by Ada Scott
What would he do with the daughter of the man he believed to be directly involved with the gunning down of his parents right in front of him? Would his self-imposed limits be strong enough to resist the temptation for this kind of revenge?
He’d never given me any reason to doubt his integrity… but to describe this as a situation that had pushed his buttons was an understatement. What would I do if he lied to me?
Eliana’s kiss worked on me in ways less overtly terrifying than the interrogation techniques at Jace’s disposal, but it was good enough to get me talking. I found myself wanting to reassure her.
“I’m Eric Winchester, and you can have a life after this. Jace is changing the world, and you can find a good place in it.”
“How did you end up working for him?”
“I got kicked out of the Seals for stumbling across some ‘colleagues’ doing some shit in the villages that I couldn’t abide by. One of them was an officer, so the cards were stacked against me. I spent some time in the brig to teach me the value of the chain of command or some shit. It all came out in the trial, all the fucking heinous things they were doing, so I was cleared, but I’d made so many enemies, enemies with access to sniper rifles, that my family, my parents, were uprooted and relocated, put in hiding. I only dare visit them once or twice a year, now, for a few minutes at a time. So there I was. The only thing I knew how to do was kill people and the armed forces didn’t want anything to do with me, and I was kind of disenchanted with the idea of a government job anyway, to be honest.”
“That’s when you started working for Jace?”
“No, he wasn’t in charge then. Let’s head back to the car.”
I guided Eliana in the right direction with my hand on the small of her back and she kind of rested her head on my shoulder as we walked. We would have looked for all the world like a normal couple from the outside. Dressed for completely different occasions, maybe, but a normal couple.
The contrast with reality was mind-blowing, of course. She was my captive, the best fuck of my life, and she was in my head. I was her kidnapper, the man who kept her in chains… and the source of her greatest freedom. I was kind of glad I wasn’t in the armed forces anymore, the debriefing on this one would have me sent to a therapist.
When I opened her door, the handcuffs rattled against the inside. Eliana stepped in and held her wrist out towards it, looking up at me expectantly. Her eyes still had the glossy shine of her recent tears, and I paused for a moment, wrestling against my better judgement.
“We don’t need them right now,” I said, and closed the door carefully.
I settled in to the driver’s seat and found the café through the binoculars again. The owner, or an employee, was setting up tables in front of the store in preparation for opening.
The café was part of a small row of stores set in the middle of what was otherwise a peaceful and prosperous-looking residential area. The houses around it all had impeccably manicured lawns, many with sparkling clean sports cars or four-wheel-drives that had never known mud parked in the driveways.
“So who did you work for then?” Eliana asked.
“Hmmm?”
“If Jace Barlow wasn’t in charge.”
“Oh. The Picolli family were still running things in Port Magnus then. I took a few contracts. They were assholes, but they paid, until they wanted me to do a job that I didn’t want to do, killing a man’s whole family from youngest to oldest in front of him before taking him out. Before I knew it, there was a contract out on me. That’s kind of why we came back here.”
“Uh… I don’t think the Picollis will pay you on this one…”
“No. Jace has all but made them extinct as an organized unit anyway. There’s one sick fuck though, the sick fuck who took the contract I refused, who almost got me once. I’m the blemish on his record, he’d like to clean that up. We think he’s here.”
“Is this going to help you keep me alive?” she asked.
My binoculars dipped for a second and I sighed. “No. This is some shitty timing. There’s something we think he’s got that I need to get.”
“Everything still going to plan then?” she said with a good measure of sarcasm.
“Always,” I confirmed, with my own equal measure.
I raised the binoculars again and watched as the guy at the café finished setting up the outside tables. Gradually, customers started showing up in their ones and twos as the people got their Sunday morning underway. Two stayed, an older couple eating at a table outside, while a young woman came and went with what looked like a cup of coffee.
A young man with a briefcase crossed the road towards the café and I immediately traced his path back in the direction he’d come from. Had he come from that car, or come from down the street? I wasn’t sure.
I brought the binoculars back to him as he entered the café. It wasn’t Joseph Cosgrove, nor did the briefcase look like it belonged with him.
After a few minutes he came out with a card with a number on it attached to a little metal stand, as if the café guy might have problems figuring out whether he should deliver the order to the briefcase-guy or the people whose order he’d already fulfilled. He took a seat at the furthest table from the other two.
“So-” began Eliana.
“Shhhh, something’s happening.”
I focused on his face. I didn’t recognize him, but there were plenty of people who matched that description in the world. What I did recognize was the fact that he was shitting-himself-terrified. Even from this distance I could see he was sitting stiffly enough to give himself cramps if he kept it up too long, and pale as a ghost.
I trained the binoculars back in the direction he’d come from and saw a man watering the lawn and garden of the house almost directly opposite the café. Once again, this was not Cosgrove, he was too old.
There were a few other house-proud men up the street on both sides going through the same ritual. Maybe there was a homeowners’ association around here that demanded everybody’s grass be within a few shades of the same color. At the back of the house, a woman tended her own garden with her big floppy hat in preparation for what was shaping up to be a clear and sunny day.
The nervous guy at the café went through three cups of coffee as I watched over the course of the next half an hour. That didn’t even begin to explain how on-edge he was, though.
Something kept drawing my eye back to the house across the street. Long after the other men had sprayed their lawns and moved on to washing clean cars, or disappearing entirely, that first lawn was still getting doused with the hose.
I looked from the man, to the woman, back to the café, and then studied the house itself. It was completely shut, with curtains drawn, except for one window on the first floor that was slid open from the bottom about half a foot.
For a person who trusted themselves as a sniper, up here on the hill would have been a pretty decent spot. That wasn’t Joseph’s forte though, his specialty was explosives.
Something was up with that house. Joseph might have rigged the nervous man at the café, and the couple at the house, with suicide-belts and be watching from upstairs.
To use the kid as a decoy and blow everybody up as collateral damage was exactly his style. The more I thought about it, the more plausible it sounded. Whatever was the case, I was going to have to clear that house out before I did anything else.
“OK,” I muttered and got out of the car, grabbing the bags of snacks from the back seat and walking around to Eliana’s side. “Time to go.”
“Where are we going now?” she asked.
I unattached the handcuffs from her door and went to the trunk, popping it open and pointing inside.
“Seriously?” she said.
“Yes.”
“Like… seriously?”
I put the food and water in the trunk and nodded. “I can’t have some pretty girl sitting in a car with handcuffs on in plain view while I’m gone. You might blow my cover.”
Eliana sighed and climbed in. I cuffed her wrists to one of the trunk supports and had my hand on the lid, but paused before I closed it.
“After I park the car-”
“I know, I know, don’t make any noise or I’m only endangering somebody else.”
“Yeah. Also, I’ll either be pretty quick or I won’t come back at all. You’ve-”
Eliana sat up again like a bolt. “What are you talking about? You come right back!”
I was taken by surprise by the sudden desperation, but had no choice but to continue. “You’ve got enough food and water to last for days, though it’ll be a pain in the ass to get at with your hands cuffed. If I’m not back, the police will be here long before then anyway.”
“You can’t… he can’t… get you.”
“He’s not expecting me, specifically, which gives me an advantage, but I don’t know exactly where he is or what traps he’s got up his sleeve, which gives him an advantage. Anything could happen. If the next person to open this trunk is a police officer, and you decide you don’t want to go back to your father, ask for your lawyer, Monty Penrose from Port Magnus. He works for Jace. He’s who I would call, assuming they don’t recognize you straight away anyway.”
Eliana’s bottom lip was visibly quivering. “You come back for me.” She paused awkwardly. “Kiss for luck?”
I leaned down, and she stretched up as much as her restraints would let her. Our lips touched, softly at first but quickly progressing into the kind of kiss that would bump up a film’s classification to protect the children.
The suction was almost too powerful to break when I finally pulled back, and Eliana gently gripped my bottom lip with her teeth for a second before letting it go and sinking into the trunk. The day had lost its early-morning briskness, but she had goosebumps on her skin.
I closed the lid with a pounding heart. I didn’t want that to be my last kiss, but it was the kind of last kiss I would want to have.
OK, Cosgrove, here I come, you sack of shit.
Eric
I parked a block away from the café so that I could cut through the alleyway and come up to the house from behind, and from the direction opposite to the hill from which I’d been observing. This was the only angle of approach where I had any decent cover.
Before I left, I rested my hand on the lid of the trunk and hoped I’d see the occupant again soon. Something told me that if I survived this impromptu mission, I’d have some spare adrenaline she could help me burn through.
Peeking around a fence, I could see the woman in her back yard three houses away. Her plants were pruned beyond recognition, but she kept on moving from one end of the yard to the other and pruning even more, acting just as fanatical as the man in the front.
When she wasn’t looking in my direction, I sprinted across the alley into the back yard of her neighbor two doors down. Her next door neighbor had a garden shed and so when she moved such that it impaired her line of sight, I leapt the fence and hid behind it, just a few feet away from her.
I heard the steady snip… snip-snip of her shears and waited until I heard her working away from me again. Taking deep, quiet, breaths, I took in as much oxygen as I could to prepare my muscles for the quick burst that was coming.
If it wasn’t for her over-zealous gardening, I probably would have landed in a rose bush when I vaulted the fence. The woman heard me coming and whirled around with a little yelp.
She dropped her shears and was reaching for something in her pocket, but the gardening gloves were impeding her. I raced to close the distance, and had her down on the ground with one hand over her mouth and one hand controlling her wrist before she managed to get whatever she was after.
I looked around to make sure nobody had seen what looked like a random assault on an older woman, and it seemed we had gone unnoticed. She was alternating between looking up at me with terror and squeezing her eyes shut as tears streamed down, trying to scream through my hand.
“Shhhh. Quiet. He made you do this, didn’t he?”
Any lingering doubts I may have had about this being a household of obsessive-compulsive gardeners were put to rest when she paused for a second in her wide-eyed phase and then nodded. She sobbed against my hand.
“OK. I’m not going to hurt you, but if we’re both going to get through this alive, you need to do exactly as I say. Understand?”
She nodded.
“First thing, I’m going to take my hand off your mouth and you are not going to scream. Ready?”
She nodded again.
Slowly, ready to clamp down again, I removed my hand from her mouth. She panted frantically, but didn’t scream.
“What were you reaching for?”
“Please! He’s got my daughter! He’s-”
“What were you reaching for?”
“H-he gave me this… thing, with a button to press to warn him if I saw anybody who looked out of p-place. Please! You’ve got to help!”
I transferred my grip on her wrist to the hand that had been covering her mouth and reached into her pocket, pulling out a simple little device about the size of a pack of gum with a button on top. With it safely stowed in my own pocket I silenced her continuing pleas to try to focus on the most important details.
“He’s all alone? Not working with anybody else?”
“Yes! He broke into the house last night… we were h-having a b-birthday p-party for my dad and-”
“Who is the guy across the street at the café?” I asked.
“My son, Peter! Oh my God! My son! He… he made him wear a… a vest thing with all these wires… it’s a bomb! He said somebody was supposed to pick up this briefcase he had and he said if we called the cops or anything he’d blow my beautiful baby up!”
“Shhh. Not so loud. The briefcase, I presume that’s not the one with your son right now?”
“Who cares! I just said-”
“Shut up and answer my questions so we can fucking get through this in one piece. I can’t help you if you don’t. Pull yourself together for your family, they’re depending on you.”
The woman visibly drew what strength she could from her motherly sense of duty, though she still spoke with a quaver that I could feel in her wrist and under my whole body as I continued to hold her down.
“No, he had a briefcase already when he arrived. He gave my son an old one that belonged to my husband. It has another bomb in it I think.”
Thank fuck the briefcase was still here. If he had hidden it or handed it off to somebody else then this task would have been a lot harder. To capture the psycho alive and try to force him to tell me what he’d done with it would be a lot more difficult than giving him what he deserved.
“That’s good,” I muttered.
The woman looked at me incredulously. “What’s good about it?”
“Nothing. You were having a party for your dad? He’s still in there? You mentioned your daughter?”
Her face fell. “Yes. They’re still in there with him.”
She was right to look that way, especially if her daughter was remotely attractive. Alone with Joseph Cosgrove was the last place you’d want your daughter to be.
“Anybody else?” I asked.
“No.”
I looked up at the house, then back to her. “How long have you lived here?”
She looked like she was going to lose it for a second, but I squeezed her wrist to bring her back into the moment and remind her of what I said.
“Thirty-two years.”
My parents had me when they were on the older side, and they’d been in their house for a good fifteen years by that stage. Even then, my mother was a fucking ninja around the house. She knew every creaky floorboard and hinge and she could, and did, sneak up on me every single time I was doing something I shouldn’t have been doing. I was counting on this woman being the same.
“They’re on the first floor, middle room at the front. Where are the stairs, and are there any creaky floorboards
on the way? If I’m going to save your family, I need to be absolutely silent.”
Her brow knitted together as she teetered on the edge of cracking up, and she was still shaking when she spoke again, but I had to admire her determination.
“Go in the back door, that’s where he came in and it’s broken. That’ll put you in the kitchen. Straight ahead is a door and just on the other side of that door, on the right is the stairway. The third and the seventh steps creak, but nothing else does.”
“OK. Come on.”
“Where are you taking me?”
I stood up and pulled her to her feet, marching her to her own garden shed and taking her inside. “I’m going to have to leave you here. I can’t have you calling the cops while I’m still around.”
“Who are you?”
“Nobody.”
I looked around and saw the kind of loose rope that always finds its way into garden sheds and used it to tie her wrists and ankles. After looking around I didn’t see anything particularly suitable for a gag at first, then I spotted some packing tape. It wasn’t as good as duct tape, but it would do.
With her suitably restrained I stood, and then looked back from the doorway. “The police will be here soon enough, but the edge on the leg of that bench looks sharp enough if you want to start using it to cut the rope. It’ll take a while, but you’ll get there in the end.”
She made no move towards it, instead she kind of deflated and slumped to the side, resting her head on the wall. She looked spent, but I wasn’t here to be her cheerleader.
I left without making any promises. If I couldn’t give any guarantees to Eliana, I wasn’t about to do it for her either.
When I approached it, I could see the back door was broken, opening and banging shut with every puff of wind. Looking through the gap when it was open, I saw it led directly into the kitchen, as the woman had said it would. I pulled my gun and slipped through, pushing it almost-closed again behind me.
The house was eerily gloomy and quiet after the hustle and bustle of background noise in the warm morning outside. This didn’t bode well for the woman’s father and daughter. Either they were too tired to plead for their lives, or they were beyond that now.