“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.
Being unable to aim, I centered on what was left of my strength and pressed the gun upward at an angle across my chest until it met resistance.
The panicked voices of various stringed instruments blended to a thick, disharmonious crescendo in my ears…
For a brief instant I considered the fact that my left arm was now completely numb, and I silently begged for the resistance I found to be his arm and not my own. Then, tensing my body, I pulled the trigger.
The muzzle flashed.
The explosion reported deafeningly in my ear.
The spent shell ejected directly toward me and transferred its searing heat to my cheek.
Thick blood spattered like heavy rain across the side of my face.
The cold fingers snapped open.
Something thudded heavily against me and fell away.
A tortured scream faded into the distance below.
A single violin cried into the night, fading with sorrowful purpose toward silence…
Everything went completely black.
I was on the verge of hyperventilating when I opened my eyes. The torturous snippet of my life was well over one year old, but it had impressed itself upon me with the clarity of here and now. Each detail was as crisp and terrifying as it had been then.
As it continued to replay in my head, I fought to focus on the situation at the other end of the line.
“So I took your hand?” I retorted, finding a morbid solace in having caused him harm. “I guess that’s one for me, then.”
“You shouldn’t have done that, Gant,” he snarled.
“You were trying to strangle me, Eldon,” I said. “Just exactly what did you expect me to do?”
“Accept your sentence,” he returned.
“I don’t accept the judgment of a lunatic.”
“Whether you accept it or not, Gant, you can’t deny your guilt. You have admitted it freely.”
“So why take her hand,” I asked, trying to push past this point of contention. “Isn’t it mine that you want?”
“Oh, Gant,” he replied. “You know what I want from you.”
“So, why her then. Do you intend to torture me by proxy?”
“Like I said, your sentence has been pronounced,” he replied. “Don’t you remember?”
He was intent on reiterating my sentence, most likely for those I am sure he knew were listening. It didn’t matter what I said to him, he was going to bring it all back around to this.
“I wasn’t paying that much attention to you, Eldon,” I said with a note of impatience. “But I get the feeling you want to remind me.”
His speech became measured and almost theatrical. “By this our definitive sentence we drive you from the ecclesiastical court, and abandon you to the power of the secular court, that having you in its power now moderates its sentence of death against you.”
“Yeah, sounds vaguely familiar,” I retorted. “But let’s get back to reality here. What makes you think you’ll be able to execute that sentence?”
“I almost did that night,” he answered. “Now I’ll finish what I started.”
“Bullshit, Eldon,” I retorted. “You made a feeble attempt and ended up losing a hand in the deal. And now you’re hiding in an abandoned building that’s surrounded by police. Give it up, there’s no chance.”
“Yes there is.”
“How so?”
“Because I have this woman, and you can’t bear to lose her soul,” he stated without hesitation.
I steeled myself for what I was about to say and tried to sound convincing. “You can have her. I’ll get another.”
“No you won’t, Gant,” he said. “I know you better than you think I do.”
“If you know me so damn well, then why don’t you just tell me what you want and get it over with,” I demanded.
“A deal,” he replied. “Your life for her…”
The telephone made a grating, double click, then fell silent.
“Eldon?” I queried into the handset.
My ear received only a thick silence in reply, but it was different from the times before when he had hung up on me. There were no clicks in the background and no empty hollowness to echo back. This time the phone seemed to have literally gone dead.
“He hung up or something,” I stated aloud, looking at Ben and then Constance.
Ben took the phone from my hand then turned and slid it almost gently into the cradle. As he did so, he slowly relaxed his hold on me.
“He didn’t hang up,” Constance said carefully.
Ben had turned back to face me, and he seemed to be waiting for something. I glanced over at Constance; suddenly perplexed by the way both of them were acting. “What’s going on?”
“Now listen to me, Rowan,” she began, maintaining her calm tone with an obvious degree of purpose.
“Oh Gods! What did you do now?!” My voice inched up the scale as I felt my anger swell once again.
“Shut up and listen, Row,” Ben barked.
Something about the way his voice was edged made me take immediate notice and fall quiet.
“The line was interrupted by the hostage negotiation team,” Constance continued her explanation. “They are taking over the contact with Porter.”
