The Law Of Three: A Rowan Gant Investigation (31 page)

I relaxed but not much. “That was just
someone calling to check on me, Eldon.”

“One of your minions, I’m sure,” he
retorted.

“You’re right, Eldon.” I agreed with him out
of desperation.

“Damn you, Gant!” he shouted. “I told you not
to patronize me!”

“Calm down, Eldon, we need to…”

“Stop telling me to calm down! Do you hear
me?! Stop it, stop it, stop it!”

I pulled the handset away from my ear as he
screamed. His voice buzzed in the earpiece, achieving a state of
frantic distortion as he repeated the order.

I watched Constance as she glanced to the
side and gave a nod. I could hear Ben whispering around the corner
of the doorway and assumed that he was conferring with her. About
what, I didn’t know, but I didn’t have time to speculate. She had
told me they were working on something, so I had to trust them.

I tried to adopt a generic voice. “Okay,
Eldon, I’m not trying to be patronizing to you. I’m sorry if that
is how it sounded.”

“What is wrong with you, Gant?” he
demanded.

“I’m not sure I understand.”

“There’s something wrong with you,” he
replied. “There’s something wrong with you!”

“Tell me what you mean, Eldon,” I
pressed.

“You aren’t the same,” he answered me, his
voice shaking with yet unreleased anger. “You… You aren’t the same
as when I talked to you before.”

“I’m the same, Eldon,” I told him.

“It’s a trick! You’re trying to trick me
again!” His voice jumped a notch in volume as he fired the
accusation at me. “I told you it won’t work, Gant. It won’t work,
Satan! Do you hear me?! It won’t work!”

The calm insanity I had always associated
with him was gone. He was now coming across as someone with one
foot tenuously planted in reality but ravaged by unimaginable
delusions. He was escalating beyond anything I had imagined, and I
was rapidly losing faith in my ability to contain this.

My mind raced as I tried to formulate a
response that wouldn’t push him any further than I had already
managed. Agreeing with him definitely wasn’t the way to go. Trying
to stick to the middle of the road wasn’t any better. It seemed the
only thing that had kept him on an even keel thus far was when he
felt like he had pushed my buttons. He was at his calmest when he
had my ire raised.

I swallowed hard and started to open the
stopcock on the mental valve that was presently holding back my
anger. I figured I would start small. Let some of it creep into my
voice and see what his reaction was. On the chance that it worked,
I would take it a little further. If he wanted me to let loose on
him, I would be more than happy to oblige.

I glanced up and saw that Constance was
looking off to the side and nodding vigorously as she motioned to
me. I could hear her saying something into her phone, but I
couldn’t make out exactly what it was. Ben was apparently still
just around the corner, because his urgent voice hit my unblocked
ear. His words were much easier to understand.

In a quiet voice, he was telling someone, “He
looks okay, so go now.”

Before I could put my hastily formed plan
into motion, Porter began to scream into the phone, forcing me to
pull the handset away yet again.

“TELL THEM TO STOP, GANT!” His distorted
voice arced several inches from the earpiece as I held the phone
away from my head. “YOU BASTARD, I KNOW THEY ARE MOVING! TELL THEM
TO STOP, OR I’LL KILL HER NOW!”

“No! Eldon! Listen to me!” I blurted.

Constance was shaking her head and waving. I
could hear the frenzy in Ben’s tone as he asked, “Did they catch
that?!”

She didn’t respond quickly enough for
him.

“Mandalay!” his voice jumped. “Did they hear
that?!”

“I don’t know!” she shot back with her own
thread of panic. “I lost the signal!”

“Abort!” Ben immediately bellowed, presumably
into his phone. “He made you! Abort!”

Throughout the tangle of frenzied voices, I
could still hear Eldon screaming at me, as well as my own pleas for
him to listen.

The next sound to reach my ears came from the
handset in the form of an agonized scream drilling its way deeply
through my inner ear. It was high-pitched and definitely female.
The tortured sound was followed by a sharp, thudding noise and then
a second pained wail.

“Oh Gods!” I stammered as I squeezed my eyes
tightly shut. I balled my free hand into a fist and began thumping
it against my forehead in a vain attempt to push the imagined
horror out of my head. “Dear Mother Goddess, no!”

The floodgates opened, and my anger spewed
forth. My skin grew hot, and my ears began to ring as my blood
pressure set a new benchmark for the term hypertension. I brought
the handset against my head and shouted, “PORTER!”

There was nothing at the other end. Just a
random repetition of hollow clicks that indicated the call had been
disconnected.

I swung the handset out and hammered it
downward into the base then vented my anger at the first person to
enter my sights.

“What the hell was going on?!” I screamed at
Mandalay. “Did you know what they were doing?!”

“Calm down!” she shouted back.

“Calm down?” I demanded as I stepped toward
her. “Screw you! Don’t tell me to calm down!”

An immense column of Native American filled
the space between Mandalay and me as Ben quickly hooked himself
around the corner. He planted one large hand against my chest and
pushed, thrusting me rearward at an angle until I was backed
against the countertop. “Goddammit, Rowan! Settle down!”

I heard Felicity yelp, “Ben!”

“You knew!” I roared, incredulity
underscoring my anger. “Dammit you knew what they were doing, and
you fucking got her killed, Ben! What the hell were you people
thinking?!”

“Rowan, you don’t know that he killed her.”
Constance projected her voice over mine as she wedged herself
around Ben and into the kitchenette.

“You were listening in!” I spat as I
struggled against my friend. “What the hell did it sound like to
you?!”

“Dammit, Row,” Ben appealed, his voice a deep
boom. “Don’t make me cuff you.”

Hot tears were beginning to roll down my
cheeks, a product of both anger and despair. I glared back at my
friend, fighting the urge to scream at him again.

“Rowan, please…” Felicity’s voice came from
behind him in an anguished appeal.

“Did you even know where he was in the
building?” I asked, my voice even but hard.

“Every indication was that you had his
attention, Rowan,” Constance explained. “We were just trying to get
a couple of men into the building so we could pinpoint him.”

“Yeah,” I shot back. “Well look what it got
you. Just what the hell were you doing calling the shots anyway,
Ben?”

“Rowan,” Ben said. “Like Mandalay said, it
looked like you had his attention.”

“What?” I didn’t want to believe what I was
hearing. “You used me?”

“Dammit, Row,” Ben lamented. “It wasn’t my
choice.”

“You were our barometer, Rowan,” Mandalay
said. “The SAIC made the decision not to go on voice analysis
alone. Ben and I were gauging your reaction visually and feeding
the information to the scene.”

“I can’t believe you did that,” I said,
swinging my disbelieving gaze between them. “Why didn’t you tell
me?”

“We couldn’t be sure that you wouldn’t
accidentally tip him off,” she explained. “Besides, you were
already on the line with him when the decision was made. I’m
sorry.”

“It was how it had to be done, white man,”
Ben told me, his voice apologetic.

“Well, how it had to be done sucks.”

He continued to hold me against the cabinets,
my torso bending back over the edge of the countertop. We simply
stared at one another, neither of us quite sure what to say
next.

A few steps across the room, the apartment
phone began to ring.

An electronic chirp issued a half step behind
it, and Constance immediately flipped her cell phone open. She
tilted her head and pulled her hair back with her free hand as she
tucked the device to her ear. “Mandalay.”

The bell jangled again.

“It’s him,” Constance stated as she looked at
me then cocked her head toward the phone on the wall. “He never
actually shut the phone off, and they tagged him as soon as he
dialed. They want you to go ahead and talk to him again.”

Ben looked me over and apparently decided
that it still wasn’t safe to leave me unrestrained. He twisted at
the waist, keeping one hand firm against my chest while reaching
past Felicity with the other and snatching the phone out of the
cradle.

He held the handset in front of my face, and
I took it from him wordlessly.

There was no way to put my rage in check, so
I skipped the initial phase of my plan and went straight for
voicing my disdain.

“What do you want now you sorry bastard,” I
snarled.

“Don’t let that happen again!” Porter
demanded.

“Go screw yourself, Porter,” I fired
back.

Silence interrupted the flow of the short
exchange as he fell mute. I listened carefully, searching for any
ambient sound I could identify—any indication that Millicent
Sullivan was still alive.

“I see you’re back to your old self,” Porter
finally spoke, his voice suddenly far calmer than it had been ten
minutes ago. Apparently, my idea was correct.

“So glad that you’re pleased,” I chided. “So
you must not have killed her.”

“What makes you think that?”

“Simple, Eldon,” I explained. “You wouldn’t
have called back if you had. If you kill her, you no longer have a
hold on me.”

“So you have decided to admit that you need
her soul?”

My fear ebbed, but the dip was shallow. I
harbored no illusion that he hadn’t at least done something to her
that was too horrid to consider.

My tone remained sharp. “Yeah, sure,
whatever, Eldon. Now, let me talk to her.”

“I’d love to put her on, Gant, but she seems
to have passed out.”

“What did you do to her, you sick fuck?”

“And thine eye shall not pity; but life shall
go for life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for
foot.”

The quote from Deuteronomy was a verbal
harbinger of things unimaginable. Unfortunately, I knew how
literally Porter interpreted the Bible. I shuddered with the fear
that he had in fact made one of the aforementioned choices and that
it was more than just a recitation of chapter and verse.

My mouth began to water as my stomach
convulsed, working into a knot, and then slowly unraveling. The
acrid bitterness of bile singed the back of my tongue, and I
swallowed hard to force it back down. The breadth of his cruelty
should have been no surprise to me by now, but this was getting to
be more than I could take.

When I finally responded to his pointed
selection, my voice was cold and hard. “Skip the verse, Eldon. Just
tell me what you did to her.”

As he had done earlier in the day, he seemed
to be taking morbid pleasure in the horrors he was committing. His
personality had made another one-hundred-eighty-degree shift, and
even though he was trapped with no means of escape, here he was
gloating. Flaunting what he perceived as his newly found control
over me.

“You wouldn’t happen to know whether or not
she is right-handed or left-handed, would you?” he asked.

“You son-of-a-bitch,” I muttered. “If you cut
her hand off, she’s going to bleed to death.”

“Son of God, Gant.”

“Not of any God I know,” I spat. “How badly
is she bleeding?!”

“Oh, calm down,” he chided. “She’s fine. She
even still has both of her hands.” He paused for a beat then added
a sinister, “For now.”

“Then what did you do to her?” I repeated the
question with added hardness.

“Nothing yet.”

I knew he had to have done something, or she
wouldn’t be unconscious. I wanted to press him for an answer but
wasn’t sure if that would just set him off again. I decided my best
bet would be to take a different approach. “So why did you bother
calling me then?”

“To find out if she is left-handed or
right-handed.”

“I really don’t know, Eldon. Why?”

“Oh well, it doesn’t matter all that much, I
suppose,” he spat. “When the time comes, I’ll take her left, just
like you did to me.”

I closed my eyes, and the memories flooded
in. Things I thought I had finally come to terms with bored into my
skull and re-awakened my own viscid fear.

I could almost feel the cold and even the
dampness of the fog. The forlorn sound of violins filtered into my
ears from somewhere above me, straining out a lament as only they
could. I stood there motionless as I felt my own arm going
numb.

Mentally, I was once again dangling in the
chilled air with a thin, nylon rope twined tightly about my
forearm, suspended precariously over the side of the Old Chain of
Rocks Bridge. A raving madman, bent on ending my life had his bony
hand wrapped around my throat and was squeezing. My consciousness
was fleeing in panic, and I was all but prepared to join it.

It didn’t matter that this was only in my
head because it had once been all too real, and right now, the high
definition memory was making my heart race all over again.

I pushed my still shaking hand back up to my
side then thrust my thumb beneath the nylon strap and pushed
outward. With a dull pop, it released, and I immediately wrapped my
hand around the grip of the pistol.

The miniscule piece of breath I’d been able
to grasp was failing quickly, and my vision was darkening as my
eyes started rolling back in my head. The abbreviated lesson in the
use of the pistol flashed through my mind as just so much jumbled
nonsense. I could find no way to apply the instructions to my
present situation.