“Don’t worry,” he said to his stone-faced captive. “I’m not going to kill you. Not because I don’t want to. I’d love to. But you’re not worth the death penalty – which I’d probably be eligible for, you know, with this being premeditated and all.
“That’s why I brought the twenty-two. If I do have to shoot you, you probably won’t die.”
Tiny sweat droplets began to bead on Bradford’s forehead. “What do you want?”
“I want you to admit what you’ve done – to Ryan Tyler’s parents, to J’Quarius Jones, to Annamaria Olivera,” Dillon said, fidgeting with his phone.
“Fine. I’ll admit anything you want,” Bradford blurted desperately. “But that won’t make it true. And you have to know that nothing I say would ever stand up in court. There’s no evidence for anything. Because
I didn’t do anything!
”
“I’m well aware that a simple admission wouldn’t be any good in court. That’s why I want details. And if they’re not consistent with what I know to be true, there
will
be consequences.”
Bradford’s mind raced. How much could Dillon really know about anything? There wasn’t much of any substance on the Avillage intranet.
Dillon held his phone up next to the gun. “Talk!”
“Ok! Ok! Where do you want me to start?” Bradford stalled.
“Start at the beginning – with Ryan Tyler’s parents.”
Bradford turned toward the side window to see a growing crowd of police cruisers congregating at a safe distance on the other side of the now roped-off interstate. From a distance he could hear the staccato “thwup-thwup-thwup” of an approaching helicopter. If he could just confabulate for long enough to give the cops time to figure out how to get him out, he might not have to give up anything incriminating.
“As you may know,” he started, speaking very slowly and deliberately, “Ryan’s dad was a cardiologist in training.”
True and verifiable,
he thought. “Well, he’d been on call the night before the car accident, and, from what I understand, he’d gotten little to no sleep.
“You can check this out yourself. It's all in the police report from the crash.”
A lie, but there’s no way Dillon could know that.
“The investigating officers speculated that he must have fallen asleep at the wheel...”
“Wrong, asswipe,” Dillon interrupted, frustratedly gritting his teeth. “One. More. Chance. And I’m serious.”
“Alright. You’re right. You got me. That’s not true – or it might be. I don’t know. Like I said, I had nothing to do with what happened to his parents!”
He paused as if to regroup, stealing another look at the police through the side window.
“But as for poor J’Quarius Jones, I do know about his death. Not a day goes by that I don’t question how I handled that situation.” Again he paused reflectively for as long as he thought Dillon would let him.
“When Dr. Bennett first called to tell me that he’d passed out on the basketball court, I had literally
just
landed in New York from Panama. I mean, I was still on the plane.”
True.
“And I’d been seated next to some screaming baby, who never should have been let into first class by the way, who had kept me up the whole flight – except for the final half hour. I had finally just faded into a deep sleep when the plane touched down, and the stewardess shook me awake.
“With the change in time zone and having just been woken up from a sound sleep, yet still sorely sleep-deprived, could I have potentially missed some details in the medical jargon Dr. Bennett was rattling off at me a mile a minute? It’s possible. But I don’t think so.
“I don’t know if you’re aware of this, but the University of Chicago Children’s Hospital actually chose to settle a malpractice case I brought against Dr. Bennett rather than risk taking it to trial.”
True.
“Personally, I was just ready to put the whole thing behind me, so I took their offer, and I donated...”
“Just shut up,” Dillon sighed, shaking his head.
“I’m sorry if...”
“I said shut up!” Dillon lowered his phone back down onto the front seat. “I wasn’t even recording. I knew you’d never admit to anything.
"But you weren’t the only one stalling.
“The truth is I’m not after confessions. I know what you did, and you
are
going to pay.”
He glanced down at the display on the device resting in the passenger seat. It now blinked, “400 PPM.”
Dillon smiled as he turned back toward Bradford. “You like the ‘72 Impala? She’s a bona fide classic.” He rubbed the back of his free hand down the tattered top of the vinyl bench seat.
“Here’s an interesting fact,” he continued. “Did you know that prior to 1975, cars manufactured in the U.S. weren’t equipped with catalytic converters?
“Interesting, huh? So if something were to block the tailpipe, like some kind of debris, or snow, or something like... I don’t know... duct tape,” he said, holding up a half-used roll, “the interior of the car could very well fill up with toxic levels of carbon monoxide.
“Don’t worry. We’re not there yet.” He put the tape down and held up the carbon monoxide monitor just before it ticked up from 400 to 800 parts per million. He then pulled a long piece of 1-inch PFA tubing out of his backpack and cracked the driver’s side window, just enough to thread about a foot and a half of the tubing out into the clean outside air. “Sorry. I’ve only got one,” he said sarcastically before sucking in a long drag of fresh air.
For the first time since he’d first pulled the gun, he could see true terror back in Bradford’s eyes. And he relished it.
“If you try to get out of the car, I promise you I’ll shoot straight for your spinal cord.” The pure hatred in his eyes convinced Bradford he meant it. He took another series of breaths through the tube. “Or you can stay in here with me and take your chances; I’m not gonna let you die.”
The monitor emitted an agitated series of beeps as the display ticked up from 800 to 1600 parts per million of carbon monoxide.
“You feeling ok?” Dillon asked pseudo-empathetically, unable to fully suppress his smile. “Because you’re not looking too good.”
Bradford tried his best to stay stoic, but he couldn’t quite fight off an involuntary urge to swallow awkwardly as an unnatural rush of saliva filled his mouth.
Dillon gleefully sucked in a few more breaths through his tube. “You’ve probably got a little bit of a headache right now? Yeah, unfortunately that’s gonna get quite a bit worse.
“By the time this thing ticks up to 3200, you’ll probably be vomiting that eight-dollar latte you were so smugly sipping a little while ago all over the back seat.
“If you’re still awake to see 6400, you won’t remember it.
“But that’s right around the time I’m gonna give myself up, and one of those heroes over there will rush in and save your life.”
Not unexpectedly, Dillon's phone interrupted his soliloquy.
“Hello? What? FBI? No, I’m sorry. I don’t know any FBI. You must have the wrong number.” He switched his ringer to silent and dropped the phone to the floorboard.
Bradford’s sallow complexion was lacquered with perspiration, his lips pressed firmly together, completely devoid of color, and he seemed to be concentrating intently on not vomiting. That could only last for so long.
~~~
Ryan anxiously turned on the TV and flipped to the news, where he found a field correspondent, just back from commercial, rehashing Dillon’s story from the southbound lanes of the interstate, flanked on both sides by the flashing lights of more than a dozen police cruisers. Mind-numbingly repetitive aerial and ground shots of the green Impala offered no clue as to what was going on inside.
“CNN has now confirmed that the owner of the car is one Dillon Higley, a freshman at MIT,” the correspondent reported as Dillon’s high school yearbook photo flashed briefly on the screen. “And his hostage is believed to be Aaron Bradford, executive vice president of Avillage, Incorporated.”
“Witnesses from inside the Southern New Hampshire travel plaza – just a few hundred yards north of us – state that Mr. Bradford had arrived at the food court alone but seemed to have been expecting Mr. Higley. The two men held a brief, but what some have referred to as ‘intense,’ conversation, after which Mr. Bradford stood, apparently with the intention to leave.
“It was at this point that Mr. Higley brandished a weapon – a handgun of some sort – and forcibly led Mr. Bradford out of the rest area and into his car. From there, for unclear reasons, he
backed
up the exit ramp and continued southward down the northbound emergency lane, just past the state line into Massachusetts, where the car you’re looking at live still sits.”
It all came together instantly for Ryan. A week earlier Dillon had told him he’d been reevaluating his priorities. And the last time he’d signed off on the walkie-talkie, there had been such an unmistakable finality in his tone.
Dillon didn’t really have career goals or ambitions. He didn’t care about money. He cared about two things in life – reuniting with his father, which was never going to happen outside prison walls, and getting some measure of revenge against Avillage. In his mind, he probably thought he’d come up with the best possible way to have a chance of accomplishing both.
His dad was in
federal
prison. He’d purposely transported Bradford across state lines to make the kidnapping a
federal
crime.
~~~
“You’re probably asking yourself, ‘why carbon monoxide?’ Aren’t you?” Dillon asked his hostage who now appeared terminally seasick. “Well...”
Bradford’s eyes suddenly bulged and his cheeks puffed out as he squeezed his lips together even more tightly.
“Go ahead. I’ll wait,” Dillon said, backing away from the seat-back to take a few deep breaths through the PFA tubing.
Bradford lurched forward, temporarily disappearing behind the front seat. Sounds of choking and retching and splattering were followed by coughs and gasps, and then more gagging and splashing as the acrid odor of stomach acid and stale coffee filled the car.
Bradford’s head eventually popped back up into view, his face now sheet white. Had it been anyone else in the world, Dillon couldn’t have helped but feel sorry for him.
“So, as I was saying,” he continued as if nothing had happened, “carbon monoxide is kind of the gift that keeps on giving.
“What you’re experiencing now are kind of the typical signs of acute poisoning.
“But you’ll eventually get to a hospital, and they’ll probably treat you with hyperbaric oxygen, and it won’t be too long till you’re feeling considerably better.
“Then at some point down the road – it might be three days from now, or it might be three weeks – but at some point, it’s going to come back.” He looked Bradford right in his glossed-over eyes, wondering how much he was still comprehending. It looked like enough.
“You could end up with personality change (which in your case could only be a good thing) or possibly seizures, dementia, symptoms of Parkinson’s Disease, or all of the above.
“You’ll live. But my hope is that you’ll wish you hadn’t.” Just as he concluded, Bradford’s eyes rolled back, and he quietly slumped over to his left side.
The monitor let out a continuous piercing scream, as it detected an imminently lethal air concentration of 6400 PPM. Dillon reached over to switch it off and then turned the car’s engine off to avoid raising the carbon monoxide concentration any further.
He sat in relative silence, breathing comfortably through his tube, for a couple of minutes. For the first time in years, he actually felt at peace. He then looked down at his watch. Time was up. With no further need for a gun, he threw it down to the floorboard and slowly opened the car door.
A swarm of screaming police officers charged toward him as he timidly tip-toed away from the car with his hands above his head.
~~~
Bradford’s doctors had cleared him to go back to work in three weeks. It had been a week and half, and he was already right back micromanaging and making his underlings’ lives miserable as if nothing had happened. Except for the occasional headache and a little fatigue toward the end of the day, he hadn’t experienced any of the late effects Dillon had predicted after the poisoning.
He’d just finished hanging up on his secretary for neglecting to add something to his calendar when Corbett Hermanson walked in. “It isn’t true is it?” Corbett asked.
“Ever heard of knocking?” Bradford sneered. “And could you please give me a shred of context before you start spouting off stupid questions.”
“The email you sent out this morning. It isn’t true is it?”
“I didn’t send any email out.”
Corbett looked confused – and then terrified as it occurred to him for the first time:
Maybe Dillon hadn’t been bluffing about planting something on their system.