M Sellars - The Law Of Three

My fragile pane of composure shattered into jagged shards. The heat that had earlier flushed my face now consumed my entire body. I could feel myself shaking, and I was gripping the handset so tight that my fingers were beginning to numb.

“Listen to me you son-of-a-bitch,” I spoke evenly into the mouthpiece. My voice started at a low volume, but with each sentence it grew along an ever-increasing upward arc. “This is between you and me. No one else, got me?! You had better start praying to your God right now. You’d best pray that the police get to you first, because I’m coming after you. I’m coming after you, and I’m going to kill you!

DO YOU HEAR ME GODDAMMIT?! I’M GOING TO FUCKING KILL YOU, YOU BASTARD!”

I was holding the phone in front of my face, screaming into it. Adrenalin was pumping through me, and I was shaking uncontrollably. I felt a hand clamp on my shoulder, and I wheeled about, swinging the handset like a club. My hand was suddenly engulfed by Ben’s own. He pushed me against the wall and held me there as he ripped the telephone away with his free hand. He brought it up to his ear and listened then frowned before dropping it onto the table beside the base and snatching up his cell phone.

“It’s clicking, like maybe he hung up,” he fired his voice into the device. “Tell me you nailed the bastard… Yeah… Yeah… Okay, I’ll hang on…”

My friend looked at me with a mixture of concern and what looked as though it might have been fear in his eyes. He was still holding his cell phone to his ear, but he twisted the mouthpiece down out of the way. “Jeezus, Row… Calm down… ‘Kay?”

I was still shaking, but Ben had me stiff-armed against the wall; I wasn’t going anywhere. I sucked in a deep breath and glared back at him as I spoke, “The motherfucker just told me he was going to rape my wife!”

I heard a gasp, and when I looked to the side I realized that my outburst had attracted the attention of everyone else in the household. The worst part was that the look on Felicity’s face told me that she’d heard every word of what I’d just said to Ben.

I stared back at her pained expression, watching as her earlier fear visibly resurfaced. I mutely chastised myself for losing control and tried to find something to say to her that would quell her uneasiness but came up empty.

“Yeah, yeah I’m here,” Ben began speaking again as he twisted the cell phone back into place. “He what? You’ve gotta be kiddin’… Shit… Okay… Yeah…” He let out a heavy sigh. “Yeah… I’ll be here… Thanks.”

I turned back to face him and found his concerned gaze still locked on my face as he switched off the phone and stuffed it into his pocket. The thick silence in the corridor rose to a crescendo and was then replaced by his almost apologetic voice. “You okay now, Row?”

“They didn’t get him, did they?” I asked.

“No. No, they didn’t.” He shook his head as he spoke. “So, can I let you go now?”

I was still tensed and shaking, but the sight of my wife behind him had forced me to calm quicker than I would have otherwise. I nodded to him, and he tentatively relaxed his stance, waiting a short moment before releasing me entirely.

As soon as I was free, I stepped past him and wrapped my arms around Felicity. She laid her head against my shoulder and held tight.

“Aye, it was him,” she whispered. “He called here, then.”

“It’s okay,” I told her. “It’s okay.”

Looking past her I could see the rest of the group milling about in the corridor, staring at us with their own brand of fear on their faces.

“They had the number to the pay phone from the caller ID.” I spoke aloud to Ben without turning; my tone was just short of an accusation. “It’s not like they had to trace it. What went wrong?”

“That wasn’t the problem, Row,” he answered. “They pinpointed the location right away and dropped every copper in the area on it like the friggin’ sky was fallin’.”

“So what happened?”

“Jeezus, Row, this bastard is a piece of work…”

“What?”

“He had two pay phones stuck together with duct tape, white man.”

“Awww, Gods…” I brought one hand up to massage my forehead as I closed my eyes. “That’s why it sounded so hollow. He relayed it.”

“Yeah. Not exactly the most high tech. All you gotta do is call one pay phone, tape it to the one next to it, and then dial here with that pay phone…”

“Doesn’t really matter, it worked, didn’t it?” I spat.

“Yeah. Unfortunately it did. They’re lookin’ at the computers now, tryin’ to trace it back, but since he was nowhere around, odds are he was talkin’ to ya’ on a cell. He was hell and gone from the scene the minute he dialed the fuckin’ number.”

“I really don’t want to monopolize your time,” I said as I leaned against the deck rail and looked out across the back yard.

“You are not monopolizing anything, Rowan,” Helen Storm answered in the clear and carefully worded fashion I’d grown accustomed to since our first meeting less than one month ago. “Besides, I was ready for a cigarette.”

Ben’s sister was a self-described chain smoker, and she supported her claim easily. To me it seemed like an odd habit for a psychiatrist, but then, she was also human. We all had our vices-for instance, with me, it was cigars-so I was not about to make a judgment.

In the physical features department, Helen bore more than a passing family resemblance to her brother; the obvious exception being that she stood just shy of a foot shorter than he was. Other than that, they shared the same mysteriously dark eyes and characteristic profiles. Her thick, black hair hung in a straight fall that pleasantly contrasted her softly angular features. It was streaked here and there with strands of grey, which was the only visual indicator that she was the older of the two siblings.

I shrugged inside my coat, giving a slight shiver against a random gust of wind that managed to infiltrate its folds and then tugged the zipper up another pair of inches in self-defense.

Yellow-brown stands of decorative grasses ringed the inside of the yard, each clump angling upward in shallow arcs to peek just inches over the top of the privacy fence. Snow was now falling in heavy waves, drifting downward, slipstreaming sideways on the wind and then tumbling to rest on the dormant carpet of Zoysia.

“Nancy probably needs you more than me,” I said while looking down and absently inspecting the burning cigar I was twisting between my thumb and forefinger. “She’s the one who just lost her husband to a psychopath.”

Helen exhaled a stream of smoke and tapped the ash from the end of her cigarette before gesturing. “Look there, Rowan.”

I looked up then swiveled my head and followed her finger with my eyes. A sturdily-caged bird feeder sat atop a post in a nearby section of the yard with a pair of black-capped chickadees flitting in and out of it. A much larger bird, speckled along its brown back, hung from the side where a suet cake had been affixed.

“That is a northern flicker,” she announced.

“Avoiding my question?” I asked, looking back at her with a slight smile.

She shrugged as she spoke. “No, not really, Rowan. I am simply fascinated by birds. Besides, you did not ask a question. You made a comment.” She returned the smile as she paused and took a drag on her cigarette. “Now, if I were to treat your comment as a question, first I would point out that Eldon Porter is a sociopath not a psychopath.”

“Touche,” I answered.

“Secondly, I would tell you that Nancy has exactly what she needs, given the circumstances. Family. As she advances through the stages of grief, her family will be the most effective support system she could ever need. She will talk to me when and if she feels ready to do so. Perhaps she will never need me. I cannot say one way or the other at this stage. That is something that is peculiar to the individual. You can rest assured, however, that she is not yet ready.”