“I’m okay, R.J.,” I told him with a slight smile.
“Good,” he nodded quickly. “So, like, the phone’s for you.”
“For me?” I asked, “Who is it?”
“I didn’t catch his name, but he said he was a cop.” He shrugged. “He just asked if he could speak to Rowan Gant.”
“I’m with Ben already. Why would the police be calling me here?” I puzzled.
“Albright’s probably got a copper checkin’ up on you,” Ben offered. “It’d be just like her.”
“Great.” I rolled my eyes. “Just what I need. Okay, R.J., I’ll be right there.”
“’Kay.”
The young man disappeared behind the wall, and we heard him moving back up the hallway.
“Be just your luck she’ll get on the phone and start chewin’ on you again,” my friend offered.
“This wouldn’t be a good time for that,” I returned.
“Hey, at least I warmed her up for you.”
“Thanks, Ben,” I said with something nearing good-natured sarcasm rimming my voice. “Thanks ever so much.”
*****
Everyone had moved back into the dining room before I ventured into the corridor and made my way to the front of the house. Ben tagged along behind me, ostensibly to lend some moral support if I was about to be verbally worked over by Albright yet again.
My left shoulder was beginning to ache, and the pain was going out of its way to make itself known. I’d had trouble with the joint ever since Porter had rammed an ice pick into it that night on the Old Chain of Rocks Bridge, especially when I was faced with a change in the weather like today. Not to mention, bouncing it from the doorframe on Ben’s van had only served to aggravate the old injury. I took a moment to rotate it in the socket and felt a grating pop, which just made it worse. I winced and hoped the ibuprofen would be kicking in soon.
“You okay?” Ben asked.
“Shoulder,” I told him.
He nodded then leaned his back against the wall opposite me. “Yeah, sorry about that.”
“Uh-huh,” I grunted. “I’ll get you back.”
“So, don’t worry too much,” he continued, keeping his voice low. “If they want you to come in, I’ll go with ya’.”
I nodded acknowledgement back at him as I picked up the handset from the telephone table and pressed it against my ear. “Hello. This is Rowan Gant.”
I was greeted with the hollow sound of static that told me the phone was definitely off hook at the other end, but there was nothing else. For a moment, I thought that I might have been placed on hold. However, as I listened I was certain that I could hear the thready sound of breathing intertwined with the semi-silence issuing from the earpiece.
“Hello?” I spoke again. “Anyone there?”
“You must excuse me,” a painfully familiar voice returned. “It is not every day that I speak with the spawn of Satan.”
CHAPTER 11:
I froze.
There wasn’t much else I could do.
The voice sounded hollow and distant, but there was no mistaking to whom it belonged.
The pain in my shoulder erupted from a smolder to an intense blaze, just like a fire suddenly fed by a back draft. The sharp ache coursed down my arm, searing every nerve ending in its path before ricocheting from my fingertips and driving back upward into my skull. I closed my eyes and sighed heavily as the burning spasm tightened my scalp and opened the gates for the dull throb that had been sequestered in the back of my head.
What I wanted to do at this very moment was to explode with anger. Instead, I forced myself to remain grounded and keep my voice even. I opened my eyes and turned to face Ben as I spoke, “Hello, Eldon.”
My friend had been slouched against the wall, and he now came fully to attention, his face masked with a look of incredulity as he stared back at me.
“Porter?” he mouthed the question silently, holding his hand to emulate a telephone as he placed it to the side of his head.
I nodded slowly in response.
“You would have been proud of your disciple, Gant,” Porter was telling me. “He maintained his allegiance to you right up to the end.”
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“And the great dragon was cast out, that old serpent, called the Devil, and Satan, which deceiveth the whole world: he was cast out into the earth, and his angels were cast out with him.”
“Book of Revelation,” I offered. “I already know you can quote the Bible, Eldon. Why don’t you stop hiding behind someone else’s words?”
“Hiding? You are the one hiding, Gant. I am walking in the light of God.”
“You’ll excuse me if I have a little trouble with that, Eldon,” I offered. “I seem to recall your God saying ‘Thou shalt not kill.’”
“He also states that there is a time to kill. Ecclesiastes…”
“…Three, three. Yeah, I’ve heard. So why don’t you tell me what you really meant?”
Ben had become a flurry of activity, moving with a choreographed swiftness as he stepped forward and checked the caller ID display on the telephone’s base unit. He quickly retrieved his notebook, scribbled something, and then motioned to get my attention and mouthed, “Keep him talking.”
I felt like I was in the middle of a movie about a kidnapping and that I had been selected to take the call making the ransom demand. I nodded and tried to concentrate on what Porter was saying.
“…remained impenitent.”
“I’m sorry, Eldon,” I returned. “There must be some static on the line, I didn’t catch that first part.”
“There’s no static,” he answered calmly. “You were distracted by Detective Storm instructing you to keep me on the line while he gets this call traced.”
My first inclination was to assure him that his comment was untrue, but that’s what always happens in the movies, and it’s always a lie. I decided to go for broke. “You’re right, but can you blame us?”
Ben had taken a few steps down the hall to get out of earshot and was now whispering into his cell phone as he read off something from his notebook. I glanced down at the caller ID display and noticed that it said “PAY PHONE,” and gave the number. I couldn’t place the exchange other than that it was definitely a Saint Louis number.
“No, I suppose that is the sort of thing you would do,” Porter replied, an eerie flatness to his voice. “His loyalty to you is misguided, but he will soon see the truth.”
“What truth is that?”
“Your devotion to Satan, of course.”
“I think you have me confused with somebody else.”
“Lest Satan should get an advantage of us: for we are not ignorant of his devices.”
“Second Corinthians, chapter two, verse eleven,” I told him. “Nice try, but you aren’t the first person to take it out of context and throw it in my face.”
I knew my comment could very possibly serve to antagonize him, but I didn’t care. He’d already done his share to anger me-and he had succeeded in spades.
“Set thou a wicked man over him: and let Satan stand at his right hand,” he told me.
“Psalm, one-oh-nine, verse six. Come on, Eldon, you didn’t really call here to recite the Holy Bible to me did you?”
Ben was nodding as he continued whispering into his phone. He looked up in my direction and motioned at me to keep Eldon on the line.
“Did you get my note?” the voice asked.
The only other time I had spoken to Porter was when he had pronounced my sentence the night he tried to kill me. Then, as now, his voice was cold and emotionless. This last comment was a sudden and unexpected exception. He sounded almost gleeful.
I felt a wave of heat flush through my face as my blood pressure rose. My free hand clenched into a hard fist, and I fought to maintain my composure. Unfortunately, my stolid silence gave him exactly what he wanted.
“I’ve been doing some more reading, Gant. Research mostly. Historical…”
“Good for you,” I muttered, barely able to contain my anger.
“Oh yes,” he replied. “It is very good for me. You see, it seems that I’ve been far too narrow in my scope when it comes to extracting confessions.”
“I hadn’t noticed.”
“Take your disciple for instance. He was my first disembowelment. I thought it went very well.”
I sucked in a deep breath through my nose and let it slowly out through my mouth, steeling myself before answering him in a cold tone. “I thought you said you weren’t able to break him?”
“Oh no, you misunderstood. He confessed. He just never told me where I could find you.”
“That’s because he didn’t know,” I spat.
“It doesn’t matter. I’ve found you now.”
I looked over at Ben, and he once again waved his hand, indicating that I should keep Porter talking. I frowned hard. I wasn’t sure how much more I could take before I completely lost control.
“Maybe you just think you have,” I said.
There was a long silence at the other end, and I thought for a moment that he might have hung up, but then his voice issued once again from the earpiece. “You never did tell me if you got my note.”
“You know I did.”
“I made that selection specifically for you. What did you think?”
“I think you are a sick bastard.”
I thought I heard him actually laugh before settling once again into his emotionless voice. “Your wife is very lovely, Gant. For a heretic. I suppose you are aware that the inquisitors of the fifteenth century sometimes found it necessary to, shall we say, ‘have their way’ with the women they interrogated?”
My fragile pane of composure shattered into jagged shards. The heat that had earlier flushed my face now consumed my entire body. I could feel myself shaking, and I was gripping the handset so tight that my fingers were beginning to numb.
“Listen to me you son-of-a-bitch,” I spoke evenly into the mouthpiece. My voice started at a low volume, but with each sentence it grew along an ever-increasing upward arc. “This is between you and me. No one else, got me?! You had better start praying to your God right now. You’d best pray that the police get to you first, because I’m coming after you. I’m coming after you, and I’m going to kill you!
DO YOU HEAR ME GODDAMMIT?! I’M GOING TO FUCKING KILL YOU, YOU BASTARD!”
I was holding the phone in front of my face, screaming into it. Adrenalin was pumping through me, and I was shaking uncontrollably. I felt a hand clamp on my shoulder, and I wheeled about, swinging the handset like a club. My hand was suddenly engulfed by Ben’s own. He pushed me against the wall and held me there as he ripped the telephone away with his free hand. He brought it up to his ear and listened then frowned before dropping it onto the table beside the base and snatching up his cell phone.
“It’s clicking, like maybe he hung up,” he fired his voice into the device. “Tell me you nailed the bastard… Yeah… Yeah… Okay, I’ll hang on…”
My friend looked at me with a mixture of concern and what looked as though it might have been fear in his eyes. He was still holding his cell phone to his ear, but he twisted the mouthpiece down out of the way. “Jeezus, Row… Calm down… ‘Kay?”
I was still shaking, but Ben had me stiff-armed against the wall; I wasn’t going anywhere. I sucked in a deep breath and glared back at him as I spoke, “The motherfucker just told me he was going to rape my wife!”
I heard a gasp, and when I looked to the side I realized that my outburst had attracted the attention of everyone else in the household. The worst part was that the look on Felicity’s face told me that she’d heard every word of what I’d just said to Ben.
I stared back at her pained expression, watching as her earlier fear visibly resurfaced. I mutely chastised myself for losing control and tried to find something to say to her that would quell her uneasiness but came up empty.
“Yeah, yeah I’m here,” Ben began speaking again as he twisted the cell phone back into place. “He what? You’ve gotta be kiddin’… Shit… Okay… Yeah…” He let out a heavy sigh. “Yeah… I’ll be here… Thanks.”
I turned back to face him and found his concerned gaze still locked on my face as he switched off the phone and stuffed it into his pocket. The thick silence in the corridor rose to a crescendo and was then replaced by his almost apologetic voice. “You okay now, Row?”
“They didn’t get him, did they?” I asked.
“No. No, they didn’t.” He shook his head as he spoke. “So, can I let you go now?”
I was still tensed and shaking, but the sight of my wife behind him had forced me to calm quicker than I would have otherwise. I nodded to him, and he tentatively relaxed his stance, waiting a short moment before releasing me entirely.
As soon as I was free, I stepped past him and wrapped my arms around Felicity. She laid her head against my shoulder and held tight.
“Aye, it was him,” she whispered. “He called here, then.”
“It’s okay,” I told her. “It’s okay.”
Looking past her I could see the rest of the group milling about in the corridor, staring at us with their own brand of fear on their faces.
“They had the number to the pay phone from the caller ID.” I spoke aloud to Ben without turning; my tone was just short of an accusation. “It’s not like they had to trace it. What went wrong?”
“That wasn’t the problem, Row,” he answered. “They pinpointed the location right away and dropped every copper in the area on it like the friggin’ sky was fallin’.”
“So what happened?”
“Jeezus, Row, this bastard is a piece of work…”
“What?”
“He had two pay phones stuck together with duct tape, white man.”
“Awww, Gods…” I brought one hand up to massage my forehead as I closed my eyes. “That’s why it sounded so hollow. He relayed it.”
“Yeah. Not exactly the most high tech. All you gotta do is call one pay phone, tape it to the one next to it, and then dial here with that pay phone…”
“Doesn’t really matter, it worked, didn’t it?” I spat.
“Yeah. Unfortunately it did. They’re lookin’ at the computers now, tryin’ to trace it back, but since he was nowhere around, odds are he was talkin’ to ya’ on a cell. He was hell and gone from the scene the minute he dialed the fuckin’ number.”
CHAPTER 12:
“I really don’t want to monopolize your time,” I said as I leaned against the deck rail and looked out across the back yard.
“You are not monopolizing anything, Rowan,” Helen Storm answered in the clear and carefully worded fashion I’d grown accustomed to since our first meeting less than one month ago. “Besides, I was ready for a cigarette.”
Ben’s sister was a self-described chain smoker, and she supported her claim easily. To me it seemed like an odd habit for a psychiatrist, but then, she was also human. We all had our vices-for instance, with me, it was cigars-so I was not about to make a judgment.
In the physical features department, Helen bore more than a passing family resemblance to her brother; the obvious exception being that she stood just shy of a foot shorter than he was. Other than that, they shared the same mysteriously dark eyes and characteristic profiles. Her thick, black hair hung in a straight fall that pleasantly contrasted her softly angular features. It was streaked here and there with strands of grey, which was the only visual indicator that she was the older of the two siblings.
I shrugged inside my coat, giving a slight shiver against a random gust of wind that managed to infiltrate its folds and then tugged the zipper up another pair of inches in self-defense.
Yellow-brown stands of decorative grasses ringed the inside of the yard, each clump angling upward in shallow arcs to peek just inches over the top of the privacy fence. Snow was now falling in heavy waves, drifting downward, slipstreaming sideways on the wind and then tumbling to rest
on the dormant carpet of Zoysia.
“Nancy probably needs you more than me,” I said while looking down and absently inspecting the burning cigar I was twisting between my thumb and forefinger. “She’s the one who just lost her husband to a psychopath.”
Helen exhaled a stream of smoke and tapped the ash from the end of her cigarette before gesturing. “Look there, Rowan.”
I looked up then swiveled my head and followed her finger with my eyes. A sturdily-caged bird feeder sat atop a post in a nearby section of the yard with a pair of black-capped chickadees flitting in and out of it. A much larger bird, speckled along its brown back, hung from the side where a suet cake had been affixed.
“That is a northern flicker,” she announced.
“Avoiding my question?” I asked, looking back at her with a slight smile.
She shrugged as she spoke. “No, not really, Rowan. I am simply fascinated by birds. Besides, you did not ask a question. You made a comment.” She returned the smile as she paused and took a drag on her cigarette. “Now, if I were to treat your comment as a question, first I would point out that Eldon Porter is a sociopath not a psychopath.”
“Touche,” I answered.
“Secondly, I would tell you that Nancy has exactly what she needs, given the circumstances. Family. As she advances through the stages of grief, her family will be the most effective support system she could ever need. She will talk to me when and if she feels ready to do so. Perhaps she will never need me. I cannot say one way or the other at this stage. That is something that is peculiar to the individual. You can rest assured, however, that she is not yet ready.”
I returned to staring out into the yard as she spoke. The seasonally barren branches of trees twisted in the air, their grey-black bark collecting cottony traces of the falling precipitation. As I stared at them, they began to look as though they were spindly arms reaching out in some agonized death throe-all in all, a visual metaphor for my own tortured mood.
I took a hard drag on the end of my cigar. I normally reveled in the spicy taste of a good, Maduro-wrapped smoke, but at the moment it wasn’t bringing the pleasure I hoped. I allowed the blue-white smoke to stream out slowly between my teeth, making a futile grab for some modicum of enjoyment and finding none.
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