Run the Risk

by Scott Frost

  Harrison glanced uneasily at me, though his eyes appeared to look no further than his own shuttered past.

  “The impulses are not so distinguishable from one another,” he said.

  He looked back at the house, seeing something entirely different.

  “I was thinking,” he said, the skin around his eyes drawing into lines as he formed a thought. “I was thinking it was Gabriel who tipped off the motel clerk about Sweeny. He knew about the affair, all he had to do was follow her right to him.”

  I nodded in agreement.

  “If you’re right, he could have killed him anytime, but he let us deliver the bomb,” I said. “We’re toys to him, his private playthings.”

  The ringing of my phone filled the car like a scream. I had never believed in the view that physical objects could embody evil, or good, for that matter. But the sound of the phone ringing now carried dread with it. It was as if he were reaching out to me, his fingers brushing the fabric of my blouse. I let it ring four times, taking a breath to settle my racing heart. Let the mother grizzly loose, I thought. Don’t let him control this. I pressed the button and answered.

  “Yes.”

  “Lieutenant.”

  Hearing his voice was like stepping back into a recurring nightmare. I closed my eyes. Every muscle in my body tensed as if I were desperately trying to stop myself from sliding over a cliff.

  “You’re going to be very busy tonight,” Gabriel said. “I have great plans for you and your daughter.”

  I felt the ground slip away beneath me as I slid over the edge and began to fall.

  “You have eight minutes to get to the corner of Marengo and Wallis. There’s a school there. If you’re late, I’ll sever one of your daughter’s fingers. If you’re not alone, I’ll cut off two.”

  His voice slipped away like a snake moving into the grass, then the line went dead.

  “Get out of the car,” I said to Harrison.

  He turned to me in surprise, then understanding appeared in his eyes like a rising sun.

  “He wants you alone.”

  I nodded.

  “I have eight minutes.”

  “This is a bad idea.”

  “I’m not writing the rules. Now go, please.”

  Harrison shook his head. “I can’t let you do this.”

  “I don’t have time for debate. Get out.”

  Harrison opened the door and reluctantly stepped out. I slid behind the wheel and started the car as a surge of adrenaline raced through my body like a jolt of electricity. My heart began to pound against my chest like an angry fist on a table.

  “Set up a three-block perimeter around the corner of Marengo and Wallis. Make sure there isn’t a cop inside that line. If there is—” The rest of the words caught in my throat. “You got that?”

  “I’ll take care of it,” Harrison said.

  I glanced at my watch; thirty seconds had passed since the call. I hit the lights and the siren and stepped on the gas, spinning the car 180 degrees, and headed north. I was fourteen or fifteen blocks south of Wallis and four or six blocks east of Marengo, if I remembered my streets correctly.

  I passed through intersections, barely taking notice of headlights swerving to the curb to avoid my flight. I was like a horse wearing blinders. Fragments of images sped past in a blur of color and vague shapes. A car horn pierced the din of the siren. I glanced right and saw the flash of a white sedan slide to a stop inches from the passenger door of my squad before it vanished into the rearview mirror.

  Rounding the corner onto Marengo, I saw a woman pushing a shopping cart step out into a crosswalk. She was wearing a pink jacket, white pants, and bright red lipstick. Her skin was dark, cocoa brown, and she had the round, pleasant figure of a recent arrival from Mexico or El Salvador. There was no stopping.

  “No, no!” I yelled, but she heard nothing.

  By the time she saw what was about to happen, it was already set in stone. She raised a hand toward her mouth as the front right side of my squad tore the cart from her and sent it tumbling into the air. Time froze for an instant as I looked into her astonished face, then shot forward as a plastic shopping bag landed on the hood, splitting open, sending tiny white grains of rice skittering across the windshield like flakes of blowing snow.

  I pressed my foot to the floor and silently counted out the blocks as they sped past. Five more . . . four.

  Do it, go . . . go.

  Three blocks south of Wallis I passed a squad setting up the perimeter at the intersection. Whatever sliver of hope I had that Gabriel had given me an opening vanished. A squad parked at an intersection was a useless gesture and I felt pathetic for the feebleness of my ability to strike back at him.

  A blue pickup pulled out into the intersection in front of me and I let out a scream. The truck jerked to a sudden stop as I slid around it, my rear wheel bouncing off the opposite curb as I swerved back into the middle of Marengo.

  “You son of a bitch!” I yelled, pounding on the steering wheel.

  My resolve began to spiral away into the madness that was engulfing me. A single, careless driver, one misstep, and my daughter would be . . . I let it go.

  At the corner of Wallis, I slid to a stop and turned off my lights and siren. I looked at my watch. Did I have time left? I couldn’t remember. Fifteen seconds, maybe . . . maybe less.

  “Please” slipped out like a prayer of thanks, and then I looked around to orient myself.

  There were no pedestrians on the street, no one visible in a parked car. Across Marengo was a bus stop bench, and beyond that, the parking lot of the school. On my right, a city park extended for a square block. At the far end, a couple was walking a dog.

  I felt alone and vulnerable. Why did he want me here? I hadn’t had time to consider it as I drove, but now I couldn’t avoid the question. I looked up and down the block, searching for a reason for my presence. What was unique about this block? What was different about it from the one to the north or west? Nothing appeared out of place, nothing appeared to be anything other than ordinary.

  The din of the sirens wailing began to lift and I heard the faint sound of a phone ringing in a phone booth across the street.

  That was why I was here. He knew he was being listened to on my phone and he wanted to talk alone. The cat with its mouse.

  I sprinted across the street and picked up the receiver. It was wet with heavy dew, cold like the hand of a corpse.

  “You’re late,” Gabriel said.

  His voice held the sharp edge of annoyance.

  “No!” I said desperately.

  I glanced at my watch, trying to determine how long it had been ringing before I noticed it.

  “I had the siren on, I couldn’t hear it. I was here.”

  “Are you pleading with me, Lieutenant?”

  “I’ll do anything you want.”

  “You’re a whore.”

  “I’m a mother.”

  “Is there a difference?”

  There it was: the X on the map of his life that marked where it all began. God help us. If it were being played out on a stage, it would have the weight of a Greek tragedy instead of the horror of a nightmare.

  “You wanted to talk to me alone?”

  “I could kill you right this moment.”

  I quickly scanned the windows of the school building. For an instant I could feel the crosshairs of a scope moving across my face, but the fear passed. He wasn’t that kind of a killer. He was a preacher of death and I was part of the ritual. He wasn’t finished with me.

  “If that’s what you want, go ahead.”

  “We have a relationship. I wouldn’t hurt you.”

  “We don’t have a relationship. You have my daughter.”

  A strange animal-like laughter came through the phone. “Look down at your feet.”

  “What?”

  “Look down.”

  Dread spread through me like a raging virus.

  “This is what happens to people who
lie to me,” he whispered.

  I looked down at my feet. In the dim light I could just make out the unmistakable shape of a human finger. I felt a horrible rising in my stomach and I put my hand to my mouth to suppress my shock.

  “Oh, God,” I whispered as my eyes flooded with tears. No, no, no . . .

  “It’s not your daughter’s, but it could be. I’m holding her hand right now.”

  I squeezed the receiver trying not to scream. I tried not to picture his fingers wrapping around my daughter’s hand, but I couldn’t stop it. He had let loose a storm inside me. My knees buckled for a moment, and I reached out and took hold of the phone booth to steady myself.

  “It belongs to the garbage I took from the FBI.”

  “You—” I swallowed the rest of the words. Play his game, I said to myself, play it right to the end. Right to the moment when I kill him and send him back to the hell he crawled out of.

  “Have you decided yet?” Gabriel said.

  “Decided what?”

  “Are we partners? Are you going to save your daughter’s life, or a stranger who means nothing to you?”

  I took a deep breath and exhaled heavily.

  “Have you decided?”

  “No,” I said in a barely audible whisper.

  “You will.”

  “No, I won’t.”

  He seemed to almost laugh, as if whatever I said to him he had already scripted.

  “Lieutenant, you have no idea what you’re going to do for me.”

  The line went dead. The receiver fell from my hand and I stepped back to get away from the finger at my feet. I wanted to believe that I was trying not to contaminate evidence, but in truth I was just horrified. I quickly scanned my surroundings for any movement, but I already knew it was futile. He wasn’t here. There were no crosshairs lining me up. He had wanted me alone for the sole purpose of escalating the terror. He had reduced me to a frightened woman alone on a dark street.

  “You bastard,” I said, barely able to form the words. “That’s the last time . . .”

  I stood for a moment on the verge of shaking with anger. I took a breath and held it for a second, then another, and another.

  I reached for my cell phone but stopped. My eyes drifted back to the severed finger. I was missing something. What had just happened here? Nothing Gabriel did was casual. Everything had a reason, even the smallest details. I replayed his words in my head . . . “It belongs to the garbage I took from the FBI.”

  I stepped toward the finger and knelt down to examine it. The cut at the base had the clean precision of a surgeon’s knife. The wound was covered with a light layer of blood that had begun to thicken and dry. There was a line of dark dirt under the curve of the nail. It appeared to be an index finger. It was lying on the pavement as if pointing toward the school behind me. I turned around and looked into the schoolyard beyond the fence. Nothing presented itself, just an empty parking lot.

  I walked over to the fence and began to follow it along the perimeter to a gate thirty yards to the right. It was closed, but the chain securing it hung limp, one of its heavy steel links severed as cleanly as the finger. I unlatched the gate and pushed it open. A hundred feet across the dark parking lot, the glow of a light that I couldn’t see from the phone booth appeared between two buildings. I picked up my cell and called Harrison. He answered before the second ring.

  “Are you all right?”

  “Yeah. I don’t think he’s here, but hold the perimeter until I call you back.”

  I hung up and started walking across the dark parking lot toward the light. The sound of small bits of gravel under my shoes shouted my presence with each step as if I were walking on glass. From somewhere out of the darkness, a mockingbird let loose a series of repeating songs that sounded like a car alarm come alive. Involuntarily, my hand drifted to the handle of my Glock. At the edge of the light, the gap between the two buildings opened into an alley that ended at a service entrance fifty feet farther on. Illuminated under the bright halogen light at the end of the alley was a large green Dumpster.

  There were no windows in the buildings lining the alley. Aside from the door at the end, the only way in or out was where I stood.

  “Garbage,” I whispered to myself, repeating Gabriel’s words.

  I started to reach for my phone but stopped as the thump thump thump of the department’s helicopter pierced the night as it slowly began to circle in the darkness.

  I pulled my weapon and started down the alley. As I approached the Dumpster, several palmetto bugs the size of mice scurried out of the light and into drains that disappeared under the buildings. The sickly sweet odor of rotting garbage hung in a radius of about five feet around the Dumpster. From inside I heard the faint sound of hundreds of tiny legs moving across paper and metal. I raised my weapon and reached for the plastic lid that hung unevenly around the top edge. As I raised it, something ran across the tips of my fingers. I flung it open, pointing my Glock inside. A flight of flies sped past my face as a wave of stench rose up, and I stepped back.

  The floor of the Dumpster appeared to be moving, alive with hundreds of roaches foraging in fast-food wrappers, soggy boxes of pizza, and cans of Coke and Mountain Dew.

  The body was upright, sitting on its knees, slumped slightly forward, the arms tied behind its back, bound just above the elbow with silver duct tape. A large, open wound on the top of the neck exposed the tendons, muscles, and bones that used to connect to the victim’s head, which had been taken. The index finger on his right hand was missing. There was little to no blood present on the Dumpster’s floor. He had been killed somewhere else and placed here. I recognized the blue T-shirt and jeans as those Philippe had been wearing. Through the moving carpet of insects, I could see that his feet were bare, just as they had been when Gabriel pulled him through the window of the safe house.

  I stepped back and looked out through the alley toward the street. The sense of hope for Lacy that I had resolutely clung to vanished with the speed of a single heartbeat. I holstered my pistol and picked up the phone and called Harrison.

  “I have a crime scene here,” I said before he could say anything. “Philippe is dead.”

  I hung up and started back toward the street but stopped before I got ten feet. Jesus. The image came to me like the faint glow of light in the east at sunrise, gradually turning the sky from night to day. I turned and looked back toward the Dumpster. Was it possible? I couldn’t be wrong. Not about this. I’m too good a cop.

  I walked back to the container and looked inside at the tape binding the victim’s arms. It wasn’t possible. It just couldn’t be. But I wasn’t wrong. The dark echo of a previous horror rose like a muted scream in my memory. I had seen this before.

  18

  HARRISON EASED HIMSELF up the side of the Dumpster to look inside with the tentative steps of an acrophobe approaching the edge of a cliff. When he was sufficiently close to get a clear look over the lip, he leaned slightly forward and stared at Gabriel’s work with the repelled curiosity of a viewer examining the gory tableau of a Hieronymus Bosch painting.

  Nothing feels real about an incomplete human body. I always imagined it was a defense mechanism we keep hidden deep inside from some dark ancestral place that allows us to disconnect from the mayhem that was once a nearly daily experience.

  “I’ve never seen . . .” Harrison said, letting the thought drift before picking it back up. “It doesn’t look real,” he said softly.

  “Without eyes or a face, we share nearly nothing in common anymore. What’s left is like an empty room that hasn’t been lived in for years,” I said.

  I noticed Harrison’s eyes drift down the length of Philippe’s arms to his hands, one of which was still clenched in a fist as if the pain of death was so great the hand refused to let go of it.

  “Except for the hands,” he said. “We still share that.”

  He was right. After sight, the next sensation that brings meaning to a life is touch. From a ba
by’s gentle soft fingers, to the paper-thin wrinkly skin of a great-grandmother’s hands. We hold, we touch, we create, we even destroy with them. And when our voices falter or words are insufficient, we speak with them.

  Harrison turned away and looked over to me, his eyes narrowing into a question. “You’ve seen something,” he said.

  “Look at the way the arms are bound just above the elbows.”

  His eyes moved back to the bright duct tape pinching the arms nearly together.

  “There’s something about that?”

  Harrison studied the body for another moment, then turned and looked at me as he realized there was something else in my reaction.

  “That means something to you, doesn’t it?”

  I nodded. “I think it means Gabriel may have made his first mistake.”

  He shook his head, not understanding. “I’m not following.”

  “Eighteen months ago we found the body of a transient in a wash at the base of the foothills. We never identified him. The case is still open under a John Doe.”

  “You think there’s a connection?”

  “He was on his knees, his throat was cut, and his arms were bound in the same way with duct tape. It was one of the things that never made sense about the case. Why execute a homeless man? But there was nothing that tied it to any other open cases.”

  Harrison thought for a moment, as if trying to construct a bridge from one death to another over the course of nearly two years, then shook his head.

  “According to Philippe, Gabriel arrived in the country just two weeks ago.”

  “But he disappeared in France two years ago.”

  “You think Philippe was wrong.”

  “Or lied, or was lied to.”

  “Just because of the way the arms are tied?”

  I glanced back into the container at the body.

  “I’ve investigated nearly two hundred homicides, maybe twenty of those involved the binding of the victims’ hands together, and in every one of those cases, the hands were tied at the wrists.”

  “Except for these two,” Harrison said.