by L. T. Ryan
I felt ashamed that I could only think of him as the little boy at that moment. Christ, what was his name? I struggled with my memory and eventually recalled Tammy calling her son Christopher. It seemed odd, that a man could rescue another human being and not be bothered to learn their name. I was built that way. Business was business. Everything that happened went down in the line of duty. I didn't deserve any credit for what I did. Didn't want it, either. Wish I hadn't gotten it, because then we wouldn't be sitting up at three forty-five in the morning hoping that some asshole named Pablo pulls through after having his heart take up protest against living.
Frank must have noticed something was wrong with me, because he said, "Everything all right?"
I didn't answer. Watched the second hand sweep through the bottom half of the wall clock as it made its ascent back to twelve. After an hour or two, it becomes somewhat hypnotic.
I heard footsteps approach from across the lobby. I saw Sarah poke her head through the open doorway in my peripheral vision.
"He's going to make it," she said. "It was a very minor heart attack."
"Can we talk to him?" Frank asked.
She shook her head. "Not for a day or two. Like I said, minor, but he doesn't need the extra stress you'd heap on him."
"We don't have a day or two," Frank said.
"Take it up with Doc," she said. "I'm only here to help."
Frank looked at me, and I shrugged. It wasn't my call.
"All right," Frank said, resigned. "Send him in. I want to hear what he did."
"Well, he-"
"I want to hear from him," Frank interrupted.
Sarah stopped and stepped back, mouth open, hands held out in front of her. "OK," she said.
I turned in my chair to watch her walk away. She disappeared into the infirmary. I turned back, looked at Frank and said, "You didn't have to go dictatorial on her."
He hunched over his desk. "I know. I'm stressed. This thing's going to give me a heart attack."
"Don't take it out on her." I stood and wrapped my hands into a fist and set them on the desk where he could see them. "And you better not try and take it out on me."
He looked up, nodded and didn't say anything, which was the correct thing to do.
"Am I interrupting?" Doc said from outside the office.
I straightened up, turned away, said, "I was leaving."
We squeezed past each other, chest to chest. He went in. I went out, catching a whiff of the sterile air that always hovered around his body. Sarah sat across the lobby on a vinyl wrapped cushioned bench. I walked to my office, poured two mugs of coffee and then went and sat down next to her.
"He always like that?" she asked.
"He's stressed," I said, holding one of the mugs out in front of her.
She grabbed it, brought the mug up to her lips and gently blew into the liquid, sending a puff of steam into the air. "So does that mean yes?"
I laughed. "You could say he's wound a bit tight."
"He's wound a bit tight. There, I said it." She smiled and locked eyes with me. Then her face drew tight and serious. "What about you, Jack? Are you wound a bit tight?"
I shrugged. "Sometimes, I suppose."
She repeated what I said, substituting 'you' for 'I', and then added, "I'm going to be a bit bold here, if you don't mind." She took a sip of coffee to give me time to answer. I didn't, not at that moment, at least. "Would you like to go out to dinner when this is all over?"
"I don't mind, and I'd like to."
She took a second to process my answers, forgetting that she asked me two questions. Her smile returned. "It's a date then."
I nodded my agreement. My knees opened to the side. Our legs pressed together, flesh separated by millimeters of thin fabric. Her right hand fell to her thigh. My left hand did the same. The backs of our hands touched, momentarily.
"So what now?" she said, bringing things back to the matter at hand.
What now? The question I had no answer for, so I told her the obvious. "We wait."
"For?" She stretched the word a beat too long.
My cell vibrated against both our legs from inside my pants pocket. Reluctantly, I broke contact and stood up so I could retrieve it. Unknown caller. "This," I said. I flipped the phone open and answered.
"Thirty-two hours, Mr. Noble."
"Thanks for the update, asshole."
The man said nothing. I heard him snicker, though. A robotic laugh, something akin to a second-rate fifties movie about a legion of robots out of control and hell bent on destroying every living thing on Earth.
"Thirty-two hours till what?" I prodded.
"You'll find out soon enough. For now, I need you to show me a sign of faith and goodwill."
"Screw you."
"Let me finish, Mr. Noble."
"OK, finish, and then I'll tell you to go screw yourself."
He chuckled in that creepy robotic way. "Release my men."
Instead of screw you, I decided to have some fun with him. "What men?" Turned out to be a mistake. I heard a smack in the background, and the little boy started to cry.
"Don't mess with me, Jack. You've got ninety minutes to get them to Lake Pine, New Jersey."
"Where the hell is that?"
"Google it. But you had better be there. Ninety minutes, Mr. Noble. You, your partner, the woman, and my men. I'll call you when time is almost up to give you the drop point."
"One condition," I said. "Exchange the boy."
"No."
"You gotta give me-" The line went silent. The faint hum of static that was always present in the background during his calls faded away midway through my sentence.
"Christ," I yelled.
"What the hell was that?" Sarah asked.
I looked down at her, well aware that the tone in my voice and the look on my face had given her cause to be taken aback. "It was him."
Frank emerged from his office with the doctor close behind. His face was tight, twisted, and there was concern hidden behind his eyes. "Jack? What's going on? Did he call?"
"Yeah."
"What did he say?"
I walked across the lobby, hand covering my face. Thumb and little finger massaging my temples. I stopped at the other end of the room and turned around. "He said thirty-two hours. And he said he wants his men back. He said you and me and her, we need to gather up his guys and go to frickin' Pine Lake-"
"Lake Pine?" Sarah said.
"-Yeah, what she said. It's in New Jersey. And we have ninety minutes."
"There's no way," Frank said. "It'll take that long to get to Philly."
"What about a helicopter?" Sarah said. "It's how we transport patients with catastrophic injuries."
I looked at Frank. He shrugged and said, "That'll work. We'll have time to spare. But I'm not crazy about turning these guys over. There's still information to get out of them."
"We're not turning them over without some kind of contingency plan." I looked and nodded toward Doc. "How long will it take you to install one of those tracking devices in one of them?"
Doc smiled. "Not even twenty minutes. Some laughing gas, a quick incision, then sew him back up."
Frank smiled. He caught onto my plan. "They'll lead us right to him."
I nodded. "Sarah, would you mind assisting Doc with the procedure?"
"No problem." She got up from the padded bench and stood next to Doc.
"OK," Frank said. "You two go with Doc and pick one of the men. I don't care which one. I'm going to get on the phone and get a car to meet us at Lake Pine and a chopper to get us there." He jogged to his office and slammed the door shut. Sat down at his desk and started hammering on his phone.
The doctor disappeared for a moment, and then returned with the necessary equipment for the procedure. We followed him down the stairs to the holding cells.
"Still up for this?" I said to Sarah.
She smiled in response, but her eyes showed worry.
"Don't worry," I said. "I
've got your back."
"This one work?" the doctor asked pointing at the first cell we came to.
"Sure," I said. I punched in the security code and the door unlocked. I opened it and stepped in.
The man got out of bed and looked me up and down. He spat at my feet. "What the hell do you want?"
I smiled. Then I took a long step to build momentum and kicked him in the solar plexus. He bowed at the waist, head to knees. I grabbed him by the back of his head with my left hand, pulled him up a foot or two, drove a powerful uppercut into his chin with my right. His body slumped and fell to the floor in a heap.
"Save that laughing gas, Doc," I said. "He's out."
The surgery took less than five minutes. Doc used a scalpel to make an incision where the neck meets the skull. Plenty of hair to cover the wound, I figured. Enough meat to hide the tracking device, which was nothing more than a thin tube, made from steel and hollow in the middle. That's where the guts of the device lived. He stitched the small incision up. We lifted the man and secured him to a wheelchair. Shackles clamped down on his wrists and ankles.
I brought the other two men out, one at a time, and handcuffed them by the wrists and by the ankles. We took the elevator to the roof. Frank was waiting for us there. A few minutes later, the heavy thumping sound of the helicopter's rotors and the whine of the turbine overwhelmed the silence of the still night.
We piled into the helicopter moments after it landed. Frank first, me last, Sarah and the prisoners in between. I settled in, sitting with my back to the pilot, which left me facing the men. They glared at me, snarled. I saw the curses they wished upon me in their eyes. I smiled in return, while aiming an HK MP7 at their stomachs.
Chapter 16
The helicopter got us to our destination in under an hour. The three men across from me didn't move except when the helicopter pitched or rolled. The three of them swayed left, right, forward, and backward in unison, their eyes fixed on me, traveling between my face and the gun I held. One of the men had been sweating profusely, and I could tell he didn't like flying all that much. His eyes were wide and he tensed up every time the helicopter moved. I assumed he had to take a heavy sedative to make it to the U.S. from wherever the hell he was from. No such luck today, though.
We landed on an abandoned dirt airstrip covered with the iced over remains of a recent snowstorm. No plow had touched the soil, nor had a shovel scraped the ground in advance of our landing.
The pilot informed us that we were halfway between Cherry Hill and Lake Pine, neither of which was a place I had any familiarity with.
Sarah stood at the edge of the platform, prepared to hop down. I offered her my hand. She took it. I smiled. She did the same. Once on the ground, I pointed at the dark blue Chevy Suburban parked nearby and told her to wait at the front.
Frank was next. I didn't offer him my hand, nor did I smile at him. He hopped onto the ground and grimaced. Old feet or old knees it appeared, relatively speaking.
"My home territory," Frank said. He yelled to make himself heard over the thumping rotor.
I nodded, then looked away, then thought about the place I used to call home. My mind wandered for a second or two. The three angry faces waiting to exit the helicopter were blurs while I recalled a time and place that were now as alien to me as Mars. Or Portland.
As quickly as the interlude began, it ended. I gestured with the barrel of my MP7 for the three men to exit the helicopter, nice and easy. Frank helped each man down and told them to take ten steps, then get on their knees. Each man did as instructed, reluctantly. Frank twisted and turned at the waist and gave the pilot a thumbs up. Together, we yanked the men to their feet and guided them toward the Suburban. Behind us, the turbine whined, the rotors thumped, and the helicopter made a hell of a cyclone as it rose into the air. Any remaining loose snow whipped all around us. It felt like a thousand minuscule icicles embedded themselves into my cheek.
I glanced around at our surroundings and didn't see a single freestanding structure. We were in the middle of nowhere. I could discharge my weapon and the chance anyone would hear it over the sound of the helicopter's rotors was slim. By the looks on the faces of the men, they realized this as well. The whine of the turbine raised a few decibels. The rotors thumped faster. The helicopter lifted off the ground and began its ascent into the fading deep blue sky. I figured in a couple minutes the silence would be more deafening than the roar of the helicopter.
A weak wintry sun began to crest over the eastern horizon, peeking through sparse holes in the trees where foliage was missing or pine needles didn't mesh. It cast a dim pinkish light over us.
When the helicopter was far enough away that we no longer needed to shout to hear each other, Frank spoke.
"Turn around, assholes."
The men shuffled on their knees until they were facing the other way.
"Ready to go for a ride?" Frank said.
One man nodded. The others remained motionless.
"It's your lucky day," Frank said. "But know that we are going to be watching you after you leave us, and if you so much as fart in a crowded elevator we're gonna have an agent there to collect a gas sample, then plug your asshole and then arrest you for polluting the environment."
One man nodded, again, another remained motionless, and one cracked a smile. So did I. I turned my head and coughed into my hand in an effort to conceal the grin that spread across my face. I swung my head back around, avoiding the eyes of the men, settling on Sarah, instead. She had a bemused look on her face, presumably amused by my reaction to Frank's words.
"You got it?" Frank said. "We're gonna be watching every move you make." He droned on for another thirty seconds, but said nothing important. Mostly tried to make himself sound like a badass and instill the fear of the SIS into the men. All in all, it seemed to have the intended effect.
We lifted each man to his feet, then brought them over to the Suburban and shoved them into the back row of the vehicle, shoulder to shoulder, hip to hip, knee to knee. I sat in the middle row, passenger side, leaning against the door so that my legs were in between the two middle seats. I loosely aimed my MP7 at the man in the middle.
My phone vibrated against my stomach from inside my coat pocket. I reached in and grabbed it, then checked the display, although I knew who it was. Unknown caller. Robot voice. I answered casually, betraying my feelings at that moment.
"I'm glad to see that punctuality is one of your strong suits, Mr. Noble." Still tinny, still robotic and annoying as ever.
"Ingrained," I said. "Growing up, if I wasn't at the dining room table by six, dinner was forfeited."
"How many dinners did it take for you to learn your lesson?"
"Plenty. I'm hardheaded."
"And you must have been quite the runt."
"I've filled out."
"So you have."
I looked at each man in turn. They sat hunched over. Their foreheads wrinkled, thin and bushy eyebrows alike furrowed over their narrowed eyes. They listened intently to every word I said, presumably trying to figure out what the man said in return. I figured I'd get to the point so we could move on. "What do you want from us now?"
"You will soon be approaching an abandoned gas station on your right. A place that looks like it operated in the fifties. You know, old time pumps, signs with smiling faces in-"
"Yeah, I got it."
"Good."
"Then what?"
"Leave my men."
"Then what?"
"Leave."
"Then what?" I asked again, growing impatient with the one word, two-word game.
"Go back to Cherry Hill and get some breakfast. There is a great little diner on Springdale Road. The name escapes me, though."
"What about the boy?"
There was a long pause and I grew concerned that something had happened to Christopher.
"What about him?" the man said.
"Leave him and then tell me where to find him. We'll be done with this
."
The man chuckled. A voice spoke up in the background. Soft, sweet, innocent. At least it would have been if Christopher weren't screaming. "Let go of me."
"Dammit," I said. "What do you want?"
"My men."
"Then what?"
"We're approaching thirty and a half hours, Mr. Noble. You'll find out soon enough."
The hum of static disappeared, indicating that the call had been cut short. I flipped the phone shut, then leaned back against the door, scanning the faces in the back seat. They all smiled, presumably at the site of me frustrated and angry.
"What did he say?" Frank said, glancing back from the driver's seat.
"He said look for an old abandoned gas station," I said. "Like something out of the fifties."
"And?"
"And we need drop the guys. Then he recommended that we head into Cherry Hill and get some breakfast." One of the men from the back seat laughed. I ignored him and continued. "Oh, and thirty and a half hours remain."
"Till?"
"No clue." I turned my head a bit to the left and looked at the men again. "Any of you know?"
They all shrugged. None of them spoke.
"Of course you don't," I said.
"There it is," Frank said, pointing across the dash.
I leaned forward and turned to my right. The building had seen better days. Panes of glass were broken or shattered or missing completely. The pavement in the parking lot was cracked and overgrown with weeds. Bushes encroached from the unkempt stretches of lawn that surrounded the lot. Vines wrapped around antique gas pumps. The old signpost that once signaled to passers-by that this was the place to stop now lay on the ground, barely visible among nature's chaos.
The Suburban stopped, and I opened my door and slid out. I flipped a lever on the seat, sending it forward and clearing a path for the men to step through. I pulled them down, one by one, and lined them up on the rear quarter panel of the Suburban. The bulk of the beastly SUV hid us from the road. Unfortunately, the big vehicle did not protect us from the wind.