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And again.
And again.
Voicemail. Each time. “Hi, this is Sam Clark, please leave a—”
He sounded so upbeat and cheery in his voicemail. It made my stomach twist into knots. I had to sit back down, the room becoming smaller and smaller. It felt like my vision was beginning to tunnel inward.
I shouldn’t have gotten close. I knew this pain would come. I knew this loss would hit.
They were intrusive thoughts. I had no control over them. The same way I had no control over this situation.
Fuck!
I wanted to shout it out. Instead, I looked down at the napkin on the table, the thick black letters seeming to taunt me now. They floated off the page and did a full fucking conga line across my vision. The answer was there, somewhere, I could feel it. And that answer meant saving Sam and Peter’s lives.
But where was it?
“Rocky, you all right?”
The voice came from far away. I looked up, across the room at the computer on the table. Zane was looking at me, his baby girl starting to doze off in his arms.
“I’m fine.” No, I was far from fine. The scar on my thigh pulsed in a phantom pain.
One particular phrase jumped out at me from the napkin. “Heaven’s gate,” I said, more to myself than to the room. I could feel the eyes on me, and I knew the other detectives were wondering if I had snapped.
“Heaven’s gate…” I repeated. Images of Sam filled my head. Images of him smiling and laughing and looking out onto the horizon and being scared of heights and that date we had when he overcame it all, when we could see all of Miami.
When we could see… “Heaven’s gate. The skyscraper they’re building in downtown. That’s the nickname for it.” I stood back up, the chair screeching as it almost tipped over. “Nick left us a clue, right here on this note. He’s taken them to Heaven’s Gate.”
Angel was on my heels as I turned to the door. “Where are you going?” Zane’s voice said behind me.
I answered without turning back. “To save Sam and Peter.”
27
Sam Clark
There were lions. I was tied up in a cage of angry lions, and there was no way I’d get out of this. It was the only way to explain the near-constant roar inside my ears. The lions were furious. Hungry. My heartbeat was loud but not loud enough to drown out the roaring that seemed to be chiseling away at my bones.
My eyes slowly fluttered open. Fear covered me like a bucket of acrid mud being dumped over my head. It was dark. My eyes took what felt like hours to adjust, even though only seconds ticked by. I blinked. There were no lions in sight. Instead, I was looking straight ahead, at what seemed like the sky itself. As if I’d been dipped into the inky black sky, not a star in sight.
I was sitting down, my ankles tied together with my hands tied behind my back. This wasn’t the afterlife, was it? It couldn’t be. I could still feel the burn of the tight rope against my skin. The afterlife wouldn’t have pain… would it?
And then more details started to appear through the dark. I began realizing I was in a room, but it wasn’t a finished room. There were exposed beams all around me. Almost like the columns inside of a coliseum, except these were hard steel beams that reflected the very little light coming from a flickering lantern, swinging wildly in the whipping winds.
Where the hell am I?
I struggled against the rope as my survival instincts began to kick in. Something told me I needed to fight. This wasn’t the afterlife, but this very well could be the end of my life.
“Sam? Sam? You’re awake?”
The voice came from behind me. Hushed whispers that barely carried over the roaring winds. A voice I recognized.
Holy shit.
“Peter?” I struggled harder against the rope, trying to turn my body in the chair I was tied down to. All I could do was turn my head, which was a move I instantly regretted. Turning my head gave me a view that chilled me down to the marrow in my bones. It made my stomach twist into a pretzel, pushing my breakfast up into my throat. I gagged, holding it down by a mere miracle. I no longer struggled against the rope. My entire body went limp with fear, my muscles turning as useful as wet paper napkins, the slightest move ready to tear them apart.
We were on the edge of a building, looking through the scaffolding of a soon-to-be-built wall, down at the entire city of Miami, lights glittering beneath me like a grid of orange and white ants. A tarp whipped back and forth in the wind. I tried focusing on that, instead of the paralyzing view.
