“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.”
CHAPTER 29:
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.
