The man was wearing a costume. He was completely covered from head to toe in a black jump suit with a thin hoody which wrapped around a black ski mask. His body language was relaxed and commanding. He knew that he was running the show here and that everyone was going to do exactly what he demanded. Brian did not care about bringing this psycho to justice right then; all he cared about was keeping his wife and his family safe.
“So, this is what they call a standoff,” the man spoke.
“What do you want?”
“I want to get out of here without any consequences. That is something that even you might not be able to deliver Brian.”
The man knew his name. He had worked with this man. Possibly in the same precinct and the same department. Who was this son of a bitch who had the audacity to call himself a police officer?
“I will do what I can to help you here. My wife’s safety is all I care about. Nothing else matters to me in the world.”
“I doubt that, Brian. You are a highly decorated veteran detective on the force. You can’t tell me that bringing me to justice and catching the bad guy does nothing for you.”
“It used to; but I just don’t care anymore. I’m so tired of it all. I’m burnt out; you can ask anybody. I don’t know who you are, and I don’t care. I’m retiring from the force anyway,” Brian said. It felt somewhat cathartic to come clean about everything that was going on with him in front of his wife and this murderer. He was doing it because he wanted to explain to this man that he had no real interest in apprehending him and that he didn’t care about being a cop anymore. He was done.
“Really? Well, I know a thing or two about lying and I have to say that almost sounded genuine,” the man said.
“It is genuine. I don’t care about you or what you’ve done. I stumbled on to you by accident. None of us had any idea that you existed.”
“I know that. Don’t think that I don’t know that. I am too careful to be apprehended. I am a cop and I know every single in and out of police procedure. You can’t catch yourself, right?”
“Right,” Brian nodded.
“That bastard Trapp sold me out. The idiot. I knew he was going to get caught soon. He was too zealous and too careless.”
Brian looked over at Amber who had tears rolling down her face. Just stay strong baby. This will be over soon enough. I am getting you out of here.
“So, what are we going to do about our little situation here? I never wanted this to happen obviously. Your wife is really good at hiding and it took me way longer to find her than I intended. Otherwise I would not have tried to beat you here once I knew you were coming.”
“Ok, but you don’t need her anymore,” Brian said.
“Well, I needed her before to satisfy myself. Killing is the one thing in this world that makes me feel alive and without it then I have nothing to live for or exist for. I don’t expect you to understand any of that Brian. I still have the need to kill her, but I know right now I can’t really unless I want to fight my way out of the hands of twenty cops. What I do need is for you to get me out of here.”
“How do you suppose I do that? They aren’t just going to stand back and let you out even if I am with you. You are far overestimating my value to them.”
“I don’t think so. They are not going to risk the life of a decorated cop to apprehend me. They don’t even know the extent of what I’ve done, but they are about to.”
“What do you mean? What are you thinking?”
The man stood up just then. “I’m thinking that I take you with me and if anyone comes near us then your wife gets to blow up,”
“What?”
The man opened a bag that was sitting beside him on the floor while still keeping the gun aimed on Brian’s chest. If he moved the bullet would pierce right through his chest.
The man pulled a small laptop out of his bag and sat it down on the nightstand beside the bed. He moved the nightstand just a few feet away from the bed by nudging it slightly. Once satisfied at its location the man opened up the lap top. He typed in something with one hand and then showed the screen to Brian.
The laptop was blank except for a clock in the center of it. The clock was counting down from eight minutes.
“What is that?” Brian asked.
“I have wired this lap top with plastic explosives. When that time runs out the laptop will detonate the bomb inside of it and half of your house will be gone, including your wife right beside it.”
“You can’t do that!”
“I am doing that. I always have a contingency plan. Who do you think schooled good old Mike Trapp? You are welcome by the way.”
“You are sick. You are so sick,” Brian heard himself saying.
“Well, luckily I’m not contagious. Now let’s move.”
“Wait, there has to be another way.”
“There is not. I’m sure your buddies downstairs can get your wife out of here before the bomb explodes or at the very least relocate the bomb. Either way they won’t have time to mess with us,” the man said as he began to nudge Brian with the gun, bumping it into his chest.
Brian knew that there was no reasoning with this man. He turned and started walking in front of the masked maniac towards the door.
“Brian...” Amber said.
“It’s ok, honey. It will be ok,” Brian said.
The man nudged him again and Brian felt the opportunity rising up inside of him. It was a moment that culminated all of the rage he felt at all of the scum he had encountered and had put away in his life. There was no one who could get the drop on him this way. No one was going to terrify his wife and kill no telling how many other people’s wives. Brian was not built to take this sort of thing lying down.
He had never backed down from a fight or a bully in all of his life. This man was essentially a bully of the worst kind and Brian had just had enough of it all. He was thinking of his wife’s safety most and foremost. What if they weren’t able to get her out of here in time? If they tried to relocate the bomb then it might blow up and hurt someone else. That was not something that Brian was prepared to live with. He was not about to pass his pain or his danger on to someone else.
In one swift move as the barrel of the gun rammed into his back Brian spun around and using both hands hit the man on the jugular with a judo chop. Brian had remembered from his self-defense courses that there were several ways to knock a man out with one blow. You could hit him on the jaw bone so that his head spun a bit and the vibration and the jarring of the motion would rock the brain back and forth inside the skull a bit which would knock the person unconscious. Or you could cut off the blood supply to the head quickly and urgently. The best way to do that was to inflict some damage on the jugular veins.
Brian had just done that by using the slight momentum created when he put on the breaks and allowed the masked man to continue moving forward at just the right moment. The man had pushed him hard out of his frustration that Brian was not moving as fast as he wanted him too. This had propelled the man’s body forward to create him being slightly off balance and Brian was able to take advantage of it.
He saw it all in his mind happening in super slow motion and then when the moment came he quickly acted.
“Aargh!” The man groaned as he staggered backwards and fell to the floor.
He would probably only be stunned for a moment. Brian had not quite hit him in just the right spot, but it had given him the temporary upper hand. Brian leapt on top of the man, grabbed the gun from him and started to beat him hard in the face with it. He could feel the bones crunching beneath each and every blow. After the third blow it was obvious the man was out but Brian wasn’t done. He wanted to continue to beat him and he did, landing blow after blow, eventually dropping the gun and continuing to pummel the man with his fists.
“Brian!” Amber’s voice yelled at him.
He looked up at her in shock, realizing what he was doing. The man was on the fl
oor with blood spilling through the mask. He might have even been dead, Brian thought. He wanted to kill the man. He really did.
But now he might need him to save his wife’s life. What was he thinking?
Brian rushed to the laptop. It was counting down and it only had three minutes left. Was there any time to get the laptop far away from everyone? No, they had to dismantle the thing.
“Guys! I need help up here. Suspect is unconscious!” Brian yelled.
The group came running up the stairs. As they bounded into the room Brian showed them the situation with the bomb. Several men quickly retreated and ran out, which Brian did not expect.
“Wait! Does anyone have any bomb experience?” Brian yelled.
“I do!” Wilkinson came forward. He was one of the rookies that Brian did not know that well. “I did bombs in the military,” Wilkins said. At first Brian thought he might be joking. There was no way they could get that lucky but he was not going to look a gift horse in the mouth right now. Wilkinson might be their only hope.
He went to work on the bomb while Brian untied Amber from the bed.
He pulled the knife out of his pocket and cut the restraints off of her. She leapt forward as he did so, feeling the blood rushing back into her arms and she slung the arms around his neck. He loved the way his wife felt against him and he could not hardly bring himself to let her go right then.
“Do you think you can fix it?” Brian asked.
“Yea, I’m working on it. It’s coded. I need the code.”
“You can’t get it without the cancellation code?” Brian asked.
“I can hack it but it will take some time. I’m not sure we have enough.”
Brian rushed to the aid of the man on the floor. He shook him until the man appeared to be a little bit awake. He was surprised that he was at all conscious or even alive, but the guy must have been a tough bastard. Being a cop it did teach you how to take a punch better than the average guy. Depending on what beat you were on you rarely went a week without having to fight or restrain someone. And you would often get hit. Over time you developed immunity to it almost. Getting hit hard in the face would hardly even bother some cops.
“Give us the cancellation code of the bomb,” Brian said.
“Fuck you,” the man mumbled almost incoherently.
“Give us the code!”
The man said nothing.
“Do it, damn you!” Brian said.
The man did not respond.
Brian grabbed the gun and shot the man in the shoulder. He screamed loudly, his voice echoing off the walls and ringing in Brian’s ears.
“Do it or I will keep shooting you. I will kill you before that bomb does!”
Brian shot the man in the other shoulder. He screamed until his voice was raw and he could hardly breathe.
Brian continued to shake him. “What is the code?”
“Six, five, two, nine,” the man said as he collapsed and passed out on the floor.
Wilkinson typed it into the laptop and the countdown instantly stopped.
The time said forty three seconds. It had been damn close. Damn close.
Chapter 13: All Ends…Well?
With everything that Brian had seen and dealt with the past few weeks—a lot of it in the past few hours—nothing would have prepared him for what he was looking at right at that moment.
He took a deep breath and pulled the mask off of the man who had tried to kill his wife just minutes ago.
The air left his body as if someone had just hit him in the back with a metal baseball bat. There was nothing that he believed in anymore. There was nothing that could make him feel that the world would ever really be ok again.
The man behind the mask was John Arnold. His best friend since they were kids. His second father’s son. He was the person he trusted most in the world after his wife. It made no sense to him. This was not something that could ever be explained. He felt sick and he wanted to vomit all over the ground. The bile reached up into the back of his neck and he forced it back down hard. This was the worst day of his life bar none.
“Why John? Why?”
“It is what I do,” John said.
“What the hell does that even mean? You are supposed to be my best friend. You are supposed to be the one guy who had my back in this world. How did this happen to you? What happened to you?” Brian was yelling through tears that rolled from his eyes. He didn’t care about being tough or macho. He had just had the entire world he knew ripped from him.
John had almost killed his wife. That thought would never leave him and it would sicken him every time he gave it passage.
Amber clung to Brian’s arm as she tried to drag him away.
“There are more like me coming. You cannot stop The Order!” John yelled at the top of his lungs, before morphing into a coughing fit.
John was going away for life and he might get death. They would eventually track down all of the evidence that pointed its way to him. It was possible that The Order existed but Brian wasn’t sure he bought it. If it did exist then they had a few strong leads to it. The police department would work diligently to bring those responsible for any of these crimes in any way to justice. Brian figured that the FBI would have to be brought in as well.
Brian quit the force that day and he never looked back. He tried not to even follow the crimes in the news. He did not care about any of it anymore. There was nothing there for him.
The chief made a full recovery but he hardly left the house anymore. He retired from being chief and his mental health had deteriorated in the wake of finding out that his son was a serial killer. That had been the last straw for Chief Arnold and he just decided to let it all go behind him.
Brian had tried to visit him as much as he could. The chief needed his support as much as possible in the days that followed. John had received a death sentence. He was going to die in the chair and Brian was tempted to ask if he could be there to watch the execution but he could not bring himself to care enough. In one way he wanted to watch this man who had caused so much misery for so many people to die and to make sure he got what was coming to him, but then he decided that he just did not need to drudge up the painful memories.
Brian had made a new life for himself and he was focused on starting his security company and in spending as much time with his family as possible. His amazing wife stood by his side as always.
Brian tried not to think about John or about Trapp. They were both dead memories to him.
Soon they would be dead memories to everybody.
The End
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