by Luna, David
Gideon, one hand still holding Alan’s head down by his chin, reached up with his other hand, opened the shears, and slid the bottom blade ever so slowly against Alan’s cheek, underneath the makeshift gag made of duct tape and cloth, and sliced through it. He gently pulled the taped cloth from between Alan’s teeth, gripped it tight, and paused for several drawn-out seconds.
He was rewarded when Alan snarled angrily, “Who the fuck—” Which prompted Gideon to yank down hard on the crude tape and cloth handle, earning him a pained shout as the tape was wrenched from around Alan’s head. Gideon’s hand was full of the ragged remains of the gag that now also included some hair, and if he wasn’t mistaken, a bit of skin.
He walked unhurriedly across the room to the table, set the gag down, and made his way back. He stood silently, waiting for the inevitable. Alan tilted his head in Gideon’s general direction. “You don’t know who you’re dealing with! I’m a very powerful man. I’ll be missed. My men will be searching for me.”
Gideon smirked. “I’ve been watching you for two months. I found it strange at first that you had no backup, until I realized what it was you were doing. You have no protection here, as this isn’t where you do business. There’s no need to have a security detail during your scouting runs, even less in your own town, not to mention, it would scare the locals. So, there’s no one to come to your defense. You don’t even carry a mobile phone. I did my homework.”
Alan’s breath hitched and he shook his head emphatically. “I check in on a regular basis. I—”
Gideon interrupted, “You make one phone call weekly, from a public telephone. You made your call from the market parking lot tonight. If you’re missed, it won’t be until next week. We have plenty of time.”
Alan snarled and wrenched around in his ties again. “What the fuck do you want with me? Let me down!”
Gideon straddled the chair, folded his arms on the chair back, and looked up at the struggling man. “Alan… Do you mind if I call you Alan? I realize you no longer go by that name, but it’s the one I remember you by so I figured I might as well.”
Alan had quietened at that bit of news and then expelled a harsh breath and a muttered oath. “Jesus, who are you?”
“Come now. I think that’s the question I should be asking you, don’t you think?”
“Look, whatever it is you’re trying to do, whoever it is you think I am, we can work something out! There’s no reason to resort to scare tactics.”
“Is that what you think this is?” Gideon shook his head and laughed, but there was no humor in it. “No, this… this is much more serious than that I’m afraid.”
“Listen, we can—”
“Alan, it’s not time for you to talk now, it’s time for you to listen.”
“Fucking coward!”
Gideon’s only reaction was a raised brow that he knew Alan wouldn’t be able to see, his tone was bored. “Excuse me?”
“Think you’re so tough, tying me up? Hanging me up from the ceiling? Get me down! Show yourself! You obviously know me, so let me see your fucking face!”
Standing, Gideon picked up the shears again and approached. That time when he grabbed Alan’s chin and pulled his head back down, the man didn’t move. He slid the bottom blade of the shears below the duct tape and fabric covering his eyes and easily cut through it. Wasting no time, he yanked the blindfold off the same way he’d done the gag; the angry, pained cries not even registering as he turned and set what was left of the blindfold next to the gag scraps.
Turning around, he made sure Alan got a good long look at him. As he watched the color drain from the man’s face, Gideon figured recognition had dawned, and with it, the reality of what was to come. Gideon picked up the dossier he’d been given, spun the chair around, and sat, taking his time.
“Now, let’s see here.” Gideon opened the file and thumbed through it almost casually. Finding what he was looking for, he pulled out some gruesome photos of several of the victims. “Why don’t we avoid beating around the bush and I’ll show you exactly why I’m here. Besides the fact that you killed my men.”
He held up a glossy eight by ten of the broken body of a little girl. “This is Elira, a little nine-year-old Kosovan girl who was stolen from her family about a year ago and funneled into a human trafficking syndicate that you’re very familiar with. She was purchased, forced into sexual slavery, her body branded and used until it was unable to withstand anymore. She was found dead and nearly unrecognizable from a brutal beating in an alley in downtown Dubrovnik, Croatia.”
Gideon continued, reading the information on the back of each picture, providing the gruesome backstory of every victim in the file, each one carrying the same unique brand, which was one of the only things tying all the victims together. When he was done he stood and set the folder aside, picking up the shears again. At that point he knew Alan’s body was in pain; being strung up for any length of time wasn’t easy on one’s muscles and joints.
Though the man remained silent, a green cast tinged his skin after viewing the photographs of the mutilated bodies. Gideon could see the tension, the now palpable fear causing full body shakes. He wondered idly if the man cared one iota that the people he’d helped kidnap had gone through much worse.
He approached Alan and slipped the shears under the neck of what was left of his shirt and began cutting. When he reached the rope between his shoulder blades, he cut through the bindings easily, ignoring the jerky movements of the man.
Stepping away quickly, he watched as the tight weaving knotwork he’d created all along the length of Alan’s arms lost its grip as his weight pulled his body from them. As the man’s now fully naked body swung from the ceiling, he swayed like a pendulum from his trussed up legs, finally crying out. Gideon approached again, grabbed an arm and wrestled it behind Alan’s body, and then grabbed the other. He snapped a pair of handcuffs on his wrists and stepped away.
“What do you want? WHAT THE FUCK DO YOU WANT? You don’t need to do this. We can come to some type of agreement! I have lots of money. I know powerful people. Whatever you want, I can make it happen! There’s no reason you have to go through with this.”
Gideon ignored him and headed to the sink where he turned on the cold tap, filling up the hose he’d attached. Picking up the spray nozzle, Gideon approached the man that was still talking to him, still begging, but the words didn’t break through his concentration. He clicked over to the jet spray option and pelted the man’s body with a hard blast of icy water as he swayed from the rafters. The begging continued as he drew closer, holding the spray lever down with a firm grip.
Alan was shivering from the cold and moaning. His broken words loud now that the water had stopped. “What do you want? What do you want? What do you want?”
He continued asking the same question over and over until Gideon bent down and looked in the man’s eyes. “Why don’t we chat about the contents of the briefcase you’ve been carrying around with you for the last two months, and go from there.”
Alan’s eyes widened and he began shaking his head no at an almost frenetic pace. “No. No. No. No. It’s not… That’s not mine to give. It’s not mine.”
Alan continued to shake his head no, muttering about the case not being his. Gideon raised the nozzle again and drenched the man with another punishing icy spray. As Alan shivered, teeth chattering, and still trying to argue about the briefcase, Gideon walked behind him to the far corner of the basement. He reached the old boiler room and flung the door open, approached the mammoth old machine, pushed down the huge handle, and gingerly drew the small, heavy metal door open. He began sweating immediately from the flames.
He picked up the crowbar, putting one end directly into the flames. He headed back to the dangling man, walked around to his front, and held the scorching crowbar close to his face, letting the heat emanate from it, cluing the man into what was to come. As soon as it did, Alan released his bladder and started to jerk in his bindings, crying out, a
nd then begging. Gideon grimaced at the stench of the man’s piss, grateful he’d avoided being hit with it.
As there was no useful information to be gleaned from Alan’s indecipherable noises, Gideon raised the crowbar and slid it between the man’s upper thighs and held it there while Alan did his best to stay still while he continued to moan and beg. The truly warped part of Gideon conjured up an image of the children’s game Operation. He touched the scorching metal to his trussed-up victim’s inner thigh and the screaming began.
After he was sure there would be quite a large brand left behind, he crouched down and whispered, “I think I’ll give you a brand in every location each of the victims had one. What do you think? Little Elira had one on her pelvis, didn’t she? Let me ask you this, are you the one that brands them before sending them off to the syndicate to be sold like chattel?”
At that point, Alan was a blubbering mess and the crowbar needed to be heated up again. Gideon went back to the boiler, taking his sweet time, whistling while he worked. When he walked around to Alan’s front, he ignored the pleas and held the scalding bar to his pelvis. “The location of the briefcase’s contents, Alan. You give me that, everything stops.”
Deciding not to wait, Gideon lifted the bar and moved it to his neck, below his ear and the answer he wanted finally came as Alan flinched away from the burning metal. “Okay, okay! No more, please! PLEASE!”
“Where is it? I know you emptied the case, where did you put its contents?”
“It’s under my mattress!”
Gideon shook his head in admonishment and tsked him as he walked toward the boiler again. Heating up the bar and walking back to Alan, dragging the bar along the floor. Placing the newly heated-up metal against Alan’s left pectoral, Gideon yelled to be heard over Alan’s cries of pain. “Let’s try this again, shall we? Keep in mind you’ll be left swinging here until I return with the contents. If you’re lucky, the trip back to your place won’t take long enough for both of your hips or knees to pop out of their sockets. Though the pain from the blood gathering in your head will be substantial, I have it on good authority that it won’t cause death for many, many hours.”
Alan mumbled something between cries. Gideon lowered the bar and moved closer. “Again.”
“Vacuum.”
“What about it?”
The crying continued and Gideon raised the bar again which had Alan sputtering. “In… Ins… Inside vacuum bag.”
Gideon huffed out a humorless laugh, eyes narrowed. “Quite the effective hiding place, you better hope you’re not lying to me.”
Alan moaned, “Please let me down… Please.”
Gideon squatted down to Alan’s eye level and rubbed his thumb hard over the fresh brand on Alan’s chest. The man moaned in agony. “Use this time to imagine what other things I could do to you. Better yet, think of the pain all of your victims have gone through over the years and what ideas I might have gleaned from just looking at the photos of their dead and mutilated bodies.”
Alan continued to wail as Gideon stood. He headed toward the doorway to the stairs and leaned the crowbar against the wall. As he headed up the stairs he called out to Alan. “I’ll be back. Eventually.”
SEBASTIAN PHILLIPS, SUNGLASSES DONNED AND hoodie up, slid into the Lyft car and quietly thanked the driver for picking him up. He pulled on his seatbelt and reached into his shirt pocket for the dose of Valium and Vicodin he’d put there earlier, swallowing them down with a drink from his water bottle. He slid in his earbuds and thumbed his way to the Spotify mix he’d made long ago for days like these.
His foot tapped out a rhythm to the first song, more from nerves than any desire to participate in the music itself. No matter how many times he went through with his doctor’s appointments, he couldn’t shake the tension it brought. His hands shook a bit as he rubbed his sweaty palms back and forth on his bouncing knees.
He was dropped off without fanfare in front of the building that housed his doctor’s office. He always arrived early so that he had plenty of time to wait and let the meds kick in before his treatment. He was highly susceptible to medications and combining them got him as relaxed as he was able to get without being knocked out completely.
As he neared the checkin desk he smiled as he watched Suda, the receptionist. She was a tiny little spitfire, always talking animatedly with her hands. She wound down the call when she saw him and took her headset off.
“Hi, Suda.”
She grinned. “Sebastian, you handsome boy. Come, let me check you in.”
He handed over his debit card to take care of his co-pay and took a seat in the waiting room. Suda came out several minutes later to bring him an ice roller and wish him luck. He fiddled with the handle of the frozen rolling cylinder that closely resembled a mini paint roller. It was used to roll over the skin for the numbing effect of ice before treatment, and the management of swelling after.
He began to use it on his face and neck, absentmindedly thumbing through people’s comments on his Instagram account. Just shy of twenty minutes later he was called into one of the treatment rooms where the machine was already humming, making his hands start to sweat again with nerves.
He waited, buds in his ears, music on stun to drown out the noise, and icing his skin with the roller. Ten minutes later Dr. Perez came in the door with a couple of interns. She said hello and introduced them, but he was awful with names and so nervous, he forgot them almost immediately.
The fact that he was at a hospital at all had him extremely on edge. Even though he wasn’t technically on the hospital campus but at a satellite location, he still hated every second of it, the mild nausea beginning the moment he got out of the car would continue until he was outside. Ever since he was little, when he’d been taken, over and over again, to a hospital for different treatments, he’d grown to hate and fear hospitals.
Dr. Perez was just shy of six feet tall, which put her several inches taller than him. She was beautiful, her loose dark curls winding their way down her back to her waist, but best of all, she had a wonderful bedside manner. While it always seemed the interns were gawking at him, she was always gracious and kind, which went a long way with him. She was very pregnant and put her hand at her lower back and stretched.
She smiled at his raised eyebrows. “I was due three days ago.” When he winced, she threw up her hands. “Right? So I figured I might as well keep working because maybe that will trigger him to make his grand entrance.”
He chuckled. “Good luck and congrats.”
She smiled and patted the hand he had on the armrest. “Thanks.” She opened his file on her iPad and looked him over critically. “So, I’m seeing some improvement. Would you agree?”
He shrugged noncommittally. “I see myself every day. I have no clue.”
She picked up the mirror from the nearby rolling tray, tilted the iPad towards him and the screen flipped for him to see the pictures she’d taken before the last treatment, and then held up the mirror. He supposed if he looked hard enough, there was a difference that could be seen, but again he shrugged. She gave him a patient smile and warned him they were going to increase the intensity of the treatment.
He clenched his shaking hands into fists but nodded his head as she stood up and chatted with the interns. He continued to use the roller until she asked him to remove his shirt. Once his hoodie and shirt were off and in a ball in his lap, she took the roller and set it on the tray.
When she approached him again, he could see that she had a hand down by her side hidden from view. He looked up at her and when they made eye contact she smiled in understanding. “You ready?”
No. He nodded his head. “Yeah.”
He closed his eyes and she proceeded to inject his facial tissue with lidocaine to provide some numbness. She injected three shots in his face and two inside his mouth to numb the area above his lip. Dr. Perez rubbed the areas to spread out the medication and he relaxed a bit, knowing that part was over. The female intern pre
pared the ocular shield, and he put his buds back in and cranked up the music.
The seat was raised and the back reclined. He closed his eyes and did his best to ignore it when the other intern lifted his eyelid and slid one of the shields directly onto his eye, pulling both lower and upper eyelids over the shield to keep it in place. She covered his other eye with gauze.
He practiced his deep breathing exercises, doing his best to calm his racing heart. No matter the drugs in his system, his tension was unavoidable. He jumped in his seat when the doctor let out a blast of the cold air connected to the laser. Voice muffled by his music, he imagined she apologized for scaring him but didn’t take out his buds to find out.
When she patted him on the shoulder a second time he knew well enough to brace himself for the onslaught. He gripped his shirt in his hand like a stress ball. No matter how many times he’d had the treatments, the first ten or so pulses from the laser always had his whole body reacting, every pulse like a rubber band snapping against his skin. After that, he was able to settle into the treatment and keep himself from jerking in his seat.
With a pulse nearly every second she was able to get quite a lot of each area done fairly quickly. Inevitably, after about a hundred pulses or so, he was usually in need of a break. The machine’s depth and strength levels needed to be changed at that point as well, when the doctor moved on to his neck and then later on his shoulder and chest.
Between treatment areas the doctor and her minions would usually go out and treat another patient and then come back. He was usually there for a couple hours, but it was either that or subject himself to it multiple times to come back for each treatment area. He didn’t even want to think about having to come back more often than he already did, so he stuck it out and did the whole treatment in one go.
When he was finally done, exhaustion had set in, as it always did after a treatment. He was given a couple ice packs and was on his way home so that he could well and truly crash. As he stepped out of the Lyft car outside of his house, his movements were lethargic. Sunglasses donned and hoodie up again, he made his way slowly to his front door. Upon entering he stripped off everything from the waist up and headed to the kitchen for some fresh ice packs and acetaminophen. His energy was nearly gone and he wanted to lie down.
