Scream Catcher (37 page)

Office of the Warren County Prosecutor

Friday, 6:55 A.M.

Jude feels nothing.

Until he senses wet on his face and thick black smoke stinging the interior of his nasal passages. He opens his eyes, immediately searches for Lennox, sees that he is back up on his feet and, at the same time, coughing, clutching at his throat with both gloved hands.

The sprinkler system has been triggered.

It’s reduced the fire to a smolder. It’s also produced a cloud of acrid gray/black smoke that fills the office.

Blanchfield isn’t dead.

From down on the floor Jude can see that although she hasn’t been badly burned, she’s having trouble breathing through her nose in the heavy smoke.

Off to his right, he sees Lennox coming for him.

Jude tells himself to roll onto his side. But his body does not respond. As hard as he wills himself he can’t so much as raise a finger. It’s as if Lennox were somehow controlling his mind; somehow able to project his will upon his kill game player. Squatting at the knees, the beast extends middle and index fingers on his right hand. He shoves them up into Jude’s nostrils, cocks his arm, proceeds to lift Jude’s deadweight body up off the floor. At the same time, Lennox shoves the iPhone in Jude’s face.

“Scream. For. Me.”

The pain is unbearable.

The pain causes bright red flashes of light to shoot through Jude’s brain, strike out against the backs of his eyeballs. He can’t possibly scream or shout, for the pain robs him of all breath. Jude simply lashes out helplessly with open hands, claws wildly at the beast, but connects only with smoke-filled air.

Lennox heaves until suddenly Jude finds himself back up on his feet staring into a black broken-toothed face and ice blue eyes.

“Scream. For. Me.” the beast insists, voice calm, non-flustered.

Jude’s eyeballs feel doused in acid. His head spins while the floor seems to be trembling beneath both his feet. But it’s his weak legs that are trembling. Jude tries to raise clenched fists, tries to resume a fighter’s stance. But the best he can manage is an unsteady wobble.

“Scream. For. Me.” Lennox repeats.

“No,” Jude whispers. “I will not scream for you.”

That’s when the beast does something strange. He nods and smiles. Pocketing the iPhone he wipes the soot and water from his eyes, makes his way back through the smoke and the dripping sprinkler water to Blanchfield’s desk where he grabs hold of a wood chair. He sets the chair down only inches from the spot in which Jude is standing. He steps up onto the chair, extends both arms out to the sides as if imitating the fully extended wings on a bird. Raising himself up onto the tiptoes of his left foot, the beast elevates his right leg and foot high in what Jude recognizes as a
crane
-style Karate stance.

As Lennox cocks his right leg back, Jude closes his eyes, awaits the inevitable impact. But instead of a snap kick to the face, he experiences something else: a handheld detonator dropping to the floor. Just a small black plastic detonator no bigger than a television remote control that comes loose from Lennox’s belt. The plastic device makes a distinct clicking noise when it hits the damp concrete floor causing a small red light encased inside its display face to flash brightly.

The Lake George Village Precinct

Friday, 7:10 A.M.

Rather than make the flight of stairs up to his own private second floor office, Mack sits behind Lino’s desk which is located inside a smaller office on the less private first floor of the Lake George precinct. His posture is best described as painfully hunched over, while he conceals the injured shoulder with an adjustable sling lifted from the hospital and a spare blazer he keeps inside his office closet.
Tries
to conceal it, that is.

He’s growing weaker with each passing second, weary face giving away every ounce of physical torment. Maybe the many uniformed and plain-clothed cops that swarm the mostly open first floor can easily see that their old Captain has taken a bullet to the shoulder. Perhaps they’re even aware of his hospital breakout. But they say nothing about it, as if their leader’s decision to place his life in jeopardy for the cause of the cop job is not only the right thing to do under blackout circumstances, but the only thing.

Still, even Mack is beginning to second guess himself.

When he slips his hand under the sling, touches the padded bandage, pulls the hand back out, his fingertips come away soaked with blood.

Slumped behind the metal desk, Mack is sure that passing out looms large in his immediate future. At this point the pain is growing unbearable. If only he thought enough to have snatched some pain killers while still inside the hospital. Hospital strength pain killers! But then that’s when it occurs to him that Lino might be able to come through with at least a couple of aspirin.

“Got any aspirin, Danny?”

Lino is down on his knees on the office floor, eyes intently staring at a large topographical map of Tongue Mountain and the surrounding state forest.

“Lower left hand drawer,” the cop mumbles without pulling eyes away from the map.

Mack opens the drawer, looks down inside. There’s a series of files stacked inside the drawer. Set on top of the files is a bottle of Advil.

“Perfect,” the old Captain whispers.

But that’s when something else captures his attention. Penned in ballpoint on the very top manila folder is the name “Blanchfield.” Without hesitation Mack flips open the lid. Inside he steals a quick glance at several photocopies of what appears to be cancelled checks. Behind those is a section of a folded
Glens Falls Eagle
newspaper that bears the headline: BLANCHFIELD STEALS THE PROSECUTION! Maybe it’s the forty years of cop inside him, but instead of directly asking Lino what business he has keeping a private file on the county prosecutor, he pulls one of the sheets of cancelled checks, quickly stuffs it down into his sling, shoving it behind the jacket. Then, pulling out the plastic bottle of Advil, he closes the drawer with a resounding slam.

“Find them?” Lino poses from the floor.

“Got ‘em,” Mack says. His entire body pains him, but on the inside he’s beginning to do a slow burn.

He might give more thought to it, but when he spots the boy and his stepmother coming through the doors of the crowded village precinct, he shoots up from behind the desk with an energy he would have thought impossible just one minute prior.

A pair of uniformed cops immediately surround the two raggedy, almost half-dead looking stepmother and son.

“It’s okay!” Mack shouts through the open office door. “Let them through!”

But the barefoot, half-naked Rosie goes no further than the Watch Commander’s desk. For just a quick moment, she peers in Mack’s direction from across the room. Without a word, she exhales a breath, collapses into the arms of the uniformed policeman to her left.

Jack pays her no attention.

The boy sprints across the vinyl-tiled floor through the office door towards his grandfather, but stops short as though shocked by the old Captain’s close-up appearance.

“It’s okay, Jack,” Mack says from where he stands unsteadily behind the desk. “Tell me what’s happened.”

“Tell us everything, Jack,” Lt. Lino chimes in as he looks up from a now superfluous topographical map of Tongue Mountain.

Jack is still dressed in Batman and Robin pajamas. He’s covered in mud, scraggily hair hanging over big brown eyes. While the pregnant Rosie is laid out on a couch in the waiting room to await the arrival of an EMS van, Jack begins relaying the night’s events from beginning to end. Does it in one long breath, like reading the headlines off a dozen newspapers.

“Dark monster woke me in my bed … A big man dressed all in black … He stuck a needle in me … Dad woke me up …The rain was coming down on my head and face … Thought I was having a dream, but we were in the woods … Dark monster did something bad to Rosie …”

“Where’s your father now?” Mack interrupts, slate gray eyes growing heavier.

“At the courthouse.”

That’s when the force of the explosion shatters the front windows of the Lake George Village Precinct.

Office of the Warren County Prosecutor

Friday, 7:20 A.M.

The spontaneous detonation of the IED does not result in a sudden, spectacular catastrophic event. The courthouse does not collapse like a house of cards in a windstorm. The explosion of the van bomb results in minimal structural damage.

Initially, that is.

There’s only the crack of the detonation, the primary shock and lurch, then a heavy rumbling that begins to rattle the steel frame so intensely, Lennox is tossed off the chair onto his back, shaved skull bouncing off the concrete like a hollow melon.

A gray-black fog of smoke and debris arrives then up through the air vents. The thick cloud consumes the building’s interior. All breathable air is sucked from Jude’s lungs. He is blinded not from fear, but from smoke and dust.

When the second, far more forceful explosion occurs maybe a second and a half after the first, he feels the building lurch beneath him as the entire west-side facade collapses, falls away in a dramatic gesture of shock and awe.

* * *

From Jude’s vantage inside the eighth floor office, it seems as if the very front of the eight-story building has been sliced like a wedding cake from top to bottom. What survives of the now broken eighth floor concrete slab is no longer level. The floor angles down at a severe thirty degrees. In order to keep from falling, Jude must either grip the floor’s smooth surface like an insect or hang on to the opposite wall in order to avoid slip-sliding away, dropping off the edge for an eight-story plunge to the concrete pavement below.

He lies flat on his belly, gripping the floor with all four limbs. What has been complete smoke and dust-filled blindness now gives way to bright morning sunshine.

Total clarity.

To his direct left, P.J. Blanchfield’s office furniture begins to fall victim to gravity’s pull. Desk, swivel chair, file cabinets, display cabinet, wood guest chairs and basketballs slide and bounce their way off the smooth painted floor. One by one the objects drop off the edge.

To Jude’s direct right, Blanchfield herself slides along the floor in the chair to which she’s been duct-taped. From down on his stomach the ex-cop views her gagged face. The reality of her life and imminent death have caused her to go wide-eyed, her color sickly pale while inch by inch the chair moves closer towards the edge. With all available strength Jude reaches out for a chair leg. But the effort proves useless. The prosecutor is just too far away, her sliding chair picking up momentum with each inch gained.

Paralyzed in his own right, Jude is now reduced to passive observer as Blanchfield’s chair grinds its way across the broken office floor. When finally it comes to the slab’s edge, the bound woman seems to hang on in one last miraculous balancing act of survival. Maybe the chair teeters on the brink for a half second, maybe a full second. But Jude imagines that time has no meaning for the woman and her final moment on earth.

When finally the chair drops out of sight, Jude does not experience an immediate disgust or sadness. In a word, the shocked ex-cop feels nothing, as if P.J. Blanchfield and the chair she was bound to never existed in the first place.

Warren County Courthouse

Friday, 7:24 A.M.

Pulling himself up, Jude attempts to crawl one limb at a time towards the far wall. Maybe there it will be possible to grab hold of an open door jamb. Something that will support him until a rescue can be organized. He looks over his right shoulder, views the empty office. He looks over the left shoulder only to view more of the same emptiness. Only this emptiness is colored with beautiful blue sky and in the far distance, the calm surface of Lake George.

Jude wonders if Lennox has also gone over the edge.

He doesn’t want him to go over the edge. He wants Lennox alive. So he can kill him.

But the beast is nowhere to be seen. His presence is only to be felt.

Jude knows this because someone or something starts to pull at his right leg—someone yanking it hard. Lifting his head off the floor, Jude peers down at his feet.

Lennox has not gone over the edge.

He’s alive, jerking on Jude’s leg, trying to break his already tenuous grip on the floor. The beast is trying to toss the ex-cop over the edge. Raising his left leg, Jude thrusts the heel of his foot downward, hammering at the beast’s face. Blood spurts from nose and lips. But the assault, as fierce as it seems, causes Lennox little harm. Lennox is
fueled
by the blood, by the pain. The more Jude kicks at him, the more he bleeds, the more he smiles a broken-toothed grin.

Lennox improves his grip on the ankle.

He pulls and yanks on Jude. He wants to send the ex-cop over the side.

Not even digging his fingernails into the concrete floor can prevent Jude from sliding. The slide is gradual at first until Lennox throws all his weight into it so that the ensuing leverage pulls the two of them down across the length of the shattered concrete floor.

* * *

Jude hangs over the edge, only one damaged hand and one good hand to support his full body weight. To his right, Lennox is also hanging vertical. Not by two hands, but by one. The beast calmly stares Jude down, black face bloodied, top front tooth broken at the root, black bodysuit torn down the middle exposing a bare, hairless, tight-muscled chest. Lennox is beaming happy and confident even while hanging by only one arm, ice-blue eyes cutting into Jude’s own eyes like the promise of certain death.