The Good Kill

by Kurt Brindley

  Toni was so deep into her thoughts that she jumped a little in her chair when Blackman tapped her on the shoulder. He nodded and told her to follow him. She took one last sip from her club soda, grabbed her purse, and followed Blackman across the club. As they weaved their way through the tables, the customers broke their fixed, eager eyes from the naked women on the stage to look her over as she passed. Several of them made lewd requests from her.

  On the other side of the club, they came to a small room with a leather-padded door. Blackman held it open for Toni. When the door closed behind them, the music from the oversized speakers in the main room was silenced and was now being piped in at a more moderate volume. Toni looked around the dimly lit room and saw that it was lined with four single-seated booths on either side of it. In the far-right corner in the back, a youthful-looking dancer, flat-chested and wearing pigtails, grinded her ample backside into the lap of a man leaning back into the booth, his arms stretched across the top of it. He wore a stylish fedora pulled down low across his brow and a wet, lustful grin stretched wide across his face. His attention was focused solely on the swaying movements of the naked dancer between his legs.

  Blackman continued walking to the back of the room to another padded door. He took out a ring full of keys from his pants pocket and flipped through them until he found the one he was looking for. He unlocked the door and held it open. When he saw that Toni was still standing in the front of the lounge watching the performance, he said, “You want to watch the show or do you want to find out about your sister?”

  Toni, embarrassed by her actions, collected herself and hurried toward Blackman who, with a nod of his head, indicated that Toni should continue on through.

  But Toni hesitated at the door, trying to see what was beyond it. All she could make out was a hallway, narrow and dark.

  “And, what’s back there?” she asked, unable to mask the concern in her voice.

  “Answers. Come on, let’s go,” Blackman said impatiently.

  The lawyer-to-be side of Toni’s brain worked hard to analyze the situation. Something didn’t feel quite right. “Can’t we just talk here? All you have to do is tell me what you know about my sister and then I’ll leave.”

  “Look, Ms. Steele. I, personally, don’t know anything about what happened to your sister, but I talked to my boss about it and he says he might have some information that could help you. He didn’t tell me what it was so, if you want to find out what this information is, you’ll have to speak to him about it yourself.” He pointed down the hall. “He’s down there waiting for you. The last room on the left.” He pushed Toni into the hallway. When the door closed behind him, there was complete silence.

  The last room on the left, Toni thought to herself. It sounded to her like the title of a low-budget horror movie. And here she was starring in it, doing exactly what every stupid actor in those movies always does. Instead of running as far away from the room as possible, she found herself walking down the dark, narrow hall toward it, knowing all along that inside the room was where the monster lay in wait.

  Blackman stopped at the room’s door, knocked once and, without waiting for a response, opened the door inwardly. He stepped inside the room and once again held the door open for Toni. This time she didn’t hesitate. She walked past him and entered the room.

  The monster was in there all right, right in front of her, leaning against the wall next to the twin-size bed, his legs crossed at the ankles. Even though she had never met the Hollywood Thug Killa personally, she recognized his handsome face instantly from all the times his mugshot appeared in the news while she was growing up. She hadn’t heard anything about him for years. Why wasn’t he in jail, locked away for good, she wondered.

  The sound of the door closing behind her made her jump and instinctively turn and try to rush out of the room. She ran directly into Blackman’s thick chest. It was then that she saw the other man in the room. This man was standing in the corner by the end of the bed. He was even larger and more intimidating than Blackman, looking like a super-sized version of the Hollywood Thug Killa. Did she know him? She didn’t have time to ponder the question. Blackman grabbed her by the shoulders and turned her back around to face Savage.

  “Holy shit, Black,” Savage said as he walked toward Toni, “you were right.” He leaned his face close to hers and looked deep into her eyes. “It is the eyes.” He stepped back away only a short distance. “I didn’t think any bitch could be more beautiful than Ruby, but with those green eyes… Shit, this bitch here—”

  “Mr. Blackman said you had some information that could help me find my sister,” Toni blurted out in a shaky voice.

  Savage ignored the interruption and continued with his thought. “I never believed your bullshit before, Black, but, as much as I hate to admit it, with those green eyes, this bitch here just might be yours.”

  Blackman grunted in response.

  “Mr. Savage, could you just please tell me what you know about my sister?”

  Savage laughed. “How ‘bout that. She knows who I am.” He bowed slightly. “I’m flattered.” But instead of answering Toni’s question, he spoke to T-Rex. “Terrence, you what, twenty-four, twenty-five?” He looked at Toni and winked as he gently rubbed her arm, “You about the same age as this fine-looking thang here, I bet.”

  Toni pulled her arm away from Savage’s hand and struggled unsuccessfully to free her shoulders from Blackman’s grip.

  “We went to school together,” T-Rex said, in response to his uncle’s question.

  “How about that,” Savage said to Toni. “Up in here reuniting with your old classmate.” He turned back to his nephew. “This is all before your time, T, but back in the day when Blackman here was still a cop and I was still running Lexington Hills, he used to keep the streets clear for me so I could sling my shit and run my hos. In addition to keeping this mother fucker very well paid, I’d let him have his choice of any of my bitches. And wouldn’t you know, he’d choose the same nasty ho every time.” Savage began stroking Toni’s arm again. “The mother of this lovely thing right here.”

  T-Rex looked at Toni and then at Blackman. “Are you telling me that Blackman is her father?”

  “And Ruby’s, too. Don’t forget her,” added Savage.

  T-Rex looked offended. “How come you never told me that before, Hollywood?”

  Savage grinned. “Because I never believed it. Besides, who gives a fuck who a whore’s baby daddy is?”

  “Are we gonna do this or what?” Blackman said.

  “What? Do what?” Toni asked, looking around in a panic. “Look, let’s forget about everything. I just want to go.” She looked back over her shoulder at Blackman. “Will you please let go of my shoulders so I can leave?”

  Blackman tightened his grip in response.

  “I don’t see it,” T-Rex said, leaning forward to get a better look at Toni. “Maybe a little in the eyes like you said, but I don’t see that big ugly mother fucker as the father of something so fine as this bitch.”

  “Fuck you, T-Rex,” Blackman said.

  Savage laughed. “Sorry, Black. I gotta agree with T. You’re one big ugly white boy.”

  Blackman, instead of responding to his boss, squeezed his fingers even harder into Toni’s shoulders.

  Toni cried out from the pain and once again tried to free herself from her father’s grip. Once again, she failed. Even though she tried hard not to, she began to cry.

  “Okay, okay, let’s do it,” Savage said.

  On his boss’s order, Blackman threw Toni down onto the bed. “Come over here and hold her down, T-Rex.”

  The large man lumbered over from the corner and sat down on the edge of the bed. He leaned across Toni, pinning her down. Toni screamed and began uselessly trying to free herself from beneath the weight of her former high school classmate.

  Blackman smacked her across the face. “You scream again and you’ll experience pain like never before.”

  Toni, her
large emerald green eyes wider than they’ve ever been, began to choke on her sobs.

  Blackman turned to the small dresser next to the bed. He took out four pairs of handcuffs from the top drawer. He shackled his daughter’s arms to the bed’s top metal posts and her legs to the posts at the end of the bed. T-Rex returned to his position in the corner of the small room.

  Blackman then pulled out a ball gag from the drawer. When Toni saw it, she started screaming again and writhing frantically on the bed as she struggled against the restraints. Blackman sat down next to her. He forced the ball into her mouth and then strapped it tight around the back of her head. When he finished, he looked up at his boss.

  Savage took a leather pouch from the inside pocket of his suit jacket and handed it to Blackman. “Everything’s ready.”

  Blackman unzipped the pouch and laid it open on the bed next to Toni. “Stop squirming around goddammit,” he said. He took a small leather strap from the pouch and tightened it around the middle of Toni’s right bicep. He poked around her arm until he found the vein he was looking for. He kept a finger on it while he grabbed a small packet from the pouch and ripped it open with his teeth. He then removed the finger and cleaned the vein with the alcohol swab. “Okay, T-Rex. Come grab her arm,” he said.

  He dropped to the floor on one knee as T-Rex once again lay across Toni and took firm hold of her right arm at the wrist and bicep.

  “Hold her steady now,” Blackman said as he eyed the syringe and needle and then lined it up to the vein. He looked up at Savage.

  “Go ahead on, mother fucker,” Savage said with a ruthless smile. “Turn that bitch into a moneymaking fiend.”

  Blackman nodded in compliance and inserted the needle skillfully into Toni’s arm. When he pulled on the plunger, a little puff of blood swirled into the syringe. Satisfied that he was in the vein, he loosened the leather strap, and injected the heroin. Within minutes of the narcotic hitting the blood stream, Toni became calm, sedated.

  “Just think, Ms. Steele,” Savage said as Blackman returned the paraphernalia to its case, “after we do this to you a few more times, instead of fighting us, you’ll be begging us for this shit.”

  Toni didn’t respond. She just lay cuffed and spread-eagle on the bed lost to the drug, a spot of blood oozing from the needle mark ran slowly down her arm.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  BEFORE

  Apatch in the dusty street swells like a boil, the pressure from below uncontainable, volcanic. Cracks in the blanched asphalt form slowly at first, but then, just before the eruption, the playback speed switches to fast-forward and the deadly payload releases upward and outward so fast that everything happening around it seems to stand still. The armored vehicle patrolling the street passes slowly over the IED’s kill zone, leaving the two soldiers trailing on foot in the vehicle’s lumbering wake centered directly over the burgeoning discharge. He watches frozen, unable to move, unable to look away as the force of the blast flips the rear end of the armored vehicle up and over while simultaneously disintegrating the soldiers, turning them into instant gory plumes, plumes that rise to the sky, turning it from a blinding white to a hellish red, and then falls down upon him like a red pulpy rain. When the carnage of rain stops falling, he is in a bombed-out house. Screams are heard coming from the back of it. He walks cautiously toward them, trying to understand what’s being said, but their meaning eludes him. It’s dark. He flips down his night vision goggles, and with them, he can now see the screams coming at him like sonic waves. He calls out for backup over his bone phone, but he can’t speak. He hollers into the transmitter. No sounds emit from his mouth. His steps are heavy, burdensome. The screams grow louder. He crouches low and draws his weapon to the ready; however, instead of drawing up his HK MP7 submachine gun, he’s holding a young girl in his arms. She is moaning from pain but completely limp. Explosions go off outside the house. He takes off his vest lined with ballistic plates and wraps it around the girl. He then takes off his helmet and places it over her face. He turns to exit, to save her, but the screams grow louder. They hold him, paralyze him. The louder they get, the closer he thinks he is getting to understanding their meaning; yet, the meaning continues to escape him. The floor begins to sway up and down. The walls begin to pulse in and out. Each time he follows the hallway around a corner, he’s back to where he began. Everything is the same except the screams. They grow louder and louder, red blasts of waves that push back against him and the girl until he can no longer make any movement forward. His legs are like pilings driven firmly into the floor as wave after screaming wave crashes violently over him and the girl. Between the swells he sees an open door at the end of the hall. It is from there where the screams are coming, waves so large and so loud now the force from them rips the girl from his arms and washes her away. Without her he is unable to resist the pressure any longer. His legs tear from the floor and the screaming waves flush him tumbling and turning out of the undulating house into a bloody sea of red oblivion.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  The killing wasn’t new. What was new was the extrajudicial nature of it. Military combat, apart from the chaos and madness inherent in any battle, comes constrained within the regulating bounds of uniformed codes and practiced good order and discipline as tempered by the history of warfare and the refining evolution of ethics, law, and tradition. Tonight’s kill, however, would have no such constraints, save that of the killer’s ability and imagination.

  He had thought about these things, but he wasn’t thinking about them now. Now he was on task, and such unnecessary thoughts were a dangerous distraction. As it had in combat from years of training and repetition, his mind went instinctively to a place where the past, the future, and any irrelevant thoughts were displaced by the demands of the present, the immediacy of the now.

  Devoid of thought but full of purpose, the killer drove his gunmetal gray 1973 Plymouth Barracuda convertible slowly, but not too slowly, through the dark and shadowed suburban New Jersey neighborhood, the light of the waxing crescent moon just off the Eastern horizon proving feeble and insignificant. He didn't stop at the house where his mark resided, nor did he even glance at it – he knew his mark was in there – he just cruised on past it until he reached the cul-de-sac where he looped slowly around and headed back up the street, stopping several hundred feet before the house where it could best be observed prior to go time with minimal risk of him being noticed.

  After pulling over to the curb and killing the engine, the killer reached around to the backseat and rifled through his backpack, pulling from it a large Honeycrisp apple. He bit partially into it and held it between his teeth as he grabbed his laptop from the passenger’s seat and powered it on. As the computer booted up, he began eating the apple, chewing each bite slowly and thoughtfully. By the time he had launched the necessary programs and had run a series of illicit, proprietary executables that enabled him to hack into the mark’s network and take over his computer, all which he had first managed to do weeks ago shortly after the operation had begun, the killer had finished the apple and had begun working on another.

  Now that he was mirroring the mark’s computer, a computer the mark used to manage his home security network, the killer could now monitor the activities within and without the house through each of its nine security cameras, of which included a camera in the master bedroom, a camera the mark used less for security purposes and more to record his sexual exploits with his unsuspecting victims. As of now, however, the camera’s primary use was for the killer to monitor his mark as he lay in his bed binge-watching Netflix videos. Of the other eight security cameras, one monitored the foyer, one monitored the garage, one was positioned over the front door and monitored all incoming and outgoing traffic as well as the front yard, the driveway, a portion of the sidewalk, and a sliver of the street, one was positioned over the outside of the walk-out basement door, monitoring all who entered and exited there as well as a significant portion of the backyard, and one was mounted on
each of the outside corners of the house, providing the mark a complete, 360-degree visual coverage of the outside of the entire half-acre property.

  ✽ ✽ ✽

  Two hours later, the mark was bound to a chair and speaking slowly into his phone’s camera. His large ears were a flaming red. An oily sheen of sweat glared off his round, expansive face. A black gag ball hung lifeless from his fleshy neck. His voice, with a slight Slavic accent, shook from fear. Not much of reader, he stumbled awkwardly over the words typed on the sheet of paper that hung before him.

  My name is Zikmund Blazek. I was born on May 13, 1980, in Czechoslovakia in a small village in what is now part of the Czech Republic to a Czech father and an American mother. After my parents divorced in 1993, my mother and I moved to Palm Bay, Florida. I now live at 413 Sampson Street in East Newark, New Jersey. I’ve worked under the aliases of Tony Smith, Robbie Larson, and Pavlov Bobek. My nicknames are Big Zik, Z Blaze, and Knuckles. Knuckles, because I always carry brass knuckles with me and I look for reasons to use them often.