HOSTAGE (To Love A Killer) (3 page)

              The memories kept coming, even after he had left, they were unstoppable. It was a very deep well. Hunter collapsed into a ball, her legs turning to rubber and her body quaking as the force of pent up adrenalin dissipated from her body in a riot of shivers. 

              She was also hiding from Ash. The way she kept her head down helped to avoid his gaze. She couldn’t bring herself to look at him, even though she could feel his eyes on her, feel his need to be forgiven. If that’s what he wanted, it was too big a request, or did he want to feed her another vague string of lies? It was getting too hard to tell whose side Ash was really on. Hunter was beginning to think Ash could only be on one side, his own, whether or not that aligned with hers was probably irrelevant to him. Hunter needed to decide what to do. She knew it was imperative to do so, but she wasn’t ready to face the knife her father had left her. Not until she had calmed down. The feeling of wanting Ash dead was still with her.

              “Hunter, I can explain,” said Ash from the corner of the room.

              “Is that why you had me circle around in the hallway and wait outside the apartment door?” She demanded, her voice furiously deep. “So you could regroup with him? Get my father up to speed? You were working for him the whole time?!”

              “That’s not true, Hunter,” he said. His voice was deep and smooth, silken.

              Hunter remembered when that voice had wrapped around her, soothing her to sleep. There had been a time when she had believed he was on her side, that he was her protector. There had been no greater feeling. Had all that been a ploy?

              “Lorne didn’t know I had abandoned my contract to bring you back. All he knew was that I had lost touch. I thought I could buy some time by playing him and acting like I was still following through with my contract to bring you to him.”

              Though he couldn’t see her face buried in her knees, Ash could tell she wasn’t listening, and if she was, she didn’t believe him. Her brown, wavy hair lay fallen at soft angles around her shoulders and knees. Her pale skin looked milky smooth in contrast, and he wished he could crawl to her and wrap his arms around her. He wished he could lift her angelic face up, chin between his fingers, and kiss her.

              There had been so many things he could have done after discovering Grizzly here in the apartment, and clearly the option he ran with had been a poor choice, but in the moment Ash had decided the safest choice was to get Hunter as far away from her father as possible, into the hallway, and try to take him down alone. But when he had entered the apartment, he realized that to be adversarial at all would risk the girls’ lives, so he had shifted tactics. Grizzly had acted as though Ash was still working for him. He hadn’t shown one iota of confrontation. So Ash had played into that.

              “Look,” he said, as he attempted to scoot closer to Hunter until the cuffs around his wrists clanked against the radiator, stopping him from moving further. “I don’t expect you to understand any of this, but I tried to make the best decision to keep everyone alive.”

              “You’ll say anything,” she said, softly, her voice hollow with hopelessness. “You’ve been playing whoever needs to be played to keep yourself alive. It’s still a betrayal, Ash.”

              She wanted to stay mad at him, ride the angry high, and let it carry her through the act of killing him, but Hunter knew that deep down that wasn’t what she wanted. As she lifted her head slowly off her knees, she found it impossible to lift her gaze as well. Was she finally ready to look at Ash? All she wanted was to see a glimmer of love behind his eyes. She wanted to see that she meant something to him. She didn’t want to let go of what they had, no matter how fucked up things had become between them. It was then that Hunter realized she could kill someone she loved, but she couldn’t kill someone who loved her. If she could find evidence that he loved her, she wouldn’t allow herself to be compelled to murder him out of rage.

              As she lifted her eyes, remembering how he had told her he was falling in love with her; Hunter braced herself for the truth, no matter how heartbreaking it could be.

              “I shot Travis in this room,” she said turning furious. “I put us in a position where it was only you and me and all the girls against one man, my dad. We could’ve taken him out, Ash. Grizzly could be dead by now, the world a better place. What were you thinking?”

              The burning anger of her words extinguished all hope that she loved him, and Ash began to break down, crumbling into regret.

              “I don’t know how to do this, Hunter,” he said. His tone sounded defeated. “I don’t know how I’m supposed to be with you. I don’t know how to be with anyone. I’m damaged.”

              All of a sudden, Hunter popped her hand through the plastic tie, freeing it. She hadn’t been aware of steadily working her wrist through it this entire time. It was an odd moment to accomplish something so exciting.

              The pain of Ash essentially giving reasons to end things trumped all else.

              It was too confusing, too sad to hear that he didn’t know how to be with her. Hunter’s heart sank, plummeting to her stomach. Her eyesight went soft, blurring her vision. The sting of his words propelled Hunter into a foggy state as she receded inwards. It was as though she was hiding inside of herself, blocking the world out.

              Because of that, she didn’t realize she was reaching forward. She didn’t notice when she grasped the knife handle firmly in her hand, but Ash did.

              “Hunter?” he asked, growing scared that she was becoming unreachable. He watched, as her eyes seemed to go blank, as though she was becoming vacant and empty, beyond her senses.

              She lifted the knife, twisted around herself, and cut the plastic tie from around her left wrist.

              Hunter felt like she was losing it, slipping into a dream. Clouds of confusion filled her eyes like a gray haze that filtered out everything around her, distancing her from reality.

              This was what it used to be like, Hunter was clear headed enough to realize that much. Life had been so stressful at the farmhouse that she seemed to float through the day in a dark haze, far removed from everyone and everything around her. It had been like nothing was real. She had to view life in that manner. If she had allowed herself to
believe
what was happening to her and the other girls, if she had taken it for reality, she would’ve gone mad. Eventually, she had gone mad anyway, hadn’t she?

              She had forgotten what it was like, though, until this very moment. She had been so afraid of her father that it brought on this clumsy effect, just like it used to when she had been a little girl.

              Hunter didn’t know how to shake this off. She felt herself slipping away, and she didn’t know how to stop it.

              Ash’s heart began to race in a panic as Hunter slid towards him across the floor, pointing the knife straight out. Whatever visceral, animalistic, reaction she was riding out in order to recover from being exposed to her greatest abuser, was not going to end well for Ash if she continued to slide towards him. She needed to snap out of it.

              The knife’s tip glided slowly through the air guided by Hunter’s hand. Ash backed away until he could back up no further. His head pressed against the wall, but she kept extending the knife. It was nearly at his throat.

              Ash stared intensely into Hunter’s eyes, but the light had gone out behind them. She was empty. It was as though she had slid downward, inward, and was hiding in the far recesses of her mind. Did she even know she had a knife in her hand? For a split second, he got a flash of the possibility that Hunter could rise out of her fugue state, discover his dead body, and never forgive herself if he didn’t stop her from going through with this. Was this how all those little girls had died? Had Hunter killed them, carrying out the mercy killings, in a dissociative haze? Was that what she had meant when she had described it as “going crazy”?

              Ash was not about to let that happen now. For her sake and his own, he needed to get through to her, jar her out of this.

              “Hunter, can you talk to me?” he asked as the knife tip pressed into the side of his neck. It was deadly cool.

              Her eyes looked so sad. She looked like a scared child. There was something about the way she held her face, tipped down, that made her look ashamed. Was she lost in some kind of memory? She didn’t seem to hear him at all.

              “Hunter I need you to respond,” he said again, making his voice soft and caring, gentle in hopes of luring her back to the present. “Hunter, we’re in your apartment, in Brooklyn. You’re safe. Everything’s going to be okay. You’re holding a knife. Can you put the knife down?”

              Hunter’s gaze seemed to float around absentmindedly, which terrified Ash, until it landed on the knife. He watched as Hunter slowly began to register where she was, what she was doing. He could see she was still in a state of confusion, but at least she appeared to be coming back.

              “It’s my job,” she whispered.

              “What’s your job, Hunter?” asked Ash immediately, hoping to engage her further and draw her out.

              “He left me here with this,” she said, referring blankly to the knife in her hand. “It’s my job.”

              “To kill me?” he asked.

              Hunter slowly nodded.

              “No it’s not, Hunter. You don’t have to do this. You’re overwhelmed,” he said.

              “If I don’t do this, they’ll bring me to the barn. This is my job and if I don’t do it, things will be bad for me.”

              Suddenly Ash realized that if Hunter was in a memory, or playing out some kind of habitual response to her abuse as though she was still a child, then the memory was revealing that at some point Hunter had traded being abused by the men with killing the little girls. Her father must have offered her the trade when he discovered she had killed a few girls on her own anyway. Was that why Hunter had escaped all those years ago?  She hadn’t escaped abuse; she had escaped being forced to kill.

              All of a sudden Ash realized that, yes, that was the reason. She hadn’t escaped to avoid the barn, to end being tortured there. She had escaped to put an end to her role in killing.

              Grizzly had said that he needed soldiers.

              That’s what Hunter had been to him, what she had been doing for him. He had already turned her into a killer, and he needed her back.

              Hunter was a killer just like Ash, and she didn’t even know it.

              “Hunter, that’s not your job anymore,” Ash said, desperate to make eye contact, but she wasn’t fully present. “Hunter, do you understand me? That’s not your job anymore.”

              Hunter pressed the knife harder against his throat, and Ash felt the blade slicing into the shallowest layer of his skin.

              “Hunter! That’s not your job anymore,” he repeated.

              Her brow furrowed and her pupils sharpened, retracting.

              “It’s not?” she asked as though drifting through a fog, unsure which way was out and which way was deeper into the sea of lost thoughts.

              “No, it’s not,” he said. “Come back to me, Hunter.”

              “I can’t go back into the barn,” she said in a whisper, pressing the knife deeper in.

              Ash felt a hot trickle of blood roll down his neck. If he didn’t get through to her soon, she was going to carry out the memory. She was going to kill him.

*              *              *

              The air was stagnant, thick with heat and humidity despite the late hour. The temperature usually cooled this late at night. It hadn’t tonight.

              The rank stench from the canal hung in the air, competing with the horrid smell of decomposing flesh. Detective Sarah Voss found it revolting to both breathe and examine the body.

              She had been out here for hours; having been called here due to some kind shooting that resulted from a raid on the sugar factory. Cops had discovered a body, shot, they had said, point blank straight to the chest. All she had been told over the phone was that it hadn’t been a kid and didn’t appear to be gang related, which put the case at a cut above the rest. Most street crimes went unsolved, lost in a sea of kids trying to cover for each other until the cat’s cradle of misinformation and half truths sank the trail into unreachable depths, otherwise known as the unsolved murders shelf at the back of the evidence room. This one would be different. It was an adult who had been killed, and he was from out of state.

              The lights that were shining down, angled directly over the body, were blindingly bright, but Sarah was more interested in illuminating the canal. The lights over the water there weren’t so bright or helpful. They seemed to reflect against the water’s surface, making it impossible to see into the depths. If the unis couldn’t spot something, like the murder weapon, she would request a diver. She had only been holding off on the request because her partner had been against her hunch that the gun was in the canal. He reasoned that since there were no prints on the railing there was no indication the murderer had thrown the weapon into the water. Sarah thought otherwise.