by James Hunt
The phone rang next to a note folded in half.
18
Sam sat on the bench carved out in the kitchen window. She had her feet on the cushion, her back against the wall, knees tucked into her chest with her forearms pressed against her shins as she squeezed herself into a ball, staring at the guitar that rested on its stand nearby.
At five ten, she couldn’t make herself that small, but sitting where Grant had spent so much of his time over the past two years helped calm her for some reason. It was like sitting there allowed her to feel his presence.
The officer that had taken up residence on their couch had told her that Grant was coming home. Sam knew that it was only a matter of time before that happened. There was no way that the authorities were going to keep him on after the report aired.
And while Sam was excited and happy that Grant was coming home, she was also worried. Because the man who had spent the past two years teaching music and stepping beyond the grief that nearly destroyed his life would be forced to confront failure again.
The front door opened, and Sam’s heart skipped a beat as she quickly stood from the window seat and watched as Grant drifted inside the apartment like a ghost. All the color had drained from Grant’s face, and when he locked eyes with Sam, she wasn’t even sure if he saw her.
Officer Miles met his fellow officer at the door and then turned back around. “We’ll be just outside the door. If you need anything, let us know.”
The door shut, locking both Grant and Sam inside, the couple staring at one another, each uncertain of how to move forward.
It was Sam that broke first, moving toward Grant and throwing her arms around him. She squeezed him tight, the words still not coming, and hoped that her touch would provide some sense of comfort.
But Grant didn’t reciprocate the embrace. He just stood there, staring at the kitchen cabinets over Sam’s shoulder.
Sam leaned back and gently placed her palms against the rough stubble of Grant’s cheeks. “Hey. Honey, look at me.”
Grant’s eyes fell in line with hers. She searched those dark brown eyes, the same pair that had always looked at her with a love that she never thought she could experience. But there was no love in them now, not even pain or grief. She saw nothing.
“We’ll get through this,” Sam said, nodding along as she consoled both of them. “We’ve beaten worse, haven’t we?”
Grant gently grabbed Sam’s wrists and pulled her hands down. He then stepped around her, saying nothing as he walked to the bedroom.
Sam waited until he had gone inside before she followed him, and when she did, she didn’t dare go farther than the door.
Grant sat on the edge of their neatly-made bed. He was hunched forward, shoulder sloped, a man beaten past the point of defeat. What little sunlight there was seeped through the blinds of the window, but it didn’t stretch far enough to reach Grant, who remained cloaked in darkness.
Sam hugged herself in the doorway. She didn’t know how to help him. She didn’t know what to say. And she desperately wanted to know what he needed. “Say something, Grant. Because I can take anything but silence right now.”
Grant shook his head, and then parted his lips to speak, but only sighed. Sam finally entered the room, dropping to her knees at Grant’s feet. She reached for his hands, squeezing tight, and then even tighter when he didn’t react.
“I know what you’re thinking,” she said, unable to keep the desperation out of her voice. “But that road you’re convinced to cast yourself down isn’t a path you have to take. You’re not alone in this, Grant, and if you think that keeping quiet will protect me, then you’re wrong. Because wherever you go, I go. No matter what.”
Grant’s lower lip quivered, and the first tears fell in straight lines down his cheeks. He reached for her hand and held it, squeezing hard. It was the first sign of the return of his strength, and Sam whimpered in relief.
Sam sat next to him on the bed and held onto him as he buried his face into her shoulder. Small tremors radiated from Grant’s body, every shudder an emission of the grief and pain that was ravaging his soul. A man who had spent most of his life in darkness, searching for the light.
The pair stayed like that, Sam holding Grant until he finally sat back, drying his face, his eyes red.
“I’m sorry,” Grant said.
Sam rubbed his back. “It’s fine.”
Grant drew in a shaky breath and rubbed his palms together. “I should have told you about the video. I should have told you what happened at the cabin yesterday.” He faced her. “I know the report only speculated that it was me, but it’s true.” Shame flashed over his face, and then he lowered his head. “It was me.”
But Sam wasn’t here to judge him. “What happened?”
And so Sam listened. Grant told her about the evidence in their possession that suggested Mary Sullivan had been taken to the cabin where he lived in Deville after he was dismissed from the police force, the place where they first met. He told her about how Mary looked like Sam, another form of psychological torture inflicted by Dennis. He told her about the impossible choice he had between pressing the detonator for Mary to save her family, which the reporters didn’t comment on.
“There just wasn’t enough time to notify the family,” Grant said. “The bomb was placed in their living room three days ago by the same man that worked at the prison. He didn’t have any priors, nothing to flag him for something so violent. Dennis converted him, like he converted the others.”
Sam pulled his face to hers and held his gaze. “What you went through, what you had to choose, was an impossible decision. But this wasn’t your fault.” She sensed his trepidation, but she wouldn’t let him look away. “It’s not. And it might take you a long time to realize that, but it’s the truth. Just like it wasn’t your fault that these other people have died. You will catch him, Chase. I know you will because you are what is right. And he is what is wrong.”
The shadow of a smile spread across Grant’s face. “Still not going anywhere?”
Sam shook her head. “I’m staying right here. I promise.”
Grant cleared his throat, and he suddenly looked tired. “I’m going to take a shower.”
“Okay.” Sam watched him disrobe on the way to the bathroom, and then picked up his dirty clothes and tossed them into the hamper. She headed to the kitchen, knowing that he probably hadn’t eaten anything all day, and defrosted some leftovers and her thoughts traveled to what came next.
The fallout from the report wasn’t going to end anytime soon. It’d be a long, drawn-out battle, in both the public eye and the courts. And she knew that Grant’s past trials were going to work against him.
The microwave’s timer beeped, and Sam checked the lasagna, and then put it back in for a few more minutes.
She could request a transfer, maybe something on the East Coast. While Grant had lived in Seattle his entire life, she believed he’d consider leaving after something like this, because while his name might be cleared in the courts, the public would keep its stigma about him. He would lose his teaching position, and the parents of the kids he taught private lessons to would stop sending their children to him.
The more she thought about it, the more she realized that getting out of Seattle was the best thing that they could do.
The timer beeped again, and this time the lasagna was heated all the way through. She poured a glass of water and set the table just as she heard the shower turn off. A few minutes later, Grant stepped out in a fresh shirt and jeans, still drying off his hair with the towel.
“I thought you’d be hungry,” Sam said.
“Thanks.” Grant sat down and scraped the plate clean. He leaned back, shutting his eyes. “I needed that.”
Sam reached for his hand. “Listen, I was going to call work and request some time off.”
“It’s going to be more than a couple days before all of this gets sorted out,” Grant said. “And even after it’s all done, there w
on’t be any guarantees that I’ll still be a free man.”
“I know,” Sam said. “But we’ll get through this. I love you.”
It was the first smile that she’d seen him wear since yesterday when he had asked her to marry him. It was hard to believe it had been only a day. It felt like a lifetime ago.
“I love you too,” Grant said. “More than anything.”
Sitting there, looking at him, Sam prayed that he believed those words. Because what came next would be ugly, frightful, and exhausting.
Grant’s phone rang, Mocks appearing on the screen and he answered.
Even before Grant said hello Sam could hear Mocks screaming, and Sam followed Grant into the bedroom where he removed her rifle from the closet, which he stuffed into a bag along with a box of ammunition. And when Grant told her what happened, that Rick and Chase had been taken, she fought him when he told her to stay put.
“Hey.” Grant forced her still and pressed his forehead against hers. “Do you trust me?”
Sam nodded.
“Then stay. I can’t do this if I don’t know you’re safe.” Grant stepped toward the door, holding a duffel bag full of weapons. “I will come back to you.”
“Promise me, Chase Grant.” Sam’s voice wavered.
Hand on the door, he nodded. “I promise.”
And while she knew that Grant was a man of his word, when she watched him leave, it felt like her heart had been ripped from her chest.
19
By the time that Grant arrived at Mocks’s house, she had reached that mental plane where rage met tranquility and endowed a person with a quiet power.
“Did you call anyone esle?” Grant asked, walking into the garage.
Mocks shook her head. “No.” She glanced to the car. “How much ammunition do you have?”
“Enough.” Grant studied his old partner. He’d never seen her like this. Not even when Rick was taken by the drug cartel. “If we go in alone, then we’ll face whatever Dennis has planned alone.”
Mocks handed Grant the note she found. It was Dennis’s handwriting. It had similar instructions from yesterday.
Bring Grant and come alone, or they die.
“I’m tired of that bastard leaving me notes,” Mocks said.
Grant set the paper aside. “It doesn’t say where to go. Did you check the house for any more instruct—”
“I checked.” Mocks stopped her pacing. “I figured he’d call or do something or—” Her phone rang, and she quickly reached for her pocket. She flashed the screen to Grant, disappointed. “It’s Lane.” She answered it on speakerphone. “What?”
“Lieutenant, you know those transponders we found at the crime scenes?” Lane asked. “They just turned on.”
Mocks headed for Grant’s car. “Where are they?”
“I’m sending you a map with coordinates,” Lane answered. “They’re out in the middle of nowhere. You should have it in your email now.”
Mocks pulled it up, showing it to Grant as they climbed into the car. She frowned. “Christ, they’re in four separate locations. Which one am I supposed to go to?”
Grant studied the map. The area was in a remote stretch of wilderness northeast of the city. He tilted his head to the side. “Lane, connect those four points with straight lines.”
“Okay, hold on.”
A few seconds later Mocks received another email, and when she opened it, the map had a perfect square drawn in it. Mocks enlarged the image. “What the fuck is that?”
It took Grant a minute for him to see it, but it made sense. “It’s a perimeter. He made himself a game preserve to hunt.” He pointed to the screen. “See that? It’s the only road that leads into the area. That’s where he wants us to go.” He backed out of the driveway.
“Lane, who else have you told about this?” Mocks asked.
“You were my first call, Lieutenant,” Lane answered.
“Good. I want this kept within our circle.”
And almost as an afterthought, Grant remembered the defense attorney, Douglas Chambers. “Lane, have we managed to find Chambers?”
Lane cleared his throat, sounding like he was choking on something. “I’m still working on that.”
“Keep us posted,” Mocks said. “And remember to keep this to yourself.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
The call ended, and Mocks pocketed the phone. “Let’s go.”
Grant drove while Mocks took apart her Glock and reassembled it to keep her hands busy.
Grant knew that she had been in this situation before. During their last official case together, Rick had been taken, used as a pawn to try and scare them off the trail of some human traffickers. They had gone in alone on that one too, but they had the good sense to call for backup once they arrived.
But Grant knew that there would be no backup for this mission. They’d go in alone, and they’d come out alone, if they came out at all.
Mocks put the slide back onto the body of the pistol, her fingers working over the weapon deftly and with a mind of their own. “We should have seen this coming.”
Grant kept both hands on the wheel, glancing at the city skyline in the rearview mirror. “I thought he would have gone after Sam. I thought he would have gone after me.”
Mocks slid the magazine back into the weapon and then flicked on the safety, thumping her head back against the seat rest. “What was it like, Grant?”
Grant frowned. “What was what like?”
“Losing your wife and your child in the same moment?”
“Mocks, that isn’t going to happen—”
“I need to know, Grant.” Mocks swallowed, shutting her eyes as she fidgeted in her seat. “It’s just better for me to prepare myself.”
Grant nodded, understanding that it was better to have a lay of the land than going in blind. “You go through all the stages, but how you experience them doesn’t feel like anything people talk about. Your existence becomes surreal. Not exactly a dream, but not real life either. It becomes something different. Something worse.”
Mocks kept her eyes straight ahead, her hand gripped firmly around the pistol.
Grant waited for her to say something, but then exhaled and continued. “You’ll want to kill yourself. But you’ll want to do it slowly, in a way that’ll make you hurt the most, because you’ll want to overpower the uncontrollable pain with something that you can control.” He glanced to the crook of Mocks’s arms, where all the old track marks from those needles resided.
Mocks’s eyes were dry, but red.
“And then you finally realize that there isn’t any type of pain that you can give yourself, no matter how great or self-sabotaging, that will return control of your life, so you’ll distract yourself with something constructive like work. You’ll make yourself so busy that you don’t even have time to think.” Grant’s eye twitched as he stared at the first curve of the mountain road that would take them northeast into the woods. “So busy that you don’t give yourself time to grieve the terrible loss that you’d just been dealt.” He slowly slipped into the past, remembering every detail about that first year after the death of Ellen and their unborn child. “You won’t eat much. Won’t sleep. You’ll be tired, but so mad that fatigue just burns off you. And you’ll like that anger. You’ll like the anger because it keeps you sharp and focused and agile. It helps take all of that pain you feel and focuses it on something constructive, and you feed off of that anger over and over, day in and day out, every breath you take in and out only circulates that hate through your veins faster.” He drew in a breath, the muscles along his arms and shoulders burning from the memory. “But then, after a while, that hate turns to poison. And it makes you sick, but it traps you because the only thing that makes you feel less sick is funneling more of that anger into your soul, which makes the poison spread even faster. And then it cripples you, brings you to your knees and forces you to confront the source of the pain that started all of it. Only now you’re too weak, and you�
��re too tired, and you know with one hundred percent certainty that if you face that pain, it will tear you down and destroy every last bit of your existence, and then you’ll be nothing.”
A tear fell from the corner of Mocks’s eye, but she quickly wiped it away before it had a chance to roll down the side of her face, then looked down at the pistol clutched in her hand.
Grant removed one hand from the wheel and placed it over the free hand that didn’t hold the pistol. He squeezed, and she finally looked over at him.
“But then a friend comes along and reminds you that while everything you went through was shit, you’re still alive. And all of that pain that you held inside of you doesn’t belong there. It belongs to the people who took your loved ones from you. And they remind you that the people you lost would hate to see what you’ve become. Because you’re not yourself. But you don’t have to stay that way forever. There is always a path back home. Always.”
Mocks matched the firm grip on Grant’s hand and no longer tried to wipe the tears running down her face as they flowed freely.
“But you won’t have to go down that path, Mocks,” Grant said, keeping his firm grip on her hand. “We’re going to get Rick and Chase back. I promise.”
Mocks gasped, the breath sharp and powerful as she let go of the pistol and wiped her face. She took a few minutes to regain her composure and then finally released Grant’s hand. “How much farther?”
Grant checked the navigation. “We’re close.”
20
Deep in the woods, Dennis secured the rope around the boy’s waist and then stepped back. The kid was slumped forward, asleep. He’d kept the boy sedated. He had grown tired of the shrill screaming. Now the boy lay still. He looked peaceful.
Nothing about Dennis’s childhood was peaceful and quiet. It was all rage and chaos. His father was a man who enjoyed control. And as a child, he was powerless to stop his father’s brutal assault.