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  Perfect Trust

  ( A Rowan Gant investigation - 3 )

  M R Sellars

  Perfect Trust

  M. R. Sellars

  Late February

  Old Chain of Rocks Bridge

  Saint Louis, Missouri

  PROLOGUE

  Eldon Andrew Porter was trying desperately to make sense of his current situation.

  He knew that he shouldn’t be unsteadily perched here on this cold steel girder high above the icy waters of the Mississippi river. He also knew that he shouldn’t be forced to finish by hand a job meant for, and started by, a hangman’s noose. But the most important thing he knew, without any sense of doubt, was that he was short on time.

  What he didn’t know was just how this peril had come to pass.

  The thing that kept going through his mind was that this very simply was not how it was supposed to happen. Still, no matter how hard he tried he couldn’t focus on exactly what had gone wrong.

  Once again, he mulled through the last few events leading up to this particular moment in time.

  He had lured the warlock to the bridge.

  He had applied the razors of the Malleus Maleficarum, a mere formality as such, because by the warlock’s own public actions and admissions he was quite obviously guilty of the sin of WitchCraft.

  He had even applied the test of “pricking” in order to be certain of the accused one’s guilt. Of course, the warlock had tried to deceive him in this test by screaming out in pain when the ice pick pierced his flesh, but Eldon knew this to be a ruse. A trick used by the impenitent sorcerer in order to avoid his due punishment.

  He had not been fooled.

  With the warlock’s guilt proven, Eldon had then set forth the judgment as decreed by Almighty God and the Holy Church.

  He had proceeded with the sentence by placing the noose about the man’s neck and pronouncing his punishment as death by hanging. And finally, he had executed that sentence by throwing the warlock over the side of the bridge…

  That should have been it. End of story. But something had gone quite terribly wrong.

  Eldon was finding it hard to think, his head ached so miserably. As he mulled over the events yet again, he vaguely remembered that for some reason he had pitched over the railing himself. Somewhere within that ghostly memory he also recalled feeling a jarring impact against the steel girder that stopped his fall. Then, everything had faded to black.

  The top of his head burned like fire whenever he touched it. There was a tortured spot on his scalp that seemed devoid of hair. It was damp and sticky and the wetness clung to his hand when he pulled it away. From its feel, he assumed it must be blood.

  The raucous clamor of loud music blaring from the warlock’s vehicle on the bridge above blended hesitantly with the eerie sounds of the ice-choked river. The cacophony was disconcerting, and when combined with the pain, it made it even harder for Eldon to concentrate.

  “What could have gone wrong?” he wondered silently.

  Again, he rewound the sketchy memories and thought through the scenario yet another time.

  He had lifted the warlock upward, pronouncing the punishment as he did so. Then, straining against the man’s weight, he had pushed his arms outward to thrust the condemned over the railing and into the foggy night.

  It was then that his head suddenly began stinging.

  His scalp had felt as if it was on fire, and he was instantly doubled forward against the railing himself. Gasping, he was deprived of the breath that had been forced from his lungs by the sudden crush against the blue and green steel barrier. The rest of it was a blur, and a split second later he had blacked out.

  The fact that he had blacked out was troubling. He hadn’t had any of those episodes for such a long time. Not since prison. He didn’t even want to think that it could possibly be happening again. It had been years since he had blacked out, hadn’t it?

  Or had it only been months? He couldn’t remember. The uncertainty forced him to consider another option. Could this predicament be his own fault? Had he simply fainted and fallen over the side?

  No, he decided. There was something different at work here. There was the burning in his scalp. His episodes had never been preceded nor followed by pain, ever. This felt like someone had physically ripped the hair from his head.

  But how could the warlock have done that?

  His hands were bound.

  He had tied the warlock’s hands, hadn’t he?

  Surely he had done so.

  The sudden rush of the real-time events brushed aside his fractured attempts at reasoning and flooded in to answer the question.

  Eldon watched his hand as he sought to choke the life from the warlock hanging in front of him. He also watched, as well as felt, a smaller hand desperately clawing at his own bony fingers.

  The warlock’s hands weren’t bound. They were free.

  Had he been in such a rush that he had merely forgotten to bind the hands of the condemned?

  No, he couldn’t have been that careless. He refused to believe it. He wouldn’t have forgotten to do so simple and necessary a task before hanging one accused of the heresy of WitchCraft.

  Somehow the warlock had tricked him. He had conjured a glamour that made him believe he had completed the necessary tasks when in fact he had not.

  But…that couldn’t be. He should be immune to the conjurings of the demonic, for he was righteous in his path. This revelation was almost as disturbing to Eldon as the fact that the warlock still lived. He felt certain that it bore a need for inner reflection and perhaps even judgment upon one’s self.

  But not right now.

  Not at this particular moment.

  There was a more pressing judgment at hand.

  Still, Eldon found himself unable to ignore the question of why the hangman’s noose had not done its job…

  In a burning fit of curiosity, he relinquished his single-handed grip around the man’s throat for an ever so brief moment and quickly felt for the nylon rope.

  It wasn’t there!

  In that fateful second, the warlock coughed and gasped, quickly sucking in the air he had previously been denied.

  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 th
at 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.