M Sellars - The Law Of Three

“You okay?” Ben asked.

“Shoulder,” I told him.

He nodded then leaned his back against the wall opposite me. “Yeah, sorry about that.”

“Uh-huh,” I grunted. “I’ll get you back.”

“So, don’t worry too much,” he continued, keeping his voice low. “If they want you to come in, I’ll go with ya’.”

I nodded acknowledgement back at him as I picked up the handset from the telephone table and pressed it against my ear. “Hello. This is Rowan Gant.”

I was greeted with the hollow sound of static that told me the phone was definitely off hook at the other end, but there was nothing else. For a moment, I thought that I might have been placed on hold. However, as I listened I was certain that I could hear the thready sound of breathing intertwined with the semi-silence issuing from the earpiece.

“Hello?” I spoke again. “Anyone there?”

“You must excuse me,” a painfully familiar voice returned. “It is not every day that I speak with the spawn of Satan.”

I froze.

There wasn’t much else I could do.

The voice sounded hollow and distant, but there was no mistaking to whom it belonged.

The pain in my shoulder erupted from a smolder to an intense blaze, just like a fire suddenly fed by a back draft. The sharp ache coursed down my arm, searing every nerve ending in its path before ricocheting from my fingertips and driving back upward into my skull. I closed my eyes and sighed heavily as the burning spasm tightened my scalp and opened the gates for the dull throb that had been sequestered in the back of my head.

What I wanted to do at this very moment was to explode with anger. Instead, I forced myself to remain grounded and keep my voice even. I opened my eyes and turned to face Ben as I spoke, “Hello, Eldon.”

My friend had been slouched against the wall, and he now came fully to attention, his face masked with a look of incredulity as he stared back at me.

“Porter?” he mouthed the question silently, holding his hand to emulate a telephone as he placed it to the side of his head.

I nodded slowly in response.

“You would have been proud of your disciple, Gant,” Porter was telling me. “He maintained his allegiance to you right up to the end.”

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“And the great dragon was cast out, that old serpent, called the Devil, and Satan, which deceiveth the whole world: he was cast out into the earth, and his angels were cast out with him.”

“Book of Revelation,” I offered. “I already know you can quote the Bible, Eldon. Why don’t you stop hiding behind someone else’s words?”

“Hiding? You are the one hiding, Gant. I am walking in the light of God.”

“You’ll excuse me if I have a little trouble with that, Eldon,” I offered. “I seem to recall your God saying ‘Thou shalt not kill.’”

“He also states that there is a time to kill. Ecclesiastes…”

“…Three, three. Yeah, I’ve heard. So why don’t you tell me what you really meant?”

Ben had become a flurry of activity, moving with a choreographed swiftness as he stepped forward and checked the caller ID display on the telephone’s base unit. He quickly retrieved his notebook, scribbled something, and then motioned to get my attention and mouthed, “Keep him talking.”

I felt like I was in the middle of a movie about a kidnapping and that I had been selected to take the call making the ransom demand. I nodded and tried to concentrate on what Porter was saying.

“…remained impenitent.”

“I’m sorry, Eldon,” I returned. “There must be some static on the line, I didn’t catch that first part.”

“There’s no static,” he answered calmly. “You were distracted by Detective Storm instructing you to keep me on the line while he gets this call traced.”

My first inclination was to assure him that his comment was untrue, but that’s what always happens in the movies, and it’s always a lie. I decided to go for broke. “You’re right, but can you blame us?”

Ben had taken a few steps down the hall to get out of earshot and was now whispering into his cell phone as he read off something from his notebook. I glanced down at the caller ID display and noticed that it said “PAY PHONE,” and gave the number. I couldn’t place the exchange other than that it was definitely a Saint Louis number.

“No, I suppose that is the sort of thing you would do,” Porter replied, an eerie flatness to his voice. “His loyalty to you is misguided, but he will soon see the truth.”

“What truth is that?”

“Your devotion to Satan, of course.”

“I think you have me confused with somebody else.”

“Lest Satan should get an advantage of us: for we are not ignorant of his devices.”

“Second Corinthians, chapter two, verse eleven,” I told him. “Nice try, but you aren’t the first person to take it out of context and throw it in my face.”

I knew my comment could very possibly serve to antagonize him, but I didn’t care. He’d already done his share to anger me-and he had succeeded in spades.

“Set thou a wicked man over him: and let Satan stand at his right hand,” he told me.

“Psalm, one-oh-nine, verse six. Come on, Eldon, you didn’t really call here to recite the Holy Bible to me did you?”

Ben was nodding as he continued whispering into his phone. He looked up in my direction and motioned at me to keep Eldon on the line.

“Did you get my note?” the voice asked.

The only other time I had spoken to Porter was when he had pronounced my sentence the night he tried to kill me. Then, as now, his voice was cold and emotionless. This last comment was a sudden and unexpected exception. He sounded almost gleeful.

I felt a wave of heat flush through my face as my blood pressure rose. My free hand clenched into a hard fist, and I fought to maintain my composure. Unfortunately, my stolid silence gave him exactly what he wanted.

“I’ve been doing some more reading, Gant. Research mostly. Historical…”

“Good for you,” I muttered, barely able to contain my anger.

“Oh yes,” he replied. “It is very good for me. You see, it seems that I’ve been far too narrow in my scope when it comes to extracting confessions.”

“I hadn’t noticed.”

“Take your disciple for instance. He was my first disembowelment. I thought it went very well.”

I sucked in a deep breath through my nose and let it slowly out through my mouth, steeling myself before answering him in a cold tone. “I thought you said you weren’t able to break him?”

“Oh no, you misunderstood. He confessed. He just never told me where I could find you.”

“That’s because he didn’t know,” I spat.

“It doesn’t matter. I’ve found you now.”

I looked over at Ben, and he once again waved his hand, indicating that I should keep Porter talking. I frowned hard. I wasn’t sure how much more I could take before I completely lost control.

“Maybe you just think you have,” I said.

There was a long silence at the other end, and I thought for a moment that he might have hung up, but then his voice issued once again from the earpiece. “You never did tell me if you got my note.”

“You know I did.”

“I made that selection specifically for you. What did you think?”

“I think you are a sick bastard.”

I thought I heard him actually laugh before settling once again into his emotionless voice. “Your wife is very lovely, Gant. For a heretic. I suppose you are aware that the inquisitors of the fifteenth century sometimes found it necessary to, shall we say, ‘have their way’ with the women they interrogated?”