Richard Doetsch - Half-Past Dawn

“I’m sorry for you,” his father said without reaction.

“I should have used a larger blade.” Cristos walked into the room and stood over his father. “You stole my prayer book.”

“You have corrupted it, using it for everything but what it was designed for.”

“Oh, it contains my inner thoughts, my life, painting a pretty detailed picture.”

“Of death…” his father said sadly.

“Where is your book?” Cristos said. “That’s what I want to see.”

“You do not want to know the future I have written in mine. Yours is very short.”

“Show me the book!”

“Suresh-”

“That has not been my name for more than twenty years.”

“Our identity is our heart, not what we call ourselves.”

“Return my book, and give me yours, and you’ll save yourself,” Cristos said as he drew his gun and screwed on a silencer.

“Know that in what you are about to do, you will seal your fate. You will set in motion a series of events that will end with your own death before this week is through. If you come back with me now, you will live.”

Cristos stared at his father, absorbing his words, and without further thought pulled the trigger. The bullet struck his father in the stomach, and as he collapsed on the couch, Cristos reached across and tore open his shirt, looking at his bare chest, at the wound in his stomach that began to bubble with blood.

Cristos turned to his father’s bag on the floor and rummaged through it. Beyond prayer robes and some personal effects, there was nothing there.

“Where are they?” Cristos shouted in desperation.

“You will never find them,” his father said as he held his stomach. “Soon to be placed in the hands of someone pure of heart-”

“I’ll tear the heart from their chest.”

“I’m sorry for you,” his father said through labored breaths.

Cristos searched the suite, the safe, every inch of the hotel room, but found nothing.

“Does it hurt yet?” Cristos spat out in anger. “The poison in the bullet is for two purposes: to ensure that your death is painful but, more important, to make sure this time it is permanent.”

“Know this, my son, it will not be long until we are together again.”

Now, riding in the Suburban, Cristos looked down at the case, which he felt would soon provide all the answers. Cristos finally had what he came for; he would carry out the second part of his mission without distraction and disappear from the world like a ghost, as he had done so many times before.

Cristos finally turned his attention to the small lock on the case and smashed it with the butt of his gun.

Savoring the moment, the anticipation of victory, he took a deep breath and closed his eyes, knowing that he possessed the power to cheat his own death. He finally lifted the lid, his heart holding in expectation, the culmination of his quest; he dug his hand inside, and as he looked at the contents…

… he lost his mind in rage.

Do me a favor?” Frank said, pointing at Jack’s former room. “Don’t open that door.”

Nolan looked up at Jack and Frank standing in the hallway of the mental facility. “And what are we supposed to say when people come asking?”

Susan Meeks handed Jack the rabbit’s-foot key ring, a key fob, and his shoes.

“Just say you saw me but never saw us leave. Trust me when I tell you that they will be in far worse trouble for holding Jack than anyone who assisted us.”

Jack looked at Nolan as he buttoned up his shirt, tossing the hospital gown onto the floor. “Someone is holding my wife. I don’t have much time.”

Nolan looked at Jack. “I never saw you, but if I did, I’d tell you good luck in finding her.”

Nolan buzzed the door, and Frank slipped out into the small vestibule and hit the elevator call button.

The elevator door of cab one opened, but Frank didn’t get in and allowed the door to close. He hit the call button again.

Cab three arrived, but Frank again let it leave without him.

It was when cab four arrived that he turned and motioned through the glass to Jack, who was buzzed through the security door and came out pushing a wheelchair stacked with blankets.

Jack raced into the open cab and without a moment’s hesitation, leaped onto the wheelchair, reaching up to the roof of the cab and pushing aside the trap door. The shaftway was aglow in the red pin lasers.

The cab door closed and began its descent

Instead of continuing to climb up onto the roof of the cab, Jack simply turned to his right and snatched a canvas shopping bag, pulling it back into the cab, and quickly closed the hatch.

He quickly sat in the wheelchair and affixed a surgical mask to his face while Frank draped his shoulders and legs with a large white blanket that covered the bag in his lap.

As Jack had ridden up from the depths of the basement in cab four two hours earlier, leaping onto the handrail, opening the elevator cab ceiling to see the red security lasers in the shaftway, he had made a decision. With Cristos giving chase and the authorities not far behind, he feared he would be trapped and captured.

So he had dumped the contents of Mia’s case, along with everything in his pockets-his wallet, the letter he had written to Cristos, his cash, keys, and the jewelry box, everything except his gun, Charlie’s rabbit foot, and Aaron’s key-fob device, which scrambled the security camera’s signal-into the canvas shopping bag he had taken from Charlie’s box of food and weapons and stored it atop elevator cab four.

After depositing the few contents of Aaron’s bag into the evidence box for ballast, he tucked it into Aaron’s black bag, jumped back into the elevator, securing the trap door, and led Cristos off on a wild-goose chase around the city, pulling him as far from his goal as possible.

All the while, Jack knew he would have to go back, and there would be only one way back in.

He was counting on being captured.

The door finally opened to the main lobby, which was abuzz with forensic personnel, mapping bullet trajectories, digging fragments out of the floors and walls, and consulting. Without hesitation, Frank wheeled Jack along the back wall to the rear hall and the rear service entranceway.

As they rounded the corner and rolled down the fifty-yard hallway, they came upon an armed New York City policeman at the rear door, with two others at the desk.

Jack could see the security monitors, ten of them showing different angles of the lobby, of the upstairs, and of the four elevator cabs. He prayed that Aaron’s key fob had worked. Otherwise, he was about to have a very short conversation with law enforcement.

His heart began to race as all eyes fell on him. The surgical mask was a silly disguise, yet Frank continued to wheel him down the linoleum-tiled floor toward the exit.

The desk guard spun around to face them. “Frank,” he said in his Bronx-accented voice. Sergeant Johnny Seminara stared at him a moment. “I’d ask why the camera in your elevator went on the fritz, check you from stem to stern, but seeing it’s you, I’m sure it’s an issue for maintenance.”

Frank continued toward the rear door.

“You want to leave the wheelchair or take it with you?” Johnny asked.

“Thanks.” Frank nodded.

Jack hopped out of the chair, holding tight to the blanket as it wrapped the canvas bag, and followed Frank through the rear door of the Tombs to find Joy behind the wheel of Frank’s car with the engine running.

“So, I heard you’re dying,” Frank said as he walked with Jack toward the open car door.

“Aren’t we all?”

Jack climbed into the back while Frank jumped into the passenger seat.