The Nature of the Beast

by GM Ford

  Craig launched himself across the slimy stones. Bear-crawling on all fours, he covered the distance in two heartbeats before throwing himself to the floor at her side. He lifted his head and snuck a peek in the direction of the shooter but was unable to find the silhouette in the darkness. His breathing was ragged. His mouth tasted like it was full of pennies.

  Without hesitation, he jumped to his feet, grabbed the adjustment strap on the back of Audrey’s Kevlar vest and began pulling her to the far side of the underground corridor, involuntarily holding his breath, waiting for the bullets to arrive in the second before the yellow muzzle flash lit the place up like the fourth of July. But nothing happened. Other than the sound of Audrey’s labored breathing the place was as silent as a tomb.

  On the far side, he squatted in the shadows, breathing heavily as he slid her body tight against the wall, out of the line of fire. She didn’t appear to be breathing but Craig never got the chance to find out.

  A hundred feet away, the figure moved to his right, blotting out the single shaft of light, throwing the cavern into nearly total darkness. Craig squinted into the gloom. A dull corona of light outlined the figure at the other end of the room.

  “I know what I am,” he said.

  Craig was stunned. Mouth hanging open in disbelief.

  “What?” he asked, stupefied.

  “I know what I am,” the voice repeated, matter-of-factly, like he was admitting to being a Lutheran. “There’s no place for me here. I know it now.”

  “Don’t hurt the boy,” Craig pleaded.

  “You came for him,” the dark figure said. “I wanted to see if you would.”

  “Let the boy go.”

  “Why did you come so far?”

  “Please let the boy go. We’ll…”

  “He’s nothing to you…nothing… but you came for him anyway,” he screamed at the top of his lungs. His voice bounced from wall to wall.

  Craig said nothing. Instead, he picked up the P90 from the floor and peered through the sight. He bobbed left and right, and up and down trying to find a safe shooting angle, but the figure at the far end of the canal was nothing but a blur.

  Before Craig could decide what to do next, a cry ricocheted over the stones and then he heard the unmistakable sound of a splash. His mind’s eye saw Michael Browning pin-wheeling in slow motion, sinking to the bottom of the filthy canal as he screamed the last of his life out into the dank water.

  Without thinking, Jackson Craig sprinted forward, firing wildly as he crossed the uneven floor. Bits of wood and brick broke loose from the target area and began to fill the air. At nine hundred rounds a minute the P90 went through its allotted hundred rounds before he was half way there. He pulled his Sig Sauer from the holster and held it in the combat position as he sprinted forward, the empty P90 banging against his chest with every bone jarring stride.

  By the time he got there, the boy was nothing but a ripple on the surface. Fully expecting to be shot to pieces at any second, Craig shrugged his overcoat to the floor and jumped, feet first, into the inky water below.

  The water was both colder and deeper than he’d imagined. He used his foot to probe for the bottom but was unable to find it. He gulped air and then upended himself, breast stroking, diving for the bottom, feeling with his hands as he forced himself down through the subterranean stew. Two frog kicks and his left hand hit the bottom. Maybe eight feet down. A century of slime and slag covered the stones. He held his breath and felt around the muck. The air in his lungs felt cold and dense. He scissor-kicked again and felt around in front of his face. His cheeks began to bulge. He continued to kick his feet and probe with his hands as the roar in his ears reached runway levels.

  The air in his lungs escaped in a single straining burst. He flipped over, pushed off the bottom and followed the bubbles up. He sputtered, pawed the water from his eyes and looked around. Still no sign of Michael. He gulped air and dove again.

  He probed desperately in the darkness, twisting his body in a full circle, feeling the floor and walls with his hands and finding nothing. He ducked his head and dove again. His head felt as if it would explode as he felt his way along the slimy, debris covered bottom. When the roaring in his ears reached supersonic levels, he allowed himself float to the surface where he threw his arms over the edge and sucked air. Above the dripping water and the sound of his own straining lungs, the sound of clanking metal caught his attention. He groaned and looked up.

  Needless to say, the pair of CPD SWAT officers were a welcome sight. In the background he heard Officer Hollins calling for assistance and then the unmistakable wail of a siren. Maybe more than one. Sergeant Leonard’s scowling visage loomed into view. He wasn’t happy. Not at all.

  “What the hell is it with you?” he demanded.

  Jackson Craig’s left arm flopped and squirmed like a trout gasping on a riverbank. Craig tried to stop the twitching but found himself unable to regain command of his nerve impulses. He used his good hand to point down at the water.

  “The boy,” Jackson Craig croaked.

  52

  The sound of the door shot Audrey straight up in the bed. Her eyes darted around the room before settling on Jackson Craig. “Michael?” she asked.

  Craig shook his head. “He wasn’t in the canal. Only thing they found was a nice new MAC-10 lying on the bottom. Must have been what I heard hitting the water.”

  The answer was written on his face, but she asked anyway. “No line on him?”

  “No,” Craig said. “CPD’s all over it. They found a couple of places where somebody had broken through into the sewer system. Patrol found a manhole out of place about six blocks west of where we were located. They think he took the boy out that way.”

  Failure and frustration settled around their shoulders like a wet blanket.

  “How’s your hand?” she asked. “ I heard you got it wet.”

  Craig lifted his left arm to eye level. “Yeah,” he said. “Reinnervation went haywire from the canal water. Took ‘em a couple hours to dry me off and get everything working again.” He twiddled his artificial fingers. “Good as new.”

  He used the hand to hitch up his sagging scrubs. “What about you?” he asked.

  “I feel like somebody hit me in the chest with a sledge hammer.”

  “Somebody did.”

  “So I’m told.”

  “Cracked your sternum completely in half,” Craig said. “The ER physician said he imagined the force of the blow probably stopped your heart for a few seconds.”

  “Didn’t somebody once say ‘either I’m dead or in Philadelphia’?”

  He didn’t answer. Instead, he walked over to the window and stared across an interior courtyard at building next door. Twelve stories below, occasional figures hustled over the sidewalks, wrapped in overcoats and mufflers moving quickly in the cold.

  “You know what he said to me?” Craig asked after an interval. Whatever it was had moved him. She could see it in his face.

  “What?”

  “He said: I know what I am.”

  “Really?”

  “Said it twice. I know what I am.”

  “How sad,” Audrey said.

  “Sad might not be the first word I would have chosen, but its certainly somewhere in the neighborhood,” Craig allowed. “He had this almost theatrical aura of melancholy about him. Like Hamlet at the end of the play. It’s hard to describe.”

  “How could he not know what he is?” Audrey asked. “Comes a point where he’s got to know that what’s going on between him and Harry is just about the worst felony a body can commit. That even convicts hate baby rapers. I mean…”

  Craig cut her off. “What you did was stupid,” he said.

  “I thought if I used his real name…maybe he would…maybe knowing who he was…would trigger…you know…”

  “Could have gotten all three of us killed.”

  “I know.”

  “I thought you were dead,” Craig said.

&
nbsp; “Me too,” she said with a bent grin.

  __

  He circled the block three times. Waiting until the girl in 1B got home and pulled her shades for the night. Garrity. Louise Garrity was always the last one to arrive home on week nights. Got off the number forty-seven bus over on Harvard Street and then walked the four blocks home. Same thing. Every night. Rain or shine.

  The old biddies on the top floor hardly ever went out. Had everything delivered. Ditto the Italian guy in 3E. Everybody else kept a regular schedule. He knew. In the months immediately after renting the apartment, he’d spent weeks following every one of them all over the Chicago metropolitan area. Just for practice. Just for peace of mind.

  He grabbed the boy under the arms, hoisted him to his shoulder and trotted out into the street. The boy was limp and loose as jelly. He’d bonked the kid’s head as he’d sprinted away from the cops. A nasty purple bruise was beginning to form in the middle of the kid’s forehead. He trotted faster.

  A pachaydermal garbage truck swerved in the snow to avoid running him down. The air horns blared. He was running now. Ducking in and out of traffic as he crossed Nassau Street and hopped up onto the front stoop of the building.

  A minute later, he was leaning back against the inside of the apartment door. Music filtered in from next door. 2B. The young marrieds. Always pawing one another in the hall, in the laundry room, everywhere you saw them. Disgusting. As if that weren’t enough, they were playing Abba. ‘ Dancing Queen.’

  He punched the overhead lights and looked around. Everything was as he’d left it. How long ago was that? He ran the sequence of the days in his mind. A week. He’d been gone a week. Seemed like longer. Seemed like…

  The music stopped. He strained his ears. Heard the snap of a lock.

  The sound of laughter in the hallway sent him from the door, out into the parlor, where he crossed to the front windows. Nothing. He listened to the fading voices and then counted three hundred and peeked again. Still nothing.

  He carried the boy into the bedroom and threw him on the bed. The boy stirred and rolled over but did not open his eyes. He stood for a moment, staring down at the unconscious child, then walked over and pulled the window wide open and checked the alley behind the building. The snow muffled the usual roar of traffic. The only sound was the hydraulic whine of a garbage truck at the far end of the alley.

  What to do? What to do? He asked himself the question thirty or forty times and then felt around in his pocket and came out with his knife. He flicked it open and stood there, twisting it this way and that, catching the reflected streetlights on the bloodstained blade and looking over at the little boy. What to do? He’d never felt more alone. Never felt more confused. He’d done his duty. Done his duty but it wasn’t better. It was supposed to be better, but it was worse. He wanted to scream and thrash but didn’t want to have to decide what to do next, so he pocketed the knife and walked out into the parlor, closing the bedroom door behind himself.

  He did what he always did. He snapped on the television. Commercial for the Harvey Winter show. He always watched Harvey Winter, so he stopped in his tracks, grabbed the remote and turned the volume up. Cut to a picture of the same two hags he’d seen earlier. The announcer blared on. “What is is that the U.S. government is keeping from this family?” The pair of cows were crying now, blubbering into a microphone. Making fools of themselves.

  Picture of a small boy. He turned away from the screen. When he turned back, the picture had changed. His breath caught in his throat like a fishbone. Harry Joyce, the caption read. He gulped air and spit on the TV screen.

  Back to the announcer and the mewing hags.

  As he stood there, listening to them sniveling out the story of Colin Sattersomething, it suddenly came to him and, for once in his life, he knew exactly what he had to do next.

  He pulled the knife from his pocket, wiped both sides of the blade along the side of his pants and walked toward the bedroom door.

  53

  Three abreast, they double-timed it across the brightly polished marble, using the brisk pace to work out the kinks.

  “We’ve got a semi-happy ending,” Dan Rosen said. “We’re going to let it go at that.”

  Craig was incredulous. “That crazy son of a bitch killed a dozen people, women, old men, not to mention seven federal agents and we’re not going to follow up on this? We’re going to leave it to the CPD and the FBI to clean up after us? I can’t believe you’re saying this. There’s still a kidnapped boy out there somewhere.”

  “It’s a jurisdictional matter,” Bobby drawled.

  “He murdered Gil and Emelda Fowles, tried to kill one of their children and kidnapped another. How in hell can you let some other agency pull the rug out from under us like this? How can something like that happen?”

  “Special Agent Craig…” Rosen’s voice took on an executive edge. “This isn’t personal. This is strictly business.”

  “Everything’s personal,” Craig snapped. “And, if you don’t mind me saying, you watch too damn many gangster movies.”

  Bobby grinned. “What Dan means to say…” he began.

  “Dan said what he meant to say,” Rosen said quickly. “It’s not personal.” Without slackening his pace, he leaned forward and looked around Bobby Duggan. “You were there. You saw it. This was a done deal before we ever arrived. Their minds were made up. They only invited us as a courtesy. This is their turf. If they want to take it from here, they take it from here.”

  “We chased that murdering son-of-a-bitch most of the way across this country.”

  Rosen wasn’t impressed. “Which is why they invited us to sit in. Your efforts were lauded by one and all and I’m sure they will be duly noted, but this is where the agency gets off the bus. Period. End of story.”

  As they rounded the corner into the Security Reception area, a pair of uniformed FBI personnel interrupted their banter and quickly snapped to attention. One greeted them like a headwaiter, the other found their overcoats.

  Outside, the sky had begun to hemorrhage snow. Little frozen crystals, fine as Kosher salt, filled the air. Cars on the street had their lights on, their wipers thrashing as they moped along through rapidly gathering slush.

  The L.A. contingent bundled themselves against the elements. As usual, Bobby sought to alleviate any internal tension. “A body can get real spoiled about weather, livin’ out in La La land,” he commented. “Can any of y’all imagine what the 405 would look like in this kinda weather?” He shook his head in country-boy wonder.

  A black Lincoln Town Car pulled to a stop under the portico. The driver got out.

  Craig looked away. Up at the enormous FBI seal on the wall. Fidelity. Bravery. Integrity. The scales of justice. None of which, at that moment, meant a hell of a lot to him. It was all he could do not to sneer.

  Bobby buttoned himself all the way to the top and turned to Craig. “We’ll be seeing you when?” he asked.

  “Soon as they let my partner out of the hospital,” he answered.

  “Call Marlene. She’ll arrange transport,” Rosen said over his shoulder.

  The uniforms opened both outside doors. The two men walked through the opening and out onto the concrete. Rosen had wrapped a long red and white muffler around his neck. The kind of thing somebody in the family must have knit for him, otherwise there was no possible excuse for wearing it. Bobby pulled his chin down into his coat like a turtle and began to hop from foot to foot.

  “Send whatever data you have over to the bureau office on Roosevelt. Attention: Special Agent Gomez. When you get back to the coast we can discuss your next assignment,” he said. He put a paternal hand on Craig’s arm. “Be sure to convey our regards to Special Agent Williams,” he said.

  __

  She had the hospital bed cranked up as close to vertical as it would go. Those areas of the bed not covered by Audrey Williams were piled high with an assortment of paperwork. Confidential NSA memos, FBI forensic reports, charts, gra
phs, files, folders, you name it. She looked and smiled up as Craig entered the room.

  “Hey,” she said.

  “What’s all this?” Craig asked.

  “Our intelligence requests have finally caught up to us.” She started a shrug, winced and thought better of it. “I figured as long I was lying here, I might as well see if there was anything we missed the first time around.”

  At the foot of the bed, an enormous spray of flowers dwarfed the narrow table, an arrangement of such a scale and magnitude as to suggest a Mafioso funeral rather than a family ‘get well soon’.

  Audrey made a face. “My mother,” she said.

  “How you feeling?” he asked.

  “Like I’ve been in a car crash.” She ran her eyes over his face. Something was amiss. “What’s up?” she asked.

  “We’ve been shut down,” Jackson Craig said.

  She folded her arms and frowned. “Shut down how?”

  “A joint CPD-FBI task force is going to take the investigation from here.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “Soon as they let you out of here, which I’m given to understand will be some time after four this afternoon. Soon as that happens it’s back to LA.”

  There didn’t seem to be anything to say, so neither of them bothered.

  Craig walked to the window. The snowflakes were larger now and more insistent. Coming off the lake at a thirty-degree angle, reducing the building across the way to bleary Impressionism.

  To his right, snow was beginning to accumulate on the streets in earnest. He watched the number ninety-four METRO bus slog its way over to the curb to pick up a woman in a red babushka, then fishtail twice as it plowed its way back into the nearest lane.

  “We have a departure time yet?” she asked.

  “Little after eight tonight. Midway.” He glanced in her direction. “And not we…you. I’m going to hang around for a couple of days. Help out with the transition.”