THE GOOD KILL
A Killian Lebon Novel
Kurt Brindley
The Good Kill Copyright © 2019 by Kurt Brindley. All Rights Reserved.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the author. The only exception is by a reviewer, who may quote short excerpts in a review.
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This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Kurt Brindley
Visit my website at www.kurtbrindley.com
Printed in the United States of America
First Printing: Jul 2019
PROSOCHĒ
Praise for LEAVE
“This story was gritty and realistic in its portrayal of the changes required when women were first put in combat situations. It is short but makes you think about what they had to endure and the adjustments to mindset of the men.”
~ Nancy Vaughn, an Amazon review
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
THE GOOD KILL
PART ONE
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER TWELVE
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
CHAPTER NINETEEN
CHAPTER TWENTY
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
PART TWO
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
CHAPTER THIRTY
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT
CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE
CHAPTER FORTY
CHAPTER FORTY-ONE
CHAPTER FORTY-TWO
CHAPTER FORTY-THREE
CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR
CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE
CHAPTER FORTY-SIX
CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN
CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT
CHAPTER FORTY-NINE
CHAPTER FIFTY
CHAPTER FIFTY-ONE
CHAPTER FIFTY-TWO
PART THREE
CHAPTER FIFTY-THREE
CHAPTER FIFTY-FOUR
CHAPTER FIFTY-FIVE
CHAPTER FIFTY-SIX
CHAPTER FIFTY-SEVEN
CHAPTER FIFTY-EIGHT
CHAPTER FIFTY-NINE
CHAPTER SIXTY
CHAPTER SIXTY-ONE
CHAPTER SIXTY-TWO
CHAPTER SIXTY-THREE
CHAPTER SIXTY-FOUR
CHAPTER SIXTY-FIVE
CHAPTER SIXTY-SIX
CHAPTER SIXTY-SEVEN
CHAPTER SIXTY-EIGHT
CHAPTER SIXTY-NINE
CHAPTER SEVENTY
CHAPTER SEVENTY-ONE
CHAPTER SEVENTY-TWO
CHAPTER SEVENTY-THREE
CHAPTER SEVENTY-FOUR
PART FOUR
CHAPTER SEVENTY-FIVE
CHAPTER SEVENTY-SIX
CHAPTER SEVENTY-SEVEN
CHAPTER SEVENTY-EIGHT
CHAPTER SEVENTY-NINE
CHAPTER EIGHTY
CHAPTER EIGHTY-ONE
CHAPTER EIGHTY-TWO
CHAPTER EIGHTY-THREE
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
For all the innocent ones who must suffer the evils
this indifferent world blindly begets them
PART ONE
He was ashamed of the casual arrogance with which he had presumed to scurry about creation. From the bottom of his heart, he concurred in the moral necessity of his annihilation.
Robert Stone, DOG SOLDIERS
CHAPTER ONE
The killer, large and powerful and full of a violent yet calculated rage, dragged his mark by his greasy hair from his bedroom all the way down the suburban Ohio home’s two flights of stairs to its dank, unfinished basement, unconcerned throughout the descent that the sleeping household would be awakened by the screaming oaths of murderous retribution and the loud thumping and banging within the stairwells as the mark tried desperately to free himself from the killer’s resolute and unbreakable grip. Prior to his abduction of the mark, the killer had visited the bedrooms of the house’s other four occupants – two young women, one in her late teens and one in her early twenties, and two young girls, one in her mid-teens, and one yet prepubescent – and held a cloth soaked in homemade chloroform to their four sleeping faces, gently sending them into an even deeper level of unconsciousness, a place where, he hoped, the nightmare of the reality they had been living in did not haunt them.
Once in the basement, the killer wrapped his flailing and cursing mark in a vice-like chokehold and put another cloth soaked in the colorless, sweet-smelling liquid anesthetic firmly over the man’s sweaty red face, holding it there until the killer was certain his victim was knocked out completely so as to give himself the time he needed to prepare for what was to come next. Thirteen-minutes later, he broke a packet of smelling salts under the unconscious man’s nose. The ammonia expanded the blood vessels within the nostrils, allowing an instant increase of oxygen to hit the brain, jolting the mark awake as if he had been injected with an adrenaline shot straight to the heart. He began coughing violently and it took a moment for him to work through his heightened state of confusion before he realized that he was now naked and that his chest, forearms, thighs, and ankles were bound securely with duct tape to one of the wooden armchairs from the dining room. He struggled frantically against the bindings taped tight to his bare skin. Eyes wide and chest heaving, he looked like a condemned, unrepentant psychopath trying to free himself from the fate of the electric chair.
When the killer stepped out from the shadows and allowed the mark to see for the first time the full scope of his six-feet, five-inch, 245-pound muscle-hardened frame dressed head to foot all in black – black combat pants and shirt, black combat boots, black assault gloves, and a black balaclava – the mark froze from fright at what looked to him like an oversized ninja warrior from hell. But what frightened him most wasn’t the size of the killer or the black garb of death that he was wearing, what frightened him most was the long, black machete that was strapped diagonally, ominously, to his back.
In his hands the killer held an incongruous blue folder. He opened it and from among all the lined sheets of paper scribbled with hand-written notes, he slid out a sheet of computer paper with several paragraphs typed neatly upon it. He looked over the words on the paper for a moment and then held the sheet in front of the mark’s face. In a voice deep, low, and intimidating, he said, “You will read out loud exactly what is written on this paper to this camera.” He stepped aside so the mark could see the phone mounted to a tripod behind him. “Comprende, amigo?”
But the mark, used to being the one doing the intimidating a
nd not the other way around, spat at the paper. “Go fuck yourself, pussy,” he said in Spanish. “I ain’t your mother fucking friend.”
In one fluid motion, the killer grabbed the machete from the scabbard on his back and slashed down across the mark’s bare, hairless chest. A thin bead of blood oozed out from the diagonal gash. The mark screamed out, more from fright than from pain, and renewed his futile struggle to free himself from the chair.
“Do you know who you’re fucking with, you crazy mother fucker?” the mark hollered, still speaking in Spanish.
“Yes, I do, Juan Carlos. Are you now ready to read for me?” the killer asked. “And let me warn you,” he continued, pointing the machete at the mark’s bloody chest for emphasis, “that if your response is anything but yes, the pain I inflict upon you next will be exceedingly greater than the small scratch you just received.”
The mark was about to speak in defiance; however, with his mouth still open, he paused, looked down at the blade pointing at his chest, and then quickly came to believe in the sincerity of the killer’s threat. “Wh-why are you doing this to me?” he asked in a heavily accented English.
Astaghfirullah!
The killer sliced off the mark’s right hand at the wrist and it dropped to the cold concrete floor with a smack. Hot blood being carried by the thick ulnar and radial arteries began pulsing out from the severed end of the arm. It all happened so fast, the mark stared down in awe at the hand lying at his feet as if he didn’t recognize it as his. And then came the pain. And then the screams. And then he began flailing in the chair as if he were now actually being electrocuted.
The killer slapped the mark hard across the face with the back of his gloved hand. The mark stopped screaming and began gulping for air as if he were drowning.
“I told you there would be unpleasant consequences if your answer to my question was anything but yes,” the killer said calmly. “So, I’ll ask again, and the same rules apply. Are you now ready to read what’s written on this sheet of paper?”
The mark’s eyes darted back and forth between the bloody stump at the end of his arm and the masked face of the large man towering over him. “Si – yes, yes! Anything!”
“Good choice,” the killer said. He turned to the tripod and, with a pre-staged piece of duct tape, taped the paper directly beneath the phone. He slid the tripod closer to the mark and then walked behind it. He tapped a finger on the phone and said, “This is yours, right? I got it off the nightstand next to your bed.”
The mark looked at the phone as if he’d never seen one before. Then, “Yes, yes. It is mine,” he said, now eager to please his captor.
The killer pressed the power button to wake the phone. “What’s its passcode?”
The mark didn’t answer. His face was pale, and he seemed as if he were settling into shock. The killer walked quickly up to him and again smacked him in the face. “What is your phone’s passcode, Juan Carlos?”
Juan Carlos came to and sputtered, “It’s… I-I can’t re—” His bladder released its contents. The urine soaked into the padded seat cushion and ran down his leg to pool on the floor with the blood. This panicked him even more.
“Wait! One nine seven three, he said rapidly in Spanish,” relieved he was able to remember the code.
“Really? The year you were born?” the killer said. “Not very good security, Juan Carlos.” The killer raised the tripod so that the paper was slightly higher than Juan Carlos’s line of sight. He entered the passcode and then opened the phone’s camera app. He then adjusted the focus so the entirety of the seated Juan Carlos filled the frame.
“When I press the record button, you begin reading exactly what is written on the paper. You don’t look at me, you don’t look anywhere except at the words on the paper. Do you understand me, Juan Carlos?”
“Si,” the defeated man said. His voice was barely audible.
“If you look anywhere else other than at the paper, or if you do not read everything exactly as it is written, I will remove more parts of your person without question every time you do not comply. Do you understand me, Juan Carlos?”
“Si.”
“Good,” the killer said. “Then let’s get started.” He tapped the record button on the camera app and then nodded to the doomed man for him to begin.
After another brief moment of uncontrollable sobbing, Juan Carlos pulled himself together and began reading.
CHAPTER TWO
BEFORE
First there were sounds, warbled, slow motion psychotic sounds, sounds as if they were being transmitted through a liquid and were being received attenuated, just beyond the realm of discernibility. As the maddening sounds swarmed and swirled and tormented, a realization of the blackness came next, a thick, fluid, eternal blackness, the viscosity of which was goo-like and suffocating. Within this blackness, the concept of time, too, became slowly apparent; however, it was a time without any context of past or present; its utility incomprehensible.
As he slowly became aware of himself, it was unclear to him how long he had been held captive within the turmoil and confinement of the blackness. It could have been one minute or one day or one hundred days, he had no way of knowing. He could, however, feel that he was on the verge of an existential precipice within this void of uncertainty; though, it was yet unclear to him whether the precipice verged on life or verged on death.
When the light came – first as a galaxy of shiny, sensual pinpricks, then, all at once, as one starry fireball of a flash that consumed the dark in an instant – with it came the pain. And the pain, he soon realized, came from pressure, a burning, intolerable pressure that felt as if it were contracting the contents inside his head, while the head, itself, was expanding outwardly. It was as if the pressure were attempting to squeeze his brains into a mushy pulp while simultaneously working to blow out his skull and scatter it into a million boney shards.
Finally, as the pressure contracted and expanded within his head with machine-like savagery and precision, scattered remembrances began taking shape and forming into disconnected memories, memories horrific and haunting, memories that erupted in his mind as explosively and as deadly as any IED.
Astaghfirullah! Astaghfirullah! Astaghfirullah…
✽ ✽ ✽
The attending physician came in after a nurse and two aides had worked hard to calm him down. The doctor read through his chart for a moment at the nurse’s mobile computer station near the door and then came over, stood next to his bed, her hands tucked into the deep pockets of her lab coat. When she introduced herself as Doctor Nadia Goran, he looked at her in an almost accusingly manner. She met his gaze directly with her large dark brown eyes. Her smile was warm but professional. Her hair, running black and straight down her back, shined and stood out in stark contrast to the whiteness of the coat.
He could not be certain where she was from – he thought perhaps he detected the slightest of an accent – or what her heritage was, but he had fought with a Kurdish soldier in Syria named Goran before being transferred to Mosul to assist the Iraqi forces in driving out ISIS. Thinking of Mosul brought back more of the memories, and with them came more of the pain; a different kind of pain from the physical one pounding inside his head, but it was pain nonetheless.
The doctor, standing there at his bedside, confidant, educated, professional, perhaps could have been, had there been just the slightest tweak in history, one of the girls who haunted him. And, just as she could have been one of those girls had the circumstances been different, conversely, one of those girls, or all of them even, could have just as easily been her. But history was as it was, leaving Doctor Goran standing alive and safe before him, and the girls... dead. Brutally and forever dead.
Astaghfirullah! Astaghfirullah! Astaghfirullah…
Having no idea the torment her presence was causing him, Doctor Goran, without emotion or inflection, began to explain his medical condition to him.
What we know, Senior Chief, is that you have experi
enced severe physical trauma to both the heart and brain. What we don’t know is how much if any psychological trauma you are or will be experiencing as a result. We will need your help over time in answering that question, because all trauma must be considered equally when developing your treatment protocols.
She went on to tell him how, during the medical evacuation flight from Iraq to Joint Base Andrews, the Critical Care Air Transport Team had to induce him into a coma to try to stop his brain from swelling from the injury it had received from the blast – the severity of which, I’m sorry to say, will be life-changing and everlasting; and she told him how the team then had worked to remove the seven pieces of shrapnel that had penetrated through his back and into his lungs, collapsing them and nearly suffocating him; and she told him how, while trying to remove a tiny piece of shrapnel that had pierced into the back of his heart, they had made the determination that it was too risky a procedure and had elected to leave it in place; and she told him how, when he finally made it to Walter Reed, another team of doctors had to work eleven more hours to remove all of the fifty-seven pieces of shrapnel that were found embedded within his back and neck; and then she told him how this morning, nearly six weeks after he had been induced into a coma, they felt he was now well enough to be brought back out of it.
She told him everything that had happened medically to him, but to him it all meant nothing. After what he had witnessed in Mosul, nothing mattered to him anymore.
Astaghfirullah…
CHAPTER THREE
Lars Blackman, or Black, as those employees and frequent customers of Fantasy Plus less opposed to his cracker-assed presence called him, sat in his cramped office leaning back in his undersized and outdated chair with his size fifteens propped up on his battered desk tapping to the heavy beat of the dance music as it grinded out its irrepressible bassline throughout every inch of the North Baltimore gentlemen’s club. His large, toe-tapping shoes were blocking his view of the two, twenty-four-inch computer screens showing the live video feeds of the club’s eight security cameras, feeds that were his responsibility to be monitoring. It didn’t matter that he couldn’t see the images on the computer screens though, because his attention was invested solely on his phone’s screen as he played a high-stakes game of Texas Hold ‘em.
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