When I finally responded to his pointed selection, my voice was cold and hard. “Skip the verse, Eldon. Just tell me what you did to her.”
As he had done earlier in the day, he seemed to be taking morbid pleasure in the horrors he was committing. His personality had made another one-hundred-eighty-degree shift, and even though he was trapped with no means of escape, here he was gloating. Flaunting what he perceived as his newly found control over me.
“You wouldn’t happen to know whether or not she is right-handed or left-handed, would you?” he asked.
“You son-of-a-bitch,” I muttered. “If you cut her hand off, she’s going to bleed to death.”
“Son of God, Gant.”
“Not of any God I know,” I spat. “How badly is she bleeding?!”
“Oh, calm down,” he chided. “She’s fine. She even still has both of her hands.” He paused for a beat then added a sinister, “For now.”
“Then what did you do to her?” I repeated the question with added hardness.
“Nothing yet.”
I knew he had to have done something, or she wouldn’t be unconscious. I wanted to press him for an answer but wasn’t sure if that would just set him off again. I decided my best bet would be to take a different approach. “So why did you bother calling me then?”
“To find out if she is left-handed or right-handed.”
“I really don’t know, Eldon. Why?”
“Oh well, it doesn’t matter all that much, I suppose,” he spat. “When the time comes, I’ll take her left, just like you did to me.”
I closed my eyes, and the memories flooded in. Things I thought I had finally come to terms with bored into my skull and re-awakened my own viscid fear.
I could almost feel the cold and even the dampness of the fog. The forlorn sound of violins filtered into my ears from somewhere above me, straining out a lament as only they could. I stood there motionless as I felt my own arm going numb.
Mentally, I was once again dangling in the chilled air with a thin, nylon rope twined tightly about my forearm, suspended precariously over the side of the Old Chain of Rocks Bridge. A raving madman, bent on ending my life had his bony hand wrapped around my throat and was squeezing. My consciousness was fleeing in panic, and I was all but prepared to join it.
It didn’t matter that this was only in my head because it had once been all too real, and right now, the high definition memory was making my heart race all over again.
I pushed my still shaking hand back up to my side then thrust my thumb beneath the nylon strap and pushed outward. With a dull pop, it released, and I immediately wrapped my hand around the grip of the pistol.
The miniscule piece of breath I’d been able to grasp was failing quickly, and my vision was darkening as my eyes started rolling back in my head. The abbreviated lesson in the use of the pistol flashed through my mind as just so much jumbled nonsense. I could find no way to apply the instructions to my present situation.
Being unable to aim, I centered on what was left of my strength and pressed the gun upward at an angle across my chest until it met resistance.
The panicked voices of various stringed instruments blended to a thick, disharmonious crescendo in my ears…
For a brief instant I considered the fact that my left arm was now completely numb, and I silently begged for the resistance I found to be his arm and not my own. Then, tensing my body, I pulled the trigger.
The muzzle flashed.
The explosion reported deafeningly in my ear.
The spent shell ejected directly toward me and transferred its searing heat to my cheek.
Thick blood spattered like heavy rain across the side of my face.
The cold fingers snapped open.
Something thudded heavily against me and fell away.
A tortured scream faded into the distance below.
A single violin cried into the night, fading with sorrowful purpose toward silence…
Everything went completely black.
I was on the verge of hyperventilating when I opened my eyes. The torturous snippet of my life was well over one year old, but it had impressed itself upon me with the clarity of here and now. Each detail was as crisp and terrifying as it had been then.
As it continued to replay in my head, I fought to focus on the situation at the other end of the line.
“So I took your hand?” I retorted, finding a morbid solace in having caused him harm. “I guess that’s one for me, then.”
“You shouldn’t have done that, Gant,” he snarled.
“You were trying to strangle me, Eldon,” I said. “Just exactly what did you expect me to do?”
“Accept your sentence,” he returned.
“I don’t accept the judgment of a lunatic.”
“Whether you accept it or not, Gant, you can’t deny your guilt. You have admitted it freely.”
“So why take her hand,” I asked, trying to push past this point of contention. “Isn’t it mine that you want?”
“Oh, Gant,” he replied. “You know what I want from you.”
“So, why her then. Do you intend to torture me by proxy?”
“Like I said, your sentence has been pronounced,” he replied. “Don’t you remember?”
He was intent on reiterating my sentence, most likely for those I am sure he knew were listening. It didn’t matter what I said to him, he was going to bring it all back around to this.
“I wasn’t paying that much attention to you, Eldon,” I said with a note of impatience. “But I get the feeling you want to remind me.”
His speech became measured and almost theatrical. “By this our definitive sentence we drive you from the ecclesiastical court, and abandon you to the power of the secular court, that having you in its power now moderates its sentence of death against you.”
“Yeah, sounds vaguely familiar,” I retorted. “But let’s get back to reality here. What makes you think you’ll be able to execute that sentence?”
“I almost did that night,” he answered. “Now I’ll finish what I started.”
“Bullshit, Eldon,” I retorted. “You made a feeble attempt and ended up losing a hand in the deal. And now you’re hiding in an abandoned building that’s surrounded by police. Give it up, there’s no chance.”
“Yes there is.”
“How so?”
“Because I have this woman, and you can’t bear to lose her soul,” he stated without hesitation.
I steeled myself for what I was about to say and tried to sound convincing. “You can have her. I’ll get another.”
“No you won’t, Gant,” he said. “I know you better than you think I do.”
“If you know me so damn well, then why don’t you just tell me what you want and get it over with,” I demanded.
“A deal,” he replied. “Your life for her…”
The telephone made a grating, double click, then fell silent.
“Eldon?” I queried into the handset.
My ear received only a thick silence in reply, but it was different from the times before when he had hung up on me. There were no clicks in the background and no empty hollowness to echo back. This time the phone seemed to have literally gone dead.
“He hung up or something,” I stated aloud, looking at Ben and then Constance.
Ben took the phone from my hand then turned and slid it almost gently into the cradle. As he did so, he slowly relaxed his hold on me.
“He didn’t hang up,” Constance said carefully.
Ben had turned back to face me, and he seemed to be waiting for something. I glanced over at Constance; suddenly perplexed by the way both of them were acting. “What’s going on?”
“Now listen to me, Rowan,” she began, maintaining her calm tone with an obvious degree of purpose.
“Oh Gods! What did you do now?!” My voice inched up the scale as I felt my anger swell once again.
“Shut up and listen, Row,” Ben barked.
Something
about the way his voice was edged made me take immediate notice and fall quiet.
“The line was interrupted by the hostage negotiation team,” Constance continued her explanation. “They are taking over the contact with Porter.”
“What?” I shook my head in disbelief. “Why now? I had him talking.”
“You did great,” she replied. “No one is saying you didn’t, Rowan. However, where the rules of hostage negotiation are concerned, they had already blurred the lines a hell of a lot more than I’ve ever seen them do before. The only reason they let him talk to you for so long was so they could gather information and get SWAT into position.”
“Dammit!” I yelped. “If they try to go in there again, he’s going to kill her!”
“They know, Rowan, they know.” She held up her hands and motioned me to settle. “Believe me, that is the last thing they want.”
“Well, he told me what he wants,” I returned. “Me for her. Why don’t we…”
“Not happenin’, Row,” Ben announced in a stern voice, verbally inserting a period into my sentence well before I had planned to be finished with it. “Just forget that crap right now.”
“That’s one of the reasons the line was terminated when it was,” Constance told me, adding a shake of her head. “He started to negotiate a deal with you, and that is something the HNT is not going to let happen.”
“It’s one of the commandments in the hostage negotiation bible, white man,” Ben told me. “Thou shalt not trade one hostage for another. No ifs, ands, or buts.”
“So where does this leave us?” I demanded. “He’s just going to escalate if they cut him off from me.”
“You don’t know that, Row,” Ben replied.
“The hell I don’t!” I said. “I’ve talked to this sonofabitch more than any of you. I’d really appreciate it if everyone would just stop telling me what I do and don’t know!”
“Rowan.” Felicity’s voice hit me at the same time she slipped around Ben and came into my view. Her eyes were damp with the tears she was fighting hard to contain. “Let them handle it. Please?”
I leaned back and closed my eyes. My headache was back, and it was hammering away with a vengeance, all the while making sneak attacks on parts of my brain I didn’t know I had. Something-or someone-was still knocking around at my ethereal perimeter, relentlessly looking for a way in. My best friend was willing to handcuff me to something stationary in order to keep me out of a mess that, whether he liked it or not, I was already at the center of. I couldn’t remember everything I had shouted at Constance, but I was betting I owed her an apology. Finally, and worst of all, my wife had every reason to believe that left unchecked, I would make her a widow.
Actually, I take that back. The worst part was that she was probably correct.
I don’t know if I had left anything out, but the laundry list was already several items too long for me to be comfortable with, so I was in no hurry to add to it. I knew for a fact that I had definitely been on the receiving end of better days than this, and I was longing for one of them right now.
I heaved out a sigh and reached up to massage my temples. “Look, all of you, I’m sorry,” I said. “You’re not exactly getting to see me at my best.”
“S’alright, Kemosabe,” Ben replied. “We know you’re under a lotta pressure. That’s pretty much why I haven’t decked your ass yet.”
“How fortunate for me,” I quipped.
“I’m thinkin’ maybe, yeah, it is,” he said with a grin.
“So what do we do now?” I asked.
“We relax and wait for this to all be over,” Constance advised. “Then you try your best to forget this day ever happened.”
“You know I can’t do that,” I replied.
“We can try,” Felicity pleaded.
“Honey…” I reached for her, and she slipped past Ben to melt into me. Her own energy was a chaotic turmoil, and it blended easily with mine, leaving us both unbalanced and preternaturally askew.
“It’s all but over, Rowan,” Ben offered. “They’re gonna take this asshole down. No two ways about it. He’ll go out in cuffs or a body bag. His choice.”
“I understand that,” I told him. “But what about Star? What if SHE is the one who ends up in a body bag?”
“That’s why HNT has the ball now,” Constance answered. “It is their job to keep that from happening.”
“But, they have to understand that I am who he wants,” I returned in a matter-of-fact tone. “There’s no other bargaining for them to do.”
“Believe me, Rowan, they know that,” she assured me. “But that is simply not how things are done.”
Her phone chirped again. I had lost count of the number of phone calls coming in and out of this apartment throughout this evening, so this was just another to add on to the pile.
“Mandalay,” she answered, speaking into the device almost as soon as she flipped it open.
We all stood there, gathered in the kitchenette as if seeking some type of comfort within our small clutch. Safety in numbers, shared empathy, I don’t know. I couldn’t tell if it was actually working or just feeding the tension.
The expectant silence grew, as our only access to even her side of the conversation came in the form of reflexive nods occasionally coupled with scattered “yes’s” and “uh-huh’s.” After a trio of minutes, during which our edgy anticipation swelled into a thick bubble around us, she finally uttered something more than a monosyllabic response.
“Are you absolutely sure?” she asked whoever was at the other end of the line, her features creasing into a frown. “You want both of them? No, I’m sure he will be agreeable to it. Okay. Thanks, bye.”
She closed the cover on the silver device and clipped it back to her belt before looking at all of us. Then she allowed her gaze to center on me.
“That was the HNT,” she said. “The lead hostage negotiator wants us to bring you and Felicity to the scene.”
CHAPTER 30:
A gelid rush of foreboding injected itself directly into my heart and spread quickly through veins and arteries with each successive beat. My entire body took on a frightening chill. Hollowness filled my chest, and after a moment, my brain pointed out that I wasn’t bothering to breathe. I released my mental grip on the feeling of icy terror and allowed my autonomic reflexes to continue once again unimpeded.
Even though I’m certain that my heart had never actually stopped beating, I would swear that I felt it stutter a bit as it seemed to restart.
I looked at Agent Mandalay and then slowly shook my head. “Call him back and tell him I said no.”
“Do what?” Ben asked with confusion in his voice.
“But, Rowan, I thought you…” Constance began.
“Me, yes,” I cut her off. “Felicity, no way. She’s not getting anywhere near that sick bastard.”
“Rowan…” Felicity brought her head up as she spoke.
“Listen, Row, the scene is secure,” Ben offered.
“I don’t care,” I returned. “What do they want her there for anyway?”
“To interview,” Mandalay said. “The same reason they want you.”
“Interview about what?”
“Porter,” she returned. “He called her today, so she’s had direct contact with him as well. You need to understand, Rowan, the HNT looks for every piece of information they can possibly use. No matter how insignificant you may think it seems, they want to know about it.”
“Fine. Then she can tell them everything he said to her by phone if they want to know that badly,” I asserted.
“Rowan,” Felicity interjected again. “You’ll not be going without me then.”
“Honey, you know as well as I do what Porter has done. I’m not willing to take the chance.”
“Aye, but I am.”
I shook my head vigorously. “No, Felicity, I can’t accept that.”
“Rowan,” Mandalay began, “I can understand your concern, but think about it. Ther
e are over two dozen police officers on the scene, and that isn’t even counting FBI and SWAT. Now, where else could Felicity be safer?”
“Right here as far as I’m concerned.”
“I’m going,” Felicity announced.
“No,” I stated in the most adamant tone I could muster. “If they want me there, fine, but only me, not you. Those are my terms, and they’re non-negotiable.”
Felicity had pulled back slightly and now fixed me with an unforgiving stare as she piped up again. “Aye, but they’re not yours to dictate, Rowan. If you are going then I am going. Those are MY terms.”
“Felicity…”
“No,” she insisted, her glare hardening. “Best you not argue with me on this because you won’t win.”
“But…”
“Aye, Caorthann, I said no.” The stern quality that filled her voice when she cut me off was as much magickal as it was earthbound, maybe even more so.
This time, her use of the Gaelic version of my name was coupled with an undeniable energy. She meant to drive home a point, and she did so with earnest. She was correct. I couldn’t win, and continuing to argue was just a waste of time. My desire to protect her was being trumped by her desire to protect me. Any other cards I could play would only bring us to an impasse.
I frowned and brushed my hand across the lower half of my face then shifted my gaze back and forth between Ben and Mandalay as I spoke. “Okay, but I want her as far removed from this as possible.”
“Both of you will be,” Mandalay replied. “The HNT is just going to be interviewing you, that’s all. So you definitely won’t be in any line of fire.”
“I’ll get our coats,” Felicity announced, pulling away from me and skirting around Ben as he shuffled to the side.
“It’s gonna be okay, white man,” my friend told me.
“I hope so,” I replied. “I don’t have a very good feeling about this.”
“Twilight Zone?” he asked.
I centered on the anxious energy that was using my spine as a multi-lane thoroughfare and felt the ache rise inside my skull as my scalp tightened. “Yeah, definitely.”
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