Perfect Trust: A Rowan Gant Investigation (2 page)

Through the darkness and fog, Eldon could
just make out the rope stretched taut from the railing above,
thinly scribing a tight line in the night to finally disappear
behind the man’s outstretched arm. He had thought perhaps the rope
had merely twisted beneath the man’s shoulder during the struggle,
but now he knew this was not the case. The noose was cinched tight
about the warlock’s arm instead of his neck where it should have
been. A triple twist of the rope serpentined around the man’s
appendage and trailed through his tightly clenched fist.

The warlock had managed to slip out of the
noose and save himself. But he still couldn’t avoid his final
judgment. Eldon would see to that.

“It won’t be long now,” he thought, as he
slipped his pale hand back around the man’s throat and compressed
it tight with a renewed urgency. Just a few more moments and the
sentence will have been carried out.

The warlock would finally be dead.

He was sure he could feel his victim’s
windpipe starting to give way against the pressure of his long
fingers. As his bony digits spasmed slightly from the force he was
trying to exert, he was forced to stretch them quickly, fighting to
keep his grip secure.

Warlock.

Witch.

Sinner.

Heretic.

Different words but all the same. This
one—the warlock Rowan Gant—was himself evil incarnate. A minion of
Satan set forth on this earth to do the bidding of the Dark Lord.
Surreptitiously spreading the vileness of sin and debauchery among
the lambs of Almighty God under the false guise of goodness and
light.

Eldon could not allow it to go on. He could
not allow those who worshipped the devil to remain among the
righteous. Why no one could understand this was a fact he couldn’t
fathom. Why no one realized what was happening by allowing these
appalling sinners to cast shadows upon the earth, frightened
him.

But, it didn’t matter.

He
understood
what needed to be done. He hadn’t at first. Not for the longest
time. He had been just like everyone else. In fact, he had been
worse. He had committed sins that had eventually put him in prison.
But his time there had been a hidden blessing. It was prison where
he had learned of his true purpose in life. It was there he had
learned he was a part of God’s righteous army. It had taken that
incarceration for him to discover he was chosen by God himself to
eradicate the infestation of heresy.

There would be others to help him of course;
of that he was sure. He needed only to find these brothers and
sisters, and then together they would show everyone the true might
of God.

The warlock was struggling. Not as much
as he had at first, but he was still fighting.
Now,
something pressed upward from beneath Eldon’s arm, cold and hard
against the flesh of his wrist.

Puzzling.

It must be the warlock clawing at his hand
again.

But this felt different. It didn’t feel at
all like the hand that had fought to pry against his fingers
moments before.

This was cold.

Hard.

Metallic.

A sharp, chemical odor blended with the moist
air to tease Eldon’s nostrils. He knew that smell. Its pungent edge
was painfully familiar to him.

Gun cleaning solvent.

In a panic he released his grip and rotated
his arm quickly away. In that moment an explosion pierced his ears,
and the muzzle of the handgun erupted with bright orange flame.

He just didn’t rotate it quickly enough.

* * * * *

Harried voices barked commands with life and
death urgency through the cold night air. The tinny bursts of
police radios punctuated the sounds coming from the scene above,
all mixed with the frenzied pace of the music. The activity sounded
rushed but methodical.

Intense.

And all focused on the rescue of the warlock,
Rowan Gant.

A strong voice filled with authority but
edged with what sounded almost like fear, parted all other sounds
to make room for itself. “Goddammit, somebody shut that fuckin’
music off!”

After a moment, the frenetic instruments fell
quiet, in comparison bringing what almost seemed to be silence to
the landscape even though the voices and activity continued on
unimpeded.

Fog was still clinging in a moist, grey
shroud to anything and everything in its path, and most especially,
to anyone. Eldon felt its clammy insistence as it pervaded his
clothing, sending tendrils of cold dampness inward to chill him all
the way past the bone and directly to the soul. Through his
mist-soaked clothes, the cold metal of the girders pressed against
him, mercilessly leeching the warmth from his body.

The sharp sting in his scalp, which had
earlier occupied the foremost position in his list of unwanted
sensations, had now taken a back seat to the fiery burn in his left
arm. The bullet, which had been expelled at high velocity and point
blank range, had ripped into the soft flesh of his wrist and
fragmented in a diagonal trajectory along several inches of his
forearm. He wasn’t entirely sure, but judging from the amount of
movement still left in the appendage, the wound involved only
muscle and no bone.

Even so, it hurt like hell.

But he knew the fact that he was here, now,
feeling the pain, was yet another of those hidden blessings,
because it could have been far worse. In fact, it almost had
been…

As the projectile had executed its damage
upon his arm, Eldon pitched to the side, absenting himself from the
precarious balance that once kept him planted on the supporting
steel girder. With that tenuous stability gone, he had begun to
fall.

To him, how he managed to keep from plunging
into the ice-choked Mississippi river was nothing short of a
miracle. As he howled in agony, his torso had slipped quickly
through the open space between the girders, moving heavily downward
beside the warlock. At almost the same instant, his knees slipped
from the latticed girder in the exact opposite direction, landing
his waist along its edge with a sound thud. Then, he had continued
his rotation forward much like an out-of-control gymnast on the
uneven parallel bars. Out of a purely reflexive survival instinct,
he had sent his uninjured hand pawing frantically for anything he
could grasp to break the fall. Through what, in his mind, could
only have been divine intervention by God Himself, Eldon managed to
entwine his fingers in the lattice on the underside of the steel
beam. With the forward motion impeded, he came to a stop, folded
dangerously over the support.

He hung there for a long moment, a mere foot
away from the suspended warlock. He fully expected another shot to
ring out and bring an end to him. But surely, Eldon thought, God
would not save him from the icy plunge that would certainly have
spelled death only to allow the warlock to execute his demise?

He had remained as still as he could,
gritting his teeth against the pain while waiting for any movement
from the condemned Witch.

None came.

It was a sign…it told him that he would not
die at the hand of Satan. There was a much grander plan at work,
and his time had not yet come. There was still far too much for him
to do on this earth.

Even as the ringing in his ears began to
subside, he heard the sirens in the distance, punching sharp holes
in the still clamoring music from above—and they were growing
closer with every heartbeat.

He wondered if the warlock might well be
dead. Perhaps the pull of the trigger had been done with his last
breath. Of course, it was more likely that he was simply
unconscious. Whichever it was, there was no time to check now. The
authorities would be arriving soon, and God had seen to it that he
had survived thus far. He knew that escape was his only recourse at
this point and that it would be entirely up to him. God would help
him, but only if he helped himself.

And now, here he was, hiding in the dead
space between the diagonal lattice of supporting girders and the
deck of the bridge, intently listening to the activity above. He
could feel a cramp forming along the muscles of his back as he used
his shoulders to hold himself in place. His free hand was occupied
with keeping pressure on the pulsing wound in his left forearm. He
would need to make a tourniquet soon, that much was certain. He
just hoped he would be able to do it in time because he had a
feeling he was going to be here for a while.

The cold and the pain were already taking
their toll. He wanted desperately to sleep but knew that he
couldn’t. He had to stay alert. He had to remain free.

He was positioned out of sight behind a
diagonal upright support and beneath the deck of the bridge itself.
If he kept himself still and quiet, he should be virtually
undetectable. The detectives would most certainly piece together
the visible evidence, and if so, they would assume he had met his
end among the muddy water and buckled ice floes below. The
assumption would be logical, as it had very nearly been fact. Eldon
prayed that they would draw this conclusion.

Through a small gap between the girders, he
could make out the form of the warlock, still suspended by the rope
only a few feet away. A second rope had already been thrown down,
and it was obvious from the sounds of metal tinkling against metal
that someone was being lowered at this very moment.

The commanding voice that had earlier
demanded the music be quelled spoke again, thickly layered with
concern. “Can ya’ tell if he’s alive?”

“Not yet,” a much closer voice called back.
“Another couple of feet or so… Slowly… Okay… A little more… A
little more… Okay… Hold it. Right there.”

Glimpses of someone outfitted in a climbing
harness shone through the gap. Eldon pressed himself further into
the shadows and held fast against the surge of pain in his arm.

No movement.

No noise.

He listened intently for the verdict, hoping
against all hopes that his mission had been carried out to its
conclusion. Praying that, by the grace of Almighty God, the warlock
was dead.

His prayer went unanswered.

“He’s still alive!” the nearby voice called
upward with momentous relief and then seemed to direct back upon
the suspended figure. “Can you hear me, Mister Gant?”

The warlock lived.

Eldon had failed.

He closed his eyes and waited in silence. All
that he could do now is make certain he escaped.

* * * * *

More than a dozen hours passed before the
scene was finally clear, and he could safely extricate himself from
his hiding place. Weak with cold, pain, and surely blood loss—even
with the makeshift tourniquet bound tightly just above his
elbow—Eldon made his way cautiously across the steel beams.

He was deeply chilled and felt clammy with
the remnants of a cold sweat. His trousers were still damp and
reeked of urine where hours ago he had finally been forced to empty
his bladder while still wedged in his cramped hiding place. He felt
degraded by the act of urinating on himself, but there had been no
other choice.

The fog had long dissipated, and he could see
the ice-packed river far below. A swift wave of vertigo touched
him, and he held fast to the latticed girder. Several minutes later
the wave of fear passed, replaced by his dire need to escape, and
he continued his shaky climb.

Carefully, he pulled himself up and back over
the railing to finally collapse on the concrete deck of the
bridge.

He lay there for several minutes, breathing
deeply and feeling the warmth of the sun’s rays soaking into his
chilled body. He simply wanted to relax and rest after the constant
strain of keeping motionless and stable on the cold steel beam for
what had seemed a lifetime.

But rest was not an option.

At the beginning of the long night, he had
made a promise to God. During the prolonged police search, each
time the swath of a powerful flashlight came close, or the echo of
footsteps on the bridge stopped immediately above his hiding place,
he had reiterated that promise in full.

If he made it
through—
if he remained free and survived
his wounds
—he had promised he would not fail
again.

Rowan Gant would die.

Ten Months Later

December 1

Saint Louis, Missouri

Heather Burke only half awoke, a substantial
part of her remaining submerged in a state of semi-conscious
anguish. As consciousness relentlessly crept in, among the
heightened sensations to immediately register were a dry throat and
a headache like no other she could remember in her thirty-three
years. Rapidly following, and skirting the edges of the pain in
complete disharmony, blind terror paralyzed her body. Her muscles
were tensed, aching, and she felt clammy with cold sweat. Her heart
was racing, and out of reflex she sucked in a sharp breath with a
startled gasp.

Holding tight to that frantic gulp of air,
she listened, waiting for the source of her terror to make itself
known. But no matter how intently she focused, she heard nothing
other than the beating of her own heart. Even so, she refused to
expel the breath until she could simply hold it no longer. When
that moment finally came, the only new sound to be added to the
silence was that of her timid whimper.

She continued to wait while fighting to keep
her breathing quiet and shallow. She desperately wanted to suck in
the cool air as fast as she could, but something was out there.
Something fearful in the darkness and she didn’t want it to find
her. She felt like she was seven years old again and hiding from
the boogey man of her childhood nightmares.