Scream Catcher (35 page)

As the dawn looms east of the lake, a bleeding Mack stares out the passenger-side window onto a dozen or more kids drinking beers, tossing empties into the road, battery operated boom-boxes blaring bass pounding hip-hop.

“You think he’s here, Captain?” asks Lt. Lino, heart still beating from having revealed everything about his inspection of the Parish 23 Assembly Point home earlier that night.

Mack groggily looks through the crowd until he spots a tall, slim young man with a blaze orange skull cap pulled far down over his head. The kid is dressed in silver Nike sweats, running shoes with bright yellow shock absorbers for heels.

Mack is thinking,
Yup, kid is exactly where I thought he’d be
.

But then he is also wondering if he made the right decision in sneaking out of the hospital. His right shoulder is leaking blood while his arm feels like it’s been sawed off at the rotator cuff.

Mack asks Lino to get out, snag the kid, drag him into the Suburban. Without a word the Lieutenant exits the vehicle, snatches T-Bred from off the sidewalk, pulls him into the back seat.

“I gave you what you wanted three days ago,” he snaps, voice a strange mixture of whisper and scream. “I think Wild Bill is getting suspicious. You know what he’d do to me he knows I work for you?”

“Fuck Wild Bill,” Mack shouts, painfully shifting in the seat to get a better view of Thoroughbred. “This isn’t about him now.”

“Then what is it you want from me, Captain?”

“Lennox is loose. I believe he’s playing a kill game with my family. He’s probably catching their screams right now. This very fucking minute. I need to know where I can find them before he does something terrible.”

T-Bred rolls his eyes, stares out the window. It’s all he can do to keep it together in front of those cops. He can hardly think. Brain is buzzing with adrenalin, stomach queasy from the sight of all that blood. Fuentes’s head in his hands and the blood and his own vomit all over the forest floor.

Maybe he’s taking way too long to answer, because Lino flings himself into the back seat, grabs the kid by the neck, draws his service weapon, presses the barrel to the temple.

Thoroughbred raises up his hands in surrender.

“What do you wanna know, Captain?” he swallows.

Mack inhales as if to calm himself while Lino slowly slides himself and his automatic back into the driver’s seat.

He says, “So far Lennox has played kill games inside an abandoned factory, a river and a gravel pit. He’s invaded my son’s house, abducted his family. I have reason to believe he took Ray Fuentes along with them.”

“If you were playing a video game that started in a house,” Mack grunts, “where would you go to next?”

“Whaddaya mean where would I go to next?”

“There’s been a factory, a river, a gravel pit, a house. You’re a video game addict. There must be a second and third level of play. Something to raise the ante. Something more challenging than the first level; something more exciting; more inventive; more risky.”

Lino, pistol in hand, dark eyes wide inside the rearview.

T-Bred leans back in the seat, runs his hands over his face, but regrets doing it immediately. The hands still smell of blood. Fuentes’s blood. Still, he has no other option than to try and think. He contemplates a dozen possibilities, searches for something the two cops might buy so he can get the hell out of that Suburban, before he shivers his way out of his own skin.

He tries to put his mind to work.

But his brain is still speeding like a hurricane inside his skull. Whenever he tries to think, all he can come up with is the feel of the blade against Fuentes’s neck, the feel of it entering through the skin, through the rigid bone and cartilage of the windpipe. There’s the blood that spurts out from the severed carotid and the high-pitched almost child-like scream of the cop as the knife sawed, entered deeper … He thinks about how he was forced to record that scream. Now he can’t get it out of his head.

“Black Dragon could have taken them anywhere,” he whispers after a time.

But that’s when the lights go on in Lino’s head. Call it intuition or a sudden opening in the clouds. But he reaches into his right-hand pocket, digs for the little piece of paper he picked up in the gravel driveway outside the Parish home. He stares down at the paper, discovers it for what it really is: a driving access ticket issued at a New York State Park. Tongue Mountain State Park to be precise, one mile west of the village.

“Wilderness,” Lino chimes in.

Mack turns to his second in charge. “What did you say?”

Lino says, “What if he took them up on Tongue? From what I’m told, no one goes up there this time of year when the rattlesnakes are migrating. For Lennox, the challenge would be a new one, a chance to test himself and the kill game in the wild.”

Mack feels sick to his stomach. It has nothing to do with the bullet wound.

Turning back to Thoroughbred.

“What do you think, T-Bred?”

Kid bobs his head, like,
Yeah, that’s a definite possibility
.

“But where do we start?” Lino asks.

“There’s got to be five-thousand acres of state forest out there,” Mack comments. “Not to mention the drive up its base road, then the climb to the summit.”

“We need a topo map,” Lino points out.

The Suburban goes silent while the kids outside the van drink, rap, try to get a look inside the tinted windows.

“Can I go now?” begs Thoroughbred. He’s convinced he’s about to throw up.

“Let him go, Danny.”

The Lieutenant turns, faces the snitch, cocks his head towards the door.

The kid opens it.

“Wait,” Mack says. “Give him twenty.”

Lino shoots the old Captain an upturned brow look like,
You serious?

But then he knows the deal, knows how it works between a snitch and a local P.D. You’ve got to pay for your information, even if the information is coming from an untrustworthy sell-out punk like Thoroughbred.

Lino pulls a twenty from his pocket, hands it over.

T-Bred takes it, stares at it for a minute, then gives it back.

“This one on the house,” he says.

“Okay,” Mack painfully nods, a little surprised at the move. “I’ll be in touch.”

“Get out,” Lino grouses.

T-Bred bolts the Suburban, slams the door shut.

“Now what?” the lieutenant exhales, re-pocketing his money.

“Take me back to the village,” Mack insists. “Let’s pull out a map, gear up Glens Falls S.W.A.T.”

Warren County Courthouse

Friday, 5:56 A.M.

Drowning in panic, Jude proceeds to do exactly what Lennox instructed him
not
to do.

He struggles.

Struggles to free his hands of the duct tape that binds them to his hips, twisting his bruised body, contorting it inside the van’s cargo bay. He has no other option but to use all the force he can muster to free his hands and legs while, at the same time, attempting to avoid thrashing about, doing anything that will trigger the explosive.

He’s fighting a losing battle and he’s quite sure Lennox has planned it that way. He has no way of disarming the bomb. His wrists and hands are too tightly secured at the hips to ensure no interference with the IED wiring system.

Rosie remains laid out fetal beside her husband. She too struggles to free herself of the duct tape. As for Jack, his feet continue to hang off the front passenger side seat, bobbing up and down in his own fit of panic.

“I’m going to free us!” Jude shouts. But he knows that shouting will not do his wife or child any good. Shouting will only make them more frightened. But then that’s when it dawns on him that he has the ability to shout. Maybe it wasn’t Lennox’s intention, but before he slammed the van door closed, he did not replace the duct-tape gag across Jude’s mouth. Maybe it was a mistake or perhaps it was an entirely scripted component of the kill game. But for Jude, the freedom of an uncovered mouth represents an opportunity. Now if he can only figure out a way to make use of his teeth, he might be able to cut the tape that binds him. The question is not only how, but where to start gnawing.

Moving his arms is an impossibility, much less his legs.

But then there is one possibility. While his knees have been taped tightly together, he can still raise and lower them. If he can raise them high enough, he can press them up against his mouth. If he can manage the maneuver without upsetting the wires that extend from his neck and chest directly to the timing device, he might have a chance.

Inhaling a deep breath, Jude empties his diaphragm. He takes a good look at the computer screen and the white-digital seconds and minutes that rapidly count down against a backdrop of fire engine red. The minutes are fading faster than a normal sixty-second minute should.

Lennox wasn’t lying.

The faster Jude’s heart beats, the faster the time fades. According to the computer readout, he has only fifteen minutes left to get himself and his family to safety. Fifteen partial minutes to accomplish the impossible.

With lungs emptied and diaphragm flattened, Jude raises knees up to his face. Close enough to press the tape that surrounds them against lips and mouth. He grinds his teeth into the tape, tearing and biting away at it like a rabid animal. The tape does not give way easily. It’s thick and sticky against his lips, teeth and tongue. It has a strong, fibrous toughness to it. The taste is toxic, sickening.

He has no choice but to chomp away at it until he finds himself halfway through the first few layers. Then more than halfway. Until it is finally possible for him to pull his knees apart, splitting what remains of the hold.

In that manner, Jude manages to free his knees.

* * *

Eyes locked on the computer screen, he can see that hardly ten minutes remains.

Ten minutes and counting.

Time dwindles at many times its normal speed. At this rate, they will all be vaporized by the explosion.

No time for thinking.

There is only the tape that still binds Jude’s wrists to hips.

He looks for an object with a sharp edge. A frantic survey of the cargo bay reveals nothing. Other than the bags of fertilizer and the computers, the space is empty.

He lowers his head and shoulders, spins himself around on his back making sure to avoid kicking the IED wires. Until he faces the two side by side windows embedded into the double van doors. Raising up his right leg, he kicks the right-hand glass panel using his boot heel as a ram.

The safety glass doesn’t budge.

Cocking his leg back, he slams it again. This time the heel makes a spider-veined dent in the glass pane.

Jude swallows a breath, lets loose with the boot heel one final time.

The glass panel blows out. Bringing himself around to his knees, he makes another time check.

Minutes flying by like seconds.

He throws himself at the broken glass panel and raises up his taped hip as high as it will go. He sets hand and taped wrist over the sharp vertical edge of the broken glass. He begins to make a sawing motion, running tape over jagged-edged glass.

It takes only a couple of seconds for the hand to come loose and free of its bind against the hip. Turning fast, Jude frees the right hand.

With total disregard for the sensors attached to neck and chest, Jude reaches for the back door handle, thrusts it open. He throws himself over Rosie’s body, grabs at the tape that binds her ankles to her wrists. He tears it to shreds with his hands and teeth.

“Go!” he orders.

Leaping across the back cargo bay, over the jug of Nitro, through the narrow space between the stacks of fertilizer, Jude grabs at Jack’s waist, at the tape that binds the child to the front bucket seat. Looking up into the boy’s face, he sees the terrorized wide brown eyes, the boiling red cheeks. Jude yanks at the tape, pulls up enough slack to place it in his mouth, tearing it with front teeth. That’s when he grabs Jack by the hand and, reaching over the boy’s lap, throws the van door open …

… at the precise moment the computer detonator counts down to zero.

Office of the Warren County Prosecutor

Friday, 6:18 A.M.

Pulling open the fourth and final drawer from the tall wood filing cabinet, Black Dragon knows he’s come to the end of his own personal paper trail. He pulls the drawer all the way out so that it falls onto the floor. Dozens of overstuffed files spill out onto the mound that already exists.

And something else too.

Maybe a dozen glass jars and vials, each of which houses a bit here or a piece there of forensic evidence pertaining to the kill game Preliminary Hearing. Spent .22 caliber casings that come from his automatic; bits of his formerly long dreadlocked hair vacuumed up from the carpet of his car after it was dragged out of the lake; an entire footprint from the gravel pit that just might match the size and shape of one of his boots; and so on and so forth.