by Brian Ewing
By the time he tried to cover up his indiscretion, it had been too late and it’s what cost him and his wife, along with Corrine and Sisto’s girlfriend at the time, their lives. Eddie’s wife, Kat, had a gotten a great job and had a huge life insurance policy in case she ever passed away, to take care of Eddie and Corrine, or Corey as Sisto had always called her. Eddie had set up a massive life insurance policy after he started getting in deep with Vinnova, in case anything ever caught up with him, which it had. The life insurance policy named Sisto the benefactor, to ensure he took care of Kat and Corey in his place. The forensic team was able to determine a domino effect of who was killed first, which left the financial compounding of policies to go from Corey back to her parents, Kat to Eddie after she was executed, and finally Eddie to Sisto. The number ended up in the low eight million range all said and done. Sisto used it as he needed but never indulged. He knew he would feel wrong going on a shopping spree or buying a mansion at the cost of his family getting murdered.
Sisto got up to get another coffee. He looked around the empty break room carefully before opening the refrigerator, grabbing into one of the rows of lined fridges along the wall, and pulled out a small bottle of Hazelnut creamer. Sisto had dealt far too long with the cheap and chalky powdered creamer when he had been a part-time consultant. After going through the academy, then SWAT training, and being on the task force, he vowed that endless cups of baby laxative in his coffee would not suffice. He poured the silky creamer into his coffee and placed the small bottle in the back of the bottom row of the fridge, in hopes to keep it hidden for his next use. Just as he sat back at the small white break room table, he felt his phone buzz. He pulled it out to see a text notification pop-up from Fitz Ackerman.
Fitz: You need a ride to this thing?
Sisto engaged in a reply.
Sisto: I am already at the station. Got done with SWAT late. No point in leaving now.
Fitz: Can’t wait to see what our fearless leader has for us this time.
Sisto: Bell is an acquired taste. He will grow on you…like the trees that now grow on your junk after sleeping with that prostitute.
Fitz: Fuck you.
Sisto: No thank you, I value being STD-free.
Fitz: I hate you.
Sisto: See you at seven.
Fitz Ackerman was one of the members Camille Caden put on her dream team list for Project: Corrine. Fitz was an ex-member of the Saratoga Saints & Sinners biker gang or 3S Gang. Fitz went straight after losing his prospect, a probationary recruit being initiated into the gang, to a drive-by that also put him in a hospital for a month. The loss of the prospect, who was also his younger cousin, hit him hard and while he told the leader of 3S he was always going to bleed Saratoga; he would be back home in Oregon for a while. A while turned into a few years and when he came back to Saratoga City, his heart hadn’t been in it like he thought it would and just never fully dove back into the life.
He did mechanic work for a few years and kept in loose touch with 3S but was patchless now as a non-member. Caden stumbled upon him when getting her oil changed one day a few years before meeting Sisto. Caden had recognized some of the emblem shapes inked out in black on the man and they had struck up a conversation. Fitz, being a long-bearded, tattooed hard-ass on the outside, carried a pacifistic tone in his words and body language. Caden had dropped the vehicle off after a shift and still had her badge on. She didn’t even have to ask, he gave her a card of one of the sales associates at the mechanic shop and wrote his information on the back, offering his help if she ever needed it regarding the biker world.
The selfless act had been put to the test a few times over the following years, and Fitz always came through. He had connections all over the city and surrounding area from the years of his alternative lifestyle. When the task force first met up for their first assignment, Sisto was pretty sure he and Fitz would bump heads. He looked like he had been through a war and could kill Sisto with one punch. The first time Fitz walked up to introduce himself, Sisto expected a deep raspy tough voice, but had been surprised by a polite and concise tone, softened by years of trying to find redemption. Sisto liked Fitz just fine but felt Fitz was a bit too pushy at trying to be his friend. Sisto was not an extrovert by nature. He had very few friends, even fewer after Laura killed Caden and recruited Carson Vinnova to butcher his best friend and neighbor, Craig. Sisto just hadn’t been in a rush to strike up a friendship with anyone.
The depressing assessment was subsided by the slamming of a freezer door behind him. Sisto hadn’t even noticed two patrol officers walking into the room to heat a frozen dinner. Sisto nodded to his fellow officers and stood up, taking his coffee out of the small area. Even with the coffee, he was feeling the repercussions of the day. The toll of messing up his last tactical on-site training was going to weigh on him until his final test next Thursday. Sisto left the break room to hook a left and head towards the task force office, which just so happened to be the interrogation room he and Caden and Bell took over on their last case together. There had been no accommodating space for a unit to get an office and Jenkins told Bell since all of the ‘shit’ from the Vinnova case was spread all over, just keep that room for the task force. Sisto walked up, passing Interrogation Room One, Three, and Four, and came up to Room Two. The plaque had been replaced with a sleek, engraved plaque stated Caden’s Den.
Sisto looked around as the room had been modified. The aluminum table had been unbolted and removed, being replaced with a three-piece wooden table which ended up connecting into one huge conference table. The matching aluminum chairs had also been replaced with computer desk chairs, similar to the chairs out at the Detective’s Hub. The two-sided mirror had been covered with a massive half-whiteboard, half-cork board to be able to display all aspects of an ongoing case.
Sisto walked to the last chair furthest from the door and rested his head on his forearms. It was not as easy as he had hoped when attempting to sit down. His legs felt like spaghetti noodles that were set on fire. He was accepting the fact he would need more than caffeine to keep him awake for the upcoming debrief he had lined up in a few hours. The coffee did the exact opposite it should for him. Instead of the caffeine hitting his veins and making him alert, the warmth of the beverage showered a calmness on his sore body, assisting him to drift off into the abyss of his forgettable dreamworld.
CHAPTER 4
Andrick had felt the tingling reside on the back of his neck for well over four days, the urge to kill tapping ever-so-slightly as if to beg his pardon and ask when the next feeding of human life would be. It was barely after 5 PM and he knew he still had a ton of time before he would go to Rucker’s and try to scout some alternates just in case Brady and Joy stood him up. Pacing around the motel room, television on but no longer able to distract him, he grabbed the back of his neck and started to rub, a futile attempt to dull the increasing sensation. After that night in Logan Woods, he gave the feeling an identity, naming it Tappy. A dumb, silly name, because at the time Andrick felt annoyed by the presence. Annoyance fell into a rage and after he could barely contain it, rage boiled over until he would finally give in time after time.
The instant he extinguished a life, it felt like he had given himself a vaccine. In the last twenty-five years, he had killed many people, not remembering all their names, but never forgetting a face. The look of fear and the conversion to the cold, dead stare in lifeless eyes were what he aspired to produce every time. He was growing increasingly concerned over the last six months as he always seemed to live in the present, but for some reason, his first kill from decades past kept creeping into his subconscious.
What does it mean? Andrick constantly asked himself.
The thought continued to compound as Tappy made appearances at closer intervals. Initially only showing up a year or two between kills, Andrick slowly kept finding the little spiny tingles arise more often. The past year, Andrick had killed over thirty people he assumed, given he stopped counting after he
got through the first dozen. Each kill held less and less thrill to him, as it is common for a drug addict to build a tolerance and tried to search for that original high that hooked him in the first place. Andrick took a brief reprieve from his panicked pacing and chuckled thinking about how it would sound going to a narcotics anonymous meeting to share his issue.
Hi, my name is Andrick and I am an addict. I love nothing more than to watch people in fear as I take their lives and I am just not getting the kick I used to, he could picture himself admitting.
Andrick sat on the ground in the middle of the motel room, cross-legged, and tried to meditate, an art he researched on YouTube a few times that supposedly helped with stress and anxiety. He closed his eyes and regulated his breath. It took a few minutes but finally felt his heart rate start to level. He had the television volume on but it seemed to drift away as he focused on a particular moment of clarity. Whenever he felt as agitated as he had in the current moment, he always went back to the first time, the time that for him, couldn’t have gone any more perfect in retrospect.
His panic melted into an oasis of euphoria. Sitting on the floor of Clancy’s shitty motel carpet, he got an intense smell of campfire to his senses. A curl formed at the edge of his lips, as Andrick realized he was pulling himself back into that memory at Logan Woods. That’s all he really wanted at the end of the day anyhow. He wanted to feel his palms sweat from the potential ecstasy he yearned for approaching each target, every time.
A crackle from the campfire, joined by the memory of the intense smell of burning wood, transported Andrick as he sat meditating in a room twenty-five years later and four-thousand miles away. Like a football coach watching a video of his team, he analyzed everything from the distant memory. Sixteen-year-old Andrick was in the exact spot his flash of memory last left him when recalling at the gym. He was staring at Troy Boatman from across the flames of the massive campfire. Troy and Dale and Andrick all went to grade school together and even were on the same youth baseball team one year. As life happens, people grow into an idea of what they think they should be and Troy left Dale and Andrick in the dust to become a very popular school athlete, a top-tier cool kid as Dale liked to categorize people.
Andrick thought to himself if he could take out a perfect specimen like Troy Boatman, then truly no one in the world could stop him from his sense of feeling ‘elite’.
“Beers are over there,” Dale pointed, to the check-in station where Ronny Filmore was standing and collecting five dollars per person before handing over a red plastic cup to fill up at the keg station behind him.
“You know I don’t really drink.”
Irritation and selfishness saturated Dale’s next response as he looked at Andrick. “Do you want to be a nobody all your life? If we make a good impression and crack a few well-timed jokes, we can have an epic spring break and keep it rolling into the fall for our senior year!”
To answer Dale’s question, Andrick did want to be a nobody. Nobody was able to slip in and out of crowds without second glances. Nobody could be in the dead center of a group and simply be invisible. It was almost a superpower in Andrick’s eyes.
Dale, how the fuck am I supposed to get away with murder if I am a popular person, people with their eyes glued to my ass? Andrick remembered thinking back at that moment.
Twenty-five years later, sitting in a meditation position in a dumpster of a motel, Andrick vividly remembered how cold it was that night in Logan Woods. The chill in the air was exemplified as it hit the beads of sweat at the base of his hairline and back of his neck, courtesy from a cocktail of nerves and adrenaline. In the present, Andrick felt his heart rate increase and the beginnings of an erection to form while he sat on the carpet in room 212, his memory coming closer to revisiting the most pivotal moment of his life.
The air was crisp with each inhalation Andrick took in while looking around at the pockets of conversations surrounding the kegger. He checked his watch and saw it was after midnight. Looking around, the crowd was starting to slow down. People were starting to pass out from drinking way too much or slowly starting to leave due to curfew or other engagements.
It’s got to be now. Do it, you fucking pussy.
Andrick saw Dale to his left, vomiting profusely in a dark outskirt of the gathering. The violent heaves and gurgling could be heard even from the insulation that the natural surrounding encapsulated. Each flicker from the fire only accentuated Dale’s suffering. To his right, the opposite side of the still massive campfire with flames starting to lose its height, Troy Boatman was severely impaired and sloshing his words with his arm around Mindy Clarkson. Mindy was in no better condition.
One of the Alaskan Archer cheerleaders, Mindy always held great posture and gave off proud ownership of her coordination. Normally on the top of any pyramid routine, Mindy was agile and could flip through the air and come down into the splits. She could perform those types of circus acts more gracefully than most people could bend down to pick up a fallen pencil from their desk. That night, however, she looked like a drunken crack-whore, slurring and trying to gesture with her hands as if Troy had become deaf throughout the night and she was attempting to communicate via sign language.
Troy whispered something into her ear, then stood up and walked behind where he sat with Mindy to go through the trees, into the darkness. Andrick paused just a moment to see if Mindy would follow, but after seeing two of her friends sitting on the tailgate of a red Toyota Tacoma, she staggered opposite of where Troy had gone, in hope of bumming a cigarette. Taking a deep breath, Andrick felt every star had just aligned to advise him that if he was going to go through with his plan, that had been the moment to proceed. Andrick had scaled the edge of darkness surrounding the gathering until he made way to the path Troy Boatman disappeared into, briskly making his way into the cold darkness of Logan Woods.
Andrick kept an eager pace until he was sure even the brightest crackle of light to come from the fire would not reveal his position in the woods. After that, he relaxed only slightly, and then his heart began to race as fifty feet away, down by the creek that ran from Logan Woods to Palmer, then Anchorage, before connecting to the Pacific Ocean, revealed the shadow of the young athlete. Andrick had two plans because the one thing his father always told him was to always have a backup plan. The first plan was going to be to let Troy start approaching him, making his way back to the party, then attack him from behind in the shadows. The second option, which Andrick desired to play out more so he could get a better view of his work, was to—
“What the fuck?” a perturbed Troy belted out from the edge of the creek.
Andrick had gotten so caught up in the moment, he didn’t even notice Troy turn around to catch him staring.
“You a fag?” Troy crudely asked. “You get off on watching guys take a piss in the middle of the woods?”
Real accepting of everyone, calling people fags, Andrick thought to himself.
At that moment, he knew Troy Boatman was still the same asshole who gave him a hard time back in the day. Andrick couldn’t reply, as his mind was racing to weigh out all options. On one hand, he thought about playing it off as he needed to find a place to relieve himself as well. He opted to avoid speaking of any attention to his genitals, however, as the entire thrill of the situation had him half-erect.
Troy threw his weight into a terrifying approach until he got close enough to see Andrick’s face.
“Andrick? Is that you?”
“Hi Troy,” Andrick said, unsure how else to reply. “I, uh, was trying to find a quiet place to take a leak.”
Troy’s demeanor changed, leaving the raging homophobic comment behind him and trying to replace his false mask of congeniality in a hurry.
“Sorry man, I have had a ton to drink and didn’t realize it was you. Just thought some weirdo was staring at me.”
“It’s a great night out. Great party too.”
“Yeah, I don’t normally see you at these things. Heck, I haven�
�t seen you at any function since we started high school.” Troy playfully tapped Andrick’s chest.
Andrick, not amused or convinced of the insincere good nature being thrown at him, “I am sorry, Troy. I know there were many opportunities taken from you by me not showing up at these events. So many times, you could have made me the butt of your joke or done something to embarrass me and make yourself look cool in front of everyone.”
Changing his body language, he dropped the bravado of trying to be a good, wholesome kid and instantly became the bully Andrick remembered.
“Listen, dude, that isn’t who I am anymore. I have changed and if you hold onto a grudge from the past, then keep it to yourself.”
Unlike the reversion Troy displayed to his old ways, Andrick had built up a quiet and sinister confidence since their previous interactions and continued to keep his shoulders up and eye contact stable.
“You are right. I would hate to have everyone here that you have fooled this year, thinking you are the Mayor of Hoskins, to find out you are a piece of shit that regularly stole mine and Dale’s lunch money, picked on us, beat on us, and that one time you asked to see my dick.”
That last part didn’t happen, but Andrick wanted to see how much Troy had changed. All the confirmation Andrick needed was given at that moment, as Troy’s face became flushed, veins starting to form at his neck, and nostrils starting to flare like a bull, the second the word dick was dropped. All façade was removed now, leaving Troy to counter the claim.
