“Aren't you curious how I came by the radio, Jess?” asked Giles in her ear.
“Yes, I am.”
“And how I knew you would be on this frequency?”
“Wise of you, Giles.”
“Tell me, Jess. What did you think of the showing?”
“The showing?”
“Don't fuck with me.”
“Oh, yeah… the showing in the back bargain basement area of the Cafe Avanti, yeah, not a large crowd but quite an enthusiastic one. Especially for the locked door exhibit, your last victim. Richard said your work was a bit off the usual trodden path. But you know how low-key those British are. Myself, I thought it curiously derivative of Keith Orion.”
“Derivative… Orion! Bullshit! You're such a lying bitch. How many lies did you tell to my father to lure him away from Mother?”
“Oh… is that what this is all about?” she replied, knowing all that she said was going over the line to Richard and Laughlin on the open line. “You think Matthew left your mommy to fuck me?” Her voice had taken on a teasing tone.
“He wanted eternity with you,” Giles replied. “Maybe if you weren't around… who knows? Maybe he could have loved Mother. As it is, she became a diabla to his diablo. Maybe the two of them reign in hell now.”
“Sure… and if we all lived in a dream world, Giles, life wouldn't suck for so many of us, would it? You don't get any fucking sympathy from me, Giles.”
“Why don't you call me Matt Junior. By the way, what did you think of the sculptures, really? I want an honest answer.”
“They were curiously lacking any of the haunting quality or humanity I had anticipated and you were obviously going for.” She lied, describing her true reaction in the opposite.
“Lying slut cunt… that's what you are. You're just denying your true feelings, ashamed that the sculptures moved you, touched something in you. I know you liked the artwork.”
“I wish I could say that was so, Giles, but-”
“Liar! You found my art, the spines included, fascinating, didn't you, Jessica? You're an M.E., hell, you've got to love it. The panache of it alone, the daring, the abandon.”
“Are you trying to convince me or yourself, Giles?”
“Just get the fuck up here and tell me to my face. I want to see your eyes when you lie, just how cold they can be.”
Jessica did wonder who had given up the headphone and mouthpiece set to Giles. She prayed no one else had lost a life due to Giles Gahran's kill spree.
“Curious thing you did out at Navy Pier, Giles. Tell me, were you going to jump?”
“I just had an accident with the box is all.”
“Not the way I heard it. You stood up in the gondola, began rocking it. Like you were going to take a swan dive. You like heights, Giles?”
She made the last and final landing. Wearing jeans, she'd placed her camera phone face out and anchored in her hip pocket. She knew that Laughlin and Richard could see what she now saw. Across from her on this lonely final floor of the museum, Giles Gahran held hostage a young black girl barely out of her teens wearing the uniform of a security guard.
He held a small caliber weapon to the terrified girl's brain. Jessica could see bruises on her forehead where he had burrowed the muzzle into her to make his point, and the girl had gone limp, fainted, so that Giles had to drag her about with him like some enormous other self.
“She's not dead,” he said immediately to clear this up. “Just went out like a light. I may've choked off her air a bit too long. But she's very much alive.”
“That's good, Giles. I know you want to do the right thing here.”
“Yeah… I do. Now take out your weapon and kick it back down those steps you came up.”
“For the girl, OK. You let her go, I kick away my weapon and become your hostage.”
“That might do except for one thing. You toss the weapon first. Then I let go of her.”
Jessica took in a long deep breath of air as she cautiously took her coat off and discarded it, displaying her shoulder holster. This she then unstrapped and tossed down the stair well to the half landing below. It made a resounding echo, causing some in the crowd below to look up at the unfolding drama overhead as if it were part of the planned activities of the evening. Stroud's voice wafted up and echoed off the marble columns here. “The Mojaves had a strange ritual and an even stranger deity…”
“Satisfied?” Jessica asked Giles. “Now let the girl go.”
Giles smiled and eased the unconscious girl to the marble floor. Jessica took a tentative step toward the girl as if she might help her, but Giles jammed the gun in her face.
“Forget about her. She's nobody. It's you and me now, and it's time. Our time, Jess. Something I do to make Father proud.”
“Time for what, Giles?” Jessica reached hands out to him. “You going to shoot me? If so do it now, because I'll be damned and dead before I go to any other location with you. I'm no fool to wind up facedown under your bone saw for a slow death.”
“Bet you have exquisite spinal fluid running through you, Jessica Coran. Juicy and thick. Thick yellow is… healthy. And marrow. I could really enjoy sucking on your-”
“It's not going to happen, Giles. It's here and now. One shot and every policeman and FBI in the building descends on you.”
“You came alone. I saw you.”
She lifted the phone and spoke into it to Richard. “Richard, where is your location?”
“Main lobby downstairs.”
“Lies,” countered Giles.
“Richard, show me your location on the camera.”
She held up the camera phone to Giles's eyes, and he saw the show of force, uniformed and plainclothes cops spreading out across the museum and covering every exit.
Jessica took this moment of surprise to drop and yank his ankles from beneath him. Giles came down hard, striking his head on the marble floor, his gun skittering away, rattling crablike as it raked across the marble floor.
“I got him!” shouted Jessica who'd snatched out her second weapon. “The same gun that ended your father's life, Giles. One fucking wrong move from you, and I put you out of your miserable fucking excuse for a life. Now get up!”
Jessica heard the elevator rev up, knowing Richard and others would spill out any moment to relieve her, Richard to scold her further. She heard others racing up the stairs to the collective shock of the crowd below. She took a moment to gather in her breath when the girl on the floor moaned, and Jessica took her eyes off Gahran for a millisecond.
Giles had been pulling himself up with the help of the balustrade, and suddenly he stood balanced atop it, threatening to jump.
The others spilled from the elevator and Jessica shouted for all to stop. She pleaded with Giles to come into her custody. “I'll see you aren't harmed, Giles, and that you aren't treated-”
“Like some sort of freak?” He laughed and sent a colorful bubblegum card billowing her way. As the card fluttered birdlike toward her, Giles shouted, “I'll see you in hell, Doctor!” And he dove swanlike out over the railing. She rushed to the edge, irrationally shouting no even at this juncture, just in time to see him pirouette onto his back and land face up, his entire back splayed open in a series of stabbings from the diablo spinata. The splat and the spatter of blood on white shirts, eyeglasses and evening gowns combined with the horror of Gahran's sudden arrival amid the elite of Field Museum donors sent up a collective terror-layered gasp.
Even from her distance, Jessica could make out Giles's open eyes staring back up at her, and she heard a whisper in her ear, not Giles's voice, but that of Mad Matthew Matisak's, quietly, eerily saying,Join me here, Jess, on the spine of Satan. She could even hear his maniacal laugh, a sound she had thought long before banished from the last corridor of her mind, vanquished years before by her heart.
