The Law Of Three: A Rowan Gant Investigation (41 page)

Whatever it was that I screamed, it was
completely unintelligible, even to me. The sound was that of a
madman—a banshee’s wail that froze blood solid even as it ran
through veins. It was a cry that could only emanate from something
not of this world.

I ran head on at him, striding harder than I
believed myself capable and ignoring any pain or complaint my body
elected to issue. My hot breath continued to expel in the tortured
scream right up to the point where I slammed into him full
force.

He had braced himself for the impact, but my
momentum was more than he could bear. He folded over at the waist
as I drove into him, and we both crashed to the floor in a tangle.
I was at the top of the pile, and I pushed myself up with my left
arm then brought my right over in a wide arc toward his face. He
threw his own arm up and tried rolling to the side, which brought
my fist slamming hard against the back of his shoulder. I pulled my
hand back and drove it home once again as he moved, glancing
downward along his back.

I pushed back and dragged myself up to my
knees as he scrambled away from me. Rage was telling me to dive on
him and continue punching. I was just about to give in to the anger
when as I leaned back to launch myself, something thudded against
the back of my head. I wheeled about in search of the unknown
attacker, swinging my left arm out in a stiff arc.

Instead, I saw a pair of legs dangling in
front of my face and heard the gurgling whimper of the young woman
hanging above me. I got to my feet and looked up, frantically
following the noose from around her neck up through the aged block
and tackle, then back down to where it was tied off on a supporting
column.

I rushed across to the column and began
working my fingers into the knot. The nylon rope was twined about a
large steel spike that had been driven deeply into the age-hardened
wood. It was solid and had obviously been placed there long ago. I
fought to loosen the tight braid, but her weight pulling back
against it was making the task all put impossible.

Panic began to seize me once again, competing
with the rage for control of my conscious self. I hooked my arm
over the taut angle of the rope and pulled down, lifting her a pair
of inches farther from the floor but gaining some slack on the
knot. I hated doing it, but it was the only way I could think of to
get the leverage I needed. Just as I began working the tangle
loose, hot pain bit into my back, and I was forced hard against the
upright beam.

Air expelled from my lungs, and my hands
flailed away from the task. I felt the rope snap taut once again,
and it flung my arm up like a catapult. A heavy fist, or so I
thought, connected with my side. The punch was concentrated on a
pinpoint and sent a lance of pain through my ribcage. I sucked in a
quick breath as I was jerked backward, and I leaned into it,
spinning myself in an arc with my right arm flailing upward and out
ahead of me.

I connected with something both soft enough
to qualify as flesh and hard enough to qualify as a skull. I
stumbled through the spin and fell downward while holding my side.
I landed on the plank floor with a heavy thud. My coat was
seriously impeding my ability to move with any agility whatsoever
as was the flak vest. I found myself wishing that I had gone ahead
and removed them when I had the opportunity.

I looked up to see that my blow had rocked
Porter backwards, but unfortunately, he was none the worse for wear
and was now bearing down on me. The reason behind the extreme
concentration of the strike to my ribs became immediately apparent
when I saw the dim light flicker from the blade in his hand.

I tried to kick away as he literally fell on
top of me, but I was too late. My mind flashed on the SWAT team
downstairs, and I wondered why the hell they weren’t up here yet.
Porter’s body pinned my legs, and for the first time, I saw his
left hand gathered into a misshapen claw as he thudded it against
me like a club. I jerked my head back just in time to see the knife
arcing through the air above me, clutched tightly in his right
hand.

I threw my left arm up to block and felt his
connect. I was too late to halt the stab or even deflect it, but I
did manage to slow it somewhat. Still, it kept coming, and I closed
my eyes. Dull pain erupted through my chest as the large blade came
down straight where my heart was thumping wildly. I felt a tingle
through my flesh somewhere just to the left of my sternum, and I
winced. I wondered for a brief second if this was how it felt to be
stabbed because I had expected it to be far more acute.

I exhaled and opened my eyes slowly to see
that the knife was still clutched in his hand with the shiny blade
lying horizontally across my chest. I sucked in a quick breath and
immediately balled up my fist.

I slammed my right hand hard against the side
of Porter’s face as I fought to kick away from him. I felt my own
pain as my knuckles glance downward, grating across his teeth and
ripping a gash in them. He howled as I quickly seized his left
wrist and twisted the appendage as hard as I could.

He rolled away, and I scrambled to my feet.
Behind me I could hear footsteps as the SWAT team made their way up
the stairwell. Only a few more seconds, I mutely told myself. A few
more seconds, and this will all be over. I started again toward the
rope holding Star aloft and heard Porter’s near breathless voice
wheezing as it came toward me.

“As you, Rowan Linden Gant, are damned in
body and soul, your sentence on this day is death.” He inhaled with
an audible heave.

I spun back toward him and steeled myself. He
was standing a few steps away with the knife raised over his head.
Standing as tall as Ben, he towered over me, but I held fast, still
reaching behind me for the rope.

“The sentence…” he sputtered, then coughed.
“The sentence to be executed immediately and without appeal…”

He launched himself at me and brought the
knife downward. I tried to sidestep him but still caught the brunt
of his force against me. I let out an agonized scream as the blade
ripped through my coat sleeve and bit into my upper arm. I screamed
again as he wrenched it back out and made a second attempt at
aiming the weapon.

Out of reflex, I stretched my hand up and
grasped his forearm, locking my elbow so that he couldn’t thrust
the knife downward. We struggled in a violent twist as we pushed
against one another.

Shouts from the SWAT entry team sounded from
across the room as a flurry of footsteps vibrated through the
wooden planks that made up the floor.

We stumbled backward in a clench, and as we
began falling, I heard the sound of something wet splattering
nearby. Somewhere in the back of my mind, my olfactory sense
absently registered the pungent odor of urine and bowel.

I crashed downward with Porter on top of me
and immediately heard a loud creak followed by a sharp crack. A
fraction of a second after the disturbing noise bit into my ears,
the section of floor we occupied gave way and opened up on the room
below.

The sensation of weightlessness I had
experienced earlier when I vaulted from the back of the van was now
magnified tenfold. We seemed to float in place for a brief moment,
and then we plummeted downward in a tangle of arms and legs.

When we hit bottom, we were engulfed in a
cloud of dirt and dust that had collected over the years. We had
started rolling to the side as we fell, so the detritus that was
once the floor above now rained down on and around us. There was
enough trash covering the floor to cushion a portion of our fall,
but as we hit I felt my left forearm snap. The sharp pain shot up
into my shoulder, and I let out a yelp. I think I would have passed
out had it not been for the adrenalin coursing through my
veins.

Porter had rolled almost completely under me
before we hit, and he had taken the brunt of the impact. He was
definitely injured, but he was still alive.

He was still struggling to regain his breath
as I pushed myself up onto my knees with my one good arm. I groped
through the debris with my good hand and felt the handle of the
knife. My fingers closed around it automatically as the rage once
again took control.

I felt myself raising the knife as a swath of
light fell across us. I heard a commanding voice call out, “Police!
Drop the weapon!”

I hesitated for a moment, a dim pinpoint of
logic winking at me from behind the curtain of rage that shrouded
my mind.

“DROP THE WEAPON!”

The light of rationality faded to black, and
I felt my hand begin downward.

I only remember three things after that: a
bright flash, a loud explosion, and the feeling that my chest had
just caved in.

The first thing I did was cough.

The second thing I did was groan.

The third thing I did was open my eyes.

When my vision started to clear, I could see
that there was a white ceiling above me—but not too far above. At
least that is how it looked. My depth perception seemed to be a bit
off for some odd reason.

There was something resembling artificial
light filtering in to aid my sight, which was a far cry better than
darkness. Why darkness stuck out in my mind I didn’t know, but I
didn’t need to give it much thought to decide that I preferred the
light.

There was a lot of noise too. Things like
distant voices and staticky radios. I picked out the rumble of a
motor and even a few electronic sounding beeps. There were
countless other things, both identifiable and not, but I very
quickly grew tired of trying to associate names with them.

Everything in my head was a jumbled blur. I
had no idea where I was or why. There wasn’t an inch of my body
that wasn’t killing me, but at the moment the real pain seemed to
be centered on my chest. Just the very sensation told me that I had
been hit by something, but I couldn’t begin to say what. I knew
what it felt like, and that was a freight train; but since I
appeared to still be in one piece, I decided that might be an
exaggeration on my part.

I lay there for a moment trying to remember.
There seemed to be something important stuck in the back of my
head, and it was fighting a desperate struggle to be released from
its holding cell. It felt like an imperative, something urgent, but
I couldn’t connect with it and that just brought on a feeling of
frustration.

“Hurts like a motherfucker, don’t it,
paleface?” Ben’s words worked their way into my ears over the
multitude of ambient sounds.

I rolled my head in the direction of his
voice and blinked, then I blinked again. When I was still unable to
focus, it dawned on me that I wasn’t wearing my glasses. Somewhere
in the dark ball of memories that was bouncing around inside my
head, I seemed to recall having lost them. But at the same time, I
remembered having another pair. The attempt at reasoning just made
me hurt even more, so I gave up and centered on his blurry
face.

“What?” I croaked.

He started to repeat himself. “I said, hurts
like a motherfu…”

“Yeah,” I eked out the gravelly word to cut
him off. “I got that.” I cleared my throat and coughed again before
continuing. “What hit me?”

“Piece of lead,” he said. He held up his
hand, thumb and forefinger spread slightly apart, then added,
“About so big, actually. But it was movin’ pretty fast.”

“Porter shot me?” I asked.

“No, not Porter.”

“YOU shot me?!” I half yelped then
immediately regretted it.

“Hell no,” he returned. “SWAT did it. If I’d
shot you I probably woulda aimed for your goddamned hard head.”

“They shot me?” I muttered.

“Hey, look at it this way, white man,” he
offered. “You just joined an elite club. That friggin’ vest you
were wearin’ saved your ass.”

“But they shot me,” I said again, confusion
permeating my voice. “Why?”

“Row, what the hell? You got amnesia or
somethin’? They didn’t have much choice. You were gettin' ready to
stab Porter to death with a big ass butcher knife. Don’tcha
remember?”

His words triggered the mechanism that
released the lock on the cell door, opening it wide to allow the
urgent memories of the evening to flood back in. Everything rushed
to the front of my brain and then vied for my undivided attention.
One item stood out from all the others, and I seized on it
immediately.

“Star?” I asked. “How’s Star? Is she
okay?”

My friend stayed conspicuously silent and
simply looked away.

My brain was adjusting to the blurry picture
being fed to it by my uncorrected vision, and I watched as he
brought his left hand up to smooth back his hair then massage his
neck.

“Let’s talk about that later,” he said.

“Tell me she’s okay, Ben,” I insisted.

He hung his head down and continued to work
his fingers against a muscle in his neck. His only audible answer
was a heavy sigh.

The stark memory of the wet sound just before
Porter and I crashed through the floor returned to echo in my ears.
The phantom odor of urine and feces sharply tingled my nose, and I
instantly realized I had been standing next to Star when she had
died.

I wanted to cry, but my body refused. It had
nothing left to give. Not now, anyway.

“They should have let me kill the
sonofabitch,” I muttered.

“I’m sorry, Row,” he returned quietly.

“At least tell me they shot him too,” I said,
my voice a mixture of pleading and demanding.

“No,” he shook his head as he uttered the
word. “He’s already been transported to the hospital.”

“Critical?”

“No. He’s worse off than you,” he replied,
“but not critical. He’ll make it.”