by Naomi West
Mark didn't say anything.
“Told her about how he killed his family while he was on Dimalerax, you see, and about how he's on death row now because of his psychotic break, something the medication was supposed to help him with.”
Still, the PV's head of sales didn't flinch, nor did he add anything to the conversation. Nothing.
Zed repositioned himself, moving a little closer to the other man. He'd had military training and done hand-to-hand combat. He knew the best place to be when his opponent had a firearm.
“Mark,” Zed said, after a while. “What if I told you that I know you're the one who approved everything? That I'd seen the files and your emails and memos pushing for the roll-out of Dimalerax, even though everyone knew it was a failure? What if I knew you were going to pin everything on Abby, when it was all said and done?”
“I'd laugh in your face,” Mark said, smiling a little.
“What if I told you, then, that it was being reported as we speak? That, if you turned on CNN, you'd see the evidence up on the big screen at prime time?”
Mark went to raise the pistol to level it at Zed, but the military vet was too fast. He grabbed the barrel, locking the slide in place, and stepped toward Mark as he pointed the barrel off to the side. He bent the gun in, twisting the other man's finger around in the trigger guard, nearly breaking it.
Mark's preservation instincts forced him to release the pistol and let Zed take control of it. If he hadn't, his body knew it would have been missing a finger by the end of the interaction.
Mark looked down in disbelief at his gun, which was now in Zed's hand. “How did you?”
“Never let someone within striking distance, idiot. Not when you're the one with the gun,” he said, taking a step back from Letterman and aiming the pistol at him. “Now, start talking. I want everything you know. Now!”
# # #
Abby
“Did you speak to them?” Abby asked Det. Reynolds, as he returned with two Styrofoam cups of coffee in hand.
“I did,” he said with a nod, as he offered her a cup of burnt coffee. “And you're right. They back you up. Also, from the questions the reporters keep screaming past the barricades at me, I gather your story hit the news. But all this still doesn't change the fact that we’ve got your crazy boyfriend out there waving his gun around, and that you're the key to bringing him in. I don't wanna hurt the guy, mainly because I tend to agree with him on Pharma-Vitae with this pill, but I can't have him injuring anyone, either. Ya get me?”
She nodded as she cradled the tiny cup in her hands. “What do you need me to do?”
“Well, there's still charges we gotta press. Whether the DA goes through with 'em, or not, who am I to say? That's above my pay grade, that's for damn sure. But, he ain't looking at a long stretch of time if he does go up. He'll have some restitution, I'd imagine, considering we've had two choppers chasing after him all afternoon, and all these men don't work for free. Now, all this is assuming he doesn't do anything stupid and hurt his newest hostage.”
Abby groaned. “Newest hostage?”
“Some guy, name of Mark Letterman. Works for your company, and I think you know him.”
Some guy was a pretty loose definition of Mark. More like piece of shit. She just nodded, though, and kept her mouth shut.
“If you can get on the phone with him and convince him to come out, it'd go a long ways toward helping him. If he doesn't have a chance to wave his gun at any cops, that keeps his offenses low. But, if he starts that shit, pardon my French, I can't make any guarantees on his safety.”
“How about,” Abby said, looking up at the gruff, but sincere, older detective, “I speak to him in person?”
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Abby
Pharma-Vitae's home office was on lock down. A ring of steel and guns surrounded the campus, with more guns than had been at her house. Teams were readying themselves to enter the building, to bring Zed and his hostage out.
She could tell from the general feeling, though, that the cops seemed to empathize with Zed and what he was doing. Pharma had targeted first responders as their prime market with a drug that didn't even work.
“Sure we have to even go in after this guy?” one of the SWAT joked. “Seems like a real dick, from the news.”
“Orders are orders,” the officer in charge said, as they walked past. “Until you're signing the city's checks, you gotta follow 'em.”
Abby and Det. Reynolds set up near the front of the line, at a vantage point that gave them a clear line of sight to her destroyed Escalade and the office building's entrance beyond. The detective stuffed a phone into her hand. “You know the number?”
“By heart,” she said. She'd had to call and talk to Letterman more times than she had liked throughout her short tenure at Pharma-Vitae, and she’d had the number memorized in the first week. She dialed the number, then worked her way through the automatic answering service, with its robotic operator.
The phone began to ring. After a few short buzzes, someone picked up. “Mark?”
“No,” the voice on the other end grated, “Mark can't come to the phone right now. Can I take a message for this asshole?”
“Zed!” Her heart leapt with joy to hear him safe and sound. “Zed, baby, you're fine!”
“For now,” he said, the smile coming through in his voice. “But, you know, the day's still young. Guess you got out all right?”
“Yeah, of course.”
“Good,” he said, sighing. “I'm glad. They giving you any trouble?”
“Not since the story hit the news,” she replied. “They all know what you're doing, and why you're doing it. Everyone knows. I've just . . . I'm just so worried about you, Zed. I want you to come out of there.”
“That worried, huh?” he asked, his breath heavy on the phone. “You sure you want a crazy vet like me?”
“Well, I wasn't at first,” she replied. “I'll be honest. When I first met you in my office, I really did care about what you and your brother were going through. But, I thought I had to keep my company front and center. I thought I needed to keep my own emotions from coming through. But you've shown me I don't need to hide behind my ambitions anymore, and that there are more important things in my life.”
Silence on his end, punctuated by him licking his lips.
“I just, I want you out of there. I want you back in my life. This past week or so, it's just been the most eye-opening experience for me, and I don't think I can ever go back to the life I was leading before you. You've changed me, through and through. You really have.”
“You …” he began, trailing off for a moment, then speaking again. “You've changed me, too, Abby. For the better. You really have. I was broken before. Just shattered. But I feel like I can have some peace now. I'm not perfect, of course. No man is.”
“I don't want or need you to be perfect, Zed,” Abby said, feeling the wetness on her cheeks from her falling tears. “I just want you to be mine. And in one piece, of course.”
“Yeah,” he said. “I think I can do that. I think I can get back in one piece for you.”
“You're going to try, then?”
“Yeah,” he repeated. “I'm coming out.”
She closed her eyes, trying to squeeze the tears to a stop. “Thank you,” she whispered.
“I love you,” Zed whispered.
“I love you, too, Zed Hesse.”
# # #
Zed
“Well,” Zed said after he hung up the phone, his pistol still trained on Mark. “Looks like I've got everything I need from you. Everything I'd ever possibly need.”
Mark's eyes nearly crossed as he stared down his nose at the barrel of his own pistol pointed back at him. “What do you mean?” he asked, nearly stumbling over his words. “Are you . . .?”
Zed thumbed back the hammer on the small automatic he'd snatched from Mark's hands, seriously considered his options. The man in front of him deserved to die. He knew tha
t. He deserved Kai's looming fate, and worse—much worse—for the resulting deaths of Zed's niece and nephew.
Mark started a low whine, a sound deep in his throat like a wounded animal.
“Shoot you?” Zed asked after a while. “Let you go? What do you think I should do, Mark? What would you do in my shoes if I'd packaged a drug for your brother that got him to kill your niece, nephew, and sister-in-law?” He fingered the trigger, his thoughts on Abby and Kai.
Pharma-Vitae was going down over this, one way or the other. Mark Letterman, though? Who knew? He may do a couple years in prison, if Zed was lucky. But the courts didn't seem to care much about corporate crimes. They just fined people and threw a couple of scapegoats to the wolves.
Look at the banks during the Great Recession. They were bigger than ever. Was that what Mark Letterman was going to be like? Richer than before?
But, then, there was Abby. Zed's soulmate. God, it sounded cheesy just to think it, but deep down he still knew it was true. It was truer than anything he'd ever believed in during his short, miserable life. What would she think of him if he gunned down Mark in cold blood? He wasn't judge, jury, and executioner. He couldn't be, no matter how light a sentence Mark would receive for his horrendous crimes against the first responders and soldiers of this country.
He raised the pistol and aimed it straight at Mark's head.
Mark recoiled in his chair, his eyes wide, his face white as the blood drained. Mark began to cry. “You can't. I didn't mean to hurt anyone like that. I really didn't.”
No. He couldn't do that to Abby. He couldn't saddle her with the knowledge that she'd fallen in love with a cold-blooded murderer, a man willing to gun down another like this.
“Bang,” Zed shouted.
Mark screamed.
“Just kidding, Mark,” Zed said, as he reached forward and yanked the executive to his feet. “Come on. We're walking out.”
Zed sniffed the air as he shoved Mark in front of him, toward the office door. He grinned as he held the gun on him. “You piss yourself, Mark?”
Together, they headed down in the elevator. Zed kept Mark against the elevator wall, opposite him, and away from the control panel. When they hit the lobby, an uneasy feeling hit the pit of his stomach.
“Lotta cops out there,” Zed mused, as they crossed to the front entry way.
“Yeah,” Mark agreed. “I'd be worried if I were you.”
“Why should I be worried,” the veteran replied, as he shoved Mark forward through the doors. “I'm not the one who was basically poisoning all their buddies with fake medication.” The sounds of the outside, the beating of the police helicopter's rotors, the blaring of bullhorns, and the sound of distant sirens all hit him like a wall as he stepped outside onto the little concrete plaza. It was a wall so difficult to penetrate that he actually had to slow a step and take a moment to deal with all the input coming at him.
“Zed Hesse!” roared a familiar voice on a bullhorn, from behind the ring of steel surrounding the building. “Put down your weapon and put your hands in the air!”
Zed hooked the gun's trigger guard over his finger and raised it in the air as Mark ran for the barricades. He could see the dots of the red lasers doing their twists and turns on the concrete in front of him, speedily making their way to his body, but he didn't think anything of it. If they'd wanted him dead, they could have gotten him in the lobby. He hadn’t used Mark as a human shield on his way out the door.
He leaned forward and, with exaggerated motions, so the police would know and understand his intentions, put his gun on the ground of the plaza, then put his hands in the air.
Zed glanced to the left suddenly, his arms going wide like he was making a move. “No!” he yelled, his voice booming out over the assembled police and other first responders.
He saw a blur coming toward him, slipping out from between the barricades. “Zed!” the blur screamed. “No!”
She must have seen the laser sights and thought that meant they were ready to shoot. Now she was rushing out in front of a trigger happy group of cops. “Abby,” Zed yelled back, waving her away. “Get down!”
She was nearly to him when they open fired and the bullets began to come down in a hail of lead and powder. Zed swept her into his arms, tackling her to the ground beneath him. His body shook with pain under the countless impacts of bullets, intended for him and his love. Beneath him, Abby cried out in fear as his body jumped and shook with each bullet that hit him.
They just seemed to continue to come, and Zed's mind groaned under the strain, sending him to a better, happier place.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Zed
Kai flipped the burgers as the kids ran around in the sprinklers. Zed stood on the porch next to his twin brother, looking out over the backyard, ice cold beer in his hand. It was his brother's own brew, in fact. He'd had labels printed up that read ‘Hesse's Hops.’ Zed was going to help him with the next batch.
“Got yourself a good family, bro,” Zed said, unable to wipe the stupid grin from his face as he watched the kids run around, chasing after each other with water guns, their laughter and simple cheers of wordless excitement filling the air.
“Yeah,” Kai said, his face wistful and pained. “It feels good to be back with them after all those years in the sandbox. Wish I could be a little better, you know, but I've been trying my damndest. Gotta embrace the suck, you know. Make it work for me.”
“Medication still not working, then?”
Kai shook his head and began to flip the burgers. “It's just so fucking hard all the time. You know, first, they say they want you to admit to having it—the PTSD. Then, they want you out because of it. Then, they don't want to give you the help you need.”
“Come on, Kai,” Zed clapping his brother on the shoulder and squeezing, “I know you're trying. It's tough coming back. I know it is. But, you're a good father, at least you try to be. Better than Mom and Dad, right?”
Kai laughed. “Yeah,” he said, still flipping burgers and rolling hot dogs. “Don't I know it.”
“Just keep taking the medication the doctor recommended. Things'll get better, and you'll still be there for your kids. You'll see. You'll be the best dad any kid ever hoped for in this fucked up world.”
His twin chuckled. “Yeah. My kids don't deserve this world, I'll say that for sure. They deserve heaven.”
“Don't we all?” Zed asked, laughing. He took another drink of his beer and looked back out to the kids, watched them rolling around and fighting on the green lawn.
“What about you?” Kai asked. “You dating anyone yet?”
“Me?” he asked, shaking his head. “Still getting used to civilian life. Haven't really started to get settled in, yet. Figure it'll happen when it happens.”
“Well, I hope you find that special someone,” Kai said, as he stepped away from the grill and, beer in hand, went to stand next to Zed. “Spencer and Caitlyn need cousins, you know. And maybe, if she gets a niece or a nephew, Marilyn will back off about our third one.”
Zed laughed. “Number three?”
Kai rolled his eyes. “I can hardly keep up with these two. And, just my luck, twins will end up running in the family.”
As they both laughed, the day began to fade, the world disappearing into a blanket of shrouded darkness. The vision ended, drifting away no matter how hard Zed tried to hold onto it.
His ears rang from the shock, and his world seemed to be coming apart at the seams. Instead of Spencer and Caitlyn's laughter, there was the sound of stomping feet. Instead of the taste of Hesse's Hops, there was salt and copper.
The men tore him from Abby, pulled her away as she screamed, and reached out for him. Abby’s hands grasped at empty air as they took her back to the barricades.
With his last bit of waning strength, Zed reached out for her like a lifeline. His hands touched nothing but empty air, though, and fell to the plaza.
This was it. It was all over. Even if Kai's famil
y wouldn't ever come back, he'd still be vindicated. Zed had seen to that. But, like in all things, there was a price to pay. Now Zed had his own crimes to take responsibility for.
# # #
Abby
The world was a blur as Abby was pulled from Zed's strong embrace by more hands than she could count. With her ears ringing, she screamed for him as she reached out across the distance, her fingers grasping vainly as she was dragged away.
The only person who mattered to her now was being taken away from her by gray, indistinct shapes that seemed little more than ghosts. “Zed!” she screamed, her soundless words raw in her frayed throat. “Zed!”