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.”
“What?” I shook my head in disbelief. “Why now? I had him talking.”
“You did great,” she replied. “No one is saying you didn’t, Rowan. However, where the rules of hostage negotiation are concerned, they had already blurred the lines a hell of a lot more than I’ve ever seen them do before. The only reason they let him talk to you for so long was so they could gather information and get SWAT into position.”
“Dammit!” I yelped. “If they try to go in there again, he’s going to kill her!”
“They know, Rowan, they know.” She held up her hands and motioned me to settle. “Believe me, that is the last thing they want.”
“Well, he told me what he wants,” I returned. “Me for her. Why don’t we…”
“Not happenin’, Row,” Ben announced in a stern voice, verbally inserting a period into my sentence well before I had planned to be finished with it. “Just forget that crap right now.”
“That’s one of the reasons the line was terminated when it was,” Constance told me, adding a shake of her head. “He started to negotiate a deal with you, and that is something the HNT is not going to let happen.”
“It’s one of the commandments in the hostage negotiation bible, white man,” Ben told me. “Thou shalt not trade one hostage for another. No ifs, ands, or buts.”
“So where does this leave us?” I demanded. “He’s just going to escalate if they cut him off from me.”
“You don’t know that, Row,” Ben replied.
“The hell I don’t!” I said. “I’ve talked to this sonofabitch more than any of you. I’d really appreciate it if everyone would just stop telling me what I do and don’t know!”
“Rowan.” Felicity’s voice hit me at the same time she slipped around Ben and came into my view. Her eyes were damp with the tears she was fighting hard to contain. “Let them handle it. Please?”
I leaned back and closed my eyes. My headache was back, and it was hammering away with a vengeance, all the while making sneak attacks on parts of my brain I didn’t know I had. Something-or someone-was still knocking around at my ethereal perimeter, relentlessly looking for a way in. My best friend was willing to handcuff me to something stationary in order to keep me out of a mess that, whether he liked it or not, I was already at the center of. I couldn’t remember everything I had shouted at Constance, but I was betting I owed her an apology. Finally, and worst of all, my wife had every reason to believe that left unchecked, I would make her a widow.
Actually, I take that back. The worst part was that she was probably correct.
I don’t know if I had left anything out, but the laundry list was already several items too long for me to be comfortable with, so I was in no hurry to add to it. I knew for a fact that I had definitely been on the receiving end of better days than this, and I was longing for one of them right now.
I heaved out a sigh and reached up to massage my temples. “Look, all of you, I’m sorry,” I said. “You’re not exactly getting to see me at my best.”
“S’alright, Kemosabe,” Ben replied. “We know you’re under a lotta pressure. That’s pretty much why I haven’t decked your ass yet.”
“How fortunate for me,” I quipped.
“I’m thinkin’ maybe, yeah, it is,” he said with a grin.
“So what do we do now?” I asked.
“We relax and wait for this to all be over,” Constance advised. “Then you try your best to forget this day ever happened.”
“You know I can’t do that,” I replied.
“We can try,” Felicity pleaded.
“Honey…” I reached for her, and she slipped past Ben to melt into me. Her own energy was a chaotic turmoil, and it blended easily with mine, leaving us both unbalanced and preternaturally askew.
“It’s all but over, Rowan,” Ben offered. “They’re gonna take this asshole down. No two ways about it. He’ll go out in cuffs or a body bag. His choice.”
“I understand that,” I told him. “But what about Star? What if SHE is the one who ends up in a body bag?”
“That’s why HNT has the ball now,” Constance answered. “It is their job to keep that from happening.”