Chapter 29
Scott dreamed.
He didn’t know why he felt so much joy in watching the bridge above him burn, but as the ashes fell all around him, Scott raised his face to the sky and opened his mouth. Flecks of ash landed on his tongue and he was surprised at the taste. It wasn’t bitter but sweet, like a fleck of sugar was hitting his taste buds.
Raising his arms, Scott cried out. His howl was long and guttural. It was more like the cry of a wild animal than a human man. The howl rolled off his lips with power and presence, so much that he almost expected the burning bridge above him to collapse under the weight of his voice.
He closed his eyes and felt the heat of the roaring flames whispering across the skin of his face. Scott grinned. It was ecstasy. He finally understood the wants and desires of a pyromaniac. To burn. Only to burn. It was that simple.
A poem came to mind. One of his mother’s. One that she had framed and hung above their stove. Bridges burning/fires yearning/to destroy/as the ashes fall/over us all/in the space/build once more.
Above him, the roar of the fire ceased and Scott was suddenly engulfed with silence. It startled him and he quickly opened his eyes. The bridge was gone as was the falling ash. Looking around, he saw that he was in the kitchen of his apartment. The illumination of the massive flames was replaced by the flicker of a florescent light. The subtle flicker of the florescent bulb made him uneasy, causing the illusion that things around him were moving, shifting with malice intent.
A cold chill trembled across his neck.
The apartment appeared in the exact state in which he had left it the previous evening, including the dirty dishes in the sink. He glanced to the floor and expected to find the same track of dirt between each cheap pale tile. But instead he saw a line of blood. Following the trail of crimson, Scott found that the river lead to a red lake, which had pooled beneath the head of a body.
Dead eyes stared up at him.
Scott’s breath caught. How was it possible? The body should be gone? The body should not be there. It had been taken care of. It had been stopped.
Leaning closer, he tried to get a better view of the face. Dead hands reached out and grabbed Scott’s shirt. The dead mouth opened and formed a moan, but the moan sounded like a ringing, like the ringing of a…
…phone.
Jerking to attention, Scott realized that he had dozed off and the cell phone was chirping in the center console of Bam’s car. Sitting straight up, he sluggishly wiped a drop of sweat away from his forehead. After fixing the crooked pair of sunglasses, he glanced out the car windows and windshield, feeling exposed in the daytime. He was in a low populated area, where only a few scattered houses sat next to stretches of woodland. Even though he could not see another person within his view, he couldn’t shake the feeling that there were a million eyes watching him, from the hills and from the trees. Paranoia. But that didn’t mean that there wasn’t someone watching him.
He couldn’t believe that he had let himself fall asleep. How stupid.
Shaking his head, Scott tried to gather his wits before grabbing the pre-pay cell phone and flipped it open. “Bam?” He asked the name but already knew that the person on the other end had to be her. There was no one else that it could have been. Bam had bought them each a burn phone, using cash which would make it untraceable. With the throw away phones, they could safely speak to each other without the police plugging a signal from the air in order to follow back to its source. They were the only people that had the two phone numbers.
“Scott?” She sounded distraught.
“Of course,” he replied.
As his head continued to clear, Scott remembered why he was parked, exposed to the light of day, while the cops of Youngstown hunted for his scalp. It was all about the mansion across the street. Even though he was in the suburb of Belle Vista, he was close enough to the city to make him nervous. The two-story, brick mansion was massive and more luxurious than he could ever hope of owning. From his view, he could see onto a slab of a circular driveway. Across the driveway he could make out a row of short, white pillars standing across a wide front porch. The porch was larger than Scott’s entire apartment. A tall, red brick wall surrounded the property. A thick metal gate secured the entrance. The entrance and gate were being monitored by set of cameras, which were perched and pointed and most likely recording everything and everyone that tried to enter the premises.
The large house didn’t impress Scott. The small house that he had grown up in, with his mother and father, always suited him better. That house had been little but full, unlike the large building across the street which was most likely empty, at least empty where it counts.
“Where are you?” Bam asked.
“Where do you think I am?” Scott asked. “I’m outside the house.”
“You need to get out of there,” Bam insisted.
“Why? The gates are still closed and I can see the yellow car,” Scott replied. “He is still in there.” As the words left his mouth, he saw motion through the closed metal gates. A group of figures was leaving by the set of front doors. “I see something. People. It think that this is it.” His pulse sped up. Anticipation filled him.
He reached across the passenger’s seat and touched the dark Browning handgun, making sure that it was real. After discarding his own gun in the park, he never wanted to touch another. But he was once again being forced in that direction.
“Abort!” Bam voice boomed through the phone. “Get out of there, Scott!”
“What? Wait. Why?” The desperation in her voice confused him. Scott watched the figures enter two separate vehicles, one being the yellow Porsche that Bam had specifically pointed out. It was time. Why was he being screamed at? Why was he being told to leave? “What is going on?”
“You are on the news!”
“What are you talking about?”
“Your god damned face is on every television, right now!” Bam hollered. “You need to get out of there and get inside! It is not only the YPD that know your face, now! You are no longer an inside secret. Do you get me?”
“I can still do this!”
“Scott! You are not going to take that chance!”
Leaning back in the car’s seat, Scott sighed. He clicked on the radio and immediately heard Oscar’s voice. “I repeat,” he began, “the suspect is still at large and may still be in the city of Youngstown or the surrounding areas. He may or may not be armed, but I want everyone to consider him dangerous. I will only be taking a couple questions. Sasha?”
“Shit!” She was right. He would be following the yellow Porsche into a place more populated than his current location. His paranoia had been correct, a million eyes were indeed on him.
The key was already in the slot and all Scott had to do was turn it to make the car roar to life. “We knew it would happen, eventually. I was just hoping that we had another day,” he said, regretfully.
“Just come home. Hurry.”
Fuck, his mind swore.
Scott knew that his proof was getting ready to pull out into the real world, away from safety of a closed gate. And he also knew that it had become a rare event, because the man in the yellow Porsche remained home, within protection, more often than not. He had to get to the man and get what the man had on him…what the man always had on him. Proof.
It might be his only chance.
Bam had told Scott that his proof would be vulnerable, barely guarded, which was also a rare occasion. The man in the yellow Porsche was only bringing a single guard along for the scheduled meeting. The meeting was crucial and those being met did not like excessive muscle, so the man in the yellow Porsche was forced to leave most of his protection behind.
A single guard. He could do it. Scott knew that he could. He had to. Desperation oozed from every neuron in Scott’s brain. The news was posting his
picture all over town, declaring him to be a killer on the loose. He was being called a murderer. But Scott had never murdered anyone in his life. Everything that happened was self-defense, even if it did not appear to be so.
Kill or be killed.
Yet…he could not prove any of it.
Scott also realized that it had gone beyond proving the truth to other people, to his father and to the police, but it had become about understanding that truth for himself, as well. Why had it happened? How did it happen? And why him? Was it God? Was it science? Or was something else completely, something that he could never possibly understand?
He just simply needed to understand.
More than anything.
“Just come home,” he heard Bam repeat.
But he couldn’t.
“Sorry, hun,” Scott mumbled. “I have to do this.”
“Scott…no,” she begged. “There will be another time. It is too dangerous.”
“I have to do this,” he said again and hung up. He had no plan on killing the man, which means that the man would never see him coming. Watching as the yellow Porsche pulled through the opened gates, Scott pulled out behind and began to follow.
Ashes to Ashes Page 30