REVENGE OR REDEMPTION
by Erik Lambert

I wasn’t a cop anymore.  I had no badge.  I had no obligations.  My partner was dead.  The battle lust that had once made me the envy of my precinct was gone.  I had spent three years developing a beer gut and couldn’t remember half my cases.  Now two dead bodies.  A family shattered.  There I was, paralyzed on a wind swept pier watching Slater inch an ice pick closer to the neck of his six-year-old hostage.  The laughter of my father kept asking that hateful question:  Are you a man who seeks revenge or redemption?

Slater’s good eye, the same color as a husky dog, rotated in the socket like a telescope.  The other lay dead behind a black eye patch.  Every breath, every twitch I made drew the yellow-toothed grin on his face a little wider.  The boy could do nothing in the confines of his red snowsuit.  I cocked the hammer.  Slater jolted back for a killing strike.

Bypassing the shoulder or arm, both practical targets, I hit the pencil-size shaft of the ice pick.  A lottery shot.  The bullet knocked the weapon out of his hand and into the frozen Bering Sea .   When my eyes opened my lungs finally let go of their breath.  Slater looked at his hand, a black smear of scum left behind by the lost pick.

“Never thought you had the guts.  Now do it again.”

He lifted the boy up and dumped him over the side of the pier.  Before I could shoot, he dove off the opposite end.  Dropping the gun, I stumbled forward and sprinted for the edge.  To the right I could jump for it and swim him down.  To the left I could save the boy but let him get away.  The charred bodies clouded my mind again.  There would be more if I let him slip into the island’s labyrinth of coves.  With an intake of breath and a silent prayer I leapt away from the edge.

Nothing could’ve prepared me for that icy water.  My mouth opened to gasp but I clenched down, sucking in a near fatal mouthful of salt water.  Every inch of skin and muscle curled hard to my body, as if to trap in the fading warmth.  The numbing came first, then the feeling of being pricked by thousands of needles.  My eyes struggled to open.  All I could see was a mixture of blue and green as I churned around and around. There was no sign of the boy.  I swam up for air.  A lone woman on the pier tossed me a white floatation ring.  For that briefest of moments I eyed the ring, thinking it was too late, the boy was dead.  I could still catch Slater.  My trembling body yearned for me to grab it.  Then I pushed the ring away, tucking back down into the frozen deep.

My hands and legs were starting to shiver.  I was having trouble controlling their motions as I swam downward.  My eyes were blurring.  It was hard not to focus on the cold.  Each hard pull on the water became slower, more difficult.  Both lungs compressed in pain, begging for air.  Below me I thought I could see a faint glimpse of red.  Either it was the boy or hallucinations.  I fought deeper, hoping to every holy spirit that I wasn’t swimming to a corpse.

The dull pounding in my head became voices that faded in and out.   They screamed at me to turn back, to do my job and catch the murderer.  The pressure on my eardrums became unbearable.  Fuck you, I told them all.  I had already lost my job and my partner because I tried to be a hero.  Never let the criminal direct your better judgment.

Through clouded vision, and an imminent surrender to unconsciousness, my arms scooped up a small body.  The coat fabric was smooth and the face pudgy.  Together we swam for the surface.  Revenge or redemption.  Slater had made the choice for me.

BIO: Erik Lambert is a native of New Mexico who moved to Illinois when he was two.  He has become a four year veteran of the Story Workshop at Columbia College in Chicago , spending time writing and reading with his fellow students.  He now wishes to teach writing in addition to publishing his own.