Jonas Saul - The Hostage

They shoved her toward the door. The man on her left moved away to walk around the back of the car to get in on the other side.

It was her last chance.

She made to enter the backseat and then dropped to one knee in front of the open door. She pivoted fast and swung her other leg into the back of the knee of the guy still with her. His knee shot forward, bumped the car door, and he dropped.

As he fell, Sarah lay down on her back and rolled under the car. She stopped rolling and slid her butt along until she was dead center of the chassis, the exhaust pipe two inches from her nose.

How does this shit always seem to happen?

Who were they? Did they work for Elmore? That couldn’t be possible. What Elmore did had to be kept to himself or he couldn’t have gotten away with it that long.

She looked left and right, rolling her head back and forth on the cement, searching for her aggressors’ feet.

The car jerked. Then the driver hit the gas. She turned her head sideways just in time. The edge of the muffler came within millimeters of tearing the top of her nose off.

Both fake cops stepped up and stood over her, guns drawn. No one in the street would question their authority. They were in uniform. They had weapons. Their person of interest had tried to flee. She had assaulted one of them. It would look justified to arrest her with this kind of force. She was all out of ideas.

She raised both hands and said, “Okay, take it easy. I’ll go quietly. Thought that might work. Who knew?”

“Shoot her in the face,” the uniform on the left whispered.

“Too many witnesses,” the other one said, frowning. “Just get her up and in the car.”

Vehicles continued to meander by on the street beside her, oblivious that she was being kidnapped in broad daylight on the downtown streets of Toronto with a heavy police presence less than a block away.

The last option she had was a bullet. She’d been shot before. She’d survive. Getting into that car was certain death. She felt it on every level of her soul. Being shot left options.

She got up and ready to rush them.

A small crowd of pedestrians walking by had stopped to watch the live action.

A man stared at her. He was at least six feet tall and it was quite evident that he worked out religiously. She pointed at him and shouted, “Help! These men are not cops. They’re trying to kidnap me!”

The man shook his head and started to walk away, just as Sarah had wanted. She would’ve been surprised if he stepped in to try to help.

The fake uniforms turned to see if he would do anything. Instead of rushing them, she ran five feet to the right and stepped into traffic. A small Nissan swerved to miss her, turning toward oncoming traffic. The car going the other way, veered to avoid a collision, but swerved toward Sarah.

She couldn’t get out of the way in time.

All she could do was jump. Her jump wasn’t high enough to clear the hood.

The vehicle had already slowed down. When her foot hit the top lip of the hood, her body rotated sideways as the windshield rushed up to make contact with her back. Four feet later the car stopped and Sarah flew off the hood and onto the sidewalk, rolling until she stopped face down.

She breathed in and out in small gasps. Aches and pains came from everywhere, but she didn’t move. She did a mental inventory of her body and was pretty sure nothing got broken.

People gathered around her. Someone said not to move her for fear of further damage. Someone shouted for an ambulance.

There was too much attention. No way the uniforms would try to take her now. It would be routine to have an ambulance attend.

She opened her eyes in time to see the uniforms getting into the car they had tried to force her into.

I did it, but I have to find a new way to live. Jumping in front of cars, just to avoid getting killed is fucked up.

She rolled onto her back and tried to get up, to the protests of everyone around her.

“I’m okay, really, I’m okay-”

The people around her were knocked sideways by a shockwave. Someone fell over her legs as she tried to right herself to see what had exploded.

Four car lengths away sat the car the cops had tried to get her into, fully engulfed in flames. No way the driver or the two uniforms had gotten out.

Her stomach clenched at the thought that not only was she almost in that car, she was under it moments ago.

Her stomach wanted to release its meager contents. She rolled to the side and got to her feet, a hand on her abdomen. Most of the people who had surrounded her had moved toward the burning car. A tattoo shop had lost all its front windows in the explosion.

Holy shit. I’d be dead right now. That was too close.

Who were these people? Who would kill in the open like this? Definitely not people like Elmore. They did it in private and they preyed on the weak.

A thought raced through her mind, like a power surge hit her. She jolted and stared, wide-eyed.

Ferenci and people of Armond Stuart’s ilk. The immigration fraudsters. The people after Drake. They’re here and after her too because she stopped them at the baseball game. Cops on the payroll. She would be a target because she took out their leader in Montone, Italy.

She cautiously stepped backwards until she was touching the wall of the nearest building. She felt exposed in the open and with no weapon.

Her left knee ached too much to walk without a slight limp. She’d torn her jeans at the knee. Her elbow was bleeding.

She edged along the building toward the alley’s entrance. As attentive to her surroundings as she could be, nothing or no one paid attention to her as far as she could tell. But she knew Ferenci was probably watching her. The bomb in the car was for when she got in. When the uniforms left without her, they ceased to be of any use to a man like Ferenci, so he disposed of them.

Where was Elmore? Where was Drake? Could Ferenci already have Drake?

She made it to the door of a restaurant called The Babur. A loud crack reverberated from across the street. People on the other sidewalk ducked as the window of the restaurant behind her shattered.

Gun.

That was enough to get her running, bad knee or not.

She ran hard for the corner, turned around it and bumped into Parkman.

“What the hell is going on out here?” he asked.

“The car… it exploded… someone shot at me… Ferenci,” Sarah managed to get out between breaths.

“What?” Spencer asked. “Slow down. What’s going on?”

Sarah leaned on Parkman’s arm, her leg pain flaring up. It struck her as odd at that moment that she would notice Parkman didn’t have a toothpick in his mouth.

“What happened to your toothpick?”

Parkman frowned. He looked at Spencer. “Elmore is dead. We found his body. He was shot in each leg and a couple times in the face.”

Sarah breathed easier. She pushed off Parkman’s arm, stood on her own and stepped away. “Good. Sounds like Ferenci did something right.” She turned to Spencer. “When I stood waiting for you two in the alley, two uniforms showed up. They escorted me at gunpoint to a car. If I hadn’t escaped, I would’ve died in that car. It just exploded on Queen Street. It was Ferenci. I’m assuming he has Drake. They just shot at me around that corner.” She pointed back to where she’d just come from, still trying to catch her breath.

Spencer got on his radio. “Lock down a two-block radius. Roadblock on each route leaving this area.”

He ran away from them, pulling his weapon, heading for the corner. A moment later he disappeared around the corner.

“You doing okay?” Parkman asked. “You’re bleeding.”

“Yeah, I’m good.”

A gun went off, sounding like a firecracker. A woman screamed. It came from Queen Street, where Spencer had just run.