Hell Bent

by Heather Killough-Walden

  Across the cabin, Sam’s tall form began to shake with silent laughter.

  Annabelle ignored him. “It’ll go Kamikaze on us and drop out of the sky like a rock just for the chance to hear us all scream before we hit the ground!”

  Cassie blinked beside her and then bit her lips to keep from smiling. She cocked her head to one side, as if considering Annabelle’s words. Then she nodded once and said, “Well, I guess you never know. Planes could have feelings-”

  “Absolutely!” Virginia piped up, helpfully. “In fact, the Native Americans have long believed in animism.” She was animated, herself now, gesturing with her hands as she spoke. “It’s something children seem to know instinctively – that all things in the universe have sentience – but that we forget as we grow older-”

  Annabelle didn’t have a chance to catch the rest of Virginia’s mini-lecture on the souls of inanimate objects, because it was at that moment that Jack wrapped his left arm around her upper body, pinning her tightly as he inserted a needle through her sleeve and into her right arm.

  Not having expected it, she barely felt the sting. But whatever it was he gave her worked quickly. Her legs gave out and she fell into Jack’s supportive arms. Her world went black in the space of two very short seconds.

  Annabelle was running, but no matter how hard she pushed, her legs would only go so fast. Or slow. They moved like bendy straws through frozen molasses, threatening to break under the pressure she was exerting upon them.

  But she needed to move. She desperately needed to get away, because the plane was skating along the frozen water, rushing toward her, flames shooting out of its windows. It was screaming as it skidded along the ice, issuing forth an ear-splitting noise like a banshee or a jet engine.

  Horrible. Loud.

  Up ahead, a crack in the ice spread out before her. It formed a hole, leading to dark, frigid waters below. They were a sapphire blue, endless and familiar. She moved toward the hole, knowing that the plunge would hurt, but would probably save her life.

  Behind her, the air grew hot. It grew very hot. The back of her neck tingled with the lick of flames. She hissed in a breath and her heart pounded hard in her chest. The heels of her feet grew hot in her boots and they began to slide on the melting ice.

  The plane was only a few yards behind her.

  Her right glove caught fire as it moved behind her in a running swing. She hugged the hand to her chest, but the fire didn’t go out. It spread to her left glove and the flames ate through the tips of the gloves to reach her fingers within.

  A warmth became a heat, searing her fingernails off. She screamed.

  Only a few more feet to the water.

  Only a few more steps.

  Fire edged into her vision on her left, and wrapped around her on her right. She was being hugged by it, embraced by the death behind her. Her hair caught on fire; she could smell it. Only it smelled like burning oil. Maybe it was the plane.

  The scream became a mixture of many screams. Voices raised in agony – and fear.

  She jumped.

  When she hit the water, it wasn’t cold. It was warm. She sank down into it, wrapped in softness, wrapped in comfort. She sank more than a mile down, without having to take a breath.

  She sank several miles and her boots touched the bottom.

  She looked down at her hands. They were healed. Her clothes were intact.

  She looked around her. The blue stretched on forever. Warm and dark.

  Behind her, the water shifted, budging her forward in a small after-wave. She slowly turned around. The plane had melted ice above her and fallen through. It was now sinking through the water. She watched it, several yards away, leaving a trail of ice blue water behind it.

  A vapor trail of cold and engine oil traced its way to the surface of the water, so very, very far up.

  Chapter Thirty-two

  “What the hell were you thinking, Jack?” Annabelle paced the distance in front of the bed in the small room. “You could have killed me or something! How do you know I wasn’t allergic to whatever you gave me? I could have died in my sleep-”

  Jack cut her off before she could continue, his voice raised an octave, his temper held carefully in check. “Bella! Come to your senses. I wouldn’t give you something that could harm you; you must know that by now.” He shook his head, taking a deep breath to calm himself as he folded his jacket and placed it within his black bag. “Not so long as I drew breath, Bella, would I ever hurt you.” He turned away from her and continued working. The silence stretched between them, punctuated only by the metallic sound of gun pieces clicking against one another as Jack reassembled his weapons. Where the hell had he put his bloody bullets?

  That afternoon, Annabelle had awoken, groggily and a tad queasy, to find herself tucked beneath a thick, soft blanket in an unfamiliar, if very nicely appointed room. Her vision had cleared upon wooden beams in the ceiling and she’d blinked to take in the rest of her surroundings, which appeared to be a cottage-like room, small but warm. A fire crackled in a fire place set into one wall.

  There was a glass of water on the bedside table. She picked it up and sat up to take a drink without even thinking. Her mouth was so dry…

  As soon as she sat up, Jack was there in the doorway. Annabelle swallowed the clear liquid as her mind raced and she stared at the man who stared back at her.

  It had taken her a moment to remember what had happened, and hence, figure out where she now most likely was.

  But when she did, she dropped the glass and it tumbled down the bed side to land and shatter on the hard wood below.

  They’d been arguing for over an hour since. In the interim, Annabelle had managed to get out of bed and get dressed and now her black boots paced out an agitated distance on the polished wood planks in the cottage bedroom.

  “You would never hurt me, Jack?” Annabelle asked then, her tone changing. “You would never hurt me? You mean… you would never lie to me or put me in mortal danger or jam a needle into my vein when I didn’t do what you wanted me to do?” She asked, her gaze narrowed, her voice barely more than a whisper.

  Jack stopped what he was doing. She stared at his back.

  “What about Teresa Anderson?” she asked, then.

  He straightened. Annabelle continued, talking softly at his back. “Did you hurt her, Jack?”

  Jack Thane slowly turned around. His blue eyes glittered in the fire light.

  Annabelle swallowed again and went on, almost as if she couldn’t stop herself. “I remember, four years ago, when I took the job with Max… You tried to talk me out of it. Something about wasting my talents.” She stopped, blinked her eyes a few times, and licked her lips. “But it wasn’t that at all, was it?” she asked.

  Jack took a very slow, very careful step forward. His expression was unreadable, his eyes burning holes through her soul. But she simply took a step back and continued.

  “The truth was you didn’t want me working for Max because you never wanted me to find out that you’d killed my boss’s wife.”

  “Bella, listen to me-”

  “No,” she shook her head, and took another step back just as he took another toward her. “Not this time, Jack. Not a thing you can say in that beautiful voice of yours – not a single sentence you can mutter – except ‘I didn’t kill Teresa Anderson’ will work this time.” Annabelle found herself up against the door. On instinct, she felt for the knob behind her.

  Jack stopped where he was and held very still. The tension in the air between them grew thick. Annabelle felt dizzy.

  “You can’t say it, can you?”

  A muscle ticked in Jack’s jaw. His posture was rigid, his expression hard. Annabelle had never seen such a look on his face. What was it? Pain? Fear? Anger? Resolution?

  Whatever the look was, it was cold.

  She shivered. Tears gathered in her eyes, un-welcome, but un-stoppable. “You drug me up? You keep secrets from me?” She shook her head and a tear streamed do
wn her cheek. “I don’t even know you anymore.” She turned the knob behind her and Jack’s gaze narrowed. “I honestly don’t know if I ever did.”

  She spun then and yanked the door open, shooting through it to run down the hall and into the den. Jack allowed her the head-start. His body could have stopped her immediately. If he’d wanted it so, she’d never have made it into the hall. But something in him hesitated. Some part of his mind paused, holding him back. For just a second. Enough time for her to make it out of arm’s reach and into the study, where Sam and Cassie were seated at the low wooden table, sharing a cup of tea.

  Sam stood as Annabelle raced by him and toward the back door of the English cottage. Jack was hot on her heels.

  Sam’s arm shot up, his hand grabbing Jack by the shoulder as the younger man made to brush past him.

  “Let her go, Jack.”

  “Get out of my way, Sam.” Jack growled through gritted teeth, turning a hard look on his old friend.

  “Go after her now and you’ll end up pushing her further away.” Sam’s voice was low, his tone steady and meaningful. His words cut through the red haze of fear and anger surrounding Jack’s perception. He wondered at them. Sherry had told him, only a few hours ago, that letting it go too long would only make things worse. Who did he believe? The man who was his best friend or the woman he barely knew?

  “I’ll go talk to her for you,” Sam finished, slowly lowering his arm.

  Jack’s mind raced. His heart ached. He wanted nothing more, at that moment, than to go after Annabelle and hold her – shake her until she could only shut up and listen to what he had to say. Let him explain.

  Memories assaulted him. Sam’s gray eyes may have filled Jack’s vision, but behind the iron doors of his consciousness, there was only darkness…

  Darkness, and a convenience store and a wrist watch that read 11:24p.m.

  From his vantage point across the street, he watched patrons pull in and out, filling up on gasoline and junk food and a numb, tired sort of late-night social interaction. It was his fourth night in this location, this exact same spot, carefully watching the building’s comings and goings. He’d learned the pattern by night two. And now it played out for him like a piece of music, each note struck in turn, a rhythm whose beat he’d carefully memorized.

  And then, as his contact had promised, his mark arrived. Thursday evening – Right on time.

  Jack’s gaze narrowed on the Toyota Forerunner as it pulled into the lot and parked. The driver got out.

  Dr. Anderson was Jack’s mark. Dr. Teresa Anderson.

  Upon sighting his mark, a shot of ice raced up Jack’s spine and settled, cold and unwelcome, at the base of his skull. His heart thudded hard against his rib cage. His palms began to sweat beneath his black leather gloves. Nausea roiled in his belly. It was an entirely unwelcome sensation, and one he’d never felt before.

  His target looked up at the night sky, a puzzled expression on her pretty features. The street light she normally parked under was broken. Jack had seen to that.

  His breathing became shallow. What’s wrong with me? He asked himself. You can do this. But, it was his first female assignment. And being faced with the living, breathing thing was much different from studying her two-dimensional photograph in a manila folder.

  He glanced down at the gun on the seat beside him. It seemed to gaze back up at him, black and heavy and silent. Taunting.

  He swallowed and looked back up at his mark. He’d been paid well. He had his orders. He’d never fouled an assignment before. Not once. He always got the job done, no questions asked.

  He swore softly under his breath.

  This time was different.

  In a few minutes, Dr. Anderson came back out of the store and headed toward her vehicle. Jack picked up his gun and opened the driver’s side door.

  Teresa Anderson glanced up at the sound of a car door opening. The parking lot across the street was awash in darkness. Long, deep shadows dominated the grounds, plunging parked cars into colorless obscurity.

  She searched the darkness for the source of the sound. No movement caught her eye. A shiver raced through her, sudden and alarming. How did the wives tale go? When someone steps on your grave…

  She turned back toward her car and broke into a brisk walk. The night air was hot and muggy. Sweat trickled down her back. Her air conditioner beckoned. She thought of home and the dinner that was probably waiting. Her son. She wondered how his game had gone. Absently, she wondered whether Max had remembered to take the camera.

  Jack moved, silent and unseen, a black cat slipping through the darkness, until he was two car lengths away. And then he stopped, raising his gun. Two shots was the deal. One wounder, one killer. Take the purse and run. An unfortunate tragedy. A person in the wrong place at the wrong time. A mugging gone wrong.

  Jack straightened. His finger released the safety on the gun and then slid into the groove of the trigger.

  Then he saw the look on his mark’s face. Wistful, earnest. He recognized it for what it was.

  After all, he had kids of his own.

  In that instant, he knew he couldn’t do it. For the first time in his career, he would fail to finish a job.

  Though his entire body had gone rigid, his hand shook.

  As Anderson opened her car door and threw her purse inside, Jack took a deep breath, lowering his gun.

  A strange whispering sound split through the night. Teresa Anderson jerked forward, her blood spraying the leather seat in front of her. A second whisper sliced the air and Jack flinched, for the first time in his life, instantly sickened by the display of death before him.

  Something inside of him clicked into place. Before he could give real thought to what had happened, he instinctively knew what was going on. And though his mind recoiled at the thought, his body knew what to do.

  He surged toward the car, grabbed Teresa Anderson’s purse, and was running through the darkness before Anderson’s body hit the ground. He made it to his car, got in, and rammed the gear shift into drive, forcing himself to go slow enough through the parking lot that his progress would not be detected by the next customers now coming out of the gas station across the street.

  Both tail lights, as well as the fog lights and the interior lights, had been removed from the vehicle long ago. There was no license plate on the car and the paint was a matte black. The windows were tinted to nearly the same shade.

  The car had been primed for running drugs, not assassins, but it suited Jack’s purpose in the same way and for the same reasons.

  Jack drove across the grass surrounding the apartment complex to further muffle the sound of his tires. The path he took had been carefully pre-determined and he followed it just as he would have if he’d done the job as planned.

  Once he made it across the field and pulled out onto an adjoining street, he drove just under the speed limit to another parking lot several miles away. There, he got out and, after screwing a silencer onto the end of his gun with shaking hands, he fired two rounds into the dirt of a nearby ditch.

  He un-screwed the silencer, pocketed it, and strode to an adjacent alley, where a long figure in black jeans, a black t-shirt and a black ski-mask lay, unconscious, against a building wall.

  Jack bent and placed the gun in the man’s hand. Then he lifted his own right boot and, taking a clod of dirt from one of the grooves, he rubbed it along the soles of the unconscious man’s sneakers.

  Jack stood and gazed down at the man in the ski mask. His name was Ryan Washington, a small-time coke dealer and general all-around creep. Jack had chosen him specifically for his bad manners toward women.

  At that thought, Jack closed his eyes and ran a hand through his hair.

  And then he slid into the darkness once more, unseen and silent, to disappear into the night.

  Annabelle raced down road after road, criss-crossing intersections and tributary-like lanes until she wound up on a street labeled “Trinity Street,” utterly lost
in her own thoughts and emotions, and semi-blinded by tears she couldn’t be bothered to wipe away. She’d found out only an hour ago that she was now in Colchester, England, and had barely a fleeting recognition of where, on a map, that might be.

  Right now, she didn’t notice Colchester’s inhabitants stop and check her out as she ran by. She had no idea where she was going until she found herself standing on the corner of two streets, staring up at a sign of red lettering against a dark brown background. “The Purple Dog”. A pub.

  She could hear music coming from the other side of the dark brown door. Annabelle stood there for a few moments, taking in the several-hundred-year-old architecture, admiring, despite her current state, the beauty of the building. Then she hiccupped, wiped her cheeks, and straightened out her shirt. After a calming, deep breath, she pushed past the door and walked into the pub.

  She stopped just past the doors and allowed her eyes to adjust to the light. The interior atmosphere of the pub was warm, rich in dark colors and timber, and the place was about half as packed as Annabelle automatically assumed it must be once the sun went down. The crowd was young, for the most part, and well dressed. On impulse, Annabelle felt her front pocket for the money she’d folded into it. It was still there.

  It was American money, but she’d been told once that lots of places took American money these days since they could just get it changed whenever they wanted. She hoped this place was one of them.

  She had yet to figure out the pound system to the degree that she would have liked, but could handle the conversion well enough for a drink. A drink she badly needed right now.

  She made her way to the bar, attracting the attention of several single men as she did so, and asked the bartender if he would take her cash. He nodded, so she ordered an “ale”. She wasn’t a complete idiot. Once she had what she likened to a slightly dark and heady beer, she found an empty table, somewhere near the back wall, and slid into the chair.