Hands were on him, pulling and lifting, and a lightning bolt of pain shot through Ryan’s right arm, from wrist to elbow, launching a howl that to him sounded like it was coming from someone else.
“Look what you did,” the sheriff said. “You broke his arm.”
Oh, shit, Ryan thought. They broke my arm? Then his head cleared. Oh, shit. They broke my arm!
“Ow!” he yelled. Then he shrieked it as they continued to lift him, still tied to the chair. As he shifted in his seat, the bones shifted under the skin and it felt like they were tearing off his arm like a drumstick. “Stop! Stop! Oh, God, please stop!”
Things flashed behind his eyes again, but this time he didn’t think it was because he was being hit. He thought it was just the pain. He’d felt pain before, but this was something new. This was Technicolor pain, sharper and brighter than anything he’d felt before, like the difference between Dorothy in Kansas and Dorothy in Oz. And what a weird analogy, he thought.
But they kept manhandling him. Finally, he just screamed-as close to the sound of the scared-shitless lady in a horror movie as he could get without cutting his balls off.
“Stop!” a new voice boomed. “Take the handcuffs off. My God, I’m going to get sick if I watch his arm bend any more.”
My arm is bending? He screamed again.
They lowered him back to the floor, and they must have really bent it because there was another flash of light, and an instant later, he was back in the chair with both hands free, except his right one was propped on a pillow that had been placed on his lap. The arm didn’t look right at all. His hand and his wrist were already swelling, and his forearm looked funny under the fabric of his clothes. The lines weren’t straight anymore.
Someone was holding him in the chair by his shoulders.
“Are you awake now?” the sheriff asked. The big man had taken a knee in front of Ryan, and was looking him in the eyes. “I think he’s okay now,” he said over his shoulders to the others who had gathered around.
Ryan had expected at least a small look of sympathy from the gathered terrorists, but he got nothing of the sort. If anything, they looked even more pissed than before. They all stared, but none of them seemed to know what they wanted.
The sensible part of Ryan-the one that desperately wanted the pain to stop, and to just be left alone-knew that this was the time to be quiet, but the other part of him-the one that was pissed off and humiliated-overruled.
“I wasn’t lying,” he said. It wasn’t until he tried to talk that he realized that blood had actually dried in the back of his mouth, leaving a kind of crust back there. “Your guy-Brother Stephen, I think was his name-attacked my mother.”
“It’s true,” the girl with the K-name said.
The point man-Ryan assumed him to be the leader since he was the guy who owned this big house-shot an angry look at her. “You were there?” he asked.
“I was there when they found his body,” she said. She looked at the floor. “He was… exposed.”
“That’s not proof,” Point Man scoffed. “They could have done that to him to make it look like he was trying to attack.”
What, like I’m going to pull out some guy’s dick? Ryan thought.
“I think that’s a stretch, Brother Michael,” the sheriff said.
So the leader’s name was Brother Michael.
The comment drew another angry glare.
“Don’t look at me that way,” the sheriff said. “How likely do you think it is that they would really do that? Why would they?”
“So that they could escape,” Brother Michael said.
“And why would Brother Stephen have been in their room to allow that to happen?”
Owned you, dude, Ryan didn’t say. He winced against a twitch of pain in his arm.
Brother Michael’s face went blank, but then he came back. “Even if that were true, that doesn’t grant permission for prisoners to execute their guards.”
“I didn’t execute anyone,” Ryan said. The words were out before he could stop them. Once launched, what was the sense of pulling back? “I couldn’t even see what I was doing. I just launched on him and tackled him. I guess I grabbed him around the neck and twisted it. We hit the ground, and when I got up, he didn’t. It was kind of an accident.”
Brother Michael seemed to swell for a moment. Clearly, Ryan had said the wrong thing, but for the life of him, he didn’t know what it could have been.
“Where’s my mother?” Ryan asked.
“You will pay,” Brother Michael said in a tone so soft that Ryan could barely hear him. He leaned close, so that only inches separated their noses.
Ryan broke first, shifting his eyes to stare at a point on the floor.
“Look at me,” Brother Michael said. He placed his hand on the boy’s bad arm, right on the break, and he squeezed.
Ryan howled as a spike of pain rocketed not just through his arm, but somehow through his whole body.
“Brother Michael!” Sheriff Neen boomed.
He squeezed tighter. “With God as my witness, you will pay dearly.”
The sheriff stepped in front of Brother Michael, breaking his grip on Ryan’s arm, but not before the bones moved and the agony topped a new height.
“Stop this!” Neen boomed.
But Brother Michael’s eyes never left Ryan. It was as if he’d gone to a crazy place in his mind. He lunged for the boy again, but Neen restrained him.
“Get him out of here,” the sheriff commanded to the room.
“Where do we take him?”
“Somewhere other than here,” Neen barked. “This is out of control. Take him to the basement. No windows this time, and I want guards posted at the doors around the clock.”
A crowd moved closer.
“Don’t touch me,” Ryan said. “Please, God, don’t touch me. I’ll come along.” Oh so gently, he slipped his left forearm under his right to splint the break, and then he stood. Movement was excruciating, and he thought he might pass out. His legs got wobbly, and some of the color drained from his vision.
When a hand grabbed him under his good arm, the touch was surprisingly gentle. It was K-girl again. “We’ll just take it slow,” she said.
CHAPTER TWENTY – ONE
They left Stacy Phelps quivering in her slippers over a threat to throw her in jail for obstruction of justice if she breathed a word of what they’d discussed. They also dropped a hint that they were actively listening and watching everything she did. Given their inside knowledge of Ryan Nasbe’s phone call, she was primed to believe every word.
Back at the command post, Boxers fired up the audio-video satellite link and brought Venice into the loop on what they had learned. She, then, started tickling electrons in cyberspace to get them something to go on.
“No Army of God has any charity status within the IRS,” she reported. “But they do have status as a private school.”
“What does that mean?” Jonathan asked.
“Which of those words didn’t make sense to you?”
“No one likes a smart-ass, Ms. Alexander.”
“Says the pot to the kettle,” Venice teased. “Among other things, it means that there are children there. But when I dig a little deeper, I can’t find anyone ever graduating from it. And before you ask, that means that it’s an odd kind of school. Who’d want to enroll their kids in a school that has no record of advancement? And I mean no record. We don’t even know who the attendees are. Of course, we don’t know who the parents are, either.”
Gail raised her hand, as if this were a classroom. “Not necessarily as unusual as you might think,” she said.
