Lost, p.24
Lost, page 24
Alfonzo laughed.
“Wouldn’t be much of a crime family if we let witnesses walk away, would we?” A manic smirk spread across Alfonzo’s face. Lysander didn’t like it in the slightest. “Here’s how things are going to work. Your old man’s gonna show. He’s gonna hand over the money. Then I’m gonna shoot you both in the head.” He reached out a hand and ruffled Lysander’s hair. “Then your stupid family can be together again. You should be thanking me. You’re welcome.”
Lysander knew it was well over one hundred degrees in the warehouse, but he was suddenly cold. Very, very cold.
“You can’t,” he blurted. “If you want to kill me, fine. Go ahead. But don’t kill my dad. He has nothing to do with this.”
“Oh, he has everything to do with this. If he hadn’t offered that reward for Kota’s safe return, you wouldn’t be here now.” He snapped his fingers. “If only she hadn’t died before we’d seen that message. I would have brought her here in a heartbeat.”
Lysander tried not to dwell on it. There was no changing the past. Dakota was dead, and that was that. There was no point in wondering what if.
Besides, there were more important things to be worrying about now — like the fact that Zack was about to walk into a trap, thinking that it would be a simple swap. Because no matter the doubts that Lysander may have been having, Alfonzo was right. Zack would show. That was just the kind of man he was. He had helped Lysander before he had even come to terms with the fact that the boy was his son; he wouldn’t leave him to die now that he knew the truth.
And Lysander couldn’t let his father to die, either. He needed to make sure that Alfonzo’s plans fell through — and fast.
“Five minutes,” one of Alfonzo’s friends announced.
Alfonzo stood.
Given the sudden time limit, Lysander began to panic. He had no plan, no way of warning his father until it was already too late, and no way of clearing the scene of weapons even if he managed to get his hands free. His best shot would be to yell as soon as he saw the door opening. To scream that it was a trap, to tell his father that he needed to run, and to hope against all odds that the man would listen.
It seemed like an all right idea — until Alfonzo stuck a dirty rag in his mouth and taped over it.
“Sorry,” the older boy said, though it was obvious that he didn’t mean it. “Can’t let you tell the old man what’s going on now, can we?”
Lysander wanted to argue, but all that came out was muffled yelling.
Alfonzo’s two companions retreated from the windows and took up positions that they deemed more appropriate. One fell into place behind Lysander, where he could cover Alfonzo; the other took up refuge in a corner adjacent to the door, where he would have a clean shot at anybody who walked through it. Alfonzo stayed by Lysander’s side. He’d shoved his gun in the back of his pants for safekeeping. All three men were ready to strike.
Lysander hoped that Zack knew what he was getting himself into.
For several minutes, all that Lysander could focus on were the sounds — Alfonzo’s watch ticking the seconds away; his own heartbeat throbbing too loud in his ears. There were birds chirping just outside and a branch scratching on a windowpane somewhere. Once comforting sounds. He wondered now if he would ever look at them the same way again. If he would even get the chance.
There was a very real possibility that he was going to die before the hour was up.
The door didn’t even creak when Zack pushed it open.
There was no warning of his arrival, but its impact was immediate. Alfonzo straightened; the man behind Lysander took a small step forward. The other man, hidden in the far corner, made himself known as he came forward with his gun pointed at Zack. To the guitarist’s credit, he didn’t even flinch at the sight of the weapon. He simply put his hands up in the universal sign of surrender.
In one hand, he held a bag.
“So glad you could join us,” Alfonzo drawled. “Come forward. Slowly.”
Lysander frantically shook his head no, but it was no use. Zack moved toward them slowly but deliberately, his hands never leaving their place in the air and his eyes never straying from Alfonzo. He didn’t stop until he was no more than six feet in front of them. And only then did his eyes turn to his son.
“Are you all right, kid?”
Lysander nodded. There wasn’t much else he could do.
Zack looked back to Alfonzo.
“This ends now,” he said firmly. “Give me my son and I’ll give you your money. Then everybody can go home happy. No harm, no foul.”
“Put the money on the ground and step back, or the boy gets it.”
The metal cylinder that pressed against Lysander’s temple was all the motivation that his father needed.
Zack set the bag down carefully at his feet. Then he backed up — slowly, with his hands in plain view the entire time. Lysander watched every move that his father made. Maybe he would get lucky. Maybe he would manage to escape with his life. The thought was a tiny beam of light in an otherwise dark situation. The boy clung to it as if his own life depended on it.
“Check the bag,” Alfonzo said to the boy standing behind Lysander.
The kid moved forward, gun pointed at Zack. Zack didn’t move; his eyes remained on Lysander even as the boy between them unzipped the bag and poked around at the contents. Even from his horrible vantage point, Lysander could see that the bag was filled with money. Definitely not millions though, as Alfonzo and his buddies had demanded.
Sadly, he wasn’t the only one to realise this.
“There’s hardly anything in here,” the bag-checker growled. He looked up at Zack. “Where’s the rest of it?”
“You said not to get the cops involved,” Zack replied. “This was as much as I could get without attracting unwanted attention.” The man looked nervous now. His eyes were definitely on the gun beside Lysander’s head instead of on the boy’s face. “I can get you the rest, but it’s going to take some time. A few weeks, maybe. One week at the very least.”
“We gave you twenty-four hours. We expected payment by no later than today.”
“This was the best I could do without bringing the law into things,” Zack insisted. “I figured you’d appreciate that. And like I said, I can get you the rest — it’s just going to take a little time.”
He looked so sincere that it broke Lysander’s heart. Here was a man who was willing to give up every cent he had to save the son he had only known for a few months. It wasn’t a sight that Lysander had ever expected to see. And it broke his heart too, because he already knew that his father’s attempts at rescuing him were futile. He was already dead. All he was waiting for now was for Alfonzo to pull the damn trigger.
He hoped Zack had the sense to run when it happened, even if it didn’t look like he was going to get very far.
“How much is in the bag?” Alfonzo demanded.
“Two hundred and fifty grand,” Zack said. “And I could only get that with the help of my friends.”
A quarter of a million dollars. If Lysander hadn’t been gagged, he would have choked on the air around him. And if the way that Alfonzo shuffled forward ever so slightly was any indication, he liked the idea of that much money just sitting on the floor for the taking. It wasn’t millions, but it was a start.
Lysander wasn’t sure that this much money could vanish from a bank without attracting unwanted attention from the law. He dared to hope — but it would hardly help them when they were already in the snake’s pit.
“Two fifty,” Alfonzo repeated, trying to sound thoughtful. It probably sounded convincing to Zack, but Lysander had known the idiot longer than his father. “Well, that’s a lot of money.”
“And more to come,” Zack reminded him, “but only if you let my son go.”
Alfonzo’s two friends didn’t even try to hide the fact that they were laughing at Zack’s terms. But Zack ignored them, choosing to focus instead on Alfonzo — the clear leader of the group. The only one not laughing. Lysander wondered if Zack had figured out who the guy was, or whether he thought he was just some random nut job. He hoped for the former. He wanted his father to know that he was staring into the face of his daughter’s killer.
“Do you think we’re stupid, Mr. Bennett?”
“You must be,” was Zack’s retort. “Why else would you have kidnapped both of my kids?”
So he did know.
“If we were to let Lysander go,” Alfonzo went on, choosing to ignore Zack’s previous question, “you’d just take him and run. Leave the state. Leave the country, probably. And we’d never see the rest of that money, would we?”
Zack didn’t respond. There was no reason to — they all knew this was the most likely outcome, whether he admitted it or not.
“I was prepared to accept your offer. I was going to say fine, bring us the rest of the money in time. But Lysander would have to stay with us until we had every last cent of it. That’s just how business works, you understand. You don’t get the product until you’ve paid for it in full.”
Zack’s eyes narrowed. “My son is not a product.”
“But since you decided to insult our intelligence by putting out your ridiculous offer, we’re going to have to decline.”
The bag checker closed the bag once more, picked it up, and carried it back to his former position behind Lysander. Zack watched the exchange with little interest. The only thing he seemed worried about was his son, for which Lysander felt bad. The end was coming; he could feel it. Run, he insisted with his eyes. Get out of here before it happens.
“We’re still taking the money,” Alfonzo assured the man, “but since you didn’t meet our demands, Lysander has to die.”
Please leave, he thought at his father. I don’t want you to see this.
“Please.” Zack was begging now. “Anything you want, I’ll get it to you. Just put the gun down and let Lysander go.”
“It’s too late for that, Mr. Bennett.”
Zack was pale. Paler than Lysander had believed the man could get. If Lysander could have just one last wish, he would wish for the gag in his mouth to be removed so that he could tell his father that it wasn’t his fault, that Alfonzo had planned to kill them both all along, that he shouldn’t feel guilty. He tried to convey it all with his eyes, but it just wasn’t the same. That, and he couldn’t deny that he was scared — and that was no doubt what truly showed in his eyes.
I don’t want to die.
Alfonzo cocked the gun; Lysander squeezed his eyes shut and hoped for a painless death.
The sound of the gunshot echoed throughout the warehouse.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
Zack’s heart pounded.
The scene was one he would have expected out of a movie — old, empty warehouse in a quiet, out-of-the-way part of Orange County; three men, barely out of their teens by the looks of it, with guns and eager expressions on their boyish faces; his only son gagged and bound to the single chair in the middle of the room. Had the circumstances been lighter, he might have laughed at the stage Alfonzo had set for his final scene to play out. But the circumstances were not light. There were lives at stake here.
Lysander’s life was at stake.
Alfonzo had pulled a gun from the back of his baggy jeans and had pressed it to the boy’s temple. Zack’s heart had nearly stopped at the sight of it, but he’d reminded it to keep beating. He’d known there would be guns involved. He should have known that either he or his son — or both, as it turned out — would become targets early on in the negotiations. If you could even call it that.
Zack couldn’t take his eyes off his son. Lysander looked as strong as ever, defiant despite the trickle of fear in those magnificent blue eyes. Zack’s thundering heart swelled with pride. He wished he could open his mouth and tell his son that, let him know before anything happened, but he was frozen. Unable to move. Shell-shocked.
The sound of the gunshot echoed throughout the warehouse.
It was louder than Zack had expected, and he jumped. So did Alfonzo’s two companions, though he didn’t pay either of them any mind. His eyes drifted over the new scene in front of himself, all in slow motion, the scene with blood splattered all over the concrete floor. The one that made his blood run cold and his heart stop. The one he knew he would never be able to forget, not given all the time in the world.
Lysander...
Alfonzo dropped like a stone.
There was an expression of surprise etched permanently onto the boy’s face. Just a kid, Zack reminded himself, barely older than Lysander. But he’d played a stupid game, and this was his prize. The gun slipped from his hand and clattered noisily to the floor. He landed with a solid thud.
Lysander’s eyes shot wide as he made a muffled scream. He looked down with a mixture of shock and horror, trying to jerk his body away from the mess. His arms strained against his restraints, the chair almost toppling with his movements. He was panicking.
So were Alfonzo’s two companions. One stood frozen, his mouth opening and closing wordlessly. The other tripped over his own feet and fell flat on his backside in his haste to back up. Zack hoped he would always remember the looks on their punk little faces.
The looks that only got better when the warehouse was suddenly swarmed by the police.
“Drop your weapons!”
Lysander looked around frantically. The bulk of the uniforms were coming through the building’s single door, but there were some who had been ordered to break in through the boarded up windows in the back and sides — a smart idea, Zack knew now, given the position of the armed idiot behind Lysander. The other two dropped their weapons at once and put their hands in the air, shouting things like “Don’t shoot!” and “We were just messing around!” Zack wondered how much of that was true, and how much was them trying to save themselves from meeting the same fate as their friend.
He made for the centre of the room the second those boys were unarmed. He knew he should have stayed put, let the police do their thing and not move until they told him he was safe to do so, but he couldn’t take it anymore. Not when Lysander was right there, struggling and panicking. He ran to his son, crossing the distance in less than a second, and pulled him into his arms.
“You’re okay, kid,” he breathed. “You’re okay.”
The chair tipped forward and made the embrace uncomfortable, but Zack couldn’t bring himself to let go for several moments. Having Lysander safe in his arms was the only way he could get his racing heart to still. Even surrounded by police and seeing those boys in handcuffs, it still raced with fear, scared for Lysander despite the fact that everything was over. What if he’d already been hurt? What if there was no coming back from this? He held his son at arm’s length and looked him over.
The gag was the first thing to go.
“Are you all right?” He flicked a single, stray tear from his son’s cheek. “They haven’t hurt you, have they?”
“No,” Lysander breathed. “I’m f-fine.”
But Zack still looked the boy over. He needed to see with his own two eyes that his son was okay before he would believe it. And even then, a trip to the hospital was in order — just in case. He was taking absolutely no chances. Not after seeing Lysander with a gun to his head. And certainly not after what had happened with Dakota.
“Can you untie my hands?” Lysander asked. “It’s really uncomfortable being tied to this thing.”
Zack obliged. The tape around his son’s wrists didn’t seem eager to come away, so it took a little longer than either of them would have liked. But eventually he was free, wrists aching but still in working order, and he returned Zack’s previous embrace without delay. Zack was all too happy to wrap his arms around his son again.
“You shouldn’t have come,” the boy said against his chest.
“I wasn’t going to let them hurt you. What kind of a father would that make me?”
“But they were going to kill you. If the police hadn’t busted in...”
“But they did.” Zack looked Lysander firmly in the eye. “They did, and we’re both fine. It’s over now, kid. He’s dead. You don’t have to worry about it anymore. It’s over.”
Alfonzo’s two friends were already being led out in handcuffs, and there were police scouring every inch of the place for any sign of hidden gunmen or weapons. The more they looked and found nothing, the more convinced that Zack grew of the situation’s end. It truly was over. The nightmare had come to an end.
“Dad?”
“Yeah?”
“I love you.”
Zack blinked in surprise.
He had known from the beginning that Lysander had never really cared to know him. He’d only come for his sister’s sake, to plead for help when he knew he would get it from no one else. But they were a long way from that now. They’d both grown so much. Been through so much.
And Zack knew now, without a doubt, that he felt the same.
“I love you too, kid. More than you know.”
Lysander looked relieved to hear it. Zack should have said it earlier. He should have said it more often. He should have made sure that the boy knew he was loved, even before Zack himself had known it to be true. Because that was the job of a father, wasn’t it? To make his children feel loved? He would tell Lysander every day if he had to, just to make sure the boy never forgot. Just to make sure he never had reason to doubt it again.
After the past two days, he would never doubt it again either.
Somebody had brought in a white sheet and covered Alfonzo’s body. Lysander was already making a point of not looking at it, but to Zack it only made the scene look more ghastly than before, particularly as it soaked up red from the floor. At least now there was no doubt that he was dead.
And good riddance, Zack thought to himself.
“Mr Bennett.” The young officer stepped forward slowly. His eyes moved between father and son, like he knew he was interrupting something. “The ambulance is waiting outside. If you’d like to—”
“Ambulance?” Lysander repeated, startled.
