Thomas O`Callaghan - The Screaming Room

With his sight suddenly returning, he discovered Margaret was holding his cell phone to her ear. Her voice, a faint whisper grew in intensity.

“Okay. Your brother made his point. It’s loaded and it works. Just bring her to the window so we know he didn’t shoot her, then hand Angus the phone.”

Driscoll glanced up to see the look of total bewilderment on his sister’s face. Retrieving the cell phone, he spoke to Angus calmly and clearly. “The chopper is sitting at the heliport, just south of us, at East Thirty-fourth Street. We’re waiting for Mr. Shewster to arrange clearance for the departure of a corporate jet from JFK.”

“What’s the hold-up?” Angus asked.

It was the first time the Lieutenant had heard him speak. His voice was not as Driscoll had imagined. “There’s no hold-up. Ever since 9/11 federal regulations requi-”

“We’re leaving the freakin’ country. Not coming in. He’s got twenty minutes.”

The line went dead and his sister disappeared from sight, as though she were on wheels.

“Any truth to that?” asked Margaret.

Driscoll’s expression didn’t make known Shewster’s attempt to lob a grenade, but Margaret clearly understood there’d be no plane. “We’ve got twenty minutes. Get on the horn to every utility that operates in Manhattan. Within the next five minutes, I want a team of eight men with jackhammers tearing into the asphalt under the highway, toward Fifty-ninth. The loft has no window facing south. I don’t want the twins to see them. Then dispatch a team from Special Operations Division. No slackers. Let’s move!”

“Yessir!”

Driscoll approached Lieutenant Ted McKeever, the SWAT team commander.

“How ya holdin’ up, John?” McKeever asked.

“I’ll feel a lot better when she’s sitting inside a patrol car. He’s given us twenty minutes. Any of your shooters get a bearing on him?”

“Once. Too much of a chance of the wrong person getting hit, though. You sure his sister’s with him? Nobody’s spotted her.”

“She was Margaret’s last caller. When I got on the line, she put me on with her brother.”

“He did a fair amount of pacing when he was on the phone. Any chance of getting him on the line again?”

Driscoll hit the return button, hoping he’d come up with a reason why he was calling by the time Angus answered the phone.

“Ready to roll?” said Angus.

He wasn’t standing.

“The Mayor’s on the line with Homeland Security. It won’t be long, now.”

“Good. Here’s how this is gonna play out. I count six shooters perched across the street. They come down. Mount your car on the sidewalk, rear door open and butted against the door to the stable. One driver. Not you. We get clearance on the plane. Cassie, me, and your sister will get into the car. Head directly to the helicopter. Make sure we hit no traffic. If I see so much as a skateboarder that looks like a cop, you’ll be calling a funeral director to arrange your sister’s wake.”

The line went dead. Not once did Angus stand.

“How many shooters up there?” he asked McKeever.

“Six.”

“Well, he tagged them all.”

Ten minutes later, Driscoll’s cruiser was on the sidewalk, its left rear door open and butted. The six sharpshooters were not only down from their perches, they were lined up in the middle of the street, weapons at their feet. To the onlooker, it appeared the Lieutenant and his idling team were waiting for clearance from JFK. But while Con Edison’s air-compressed hammers ripped into asphalt, coupled with the noise of hovering helicopters, a team of Special Operations technicians were using a Sawzall to cut through the rear wall of the stable.

Angus, suspicious of the racket, tried calling Driscoll on his cell phone, but he couldn’t hear himself over all the noise. He was in the bathroom, door closed, hoping to hear more clearly, when the noise abruptly stopped.

Stepping back into the room, he heard the sound of feet storming up the stairs. He dove for Mary’s ankles, grabbing hold just as Driscoll and Margaret appeared with guns drawn. On his knees, his pistol jabbed into Mary’s rib cage, Angus smirked as he stared down the barrel of the Lieutenant’s semiautomatic.

Cassie had managed to position herself behind Driscoll’s sister, but Margaret’s weapon was bearing down on her. As the twisted twins scoped the fashionably dressed Driscoll and the casually clad Margaret, the two officers witnessed, for the first time, the cruelty that indelibly marked the pair. Cassie’s face looked as though it had been carved with a blowtorch. Beady eyes peered through jagged slits, surrounded by twisted shards of flesh, the color of burning charcoal. Layers of blubber-like flesh draped her narrow neck. She stood no more than four-foot-five. Her ears sat unusually low on either side of her head. A flat, shieldlike chest threatened to burst through the tapered blouse that clung to an anorexic body. In stark contrast, Angus displayed boyish good looks and wavy blond hair. Driscoll wondered what lay hidden behind his shirt, buttoned from waist to neckline. Hadn’t he labeled himself an odd-i-twin?

“Here! Feast your eyes,” Angus said, as if reading the Lieutenant’s mind, ripping off the garment, exposing horrific scarifications. A collection of gargoyles, a distorted unicorn, irregularly shaped tombstones, several primitive amphibian and ophidian creatures surrounded an odd figure, its upper half, Goth, its lower, paranormal. Hues of bistre, raw umber, taupe, indigo, and Prussian blue bled haphazardly, producing the ominous and all-encompassing imagery that was his body.

“Enjoying the freak show, Lieutenant?”

“This is the end of the line, Angus. I’d prefer to see everyone walk out of here alive.”

“But we’re not alive,” said Cassie. “We have no souls. They were stolen from us.”

“You’re the thieves,” said Margaret. “You took away life.”

“Depraved life,” said Angus.

“What’d you do with your father?” Driscoll asked.

Angus looked to his sister and chuckled. “He’s fertilizer.”

Driscoll caught Mary’s perplexed gaze. He offered a prayer for her and all present, before beginning what he believed to be their only way out of the stalemate. “You’re vicious, Angus. Subhuman. You know why I say that?”

Angus didn’t appear to care.

“Evil people kill. And there’s no doubt you’re evil.”

Angus squinted, looking as though he were trying to decipher a riddle.

“But vicious people are menacing. They take pleasure in watching their victim suffer. They’ll take a stick to a stray cat. String up a dog. You know why you fit, Angus?”

“The next victim I’m gonna kill is your sister if you don’t stop badgering me.”

“Vicious people kill because they’re callous.”

“Don’t press your luck, Lieutenant.”

“Vicious people kill the helpless. You know what that says about scum like you?”

Margaret was now anxious. She redirected her weapon on Angus.

“Scum like you-”

“Shut up!” said Angus. “Shut up or I’ll kill her.”

“Scum like you aren’t seeking revenge. They’re-”

“Shut up!” he hollered.

“They kill purely for selfish reasons. For the thrill of it. What’d you do with the horse, Angus?”

“Yo’, lady cop, tell your boss here to shut his mouth up.”

“Teener. That was her name. She too, was defenseless. Innocent. The perfect prey. How’d you kill her?”

Rage filled the teen.

“Poison? Starvation?”

“Lady, I’m talking to you. Do something. Or I swear, his sister’s gonna die.”

“That’d make you next,” said Margaret.