John Gilstrap - Hostage Zero

“Brandy.” He turned his head and looked at her with an expression that defined exhaustion.

“Sir?”

“Shut up for a while, okay?”

“I didn’t do nothin’ to the kid,” the hippie insisted. Jonathan detected a slight Spanish accent. “I saved his life.” The guy kept putting his hands up as they walked toward the Batmobile, and Jonathan kept telling him to put them down. They were beyond the cover of the trees, back out in the open, and few images could draw attention quite like a scruffy man in full surrender.

Jonathan thought it was important to move Jeremy away from the bodies as soon as possible. Poor kid already had enough to deal with; he didn’t need to see spattered brain tissue. Boxers was still back there, though, rifling through the men’s pockets and gathering intel.

Jeremy might as well have been welded to Jonathan’s side. More behavior that seemed too young for the boy exhibiting it. Jonathan needed to get him to Father Dom’s head-shrinking couch as soon as possible.

“Tell him, Jeremy,” Harvey said. “Don’t let me hang out to dry like this. Tell him I saved your life.”

Jeremy wasn’t talking to anyone about anything. He kept his focus straight ahead.

Harvey went on, “Look, Mister, I swear to God-”

“I believe you,” Jonathan said, cutting him off. They were still thirty feet from the Hummer, but Jonathan stopped the parade.

Harvey’s face showed only distrust.

“Swear to God,” Jonathan said. “I saw how you were protecting the boy. I saw you pulling their aim away from the campsite, and I know you didn’t take him. So relax, okay?”

Fear gone. Cue the anger. “Relax!” Harvey erupted. “How the hell am I supposed to relax when there are two dead guys in the camp that everybody knows is mine? And, all respect, how the hell am I supposed to relax when I’m talkin’ to the guy who killed ’em?”

Jonathan shot a nervous glance down to Jeremy. He didn’t like this kind of talk in front of a child. Then he realized how far out of the bottle that particular genie was. “Any idea who they were?” Jonathan asked, softening his tone in the hope that Harvey would follow suit.

“I know they were killers!” Harvey said. “They were there to get his body”-he thrust a finger around Jonathan to Jeremy, who continued to reside in his own world-“only he wasn’t dead because I saved his life. They’d drugged him-I could tell from the pinpoint pupils-and they were supposed to have shot him, only they missed.” The details spilled out in a rush of words and arm flaps. He covered all of the details of his medical ministrations. “I swear on a stack of Bibles that I didn’t do nothin’ but good for that boy. I sure as hell didn’t touch him inappropriately or nothin’ like that.”

That struck Jonathan as an odd detail to emphasize. Why deny an accusation that had not been made? “Where did you get your medical training?” he asked. It was a legitimate question, but he intentionally timed it to pull the hippie away from his anger.

“Who says I have medical training?”

“You said you knew Jeremy was drugged because of the ‘pinpoint pupils.’ Not only is that specialized knowledge, but the phrase ‘pinpoint pupils’ is sort of…esoteric.”

Harvey didn’t flinch a bit from the five-dollar word. “I was in the military a while back,” he said. “I was a medic. A good one. Saw action in both the Bushes’ wars.”

“Which branch of the service?” Jonathan started leading them toward the Hummer again.

“Marines.” Harvey glared for a few seconds, then shook his head. “No need to talk about bad times,” he said. “And who the hell are you, anyway?”

Something about the delivery-the sheer incredulity-of the question made Jonathan laugh. “Well, now, that’s complicated,” he said.

“You with the government or somethin’?”

“No.” He didn’t bother to add, not today, anyway. “Let’s just say I’m a friend.”

“Whose friend?”

They arrived at the Batmobile. “Jeremy’s certainly,” Jonathan said. “And yours, if you’ll play along.”

“Play along with what?”

“Just answer the questions as they come. You’re not the only one who saved a life today, you know?” In case the hippie’s memory had failed, Jonathan tossed a glance back toward the woods and the bodies they concealed. He noticed that Boxers was just emerging and heading their way.

“You look like government,” Harvey said.

“Actually, I’m told I look like an aging Boy Scout.”

Finally, a smile from the guy. “Yeah, that, too. But I think those guys you shot were government, too. It was the way they held themselves. The way their hair was cut.”

And the car they drove, Jonathan thought.

“At least give me a name,” Harvey said. “Somethin’ to call you.”

He hesitated. His was a world of pseudonyms and fake credentials; he didn’t like being this far out on a limb under his own name in his own backyard-almost literally. Jeremy knew who he was, though, and soon Harvey would know where he came from, so it didn’t make a lot of sense to keep unnecessary secrets. “My name’s Jonathan,” he said as Boxers approached within hearing distance. “My friends call me Digger.”

Harvey considered that for a while. “Well, Jonathan,” he said, his eyes squinting to slits, “what the hell is going on here?”

Jonathan unlocked the Hummer and opened the front and back doors on the passenger side. “You stole my line, Harvey. I wanted to be first on the record with that very same question.” He looked beyond the hippie to Boxers. “Did you get it all?”

The big guy nodded. That meant he’d recovered the spent brass from the shootings, and he’d stripped the bodies of identification.

“Good,” Jonathan said. He leaned into the truck, across the massive front seat, and into the center console, from which he removed a black box about the size of a pack of cigarettes. Turning to face Harvey he said, “I need to see your hand.”

Harvey shoved them into his pockets. “What for?”

Jonathan opened the box and displayed a flat surface that might have been an iPod but wasn’t. “I want a fingerprint from you. Just want to make sure you’re not scarier than you seem to be.”

“Fuck you.”

Boxers loomed over the man. “Watch your mouth, friend,” he growled. “The kid doesn’t need that kind of language.”

When Boxers wanted to look intimidating, even the toughest of men cowered. Harvey Rodriguez was nowhere near the toughest of men. He withdrew his hand and held it out flat. It was trembling.

“Thank you,” Jonathan said. He took the hippie’s forefinger and pressed it against the tiny screen, and then repeated the process for his thumb. After verifying that the images were clear, he pressed S END. Within minutes, Venice would begin the process of matching the prints to people.

“That wasn’t so hard, was it?” he said. “Now I want you to climb into the backseat here, while Jeremy rides up front with Boxers.”

The big guy shot a furious glare at the sound of his real name. Jonathan ignored it.

“Why?” Harvey asked.

“Because I asked you to?”

“Where am I going?”

“Where Boxers takes you.” He paused for a smile. “Harvey, you’re safe, okay? You’re no longer in any danger.”

“What about my stuff?”

“It’ll keep,” Jonathan assured.

“Everything I own is out there.”

Jonathan cocked his head and let the words hang, hoping that Harvey would hear the nonsense of his own words. “You think those two guys are the last ones?” he asked. “When they don’t show up to wherever they’re supposed to be, don’t you think there’ll be more? I don’t think you want to be around when they arrive.”