John Gilstrap - At all costs

Jake saw the flash of steel the instant he broke his aim. Wiggins came from nowhere, lunging out of the foliage, propelling his knife in a huge downward arc. Jake got an arm up but couldn’t deflect it all. He grunted as the glancing blow left a wake of torn flesh down the side of his ribs, and he tumbled for cover in the leaves.

The speed of the attack caught Thorne off guard, but once he recovered, he struck like a snake, firing two quick punches, one to the stump of what used to be Wiggins’s hand, and the other to his face. The gunman went down hard but rolled fluidly to his feet. As he took a martial-arts stance, or a pitiful imitation of one, he seemed to notice for the first time that his right arm was four inches shorter than his left. He shifted his eyes to the stump, and in that instant, Thorne dropped him with a chilling elbow shot to the jaw.

Thorne was out of control. He muscled his trophy off the ground and punched him again. “Who are you, you son of a bitch?”

The man said nothing. For an instant, Jake wondered if the guy was already dead.

This time Thorne’s fury took the form of a savage kick to the gunman’s testicles. The mystery man made a gagging sound and tried to clutch at himself, but Thorne launched him back with yet another kick, this one to his face.

“Stop it!” Melissa shrieked, appearing with Nick at the edge of the clearing.

“What’s your name, asshole?” Thorne yelled, preparing for another kick.

“Wiggins!” Melissa answered for the gunman, even as she ran to be with her daughter. “He already told me his name is Wiggins!”

Thorne shook his head. “I want to hear it from him.”

“Not here!” Nick yelled, clearly torn between joining his wife and confrontingThorne. His skin gray with pain and fear, he chose the latter. “Not in front of my daughter, Thorne!”

Thorne looked thoroughly disgusted. “Do you know what this rat turd tried to do?”

It was Jake’s turn. “This isn’t the plan,” he said, shooting a glance toward the terrified little girl who sat hugging her knees at the base of a tree. The blood from her chin left a sweat trail down the front of her neck, which Melissa tried to wipe away with her one good hand. “Let’s stick with the plan.”

Thorne laughed loud and hard. “Plan! What plan? You don’t have a plan, Jake!”

Jake felt his face flush. “We agreed-”

“We didn’t agree to shit!” Thorne declared. “You came up with the pea-brain idea that Mr. Terminator here would spill his guts. All we had to do was say ‘pretty please.’ ” He laughed again and launched another kick to Wiggins’s ribs. “Just like Murder, She Wrote, right, ace?”

“But my daughter-” Nick said.

“What about her? Get her outta here, if you want. I’m not stopping you!”

Nick swallowed hard, then glanced nervously over toward his wife and daughter before whispering, “You can’t do this here. I don’t want that kind of involvement. That’s not what I signed on for.”

Thorne set his jaw angrily. A long moment passed as he struggled with his temper, and when he finally spoke, his voice trembled. “You’re in this up to your eyeballs, Nick. Remember that. Don’t you dare think even for a minute that you’re not a part of it all.” He leveled a forefinger and lowered his voice. Anger burned in his expression, genuine loathing. “You do yourself a favor and think real long and real hard before you go soft, you hear?” He let the words sink in for a moment. “Now, why don’t you and the missus go back to the house and clean up? Jake and I will take care of what needs to be done. Tomorrow morning, you can tell your kid all about how real nightmares can seem.” He paused again, for effect. “You’ve got a secret now, Nick, and I expect you to keep it. Now get outa here. Go find that hotel you were talking about and make sure it’s a million miles from here.”

“Suppose someone sees you?”

That one caught Thorne off guard. He scowled as he considered the question. “What’s inside that barn?” he asked, pointing.

“It’s just a storage shed,” Nick said as Thorne began dragging his prey in that direction.

Thorne called over his shoulder, “You’re with me, ace!”

Jake ignored him and took a step closer to his old friend. In the distance, he could hear children’s voices calling for their mom and dad. “Is that your boys?”

Nick nodded. “I guess they just got home.”

Jake nodded back. It was an awkward moment. “Look, Nick…”

“You’re welcome, Jake, okay? Let’s just leave it at that.”

Jake stood still for a moment, wanting to say something but unable to construct the sentence. Finally, he nodded. “Okay, Nick. Thanks. And I’m sorry.”

Nick nodded, too, but looked away. “I’m glad I could do my part. Now, just do us all a favor and end it.”

“About your wife…”

“Just end it, Jake. I’ll worry about my wife.”

It was a sickening thing to watch. Wiggins sat bolt upright in the middle of the dusty skeleton of a barn while Thorne secured the man’s neck directly to the twelve-by-twelve center support column with five loops of duct tape. A tourniquet at the gunman’s wrist, fashioned out of an old rag and a screwdriver, kept him from bleeding to death, even as blood and snot continued to leak freely from his shattered nose. With the man’s neck secured, Thorne went to work on his arms, binding them with loop after loop of tape, just above the elbows.

“You like to be called Wiggins?” Thorne growled as he worked. “That’s fine with me. What I want to know is who you work for. And why. Every little detail.” Thorne tore off the last piece of tape and tossed the roll aside. “Won’t it be fun?”

Jake had never seen Thorne so animated, so entertained.

“Who do you work for?” Thorne paused for just a beat-barely long enough for the man to have formed an answer, even if he’d wanted to-then loosed a backhand smack that scattered a bloody mist into the air.

Jake felt his stomach turn and moved his head to look away when the most amazing thing happened. Wiggins smiled. His teeth-what was left of them-were shiny with blood, but the son of a bitch thought this was funny.

And that really pissed Thorne off. He fired a kick into the prisoner’s tattered hand. Wiggins’s face knotted up tight against the pain, but as soon as the wave of agony passed, the smile returned.

“Jesus Christ, Thorne,” Jake moaned. “Is this it? You’re just going to beat him to death?”

Thorne stayed poised for another shot but moved his head to see Jake. “Actually, that’s up to him. He doesn’t have to die. I’ll stop as soon as he starts talking.”

Wiggins actually chuckled. And earned himself a kick in the ribs.

It was an obscene cycle. Wiggins seemed to grow stronger through the beating, refusing on the strength of his spirit alone to use the one key Thorne had given him to unlock his dungeon of pain. And the more he held out, the more vicious Thorne’s attacks became.

After maybe three minutes, Jake actually found himself feeling sorry for the son of a bitch. Then he thought of Travis’s face, and he made himself imagine the suffering his son must have endured.

He thought of this animal hanging Carolyn in her jail cell, and he conjured the images of the grief endured by the family of that little girl in the hospital, whose only involvement in any of this was to have the misfortune of getting sick at the same time as a stranger down the hall.

The rage Jake summoned up was enough for him to root Thorne on for another minute, but ultimately, it was of no use. He found himself desperately searching for an alternative to prolonged beating. What was infuriating was the man’s defiance. This asshole’s life lay in their hands, yet his battered, swollen eyes continued to say, screw you.