The Warning

by Saul, Jonas

  The guy at the door was watching every face as they entered so he hadn’t seen her falter yet. She turned away from him and headed for the Temple. A couple of the women said things like, “No, this way,” and, “To the basement,” but Sarah only nodded and kept going. There was no way she would make it past the guy standing at the door back there. She was sure of it.

  Without looking, she almost bumped into the back of a third man in a black leather jacket.

  This is becoming monotonous.

  She made to walk past him as the last few people left the building but the guy grabbed her arm to stop her.

  “No, it’s the other way. We need everyone to go to the…”

  He didn’t stop talking because she had turned and reached into her basket. He didn’t stop talking because of the sound of the weapon discharging. He stopped talking because the second he recognized her and the bruise he put on her face was the same second a bullet hit him in the center of his throat.

  His grip tightened on her arm. His hand went for his weapon, but ended up on his wound, blood seeping through his fingers in gushing movements. Then he released her and slipped down the wall.

  In the shock of the moment Sarah lost touch with what was happening around her. A couple of women ran up and stared wide eyed at the man bleeding on the floor.

  “Go get a doctor. This man needs help,” Sarah said, keeping her weapon hidden behind her back. She followed them to the door and shut it behind them. She set her basket down and as fast as she could move, she pulled two wicker chairs over to try to hold the doors shut.

  When she picked up her basket and turned around, one of the Mormon women was staring at her.

  “We’re a quiet people. What have you done? Why would you do this in our Temple? This is the worst crime.”

  Sarah could see the woman’s eyes watering. She was seriously buying her own bullshit.

  “No it isn’t, sister. In your sheltered compound life you have no idea what real fuckers like this are doing. They have been kidnapping young girls and they’re hiding them here on your compound. I have come to take them home.”

  “You want to remove our children? Is that what you want?”

  “No, not your children–”

  The woman cut her off. “We are a peaceful people,” she said while shaking her head.

  “Yeah, well, so am I. Get a life, sister, because this guy is filth and real crimes are happening in the real world. You may be able to avoid it on your compound, but when they bring their victims here, then it’s my problem.”

  As Sarah stepped forward to enter the Temple she heard a squeal from somewhere above. The woman looked up too.

  “I thought everyone was evacuated,” Sarah said.

  “Everyone was.”

  She could see the woman was stunned. Maybe she was going into shock after watching a man die in front of her.

  “Then what’s upstairs?”

  “Rooms.”

  “Rooms for what?”

  “It’s where the babies are baptized and sometimes I’ve heard that new wives consummate their marriages there.”

  “Are you serious? In the Temple?”

  The woman looked at her. “What? What did I say? Am I serious about what?”

  “Nothing. If you want to live you might want to get across the road to the basement like everyone else,” Sarah said. She dropped the basket and held the cop’s gun firmly in her right hand. The time for subtlety was over. With one man down they would know she was here.

  The woman started moving toward the door. She didn’t look back at Sarah. The door swung open easily after the chair was pushed aside and then she was gone.

  Alone in this large cavernous Temple, Sarah started for the side, walking by the pews. She found the stairs and started up them as quietly as she could. There were no more sounds from upstairs except for the usual scuffling sound of people moving around.

  It took her almost no time at all to get to the top of the stairs. A small hallway led to three closed doors. She paused and looked back down into the Temple area below, allowing herself a moment to catch her breath. If it wasn’t for the constant scuffling sounds of people moving around on this level it would feel like the whole building was empty.

  With the silence of a ballet dancer on her toes gliding down the hallway, Sarah stayed close to the wall and moved beside the first door to listen. She heard nothing behind it.

  Her stomach growled. It had been so long since she’d eaten again. After using the bathroom in that truck stop this morning she wished she’d gotten something to eat, but bumped into that cop with the questions instead.

  Wouldn’t that be funny if her stomach gave her away? she thought and smiled to herself.

  The next door also had no noise behind it. A soft thump and another scuffle told her the movement was coming from behind door number three.

  She wasn’t trained on how to enter a room. There was no police training for civilians, no S.W.A.T. manual to read. All she knew how to do was surprise them with speed and be violent to get their attention. So she did just that.

  All it took was one hard shoulder bump and a quick twist of the door handle to knock the door open. It flew around so hard that it hit the other wall with a bang.

  Sarah, gun pointing out in front of her, jumped into the room. As soon as she crossed the threshold, an arm holding a wooden club dropped down onto her right wrist, snapping it with a loud audible crack. The gun went flying from her grip, lost to the air, along with her hope of getting out of here alive.

  She couldn’t believe the pain. It was almost instant. From the moment the wood broke her wrist to the moment she found herself on her knees leaning into the doorframe she hadn’t even seen who was in the room yet.

  Water covered her eyes. She had to blink it away to see the five teenage girls staring back at her. Forlorn eyes, saddened by a knowledge that death wasn’t far away, deepened by a depression that had stolen their innocence, these girls stared back at the person who had come for them, the one person who might have helped them leave this nightmare behind. What stared back at them was a beat up girl just past her own teenage horror, wounded now to the point of immobility.

  Sarah held her right wrist in her left hand, moaning and rocking back and forth as it began swelling. She looked up at her attacker and saw Jack Tate, or Armond as she had come to know him, looking back at her, grinning.

  “Glad you could join us. Now I finally get to kill you, you meddling bitch.”

  Chapter 47

  The Nissan hadn’t been hard to find. The land out this way was vast and barren. On this particular curve in the road, Parkman could easily see the tire treads of a recent skid mark where a vehicle left the road. He pulled over and got out. The sun was higher now, the heat rising with it. By the time he got off the shoulder and was walking towards the shrubbery, his shirt was pasted to his back.

  The rear of the Nissan came into view. He pulled his piece out and approached with caution. The only sound was a vehicle racing by on the highway. Then something moved by the car. Or was it the car that moved?

  “Hello, anybody there?”

  It came from the car. Parkman saw two holes in the trunk lid that resembled bullet holes. A sweep of the area confirmed no one was waiting to ambush him.

  “This is the police. Identify yourself,” Parkman said.

  “Oh, hey, get me outta here. I’m Andre Wilson, an Arizona State Trooper. Some girl got the jump on me. She tricked me and stuffed me in the trunk.”

  Sarah Roberts, that’s my girl…

  “Did this girl have a bruise on her cheek?”

  “Yes, yes. Now get me out of here.”

  Parkman holstered his weapon. “Okay, hold on, if the car is unlocked I’ll pop the trunk.”

  He walked around and opened the driver’s side door which was unlocked. Down beside the seat he flipped the trunk button. On the passenger seat he saw scattered papers. Parkman reached in, picked them up and as he got out of the car, pocke
ted them.

  He walked around to the back and saw the Trooper crawling out, his hands cuffed in the front.

  “You doing okay? How long were you in there?” Parkman asked.

  The Trooper got to the ground and stood up. “I don’t know, probably an hour and a half, maybe two hours. Hard to tell. I have to admit, there were times when I was wondering if someone would find me, but I kept reassuring myself that I’d called in so it would only be a matter of time. Where are you from?”

  Parkman had grabbed his cuff keys and began working on releasing the Trooper’s wrists. “Long way from here. I’ve been trailing that girl for hundreds of miles. Did she say anything about where she was going?”

  Andre shook his head. “No, nothing. It was clear to me that she just wanted the cruiser. She followed me until these trees could give her coverage and then made me come in after her when she ran off the highway. I shoulda seen it coming. She’s good, but it sure pissed me off.”

  Parkman nodded. The cuffs flipped open. “If you only knew how good. And trust me; she pisses a lot of people off. Let me call this in and get one of your colleagues to come pick you up.”

  Andre was already walking away from him but he was heading towards the trees, away from the highway. “Go ahead, call it in. I gotta take a piss. I was holding it to see if I got out in time. Didn’t want to soil my uniform.”

  Parkman turned around, pulled out his cell and dialed Jill while he began reading the papers he took from the front seat of the Nissan. By the time Jill answered he recognized the notes for what they were and knew what needed to be done.

  “Jill Hanover here.”

  “Jill, its Parkman.”

  “Where the hell are you?”

  “Fredonia, Arizona. I’m tracking Sarah Roberts.”

  “Fredonia? Why is she in Fredonia?”

  “Look, how fast can you get down here?”

  “Why?” Jill asked.

  “Something big is going down at an address on Six Mile Road. I don’t know what yet, but I can tell you we need to be there.”

  Andre walked up beside him. “What’s this I hear about Six Mile Road?”

  “Jill hold on a sec,” Parkman lowered the phone. He lifted the paper with the address on it. “Do you know what is located at this address?”

  “Sure, it’s a huge Mormon compound. A gated and secured facility.”

  Parkman lifted a finger to get Andre to wait.

  “Jill, I think Sarah is in trouble. She stole a police car and I can assure you she has singlehandedly broken into a gated Mormon Compound.”

  “Stole a police car? Broke into a Mormon compound? Why would she do that?”

  “Probably because that’s where the perps have taken their captives. It’s a perfect hiding place, away from civilization.” He motioned for Andre to follow and started for his car. “It’s how she operates too. She does things alone, without any help, but I’m afraid she may be in over her head. How long before you can get here?”

  “I’m on my way. I have the chopper. It shouldn’t be more than an hour.”

  Parkman pocketed his cell and jumped in his car. Andre got in the other side.

  “Take me to this compound. We need to get there quick.”

  He turned the car around, hit the lights and dropped the accelerator.

  “We can’t just walk in. That’s one of the heaviest guarded compounds in the area. Remember what happened in Texas back in two thousand and eight?”

  “I have a feeling the front gate will be wide open already.”

  Chapter 48

  “Get over where I can see you,” Armond shouted.

  Sarah got up from the floor and stumbled across to the wall to sit with the other girls. The raw edge of the pain had abated a little, becoming a dull ache, throbbing with her pulse. She cleared her eyes and stumbled back down to the floor. She had to try to stay focused. Think, dammit, think. There was no way she would let it end here.

  “I have waited for this for years. We had it planned well,” Armond said. “Did you know that?”

  Sarah shook her head in the negative. Armond had already picked up her weapon and put it in his waistband. He’d closed the door and called someone on his cell phone telling them to let him know when they had the all-clear. Then meet him up here. Sarah knew the all-clear would come shortly and when Armond’s associates showed up, it would all be over.

  “The girl’s body by my house was to throw the Feds off. They’ve been tracking me for too long. I couldn’t lead a private life anymore. If they thought someone else did that killing, maybe they would leave me alone because I knew they were trying to pin her kidnapping on me. My boys are creatures of habit so they ripped her shirt like they were supposed to. But fuck if they didn’t screw up. They weren’t supposed to on this girl.”

  He walked to the door and placed an ear against it. Then he turned back to her. “Ever since you killed Alex, my brother by the way and not my son, I have wanted to kill you in the most severe ways. But you moved out of your parent’s home and stayed on the move. I have a business to run,” he paused and swung his arm in an arc, indicating the girls sitting alongside Sarah, “so I couldn’t spend all my time trying to deal with you.”

  One of the girls beside Sarah started crying. It was a subtle sobbing that didn’t ellicit a response from Armond. In that second, whatever motivation Sarah had to kill Armond shot up tenfold.

  “It was all planned,” he said as he started to pace in front of her and her companions. “I would go your parent’s house, get them to invite you over and I’d murder them in front of you when you got there. That would be payback for my brother.”

  He stopped and looked at her, his eyes filled with the fire and anger of hatred.

  “Then, I would take my time killing you. But you fucked that all up. If you hadn’t shown up like you did and shot my man and then dropped the other one, you were dead. How did you know to be there at that precise moment? And what made you think they were going to kill me?”

  It hit Sarah like a load of manure. Her sister had saved her life. By sending her into this mess, she had avoided being killed. Sarah was supposed to be at her parent’s house that next morning but got the message to meet Vivian’s killer. She took the chance to meet the killer, thereby saving her life. That meant Vivian wasn’t fighting her and sending her into risky situations. Instead, she was trying her best to keep Sarah alive. The tears that still came from her eyes weren’t from the pain anymore as much as from her newfound knowledge.

  Armond continued, “It doesn’t matter now. You walked straight into my hands. This is a secured compound. The regular authorities don’t come around here and the leader of this place does what I tell him to or he doesn’t get the money I pay him and without that, he’s done.”

  “So why take…my parents?” Sarah asked.

  “We were supposed to kill them. Keeping them alive was only to get to you. Then you fucking escaped, so I had to trade them for Sam hoping he could tell me what the police knew about you. You, Sarah Roberts, have always been my priority.”

  “Well, it’s not over yet. I will kill you before this is done,” Sarah said.

  Armond stepped back, visibly shocked. “What did you say?”

  “I said, I will kill you before this is done. You have my word on that,” Sarah said. Even through the pain, she remained rooted, eyes unwavering, hatred unchecked.

  “My, what big aspirations for a beat up little girl with a broken wrist and no fucking gun!”

  “The police are on their way or already here. You are through. It’s over. Now give me your gun so I can make sure you never see the inside of a prison cell. You don’t look like the type to be some big black fucker’s bitch.”

  Armond started laughing. “You are some piece of work. Even with all the odds stacked against you, you’re still feisty. What’s stopping me from pointing this weapon and pulling the trigger right here, right now?”

  “Nothing, except you know that if I’m tel
ling the truth you could use me to bargain a deal. Then, once this blows over, you could take another shot at me later.”

  “No,” Armond waved the weapon in the air. “I’ve got these beauties I could bargain with. I have to kill you. You murdered my brother.”

  He lifted his weapon, aiming it at Sarah. She could detect the girls around her moving away in a scurrying motion. With nothing left to do but get close to him, Sarah turned away and, using her good hand, balanced herself to her feet and then to a full standing position. When she turned around, the gun was aimed at her forehead from about five feet away.

  Armond’s cell rang. Without missing a beat, he pulled it out and answered it. A moment later he pocketed the phone and lowered his weapon.