock and offense. “I’m only trying to answer your questions.”
“I didn’t ask you about your disgusting lair or anything else. What do you want from me?”
“I want you to experience what they experienced. To give you insight into being a victim, knowledge that you could never discover in a million years of detective work.” He stepped forward, glaring at her. “That’s why you’re fucking here. Got it?” Spit flew from between his teeth as his voice rose.
She didn’t know what else to say. Her only hope was to escape.
“I want to see Sarah,” she said.
“In time,” he responded, turning away. His voice drifted as he slunk back into the shadows, opening an unseen door. “Until then, stay comfortable.” The sound of a heavy, creaking door echoed throughout the room. He slammed it shut, offering nothing more. Miriam lay in the dimness of her new cell, praying for an impossible outcome. She had to survive. There was no other option. And in order to survive, she had to escape.
***
Before Phillip Anderson could flee from the feds, the boat explosion had thrown his body a hundred feet in the air and into a nearby sawgrass marsh enclosed by looming mangrove trees that stretched out from the shore’s shallow tidal sediment. For the first hour, Phillip just lay there, floating on his back unconscious in a shallow pool, horribly burnt from his head down.
The authorities tended to the aftermath of the explosion as Phillip lay there semiconscious. Somehow, in all the searching and patrolling of the South channel, they missed the one submerged spot where he lay submerged within lily pads and weeds.
A black water moccasin swam past Phillip’s body, slithering against the current and toward deeper waters. Coast Guard boats trailed past the marsh, headed farther down the channel. Meanwhile, federal agents walked the shoreline with dogs, in pursuit of Anderson, on the off-chance that he had survived.
His red and blackened body blended in with the thick marsh foliage as though it was a branch or log. The trees further concealed his appearance from afar. After the search parties moved on, Anderson came to, gasping in a horrible fit of pain with no recollection of where he was or how he gotten there.
The moon was a bluish orb in the night sky and the swamp echoed with a deep symphony of crickets and frogs and night birds. His vision was blurred; his movements were slow and labored. He had floated ashore, finding himself caught in mud and weeds. But he could feel nothing. The third-degree burns had singed his nerves and blood vessels.
Layers of skin had been reduced to pulp, reddened blisters and blackened flesh. As he sat up slowly, the fogginess faded as details of the incident became clearer. Phillip recalled being on the boat. Something had happened. There was an explosion, and either he was already dead or he was destined to live the rest of his years with the mangled visage of a burn victim.
He had no hair. He face was covered in blisters. He struggled to move but was too weak and sick with shock. His body had sunk into the thick mud. He trembled as a helicopter flew overhead with its spotlight flashing, searching the mangroves and the water. In the far distance, he could hear boats. He was still being hunted.
With one leg up, he attempted to stand and walk, but could only crawl. His pants, shredded in the blast, gave little protection. Both his legs dragged, and he could barely keep his arms up. He felt crippled. Debilitated. Helpless. But he knew that he needed to keep moving.
He crawled through the weeds and up the muddy banks, going as far as he could—about fifty feet before collapsing. He rose again, gritting his blackened teeth, and crawled another fifty feet, then fell again. His lungs felt as charred as his skin, with every breath pulsating and burning and sending an intense stinging pain that spread throughout his lower abdomen. Perhaps it was time to turn himself in. Either that or face the vast wilderness of the Everglades. But Phillip would not give up.
As he lay under the night sky on his stomach, with only a few tattered patches of jeans remaining, he had a vision, intensified by his frenzied delirium. An unseen, malevolent force stood and spoke not with a voice, but with its mind, feeding Phillip its thoughts—explaining why he had been spared. His job wasn’t done yet. There was still much to be done. And Miriam was to be his for eternity, the voice told him. The mysterious apparition vanished as quickly as it had appeared, leaving Phillip with a renewed sense of energy.
He had lain in a field throughout the night as unseen insects crawled over his nerveless flesh. By dawn, he could stand. As he rose on wobbly legs, he got a fair look at the condition of his body. His chest was festered with reddish and white bulging blisters. The skin on his arms and legs was ravaged. He could feel nothing in his crotch and was too terrified to look.
His skin looked stretched and folded, with a series of spidery welts and blisters covering his front and back. Lack of physical sensation was a blessing in disguise. L
uckily, his shoes were somewhat intact, but barely holding together. He continued, walking across chest-high sawgrass, as the sun peeked out from the clouds above and shined down from above.
The ground was moist and spongy. He constantly found himself sloshing through puddles. Directionless and without clear purpose, Phillip walked for what felt like hours, badly dehydrated and in need of serious medical attention. Any other man, he believed, would have been dead miles back. He felt indestructible, driven nearly entirely by vengeance.
He saw a boat ahead near the Everglades coastline with a small canopy attached to it—a fishing boat trolling the waters with two men sitting aboard with their poles in hand.
Phillip hunched down like a wild animal and moved through the weeds nearing the water. A portable radio played classic rock tunes from the boat as Phillip neared. A man with a white beard and tropical shirt manned the outboard engine in the stern while his buddy, a lanky man with a boonie cap, sat in the bow casting his line. The boat slowed and then drifted without the engine running as the men found their spot.
Phillip kept a careful eye on them from behind a patch of palmetto bushes. They looked to have drifted about fifty feet out from where he hid. His twitching eyes followed them as they came closer to a canal, closer to land. On the boat, he saw an Igloo cooler, which caused him to lick his dry, blistering lips.
He wanted the cooler. He wanted the boat. And he was ready to take it all. He stayed low and moved along the shore, causing only a minimal rustle in the brush. The men seemed too wrapped up in their own conversation to pay attention.
Phillip knelt behind some palmettos and looked out again. The boat was only a short swim away. He looked around at the weedy ground for a weapon, something that would give him an advantage. There were two men in the boat and no matter how confident Phillip felt, he wasn’t invincible, especially not now.
A flash of something bright caught his eyes. He looked down and saw an empty bottle buried halfway into the mud—another sign of what he had to do. The bottle made a tight suction sound as he pulled it from the mud. He crept over to a low hanging cypress covered in low-hanging moss.