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Crown Vic to a Parallel World: Stolen Love The third and final installment of the ongoing adventures of Church Philips
11
What do you mean he's not back yet?
"Sir. Sir! SIR!" Cellarius demanded as he shook me awake. "Sir, you must wake up!"
"What? What the fuck?" I asked and sat up.
Cellarius waited impatiently while I rubbed the sleep out of my eyes. The old butler was wringing his hands in a nervous motion that I'd never seen him use before. He didn't give me a chance to figure out which end was up before he was harping on me again. "Master Shawn isn't back yet!" He announced like his words should mean something to me. "Do you hear? Master Shawn is not back yet!"
I didn't get why Cellarius was so upset. It was rare that Shawn would stay out all night, but not unheard of. If he got done at the office late and was too tired to fly back, he sometimes would spend the night in town, either at his office or at the hotel. Usually, he called or sent me a message when he decided to stay over.
I figured that he may have done so, and I just hadn't seen it yet. Even if he didn't, he may have decided not to because of the lateness of the hour when he made the decision to stay over. There were a million possible reasons for Shawn not to be home and for him not to have called.
I reached for my shirt pocket to find my phone, but my hand landed on my bare chest. My shirt had spent the night under my head, presumably with my phone in its pocket. I shook the shirt out, found the phone and checked it. There was no message, but the light in the room told me it was still very early in the morning. It was obviously too early to be worried. Shawn probably wasn't even awake yet.
"SIR!" Cellarius demanded.
My bleary confusion and the butler's repeated insistence made me angry to the point that I snapped at him. "JESUS FUCK, WHAT?"
Cellarius forced calm over himself and explained his concerns. "Master Shawn's plane is down. It was not forced down nor did it crash. The plane landed sixty miles to the east of here. It's been there for several hours. I cannot reach Master Shawn or Master Met by phone or through the aircraft's communication system. I fear something has happened to them. Please, sir, we must go to them."
I checked my left wrist. The bracelet that signified my marriage to Shawn was still in place, still sealed to my wrist with his living magic. That meant that Shawn was alive. At the very least, the absolute minimum, I knew he was alive. That was something.
I stood up and took a step and realized my feet were bare. I sat down and put my heels on and stood up. I tried to put my phone in my shirt pocket, but I hadn't put the shirt on yet. I snatched it from the couch and threw it over my head and put my phone in the pocket. I put my hand on Cellarius' shoulder to steady myself and think for a minute. I had to think. If something was wrong and Shawn needed help, I had to be able to help him. It didn't make sense to go off half-cocked.
"You know where they are?" I asked.
My butler held up his phone with the plane's location shown on a GPS map. "Good." I racked my foggy mind for what to do next. "We might need help." I thought aloud. "Who...who can help?"
I ran over the list of the people on the property and remembered my old teammate, Bem. "Get Bem." I ordered. "I'll get the car started. Get Bem, just fucking get him. I'll be in the car." As soon as I took my hand from his shoulder, Cellarius literally sprinted away to do as I asked.
I stumbled into the kitchen, drank several handfuls of water from the tap, and lurched to the garage. I got in the Vic and started it up. A few impatient minutes later Bem jerked the passenger door open and jumped in. He slid over against me so Cellarius could get in beside him.
I threw the car in gear and mashed the throttle down. We left the garage sideways and accelerated onto the plains. The speed climbed as Cellarius pointed the direction of travel through the windshield and explained the situation to Bem. I held the gas pedal to the floor and ignored all the dashboard gauges. I didn't give a fuck if the car overheated or if it had oil pressure or what speed we were achieving. I knew the old beast would get me to Shawn. I had faith in my irreplaceable mechanical partner.
I don't know how many minutes went by before we saw the plane. Too many. It felt like we drove for a year before we saw it and ten more years before I could stop next to it and park. Bem yelled at me to wait. He wanted me to approach cautiously. I ignored him.
Everything looked more or less OK as I leapt from the still-running car and ran to the plane. It was sitting level and normal on the hard packed dirt of the plains, and it showed no visible damage. It had obviously landed deliberately as opposed to crashed.
I ran to the open door and climbed the fold-down steps into the cabin. Inside, I saw Met tied to one of the center-facing passenger chairs, a white gag in his mouth. He was awake and heard me coming. He'd started to struggle against his bindings as I approached. I pulled the gag from his mouth.
"THEY TOOK HIM!" He screamed in my face, his voice raspy from the gag. "We landed for a distress call, and they took him. Left in a plane. Tied me up. They took him! THEY TOOK HIM! THEY TOOK HIM!"
"WHAT DO YOU MEAN?" I shouted back. "TOOK WHO?"
"SHAWN! HE'S BEEN KIDNAPPED!"
An icy hand reached into my chest and squeezed my heart until it stopped. My body stopped moving, my mind stopped thinking, everything froze. I felt like I'd been submerged in wet cement. I went numb and time seemed to stop.
Bem appeared in front of me. He untied Met and helped him out of his seat and out of the plane. Cellarius appeared in the plane. He paced the aisle and wrung his hands and muttered words I didn't hear. Bem came into the cabin from the outside. He loitered near the door and talked on his phone. He seemed to make several calls, but I didn't catch any of what he said. Bem ended the last call and came to stand in front of me. He spoke but I didn't hear any of the words. It was like he was speaking with his mouth full of cotton.
The look on Bem's face worried me. I'd seen it before, but not in a very long time. He had a stern expression and depthless, dead eyes. I hadn't seen that look since before he'd asked Mary to marry him, and she'd said `yes.' The last time I saw that look, Bem was talking about killing my former brother-in-law. I knew that something was wrong. If Bem looked like that, something was very wrong. I knew what that something was, but my mind didn't seem to want to acknowledge what that thing was.
Whatever it was, it was so wrong, it was too wrong to think about. The thing that was wrong...it was...I couldn't...something wouldn't...Bem was looking up at me and talking some more. He was talking, then he was talking in a louder voice, then he was yelling. Bem seemed angry with me.
I watched Bem clench his jaw and draw his right hand back in a wide arc. I watched the hand from the corner of my eye as it moved toward my face, faster and faster, until Bem's palm made hard contact with the left side of my face. The contact was abrupt and violent and spun my head around. It was like he'd hit my reset button. My mind started working and my body came unstuck.
"CHURCH!" Bem shouted and wound up to strike me again.
I caught his hand and held it. The thing that I couldn't think about slammed into my mind like a blow from a sledgehammer. Someone had taken my husband away from me. Someone had kidnapped the person that mattered most to me in the world. Impotent, white-hot rage flared inside me. Someone took my husband from me, and I hated them. I hated them and I hated what they did, and they would pay. "What do we do?" I asked.
Bem took his hand from mine and commanded my attention with his shallow dead eyes. "We get him back." He said evenly and calmly. "I need you to stay with me. I need you engaged. I need you angry enough to be focused but I need you calm and centered and with me. Listen to me. Are you listening?" He asked.
"Yes."
"They will NOT hurt him. They did this for MONEY. If they hurt him, you will have no reason to pay them. That's how this works and they know it, and we know it, and they know that we know it. THEY...WILL...NOT...HURT...SHAWN. We WILL get him back and we will PUNISH those who did this." Bem's left hand rose to his right shoulder, his arm made a vee across his body, and his right hand slipped into his pants' pocket. "I will kill them myself." Bem said flat and even and with stony sincerity.
I was angry and I was terrified. I was worried about Shawn, about what they could be doing to him, about how scared he would be, about what was going to happen. I wrapped my fears around Bem's words like a drowning man would cling to a life preserver. I held onto his reassurance, and I embraced my anger. I welcomed the anger like it was a friend, a physical thing. In my mind, there was a great wall of anger around all my other emotions. It protected me from them, and it would help me help Shawn.
In my mind, the people who took my husband were already dead, they just hadn't laid down yet. They wouldn't lay down until they gave Shawn back to me. Once they did that, Bem and I would show them where to rest and we would tuck them into their eternity.
I gritted my teeth and mentally promised Shawn that we would save him, whatever that meant. I promised that I would hand over my entire fortune, my very life if it would save his. I looked to my teammate, Bem the problem solver, and I had faith that what he said was true. The man had never lied to me, and besides that, believing that Shawn would be OK was the only way I could believe. If I thought that he was lost to me...I would die.
I noticed that Bem was speaking again. I dragged myself out of my thoughts to listen to him. "I called Neb and Cy and Steward Summas. They will meet us at the house as soon as they can. I need to call Mary and tell her, so she can tell Lenis and the others. I need to download the records from the plane's flight recorder, and I need to take pictures of the scene before it changes, then I need you to drive us back. Can I trust you to keep it together? Church, I need you to hold together. Are you with me?"
I nodded to my friend, to my teammate.
Bem shook his head and advanced on me. He closed in as far as he could and stared up into my face. "I need more than that. Say it. Tell me you're with me. SAY IT!" He commanded.
"I'M WITH YOU!" I screamed in his face.
"GOOD! STAY THAT WAY!" He screamed back.
I nodded again. Bem shifted his weight like he was about to move away and go about his business, but his feet remained planted in front of me. "I love him to, Big Guy." He said tenderly. "I promise...I swear on my life I will bring him back to you."
Bem moved around me to the cockpit of the plane to do some of the things he'd said he needed to do. I stumbled out of the cabin, down the fold out steps, and walked over to the Vic.
Cellarius was weeping bitterly in the front seat as the door hung open and funneled the breeze of the plains into the cab of the car. I went around to the driver's side and reached in to shut off the idling engine. Met was balled up in the back seat, his head in his hands. His eyes met mine as I looked at him through the window glass. His cheeks had an angry red welt that ran from his mouth toward the back of his head from the gag.
Met cleared his throat and tried to speak, but his voice wouldn't work. He cleared it again to say, "I'm sorry."
His pointless apology fanned the flame of my anger. In that instant the man that I'd known for years meant nothing to me, except as a function of his role in the kidnapping of my husband. I knew he was either a bystander or a participant. If he was the former, I was merely disappointed that they took Shawn instead of him, if he was the latter...well, that meant something different. Either way, I didn't want to hear from him. "Shut up." I replied to his apology.
"Church, I..." He started again.
I cut him off with a glare and an angry wave. "Save it. You either have nothing to apologize for, and none of this is your fault, or you were involved, and you won't have to be sorry, because you'll be dead."
"You can't think I..." He objected and raised his hands to indicate the entire situation.
I shook my head at him. "I don't think anything. I don't know. I'm just telling you how I plan to deal with whoever was involved."
Met quieted and went back to holding his head in his hands. I went to the front of the car and sat on the hood to wait for Bem.