THE MAN IN black can’t be that far ahead of me.
He ran off in a northerly direction.
Head fills with a thousand screaming voices, veins on fire, blood boiling, searing. The rage consumes me. I make chase to the sound of Penny screaming at me. Screaming for me. This is not me being smart. This is not even me losing my cool. It is me acting on raw emotion. It is acting on the survival instinct I learned inside prison. It is something you cannot understand, nor comprehend. That is, unless you’ve spent any time inside a maximum-security prison yourself, and done so as a perpetually hunted man. You don’t become the victim of another attacker. You face the attacker head-on. You attack the attacker. You use your brain, but you also use brute force. It is survival of the fittest in its purest form. Prison Darwinism.
Penny screams. “Stop! Wait! Sidney, we need to call the police!”
But I can’t help myself, can’t ignore the anger. It’s the instinct of an animal. A rabid animal. It’s all consuming. I don’t feel myself moving, don’t feel myself breathing. It’s as though I am dreaming this moment rather than living it for real. It’s all about finding this man who cold cocked me over the head. Finding out what he knows about Chloe, where they’re keeping her. Finding out the identity of the bastards who stole her.
I come to the edge of the beach and the hotel property. A storm fence lines the perimeter of the property. Nowhere to go other than to the right and into the lake, or go left in the direction of Main Street.
That’s when I spot him.
The same man who followed us back from the police station. He’s climbing the storm fence, trying to make his way to the safety of the other side. I run to him, thrust myself at him like a line-backer trying to make an impossible tackle. I grab hold of his legs, yank him down from the fence.
Throwing him onto his back, I jam my knees into his shoulder joints, cock my right arm back, land three swift back-to-back tight-fisted punches to the face. His bottom lip pops like a water balloon filled with blood. His nose snaps. His left eye swells up like a plum. When you’re trained to heal someone, it’s easy to damage them. You know precisely where it hurts, precisely where the most damage and the most bleeding will occur while expending the least amount of effort.
I see his left hand reaching. He comes out with a snub-nosed revolver. I slap it away, wrap my right hand around his throat.
“Where’s my daughter?”
“Go to hell, killer.” He spits blood in my face.
I punch him again. A short, sharp, powerful jab. Then, pulling his right hand up, I grab hold of the index finger.
“Who sent you?”
“Fuck … you … killer.”
I pull the finger sideways, as far as nature will allow the proximal phalanx and the middle phalanxes to go without dislocating. I feel the flexor digitorum profundus tendon pop at the center knuckle, just a split second before the bone snaps like a dry twig. At the same time, I cover his mouth with my free hand while he screams into it.
“Where are you hiding my daughter, you ugly bastard?”
Lifting my hand off his mouth.
“Go ahead,” he spits. “Kill me, killer. That’s what you do. You sick, violent killer. Go ahead. You succeed at that, you’ll never see Chloe again. You understand me? You kill me, you call the cops, you so much as breathe in the direction of the hotel house detective, your little teeny-weeny polka-dot bikini-wearing daughter will die a slow, agonizing death.”
Raising up my fist, I’m about to plow it into his face again. But his face already looks like raw hamburger. If facial symmetry is an important component to one’s perception of physical beauty, this guy is truly screwed for a while. His procerus, or what you and I recognize as a nose, is definitely leaning left, and I might have broken his left orbital plate. Not to mention his lips, which resemble rare sausage with punctured casings. And that finger on his hand will require surgery to repair. Perhaps several pins. I guess I’ve made my point.
“What the hell do you want?” I ask, swallowing a lump of concrete.
“You’ll find out when we’re ready, killer. And not before.” There’s pain in his voice. Fear. But he’s not backing down. He’s a professional. I know the type.
I slide off of him. Stand.
“You tell Rabuffo I had no choice.”
“Maybe you can tell him that yourself.” He stands, awkwardly. “Or maybe this ain’t about Rabuffo at all, killer.”
He turns, begins limping toward the parking lot and Main Street.
“Why’d you do it?” I shout. “Why’d you come to me?”
He turns. “So that I could deliver a message. An untraceable message. Cell phones aren’t safe.”
“And what message is that?”
“It goes something like this: If you want to see your daughter alive again, you will do as we say.”
“And the little girl? That was Chloe? My Chloe?”
He wipes the blood from his nostrils and lips with the back of his one good hand.
“What the hell do you think, Inmate number 03C2258, Sidney O’Keefe?”
Turning, he runs off, taking his damaged face and hand with him, but mistakenly leaving his gun behind.