Page 41 of One Cry Too Loud
“Is that a joke?” I asked. “We’re not going to do that. We’re not going to kill each other.”
“Then you’ll both die,” Nefarious said.
“Then we’ll die!” Charlie shouted. “But we’ll die with honor.”
“Why are you doing this?” I asked. “Charlie isn’t on your list. I’m the one with the bounty on my head. I’m the one you want dead. Let him out of here. Let him out and I’ll stay.”
“He can leave anytime he wants,” Nefarious answered. “All he has to do is kill you.”
“I’m not doing that,” Charlie said, his eyes pinned on me. “I’m not killing anyone. I’d rather die.”
“Yeah. I figured you might say that,” Nefarious said. “I figured both of you would. That’s why I’ve got some incentive.”
“What did you do?” I asked. “If you’ve done something to Cindy-”
“This has nothing to do with Cindy,” Nefarious answered. “This is about something else.” He chuckled. “You hid the people close to you from me.”
“You’ll never find them,” I said.
“I will. I’ve almost found them now,” Nefarious answered. “But you missed one. Isn’t that right,” Charlie?”
“What did you-who did you find?” Charlie asked, almost gasping for breath.
Instead of answering the question, the televisions sitting on the walls came to life. Each one showed a stream of a house. It was the same house from seven different angles. There was a family in it; a middle aged man, a thin blonde woman, two girls and a boy.
Charlie gasped, and if not from the look on his face, I would have thought it was because of the quickly fading air supply. As soon as I looked at him, I could tell that what we were looking at meant something to him.
“What?” I asked, my stomach doing flips.
“It's Walker,” he said, horrified. “It’s my sister’s little boy.”
CHAPTER 27
The exhaust fans roared above us, signaling a clock that was ticking down to our demise. The air, as Nefarious had promised, was thinning out. Each breath was harder than the last, and the hacker from hell was laughing over the speakers, his terrible voice searing into our ears and our minds. None of that was what was haunting me at that moment, though. The thing that hit me the hardest, the thing I knew would live with me for the rest of my life, should we survive this, was the look on Charlie’s face.
Charlie was an impressive man, one of the most impressive I had ever met. That was saying something, as my life had been full of impressive human beings. There was something about Charlie that differentiated him from the others, though. Charlie, it always seemed to me, was as much a machine as he was a man. He got the job done, he did it expertly, and he did it seemingly without breaking much of a sweat. There was something else too, though. For all the high stakes and high pressure situations the man and I had found ourselves in, I had rarely seen his emotions come to the surface. I could count the times he had raised his voice on one hand before all of this started. He neverbroke. He always found a way to separate what he was feeling from what was going on around him.
That was, until right this minute.
The look on Charlie’s face now spoke only of defeat. He was no longer the man who worked his ass off to find his way out of whatever garbage heap had fallen in him that day. He was too distraught to fight. One look at that little boy had dashed all his resolve.
“I’m surprised you recognize him,” Nefarious said, going directly from his cackle to what was almost certainly a snide insult.
“He’s my nephew, you sadistic trash! Of course, I recognize him,” Charlie said, his terrified eyes following every move the child made on the screen.
“Don’t say that like you know him,” Nefarious said. “You’ve never been in the same country as the boy, let alone the same room.”
My eyes widened. It was not something that Nefarious missed.
“Does that surprise you, Jack?” The Hacker asked. “That your friend here would allow his own nephew to grow up without knowing him, without knowing his own mother?”
“That’s not how it is!” Charlie said. “That’s not-”
“Don’t defend yourself to him,” I said, placing a hand on Charlie's shoulder as I gasped for breath. The air was growing thinner by the moment. “You don’t have to do that.”
“He didn’t tell you, did he?” Nefarious asked. “He didn’t tell you what happened to the boy’s mother, to his sister?”
“He doesn’t have to tell me anything,” I answered, keeping my eyes on Charlie, whose own eyes were on the screens, on his nephew.
