Freedom Incorporated by Peter Tylee (the best ebook reader for android .TXT) 📕

today, don’t you agree?” He took the time to lick Jen’s right earlobe and held the receiver up to her mouth. “Be a dear and say hello, will you?”

“Dan?” Jen was trembling with the effort of keeping tears from her eyes. She didn’t want to give Esteban the satisfaction.

His eyes shot wide with another shock of helplessness. What can I say? It was the most excruciating word he’d ever uttered, “Jen?”

“Dan, it’s me-”

Esteban stole the receiver back and planted an unwelcome kiss on Jen’s cheek. “That’s enough for now.” He smiled maliciously. “That’s right, Daniel, her mouth. We’ll lay a thin track of our special glue along her lips and seal them shut.”

Dan remembered the state of his wife’s body when he’d identified her in the morgue. He remembered how blue she’d looked and remembered the signs of stress along her eyelids where she’d tried to tear them open.

“We’ll give her four hours to think about that too. Unfortunately, it doesn’t stop the sobbing. Or at least that bitch you called a wife made an awful noise. It does stop the begging though, so that’s something. But that’s all in the past, right? Onward and upward.” He appraised Jen with an admiring look. “Jen looks like a better screw than your wife anyway.”

Dan crawled further from Samantha and Cookie, who were watching with anxious expressions. “If you touch her, I swear…”

“What?” Anger replaced Esteban’s pleasure. “What’re you gonna do about it, tough guy?”

“I’ll kill you.” It was the simple truth. This one man had done more damage to everything Dan held dear than the rest of the ugliness in the world combined. No matter how long it takes, I will kill you.

Esteban laughed into the phone. “You go right ahead and try. In fact, I’d be bitterly disappointed if you didn’t try. But it won’t be before Junior gets his turn with your new friend.” He audibly mocked a wince. “And he’s the really rough one. That’s why he has to go last. Do you remember all that bruising around your wife’s genitalis? That was Junior, and he’s grown worse since then. I almost pity Jennifer for what he’ll end up doing to her.”

Pity? Dan sourly doubted that Esteban was capable of such an emotion.

“After Junior’s had his jollies there won’t be much left.” Esteban revelled in the resignation he accurately read in Jen’s eyes. “We’ll glue her nostrils shut, which will leave her with two choices. She can either suffocate or tear her own lips to draw breath.” Another mock wince came through the phone to punish Dan’s waiting ear. “You read the autopsy report on your wife, so you know what she chose. I wonder what Jennifer will do?”

“You’re an animal,” Dan whispered, a primal rage consuming what was left of his sanity - just as Esteban had hoped.

Esteban thought about that for a moment. “Yes, I am. And proud of it. You know, your wife used her bloodied lips to plea for her life again so we had to leave her writhing in agony for another four hours.” He sighed. “She really was a mess, and the thrashing Junior gave her nearly tore her hands off. It turns my stomach to think about it, truly it does.” But the merry tone of his voice betrayed the lie. “Anyway, if Jennifer’s anywhere near as determined as your wife, we’ll have to spend the final four hours getting drunk. After all, we’ll need full bladders.”

Dan’s world was swirling from forces more powerful than the chemicals he’d inhaled. He felt the final strings of his sanity fraying at the edges.

“You know what’s next, don’t you? You probably pieced it together from the pitiful amount of forensic evidence the Australian detectives slipped you. We’ll clamp her head in a vice, glue her messy lips around a funnel, and take turns pissing in it until she drowns on our beer reeking urine.”

Snap. Dan screamed into the phone, an unintelligible mass of raw energy that, despite the drone of the engine, everyone in the land rover could hear buzzing through Esteban’s mobile. “Your life is forfeit!”

Esteban laughed, enraging Dan further.

“Come and get me.” With a final sneer, he hung up, leaving Dan on his hands and knees listening to the beeping tones of the termination signal.

Dan tightened his grip on the phone until the plastic cracked and he smashed it against the carpet, bending the areal. In a fit of rage he pounded it again and again until the case split and bits of shattered PCB cartwheeled across the floor.

“What is it?” Samantha retreated into Cookie’s arms, frightened by Dan’s violent outburst.

Dan didn’t reply. He couldn’t reply. His mind had collapsed and was tormenting him with visions of his tortured wife’s body as she lay on the coroner’s table. Why? He bit hard on his lips to stop the scream that was about to boil from his lungs. Fucking why? It didn’t make sense. Dark emotions swamped him. Anger seethed through every cell in his body and projected a singular desire for revenge, to take an axe and smash it into those who had snatched his beloved wife. He wanted to maim, to kill and to destroy. He gathered every ounce of energy he had and bent it toward Esteban’s death. The result was a poisoned core, so damaged that he doubted he was capable of feeling anything but hatred. It generated a bloodlust unquenchable by anything except Esteban’s entrails.

Samantha wasn’t the only one to recoil from Dan’s transformation. Cookie saw the void in Dan’s eyes and wondered what it was. It wasn’t anger, nor was it any feeling he’d had the luxury to catalogue. The closest match was pure, untainted death, living in the mind of a man. He flinched, wondering whether Dan would still recognise they weren’t the enemy.

“Who was that?” Cookie’s voice cracked with a concoction of fatigue and fear.

Dan viciously snarled his reply, a guttural bark that could’ve come from the throat of a wolf. “He killed my wife.”

That stunned Cookie into silence and brought compassion flooding to Samantha’s fearful eyes.

“And he’s going to kill Jen too,” Dan said, nearly chocking on the words.

“Is there anything we can do?”

Dan laughed, cursing himself for his stupidity. Why did I let her go outside? I knew it was dangerous and I let her go anyway. At that moment, an unwelcome emotion surfaced from his past. He hated himself. He loathed what he was and what he’d done. Someone had once told him that people were judged by their actions in life, not by how much money they made. If that were the case, and if there were an afterlife, then he’d never see Katherine again because he’d rot in hell. He wished he had the power to turn back the clock and hated that he couldn’t. He’d begged to revisit his past in the weeks after Katherine’s murder, but no God had responded to his pleas. His reflection in the mirror revolted him and, eleven months ago, he’d smashed every mirror in the house, bloodying his knuckles and wallowing in the pain from the shards. I deserve pain. He preferred physical agony to the emotional variety; he’d already taken a gutful of that.

How could I be so fucking careless? It was just as bad as if he’d killed Jen with his own hands. There’s no excuse for negligence.

But, cruelly, it gave him purpose. He had something to work toward. He doubted he’d be in time to save Jen from her hideous fate, but he’d make certain that Esteban and his thugs would never harm another woman.

“Dan?”

He was shaking on the floor, convulsing with self-loathing. Samantha’s voice chiselled through to a part of his mind still capable of rational thought. His first priority had to be to the survivors, they needed him now more than ever. Come on Danny-body, snap out of it. But it was not something he’d ever be able to ‘snap’ out of. It would haunt him until he lay restlessly in his grave. But purpose sharpened his survival instincts and focussed his determination into a fist of cold steel in the pit of his stomach.

He struggled to stand on wobbly legs and pressed the back of his wrist to his forehead to stem the pounding in his brain. “We have to leave.”

“Whoa, hang on a second man.” Cookie took a pace forward, ready to catch him if he collapsed again. “Tell us what’s going on.”

Dan wasn’t in the mood to recount tales of his foolishness, but they deserved to know what they were facing. “Eleven months ago my wife was murdered, I never found out who did it.” The memory still tore at his chest. “The man who captured Jen just confessed to it, and he said he’ll do the same to her.”

“Why?” Samantha was fighting tears of anguish.

“You heard how Jen’s grandfather was assassinated, right?” He waited for them to nod. “He was the one who did it and I was the detective who hauled him back to Australia to face charges.” Dan sighed with sorrow. “I wish I hadn’t. Political pressure got him off the hook, and now he’s pissed.”

“You mean this is a vendetta?” Samantha asked, mortified.

Dan nodded. “I suspect so, yes.”

“But… Why now?” Cookie thought he knew the answer but he wanted to see whether Dan shared his suspicion.

“I don’t know. As far as I knew, he hadn’t worked for UniForce since assassinating Mike Cameron. It was a public scandal so they sidelined him. Or so I thought.”

“What’s his name?”

“Valdez. Esteban Garcia Valdez,” Dan replied.

Cookie nodded vigorously. “Yeah, that’s right. I thought the name was familiar.” He slapped a palm to his forehead. “Damn it!”

“What?”

“Ah, you’re not gonna like this.” Cookie briefly pushed his lips sideways before continuing. “I found repeated references to him on their network. He’s their assassination co-ordinator. They revoked his field status in ‘59 but he’s been part of UniForce’s management team ever since. He assumed the co-ordinator’s position last year when, I might add, the previous co-ordinator died under suspicious circumstances.”

So, he thought bitterly. It was UniForce all along. It drove the final stake into his heart - he’d begun work for his wife’s killers a few months after lovingly laying her to rest. How could I be so blind? “It’s unusual for an assassin to be that… direct, that candid,” Dan said, wondering how Esteban had received permission to play out his fantasy.

“I think I can explain that,” Cookie said with an apologetic cough. “The Raven killed their CEO and they declared a state of company emergency. I think he can do pretty much what he wants.”

I told you so. Dan knew they were thinking it. Hell, I deserve it. It saddened him. One more mistake to add to my damning list. “At least we know where to start looking for her.” He wasn’t yet ready to give up. Not yet. He wasn’t going to give up until they’d recovered Jen’s corpse. He remembered where they’d found Katherine, in some musty, anonymous woods. One night and already the animals had gnawed her bones, defiling her naked and bloodied body. Her murder was bad enough, but Esteban hadn’t even granted her the decency of protecting her body from hungry animals or prying eyes. The insects had feasted too. He stopped the memories before he recalled her infested flesh.

“We have to leave. Now,” Dan said, as much for his benefit as for theirs. “Get your stuff.”

They obeyed without discourse, leaving Dan to strip naked and shower to cleanse the filth from his body. Afterward he brushed a hand across the steam-fogged mirror and gazed upon his reflection, wondering how such a vile creature could exist. But instead of