The Warning Read online

  Crazy Glasses guided her to a hallway that led away from the main room. Twenty paces down, he opened a door and told her to go in and wait.

  A table and chair sat in the middle of the room. On it were a pad of paper and a pen.

  Glasses shut the door behind her. She walked around the room looking for cameras or peepholes. Was anyone watching like in an interrogation room?

  The room appeared to be sealed off. Two minutes alone and the door opened again. Three men filed in. Sarah backed to the corner.

  “Have a seat,” one of the men said.

  “I’d rather stand,” Sarah replied. If there was anything she had learned over the years it was to establish some kind of authority even when none could be had.

  One of the men, the one closest to her, pulled something from under his jacket and swung hard. Before it hit her, Sarah saw he was carrying a strap of some kind. In the second it registered, the strap lashed across her left shoulder and collar bone. Intense pain shot through her, crippling her ability to stand.

  Sarah fell to the floor, grabbing her shoulder as best she could with cuffed wrists. She used her feet to push herself away from the man who still wielded the strap.

  “Damn!” she shouted. “That fuckin’ hurts. Get away from me,” she said as her efforts to avoid the man came to a halt at the wall.

  He swung the strap back and forth and then collected it into a ball. “Get up and sit in the chair or I will whip you to a bloody pulp.”

  Sarah heard a British accent and not for the first time wondered who these people were.

  She used her uninjured right hand and arm to balance herself and get to her feet. Sweat came out in beads on her forehead. The pain made her woozy. When she eased the chair out to sit on it she saw each man in the room sported a rip in their shirts just like Jack did. One of these days she would have to find out the significance of that fucking rip.

  She hunched her back when she sat. She used her right hand to gingerly reach inside her shirt and feel the wound. Little rivulets of blood formed on her skin. Her hand came away crimson. What the hell was on that whip? Was it studded? Damn did that ever hurt!

  “Tell us what you do?”

  “What do I do? What are you talking about?”

  The man with the whip unfolded it and stepped closer.

  “Okay, okay, what I do. Are you talking about automatic writing? I’m assuming that’s what you’re talking about, right?”

  The man asking the question nodded. He stepped closer, produced a key and with deft hands undid her cuffs.

  Sarah gently massaged the feeling back into her wrists.

  “I have no control over it,” she said, keeping an eye on the strap man again. “It happens when it happens. I black out for anywhere from a few seconds to a full minute. While I’m in the blackout I have no conscious idea what’s happening. For me, it’s lost time. When I come to, there’s a note of some kind with a message. I follow the instructions. That’s it.”

  No one responded. The three men stood close, watching her.

  “What?” she asked. “Is there anything else?”

  The man who had uncuffed her spoke: “How come you can save all those people from a burning building but you can’t save yourself?”

  “I have no idea.” Now she knew they were organized enough to have researched who she was in serious detail.

  She waited. Strap man stepped close again.

  “What? I really have no idea.”

  “You are going to want to explain things until we are content with your answer. You will know we are content when we ask another question. Otherwise there will be consequences.”

  She bent at the waist again and leaned on the table. The pain seemed to ebb a little when she did. It felt like she’d been burned. She took her eyes off them and bent her head. “Each message is different. Some come with specific details, others don’t. The ones with details are easier for me to manage. Usually messages that involve something personal are the ones that aren’t specific. It would’ve been great to get one that told me to avoid you guys, but, alas, that didn’t happen.”

  She feared her attitude would inspire them to further harm her, but no one moved. She waited. Then he asked another question.

  “Give me an example of a specific message.”

  She raised her head and looked him in the eye. She knew where this was going and didn’t like it. She could see their faces. These guys kill cops. There was no way she or anyone else would make it out of here alive. The only thing she had was time.

  “I once received a message that said, ‘sit directly in the middle, under the St. Elizabeth Bridge. 10:18am. Bring hammer’. I did exactly as it said to do.”

  “And what happened?”

  “At 10:18am, there was an accident on the bridge above. A car broke through the guardrail and plummeted to the river below. It landed upside down. The car was damaged from the accident and the impact into the river. I couldn’t get in to pull out the driver. The river water was seeping in fast. If I hadn’t had the hammer, and acted quickly, she would have drowned. She was upside down, suspended by her seatbelt. I used the hammer to break the glass, rolled into the back and lifted her head just in time. Firefighters took over from there when they arrived.” She paused looking at each one of the men. “Is that what this is all about?”

  “As I recall you saved an anchorwoman that day. Tell us why you do it.”

  Sarah sat up straighter and placed her hands on her thighs. “I do it because I have to.”

  “What do you mean, you have to?”

  “I didn’t respond to the first few messages I received. People got hurt. A girl down the street from where I used to live got beat up pretty bad. If I don’t act on the messages I receive, people die. I can’t have that on my conscience. I’ve been doing it so long that I trust I’ll get out of it unscathed. Like this scenario. I’ll walk away from this and you three will either be in jail or dead. My preference is dead.”

  Strap Man moved forward. Question Man waved him off. Blake was a statue by the door.

  “Is this something you were told in your messages?”

  Should she lie? Would they be able to tell? Her conscience got the better of her.

  “No. It’s something I know. I’ve been in worse situations than this and walked away. There’s a reason you haven’t killed me or the other people you have here.”

  Question Man stepped around behind her.

  “Who do we have here?”

  “Esmerelda, Jack Tate, my parents. That’s what I do know.”

  “So you don’t know who else?”

  Sarah turned around. It looked like he was grinning.

  “It’s okay, you don’t have to answer that last question. In about five minutes it won’t matter what you know.”

  Blake pulled out a revolver.

  Question Man continued. “There’s one bullet in that gun. We need you to do your thing with that piece of paper and start writing. Every time you black out and write a prophecy we move the clock back. If you write nothing, every sixty seconds my colleague here will point the gun at your head and pull the trigger. The most amount of time you have left to live is five minutes, the least, one minute.”

  She instantly felt sick. They were dead serious. Fight mode raged through her but she knew there was no way she could get past all three men. She started panting.

  “Are we clear? The clock starts now.”

  “Wait…what, what are you…”

  “Sarah, you don’t have time to talk.” He pointed at the paper on the table. “You need to write or you will die.”

  For a second her panic locked her vocal cords. This couldn’t be real. “That’s not how it works!”

  “Goodbye, Sarah,” Question Man said as he headed for the door.

  “It’s involuntary! I pass out. I have no control over it. You have to listen to me.”

  He stopped at the door, his hand on the knob. “Well then, you had better black out. Let’s see which on
e of us gets out of here alive after all, eh Sarah?” He looked at his watch. “Thirty seconds until the first game of Russian Roulette.”

  He stepped out. Only Blake stayed behind.

  “You have to listen to me. Put the fucking gun away. What are you doing this for? You don’t have to do it.”

  Blake cocked the gun. He was staring at his watch.

  “Look, give me time. I always write something eventually.” Her heart was racing. Could this really be the end? She didn’t believe it. Something in her soul shouted no, it’ll be okay.

  At the one minute mark, Blake brought the gun within an inch of her forehead. She opened her mouth to protest.

  He pulled the trigger.

  Chapter 20

  Sam had rarely worked a case with so few clues. He had nothing to go on. He knew he wasn’t supposed to even be out here trying to track anything down, but he couldn’t stay home.

  Officer Winnfield was back on duty this morning. Sam knew exactly where he would be: at his desk, filling out paperwork regarding last night.

  He parked in his usual spot at headquarters and walked straight to the second floor where he saw Winnfield sipping coffee at his desk.

  “Winnfield, you got a sec?”

  He set his coffee down and leaned back in his chair. “Sure Johnson, what do you need?”

  “I want to talk to you about last night.”

  Winnfield looked around. He sat back in and picked up his coffee cup. “I can’t talk about that.”

  Sam frowned. “What’s the problem? Since when can you not talk about a case like Jack Tate?”

  “Since the FBI took it over,” Winnfield said. He leaned in closer and whispered, “Listen, Sam, let’s go across the street and grab a coffee. We’ll talk there.”

  Sam agreed and within ten minutes they were seated opposite each other, Sam having a normal coffee with just cream and Winnfield having something called a peppermint latte.

  “What’s really going on?” Sam asked.

  Winnfield looked around like they were being watched. “There’s so much going on I don’t even know where to start.”

  “Come on Winnfield, stop being so cryptic. Just tell me what you know.”

  “I’ve been pushing Parkman for information because I was pissed the FBI walked in and took me off the case. Then they let Jack Tate walk away last night. I mean, why is Jack so fucking important? And I think the FBI is going to have to answer to this fuck up because as soon as Jack is set free, some guy dies in the front foyer of Jack’s house. The dead guy has a bullet in his knee that looks like it came from Sarah Roberts’ gun and a knife in the thigh that came from Jack’s kitchen.”

  “I know all this. I talked to Parkman.”

  “Did you know that the dead guy also had a rip in his shirt, just like Jack’s and the dead girl we unburied by Jack’s house?”

  Sam wasn’t sure he heard him right. “How could that be? Or maybe Jack is crazy and every time he kills someone he has to mark them with a ripped shirt?”

  Winnfield was shaking his head. “I don’t think so. I think this is huge. I think this thing is bigger than Jim Jones or that David guy in Waco.”

  “What makes you say that?” It was such an odd statement that Sam started to feel like they were being watched too. He looked around but could see no one being obvious about it.

  Winnfield leaned in close and lowered his voice. “I can’t say much because I don’t know all of it, but they got a license plate from a witness on the highway where our two colleagues were murdered. When they ran the plates, according to Parkman, they belonged to a college professor on the other side of the city. A couple of uniforms went over to look into it. Apparently, the professor’s plates were lifted off his vehicle two nights ago. But get this, so were ten other license plates in the same neighborhood. So whoever these guys are, it looks like they have at least ten vehicles and they change plates routinely.”

  How had Sarah gotten mixed up in all this? “You know, a lot of people have gone missing since last night.” Sam said and grabbed his coffee for a quick pull on it. “This whole thing is bigger than I thought. The more I hear about it the more worried I get. Has anything come in on the dead girl by Jack’s place?”

  Winnfield shook his head. “Not much. Her fingerprints were burned off and her teeth removed. There’s evidence of sexual torture of some kind, but nothing conclusive until the autopsy report comes back in a few days which I won’t get access to now. They’ve estimated her age to be around sixteen. This is pretty messed up you know. I’m starting to get the feeling that this has something to do with human trafficking.”

  A couple of college kids entered the coffee shop. Their loud boisterous conversation caught Sam’s attention. He watched them for a moment and then looked back at Winnfield who was talking, but Sam missed some of it.

  “What was that?”

  “I was just saying that I’ve been ordered to finish my reports and then hand them off to the FBI and to not talk about this case. To let it go.”

  Winnfield looked chastised. Maybe this was a big case for him to land? Sam seemed to remember that Winnfield was always looking for something like this, something that could make him famous among his fellow officers.

  “Winnfield, I gotta run. Thanks for the coffee,” Sam said and got up to leave, pushing his chair in.

  “Hey Sam, you’ll let me know if you find anything, right?”

  “Of course, Winnfield, of course.”

  Sam patted his shoulder as he walked by him on the way to the door. He took one last look at the two college kids and knew that in today’s society everyone had to look out for themselves. There really wasn’t any protection.

  The police always got there too late.

  Chapter 21

  Sarah felt a wetness oozing through her pants. Her bladder had given up and surrendered its warmth.

  Blake had lowered the gun. He was looking at his watch again. In her panic she had no idea what to do. Her mind went blank. They actually meant to kill her.

  “Do you have a dog?” she asked.

  He didn’t look away from his watch.

  “Do you have a cat? Any kind of pet? You were a kid once. Didn’t you have hopes and dreams? Is this what you wanted to be when you grew up?”

  Still no response. The guy was a robot. She would be dead in minutes and he wouldn’t even acknowledge her existence.

  A tear leapt to her eye. Shit. Why do I cry at moments like these? Damn. “Do you even feel? Are you fucking human?” She lowered her head in frustration. “You know, if you had a pet, a companion, maybe your heart would heal. Maybe you could join the human race again.”

  Then a thought hit her. Why hadn’t she come up with it before?

  She turned away from Strap Man and grabbed the pen. Mentally she tried to figure out how much time she had left before he would shoot again.

  She figured at least thirty seconds.

  There was no way to convince these people. They couldn’t be reasoned with. She had to beat them another way.

  She held the pen and started rocking back and forth in the chair to the imagined rhythm of seconds on a clock. After a count of twenty, she saw, out of the corner of her eye, he had raised the gun again.

  With only seconds left, she rolled her eyes back as far as she could and slumped in the chair. Her hand worked the paper furiously. She wrote whatever came to mind. After a few moments, she dropped the pen and slipped out of her chair.

  The urine was cold on her butt when she hit the floor. She bumped her elbow but kept the groan buried.

  She was sure ten seconds had passed. She hadn’t heard the click of the gun.

  She heard Blake picking the paper up. She waited while he read it.

  She had done what they’d asked for. She blacked out and wrote down a prophecy. What came next?

  She moved and moaned. With a push off the ground, her insides roiling around like she might throw up, Sarah lifted her head and looked around. Blake was stan
ding back, the paper in his hand. She saw his gun had been put back into his holster.

  She edged out from under the table feeling confident that her ruse may have worked. At least the gun was gone so she’d made some progress.

  Her pants felt heavier. She wanted to cry again. This was the worst scenario she had ever found herself in.

  Blake didn’t move. He stood and stared at her.

  She made it up into the chair and sat, trying to look defeated. The smell of urine started to bother her nostrils. If the door wasn’t opened in the next few minutes she was sure she would throw up. A flare of anger rose in her because she hated being so weak, so feminine and soft. There were times to be feminine and revel in it and there were times not to be. This was one of those times when she needed to be tough.