Every Wicked Man

by Steven James

  +++

  Sasha took a deep breath, then drew the plastic bag over her head.

  Through the transparent plastic, the world became crinkled and blurred. Wrinkles of reality folding in around her.

  Backup is coming.

  She reassured herself that they were going to get there in time.

  But even if they don’t, you can save Greer.

  She kicked off her heels.

  You might have to do this. You might actually have to go through with it.

  * * *

  +++

  Behind me, I heard the noseless man exclaim, “Got another one back here.”

  I turned in his direction and saw that the door to the basement was open. Calvin appeared and locked his gaze onto Joe. “You’re the man who convinced Thomas Kewley to kill himself.”

  “There isn’t time for that now,” I said to Calvin. I pointed to the computer screen where Sasha had pulled out a length of duct tape and was starting to wrap it around her neck to seal off the bottom of the bag. “We have to stop her.”

  * * *

  +++

  Sasha was still holding her breath when she finished with the tape.

  She tore off the end and dropped the roll.

  * * *

  +++

  “The person who paid to watch,” I shouted to Joe, “tell him to stop her.”

  “It doesn’t work like that.”

  I unpocketed my phone and hit redial to reach Angela at Cyber.

  “Where is this online?” I asked Joe.

  He said nothing, but the woman who was seated nearby said, “It’s being run through a Krazle account.”

  “Give it to me.”

  I repeated what she told me to Angela, then added urgently, “We need to trace this now. Sasha wasn’t suicidal. Someone’s coercing her to do this. Find her. Stop this.”

  “I’m on it.”

  The noseless man made for the door, shoving Calvin aside as he fled. He limped heavily on his left leg, just as the man I’d chased into the subway station had done.

  “No one else leaves this room.” I pointed to the men. “Get on your knees. Calvin, call for backup.”

  “Right.”

  On the screen’s counter, the number of viewers continued to grow.

  * * *

  +++

  Although on one level she’d known it all along, now the seriousness of her situation overwhelmed Sasha in a gut-punch realization—she was going to die, or she was going to be responsible for Bill Greer dying.

  As she slipped her left hand into its zip-tie loop, she prayed that Greer would be saved and that God would accept her soul even if she truly did end her own life by her own hand.

  Your life for his.

  Don’t give up. Don’t give in.

  It was getting harder and harder to hold her breath.

  A few more seconds and that would be it, then she would have to let out her air and try for more.

  She tugged her left arm to the side, tightening the zip-tie around her wrist.

  * * *

  +++

  Angela got back on the line with me. “I’ve got nothing,” she said, taut desperation in her voice. I suspected she was seeing what I was seeing. “It’ll take too long to trace.”

  I said to the woman at the keyboard, “If there’s anything you can do for that woman, you need to do it now. She’s not killing herself because she wants to. Someone is making this happen. Can you help her?”

  She was quiet.

  “Please.”

  She glanced at the screen. Sasha was passing her free hand through the second looped zip-tie. Once she tugged that one tight, she wouldn’t be able to rip the bag away no matter how desperate she became.

  Rather than answer me, the woman repositioned the keyboard and began typing furiously, entering code. Her screen shifted from the video of Sasha to a scrolling set of digits and numbers while all of the other screens showed Sasha yank her right wrist tight, securing the loop.

  * * *

  +++

  Sasha couldn’t hold her breath any longer.

  She let out what was left of her air and tried to breathe in again, but the plastic bag suctioned in and sealed the air off, pressing up tightly against her lips.

  * * *

  +++

  All at once, two of the men in the basement scrambled forward and went at Calvin, who was standing between them and the door. He spun with surprising agility and drove his foot down against the side of the man on his right’s knee, and it crumpled, sending his assailant to the ground.

  The other man tried to hold Calvin by the back of the head, but my friend threw an elbow at the man’s nose, connecting hard enough to send him reeling backward.

  I whipped out my SIG. “No one else moves!”

  * * *

  +++

  Sasha found herself yanking frantically at the zip-ties, but she couldn’t free herself.

  Here it is. It’s too late. This is happening now.

  * * *

  +++

  Though I didn’t want to watch, I needed to see if someone else was present or if something might appear on the screen that would give me a clue to where Sasha was, so I didn’t turn away from the monitors.

  “Hurry up!” I told the woman who was typing, the only chance we had at the moment to save Sasha. “We need to stop this now!”

  The bag had steamed up from the moist air Sasha had exhaled, but the terrible mechanics of this means of death took over as she did her best to draw in more air, and each time she tried, the plastic closed up tightly over her nose and mouth.

  * * *

  +++

  Sasha had grown up hearing that those who commit suicide go to hell, but she hoped that God would forgive her, would know her heart, would see that she was doing this only to save Greer, and she prayed that the Almighty would not hold it against her.

  Backup wasn’t coming.

  “Greater love has no one than this . . .” She heard the scriptural words deep in her soul, echoing through the years from the time when she still went to church. “That he lays down his life for a friend.”

  This was how she was going to die.

  Sasha kept her eyes open.

  She wanted to view the world for as long as she could before it all went away.

  * * *

  +++

  I watched Sasha become more frenzied in her attempts to breathe. As she instinctively yanked at her restrained wrists, the chair crashed sideways to the floor.

  Whoever was recording her death zoomed in on her face.

  The plastic bag did its job.

  The duct tape sealed out the air she needed to survive.

  It didn’t take long.

  After just a few more heart-wrenching seconds, Sasha MacIntyre stopped moving, stopped struggling, and lay limp and lifeless on the floor.

  “No!” I cried, my voice reverberating starkly off the basement walls.

  Sirens screamed down at us from the street outside.

  Backup.

  It was over.

  But then it wasn’t.

  The electricity clicked off, and all of the monitors went black, sinking the basement into a thick, unforgiving darkness.

  I still had my phone in my hand. I tapped the screen to wake it up, then used its light to see as best I could.

  No one was coming at me, but the men were trying to escape.

  I shouted for them to stay where they were but heard scuffling, and two of them headed toward the steps. The first man knocked Calvin to the ground, and then Joe kicked my friend twice in the abdomen as he rushed past. They were brutal, powerful kicks, and Calvin gasped harshly in pain.

  This could easily turn into a bloodbath if I started shooting, and as far as I’d seen, no
one down here was armed, so, swearing, I holstered my weapon, cuffed the remaining man, and ordered the woman not to leave her chair.

  She sat there staring at her screen, muttering how she’d been too slow, how she shouldn’t have let this happen.

  And then, as I knelt beside Calvin to see how he was doing, I heard her begin to cry soft, tender tears for the woman she had just watched die.

  59

  NYPD stopped every one of the basement’s occupants from escaping the neighborhood except for the noseless man, who’d slipped away before they arrived.

  The officers took them all into the station. We would need to let our lawyers sort out what charges might be leveled against them. The physical assault against Calvin might be enough—might be all we could get.

  Right now I wasn’t concerned about any of that.

  I was concerned about my friend making it through the night.

  He wasn’t recovering from being kicked while he was on the ground, and the EMTs loaded him onto a gurney to take him to the hospital.

  “I’m riding along,” I told them unequivocally and, after exchanging a glance with each other, the one in charge nodded. “Alright.”

  As we left, the ambulance’s emergency siren sounding, I tried to process all that had just happened.

  Calvin was injured.

  Sasha was dead.

  I’d witnessed her suffocate, and that was not a memory I would ever be able to erase or escape.

  Somehow she’d been coerced into killing herself, and thousands of people had clicked to the Matchmaker’s Krazle account to watch her do it.

  And someone had filmed it. Had zoomed in on her face to make sure the viewers got the best possible angle of her struggling to breathe.

  I felt my fists tighten.

  Right now, there wasn’t anything I could do about what had happened, but I vowed that when the time came, I would do whatever was necessary to see justice done.

  Calvin slipped into unconsciousness while we were still en route to the hospital.

  The EMT beside me assessed his vitals and told me that he might have extensive internal injuries.

  “As far as I know, he was only kicked twice,” I said, as if pointing that out would somehow help my friend recover.

  “Yes. Okay.” But his voice was grim, and I realized that this might be even more serious than I’d thought.

  I contacted Christie and told her that Calvin had been injured and that I was heading to the hospital with him. I couldn’t think of any good reason at the moment to mention Sasha’s death.

  “I’m not sure when I’ll be home,” I told her. “I’ll text you as soon as I know more.”

  * * *

  +++

  When Tessa walked through the front door, her mom asked concernedly how she was.

  “Fine. Why?”

  “I just wanted to make sure. How was the book signing?”

  “Memorable.”

  “Did you get to meet the author?”

  “Yeah. Briefly.”

  “And?”

  “And?”

  “Did he sign your book?”

  “Well, actually, no.”

  “Why not?”

  “Something came up.”

  Tessa tried to figure out exactly how much to tell her mom about secreting the novelist out the back door while the woman who’d burst into the bookstore shouted accusations about him killing her daughter.

  Probably better not to get into all of that.

  “The guy had to rush out before I could get the book signed. It’s no big deal. Really.”

  “Alright.”

  “Where’s Patrick?”

  “With a friend who was injured tonight. They’re on their way to the hospital.”

  “Is the guy okay?”

  “I’m really not sure.”

  * * *

  +++

  At the emergency room entrance, the paramedics hurriedly transferred Calvin inside, and as I was following them, I got a call from Greer.

  “Did you hear what happened to Sasha?” I asked.

  “Yes,” he replied heavily.

  “Where are you?”

  “On my way to the nearest precinct. A couple of NYPD uniforms picked me up.” He spoke in a tight, strained voice. “Blake’s men caught me. They were gonna kill me. Mannie put a plastic bag over my head and cinched it tight. I thought I was a dead man. I swear to God, I thought my time had come. But then, a couple of seconds later—the longest couple seconds of my life—he ripped it open. Then he left me there in that chair. That’s all I know. I waited, it was a little while, but then the officers showed up. I don’t know how they found out where I was.”

  Mannie was going to kill him? That didn’t seem right at all. From my experience with Mannie, when he had the chance to save lives, he did. As far as I knew, we had no evidence that he’d ever taken anyone’s life.

  “I’m glad you’re alright,” I told Greer.

  “That makes two of us.”

  I saw an incoming call from Ralph and I told Greer I’d call him back.

  Ralph explained that he’d spoken with both DeYoung and Angela. He knew about Sasha, but that wasn’t why he’d called.

  “Don’t you find it a little convenient?” he said.

  “Find what convenient?”

  “The anonymous tip about Greer’s location. The fact that he wasn’t killed. And then he walks away from all this without a scratch?”

  “What—you think he’s involved somehow?”

  “I wouldn’t say that, but I think we need to make sure he wasn’t.”

  I couldn’t believe that Greer had anything to do with this or that his abduction had been faked.

  “Think about it,” Ralph said. “He plays the part of the victim so they can get Sasha to kill herself.”

  “That seems like a stretch to me. Let’s see where the evidence takes us.”

  “Yeah,” he replied soberly. “Let’s do that.”

  * * *

  +++

  Back at his house, Timothy Sabian stood in front of the upstairs bathroom mirror.

  Things were starting to pull apart at the seams. Miranda’s mom was convinced he was the one responsible for her daughter’s disappearance—for her death.

  His life was a piece of cloth that was unraveling right before his eyes.

  He flung his head forward and smashed it violently against the glass, shattering the mirror.

  This has to end. This has to stop!

  The only way for that to happen is getting rid of Julianne.

  Or getting rid of yourself.

  He stared at his splintered reflection, at the unyielding cracks slicing up and through and across his face.

  That’s an option. That’s always an option, Timothy. Don’t forget. You can take care of what needs to be done here at any time.

  The last time you used the letter opener against your throat you just didn’t go deep enough. You can fix that. You can be free from the past. Next time, you can make sure you go as deep as you need to go.

  Until then, he found the X-ACTO knife and went to work freeing the bugs that were trying to climb out of his left side.

  60

  Two broken ribs and a lacerated liver.

  Even for someone much younger, the injuries would have been serious, but for someone Calvin’s age, the lacerated liver could be life-threatening.

  The doctors kept him in the ICU so they could monitor him more closely.

  I tried to sort through where we were at.

  Ralph suspected Greer of being complicit in Sasha’s death.

  It was unfathomable to me.

  As I considered the possibility, it struck me again that she was dead. Unequivocally dead. Now and forever gone.

  We still hadn’t
been able to track down where she’d been when she suffocated. We didn’t have a body; we just had proof of what’d happened with a video that was watched by nearly six thousand people and downloaded hundreds of times before it was finally taken down.

  I’d met Marcus Rockwell, Krazle’s founder, last summer and had been impressed by him. Sharp. Clear-headed. Generous and unpretentious for a thirty-one-year-old billionaire.

  The last I heard, just fourteen percent fewer people were doing online searches using Krazle than Google—and things were trending in their direction. And as far as a social networking platform, Krazle was on its way to surpassing Facebook in the number of daily user interactions.

  Though Jon Murray had streamed his suicide through 4chan, the others had all used Krazle.

  If Marcus’s platform was being used to post and share live-streamed suicides, I thought he would likely do all he could to stop that. I made a mental note to call him in the morning and see if we could have a little talk about what Krazle was and was not doing in this arena and how he could help shut this down.

  The details about Greer’s abduction and how he was overpowered were still murky—he’d been following an executive car that’d picked up Sasha. He stopped at a red light, and a person dressed as a vagrant walked up and started to clean his windows for a tip.

  When Greer lowered his window to wave the man away, someone else leapt out of the shadows, and the two men overpowered Greer—somehow getting him out of his car. They restrained him and hooded him, then drove him to a warehouse where Mannie was waiting for them.

  Ralph had a point.

  It did look suspicious.

  From what we could piece together, the men who took Greer hadn’t necessarily intended to kill him but rather used his abduction to convince Sasha to take her own life. Since they left him alone afterward, it appeared that he hadn’t been the primary target.

  Once again, just like when I was at Jon Murray’s funeral, I was forced to think about life and death.