by Ninie Hammon
Then she heard Princess Buttercup’s voice, not in her ear, in her head.
Andi, ring the bell!
Andi looked around, uncomprehending. Why would Princess Buttercup…?
Ring the bell! Hurry. Princess Buttercup paused, then added, Andi, do it for Daddy.
Andi leapt to her feet and ran the full length of the sanctuary and out into the vestibule. She took the steps to the bell-cord room two at a time, threw open the door and flipped on the light switch.
The cord hung there in the middle of the room. And the sight of it slipped neatly into its shape that’d been seared into her mind.
Andi raced across the room to the wooden chairs pushed against the wall. She shoved the nearest one out into the room. Not right beneath the rope, off to the side.
She grabbed the rope, pulled once on it like Daddy always did to unfasten it from the clip high above. Then she climbed up onto the chair, took a deep breath and leapt. She got a good grip on the rope and her weight pulled it down so far she had to lift her feet to keep them from touching the floor. She hadn’t been this tall the last time she and Daddy played the game.
She heard the dong of the bell high above her and rode the bell rope back up into the air.
* * * * * * *
“…little pieces off her until you tell me what I want to know,” Vic snarled at Daniel. “Where’s Becca?”
Vic reached out, grabbed a fistful of the front of Daniel’s shirt, and hauled him to his feet as easily as lifting a rag doll. He held Daniel upright with only one hand.
“Stand up!” he ordered, and Daniel set his feet under himself, certain that he would not be able to hold up his own weight when Vic let go. “You don’t want me to have to carry you out of here. If you don’t have to be in one piece so you can walk, maybe I’ll snap your back like I done this.”
He grabbed Daniel’s hand below the broken wrist, and twisted it. Daniel’s scream sounded mewling and pathetic even to his own ears, and the world started to go black around him. He fought to stay conscious and somehow managed to remain standing, swaying. Vic shoved him down the catwalk around the side of the big bell toward the belfry door.
Time slowed down then. Daniel seemed to take a long time to make the few steps around the bell and he couldn’t drag his eyes off the rope. There was something odd…familiar…
Then he saw the rope tighten, slip out of the clip to form a straight brown line. That was it! He collapsed to the floor of the belfry, rolled over and lifted up his hand.
“Help me up,” he said. Vic leaned over to take his hand and Daniel kicked out as hard as he had strength to kick, caught Vic in the knee and threw him backward, off balance.
The bell hit Victor squarely in the side then, an outward and upward blow that literally lifted him off his feet and threw him over the belfry railing. He cried out as he fell. Daniel could hear it until the clapper hit the side of the bell and he could hear nothing at all but the gong, gong, gong sound.
The bell seemed to ring for a long time, but Daniel didn’t know that for sure. When it stopped, he hauled himself to his feet and looked over the railing. A crowd of people had gathered by that time, doing nothing, only staring. Victor hadn’t hit the ground. He hung face up, looking at Daniel in a death stare, with the cross pointed at the top that decorated the wrought-iron gate of the children’s play area sticking out of his chest.
* * * * * * *
Jack ran back across the barrel warehouse to the hole where the metal door had been. Or tried to run. The pain from his broken ribs stabbed a dagger into his side with every step. He reached up and wiped sweat off his forehead but his hand came away red. Blood, but from what wound he couldn’t remember.
As soon as he got close enough to see out the doorway hole, his heart sank. This building was only just beginning to catch fire at this end, but the one next to it, the one Theresa was in, was burning. Smoke leaked out through the sideboards of the building and flames leapt up off the roof. The paper inside had ignited and paper burns fast.
He burst out the opening to a flurry of activity. New fire trucks were pulling up, called in from Cincinnati and from Florence and Newport, Kentucky, across the river. By the time Jack rounded the corner of the burning paper warehouse to the front side, firemen were already directing streams of water to the roof of the barrel warehouse as well as fighting the active fire in the paper warehouse.
Jack blocked out the pain in his side and ran to a knot of firemen who were positioning hoses to send streams of water at the paper warehouse.
He stopped the first fireman he came to.
“There’s somebody in there,” Jack said, then realized the fireman was Charlie Avery, who’d been on the Harrelton Fire Department since before Jack became a police officer there. He knew Jack well—which was probably why he stared at Jack in astonishment. Jack couldn’t begin to imagine what he must look like.
“There can’t be anybody inside,” Charlie said. “We evacuated these buildings hours ago.”
“There’s a woman in there,” Jack snapped. “Give me your respirator.”
“You can’t go in—”
Charlie’s was a simple face-mask air-purifying respirator. Jack needed a more sophisticated air-supplied respirator, but he didn’t have time to wait for one. Before Charlie could respond, Jack snatched the respirator out of his hands and started toward the building. “Right there,” he called over his shoulder, pointing. “Focus a hose on that wall.”
He put the face mask on as he ran.
When he pushed open the door to the warehouse, smoke boiled out at him and flames danced just inside the doorway, blocking his path. The smoke was much too thick for his respirator, too thick to see anything at all.
Then he saw the glow. It wasn’t the angry red of the fire. It was a soft, golden glow about twenty feet ahead and off to the right, a gentle light that didn’t so much shine through the smoke and flames as…it seemed that the glow pushed the smoke and fire away, created a path for Jack. He was sure he’d seen a light like that before.
Jack staggered toward the glow.
Flames curled and danced all around him, but the fire receded, pulled back away from the lighted path he followed. There was no source for the glow, and it didn’t appear to move. Jack never seemed to draw any nearer to it as he ran than he’d been when he was standing in the doorway. Then the security guard’s office appeared, and the glow grew brighter there, illuminating every object in the room. Jack noticed that the light left no shadows.
Theresa lay in the elevator, still bound by tape to the back, arms and front legs of a broken chair. She was on her side, unconscious, with her face pressed up against the side of the elevator where it met the floor. He knelt beside her, rolled her over on her back, took the respirator off and began to fit it to her face. When he did, he noticed the fresh air. All around her was fresh air, coming through the crack between the elevator and the floor. The air was cool, chilled, smelled…sweet, and it swirled around and around her, blowing the smoke away. Jack could breathe.
He fastened the respirator on Theresa’s face, but there was no way to pick her up, not taped to pieces of the chair like that. But even if she hadn’t been, Theresa Washington was a big woman and Jack was…so tired, utterly exhausted.
Instead of trying to lift her, Jack grabbed hold of the chair back like a handle, took a deep breath of the clean air, and began to drag Theresa across the floor.
She was heavy and he struggled slowly forward, one lurching step after another, and it was immediately apparent he couldn’t possibly drag Theresa’s body all the way out of the building in the minute or two he could hold his breath. And once he breathed in that smoke…
He staggered on, and as the seconds ticked away, he should have felt the urgent, holding-your-breath need to gasp building in his chest. He didn’t. The air he’d filled his lungs with had been so fresh and pure. And with every step forward, his weariness seemed to drain away. He felt strength surge through him, like he was
a kid again.
The glow moved ahead of Jack, illuminating the way, moving aside the smoke and flames until the doorway emerged from the swirl of smoke in front of him. Then the glow vanished.
Jack staggered out the door of the warehouse, dragging Theresa behind him, and collapsed in a heap. The breath he’d been holding for—how long? At least five minutes. Probably closer to ten—exploded out of him and he dragged in a smoky breath that made him cough. The surge of strength he’d felt—it was his last. He had no reserves. He was totally spent, unable even to walk.
Firemen swarmed around them. Two lifted Jack off the ground, drew one of his arms around each of their shoulders and dragged him away. Back behind the fire line, they set him down and suddenly paramedics were everywhere, shoving an oxygen mask on his face and speaking to him. But their voices were the hum of a beehive, and he couldn’t make out individual words.
Then Theresa was beside him on the ground, an oxygen mask matching Jack’s covering her face. He saw a quick, confused look pass between the paramedics before they snatched out the scissors they used to cut surgical tape and freed her from the duct tape on the seat back and chair legs. Then they lifted her onto a collapsed gurney, snapped off the catch, pulled it up waist high and began pushing it toward an ambulance.
Paramedics soon had him tethered to a gurney like Theresa’s. Then the red glow of the fire reflecting off the clouds overhead was replaced by Crock’s face. He looked a thousand questions at Jack, but knew he wouldn’t get answers to any of them right now. Jack shoved the oxygen mask off his face, grabbed the front of Crock’s shirt and pulled him down so he could whisper into his ear. He didn’t have enough air to speak out loud.
“Daniel Burke…” Jack was surprised to discover that even his whispered voice was hoarse. “…Reverend Burke. Send a car—”
“That man’s church is swarming with law enforcement,” Crock said.
“He’s alright isn’t he? Not—?”
Jack found he couldn’t put words onto the end of the sentence.
“Reverend Burke is alive and on his way to the hospital.” Before Jack could ask, he continued. “Far as I know his injuries aren’t life-threatening.”
Jack relaxed back on the gurney, and the paramedic slipped the oxygen mask back over his face.
“What you were doing in that warehouse with Theresa Washington, her all trussed up in more duct tape than a hillbilly’s pickup truck, has something to do with what went on at Burke’s church tonight.”
It wasn’t a question, but Jack wouldn’t have been able to answer it even if it had been.
Crock knew that. He looked at Jack sympathetically and Jack thought again to wonder what a sight he must be—what injuries he had sustained that would make their presence vividly known as soon as the anesthetic effect of adrenaline wore off. Then Crock patted his arm and the paramedics lifted the gurney up into the ambulance beside the one holding Theresa.
The ambulance bumped across the ground toward the road, dropped over the curb and turned toward town, lights flashing and siren wailing. Theresa seemed to be breathing well. Jack looked questioningly at the paramedic, pleaded with his eyes.
The young man hesitated. “I’m no doctor,” he said. “But I think she’s going to be fine.”
Jack relaxed back on the gurney. It wasn’t until then that he realized Crock hadn’t said anything about Emily and Andi. Where were they?
Too much. He couldn’t think about that right now. He closed his eyes and pondered the wonders and mysteries of the last few minutes.
The air. The fresh basement air around Theresa. Warm air rises, cool air sinks. Basic physics. Cool air wouldn’t have…couldn’t have…
Then he let it go.
CHAPTER 35
When Crock appeared at Jack’s hospital room door, Jack tried not to let it show on his face how badly he did not want to talk to the man.
Oh, he could have pleaded that he was badly injured and not up to answering questions right now. That’s what the doctors had been saying about him every time Crock showed up for thirty-six hours now.
He could put it off. Then Bishop’s words swirled up out of his memory.
Son, if’n you got to eat a frog, don’t look at it too long. And if’n you got to eat two frogs—
Bishop. That’s where he’d gotten that phrase! Jack smiled at the memory and Crock took the smile as an indication that Jack was glad to see him, and eager—well, at least willing—to talk to him.
Jack relaxed back on the pillow and prepared to eat a frog. The big one.
“You look like death on a cracker,” Crock said as he crossed the room to Jack’s bedside in his swaying, sailor-on-the-deck-of-a-ship-at-sea gait. His legs were so bowed that Jack once pointed out if he danced with a knock-kneed girl they’d look like an egg beater. Crock sat heavily in the chair beside Jack’s bed.
Jack knew he looked a mess, probably worse now than when he got here, since bruises got uglier and more colorful with the passage of time. Being black helped. They were harder to see.
But his right eye was swollen shut, his lip had required two stitches to close the split in it, his scalp had required six to close the gash, and his nose was flat, though it had been moved off his cheek and returned to more or less its original position above his mouth. Doctors said it would have to be “re-shaped” eventually. Jack was looking forward to that.
Add to that two cracked ribs, a concussion, badly bruised kidneys, a shattered sinus, a dislocated thumb. And two broken fingers.
Not as bad as Daniel’s broken wrist, which he might never have full use of again.
Daniel wasn’t thinking about the future right now, though. His world in the present had come crashing down around him and he couldn’t see anything but the debris.
They’d made Jack promise he wouldn’t get out of the wheelchair if they took him to see Daniel, because they knew if they refused to wheel him there, he’d get up out of the bed and walk to Daniel’s room under his own steam.
When the door closed softly behind the nurse, there had been only silence. Jack had no idea what to say. And Daniel knew that—knew how uncomfortable this made Jack.
Feelings as tangled as last year’s Christmas lights clogged Jack’s throat so he couldn’t have spoken even if he’d known what to say. Daniel knew that, too, spoke into the awkwardness, eased it away.
“You got Cole.” It wasn’t a question. Daniel knew if Jack hadn’t killed the man, Jack wouldn’t be here.
“Yeah, I got him.” The how didn’t matter—though when Daniel got around to asking, he’d tell him. Jack knew the basics of what had happened between Daniel and Victor, how he’d somehow managed to throw the man off the bell tower of the church. He didn’t ask for more information, but Daniel gave it.
“I didn’t get Vic, Andi did. She pulled the bell rope—the straight brown line—and the bell knocked Victor over the railing. She said an angel told her to do it while she was kneeling beside her mother.”
There it was. Emily.
“Daniel, I’m so—”
“If Andi hadn’t rung the bell at that precise moment…”
“Andi saved my life, too,” Jack said. “Her vision did.” He’d tell Daniel about that, too. But not now. “I’m…sorry about Emily.”
“She told me she loved me. On the phone, she said she was…sorry.” Then Daniel started to cry. And Jack broke his promise about staying in the wheelchair.
Jack had remained in Daniel’s room for hours, wouldn’t leave even when the nurses ordered him to, silenced their threats with, “You need to do whatever it is you people do when you don’t get your way because I am not leaving this room. We clear on that?”
When he and Daniel finally got around to that part, they had agreed they’d tell the authorities the truth—up to a point. They’d say they had no idea what had “possessed” these two men to try to kill them. Theresa had been put on the cardiac ward because of a heart condition she hadn’t bothered to tell them about, and
Jack couldn’t bully his way in to see her—so there was no telling what she might say. But she had, after all, lived her whole life a witness to things other people couldn’t see. She’d obviously figured out some way to deflect questions about it.
Jack was about to develop his own skill at that right now. He looked at Crock and genuinely didn’t want to mislead him. But there flat out wasn’t any way to tell him the whole story.
“You ready now to explain why you and Reverend Burke got the crap stomped out of you and the reverend’s wife…” Crock stopped, looked down. “We got several calls from neighbors who lived near his church.” He shook his head. When Crock spoke again Daniel knew the words were an effort to convince himself. “Fighting a five-alarm fire, it’s hard not to back-burner a complaint that somebody’s pastor just ran over a rose bush.”
“Tell me what you already know,” Jack said.
“So you can figure out how much information you can withhold and I won’t figure it out?”
Jack took a deep breath and unloaded the whole story on Crock—except the parts he wouldn’t believe, the parts that would earn Jack a room in a padded cell in St. Somebody’s Home for the Bewildered.
Crock let him give his whole spiel without interruption. When Jack was finished, Crock reached up and took the hearing aid out of his right ear. The major had a strange kind of hearing loss, only certain frequencies, couldn’t hear specific music notes and speech sounds. But when he was wearing his hearing aids—which he called Sonny and Cher—he could actually hear a dog whistle.
“I was just checking,” Crock said. “Figured Cher must have died on me, because you couldn’t possibly have said what I think you did. That story’s got more holes in it than a wino’s raincoat.”
Jack said nothing.
“You’re not going to tell me why two guys who, as far as we can determine, haven’t seen each other since high school got together and decided to kill two other people they hadn’t seen since they played baseball together when they were twelve. What’d you and Burke do, give them wedgies in the locker room?”