Finding Faulkner

     Hiding out in another hotel, smashing my head against the wall. I had him, right there in my hands. RIGHT THERE, and I had to let him go. If I hadn't there would have been an investigation about the murders, and Mike hadn't been wearing gloves. I was trying to think of something anything that could help me make sense of all of this. The list, the detective, the secret data center, the puzzles, the man in the lake, and his beating heart, none of it made any sense to me. It was infuriating, knowing nothing, and feeling like I was being shoved around by forces I couldn't control. Forces I couldn't even talk to.
     At that moment, something occurred to me that I should have realized on day one. Gregory Faulkner could not have stapled his chest shut. Gregory Faulkner couldn't have wired up his own heart to tell me a clue. Gregory Faulkner was the source of my problems, and I needed to understand him.
      I sat down and talked to Mike, told him everything that had happened. He hadn't heard anything before the data center, and was surprised to find out that I had taken on this job without knowing Gregory at all. I guess it put things in perspective for him, he left the hotel and came back with food and a bottle of plastic bottle vodka and orange juice.
     It was terrible stuff, but it did the trick. We sat in our hotel room, and did a lot of internet research about Faulkner. As you know, Gregory Faulkner is an alias that I gave him, since I've changed all the names here, but the name we searched turned out to also be an alias. There was a long series of webpages about this man, most of them had 404'd, or were taken down, but we found two websites that mattered. Each page held a message, the first one read:

     "Those of you who knew Gregory Faulkner remember him as a brave man who fought for what he believed in. We all loved him very much, but do not make his mistakes, he was wrong."

The second site we found sitting on the computer screen when we woke up. We had apparently gotten drunker than we thought. But when we woke up, we found a simple white webpage with a faint grey omega symbol on it.

Interrogation.

I had Wilson firmly by the throat, but I didn't take any chances. Mike climbed up the stairs, and took my gun, and held it on Ingram While I patted him down. I kept the knife from his ankle, and the derringer from under his coat, and sat him up in a chair in one of the rooms upstairs. I tied him in a shredded sheet, and began to talk.

"How's your arm?" I had no idea how to interrogate someone, but I saw the blood leaking from where the bone was sticking out of his forearm, so I asked.

"Really? That's where you start? It's great, Allen. I'm sure it will heal up nice, and we'll be playing tennis again anytime now." What an asshole.

"Fine. How's this? Why are you killing these people, and how are they connected?" I shouted more than I meant to.

"No Allen, you know I won't tell you any of that. Try again." He was calm, and incredibly irritating. I did something a bit rough, and nudged the bone. He screamed, and I asked again.
He started laughing. Laughing at the top of his lungs. I shoved the gun into his face, pressing it between his eyes. His brow furrowed, and the laughter stopped.

"Interesting... are you going to shoot me, Allen? If you shoot me, I can't tell you anything. That's what you want, isn't it? Information?" He started laughing again, and after about ten seconds of laughter, violent, full-body laughs, a small spurt of blood shot out of his arm, and he blacked out. He was still breathing, still had a pulse, but he had lost so much blood that he collapsed. Mike and I put his gun back in his hand, repositioned him in the room with the father and the son, and left, calling 911 from a payphone in the area and reporting gunfire from the neighborhood. Then we threw away the bloody sheets and hid.

An Old Friend

Mike was a faster driver than me. Lots of zipping in and out of lanes, lots of speeding. We dashed to the house of the first man as fast as we could. The door was left open, swinging, and we sprinted in through it. We heard a thud upstairs, and I rushed up, leaving mike at the door to stand guard. I couldn't believe what I saw when I hit the landing. The first man was curled up in the corner of the nursery, covering his child as well as he could, and standing over him was the last person I expected: Wilson Ingram, the cop who first attacked me. I immediately had my pistol trained on him, and he looked up as I entered the room. He smiled an acid smile at me, and fired two shots, one for father, one for son, and greeted me like an old friend.
"Allen, what a pleasant surprise."
He trained his gun on me next, and I ducked into the hallway to avoid his shot, which shattered a door at the end of the hall. The laughter was unsettling, he just broke out and laughed. "Good to see you've gotten quicker, Alan! Let's have some fun!"
Ingram walked slowly down the hall, toward the door I was hiding behind, leading with his pistol. I heard him fire another shot, followed by a shout from downstairs. Mike. He was unarmed, and I had left him alone. I jumped out from behind the door, and found Ingram pointing his gun downward. I lept at him, and caught his arm, knocking him to the ground. He pulled the trigger as his arm hit the floor and broke under my shoulder. He wailed on me with his free hand, and I pinned his throat under my elbow, and used my left hand to take his gun from the now limp arm. I held it to his head and told him to hold still. I called for mike, who responded that he was fine, and then began my interrogation of Wilson Ingram.