by Sean May
2
I woke up on the ceiling of the van in a pool of blood. I couldn't feel my right leg, but my arms were still working enough to pull myself out of the sticky crimson I was laying in.
"Hamilton...King...guys?" I said, my vision still blurry from shock to the point that I still wasn't able to see the chaos around me. Nobody said anything in response, but as I got my bearings, I became aware of the massive figure in orange standing over me.
"Huh. You seem to be the luckiest of the bunch."
Donovan's voice shook me to the core. Even a van crash couldn't kill the bastard. I looked for the shotgun, but I was still too groggy to see anything other than blood and Donovan standing right in front of me.
"Your friends shoulda worn their seatbelts, you know? Way I figure, that's the only way I'm still around, with all that stuff you guys strapped me into. You, I dunno, guess it was a fluke that you're still here."
"...kill you, Donovan..." I said, trying to make the words sound forceful and aggressive.
"Fuck...you don't stop, do you? You're really in no position to do anything to me right now, so how about you chill out and we look to see if you'll ever be walking again."
Donovan stomped his way across the metal roof of the van, stepping over the bodies of Collins and Hamilton. He reached into the cooler that King had packed for the trip and withdrew two waters. He handed the first one to me, and I took it. The other one, he cracked the seal on and angled toward me. "Pull up your pant leg."
"What?"
"Your leg, you're bleeding a hell of a lot around your knee, but I need to see how bad it is."
"Why the hell are you doing this?"
"You want to live? Pull up your pant leg."
I wanted to use every last bit of my strength to find the shotgun to just put an end to all of this, but with the way my leg was throbbing, bleeding and stinging worse than any pain I'd ever felt. So I pulled up my pant leg.
Donovan crouched down and poured some water over the wound to irrigate it. With the blood cleared out, it was easy to see the eight inch long gash going from the top of my knee down to my calf. Actually seeing the wound made it hurt that much more.
"I've seen worse, but we'll get you patched up and you should come out of this alright." He pulled a first aid kit from the back of the driver's seat and got out a few items. "Wish I had some real gear, but this stuff'll have to do." He crouched back down and flipped the top off of a small bottle of iodine. "Guess you're lucky this isn't alcohol...iodine doesn't hurt nearly as much." He poured a generous amount of it onto the wound, and he was actually right about it. The iodine burned a little bit, but with the choice between the temporary pain of the iodine and the chance of infection, the iodine was the better choice.
"Where'd you learn all this first aid stuff?"
"Spend some time in the military, you learn how to put things back together."
"Donovan..."
"Yeah?"
"You know you're still going to that execution chamber, right?"
"Don't talk about that shit right now..." He trailed off, focusing on working on my wound. He unwrapped a few butterfly bandages. "Let's talk about you, Marshal Logan. What made you become what you are today?"
"You really want to know?"
"I don't ask about shit I don't want to hear about."
"You made me what I am today."
"Come on, I ain't taking credit for anything--"
"--Do you remember those two feds you killed, the two who tried to run you off the road as you were escaping?"
Donovan got a wistful look in his eyes, but my mind wasn't sharp enough at the moment to tell if he was feeling the sting of regret or reminiscing in the warm nostalgia of his murders. "Yeah, guy and a girl." He said, matter of factly, putting no emotion either way into it.
"The guy was my brother, Eric Logan."
Donovan pinched my wound together at the bottom and pasted the first butterfly bandage into place. "Thought the name sounded familiar."
"You don't know what I went through to come here so I could take you to that execution chamber, Donovan."
"And what for? You think doing it is your penance or something? A way to make things right? Listen, nothing in this world makes things right...shit only gets farther and farther derailed as you go along. Killing me isn't going to bring your brother back...and all this shit you went through, whatever it was, wasn't worth it. I'm gonna die on that table just the same whether or not you bring me to it or not."
"I can tell you're not really into sentiment. I guess that explains how you can kill fifty seven people and not feel a shred of remorse." He cinched together the middle of the wound and slapped on the next butterfly. I hissed at the pain.
"Remorse...remorse...you think I don't feel any fucking remorse? I only don't feel remorse for two people I killed that day, my bitch ex-girlfriend and her cunt of a friend who told her I wasn't good enough for her. But, you know what, you enter the Mall of America with an M16 and a bunch of bombs, things can get out of hand pretty goddamned quickly. People tried to stop me from getting to Mandy, my ex, so I had to put them down. They were keeping me from my goal, my mission. When that crowd started forming behind me..." Donovan's eyes went glassy, honest pain seemed to be seeping in. "...that's when I had to let those bombs go. Crowd control. When I finally got to where Mandy was working, I found her, that friend of hers, and all the people who had been in the store cramped up in a supply closet. I saw it turning into a hostage situation if I didn't just kill them all, so that's why I did it. After that, Mandy was dead, so was her friend, and I wanted to just get the fuck out of there, but the people just kept coming at me, and I kept putting bullets in them. What was I supposed to do?"
"Most spree killers off themselves after they've done what they set out for. Could have started there."
"It wasn't my time, Logan. Just wasn't." He put on the third and final butterfly to close the wound up as well as he could. He then unwrapped some gauze rolls. "I'm sorry you feel that I should have behaved in some kind of pattern, but the truth was I was just playing shit by ear, and I do really fucking regret that I had to kill all those other people just so Mandy and I could get even. But they got in the way."
"So my brother was just...in the way?"
"The honest truth, yeah. Doesn't mean I don't feel bad about it, but I'm not going to sit here and try to make something up, be all dramatic and tell you that your brother was somehow special out of those other fifty-five. I mean, I'll apologize to you." He looked me straight in the eye. "I'm sorry I had to kill your brother. There, that make everything better?"
Donovan was busy wrapping gauze around my leg, which explains why he didn't see my left fist swinging around at his temple. It smacked into him with a satisfying thud, accompanied by a nice little trickle of blood pouring out of his cheek. "Fuck!" He screamed.
"I didn't want an apology, Donovan...nothing you could ever say would make up for what you did to Eric."
"Yeah, well, I don't think getting shot up with drugs on a table in some godforsaken prison's going to do much either, you ask me."
"I didn't."
Donovan reached the end of the roll of gauze and taped the ends so they wouldn't unravel. "There you go...patched up. Don't try to walk, though, not for a while at least."
I tried to ignore Donovan's advice, but the second I tried to move my leg, I understood why he recommended it. Pain exploded along my right side, my knee the epicenter of the pain.
Donovan picked up the shotgun from underneath Hamilton. He wouldn't...but considering his track record, killing a man right after you saved him would probably be in the Terry Donovan playbook. "I guess you probably knew after all of this that we'd come to this moment."
"What moment?"
"C'mon, man...you didn't see it coming? This is where I get the fuck out of here. Sorry to shock you, but I am, after all, a really fucking terrible person at heart."
"You see that storm out there? You'll die from exposure in a
few hours."
"Gonna die one way or another, right? At least this way I'm giving myself some options."
And with that, Donovan winked and gave me that cracked joker's smile again. He opened the door to the van and disappeared into the blizzard. As I waited for my help to arrive, I hoped the bastard froze to death.
The Cleanup
Tim caught a glimpse of himself in the side mirror of his car as he walked toward the apartment: he looked like a complete fucking idiot. He was decked out in an improvised biohazard suit composed of a set of long sleeved disposable scrubs, rubber boots, a ski mask, goggles, thick rubber gloves and a respirator he’d picked up at Lowe’s. Every gap in the outfit was wrapped with at least three layers of duct tape, sealing him into the clothing, protecting him from the outside world.
He carried a plastic tub full of cleaning supplies with him as he trekked across the parking lot. Tim was in plain view of anyone who took a second to look out their window, but at this point he didn’t really care if anyone called the cops about a suspicious man in what may or may not be a poorly executed stormtrooper costume going into an apartment where something horrible happened a couple of days ago. Things really couldn’t get a whole lot worse at this point for him.
As stupid as he looked, he knew he’d need every layer of protection he had on once he opened the door to the apartment. The smell of stagnant blood, a nauseating mixture of copper and rotten meat, hit him like a wall. As good as the respirator was, nothing on earth can combat the smell of blood left to sit in the sun for two days. His first step and his first breath in the apartment tested his gag reflex, but he thought it would probably be even worse for him if he threw up inside his protective bubble, so he moved into the apartment, trying to breathe as little as possible.
Tim walked into the kitchen. The mess was as bad as Jimmy, the guy who set him up with the job, had described it, though there’s a lot of difference between a guy sitting in a diner saying “there’s gonna be blood on everything, brains, bits of skull, and probably some other stuff you shouldn’t even ask about” and actually standing in front of that blood, those bone fragments, and the pinkish chunks that littered the room.
Tim put his bucket on the corner of the coffee table in the living room and assessed the situation. This job was going to take hours of work for something that had unfolded over the course of seconds, the blood and entrails going everywhere as Boroni’s guys taught a lesson to some ecstasy dealers who’d skimmed a little supply and a little cash off the top to sell on their own. The baseball bats, the knives and the hatchets the thugs wielded gave them plenty of education about what happens to people who decide to have a little entrepreneurial spirit with product that wasn’t theirs.
In what Tim could only see as merciful, the bodies weren’t in the apartment anymore, as Boroni’s guys had taken care of them right after the murders, since a body creates an unbearable stench after even a few hours, not to mention how much that stench would be amplified after two of the hottest days in August. But, even hitmen had things they were above doing, like scrubbing blood out of tile grout. Thus, Tim’s job came about.
This wasn’t what Tim thought he’d be getting into when he said he wanted to be a part of Sal Boroni's legendary syndicate. His brother, Brad, was already a top-level enforcer with Boroni and was living in luxury, with a gigantic house in Long Beach, a garage full of Audis and a nineteen year old mistress that could cause a man to beg for time with her. Tim’s life wasn’t going so well at the time, just getting out of San Quentin after doing three years for grand theft auto. Seeing Brad’s McMansion caused pangs of envy to drum up in his stomach, and Brad’s beachfront view beat the hell out of Tim’s cell. After seeing what his brother had achieved, and thinking that Brad would be willing to give him a helping hand, Tim asked him one day if he could maybe get in on the action with Boroni, and Brad told him he’d see what he could do. This was apparently what Brad could do, Tim thought to himself as he began to resent getting into this whole thing in the first place. He shouldn’t have admired his older brother as much as he did, but it had always been that way, ever since he felt envious that Brad always came home with the coolest video games, comic books and porno magazines when he went on his daily shoplifting sprees. Tim followed in Brad’s footsteps, stealing things daily from the local Target, some of his hauls turning out to be incredibly bountiful, and the popularity he garnered by having every Playstation game available made him feel good about himself. But by the time Tim had started shoplifting, Brad was stealing cars and taking them to chop shops, eventually spreading out into drugs, pulling in thousands of dollars a week while Tim had to be content with the copy of Jet Moto he’d taken while that cute checkout girl wasn’t watching. Tim always felt like he was a few steps behind Brad, and right now he felt like he was a whole mile behind his older brother.
When he first came to Brad, Tim asked if he could help in running some intimidation on locals that weren’t paying to keep their windows from being broken, but when he came to Brad with the proposal, his big brother cackled in his face. The truth was Tim couldn’t hold his own in a fight, not in the least. At five feet six inches and about a hundred and thirty pounds, he wasn’t going to intimidate anyone any time soon. So, it was logical to expect that Boroni wouldn’t send Tim out to strongarm a shopkeeper out of some more protection money, but he thought to himself that there had to be some intermediary steps between being the enforcer who kicks in your door and demands a bigger cut of the cash and the guy who sops up their trail of chaos with a bloody sponge.
Tim told himself he couldn’t get wrapped up in regret at this point, because he’d agreed to do the job and he wasn’t the kind of guy to break a promise, and also if he did break that promise, he knew his apartment was going to end up looking a lot like the one he was standing in right now. He also had to remember that Boroni was paying him well for this job, six thousand up front with another four on the back end if he did a great job cleaning up. Tim hadn't seen a payday like that ever in his life.
Tim kept his breathing as shallow as he could without passing out from lack of oxygen as he assessed the room. All of the action had occurred in the kitchen, with every surface caked in red, black and purple. Tim saw this as a plus, with the kitchen's tile floor and plastic countertops leaving the blood nowhere to go, nothing for it to soak into. If they’d taken the fun into the carpeted living room, who knows what sort of time he would have had to put into this mess.
Tim got to work on the floor first, dumping bleach onto the places where the blood had pooled the most. The smell of the bleach combined with the updraft of all the dried blood being liquefied again almost knocked him out, so he cracked a window and went on with the cleaning.
Once Tim got into the cleaning, once he focused solely on removing all traces of bodily fluids from the kitchen...he sort of forgot that he was cleaning up the aftermath of a horrible murder. It was just cleaning to him, nothing different than what millions of people do to their kitchens every weekend, except Tim imagined there wasn’t usually as much blood involved in most kitchen cleanings. He really got into it, it was cathartic to him, and he was able to vent his frustration with Brad, Boroni and the whole situation as he brushed steel wool into the cracks and crevices of the tile. He scrubbed the floors for an hour and a half, dumping bucket after bucket of black-red water down the drain of the kitchen sink, and finally he went to work on the countertops and the cabinets. They didn’t really have all that much blood on them, so they finished fast. He poured a bottle of bleach down the kitchen sink followed by a liter of hydrogen peroxide to cleanse the pipes. Even if there were bits of whoever down the drain, everything would be so burned by the bleach and peroxide to get any kind of solid evidence. All those reruns of CSI he watched in jail had taught him something.
He’d cleaned the kitchen better than he’d ever cleaned a room in his life, even counting his own apartment, which was a perpetual mess. He was even a little bit proud of the transformation he put
the room through, from a forensic investigator’s playground to something that belonged in Better Homes and Gardens.
Before packing up his things and calling it a night, Tim decided to check the other three rooms of the apartment. Jimmy had told him that they’d only worked in the kitchen, but Tim was going to do the best crime scene cleaning he could possibly do, and that involved checking every corner for traces of blood. He checked the bathroom and thought he saw long streaks of blood in the shower, but they turned out to be rust stains, and although Tim was functioning as Boroni’s cleanup man, he wasn’t going to be his maid. He left the rusty bathroom and checked the master bedroom to again find nothing incriminating.
Finally able to breath after being away from the blood for a little while, Tim pulled his ski mask and respirator off and opened the door to the other bedroom. There was a small table lamp on beside the bed in the room that illuminated a collection of pictures. Tim tried not to focus on the faces of the people in the pictures in order to keep himself distanced from the brutality that had been waged upon them. He looked around the room for blood, but once again came up empty. He turned to leave the room, but just as he was making his way across the threshold, he heard something. A whimper, a half cry half guttural wretch coming from the closet on the far side of the room. At first, Tim was pretty sure it was a dog or cat, since the sound was so faint and inhuman, but when he slid the glass door to the side, he found out just how wrong he was.
It was a kid.
He couldn’t have been more than nine years old, but curled up in a ball in the corner of the closet, his arms and legs flecked with splotches of blood, he shrank down to a newborn. He was dressed in his pajamas, a Superman t-shirt. His face was hidden, all Tim could see was a tuft of curly black hair poking out from the crook of his arm.
Tim stumbled back from the closet, his equilibrium tossed around like he’d just been through the spin cycle. His vision dimmed. Whenever things got really bad on a job he was doing, he had this nasty habit of losing vision and coming very close to blacking out. It was the reason he’d gotten caught on the grand theft auto charge after he passed out when he saw the police cruiser amble around the corner when he was trying to steal a Lexus. He thudded into the wall of the bedroom and smacked his head against the drywall, shaking a couple of family portraits off of their hooks and down to the floor, the glass shards twinkling in the dull moonlight of the unlit bedroom.
