“Of course. I can be in your neck of the woods in a few hours. Want to grab a late lunch?”
“Sure.”
“Fine. Pick a spot for us and I’ll hit you up when I’m close.”
“Sounds good. Thank you.”
“See you soon.”
• • •
They met at a small diner a few miles from the Lambert home. A “late lunch” had turned out to be a blessing for Caleb; the place was all but empty. He wanted privacy for what he was about to ask Jack Dixon.
Caleb remembered meeting Jack Dixon when Domino was still alive. He remembered the man as being thin and tall, as tall as his father. Eyes a startling pale blue beneath a head of fine blond hair. Cheekbones high and sharp.
Seeing Jack Dixon now, over a decade later, he found that the man’s physical characteristics—save a few more wrinkles and a few less hairs—were mostly intact. The height was the only thing that surprised Caleb. He’d remembered the man being as tall as his father. Now, they were nearly the same height. Man to man, if you will.
Caleb wondered what it would be like seeing Domino again. No—he wondered what Domino’s reaction to seeing him again would be. To seeing the young man he’d become. Caleb felt an instant burn in his chest and willed the thought away. An old hat at suppressing all things painful, was Caleb Lambert.
(Then why are we here?)
The waitress, rough-looking but warm, tagging them “hon” or “sweetie” whenever feasible, sat them in a booth at Jack’s request. She brought them coffee and water and told them to take their time with the menu.
Jack flapped a Splenda packet back and forth between his fingers before tearing it open and dumping it into his coffee. He spoke as he did so. “Want to do the whole small-talk thing? Tell you how much you’ve grown, that you’re looking good and all that?”
Caleb sipped his coffee. “Not particularly.”
“Good. Because I’d be lying. You’ve definitely grown. Got your dad’s genes in that department. But I’d be lying if I told you that you looked good.”
“Thanks?”
Jack smiled. “Out with it, son.”
Caleb had rehearsed what he would tell Jack at least a dozen times, each time as uncertain as the last. Today was no different.
“It’s not an easy—I’m not really sure how to say it.”
Jack added cream to his coffee, stirred, sipped, and said: “Well, why don’t we stick to the ‘no small talk’ rule?”
Caleb nodded, paused, then leapt.
26
Jack Dixon listened. He did not interrupt once. He did not show shock or concern once. Just listened with the stoic face of a man whose life experiences had either desensitized him to all things disturbing, or had at least granted him the necessary poker face to withstand them until he could be safely alone and remove that face, preferably with a bottle of bourbon.
When their food had arrived, Jack ate slowly and methodically, never taking his eyes off Caleb as the boy spoke.
Caleb touched his food in the literal sense only, prodding it here and there with a fork, never once bringing it to his mouth. The waitress had come over, gesturing to Caleb’s full plate: “Everything turn out okay, hon?” And Caleb had returned a labored smile, telling her it was fine, thank you. When she came back a second time—“want to order something different, sweetie?”—Caleb was smack in the middle of telling Jack Dixon about his growing urge to kill people.
And so it was Jack who had replied for Caleb, smiling up at the waitress with a fine-tuned offering that somehow projected “fuck off” politely, answering then in similar “fuck off please and thank you” fashion with: “We’ll call you if we need anything,” leaving the waitress to wander off, bewildered, wondering whether she should be offended. It was a skill Caleb immediately coveted, stowing it away to be practiced later—assuming Jack Dixon would accommodate his odd request, that is. Hard to practice the innocuous fuck-off smile and tone if you’ve got a silver bullet in your head.
Spiel done, Caleb felt hollow. He’d hoped (prayed) to feel some sense of relief, something perhaps cathartic that, after hearing it voiced aloud in his own words, would lead him to believe it all absurd, that his plight was not so black and white—either a silver bullet for them or a silver bullet for me—but one that offered several shades of gray he had not yet considered.
He felt no such catharsis. No alternate shades of gray were forthcoming. Voicing it all aloud for the first time, he felt his plight was blacker and whiter than ever.
Unless…
(Unless what?)
Unless Jack Dixon suggests shades of gray.
(Make up your mind—do you want him to serve you up a license to kill people with impunity so you can satisfy whatever the hell is going on inside your head, or do you want him to suggest a way to tame the beast?)
Tame the beast?
(Up until now, it seems as though you’ve resigned yourself to two options—feed the beast or kill it.)
Feeding the beast IS taming it.
(Feeding the beast is appeasing it. The way a pet snake fools its owner by acting the pet as long as it’s kept fat, its loyalty only extending as far as its next meal.)
A snake is cold and unfeeling. I am NOT.
(As long as you’re appeased, you’re not.)
Fuck you.
Jack Dixon’s stoic way of listening extended to his manner when talking. Couple that with his distaste for small talk, and Caleb was more than appreciative. Whatever was coming, he wanted it curt and between the eyes.
“Sounds to me like you’d like to be a contract killer,” Jack said. “Not unlike Domino’s nemesis, Monica Kemp.”
Caleb quickly shook his head. “No—no, nothing like her. I don’t want to hurt good people. I would only hurt people who…who deserve to be hurt.”
“And who are you to decide who deserves to be hurt and who doesn’t?”
“The people who tormented my family. Killed my father. Killed Domino. I would say people like that deserve it, wouldn’t you?”
“I would. But those people found you, Caleb. How do you propose to find them?”
“I don’t know. I guess that’s why I’m here. I thought maybe you would know how to find them.”
Jack chuckled. “With what, my crystal ball?”
Caleb looked away.
“Domino was in the protection business, son. I am in the protection business. As I just stated, we do not look for trouble, we simply put a stop to it when it comes looking for our clients. Still, if we had the means and sought to pre-empt such trouble, we would be vigilantes.”
“What’s wrong with being a vigilante?”
“Other than the fact that it’s illegal? Moral and ethical concerns, I suppose.”
“Punishing wicked people hardly moves the needle on my moral compass.”
Jack smirked. “I’m sure it doesn’t. And I’m sure there are plenty of people in this world who think the way you do, son. The man who takes matters into his own hands and guns down his daughter’s killer in court, for example. He’s celebrated for it after. People empathize and claim they would do the same.”
“Damn right.”
“Only he’s celebrated in prison, son. As much as our legal system may seem unfair at times, we are slaves to it. Your passion may exempt you from the moral issue, but nothing can grant you immunity from the legal one.”
“I’m okay with that. If I’m caught, I’m caught.”
Jack nodded and sipped the last of his coffee. “Well, you might be, but I am not. If Domino were here, he’d tell you the same.”
“But he’s not here, is he? He’s not here because of a psycho little cunt named Kelly Blaine. Are you honestly telling me that if you’d had the chance to kill that bitch before she visited Domino’s house that night, you wouldn’t have? Be honest.”
Now it was Jack who looked away.
“You would have, right? Come on, man, be honest. Fuck the law—you would have.”
J
ack said nothing. Kept his gaze averted.
Caleb sucked his teeth, doing little to hide his contempt.
Jack finally turned back to Caleb. “I’m sorry, Caleb. I’m sorry you’re going through what you’re going through. I’m sorry these urges are consuming you like they are. And I appreciate that you’re taking steps to fight them rather than submit to them—”
“Then help me—”
Jack raised a hand. “But Domino left me in charge of the most prestigious protection agency on the planet, and we simply cannot be a part of vigilantism…” He looked away again. “We can’t.” Jack took the check the waitress had left on the table and slid out of the booth. “Lunch is on me. Take care of yourself, son.”
Caleb said nothing, just nodded once and dropped his gaze to the table. He was fiddling absently with a sugar packet when the waitress appeared and slid him the check.
Caleb looked up at her. “My friend took care of it.”
The waitress did not reply. Just gestured down at the check and tapped it with her index finger before leaving.
Caleb frowned and picked up the check. There was a phone number scribbled on it. Beneath that number, an answer and a name:
You’re goddamned right I would have.
Ask for Ray.
27
Caleb sat on the edge of his bed, phone number in hand, hesitant as the day was long. He felt like a kid building the courage to dial his grade school crush.
Ray. Who the hell was Ray?
(Clearly, Ray is someone who can provide the things for you that Jack Dixon could not.)
Why didn’t Jack just hand me the number himself, then? Explain who Ray was, then? Why the cloak-and-dagger shit?
(I thought he made himself fairly clear. Like the cop who wants a criminal dead, but can’t legally risk his job, pension, whatever, by condoning such a thing to a willing party. So he says no. No way. That would be illegal, good sir; I want no part of it. Only to meet up with said party at a safer time to say, fuck yeah, kill the son of a bitch. Take photos too, please.)
Covering his ass.
(Bingo. Like he said, he runs the most prestigious protection company on the planet. He can’t blatantly risk such an enterprise by condoning vigilantism.)
But he IS condoning it.
(HE is. His company isn’t. I thought his distinctions were clear. Why are you second-guessing shit? You’ve been granted what you wanted.)
We don’t know that yet. We don’t know who Ray is.
(Then call the fucking guy already.)
Caleb dialed.
28
The last tape ended. The Lambert family tape.
Charlie looked at Andy. “What do you think?”
“I think it’s awesome. It’s…priceless.”
“And my idea?”
Andy looked away. “It goes against everything Arty and Jim believed in.”
“What do you mean?”
“Getting caught? On purpose? Everything Arty and Jim preached was geared towards anonymity. To do what they did forever. Don’t you want that?”
“I want to be feared,” Charlie said. “I was wrong about respect. I want fear. Respect fades. Fear is forever.”
“But Arty and Jim…” Andy said.
“What about them? I’m still a fan. I’m still their biggest fan. But maybe we were looking at this all wrong. Maybe being the next Arty and Jim wasn’t our true calling. Maybe we need to be the first Andy and Charlie.”
“We haven’t accomplished nearly the things they have.”
“It depends on your definition of accomplish. Actually, we have the opportunity to accomplish something they couldn’t do.”
Andy dropped his head. “I don’t know, man.”
“What if Arty and Jim weren’t our spirit guides like we imagined they were?” Charlie said. “What if they were helping us find our own way? It’s like handwriting, man. Everyone’s taught the same letters, the same method of creating those letters, but everyone’s handwriting is unique. What if Arty and Jim were just giving us the letters, and now it’s up to us to develop our own handwriting? Our own signatures?”
“It feels premature,” Andy said.
“We don’t have much time. How long until they find out about our folks?”
“Then we go on the run like we planned.”
“For how long? I agree with you; we haven’t accomplished nearly enough as Arty and Jim have. We sure as hell made a mess of the hooker thing.”
“That was our first time.”
“Which proves my point. Other than the hooker and our parents, we don’t have enough experience under our belts, not enough trophies in our case. If we got caught soon after we ran, what would separate us from anyone else? Who would talk about us years from now? No one, that’s who. But if we accomplish this, we’ll be fucking famous, brother. Infamous. Fucking campfire stories for centuries.”
Andy dropped his head again.
“Is it Arty and Jim that you’re worried about?” Charlie asked. “If we pull this off, you don’t think they’ll be smiling down on us? If anything, we’d be fucking honoring them.”
“You make it sound easy.”
“It won’t be. But it is doable. If Amy Lambert really wanted to hide her family, she wouldn’t be on the news every damn minute. Putting out bestsellers like she does. The bitch is an attention whore. I say we give her that attention.”
Andy stayed quiet. Charlie went on.
“Think about what I said at lunch today: We might think we’ve changed, but no one else sees it. In their eyes, we’re still the pathetic pieces of shit we’ve always been. It’s time to change that.”
“Aren’t you afraid of prison? We wouldn’t last one second.”
“We’ll be given special privileges.”
Andy frowned. “How do you figure that?”
“We’ve got one hell of a bargaining chip. Or should I say, chips.”
Andy’s frown remained. “Like what?”
Charlie nudged the cardboard box of tapes over towards Andy with his toe. “What do serial killers often do to buy themselves lesser sentences, special privileges, and all that after they’re caught?”
Andy looked down at the box of tapes.
Charlie went on. “They offer to reveal the locations of several more victims they claim to have killed during their reign. Lawyers and cops go nuts for it because it gives them the hope that they might attach some of those victims to the millions of missing-persons cases they have. Now, most of those killers are full of shit and are just bluffing to try to buy themselves time, but we, my friend, are not bluffing. We have rock solid fucking proof.” He nudged the box with his toe again. “We have actual video footage of countless victims at the hands of the infamous Arty and Jim Fannelli.”
Andy looked up at Charlie. His skepticism was still evident, but lessened some.
“We hide the tapes. Scatter them all over the place like a fucking scavenger hunt—” He laughed at his own wit. “We give them one, and only one, the priceless—as you so rightfully called it—tape with the Lambert family, with the promise of many more to come if they accommodate our needs. And they will accommodate our needs. Just imagine when the press gets wind of the tapes. And we’ll make damn sure they do. All those potential victims out there? The families of those victims demanding closure to the as-yet-unsolved disappearances of their loved ones? The public backlash will be fucking huge if the police don’t play ball.”
“But it won’t be just one tape we give them at first,” Andy said. “It’ll be two.”
Now it was Charlie that frowned. “Huh?”
A smirk crept onto Andy’s face. “They’ll get the Lambert family tape we just watched, and then they’ll get the official Lambert Family Sequel with special guest star Mike Childs.”
Charlie cried out with joy, leapt to his feet, and dove on top of his friend, the two of them tumbling to the floor in a laughing embrace.
There was much to do, but now was a time for cel
ebration.
29
Christ, this is how every friggin’ horror movie starts, Caleb thought. Lost on a back road at night in God’s country. And Caleb supposed he, of all people, was a bit of an authority on the subject, a musing that held no humor.
How nice it would be if he could just use the maps app on his phone instead of the handwritten directions he had. But, as Ray had told him on the phone: “No app is gonna help you find ME, son. Fucking NASA can’t find me.”
And Ray had been right. Caleb had initially chalked up the man’s talk to bravado and entered the directions into his phone anyway. And they had gotten him a good ten miles without incident before his phone went on the fritz, kept telling him, in its synthetic female voice, “Re-routing…re-routing…re-routing…” before Caleb pulled to the side of the rural road, fiddled with his phone to no avail, and then ultimately gave up and snatched the hand-written directions, cursing his piss-poor handwriting and once again musing without joy that his nearly indecipherable chicken scratchings made for a solid vehicle to move the horror-movie plot along, inevitably getting him lost.
Caleb had heard the expression “off the grid” before, but, like Ray’s boastings of invisibility, he had believed the expression to be more bravado than fact—much as we’d like to think otherwise, we are all slaves to the inescapable eye of technology.
Ray, however, appeared to be the exception. This was both comforting and concerning. Comforting for the prospect that Ray was the real deal, the one man who might be able to help him, concerning because, well, he was fucking lost and might not ever get to the man.
He considered calling him. Wondered whether he could call him. Would Ray’s cell signal be scrambled this close to his house? But then, was he close? And how would it look if he called? “Hi, sir. I’m on my way to see you about that vigilante stuff we talked about, but I got lost on the back of some scary road. Can you come get me?” Hardly the stuff of John Wick.
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