The Law Of Three: A Rowan Gant Investigation (26 page)

“How?”

“A call from one of the coppers on the case,”
he answered. “He overheard a phone conversation she had, and he
thought I should know.”

“Recklessly endangering a civilian on
purpose?” Mandalay sounded incredulous when she asked the question.
“Have you gone to IAD about this?”

“That’ll be my next move.” Ben nodded. “But I
want to make sure I can count on my source and get something a
little more concrete before I make an accusation like that. Right
now it’s just hearsay, plus there’s someone else involved, and I
don’t know who.”

“Let’s give her what she wants,” I
muttered.

“HELL No!” Ben stood and thrust his hand at
me as he made the exclamation. “You just forget that shit right
now! Hear me?”

“Look, Ben.” I focused on him with as much
intensity as I could muster. “This sonofabitch is playing this out
like some kind of contrived, low-budget movie. He’s going to
torture and probably kill an innocent woman just to get me out in
the open. I can’t let him do that.”

“We don’t plan to,” he shot back.

“You can’t stop him.” I shook my head. “He is
going to keep killing until he gets to me.”

“You don’t know that we won’t get him, Row,”
Ben said.

“Oh yes I do,” I nodded and spoke with
absolute certainty.

“You wanna tell me how?”

I just stared at him. The silence in the room
grew thick and charged with a frightening energy that made my skin
prickle.

“Dammit, Rowan, stop this crap. Just get in
there and talk to your wife.”

“I can’t yet,” I said with a disconcerting
calm.

“Why the hell not?”

“Because that’s him now.”

Ben shook his head and gazed back at me with
confusion creasing his forehead. “Him now what?”

The startling ring of the telephone answered
the question for me.

Ben followed me all the way into the
kitchenette, spouting instructions as he made himself my shadow.
“If it is him, then don’t explode on ‘im, Row. You’ve gotta keep
the bastard talkin’ until we pin him down.”

“I know, Ben,” I returned.

“I’m serious, white man,” he said as he
continued to reinforce the mandate. “After this afternoon, I can
easily see you losin’ it here. You gotta keep your temper under
control.”

I rounded the corner of the doorway and
turned, placing my hand on the telephone as I stared wordlessly
back at my friend. On the fourth ring, I lifted the receiver and
placed it against my ear, then spat, “What the hell do you want
this time, Eldon?”

Ben moved his head through a frustrated
gyration as he grimaced, closing his eyes and then opening them
again as he came back to face me. He settled his stare on me with a
thin-lipped frown cutting a deep gash beneath his angular nose.

I continued to watch him as he held the
obvious question in his eyes.

“So you ARE going to answer the phone, Gant.”
Porter’s voice poured out of the speaker, blended throughout with
self-righteous arrogance. “I was beginning to wonder if you had run
back to Hell where you belong.”

I gave my friend a quick nod in the
affirmative to his visual query.

“Without you?” I asked into the handset, my
tone a fountain of dark sarcasm. “Never crossed my mind. I want to
make sure you don’t miss it.”

He actually chuckled, something I hadn’t
expected. The very sound of his voice was already sickening to me,
but the theatrical measure of forced laughter made me want to turn
and vomit in the sink.

“Well, Gant,” he replied. “When I am finally
called by the Lord, unlike you, I will have the pleasure of living
in his divine presence.”

“Yeah, well, we will have to see about that,”
I snarled. “So while I’ve got you on the phone, why don’t you
answer something for me.”

“She’s still alive,” he returned. “For
now.”

“Slow down, Eldon. That wasn’t even the
question.”

“Really?” He seemed almost surprised. “Okay.
I’ll play along. What did you want?”

I watched Ben carefully as I spoke. “You see,
what I want to know is this: If I’m such a big, bad minion of Satan
like you say I am, then what exactly makes you think that I am
going to give a damn about some insignificant woman’s life?”

My friend’s eyes widened, and he glared at me
as he made a grab for the phone. I had anticipated the reaction and
easily ducked his hand as I stepped backwards.

“You see, I should expect you to say
something like that. It’s exactly what Satan would say. But, it’s
not her life that I think you are worried about,” he replied with
undaunted surety in his words.

“Sounded that way to me,” I prodded. “Maybe
you should explain it to me so I understand.”

The fact that I still had Porter on the line
appeased Ben for the moment, and he started to calm even though he
still kept a suspicious eye cast in my direction.

Porter chuckled again. “Be serious, Gant. We
both know that it’s her soul you want.”

“You think that’s what it is?” I asked.

“Of course. Tempting the weak is what you
do—corrupting their souls and recruiting them into Satan’s army.
This is what keeps you in his good graces. If you can’t succeed
then you will fall from favor with Satan.”

“What? You actually think that I am
recruiting a satanic army?” I returned. “You’re crazier than I
thought you were, Eldon.”

“So you are admitting your allegiance to
Satan, then.”

“No. I don’t even believe Satan exists,
Eldon. Not that you are going to believe me, no matter what I
say.”

The speaker on the telephone issued a forlorn
plink then shifted into the hollow thrum of a disconnected line. I
stepped forward and dropped it carefully into the wall cradle.

“He says that Millicent Sullivan is still
alive,” I said as I leveled my gaze on my stoic friend.

“He hang up?” Ben asked.

“Yeah,” I returned.

“Row, I asked you not to go ape-shit on the
SOB,” he began to admonish.

“He didn’t hang up because of anything I
said, Ben,” I told him. “And he’s going to call back any
minute.”

“That’s not exactly what I mean,” he said.
“Hold on a sec.” He frowned hard then turned away from me and
called back into the living room. “You get anything, Mandalay?”

“He was using the Sullivan woman’s phone,”
her voice echoed back to us. “They’re tracking the… What?… Hold on
for a second Storm… Okay, go ahead…”

She shifted attention back to the
conversation on her cell phone once again.

Ben twisted his head back to me, “Listen,
Row, you’ve got to calm down. If you antagonize the sonofabitch, he
just might kill the woman.”

I shook my head. “No. Not yet.”

“How can you be sure of that?” He cocked his
head to the side as he looked back at me. “This ‘effin wingnut is
just about as off kilter as you can get. You don’t know what he’s
gonna do.”

“I won’t dispute the first part,” I told him.
“But the fact that she’s still alive tells me that she is his
bargaining chip. He’s got my attention, so now he’s going to use
her to get me out in the open.”

“How do you know she really is still alive?”
he pressed.

“Because he would have gloated about it if
she wasn’t.”

“I dunno about this, white man. You’d better
hope you’re right.”

“We’ve got him crossing between two cells,”
Mandalay’s voice came from almost immediately behind Ben.

My friend stepped to the side and turned to
look at her. “Where?”

“Near Interstate Two-Seventy and Highway
Forty,” she answered.

“Troop C headquarters is just west of there
off of Forty.” Ben referred to the highway patrol.

She nodded briskly. “The field office has
already notified MHP and County. I was just getting ready to call
in to the Major Case Squad and let them know what’s going on.”

“Good deal.” Ben reached up to his neck but
caught himself. Judging by the look on his face, he apparently
managed to do so just before flexing his hand enough to bring on
any real pain. He dropped his hand back down and continued. “Maybe
we can put an end to this whole thing right here and now.”

“It’s not going to be that easy,” I told him
as I shook my head.

He held up his hand to stop me and then
huffed out a breath as he stared at my face. He was looking for
something in my expression but wasn’t finding it. “Look, Row,” he
said. “Do you think that maybe you just might be wrong this
time?”

“You have no idea how much I’d like to be,” I
retorted. “It’s not like…”

My sentence was truncated by the telephone
pealing for attention once again. I snatched up the handset and
brought it to my ear.

“What took you so long, Eldon?” I chided. “I
was beginning to think you’d lost my number.”

“I am her absolution, Gant,” he said in a
measured cadence, but this time his voice held more distraction
than arrogance. “And you will be witness when she is released from
her darkness and given unto the glory of God Almighty.”

“Let me talk to her,” I demanded.

He continued, ignoring my assertion. “You
will know when it is time. Vengeance is mine.”

Flat resonance issued from the speaker for
yet another time as the connection was unceremoniously ended.

I took in a deep breath and let it go in a
heavy rush as my shoulders dropped. I rested the handset back onto
the hook and looked up at Ben and Constance.

“Well?” Ben appealed.

“He wants me to see him kill her,” I
answered.

“Jeezus…” my friend muttered. “He give you a
place or somethin’?”

I shook my head. “No. He sounded a little
preoccupied. I think he knows he was on the line too long the first
time around.”

“He’s probably going to try getting off the
main roads then,” Mandalay offered as she began stabbing at the
buttons on her cell phone.

I could feel the icy breath of the Dark
Mother on the back of my neck, and I shivered inwardly. She was
waiting in the wings for someone, and I had a bad feeling that the
someone just might be me. There was simply no way that this was
going to play out well.

Ben stared at me and furrowed his brow. “I
know that look, Kemosabe. Whaddaya got chewin’ on ya’ now?”

“Nothing,” I replied in an absent tone.

“You’re lyin’, Row.”

“Am I under oath all of a sudden?”

“Awww, man, Row…” he started.

I moved past him with deliberate purpose. “I
need to go talk to Felicity.”

* * * * *

“Hey.” I offered the word softly as I pressed
my back against the door and felt it click shut.

It was quiet in the room. My wife was sitting
on the edge of the bed, hunched over, with her arms encircling a
pillow. Her back was to me, and I could hear her sniffling. Either
she was still crying, or she had only recently stopped.

The only light in the room came from a
reading lamp on the book table to one side of the bed. It cast a
soft luminescence across the dark blue comforter, then dissipated,
leaving Felicity in the muddy shadows just beyond its reach.

I waited for a long stretch and received no
response.

“Do I need a white flag?” I finally
asked.

I watched as she slowly moved, releasing her
grip on the pillow and setting it aside. Her dainty hands slipped
upward and pushed her mane of spiraling auburn back from her face.
She continued to the back of her head, where she gathered it with a
twist and pulled it into a fiery fall over her left shoulder then
began to fiddle with it absently. The pale skin of her now exposed
neck seemed to glow in the semi-darkness.

“Aye, it was him again, wasn’t it?” she
asked, her voice almost a hoarse whisper. “On the phone?”

“Yes,” I answered, keeping my own voice low
for fear of shattering the tenuous calm in the room. “It was
him.”

“Is Star dead?” she asked, the words catching
in her throat.

I noticed after a moment that I was shaking
my head even though she couldn’t see me; I verbalized the answer.
“No. She’s still alive.”

Silence filled the space between us and
thickened as each second passed. The energy in the room was a
chaotic mix of anger, sadness, fear, and resolve. It assaulted me
on every level, igniting my nerve endings with cold fire. The
physical atmosphere was warm—too warm—but I still fought off an
overwhelming need to shudder as I pushed away from the door and
stepped farther into the room.

“We need to talk about all of this, honey,” I
said.

She still hadn’t turned to face me, but I
could see her head bob in the shadows as she spoke. “Aye, we
do.”

I pressed on. “Star is still alive, for now,
but he does intend to kill her.”

“This shouldn’t be happening,” she
muttered

“I know,” I said. “Believe me, I wish it
wasn’t.”

“What did he say to you?”

“No, honey,” I objected. “There’s no need for
you to…”

“Dammit, Rowan,” she half demanded, half
pleaded. “Don’t leave me out. The bastard called me this
afternoon.”

“Ben told me,” I acknowledged. “I was going
to talk to you about that later.”

“He’s sick, Rowan.”

“I know that.”

Another lull slipped through the room. I
heard her take in a cleansing breath and watched the shadows as her
shoulders moved upward then slowly fell when she exhaled. She
pulled her hair upward and began working it into a loose pile on
her crown.

“So what did he say to you?”

“Honey…”

Insistence permeated her voice. “What did he
say, Rowan?”

I lowered my head in resignation. “He said
that he was her absolution.”

“What else?”

I sighed and moved another step toward the
bed. “He said that I would be a witness to her release.” I left out
the “vengeance is mine” comment.