Abby
Pharma-Vitae's home office was on lock down. A ring of steel and guns surrounded the campus, with more guns than had been at her house. Teams were readying themselves to enter the building, to bring Zed and his hostage out.
She could tell from the general feeling, though, that the cops seemed to empathize with Zed and what he was doing. Pharma had targeted first responders as their prime market with a drug that didn't even work.
“Sure we have to even go in after this guy?” one of the SWAT joked. “Seems like a real dick, from the news.”
“Orders are orders,” the officer in charge said, as they walked past. “Until you're signing the city's checks, you gotta follow 'em.”
Abby and Det. Reynolds set up near the front of the line, at a vantage point that gave them a clear line of sight to her destroyed Escalade and the office building's entrance beyond. The detective stuffed a phone into her hand. “You know the number?”
“By heart,” she said. She'd had to call and talk to Letterman more times than she had liked throughout her short tenure at Pharma-Vitae, and she’d had the number memorized in the first week. She dialed the number, then worked her way through the automatic answering service, with its robotic operator.
The phone began to ring. After a few short buzzes, someone picked up. “Mark?”
“No,” the voice on the other end grated, “Mark can't come to the phone right now. Can I take a message for this asshole?”
“Zed!” Her heart leapt with joy to hear him safe and sound. “Zed, baby, you're fine!”
“For now,” he said, the smile coming through in his voice. “But, you know, the day's still young. Guess you got out all right?”
“Yeah, of course.”
“Good,” he said, sighing. “I'm glad. They giving you any trouble?”
“Not since the story hit the news,” she replied. “They all know what you're doing, and why you're doing it. Everyone knows. I've just . . . I'm just so worried about you, Zed. I want you to come out of there.”
“That worried, huh?” he asked, his breath heavy on the phone. “You sure you want a crazy vet like me?”
“Well, I wasn't at first,” she replied. “I'll be honest. When I first met you in my office, I really did care about what you and your brother were going through. But, I thought I had to keep my company front and center. I thought I needed to keep my own emotions from coming through. But you've shown me I don't need to hide behind my ambitions anymore, and that there are more important things in my life.”
Silence on his end, punctuated by him licking his lips.
“I just, I want you out of there. I want you back in my life. This past week or so, it's just been the most eye-opening experience for me, and I don't think I can ever go back to the life I was leading before you. You've changed me, through and through. You really have.”
“You …” he began, trailing off for a moment, then speaking again. “You've changed me, too, Abby. For the better. You really have. I was broken before. Just shattered. But I feel like I can have some peace now. I'm not perfect, of course. No man is.”
“I don't want or need you to be perfect, Zed,” Abby said, feeling the wetness on her cheeks from her falling tears. “I just want you to be mine. And in one piece, of course.”
“Yeah,” he said. “I think I can do that. I think I can get back in one piece for you.”
“You're going to try, then?”
“Yeah,” he repeated. “I'm coming out.”
She closed her eyes, trying to squeeze the tears to a stop. “Thank you,” she whispered.
“I love you,” Zed whispered.
“I love you, too, Zed Hesse.”
# # #
Zed
“Well,” Zed said after he hung up the phone, his pistol still trained on Mark. “Looks like I've got everything I need from you. Everything I'd ever possibly need.”
Mark's eyes nearly crossed as he stared down his nose at the barrel of his own pistol pointed back at him. “What do you mean?” he asked, nearly stumbling over his words. “Are you . . .?”
Zed thumbed back the hammer on the small automatic he'd snatched from Mark's hands, seriously considered his options. The man in front of him deserved to die. He knew that. He deserved Kai's looming fate, and worse—much worse—for the resulting deaths of Zed's niece and nephew.
Mark started a low whine, a sound deep in his throat like a wounded animal.
“Shoot you?” Zed asked after a while. “Let you go? What do you think I should do, Mark? What would you do in my shoes if I'd packaged a drug for your brother that got him to kill your niece, nephew, and sister-in-law?” He fingered the trigger, his thoughts on Abby and Kai.
Pharma-Vitae was going down over this, one way or the other. Mark Letterman, though? Who knew? He may do a couple years in prison, if Zed was lucky. But the courts didn't seem to care much about corporate crimes. They just fined people and threw a couple of scapegoats to the wolves.
Look at the banks during the Great Recession. They were bigger than ever. Was that what Mark Letterman was going to be like? Richer than before?
But, then, there was Abby. Zed's soulmate. God, it sounded cheesy just to think it, but deep down he still knew it was true. It was truer than anything he'd ever believed in during his short, miserable life. What would she think of him if he gunned down Mark in cold blood? He wasn't judge, jury, and executioner. He couldn't be, no matter how light a sentence Mark would receive for his horrendous crimes against the first responders and soldiers of this country.
He raised the pistol and aimed it straight at Mark's head.
Mark recoiled in his chair, his eyes wide, his face white as the blood drained. Mark began to cry. “You can't. I didn't mean to hurt anyone like that. I really didn't.”
No. He couldn't do that to Abby. He couldn't saddle her with the knowledge that she'd fallen in love with a cold-blooded murderer, a man willing to gun down another like this.
“Bang,” Zed shouted.
Mark screamed.
“Just kidding, Mark,” Zed said, as he reached forward and yanked the executive to his feet. “Come on. We're walking out.”
Zed sniffed the air as he shoved Mark in front of him, toward the office door. He grinned as he held the gun on him. “You piss yourself, Mark?”
Together, they headed down in the elevator. Zed kept Mark against the elevator wall, opposite him, and away from the control panel. When they hit the lobby, an uneasy feeling hit the pit of his stomach.
“Lotta cops out there,” Zed mused, as they crossed to the front entry way.
“Yeah,” Mark agreed. “I'd be worried if I were you.”
“Why should I be worried,” the veteran replied, as he shoved Mark forward through the doors. “I'm not the one who was basically poisoning all their buddies with fake medication.” The sounds of the outside, the beating of the police helicopter's rotors, the blaring of bullhorns, and the sound of distant sirens all hit him like a wall as he stepped outside onto the little concrete plaza. It was a wall so difficult to penetrate that he actually had to slow a step and take a moment to deal with all the input coming at him.
“Zed Hesse!” roared a familiar voice on a bullhorn, from behind the ring of steel surrounding the building. “Put down your weapon and put your hands in the air!”
Zed hooked the gun's trigger guard over his finger and raised it in the air as Mark ran for the barricades. He could see the dots of the red lasers doing their twists and turns on the concrete in front of him, speedily making their way to his body, but he didn't think anything of it. If they'd wanted him dead, they could have gotten him in the lobby. He hadn’t used Mark as a human shield on his way out the door.
He leaned forward and, with exaggerated motions, so the police would know and understand his intentions, put his gun on the ground of the plaza, then put his hands in the air.
Zed glanced to the left suddenly, his arms going wide like he was making a move. “No!” he yelled, his voice booming out over the assembled police and other first responders.
He saw a blur coming toward him, slipping out from between the barricades. “Zed!” the blur screamed. “No!”
She must have seen the laser sights and thought that meant they were ready to shoot. Now she was rushing out in front of a trigger happy group of cops. “Abby,” Zed yelled back, waving her away. “Get down!”
She was nearly to him when they open fired and the bullets began to come down in a hail of lead and powder. Zed swept her into his arms, tackling her to the ground beneath him. His body shook with pain under the countless impacts of bullets, intended for him and his love. Beneath him, Abby cried out in fear as his body jumped and shook with each bullet that hit him.
They just seemed to continue to come, and Zed's mind groaned under the strain, sending him to a better, happier place.