Robert Walker - Absolute Instinct

Jessica meandered through the desert on the Field Museum marble floor, and she wondered what the effect had had on Giles, and where he might be at this moment. Certainly, he hadn't donned white shirt, coat and tie. He should, like herself, stick out in this crowd. But she could not find him.

Her phone rang, annoying people closest to her, milling about the complex recreation of the dig.

It must be him. Still playing games.

She let it ring until other patrons showed their annoyance. The man of the hour, Abraham Stroud-a bifocaled elderly Kirk Douglas look-alike, in need of a good tailor- looked ill at ease with unkempt hair and a scraggly beard at odds with his baggy tuxedo. He addressed the crowd in a warm and unpretentious manner, folksy in his approach, befitting the string tie, Navajo jewelry and western boots he wore with the tux.

“The find at Mojave is perhaps the most important single…”

Jessica answered the phone and heard Richard's voice, angry at her sudden disappearance. He did not disguise his anxiety. “Are you mad? You've gone after him alone, haven't you? Where are you?”

She pointed the camera and panned the museum. “Field Museum,” she said. “He's here someplace, Richard, and he insisted I come alone.”

“Damn you, Jess! You have no bloody right to endanger yourself in such a way, not now, now that you've made me love you.”

“He's close, Richard, and he thinks we have some sort of connection due to-”

“Foolish, Jess! He's a mad hatter, and you are following his lead! Harry Laughlin and I are on our way now. Stay put. Stay close to that crowd there.”

“I'll be careful, of course.”

“Don't hang up, you! Keep this line open, and keep the camera filming. I swear this will not be our last conversation. After what this monster did to Amanda Petersaul, Cates, all the others… how could you be so foolish as to go off after him alone, Jess?”

“Richard, had I come with an entourage… even being on the phone with you now compromises my deal with Gahran.”

“You cannot make a deal with the Devil and come out unscathed, Jess. You of all people know that!”

She thought of her many scars over the years inflicted by others such as Matisak, both physical and psychological.

The radio earphone crackled with a voice now, Giles Gahran. “We don't have a lot of time left, Jessica-darling of my father's wet dreams. I want you with me now. You'll be the prize Father could not have, but I will possess. Make the old man proud, wherever he is.”

“Giles, where are you? I'm here. Just direct me… guide me.”

“You almost sound willing.”

“Maybe I am. Maybe I should have gone out of this world with your father, Giles. I haven't exactly had the best life since then. Filled with depression, fear, anxiety, night sweats, nightmares, visited by your father's spirit.” She hoped the lies would keep him off balance.

“Come to the top floor, rear stairs, directly on your right or left, either way… but no elevators. And come alone. Remember, I can see you from here.”

She looked up far overhead, but she could not see Giles on the overhead promenade due to the lighting around the Mojave boneyard exhibit. The Lovely Bones banner lifted and lowered with the air spilling from nearby ducts, sending a shiver through the canvas sign. The smooth river of movement and ripple reminded Jessica of how at the lightest touch of the brush her horse's back rippled with feeling from hoof to ear. How could a horse have more feeling in its epidermis than a man had in his entire being, she wondered as she took the first white marble step toward her and Giles's fate.

As she made the half-landing, she could see down over the crowd. The speaker continued to gloat and praise fellow archaeologists working the dig back in the southwestern desert. He was working up toward the money pitch, she realized. Looking down from the second landing, she saw the enormous boneyard from straight over the top now. It looked like a jagged pile of arrowhead shaped glass. It's centerpiece appeared to be what the speaker referred to now as the diablo spinata, and with a long pointer, he touched it and added, “The Devil's Spine, we came to know it as… called it that when it began to take full shape from out of the eons-old layers of rock and sand around it. And I can tell you, ladies and gentlemen, out under a Navajo moon at night with that thing staring up at you for what seemed a half a mile at the time, I can tell you, it began to smell of sulfur, it had so convinced us of its namesake… that we knew we were indeed tugging on Satan's own tailbone.”

The laughter rose up to Jessica as she made the third landing. The boneyard looked smaller from here, all save the diablo spinata section.

“Aren't you curious how I came by the radio, Jess?” asked Giles in her ear.

“Yes, I am.”

“And how I knew you would be on this frequency?”

“Wise of you, Giles.”

“Tell me, Jess. What did you think of the showing?”

“The showing?”

“Don't fuck with me.”

“Oh, yeah… the showing in the back bargain basement area of the Cafe Avanti, yeah, not a large crowd but quite an enthusiastic one. Especially for the locked door exhibit, your last victim. Richard said your work was a bit off the usual trodden path. But you know how low-key those British are. Myself, I thought it curiously derivative of Keith Orion.”

“Derivative… Orion! Bullshit! You're such a lying bitch. How many lies did you tell to my father to lure him away from Mother?”

“Oh… is that what this is all about?” she replied, knowing all that she said was going over the line to Richard and Laughlin on the open line. “You think Matthew left your mommy to fuck me?” Her voice had taken on a teasing tone.

“He wanted eternity with you,” Giles replied. “Maybe if you weren't around… who knows? Maybe he could have loved Mother. As it is, she became a diabla to his diablo. Maybe the two of them reign in hell now.”

“Sure… and if we all lived in a dream world, Giles, life wouldn't suck for so many of us, would it? You don't get any fucking sympathy from me, Giles.”

“Why don't you call me Matt Junior. By the way, what did you think of the sculptures, really? I want an honest answer.”

“They were curiously lacking any of the haunting quality or humanity I had anticipated and you were obviously going for.” She lied, describing her true reaction in the opposite.

“Lying slut cunt… that's what you are. You're just denying your true feelings, ashamed that the sculptures moved you, touched something in you. I know you liked the artwork.”

“I wish I could say that was so, Giles, but-”

“Liar! You found my art, the spines included, fascinating, didn't you, Jessica? You're an M.E., hell, you've got to love it. The panache of it alone, the daring, the abandon.”

“Are you trying to convince me or yourself, Giles?”

“Just get the fuck up here and tell me to my face. I want to see your eyes when you lie, just how cold they can be.”

Jessica did wonder who had given up the headphone and mouthpiece set to Giles. She prayed no one else had lost a life due to Giles Gahran's kill spree.

“Curious thing you did out at Navy Pier, Giles. Tell me, were you going to jump?”

“I just had an accident with the box is all.”

“Not the way I heard it. You stood up in the gondola, began rocking it. Like you were going to take a swan dive. You like heights, Giles?”

She made the last and final landing. Wearing jeans, she'd placed her camera phone face out and anchored in her hip pocket. She knew that Laughlin and Richard could see what she now saw. Across from her on this lonely final floor of the museum, Giles Gahran held hostage a young black girl barely out of her teens wearing the uniform of a security guard.