Read Perfect Trust: A Rowan Gant Investigation for Free Online Page A

him and brought his hand back up with what looked like
an oversized index card in it.
    “Porter, Eldon Andrew,” my friend told me
succinctly, tossing the name out as a raw fact for me to
digest.
    “Sounds like a beer,” I replied.
    “Just look at the picture,” he returned as he
handed over the black and white mug shot.
    I took the card and stared at the muddy grey
tones of the photo as I leaned back in my seat, feeling a slight
wince of pain in my shoulder in the process. The twinge might very
well have been psychological, but the surgery to repair the joint
and its associated musculature was still less than a year old. If I
could believe the doctor, whom I had no reason to doubt, an
occasional pain wouldn’t necessarily be all that unusual for a
while yet.
    I suppose that when you consider all the
facts, a minor pain should actually be welcome. I mean, first, a
madman bent on ushering me across into the world of death rams an
ice pick into my left shoulder. Nearly up to the handle… Twice…
Planting it firmly into bone on the second plunge I might add. And,
if that weren’t enough, I ended up plummeting off the side of a
bridge, only to have the very same shoulder forcibly dislocated by
the sudden stop at the end of the fall. Of course, I suppose I
should be thankful that the rope held, or the sudden stop would
have been farther down and more along the line of fatal. And
finally, I proceeded to hang from the damaged joint while the
crazed serial murderer attempted to finish the job he’d started. I
was lucky to even be alive, much less to still have the arm intact
and functioning.
    Still, looking at the photo that was
officially labeled Texas Department of Corrections brought that
night back to the forefront of everything with painful clarity. A
finger of acidic fear tickled the pit of my stomach, threatening to
invoke nausea. I ignored it and continued to stare at the
picture.
    The countenance depicted in the photograph
was younger than I recalled and lacking the greasy shag of white
hair that had framed it earlier this year. In fact, in the photo
his head was shaved. His cheeks were fuller, and though the picture
was black and white, one could tell from the grey scale tones that
his complexion held a healthy color. The gaunt mask I had faced ten
months before had been almost devoid of such pigment, appearing
pasty and ghostly white in pallor—the color of death. Even so, his
eyes hadn’t changed at all. Dark and sunken, almost hidden in their
deeply shadowed sockets, they burned with a furious malevolence.
Just as they had done when I stared into them months ago.
    When last I had seen this face, it had been
firmly attached to the ice pick wielding lunatic.
    The self-proclaimed Witch hunter…
    The modern day, self-appointed inquisitor
with a singular purpose—to eradicate from the world those he
perceived as heretics. Being a Witch, and a male one at that, I
matched up easily with his set of criteria for those belonging on
his hit list.
    He had managed to kill six others before
getting to me, two of them not even actual Pagans. Why he had not
yet killed again, I was at a loss to explain.
    If you asked the authorities why—even the cop
sitting across from me now that I call my best friend—you would be
told that it was because he was dead.
    You would be told that I had shot him in
self-defense, perhaps mortally, though no one could be sure. And
even if the wound was not fatal, it didn’t matter because he had
then fallen to his certain death from the Old Chain of Rocks Bridge
into the ice-laden Mississippi river.
    That was the official story. But I knew
better.
    Yes, I will admit that I had most definitely
shot him. However, I fired the round into the arm he was using to
try to choke me to death. And while there was plenty of solid
evidence that I had not missed when I pulled the trigger, something
told me that the wound wasn’t nearly so grievous as others
believed. That same something also told me that