Don't own any part of Numb3rs or any of the Numb3rs characters. Original characters belong to me. One of them tried to escape, but I'm not saying which one.
Chapter 13
"There it is again! I know you had to hear it that time!" Aimee Russell shook her groggy husband more awake. "Don't try to tell me I imagined it this time, Colin. I definitely heard a noise downstairs!" She sat upright in bed, clutching the covers to her chin.
"Aimee, honey, please tell me we're not going to do this again tonight!" Colin groaned, rolling over in bed to deal with his semi-hysterical spouse. Why couldn't she let him sleep? Tomorrow was a make or break day for him. "It's an old house, sweetie" he reasoned thru clenched teeth. "It's going to settle, make noises, like any other place with this much age! The only reason you hear it more at night is because everything is quiet. No TV or anything else to cover it up. I can't keep getting up in the middle of the night to investigate every little sound! Please, honey. I've got a big day tomorrow, the presentation and everything, you know that! Gimme a break, huh? There's nobody else in the house but us! Can I go back to sleep now? Please!?" Colin flopped onto his stomach, pulling a pillow over his head. He was soon sound asleep once more.
Tearful and tense, Aimee refused to relax. It was bad enough that she and Colin struggled to communicate at all these days. Now things had deteriorated to this. He was dismissing her legitimate fears as paranoia, accusing her of jumping at creaky floorboards. She threw back the covers and climbed out of bed. Waking Colin again would be useless. She didn't need any more ridicule. But one of them had to check on Jeremiah. Determined to make sure her son was unharmed and sleeping peacefully, she grabbed a putter out of her golf bag and started nervously down the hallway.
Bare feet making no sound on the hardwood floor, she slowly pushed the boy's cracked bedroom door open wider, peeking in to check on him. The glow cast by the SpongeBob Squarepants nightlight her three year old swore he could not be without let her see him. Chest rising and falling gently, mouth slightly opened, Jeremiah Russell slumbered blissfully. Balboa, his floppy blue bear hugged to his tiny chest protectively, he'd kicked his blankets nearly off the bed. Pulling them back up over him, she kissed him softly and went back to her bedroom. Had she lingered by the child's bedside a moment longer, Aimee would have seen the large dark shadow that passed by the window. Unknowing but uneasy, she climbed back into bed next to Colin, the long night passing slowly. The pink and blue pastels of dawn decorated the skies before she finally slept.
Aimee hated her house. She hadn't always, but she did now. The scary part, the part she couldn't say out loud to anyone, especially Colin, was that she somehow knew, with absolute one hundred percent certainty, that the house returned her enmity. She wasn't sure how she knew, but she did. There were strange sounds at night or when only she and Jeremiah were at home. Objects inexplicably moved from one spot to another, belongings that went missing, and the terrifying feeling that she was being…watched. These things never happened to her husband or son, only to her. As if her new home bore her some unfathomable malice. But that was absurd, wasn't it? House's weren't alive. They were inanimate objects, not living beings. They were incapable of sentient thought or feeling. If she'd told Colin how she felt he'd have laughed, or taken Jeremiah and left, and then laughed. Maybe he would have accused her of trying to sabotage his work again. All of her family lived out of state, she and Colin's mother had a difficult relationship at best, and she had no close friends here. She'd called the cops once and ended up being threatened with jail for attempting to file a false report. So she soldiered on in silence, fighting a daily pitched battle with the roof over her head. She would not let the house win. She couldn't. She didn't dare.
Completing his daily check-in with Don, Colby closed his phone, looking over his shoulder at Steve Walton and Rudy Thomas. He quashed the sliver of doubt trying to seep in. They were out of road. No room for doubts. Not at this stage of the game. He just wished he hadn't used the term 'mission impossible episode' with Thomas. Now he couldn't get the theme music from the sixties TV series out of his head.
"Looks like the light is about right" he said. "What say we get this show on the road?" They sat in Colby's vehicle, half a block from the house. All three were armed . He hoped they wouldn't be using any weapons, but Colby hadn't gotten called "boy scout" by Che Lobo Santiago for nothing. He wasn't particularly worried about Jeremiah. Avery Cummings could be another story.
"Ready when you are Major Tom" Steve responded with a mock salute.
Colby grinned. "Major Tom was an astronaut. Let's try to keep this on the ground, ok?" He sobered. "Seriously, watch it in there. I got too much explaining to do if anything happens to either one of you." He and his ad hoc team began to move.
Nikki took a deep breath to steady her nerves, and, after a last look around, picked up the payphone's receiver. After one more breath, she slipped enough coins in to complete the call, handed the receiver to the kid, and dialed.
"FBI" the gruff voice sounded tired, its owner at the end of a long, teeth grinding day.
"Agent Gorman?" the teenage girl blurted, trying her best to sound tough in front of the FBI agent. Nikki made the girl hold the phone so they both could hear.
"Yeah, who's this?" Gorman's clipped responses indicated he wasn't in the mood for nonsense. They'd better keep the conversation short.
" Don't worry 'bout that. You want to know who killed Jack Lucern? Talk to a guard at the MDC by the name of Carlos Herrera. He just came into a lot of dough. He's hiding the money under his nephew's name at Wells Fargo. Has a box at Yourmail Express on Halifax Street too. Check him out if you want to find who did Lucern." The girl hung up, before any questions came back her way. A hand on one of her bony hips, she held out the other.
"Okay, you said I could have the other half of the money after I did what you wanted. I just did what you wanted. Pay me!" she demanded. Nikki paid the kid and then dropped the girl in front of her home, waiting until the door closed behind the junior thugette-in-training.
"PLEASE! let me keep my job!" she threw out silently to the powers that be as she drove off. "I know it's hard to tell sometimes, but I really like what I do and the people I'm doing it with! Wait, that didn't come out right, but you know what I mean! I really don't want to get canned! PLEASE!" She got back in her car to go home. Surviving the idiocy on the 101 would help take her mind off her potential career suicide.
He watched critically as the woman prepared dinner for her husband and son. Everything came from a box, can or jar. Mother would have disapproved, calling it a sign of laziness. He'd been observing her closely since the "happy" family had come to dwell at 12973 Marshlight Lane. He decided she was not a good caregiver. That she was, in fact, not even adequate. Mother's rules were ironclad, literally seared into his mind. He touched a finger to the long healed burn scars. Each room should be thoroughly cleaned, each day. Laundry was to be folded neatly and put in its proper place. The kitchen must be spotlessly cleaned and disinfected. This woman did none of those things, preferring instead to care for her home and family in a slovenly manner.
The man was no better. Claiming to have his family's best interests at heart, he worked twelve and fourteen hour days. More often than not, he continued his work after arriving home, spending hours at his computer entering and manipulating data. He snapped and pouted when interrupted, often getting into arguments with his wife about neglect and priorities. The property suffered too, with the woman often needing to badger her spouse into caring for the overgrown lawn and shrubbery or make needed repairs to the house.
But their chief sin, the most egregious of all their faults, the one they both must be suffered to answer for, was the boy. Their blatant disregard for his welfare deserved punishment. Unable to see to his own needs, the child depended on his parents for nearly everything. His food, shelter, and guidance, all were the obligation of the mother and father to provide. It enraged him to see the pitiful half measures Colin and Aimee Russell employed in the care of their son. Leaving him alone in his room to play with toys for hours at a time, feeding him sub-par meals, and their curt dismissal of his requests for attention. That they dared to treat his "brother" this way made him boil with anger.
For Avery Cummings had come to see Jeremiah Russell as the brother he'd never had as a child. As his family, to be nurtured and loved. Taken care of in the right way. When the Russell's had moved into the home formerly owned by his mother, he'd desired to adopt all three as his family, but soon decided that the parents were unworthy. The home's past as a den of iniquity allowed him to watch and evaluate them unnoticed. He came to a momentous choice. Colin and Aimee were "violators." Jeremiah must be liberated from the life of benign neglect his parents subjected him to. He could take much better care of his "brother" without their bumbling interference. Little Jeremiah would not understand in the beginning, but Avery knew the boy would adapt over time.
He set about to destabilize the woman first, keeping her awake at night with sound, moving things around, taking what she did not deserve to have away from her, leaving her with no way to explain the mysterious happenings. It was easy to isolate her. She received no support from her spouse. Colin Russell laughed, joking unkindly that perhaps she was imagining things or maybe spending too much time with no one but a small boy for company. After a time, she said nothing, bottling up her fears, or drowning them in glasses of wine in front of the television.
The husband followed, and was even easier. Tampering with his precious electronic pets, his toys, struck at what he prized most. Certainly more than his wife or son. Making him believe Aimee's resentment of his working hours made her responsible for the damage increased the friction between the married couple. Slowly accelerating the level of torment, their just reward for their treatment of Jeremiah, Avery Cummings was both agitator and witness to the disintegration of a marriage. When, in his judgment, they had paid sufficiently, he ended it, putting them down like sheep to the slaughter. Afterwards, bathed in their blood, he'd gone in search of Jeremiah, find the child hiding in the closet of his bedroom, wide eyed and shaking violently, clutching a stuffed blue bear and weeping softly.
"Come now, brother, no weakness. It's going to be better now. You'll now have the family you deserve. I will care for you in the way you should have been cared for all along. Come now" he said, reaching for the three year old.
"That's the thing about plans" Colby Granger said to David Sinclair as they watched Liz Warner, against orders, climb into the backseat of a murderous drug dealer's car. "They're great right up to the time you put them into action."
This one started off well enough. The trio of himself, Steve Walton and Rudy Thomas had gotten to the house in plenty of time. Making the most careful entry possible, they found places of concealment, no mean accomplishment in the almost empty rooms. Granger was closest to the kitchen door, wanting to cut off Cummings and Jeremiah's one sure escape route. Steve and the Seattle homicide detective were farther away, on the other side of the wall separating the kitchen and dining areas.
Right on cue, almost as if bidden, the perverted killer and his teenaged victim/apprentice appeared as the basement door opened. Coming into the kitchen, Avery Cummings drew Jeremiah out behind him, needing to coax the timid youngster into the open.
Only a few more feet. That's right, Colby urged silently, keep coming, you're almost there. It was a matter of inches now. He wanted their two subjects, especially the boy, as close to the center of the room as possible. Far enough away from the cellar door, he hoped, to keep it from becoming a bolt hole.
"Brother" Jeremiah pleaded, in a near panic state, "please let me stay here tonight. You know it frightens me, out, out, out there." Jeremiah pointed a quivering finger towards the front of the house.
Cummings voice was harsh and firm. " No, brother. Not tonight. I cannot indulge your weakness yet again. You must learn to be strong. To have no mercy or compassion for the corruption of others. And you must not fear them. They must learn to fear you. To fear your mind and your deeds. To fear the justice you bring them for their foolish vices. It's our task. We mustn't shirk it. Come now. No more delay, the night's work awaits us." He grabbed the reluctant, whimpering teen, pulling him along.
The two were right where Colby wanted them to be. He uncoiled, preparing to jump the unsuspecting Avery, and was poised on the balls of his feet when the wheels started to come off his brilliant master plan.
RING!!! Sounding incredibly loud, Rudy Thomas's cell phone shattered the brittle silence, sending a shock thru all five occupants of the room. A veteran cop, Thomas had made the greenie mistake of forgetting to turn his phone off. Unseen, the message window read WILLIS CALLING. Too late, he frantically shut it down, but the damage was done.
The psychopathic killer, Cummings, discovering he and Jeremiah were not alone, reacted with animal ferocity. Steve and Thomas poured into the kitchen, Steve going for the hysterical Jeremiah. The young boy was spinning in circles, an inarticulate wail indicating his distress.
"Ahhh! Ahhh! Ahhh! Brother, help me! Help me! Please! No! No! Go away!" Jeremiah screamed, wriggling frantically in Walton's grasp. The older man had his hands full containing the confused, unhinged adolescent, and could provide no assistance to Colby or Rudy Thomas.
Colby leapt for Cummings but missed as Cummings went towards the sound that had alerted him to danger. As he made contact with Rudy Thomas, one of Avery's hands touched Thomas's gun. Instantly understanding what the object was, Cummings pulled the weapon before the detective could prevent it. Not caring who he hit, Colin and Aimee's murderer fired.
Thomas's gasp of pain told Granger and Walton the shot had gone home. Slumping to the floor, all else forgotten, Rudy Thomas clutched his wounded leg in both hands, trying to stem the bleeding.
Colby tackled Cummings before he could shoot again, knocking the gun free. It went skidding across the floor out of reach. A brief, extremely violent tussle ensued, guttural grunts of madness issuing from Avery Cummings throat as he struck at his adversary.
Gaining the upper hand, Granger came very close to having Cummings subdued when Jeremiah twisted his slender frame bizarrely and managed to momentarily slip free of Steve Walton's grip. Going for the only refuge he knew, the boy threw himself at Avery Cummings, still shouting for his "brother's" help. He collided with Colby, creating a Gordian knot of arms and legs and liberating Cummings .
Covering the few feet back to the basement door in a flash, Cummings slammed the door behind him, locking it, and jumped, missing the entire flight of steps to land on the cold floor in a heap. Quickly recovering, he ran for the bootlegger's entrance.
Granger wanted to follow, but needed to see to the wounded Thomas. Blood leaking on to the floor, Thomas raised his head, sweat pouring off as he strained to talk.
"I'll be ok. It…it's not…it's not critical! Go after him! Go! Go! Go!" he urged, collapsing back to the floor.
Steve Walton cuffed Jeremiah Russell to the only appliance the kitchen held, the stove, and went to help.
"He's right! Go after him. I'll take care of Thomas and the kid! Go, Colby! Now! Hurry! Go! I've got this! Go!"
Colby nodded his assent. He'd have to trust Steve could handle the rest. Deciding not to waste the time trying to batter the door down, he shot at the lock, then plunged into the basement, seeking Avery Cummings.
"Me and my big mouth" Granger thought, disgusted. He pursued Avery Cummings thru the smugglers tunnel and past the skeletal death scene of Colin and Aimee's frozen in time meal. Maybe David was right. Maybe he did need a microchip. Or a keeper. Or something. This was getting to be a bad habit, him chasing these homicidal cracker box escapees thru the darkness.
He ran faster, chasing the fleeing man thru a section of Seattle's underground he'd not seen before. He could see flashes of moonlight as they passed beneath street grates in the sidewalks far above. Since he was armed, Colby thought about risking a shot to slow things up, but in the encompassing darkness, nixed the idea. As good a shot as he was, he knew when to put a lid on his ego.
Cummings reached an access ladder leading up to the street. If he made it to the surface, Colby figured he'd need some of Charlie's math to calculate how much more complicated the situation would get. He knew he had the best foot speed of anyone in Don's unit. Picking up the pace, he narrowed the distance between himself and his quarry.
Cummings started up the ladder, feet and hands slipping at first until he gained traction. Looking back over his shoulder, the man Colby chased snarled silently, much the same way he had the day Granger had first seen him standing in the Russell dining room. He turned his attention back to the slick rungs, desperate to make his escape. Avery's every pore oozed rage. These violators were the worst of all. Their repeated intrusions into his home screamed profound disrespect and now they had taken his brother from him. They had no right! They had no right!!! He would make them pay!! He would force them to give his brother back! They would suffer for their affront! Maybe one of them already had, he smiled, remembering the bleeding, groaning man lying on the kitchen floor. There was more in store for them. Although they did not realize it, due to their own carelessness, he knew how to find them. He had much practice hunting the weak and morally inferior. Above his head, the sound of traffic grew more audible. He would be above ground in mere seconds. The violator harassing his path was now at the bottom of the ladder but it would gain him nothing. Avery was inches from the manhole cover. Pushing up with all his considerable strength he shoved the heavy metal disc out of its groove and created enough opening to crawl up and out.
Colby cursed softly as he saw Cummings push thru the hole. Starting up after him, he reconsidered using his gun, but had no chance to. Halfway up the filthy ladder, hands and feet fighting for purchase on its slimy surface, he dug harder, keeping the other man in view. He couldn't afford to lose line of sight. His attention divided, he underestimated how precarious his present circumstances were. The lack of concentration came very close to getting him killed as one of his hands and then his feet slipped off their perch. The fingers of his other hand closed spasmodically around the bar, saving him from a crushing fall. His legs dangling in the air, he looked down, instantly realizing his mistake. Not having your feet under you was worse when you couldn't see what was down below you. Throwing himself at the ladder with a grunt, he seized it in both hands again. He'd have to rest later. He resumed his climb. The iron weight of the manhole cover rested half on, half off its base. Colby was unaware, but a sizable female portion of the L.A. field office timed their trips to the federal building gym to coincide with his for a very good reason. Enjoying the ripple and flow of muscles as he worked out was the highlight of many a feminine day. The regular conditioning paid off now. Putting a shoulder and a hand on the rim, he moved it completely out of his way with more ease than he expected. He poked his head out, picking up the receding form of Avery Cummings running hard down the winter dampened street. He swore again, pounding a fist against the drizzle soaked asphalt. He was about to finish climbing out when-HHHHOOOONNNNNNNKKKKKKK!!!!!!!!! Colby turned to see a huge box truck approaching at full speed. Over the blaring horn he could hear the scrape of rubber on the road and the squealing of breaks as the frantic driver tried to avoid the unexpected obstruction. It wasn't going to work and Granger froze for a split second dazzled by headlights as 16 tons of truck bore down on him relentlessly. With no other options, he took the only one left to him. Melting back down into the manhole, he yanked his head and shoulders out of the way just as the truck passed over, its massive size squishing the cast iron manhole cover. Once again engulfed in blackness, his night vision ruined by the enormous lights of the truck, he made a blind grab for the ladder-and missed! Both feet lost contact also, and F.B.I. Special Agent Colby Granger suddenly found himself freefalling towards the mud and concrete floor thirty feet below.