No Greater Love

by Susan Rodgers

  The world crashed to a sudden stop but Jessie’s insides continued to churn, accelerating, causing her to stoop over in pain as she relived the blunt thwacks of the daggers thrusting in and out of Sandy’s belly and chest yet again, an eternal horror-bound record on a continuous loop. No! She could not endure this again. The husky tremor of Josh’s voice, pleading, morphed into Sandy’s moans as he lay dying in her arms years before. Jessie collapsed on the floor, wrapped one arm around her belly and hunched tightly against the bed as if it could somehow protect her, the phone shaking by her ear as she stared helplessly up at Jacob.

  She had the wherewithal and decency to look away from him before sobbing into her cell, “You’re wrong Josh. You’re everything! You’re everything!”

  An already dimming light faded to black in Jacob’s eyes. Coolly, he turned to the armoire where they’d stashed their gun, crouched and wiped his hand along the floor until it touched a hidden key, curled up his fingers and drew it out, then stood and unlocked the door.

  Far away, Josh didn’t care if his own death was on the universe’s agenda that night. Because he had just heard what he needed to hear most from the person he needed to hear it from.

  And then over the phone Deuce was commanding Jessie to get her butt in the Mustang and drive to a deserted road at the bottom of Seymour Mountain. Quickly, she heard him demand through the fog suffocating her brain and heart.

  Deuce added, “I wouldn’t take a chance on calling Matt if I were you. Because you know what will happen if you do.”

  As the phone sputtered and died in her hands Jessie saw that Jacob was already trying to call Matt. They were out the door of the condo in two seconds flat with Ulysses, who was on foyer guard duty, right behind them. Jacob’s cell did not work in the elevator and so the two of them were in the car and flying out the garage door before they succeeded in reaching Matt.

  Dan was waiting in a sedan outside, which Ulysses hopped into while hollering “go, go!” upon being angrily refused entry into the wildly terrified Jessie’s small car. As the blinding headlights of Dan’s vehicle careened behind them, Jessie pondered through her shock and haze that Deuce had said last night. That would explain the presence of two of Matt’s guys instead of one, as was the norm. Suddenly she was enraged beyond sight, and thought that once and for all she was going to have an all out knock-down fist fight with Matt and maybe with Charles too when this drama finally played itself out.

  A mile down the street she yanked the wheel sideways, piloting the Mustang swiftly and abruptly to a crooked stop by the curb. Jumping out, she stood with her feet apart staring back at Dan’s sedan, screaming at the men who spent their days trying to protect her superstar ass from a psychotic stalker.

  “Don’t follow me,” she cried, herself suddenly a madwoman on the loose. “Don’t follow me!” She was swaying from side to side. “Give me some time, at least! Five minutes. Five minutes, Dan! Ulysses, come on! I need at least five minutes with him before you guys pounce.” From some inane place deep inside her exploding mind she thought she could talk Deuce out of hurting Josh. They had established some weird rapport before he went crazy after the concert that hateful hot August night. If the cops and Matt’s guys showed up too soon Deuce might panic and…well, that thought was too horrific to bear.

  Ulysses bounded out of Dan’s car and strode heatedly towards her. Dark eyes blazing, he opened Jacob’s passenger side door, yanked the seat forward, and swung into the back, hunkering down amongst the aftermarket white leather seats Jessie had installed after she purchased the car.

  Her breaths raspy, pained, Jessie sobbed “No, Ulysses! Please, for God’s sake, no!”

  “I’m going with you,” he insisted, picturing Matt’s wrath if he didn’t jump in with Jessie. Incensed, Jessie’s eyes pleaded with him as she struggled to regain some composure, but she was running out of time. She leapt back into the car and stomped on the gas pedal, changing the three vintage gears quickly as she picked up speed. The car lurched forward, as anxious to end this thing as she was.

  “Get down then,” she begged, eyeballing Ulysses through the rearview mirror. “Get down!”

  It was the longest ride of Jessie’s life – what would she be faced with when she turned the car onto the lonely old dirt road? Deuce was unpredictable, and was enough of a spy that she knew he might have figured out his time with her was running out. That would be the only reason he would have picked up Josh – to use him as bait against her. In all likelihood he meant to kill him. Because, she reminded herself, if Deuce can’t have me, then no one can. Jessie was sickened. Neither Jacob nor Ulysses spoke to her, for both knew her story and were not about to interrupt the plotting and planning in which she was likely engrossed, the despicable memory of a young boyfriend’s brutal murder more than a decade earlier haunting this torturous endless drive into the mountains.

  Jessie glanced over to Jacob. He caught her eye and gestured downwards. Her eyes narrowed when she spotted the Guardian pistol he fingered between his knees. Jacob was a good shot – they had practiced diligently with Matt as their supervisor. She wanted to talk to him, to tell him not to fire carelessly, or too soon, but with Ulysses hovering down in the backseat of the car she decided it best not to say anything. But the sight of the gun was so final; everything about this night already seemed so damned final.

  At the bottom of the mountain, she whipped the car over to the side of the dirt road and this time faced Dan, who was close on their tail.

  Her voice was now low, throaty, controlled. “You’ll have to show Matt and the cops the way,” she glowered at him in an attempt to stall for time, her fingers clenching and unclenching in fists of fear and rage. “I have Ulysses and Jacob, I’ll be fine.” She gave him directions, and Dan stood pacing interminably in the deep dark woods until Matt’s Audi would careen down the road, closely followed by two North Van RCMP cruisers, seven minutes later.

  Jessie once heard on a talk show that hypnosis helps to slow down time. She had no idea how it worked, but the concept was fascinating. Wishing she had studied the technique, she prayed for enough time. As she parked the car crookedly behind Deuce’s rented Ford, Jessie whispered one last desperate instruction to her determined nervous passengers.

  “Let me try to talk him through it first. Don’t do anything rash or he will react. I mean it, you guys.”

  Without looking at either Jacob or Ulysses, who both ducked deeply down into the safety of the vehicle, Jessie rested her fingers on the handle, took a deep breath, and then slowly opened her door. She could hear Jacob’s shallow breathing – or was it hers – echoing in the silence of the lonely tree-lined road. It was a clear Vancouver night, the stars overhead alighting Matt’s way to her as surely as the GPS he’d stashed in the old car. Deuce himself had only recently arrived, judging by the ticks and clicks Jessie heard emanating from the Fusion’s cooling engine.

  Her heart throbbed painfully in her chest, threatening to leap out, as Jessie placed first one foot and then the other in front of her as she narrowed the gap between safety and a debilitating unknown fear in the aching desire for Josh to be alive and well. But then her heart seemed to stop altogether as she saw Deuce step out from behind a clump of poplar trees in front of his car. With his left arm he had a solid grip on Josh’s right bicep. Deuce’s stovepipe talons were digging deeply into the flesh just below the short sleeve of Josh’s white T-shirt.

  Josh was alive.

  Stifling a sob, her knees weak, Jessie was desperately relieved to note he was balancing – barely – on his own two wobbly brown boots.

  After closing her eyes for a brief second and whispering a fleeting agonized heartfelt prayer of thanks, Jessie re-focused and fixed her eyes on the strange scenario twenty feet ahead. Deuce strode purposefully in front of and then just past the Ford, and then stopped and turned his stumbling victim towards Jessie. Josh’s hands were tied behind his back and he was slumped over, as if he had too much to drink and couldn’t quite stand o
n his own, or focus, or speak. He was upright, but barely, and seemed to be favoring his right side, that Jessie guessed had borne the brunt of Deuce’s heavy boot. Josh’s own dusty cowboy boots dragged in the russet B.C. dirt, leaving a wispy trail that echoed his displeasure in becoming a pawn of Deuce McCall. The white T-shirt Josh wore was dirty, as if he had been held in a dingy basement or warehouse, and his hair was limp, shielding his face, preventing Jessie from seeing whether there was any light left in his brown eyes. The hair she loved to touch and move behind his ear was hiding him behind its veil of trepidation and pain. If his eyes were open, they could only see the earth beneath the ragged hem of his jeans.

  She wanted to call to him but her throat was thick and congested; words would not come. Instead, she swallowed and whispered to herself Josh. That was all.

  Somehow he seemed to hear, or at least sense her presence, for he forced his head up on an unsteady neck and tried to make eye contact with her, but the task was impossible. His knees were giving way and Deuce was getting annoyed trying to hold him up, and kept yanking on the already sore bicep. Somewhere in his murky thoughts Josh wanted to tell Jessie to leave, in fact he willed her to make a hasty exit. At the same time, he knew she wouldn’t go even if he could find the energy to tell her, because she would do what he would do if the situation were reversed, and that would be to stand by the person you love.

  At least – this time. It meant something, that she was there, that she’d come back to Canada to face her adversary, to end things, to let those who loved her know in all certainty that, as difficult as it was sometimes, she loved them back.

  Planting both feet securely in the dirt, Jessie’s mouth tightened into a firm line and she stared defiantly, with purpose, at Deuce. This was it. One way or another, it would end here, tonight. She wondered if that was how soldiers felt on the front lines – prepared for any eventual ending. Ready. Tired of the incessant futile fight.

  Something in Deuce’s right hand glinted in the moonlight. A dagger of some sort. Six to eight inches in length, likely. No surprise, yet the bile in Jessie’s stomach still threatened to erupt. She told herself this was not Sandy in front of her, that she was not the same young girl who once found herself imprisoned in a damp heritage home on Tradd Street in Charleston so many years ago. That she was no longer afraid of Deuce McCall, for she understood him now. She comprehended his past, his own hurts, what motivated him. He was still unpredictable, but on some weird level he and Jessie had forged some kind of twisted relationship that last summer. Maybe she could reason with him, although from where she stood she could detect a vein throbbing in his forehead, which she knew from past experience meant only one thing - unmitigated rage.

  She found the courage she needed in her inner Grace Hanadarko, and listened to Deuce’s plea. She had to try. For Josh, for her. For Sandy, and for Rachel.

  “Jessie.” It was pathetic, the way he murmured her name, as if everything he was or ever would be was dependent on how she felt about him. “I want to know how you stand it. Not being able to touch him. Tell me how you stand it.”

  Her mouth dropped open. This wasn’t what Jessie expected Deuce to say. This pathetic weeny voice wasn’t what she was used to from him. Suddenly he was a moonlit Karsh portrait at the moment the famous photographer snapped the shutter – his soul was open for her to see, to delve further into, although she was quite certain she did not want to know or understand Deuce further.

  Behind her, in the Mustang, the silence was overwhelming, punctuated only by Jessie’s distant voice and the strange shrieks of midnight creatures on the prowl. Jacob strained to hear human voices in the inky darkness. He stared hard down at the cold gun clenched between his hands, held his breath, and waited for Jessie’s response to Deuce’s odd question. Ulysses tapped on the back of Jacob’s seat – he wanted the door opened, and soon.

  “I can’t,” was what Jacob heard Jessie say.

  She changed her stance and said it again, a little louder. “I can’t,” Jessie stammered forlornly as the lump in her throat expanded and threatened to choke her. Accenting her point, her hands moved ghostlike in the night, expressive, but utterly futile. “I can’t stand it. But what choice do I have?”

  “I know you still want him, Jessie. You came back for him. You’re still hoping. That song…about hope…you wrote it for him. And you still believe it. Never give up, you said. You told all of us that. All of us.” His voice edged with unrelenting despair, Deuce gestured to himself with the dagger, and Jessie wished fervently she were closer so she could push it into his broken heart, the kind of damaged lovesick heart not subject to repair – ever.

  “I came back because I knew you would slither your way back into my life, Deuce. I was worried you might be hurting some other girl,” her voice was even but, in the moonlight, she was trembling. Her eyes kept darting from Deuce to Josh and back again. She ached to hold Josh in her arms, to weep into his shoulder and neck, to be the one to hold him up. An angry tear leaked from the corner of her eye and she wiped it away with a knuckle before Deuce could see how scared she really was. “I want to take away your freedom to cause pain, Deuce.”

  Hearing this, Deuce theatrically staggered backwards a few steps, dragging Josh with him. “My freedom?” he cried. “What freedom? My life without you is a prison, Jessie. I lost my freedom the day I first laid eyes on you. That’s what love is, good or bad – it’s a prison, isn’t it Jessie? You ache so bad to feel the touch of that one person…their skin on yours…love is a singularly destroying pain. Touch is light, Jessie. It’s light! It’s the only way I have managed to survive…hoping for that touch…craving it…”

  As Deuce railed, Jacob finally responded to Ulysses’ more urgent taps on the back of his seat, and so Jacob pulled down the handle of the Mustang and discreetly pushed on the door, praying Jessie kept the car’s hinges well oiled so they wouldn’t squeak and betray his and Ulysses’ presence. In his heart – and in Jessie’s, too – were silent wishes that Dan and Matt and their entourage would not arrive too soon. The dagger clenched in Deuce’s unsteady hand was flicking dangerously close to Josh. And Jessie wasn’t all that far away from it, either. This was a murder suicide waiting to happen – Jacob could hear the torment in McCall’s voice. It seemed Deuce no longer believed in Jessie’s song about hope. It seemed Deuce could now see only one way out.

  Jacob slipped from the white seat onto the dirt road and then around behind the Mustang. Finally able to see the bizarre scenario in front of him, he was instantly struck by the misplaced thought that Deuce McCall, standing there behind Josh, waving his right arm high in the air, had taken on the appearance of a cross. He was Josh’s cross to bear, and had been since Josh and Jessie first laid eyes on each other.

  We all have one, Jacob found himself thinking forlornly. A cross. And there is mine. Jessie was standing before Josh, her arms outspread, trying to talk some sense into a man too deranged to hear what she had to say. In her pajama pants and boots, a hoodie hastily thrown over Jessie’s tank top, she looked like anything but the celebrity the world helped her become. And Josh was a puppet whose strings had been loosened – was he drugged? Beaten? It was evident he was suffering at the hands of McCall. He was starting to emit a low moan every time McCall moved him. Jacob could see Jessie react painfully every time she heard his cry. He prayed she could keep her wits about her a little longer. Jacob’s hands were shaking, but he forced the right over the left in order to hold the gun steady. He had a job to do.

  Ulysses did not follow him. Where was the dark skinned man? Hiding like a musky bear in the shadows? In fact, Ulysses decided the best opportunity to overcome McCall was to attack the southerner from behind. The bodyguard was hunkered down by the right front tire of Deuce’s car, peeking out from the side of the rental. He could see McCall, whom he hoped would continue on his emotional appeal to Jessie, if for no other reason than to create his own diversion.

  “This is life, Deuce,” Jessie was saying. “You
don’t always get what you want!”

  “You did, Jessie. You got everything.”

  “No Deuce, it’s not what it seems. I would give everything to have my dad back again. To build sandcastles on the beach again, to play guitar with him. The fame part, that’s nothing but a curse! Look what it’s gotten me…”

  Deuce interrupted angrily, “What, Jessie? What has it gotten you? Me? Following you around? I have news for you, I found you way before anyone else did. You were mine. Remember? Playing at the Renegade? You were mine first, Jessie!”

  “And who fucked that up, Deuce? Maybe I would still be there today, playing at your club, if you didn’t become some fucking madman! You fed Rachel drugs, you killed her as surely as you killed Sandy! And God only knows who else!”

  “Don’t forget your little Terri, she was easy, a few crushed percs on a bad day!”

  Feeling her knees weaken, Jessie gasped. She knew it, though, in her gut she knew all along that Deuce had destroyed Terri as well. An innocent young girl who was trying to find her way out of a dark hole. Any little compassion Jessie had remaining for Deuce’s own painful plight shuddered to an immediate and definitive end.

  She was openly sobbing now. “You ruined everything, Deuce. You took any enjoyment I might have found in my life and you destroyed it. Even the good moments – they’re all tainted now.” She threw up her hands. “You win.”

  “You could still have love, Jessie. With me. If you would just give it a chance…” He was begging now, whining again. “We could go away, back to Charleston, maybe, and just be together.”

  God, he’s twisted, Jacob was thinking, as he pondered his options for a shot.

  “No Deuce. We can’t. Love is not some Hollywood romance. It’s not some idealistic perfection that exists just by looking at someone. It’s not…Gatsby’s incorruptible dream, it’s real, love is real! It’s…it’s making crunchy biscuits when you like mushy ones! Or going for a walk with your lover in the cold when you don’t want to!”