by Ryan Schow
“Let’s go,” another guard said to her. She walked with him, hoping to leave as soon as possible. Warden Dicampli was there to politely see her out.
“Did everything go according to plan?”
“Close,” she said. “We’ll probably need a follow-up visit, but don’t worry, your secrets are safe with us.”
“I didn’t realize you were privy to my secrets,” he whispered.
“I’m on a need-to-know basis, Fabian. And unfortunately, I needed to know this. I wish to God I hadn’t, though.”
He clenched his jaw, clearly embarrassed.
“You’re a sick man, but I’ve met worse. Hell, I’ve killed a whole lot worse.”
“Really?” he asked, shocked.
“Really,” she said, pissed off that she had failed.
Cira’s anger turned to fear. Leopold was known for both his charm and his temper. Everyone who knew him said he was patient to a point, but that he could go nuclear if provoked. When that happened, she was told by others that it was best to get underground and let the fallout pass. Was she about to get the full force of his ire now?
“I’m ready to go,” she said, scared.
Warden Dicampli ushered her out. At first he started to say something, but then he stopped when it was clear she didn’t care.
“So you’ll be back?”
“Probably.”
The walk out to the limousine felt like the walk of shame. She felt her blistered confidence in every uncertain step, in her expression, in the California sun beating on the back of her neck. When she arrived at the limo, the driver got out and opened the door. She slid in next to Leopold.
He didn’t look at her. He simply waited for the driver to get in the car, but they didn’t go. Not right away. Instead he sat there, perfectly silent, not even looking at her. Finally, he opened the intercom between himself and the driver.
“Bring me the box, please.”
The driver got out, going first to the trunk, then to Leopold’s door. Leopold rolled down the window and took the metal box handed to him. From inside it, he withdrew a satchel. Inside that satchel was a shank. The weapon was hideous, still stained with bits of blood.
“I don’t know what to say,” she said.
She was looking at half a pair of scissors. The single blade was sharpened to a lethal point, and the hook blade was wrapped in duct tape right up to the single ring for grip. He slid the makeshift shank back into the satchel, then tucked the flat package into his jacket pocket. Without another word, or a reprimand for her failure, Leopold opened the door and walked toward the prison.
Scratching her head, staring out the window at the lush green landscape, she wondered if her time with Leopold had come to a close. If she wasn’t useful, she wasn’t dependable. And if she wasn’t dependable, people like Leopold Wentworth tended to get rid of people like her.
Half an hour later, Leopold returned, climbed into the limo, then drew a deep breath and blew it out slowly but certainly. As they drove off, his gaze settled onto the passing landscape.
“Are you trying to torture me?” she asked, breathless.
“Of course. Is it working?”
“Masterfully.”
He turned and looked at her. Seeing the worry on her face, he cupped her cheek, smiled, then said, “You didn’t think a guy like Atlas would turn on the first pass, did you?”
“That was my chief concern.”
“It was a job you were bound to fail at,” he said with an empathetic smile. “Not because of who you are. I expected you to fail because of who he is.”
“So are we done, then?” she asked. “You and me? This arrangement?”
“Oh, no,” he replied, his eyes returning to the lush scenery. “On the contrary, Ms. Kingsley, we’re just beginning.”
Chapter Eleven
ATLAS HARGROVE
Outside his cell, Atlas was told to strip naked again, keeping just one sock. When he was done, one of the C/Os slapped the back of his head. This maggot put it nicely when he said, “Get in the hole, kid killer.” The “kids” he was referring to were not kids at all. The ones he’d killed ranged in age from twenty-one to twenty-four. The dead children run over by those monsters, however, were seven, eight and nine. Atlas wasn’t a kid killer. But the men he’d killed were. He held these facts close to his heart, if anything to assuage his conscience, but that wasn’t worth mentioning to the guards. What anyone thought of him there simply didn’t matter.
He stepped into the familiar darkness, the distress setting in immediately. A darkness as thick as oil coated him, embraced him, erased him. When the heavy door closed completely and the last light was extinguished, he was hit so hard and fast with a surge of vertigo, it had him reaching out for the wall. He staggered toward something solid, something definable. When his hand met solid wall, he whispered to himself, “Floor to ceiling, it’s just six concrete walls, a toilet and a drain. A room like any other.”
He curled up on the floor, took off his sock, laid the fabric under his head and tried to go to sleep. At first he was cold, but then he realized cold was just a sensation, so he tried to forget about it. Sometime later, someone opened the cell door. The light hit him the same way holy water might hit a vampire. He closed his eyes to the stinging sensation, then turned away. The sound of something landing nearby piqued his curiosity, but he waited until the door was shut and he was once again shrouded in darkness to respond. What he found beside him was a file folder and a lighter.
“Bedtime story for you, kid killer,” the C/O said on the other side of the door.
Atlas ignored the file and the jab. Pushing it aside, he went back to sleep. When he woke up some time later, he threw punches and kicks in the dark, working on his snap, working on staying loose and fast, right up to the point of contact. Every so often, he’d hit the wall wrong and smash a knuckle. That was his clue to tighten back up and focus. When he was done with that, he dropped down and did a variety of pushups and sit-ups. When his arms shook and he reached failure, he got to his feet, did wall sits until his thighs burned. After that, he threw a hundred more punches, striking the concrete wall first with his right fist, then with his left.
Weary, beyond drained, he collapsed into a fitful slumber. The nightmares were there, the same as always, making it hard to sleep and even harder to recover. He woke up, repeated the routine.
Food came as he was punching the wall with his left hand. Atlas stopped his regimen and gobbled up the slop, nearly choking because he swallowed it too fast. He chased the meal with several big gulps of water from a thin paper cup. When he was done, he sat down, let the food and water settle. Then he blindly felt around the floor until he found the file.
The folder was thin, nearly insubstantial. He opened it up, felt the contents. Photos. Some paper. He felt around again, found the lighter. Rolling the flint wheel, he struck a flame. The sight of the first photo hit him like a gut punch. He extinguished the flame. Turning away, Atlas found himself nearly hyperventilating. The food he’d just eaten, the food that wasn’t settling right in the first place, now felt like a brick someone dropped into his stomach.
He thought he knew what this photo was, but he couldn’t be sure. Psyching himself back up, he struck the lighter again, returned to the photos. There was a small stack of them. He made it through two more pictures before stifling the flame a second time.
Tears gathered in his eyes, but they did not spill over. He couldn’t stop shaking. Atlas was a strong man, a man who didn’t cry, except for the loss of his daughter, and the unexpected death of Julie Holloway. But as he bit back the tears, he wondered if he could continue through the remaining pictures without suffering severe emotional and/or psychological damage.
“Where are your balls, Hargrove?” he mumbled critically.
Back when he’d killed the meth heads, right before he’d been shot by Officers Petty and Holloway, he’d seen the up-close mess his Remington had made of the passengers in the Mustang. He’d turned
the driver’s head into a pulped cantaloupe. He remembered a flash of the incident, a disgusting mess of blood, bone and brains.
Atlas studied one more photo before killing the flame completely. Disgusted, he dropped the contents of the file and fought to keep his lurching stomach down. When he managed to gather his wits about him, when he managed to put a lid on his brewing nausea, he did pushups, sit-ups, kicks and punches. Then he did wall sits, burpees, lunges and some very slow yoga, focusing entirely on holding his poses. Sweat drained out of him, rained down on the floor. Standing up, moving out of the puddles, he went back to punching the walls, stopping the moment he felt a small cut open up on his knuckle.
As he stood there in perfect blackness, out of breath with too much adrenaline surging through his veins, he opened and closed his fist, flexing hard, then relaxing it completely. If he didn’t calm down, he was going to damage his knuckles. So he sat back down, closed off several streams of thought, and returned to sleep. When he woke, it was with a strong curiosity.
The first photo he’d seen was of a girl’s torso with the cut-off legs where the arms should be and vice versa. Seeing a child like this, desecrated and defiled, he thought of a spider for some reason. To see a body taken apart and then so crudely put back together reminded him of things he’d seen with some of the more demented serial killers. These photos ranked right up there with the worst of them. The folder and its contents served as a message. He knew this as plain as day, and yet it had the intended effect.
Now, in a better frame of mind, he struck the lighter and fingered through the rest of the file’s contents. At the bottom of the stack, he located a final report. As he suspected, these snippets belonged to a murder book. The murder book on Ronnie Beckett.
Ronald Leland Beckett was forty-four years old, stood six foot three inches tall, and had blond hair, blue eyes and multiple tattoos. According to the report, for no apparent reason but to further his artistic talents, the man had butchered two generations of a family he didn’t know. There was no connection to them before the murder, which unnerved those in charge of the investigation. Seemingly, he had no reason to have done what he had to this particular group of people. For Ronnie, it was simply a random murder. Atlas had watched part of the serial killer’s confession tapes back at the precinct, before he’d washed out. They all had. Ronnie said to the arresting officer that he’d seen the child and a vision had overtaken him. He’d followed the family home, staked out their place, then slaughtered them that night.
The details of the case were flooding back in. The murders were so brutal, so violent and bloody, that seasoned detectives testified to having to catch a breath of fresh air more than once. The first-on-scene admitted to vomiting in the front yard. He said his partner had run out of the house after him, holding his mouth as bile and puke sprayed through his fingers. The lead detective started yelling at the newbies for contaminating the scene. The same detective staggered outside a few minutes later, looking queasy. No one said anything to him. When said detective managed to pull himself together a few days later, Atlas pressed him for the details of the case. That detective was Foster Truitt. He had asked Truitt if he’d talk to Ronnie Beckett about his daughter, Alabama.
“That’s been in the back of my mind,” Truitt had said. “I’ll feel him out.”
Detective Truitt’s questioning of Ronnie about Alabama led him nowhere. The murderer had an alibi for the day his girl had gone missing. After the interrogation, Atlas had rewatched the tapes, worked the timeline, then ruled him out as a suspect.
Although that tree bore no fruit, the stain Ronnie Beckett left on his mind was not one he wanted to revisit. He thought he’d buried it. He hadn’t. Much of it had come back up the moment he’d laid eyes on that maggot in the chow hall. Now, with the crime scene photos within reach, that same dreadful stain bled up through the layers of time, finding its way to the forefront of his mind. Ronnie Beckett was a vile, truly malevolent soul. Something he didn’t understand. What would cause another man to slither down into such wicked depths and deem any kind of murder-porn “art”? And why did he still have air in his lungs? The taxpayers shelled out a lot of money to the State of California, some of it for noble causes, and some of it to pay for the lives of monsters like Ronnie Beckett.
Atlas thought of the semi-good looking blond with the severe hair, the exquisite body, and the silver tongue. She’d almost talked him into killing Beckett. Almost. Now this file. Now the promise of finding his daughter in exchange for exorcising this demon. For a long time, he wasn’t sure how he felt about killing in cold blood. Ronnie wasn’t a normal man, though. He was human filth. Evil incarnate. Didn’t that count for something? Wasn’t this a way to right a few societal wrongs?
Almost against his own better judgment, Atlas studied the crime scene photos once more. Just like before, he succumbed to physical revulsion. He was no masochist. He derived no pleasure from the gore he studied. Rather, he locked those ocular obscenities firmly into his mind to use as fuel later. When he finally faced Ronnie Leland Beckett with murder in his heart—with these tedious, offensive memories—he knew he’d have the will, the desire, and the drive to send him back to hell where he belonged.
He gathered up the file, pounded on the cell door and waited. No one came. Some time later, his one meal for the day arrived. The C/O slid the tray of food into the cell under a small door located at its base known as the bean chute.
“I have something for you,” Atlas said as he took it.
“Okay,” the gurad said.
The bean chute opened back up and Atlas slid the file his way. “Whoever gave this to me, you tell them it’s a go.”
“So you’re in?”
“Tell them I said I’m in.”
After eating the scant, tasteless meal, he lay down and curled up on his side. He no longer had his sock for a pillow; he’d been forced to use it as toilet paper. He lay on his arm instead. When he managed to drift off to sleep, it was to a cacophony of horror. Nightmares spawned from those photos ran through his mind unending. Twice he jolted awake, sweating, his chest heaving, and twice he barely managed to get back to sleep.
Eventually, a voice cut through the madness and he woke up. “What?” he asked, groggy. “Is someone there?”
“I said get dressed,” the voice on the other side of the door said.
Atlas stood slowly, shrugging off the effects of sleep. He saw his clothes being pushed through the bean chute, along with his shoes and a fresh pair of socks. When he was done getting dressed, he stood there and yawned. And then he waited.
“Now what?”
Something metallic slid under the door. He picked up the item, turned it over in his hands. He knew exactly what it was. A shank. The former SWAT commander turned the barbaric weapon over in his hands. The business end of it felt like one half of a pair of metal sewing scissors. The tip was razor-sharp, as was one side of the weapon; the other side was flat and dull. The hilt, however, felt like soft plastic and slightly gummy. Duct tape? Electrical tape? The tool fit perfectly in his palm, the grip solid. He moved with it like he was working a blade. Thrust and rip, thrust and rip.
“Anything else?” To the question, Atlas was met with a wall of silence. Knocking the flat side of the shank on the metal door, he said, “Yo, c’mon. What’s next?”
Inside the perfect darkness, his question remained unanswered.
He was alone again.
Instead of making any more noise, he sat down and meditated. The act of clearing one’s mind was easier said than done. Thoughts drifting aimlessly through your mind was a normal occurrence; trying to stop them—or to at least hold them off for the sake of clarity, or peace—was near impossible. Things had changed, though. Time was no longer a measurement. This made getting into a meditative state much easier. He simply peeled away every last thought until there was nothing. After that, he allowed a single thought to enter his otherwise cleansed mind: Ronnie Beckett’s death. From this place of peace, At
las Hargrove planned absolute mayhem.
The guard finally showed up. It wasn’t the same man as before; he was new to Atlas, yet somehow his voice rang familiar.
“For this to work,” the guard whispered through the door, “for you to complete your end of this deal, you need to kill Ronnie Beckett.”
“I know the drill,” Atlas said, clear of mind but queasy of heart and gut.
When he’d woken up in the hospital after being shot in the back, while stuck in an uncomfortable bed with an ungodly amount of pain radiating throughout his body, there had been nothing to do but contemplate his sins. Later, when he was marched before a judge and jury, as well as the families of the men he killed, he’d come to terms with his actions. The murder of those boys was justifiable. He believed that. In his mind, in the moment of their slaying, Atlas had become the hammer of God, stamping out the lives of those three murderous fiends. That didn’t mean he condoned murder. He didn’t. This was a choice he made, a contradiction he would have to live with, his penance justified in the eyes of the law. Back then, he’d thought he was done with killing. But now, as he was faced once more with the desire to mete out justice, the feeling was freeing, even though it wasn’t provoked. This was killing in cold blood.
This was premeditated murder.
The locks on the cell door were thrown. He covered his eyes, preparing for the sting of the artificial light. The door opened. He closed his eyes and held out his hands to be cuffed.
“It’s not like that, fish,” the C/O said. Atlas fell silent, tried squinting his eyes open. The piercing light cut like a knife. “Hurts, doesn’t it?”
“It’s fine,” Atlas said.
He still didn’t recognize the voice, and he couldn’t see a face. Was this a C/O? Or was this someone else entirely? The man continued speaking.
“You can just cut his neck and let him bleed out. But whatever you do, it has to be violent, messy. You need to do to him what he did to that little girl.”
