Ice Where There Was None Read online

  Ben blinked rapidly and used a great deal of concentration to try and clear his vision. When he did, he saw her standing in front of him. She had a look of affection mixed with pity on her face. Her strawberry blonde hair was cut very short, the layers inconsistent as if she’d done it herself with scissors and no mirror. She wore a dark green jumpsuit with a tan leather apron over it that was long enough to cover her legs. Her feet were bare and she continually curled her toes in the green … grass? No, he thought, not grass, but the fake stuff like they use on football fields. He glanced around and saw the entire space was covered in the fake turf.

  “There you go,” she cooed, crossing her arms and looking at him with her head slightly cocked to the side. “I knew you’d get out of it. You two are my strong ones. I knew you’d get out of it. I knew it.”

  “Anna,” Ben repeated. “Anna, what are you doing? Why am I here?”

  With an incredible burst of speed, she charged forward and placed her hands on Ben’s forearms, which he realized were bound to the arms of a chair. She leaned in close, almost touching his nose with hers. He couldn’t lean back because his head was against a headrest of some kind.

  “You know, love,” she purred. “You know where you are and why you’re here.” Her eyes didn’t blink as they stared into his. The only sound in his ears outside his rapidly beating heart was what sounded like her humming … or something like that. Her calm demeanor was very unsettling.

  “I-I-I don’t … really don’t,” he managed to get out.

  With a small sigh through her nose, which was still very close to his, she said, “You and your partner make this game very difficult, you know? I went through a lot of work, I mean a lot of work for this day and you two … you two …” She stood up, looking down to him. “You two just don’t seem like you actually want to do this. Is that true? Did everything we shared that day mean nothing? Were you just pretending to care and be a part of my life?”

  Ben heard her inflection rise as she spoke. He saw the calm break slightly as aggravation started to make its way across her features. He felt certain that her aggravation would be dangerous for him.

  “No, we weren’t pretending,” he offered. He pushed through his drugged mind to remember the conflict resolution course he took at the academy. His first thought was to get her to see him as someone who wasn’t her opponent.

  “We, I mean, Joe and I, we definitely cared,” he continued. “We still do, really. We are real people who care. That’s why we do what we do, Anna.”

  The calm returned to her face and she smiled softly. “Good,” she said and then returned to her task over to his left, out of his field of view. He tried to turn his head to follow her, but felt resistance. A dawning realization came as he tried to move the rest of his body. It was no use as he quickly surmised that he was bound entirely, from head to toe, to a chair.

  Trying to quell the rising panic, he scanned the room. It was a large space, and he could barely make out the back walls. The turf was stretched almost to the far wall, but he could see areas that were uncovered. The walls were cinder block and painted white. No distinguishing features or windows anywhere that he could see. Above, the ceiling was exposed girders and metal beams rising to a corrugated metal roof. In a few spots, large fans were mounted. He couldn’t tell if they were supposed to blow air out or in, but they appeared old and unused.

  Directly in front of him, just past where Anna had stood moments ago, was an impressively large tank. It looked like the kind used to hold beer, he thought, as he remembered a brewery tour he’d taken a few months back. This tank was different and looked like it may hold some type of gas, based on the warning labels adhered to its side. It stood about seven feet tall and probably five feet wide. Hoses extending from it snaked along the fake grass off to his left, where Anna could be heard doing something. It sounded like she was moving heavy objects around, but he couldn’t discern exactly what it was.

  Panic was working its way up Ben’s spine despite his best efforts to keep it at bay. It did not help that he had no idea where this was and if there was any hope that anyone else did, either.

  * * *

  “Officer Salk, you will stand down and wait for SWAT and backup!”

  Joe ignored the voice on the phone as he sped his way through town. He didn’t respond to the Captain for a few minutes. Finally, he said, “She’s going to kill him. I can stop this. I can stop her.”

  No response from the Captain and with a quick glance at the front of his phone, he saw why. The call was disconnected.

  Throwing the phone into the passenger seat, he continued his high-speed path, honking at cars to move while running through red lights and stop signs. He knew he had to hurry. She didn’t say she was going to kill him right now, but he was certain she intended to soon.

  He had told the Captain what he’d remembered.

  “I said last June she was attacked, and we were on scene after it was over. She was slowly coming out of her crying as we sat with her and talked. Well, at the time we couldn’t get what she was saying, but now it makes sense.”

  “How so?” Captain asked.

  “She was hurt, both physically and emotionally. The attacker repeatedly said she should be a trophy.”

  “Yes, you said that before.”

  “Well, when we were sitting together that day, she kept saying that she just wanted to ‘go home, but not home.’ Over and over, she said this. I thought it was because of the trauma of the day and that she was referring to her childhood home or somewhere more comforting. It wasn’t until I finally asked where ‘home, but not home’ was that she said something I dismissed at the time, but now realize it was important.

  “She said, ‘Not home is my house, but my home is where the bears played. I’ll have grass I don’t have to mow as far as the eye can see, and no one will know I’m there.’”

  “What does that mean?”

  “It wasn’t until you mentioned the materials that it dawned on me. That’s the reason for the ice joke.”

  Joe then explained that The Orlando Solar Bears are an IHL hockey team that used to practice in an indoor arena on the western edge of the city. When it was discovered that the building had major foundation issues, they moved to a new facility on the opposite side of town. But the old building stayed put, stuck in development limbo during one of the many real estate crisis that plagued Florida.

  It was an empty, unmonitored building where “bears” used to play and presumably still had the means to make ice for the rink. She had told him where she would be; he just hadn’t realized it.

  He accelerated as his realization and worry grew stronger.

  * * *

  “Now, Officer Benjamin Obvari, I won’t do for you what I did for the others. They were meant to convey a message. You are not. You are not. Nope. Are not.”

  Ben tried to regulate his breathing as he watched Anna George set up the box in front of him. He called it a box even though it stood nearly as tall and wide as the large tank. The sides and floor, as he watched her assemble it, were made of large plates of rib-reinforced steel. She held them together with long clamps and a rubber gasket at the seams. She was quick about it, even though the plates were fairly heavy looking. Ben wondered if he could pick one up on his own. She must be quite a bit stronger than him, he realized, with an extra bit of dread. That did not speak well to his ability to overpower her and escape.

  When she finished setting up the bottom and four sides, she took a large diameter hose with a spigot valve on the end and placed it over the side. He heard water rush into the box.

  She then set about a new task that he didn’t expect. She took some length of copper pipe and held it up. It was a tight coil of two-inch copper pipe that had been wound about four feet in length. It looked like a fat spring. She went over to the large tank and grabbed a hose from it, and connected it to one end of the coil. To the other she connected a second hose that went somewhere he couldn’t see.

  �
��The trick, I discovered,” she said as she lowered the coil into the box, “was that to get the really clear stuff, the stuff that looks like glass, you have to have two things.” She turned to face him, her hands on her hips. “Do you know what those two things are?”

  Ben shook his head. He really didn’t know, but he also wanted her to keep thinking she was in charge. She was, but he was also trying to think of every possible avenue of escape he could and didn’t want her to know this.

  “Well, love,” she continued. “The two things are pure water. This water here,” she reached over and tapped the hose, “this water is from my own reverse-osmosis filtration system I’ve got set up over there. The second thing is you have to cool the water very slowly. I mean very slowly. That way no bubbles or imperfections have a chance to form. It’s amazing, really.”

  “Wh-wh-what is this one for?” Ben asked, knowing the answer.

  Anna George actually looked taken aback at the question.

  “You mean you don’t know … or you don’t want to know?” The anger started to rise in her features again.

  “Why do you want me in the ice?” he asked after maintaining eye contact in silence with her for a minute.

  “Isn’t it obvious?”

  “What? No, it isn’t.”

  “Sure, just think about it.”

  “I don’t want to be in the ice, Anna.”

  She chuckled and held a half-grin. “Well, it ain’t about what you want. You’ve gotta go in there. That’s where you have to go. It ends when you go in there.”

  “What ends, Anna?”

  “Why, everything, silly.”

  “Everything?”

  “Yeah,” she said with the same expression one gives a friend who is having a hard time realizing a sad truth. “Yeah. We will be complete, and whole, and finished. Everything will be finished for us. We will be complete.”

  “How is my dying in ice going to finish everything for you?”

  “I said ‘us,’” she said in a strong, stern voice. “Everything will be finished for ‘us.’”

  Ben realized, in an instant, what she meant. This wasn’t his ice block. It was theirs. She intended to join him. He noticed she no longer had the apron on and was only wearing the jumpsuit. She had a single flower over her ear—a small tea rose.

  “No …” he said as much to her and as much to the world. “No, Anna, I can’t go in there with you, I can’t—”

  His words were cut off when his chair started to rise. She had a wench remote in her hand and he realized he must be attached to it through the chair. As he went up, she watched him with a small grin.

  * * *

  Officer Joe Salk screeched to a halt outside the old Solar Bears training building. As he got out, he heard the sirens of the SWAT and other units coming. His training told him to stay put, but he knew every second could count.

  Without waiting for the others to arrive, he ran for a small door on the side next to a loading ramp where a white cargo truck waited.

  He drew his sidearm, checked the door’s handle and found it unlocked. With a quick glance back up the road, he saw the other units were nearly there. He opened the door and went inside, gun raised and ready.

  The entry door opened to a hall that stretched ahead of him. There was a small amount of light due to an emergency lamp over the door with one good bulb remaining. It cast his shadow far in front of him as he made his way forward.

  His path down the hall went roughly twenty feet before he reached another hallway at a T-intersection. He waited a moment, looking into the darkness down both directions. To the right, the darkness was solid and impenetrable. He cursed under his breath for forgetting to grab his flashlight. To the left, he thought he could see a faint light some fifty feet down. Without his flashlight, he chose the left.

  Quickly walking in a semi-crouch in order to avoid making noise, he made his way unobstructed to the source of the faint light. It was a door casting light from underneath.

  He reached forward, tested the handle and found it, too, unlocked. He quietly turned the handle and opened the door, making his way inside in the same motion, eyes down his gun sights.

  He stopped and gaped.

  There in the middle of the space that was once an ice rink was a collection of tables, machines, equipment, a large tank, and his partner, dangling from a chain from the ceiling, tied to a chair, over a large metal crate. Anna George sat on his lap, facing him. Legs straddled over his. She seemed to be riding with him on this conveyance.

  She turned her head to him and yelled across, “Officer Salk, there you are! I’m sorry, but I guess Ben is the one. You understand, right?”

  Regaining a little of his composure, he aimed the gun at her and yelled, “Anna George, you are under arrest! Come down with your arms raised!”

  She laughed.

  Joe crossed the space to her and was within the light of her work lights. He had his gun still trained on her, but knew if he fired, he would hit Ben. She had her chest against his and her head on his shoulder.

  “No, no, no, no, no, Officer Joe Salk. You missed your chance. This is just me and Ben now. It’ll be OK. Everything will end after this.”

  Joe heard the SWAT team enter the building from the same entrance he’d used. Their yells announcing their presence echoed into the room.

  “Oh, you brought company …” she said, the grin disappearing. “That’s not part of the rules. You know the rules. This was supposed to be just us.”

  “Anna, please,” Ben said in a hoarse whisper. “You have to stop. This won’t end anything.”

  “Shush, shush, shush, Officer Ben. Ben, Ben, Ben. This is it. You and me.”

  The wench moved forward and started to lower into the box. Joe ran in to try and do something but didn’t pay attention to Anna as she produced a Taser in her hand and fired at him. The fléchettes hit the fabric on his shoulder, but not his skin. He felt the sting of the electric current and it caused him to falter, but not stop. He made it to them just as the chair hit the water, which was at the top edge of the box.

  “Ben!” he yelled, trying to jump up and grab him. She laughed and swatted his hand.

  “Orlando Police!” they heard someone bellow behind them. Joe didn’t turn; he just kept trying to jump and reach for his friend. The chair lowered far enough that their chests were starting to submerge. Water flowed over the edge in displacement, soaking Joe.

  He stepped back, ignoring the calls from the SWAT team to step away, and looked at the box quickly. He saw the clamps and reached for them as fast as he could. He loosened one when he felt a hand on his arm try to pull him away. With a growl, he twisted his arm free and started on the next.

  Whoever had reached for him stopped and instead, went for another clamp on another side. Within a few moments of their heads submerging, stifling her laugh, they saw water begin to trickle out of one of the box seems.

  With an enraged kick, Joe dislodged the last clamp and saw the seal give. Water flowed out quickly. He jumped back as the entire wall fell towards him, water flowing everywhere.

  He didn’t resist this time when several hands grabbed him and pulled him backwards. He watched as his partner gasped and spit out water. He saw the SWAT team grab Anna George and pin her to the ground. He saw her sob heavily as they tightened the zip cuffs to her and hoisted her up to take her away. She yelled, “No!” the entire length of the room as they took her outside. Other members were already untying Ben and getting him out of the chair.

  Joe collapsed onto his haunches. He would have hit hard if not for the same hands that pulled him back and helped him down.

  * * *

  “How did she do all this, Captain?” Ben asked from the bed at Florida Hospital.

  “We were hoping you could tell us. She hasn’t said a word since last night,” the Captain answered.

  Ben lowered his head to his chest and sighed. “Captain, I … I don’t want to go back there …” he said as his voice trailed off.
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  A hand on his shoulder from his wife, Patricia, seemed to give him a little strength. He inhaled a big breath and blew it out slowly.

  “No, you’re right,” he said, looking up at his wife. “I’ll tell you what she told me.”

  He went on to describe the events as they happened. He explained what she told him about why they were chosen. About how she wanted to make a trophy with them. That they were the answer to the question her attacker had asked last year.

  “Question?” Joe asked. “What question?”

  Ben looked at his partner, his eyes welling up reliving the memory so soon. “She told us that he said she would make a nice trophy, remember?”

  Joe nodded.

  “Well, what she didn’t tell us was what he asked, repeatedly. ‘Do you want to be my trophy? With me? Forever with me?’”

  The room fell silent.

  Ben cleared his throat and continued. “She said that she gave him trophies. That all the ‘stupid women and their stupid lives’ were trophies for him, and he could have his pick. She set up all these women to be trophies for her attacker.”

  Patricia put her hand over her mouth and held back a sob.

  “She said that she wanted to make sure he couldn’t have the trophy he wanted. She was going to be with one of us, her ‘loves,’ as she kept saying. We were going to be part of her trophy, just to deny him the satisfaction.”

  “We? But she said she only wanted one of us?”

  “Yeah, turns out which of us wasn’t as important as it just being one of us.”

  They resumed their silence, each not wanting to be the first to break it.

  “What did you find out about that place?” Joe asked the Captain, breaking the rising tension.

  “Well,” Detective Hobbes interjected before the Captain could answer, “we know she didn’t own it or anything, but she had been there for quite some time. It’s been in some sort of deed limbo for quite some time and no one is able to claim the place in order to sell it. There were no reports of her trespassing or anything in the area so she just had run of the place.”