Free Hostage by Emlyn Rees

Chapter One
    Casper, Wyoming, USA
    30th November, 4.50 p.m., North American Mountain Time
    Sacrificing someone evil to save the life of someone good had never been a tough choice for Danny Shanklin. Black and white. That was how the world worked. The only choice anyone really had to make was which side they were on.
    Shanklin hoped no one would end up dead tonight, but if someone did, his job was to make sure it wasn’t his client’s wife, Mary Watts. Or himself.
    Shanklin was in a taxi, crossing Richards bridge, the arched steel structure which spanned the churning grey guts of the North Platte river. His dark brown eyes stared across the ravine. Old eyes in a young face. Watchful eyes that missed nothing.
    Shanklin’s stomach growled with hunger. He’d failed to eat lunch. Too busy staring at the phone in his hotel room, willing it to ring. The club sandwich he’d ordered from room service had been so dry by the time he’d taken a bite that it had tasted like Styrofoam. He’d left it on the bedside table, next to an empty packet of painkillers and a half-drunk bottle of Coke.
    â€˜Strange place to visit this time of day,’ the taxi driver said. ‘It’ll be dark in half an hour.’
    Shanklin didn’t answer. Up ahead, the State Veterans’ Cemetery loomed into view. Rows of cold white tombstones protruded from the barren ground like teeth. The sun had already set. In less than half an hour, it would be dark.
    â€˜You here to pay your respects to the dead?’ the driver said, glancing in the rear view mirror at Shanklin’s conservative grey business suit.
    â€˜Something like that.’ Shanklin’s voice was gentle, but precise, like a school teacher’s. Its accent was East Coast. Well-travelled.
    He didn’t look at the driver as he spoke. Didn’t need to. He’d already made up his mind about him.
    The taxi was a black Ford Crown Victoria Sedan. An ex-Police Interceptor, Shanklin reckoned, converted for civilian use. It smelt of fried chicken and root beer. Stuck to the dash was a Polaroid of two teenage girls. A torn strip of tape beside it showed where another photo had been ripped off. The fifty-year-old driver, weighing about two hundred and thirty pounds, had bloodshot eyes from working too many nights. His greying hair was unkempt. Black dirt rimmed his chewed-down nails.
    Shanklin already had him down as a family guy. Possibly a retired cop. Recently divorced. Living alone. With alimony to pay.
    Not in on the kidnap, in other words. Just someone the kidnappers had plucked from the phone book and told to fetch Shanklin from the Colonial Inn over on College Drive, where Shanklin had been waiting for them to contact him since he’d driven into town last night.
    The taxi pulled over into the deserted cemetery lot. The wind howled, buffeting the windows, gently rocking the car like a paper boat on a pond.
    Shanklin slowly ran his tongue across his dry lips, like he was tasting the air. An ancient dread was rising inside him. The fear that today might be the day when he didn’t make it back. A day that reminded him of the woods where he’d grown up, and where a part of him had many years later been left dead the day his wife and only son had been tortured there and killed.
    Sally and Jonathan. Their names opened inside his mind like beautiful butterflies spreading their wings. For a moment, here in the twilight of the cab, in Danny’s mind’s eye, they flew and Danny wanted to rise up with them, to travel far from here. But most of all he wanted to be near them again.
    But then the vision darkened. The wings of the two butterflies crumpled and blackened, like torn strips of newspaper cast onto a fire. And Danny remembered them then as they had been when he had last seen them.
    He remembered paper and stone and scissors. He remembered what that animal had done.
    The Paper Stone Scissors Killer. That was the name the TV and