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Scream
Part Four
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Her head screamed at her as she left the hospital clutching Danny's arm; while Vivian followed behind with her suitcase and flowers and Martin stood to the blonde's other side, ensuring she did not fall.
Because there was someone missing and he wasn't supposed to be.
Another week added to the month. He was gone five solitary weeks with no assurances that he still breathed.
It scared her, but there was nothing more she could do or say to force his reappearance to the world he knew – the world he had built for himself and his team.
She wondered where the hell he was as they placed her into the Toyota Celica, threw her bag in the trunk. Her brain reeled over the possibilities. He could have hid at any number of places along the expansive highway system, at the house of one of his college buddies or an old Army colleague from the 82nd, or with an odd family member she'd never heard of.
Hundreds of sites.
She huffed the humid summer air.
The indentured vehicle began a lazy drive toward her apartment. She knew they all wished to be graced with her insight into Jack Malone's psyche, but there was little she could tell them. True, she knew much more than she ever let on, yet that little voice in her head screamed out that he deserved time.
Her worry multiplied in her belly.
A soft sun-shower melted at the extreme temperature, pelting the windows like diamonds shattering. Like dreams ending.
Someone spoke but she didn't hear them. She only saw her memories play wisps across her eyes, listened to his voice rake across her eardrums, and remembered the feel of his skin beneath her fingertips.
Her cellphone trilled its demand; Vivian lifted it.
Samantha's mother. Whom she ignored, shaking her head and stating that she'd call back later.
More indeterminable silence, more refusal to speak for fear of turning her anger outward. Her therapist's warning, she was quite sure, involved something of the like and her coworkers were taking the advice. Causing them to continue toward her homely apartment uttering nothing until they reached the parking spot designated F-12.
There Martin stirred her, laid a hand on her shoulder and gently shook.
She ran a hand through her hair. Trying to extract the racing ideas from her frontal lobe, then shuffled ahead of her friends to slam through her first floor apartment door.
Her answering machine blinked in systolic rhythm. The number thirty-nine glowed in fabulous chartreuse.
Hesitantly, she tapped the playback.
Almost immediately, her heart leapt, hearing Jack's voice. But the electronic male informed her that the first message was dated two days after the shooting at the bookstore. The ones that followed were telemarketers, her bank, friends who'd seen the news but didn't know enough to call her cell phone…
And one more connection from the day just recently ended.
His tone broke, skewed, and shaved to a trickle. She could hear the tension in his body, as he asked her to pick up if she was there. When she failed to have picked up, he sighed, whispered something indecipherable before hanging up with a deafening click.
Martin recovered the quickest – taking her machine as well as Danny, ducking out of her living room and heading for the car.
The message flitted through her mind again. And again. Her heart reeling at the image it created. The horrid visage of a degraded Jack, his face unshaven and his hair grown an inch too long. Clothes dirty and torn, sleeping in a dilapidated bed lacking sheets with a bottle of cheap liquor in one hand.
She shook her head suddenly, stirring the unlikely thought from her head. She knew he would never steep that low. No, she was sticking to her decisive argument that he was hiding with someone and taking his time-out from the real world.
That he would be back soon.
That he would return to help her deal with the nightmare-dreams that always ended the same way, that always ended with him dead because he just had to push. Had to push until the gun was pressed to his forehead.
Once more, she shook her blonde hair into a whorl-wind. She only then noticed that Vivian was gone, leaving her in the solitude of a now-strange home.
Her heart thudded dully, reminding her she was still alive, while she tilted her head to her hands to rub away the mutinous tears.
She won't cry.
Because he wasn't missing.
And her mind clung to that fallacy like water to the thirty.
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*v* Cassie Jamie *v*