Flawless Dreams

by Hadena James

  He lunged at Caleb, the more imposing of the two of us. I stepped into both of them, sending him off target. He collided with a table chair and both skittered across the floor. Caleb winked at me and threw himself on top of the naked man on the floor.

  The real problem with nudity was that it was hard to hold onto a person with no clothing on. Wayne wriggled around, trying to free himself from Caleb. Caleb being a guy, refused to grab onto the only thing that really allowed purchase on a guy. He crab crawled with the wriggling suspect. I could hear Fiona and Xavier talking to the girl that had been on the floor. They were saying soothing things to her.

  To help Caleb out, I walked over to Wayne. He grabbed my leg and jerked, not even moving my foot across the floor. For a moment, doubt passed over his face as he attempted to calculate what was wrong with the situation. All thought left his face as I brought my other boot down on the arm holding me. There was a crunching noise. Like the baton I carried, the boots were custom made to assist with capturing psychopaths alive, when at all possible. They did serious damage to someone with all their nerve receptors working just fine. If I had done that to Caleb or Malachi, they would have noticed only that their hand no longer moved as directed.

  Wayne was not a psychopath and it was apparent I had done damage. Caleb grabbed the arm and flipped him over using the pain as leverage to move him.

  “You should have just grabbed his penis,” I told him. “That will stop every male sociopath I have ever met. It stops most psychopaths. Men are very protective of that area.”

  “I’ll keep that in mind next time I come across a rapist in the middle of the act and need to wrestle with him,” Caleb snarked.

  “Men,” I sighed.

  “Hey, the arm breaking was efficient,” Caleb said, trying to get the guy in cuffs. The fight was returning to him. He had moved out of shock and into the darkness.

  “Watch him,” I said a half a second too late. One minute, Caleb was putting the broken arm in cuffs, the next he was airborne.

  “You bitch!” Wayne spat at me as he got up into a fighting stance. I smiled at him. He paused, cocking his head sideways. Rachael moved closer to me. I wanted to say something, but didn’t. I kept my focus on the serial killer. Caleb was already back up.

  He did some sort of fancy kick that missed my head, but just barely. I could feel the air around me move. I grabbed the leg and jerked, pulling him off his feet. He crashed into the floor. I twisted the leg at the knee, wrapping it around my arm and pulling back. There was a loud pop. Caleb was suddenly there, moving Rachael as he came towards us. Wayne didn’t scream or cry out. He gave a short laugh. The darkness was definitely upon him. We acted and reacted differently there.

  I jerked him again, pulling him closer to me. His good arm swung out and hit my knee. I felt it fold under me before it slammed into the ground. Something cold entered my body near my hip. I brought back my elbow and slammed it into his face. Caleb jerked the arm that wasn’t broken and we all heard it snap. It didn’t sound like a twig. It was wet, meaty solid sound. The cold at my hip was becoming warm.

  “You’ve been stabbed,” Rachael’s voice was high pitched. I drew back and punched Mr. Rapist in the face until Caleb stopped me. There was the sound of a gunshot. His limp body jerked. We all turned to look at Rachael. Caleb smiled. I shook my head and dropped the limp man.

  “Get Xavier,” I told Caleb. “Why did you shoot him?” I asked Rachael.

  “He stabbed you,” she said as I got to my feet.

  I jerked off my jacket and tore at my shirt. I felt the fabric give way around the knife that was sticking out of my side. I exposed the flesh of my torso. She stared at it and her hand went to her mouth. I didn’t know if she was stifling a scream or vomit. People reacted in different ways. I did a slow turn for her. The blood was starting to soak into my jeans. Once the blade came out, I was either going to be completely clotted and it was going to have complications or I was going to bleed heavily for a few minutes.

  “You don’t get this way by not being stabbed,” I finally said. “Or set on fire, shot, cooked alive in a medieval torture device, there was even the guy who used a whip to try and open up my back. The fire removed most of those scars though. I can take it.”

  “I…” She stammered for several seconds. Xavier came rushing in. He looked at me and at the guy on the floor. Robert Timothy Wayne had the tattoo we were all watching for. He was also bleeding from a wound near his heart.

  “Tend to him.” I told Xavier.

  “I…” Rachael tried to compose herself. Fiona put an arm around her.

  “She pulled a gun and put it to my head once. Those scars are scarier.” Fiona helped. “However, that’s why she gets to go first. All those scars and yet, she just keeps going, like a psychopathic Energizer Bunny. That’s Ace’s secret. She has the mentality of a sociopath, but the body of a psychopath. She can stand there and look pissed off because she mentally understands she’s been stabbed, but the pain is more of an annoyance than actual pain.”

  “Here,” Caleb gave me his jacket and began to examine the knife. He was medically trained in the same way Xavier was, which meant he couldn’t have living, normal patients. He was my backup doctor. I took the jacket and let it hang by my side.

  “He’s gone,” Xavier said from the floor.

  “Damn,” I sighed.

  “Doc,” Caleb called Xavier over and they both looked at my side.

  “Well, the good news, it seems to have hit bone and stopped. The bad news, we’re going to have to twist it to get it out and you are already starting to clot. How, why, good grief you need to take more aspirin or something just for this reason.” Xavier exclaimed.

  “She’ll be fine,” Fiona assured Rachael. “As will you, if you don’t have a psychotic break from reality. We’ll have a talk later, probably tomorrow, with beer and pizza and you can ask questions and things.”

  “Do it,” I told them, trying not to roll my eyes. Rachael would learn, she was just new. I kept telling myself. She didn’t understand my role or Caleb’s or Malachi’s or Xavier’s or anyone else’s for that matter. Fiona was right, there was a steep learning curve for dealing with serial killers of the whatever-pathic variety. All the training in the world couldn’t always prepare a person for it. That’s why there were people like me. I felt the blade twist and come out. It wasn’t a fluid motion, more of a jerk, with Caleb holding my hip and Xavier yanking on the blade. They both stared at it for a moment.

  “I’ll get some filament for stitching it closed,” Caleb announced. There were sirens in the distance. It was about time.

  “What about the girl?” I asked Fiona.

  “She’s in the hallway, with a very nice old lady neighbor who said and I quote ‘he seemed like such a nice young man, imagine him turning out to be such a bastard,’ and an off duty cop that was visiting his cousin in the complex when we kicked in the door. She’s babbling, but that will probably go away with a good sedative, some sleep, and the name of a good therapist.” Fiona answered.

  “You sure he’s dead?” I asked Xavier.

  “Yes, do not shoot him again, that’s hard to explain,” Xavier told me.

  “That was not my intention. I was just thinking that if he were still clinging to life, I might kick him once or twice for good measure.” I frowned at the disheveled dark-haired man who looked like he had escaped an institution for the criminally insane.

  “He’s not even a little bit alive, you’d just be kicking his corpse and where’s the fun in that?” Xavier countered as he pressed on the wound. “The bleeding is already stopping. I’m going to shove my fingers in it, see if I feel anything nearby that might need attention.”

  I shrugged at him. I hated hospitals almost as much as they hated me. If I could avoid a trip through an MRI by having Xavier stick his fingers in the wound, so be it. “I can’t feel anything.”

  “Good,” I told him.

  “No, it means I want an MRI. We’ll do it at th
e FGN clinic. I’ll call ahead.” He stood up, yanked off a glove, and made a call. I tried not to sigh again.

  Eight

  Twelve hours later, I was bundled up, hidden in the bushes of a local park. I was physically fine. Wayne had stabbed downwards, catching my pelvis bone and not damaging anything in the process. This made him the least competent stabber I had ever met. There was nothing to the torso, if he had stabbed straight in, he probably would have gotten a kidney or intestines or at least something. Even an upward angle would have done some serious damage to internal organs. However, the MRI had shown a chunk of bone floating around from where it had been taking out by the point of the knife. He hadn’t even been lucky enough to break the knife point off when it hit bone.

  Gabriel had been nice enough to call me. Of course, he had yelled at me for most of it. I wasn’t following directions and blah blah blah. He stopped when I mentioned the tattoo and my reasoning of not putting Rachael up against a psychopath her first time out. He’d mumbled something about the talk we needed to have and hung up.

  After that, I had changed into the warmest clothes I owned, which wasn’t saying much since I hadn’t replaced most of my lost wardrobe in the previous months, and been dropped off at ten pm to see if I could catch a serial killer putting out a pile of bones. I hated the cold and it wasn’t exactly the warmest March on record for Missouri. There was still snow mounds in places.

  Since arriving, I had seen a man walking his dog and not carrying anything that would allow him to have a bones with him and a group of young thugs looking for a place to get high. They had moved quickly out of the park once I jumped up from my hiding place. I was not the type of person you wanted to meet on a dark street or in a dark park.

  There was noise coming towards me. I held my breath and waited. After about a minute, a woman in jogging clothes with earbuds in and music so loud I could hear it went past me. I stared at her back until it disappeared.

  “We should hand out T-Shirts to people that say ‘Volunteer Victim!’,” I said into my comm unit. “Some woman is jogging at three in the morning, in a park where bodies are routinely found, and her music was so loud, she wouldn’t have heard me even if I had shouted at her.”

  “Maybe she’s a psychopath who can take care of herself,” Fiona offered.

  “Doubtful,” Caleb answered. “I’ve had a couple of joggers over here too. I think they just ignore the danger with the mindset, it won’t happen to me.”

  “I wouldn’t be out here jogging,” Xavier answered. He was teamed up with Rachael. I ignored the fact that they were probably discussing me. If I thought about it, I’d become paranoid. Paranoia was one of those things sociopaths were prone to experience without provocation. It was also something I tried to tamp down, much like my vanity and narcissism. Sometimes, I failed miserably.

  Truth was, I was cranky because it was March and I was outdoors. My body didn’t like the cold. It was one of the few things I couldn’t ignore. I was fine in 100 degree weather, but anything below fifty and my body started to conserve energy by starving essential muscles of blood and oxygen. Once, a doctor had explained to me that if I kept my lifestyle, I was going to have trouble with achy joints and damaged nerves. I had tried to listen, but even when I wasn’t out looking for serial killers, they stumbled upon me. The cold was just the first symptom of many that had yet to manifest. If I kept it up, I’d be doing good to move my legs by the time was thirty-five. The scar tissue was now building on top of other scar tissue. Xavier and Caleb were both interested in trying a radical procedure to remove the layers of damaged flesh, but I wasn’t convinced to allow them to play Frankenstein with me as their monster.

  In a few years, if we were all still alive, I might change my mind though. I could only pop so many multivitamins and do so much exercise to keep mobile. I thought about the stab wound. It hadn’t been bad, just an inch or so long. A handful of stitches had closed it up. The problem was that it was on top of other scar tissue. I’d been stabbed there before by a much larger blade. As the smaller stab wound healed, it would raise the skin there, make it stick out even further. Eventually, it would impede my hip movement if I didn’t watch it.

  The chatter had stopped. My mind had latched onto my scars as a way to ignore my inner voice. All sociopaths and psychopaths should not be left alone in their own head for very long. Introspection was bad for us. Our egos inflated easily and our narcissism could get away from us because most of us thought we walked on water. The fact that I wasn’t dead seemed to confirm some aspect of this, which is why I was trying to think about other things.

  Then again, I had been stabbed earlier in the day. I definitely was not as good as I thought I was. That was obvious by the sheer amount of injuries I had sustained over the years. If I was a little faster, a little more graceful, a little more intuitive, I might not have to consider Xavier and his mad scientist ideas to remove scar tissue. I wouldn’t have this problem. The thought was humbling, to a degree.

  Another jogger ran past me, this time a male who looked like a stray cat could take him down. There was nothing exceptional about him. He didn’t have the contained violence that I saw in Malachi or Caleb. Or the raw rage that I saw in many serial killers. Once again, prey had jogged past me, listening to music, and not nearly alert enough to be out at this time of the morning.

  In the pre-dawn hours, I counted seventeen joggers. Not a single one of them seemed to have the skills necessary to be out in the dark. Caleb was right, everyone still had the I can’t happen to me mentality. Sadly, they were wrong. We’d reached the point where one in four people had some sort of run in with a serial criminal of the violent kind. That meant at least four of the joggers I had seen would be the victim of a violent crime at some point in their lives. It was just a matter of what type of violent crime.

  We dealt with killers, but there were more than just serial killers and mass murderers in the world. Serial rapists, pedophiles, and torturers were just as common. There were times I felt I was living in the Purge movies, but without the time constraints.

  I’d also been introduced to the other side of violent crime; mobsters. Mobsters, drug cartels, and gangsters weren’t my area, not really. It wasn’t until they became consistently violent that I could legally do anything about them. However, I had won some points with Interpol for catching the serial killer known as Bec or the Russian Demon. As a bonus, he’d brought along both his brothers and all three were now in custody. I had grown up in the era of civilized mobs or at least, that was the facade. Now, they used serial killers to do their work for them when they needed someone dead. The difference wasn’t that they were more or less civilized than they had been nearly thirty years earlier. It was that the people they employed were more willing to step out of the shadows and use their serial killing hobbies as perks on their resumes. Contract killers had always been a specific breed of serial killer. However, men like Bec were serial killers before they became contract killers.

  The sun rose and I got out of my position in the bushes. I’d been less than ten feet from every person that had gone by and no one had noticed me. Either I was well camouflaged or people were very unobservant. My money was on unobservant. Someone should have at least stopped to see if I was dead or injured.

  “I don’t suppose anyone saw anyone dumping a skeleton?” I asked as I stretched.

  “Not here,” Xavier answered.

  “Or here,” Fiona answered.

  “Give me a moment,” Caleb sounded concerned. I immediately started towards my car. He was about three miles from me in another park. I could be there in maybe two, if I ran towards my vehicle. I did, sprinting the distance from my spot in the park to entrance gate. I stopped dead in my tracks. Caleb was in the parking lot, he was staring at my car.

  My car is not unnoticeable. It is a 1969 Dodge Charger painted black with Dodge Orange racing stripes. It made more noise than some small jets and had the power to win just about any race. My father, Eric, and I had built
it before their lives and mine went their separate ways.

  “Did you run?” Caleb asked, not looking at me.

  “I was concerned,” I answered slowing down and walking towards him.

  “Stop, Ace,” he held up his hand. I didn’t see anything out of the ordinary.

  “Why are you here and what are you looking at?” I asked him.

  “Just wait there,” he told me again. I stopped and glared at him. “Glaring will not help.”

  “At least tell me why you’re here,” I snipped at him.

  “I decided to walk to your location instead of having you pick me up.” Caleb pulled out his phone and began to aim it at my car. I couldn’t see the side he was filming. I started walking towards him. “Are you having issues with the statement that you need to stay there?” He finally looked up at me. The corners of his mouth were turned down. His forehead was wrinkled. Creases at the corners of his eyes stretched his cheeks away from his frowning mouth making them seem thin.

  “I take it there’s a dead person next to my car,” I told him.

  “Yes, there is,” he nodded twice.

  “Why am I standing over here?” I asked.

  “Because you know them,” he answered. “You are not going to be happy and you’re armed.”

  “Headed that way,” my comm came alive as both Fiona and Xavier attempted to talk to me.

  “Who is it?” I asked.

  “Ace, you need to go sit down and wait for back up.” Caleb began walking towards me.

  “Who is it?” I enunciated each word. My family was all in Witness Protection and Australia, that didn’t leave very many people in my inner circle.

  Caleb shook his head, as his hand grabbed me. He held me very firmly and when I tried to jerk away, he cocooned me, making sure to pin my arms against me. I kicked him, but he didn’t let go, he didn’t even gasp. He was in off mode, impervious to my attempts to inflict damage to get away. A squad car with flashing lights showed up at the exact same moment that Xavier and Rachael pulled into the parking lot. Caleb kept me in his arms as Xavier walked around my car. His face paled.