Blazek paused to clear his throat. As his nickname Big Zik implied, he was a large, heavyset man. His tight crewcut made way for his prominent ears to stand out even more prominently. His close, droopy eyes gave him the look of a sleepy, hound dog. When he spoke, his jowls shook in time with the shaking of his voice. He looked briefly off camera to his right before continuing speaking.
Since moving to the States, I have been in and out of juvenile detention and prison for crimes such as larceny, grand theft auto, possession, assault, and manslaughter. But I have never been incarcerated for the crimes for which I shall now confess and be punished.
He again looked off camera. This time he spoke to the killer. “What the fuck is this bullshit? I ain’t reading no—”
A blur flashed in front of Blazek and a resounding whack was heard, followed by the thumping to the floor of Blazek’s right hand. Blood squirted on the camera lens. The killer walked quickly to the phone and paused the recording as his prisoner thrashed against his bonds and screamed in agony.
When the recording began again, the blood on the lens had been cleaned. Blazek’s face was covered in sweat, tears, and snot. After several unsuccessful attempts, he continued reading again from the blood-spattered sheet of paper taped to the camera stand under the phone.
Three years ago I began working as a broker for overseas criminal organizations looking to traffic young women and girls on the East Coast. Mostly I worked with gangs from Russia and the Baltic States, but recently I’ve also been doing some work with the Mexicans, Chinese, and Japanese. For a commission, I help these overseas groups move their women and girls into the States by obtaining for them fake passports, drivers licenses, and other immigration documents. I also will connect them with gangs and other criminal elements in the States who they then sell the women and girls to, or use them to barter for other goods, such as drugs and weapons.
You will find the contact information of many of the buyers and sellers on my phone. However, I’ve written down a more complete list of names and my means of communicating with them on a sheet of paper. You will find this list on the desk next to me. Finally, I know that the life that I’ve chosen to live has hurt and destroyed the lives of so many others. I am an evil man completely deserving of…
He looked at the killer. Fresh tears began running down his face. He took in a deep breath and then let it out. He tried again.
I am an evil man completely deserving of the punishment I am about to receive. I only ask that God have…
He stopped reading once again. His eyes narrowed, and a look of defiance overcame him. He gave the killer a brief, venomous look, and then began screaming fiercely into the camera. “I don’t know who this asshole is or why he is doing this to me, but this big crazy mother fucker is around six feet five and looks like he weighs about two-hundred-and-thirty—”
Astaghfirullah! With one swing of the machete, Blazek was decapitated. The force of the swing caused the severed head to fly back behind the body, spinning face forward as it did. It sounded like a watermelon breaking open when it hit the floor.
The killer turned off the camera and removed the phone from the tripod. He returned the tripod, the duct tape, and his knives to the backpack. Not minding the blood pooled large on the floor, he walked through it as he took Blazek’s phone to the table next to the headless body. He leaned against the table casually as he launched the phone’s browser and navigated it to 4chan.org where, from its homepage, he tapped a menu link that took him to the /b/ - random message board. There, he uploaded Blazek’s confessional video. He then copied the link to the video and pasted it into an email that he sent to the crime reporter for the Newark Daily Gazette. He left the phone on top of the sheet of paper with the list of names and their contact information that Blazek had written earlier at the prodding of the killer’s machete.
✽ ✽ ✽
Disallowing any unnecessary thinking – he was hours away from that luxury – the killer opened the trunk of his car, now parked at the end of a litter-strewn, dead-end street under a gnarly old oak tree and its canopy of dead leaves, hiding the Cuda from the thin light of the sliver moon now on its descent toward the Western horizon. He took out a black plastic lawn bag and shook it open. He took off his backpack and placed it inside the bag. He then set the plastic bag on the ground next to him and began to quickly undress. He removed his black leather gloves, black knitted balaclava, black long sleeve shirt, black leather boots, black pants, and gray boxer shorts and stuffed them all inside the bag. Standing naked, he began to dress himself with the change of clothes that were folded neatly inside a gym bag setting next to the spare tire. Once dressed, he donned a blue ball cap and flipped up the hood of his black sweatshirt. Finally, he tied the top of the plastic bag into a knot and set it in the trunk next to the gym bag.
Three-and-a-half hours later the killer parked the Cuda under the nine-foot cantilevered forebay of a late eighteenth-century Pennsylvania Sweitzer barn that was banked stoically into the side of a rolling hill. He left the car running as he got out and slid open the set of large barn doors. After pulling the car inside the barn, he remained behind the wheel for a moment while he took in a deep breath and rubbed his eyes aggressively. He was exhausted, but he couldn’t allow that to distract him from his focus. There was much work yet to be done.
He took the plastic bag from the trunk and walked to the east end of the barn, past a tarpaulin-covered car, past the vehicle inspection pit, and grabbed a five-gallon gas tank as he exited through a side door. Outside, he walked over to a 55-gallon burn barrel that stood near a woodshed with the same gray, weather-beaten look to it as the barn. Beyond the woodshed, dark snow clouds set heavily upon a bleak, wind-swept field. Row after row of sheared cornstalks stood like bleak markers in a frozen graveyard that sloped gradually downwards for many acres before running upwards again toward a low, distant hilltop where a forest of barren trees stood shadowed and silent.
After setting the plastic bag and gas tank down next to the barrel, the killer grabbed a box of matches off a windowsill inside the woodshed and an armful of kindling wood from a pile stacked neatly under the eave outside it. He set the kindling up inside the barrel and doused it with gasoline. The strong fumes made him lightheaded, reminding him of his empty stomach. He struck a match and tossed it into the barrel. An orange, snapping flame whooshed upward, invigorating him as it chased away the morning chill. When the kindling was burning strong, he fed two small, seasoned logs into the flame. After the logs had caught fire, he laid a third, larger log across them. He warmed his hands over the barrel as he stared down into the blaze.
When the fire had matured, he placed the plastic bag into the barrel. The plastic melted fast and the bag’s contents spilled out, threatening to extinguish the flame. He grabbed a long, thick stick that leaned against the shed and poked the blackened end of it into the barrel, moving the contents around until the fire could breathe and prosper again. Once the backpack and clothes had caught, he added some more kindling and then returned to the barn.
Inside, he lit a coal fire in the hearth of the small forge that was set up in the first of the four stalls in the back of the east corner of the barn. He took down a pair of twelve-inch tongs that hung on the wall at the side of the stall and stuck them in his back pants pocket. As he walked back out to the burn barrel, he picked up a rusted metal bucket along the way.
Fire and burning ash rose to greet him as he poked around in the barrel with the stick. The boots still had some burning to do, as did the leather scabbard, most of the tripod legs, and the thick roll of duct tape. But the clothes, the blue folder filled with his mission notes, and the backpack had all turned to ash. He opened the cleanout door at the bottom of the barrel and tamped out with his foot the several small coals that spilled out with the ash. He rummaged inside the bottom of the barrel with the tongs and, one at a time, pulled out four heated, ash-dusted knives and one large machete. He set them carefully, reverently almost, into the meta
l bucket.
Back at the forge, the coal fire in the hearth was burning nicely on its own. Its blue glow casting warm, stretching shadows out from the stall and into the center of the barn. He flipped a switch mounted on a post next to the hearth and a blower kicked on that fed the fire from below. The flame grew, and a strong yellow-white glow emitted from its center. He placed more coal around the burning mound and then set the end of the twenty-four-inch machete into the heart of the flame. When the metal was glowing red, he pulled it out with the tongs and began working it with a three-and-a-quarter-pound, cross peen hammer on the face of the 248-pound, 1902 Hay Budden forged anvil that was located prominently in the center of the stall. Sparks shot out from each blow as he slowly shaped the blade into its new form.
His Veterans Affairs therapist had recommended to him on more than one occasion that he should find himself a hobby, one that he could engage himself in whenever he felt his moods were growing too dark. He ignored the advice for many months after his discharge from the hospital, unable to find the adequate motivation. However, once he had found the motivation, he also found blacksmithing, a relaxing yet physically demanding hobby that aligned neatly with the direction his newfound-motivation was leading him.
Since blacksmithing was new to the killer, he would often have to refer to an old, weathered book called The Ancient Art of Blacksmithing, a book that his father had stumbled upon many years ago in a used bookstore when the killer was just a child. Intrigued by the possibilities, his father purchased the book with a new desire to learn the craft and employ it as a weekend hobby for himself. He even went so far as to build and equip the forge exactly to the specifications laid out within its pages. However, the father had to abandon his newly found passion after his nascent consulting firm specializing in the nascent field of computer security began to prosper, turning his free time on the weekends into a scarce commodity.
The killer now kept the book on hand to help him master the various techniques of the trade, such as when to apply the borax when forge welding his knives together after the kill, knives he had originally forged separately for the kill; or how, after the kill, to hot cut a section away from one of the knives so the cutaway piece could be forged into a square nail. As a novice, his quality of work was far from superior; however, he was a fast learner and he found peace in the hard work it took to smith. There was a meditative aspect to it in the pounding and shaping of the metal and in the patience and focus it took to complete even the simplest of tasks.
Just three short days ago the killer had slipped out of the barn on an ATV with several white, two-gallon buckets stacked together and strapped within the cargo carrier in the back, along with a pick and shovel. He drove the ATV down the hill behind the barn, across the field, and into the eastern side of the forest. He followed the dirt path, hardened by decades of feet, hooves, and tires, until it led him to the rusty-colored creek. When he returned to the farm nearly an hour later, the buckets were now set side-by-side within the carrier and filled to their brims with iron-laden river rock. He unloaded the buckets near the burn barrel by the woodshed and, after returning the ATV to the barn, he got into his pickup and left the farm.
When he returned two hours later, he drove the pickup to the back of the barn and parked the truck near the buckets. From the back of the truck he unloaded a dozen cinder blocks and then used them to build a rudimentary furnace. He then spent the rest of the day smelting the ore from the river rock, firing away all the unnecessary gases and slag from it, and leaving only the iron, of which, when he had finally smelted enough of it, he then forged into his weapons of death and retribution.
After four hours of straight, meditative but exhaustive labor, the killer took from the coals for the last time what were once those five separate weapons of death and retribution, and what were now one singular symbol of eternal life and forgiveness. The large, coal-fired cross cast a red glow upon him as he held it up and studied his work. He wasn’t a believer, he had removed that burden from his life long ago when still a child, not long after his mother’s senseless death, but he always appreciated the simple message and Zen-like qualities of the cross and, for a moment, felt a resurgence of energy from the one he had just created. He clamped the iron cross down over the anvil’s pritchel hole and punched out a small square through its red-hot center, a square fitted precisely for the nail he had forged earlier from a chunk of one of the knives.
When he placed the cross in the quench tank, the water hissed and steamed from the heat. He left it there to cool as he fetched a ladder and placed it under the thick summer beam that ran the length of the barn, giving support to most of the loft. The cross was still hot when he removed it from the tank, but the heat wasn’t strong enough to penetrate his thick, flame resistant gloves. He climbed the ladder and carefully nailed the black metal cross onto the wooden beam, hanging it next to the similar cross he had forged after his first kill.
After climbing down from the ladder, he had found his legs had grown weak. His body, seeming to have sensed the completion of the task, switched off its rote, kinetic memory mode that had enabled it to function so efficiently in a focused state free from physical needs and mental distractions. No longer on task, all those pent-up needs and distractions released and washed over him in relentless, pounding waves of hunger, exhaustion, and remorse. His body tired and aching, he dropped to the cold dirt floor and prostrated himself before the crosses.
Astaghfirullah!
Vivid, bloody images from the recently-completed mission flashed through his mind and reminded him of the initial horrors that had driven him to seek out such vengeance and to kill so mercilessly in the first place.
Astaghfirullah!
Sobs of sorrow and helplessness wracked his body. Hot tears cut tracks through his dirty cheeks and dripped to the floor as he moaned and prayed out loud for each one of the thirteen souls that had been haunting him ever since his final, failed operation in Mosul.
Astaghfirullah! Astaghfirullah! Astaghfirullah…
CHAPTER NINE
Toni didn’t know where she was, nor did she care. Had she cared, she could have simply looked out the window at the litter-strewn street lined with boarded up and dilapidated row houses to know that she was in a bad place. The gritty room itself, with its large, busted out hole through the drywall next to the bathroom door, a bare bulb overhead casting a weak yellow glow on the thick layer of rat droppings within the hole, would have been enough of a clue to warn her of the bad place she was in if she had cared enough to notice. But she didn’t care about where she was or the danger that she might be in. The only thing she cared about was when her next high would be.
Had she cared for more than just her next high, she would have realized that she was lying on a rickety bed without sheets or blankets, its stained mattress sagging like a swayback horse, while wearing the same clothes she had been wearing so many days ago when she went to Fantasy Plus in search of her sister. She would have also realized, had she cared, that she had not showered nor brushed her teeth since that same day. Her gnawing stomach, burning and soured from a lack of food didn’t matter; nor did the pain and discomfort of her cramped and constipated bowels. Not once did she think about the fact that she was absent from her studies at Georgetown; nor, since first entering the strip club so many days ago, did she even think about her missing sister.
All she thought about, all she cared for, yearned for, painfully ached for was her next high, so all she did was lie unmoving on the sagging mattress and watch with unblinking eyes the tarnished brass knob on the bedroom door. She watched the knob, not knowing or caring if she had been doing so for five minutes or five days, waiting for it to turn and for the door to open and for the person bringing her next high to walk into the room. If someone who did not know Toni was trapped within a heroin nightmare had happened upon the room and had seen her lying there on the bed like she was, this person may have assumed that she was in a vegetative state, or perhaps even dead, the way
some people die with their blank eyes remaining open. And when the knob finally began to turn, this person would be very surprised, frightened even, to see Toni coming to life and springing from the bed and leaping for the door beastlike, ravenous and desperate.
When Savage opened the door, Toni was on him even before he could fully enter the room, her hands rubbing all over his chest, his back, his back pants pockets, his front pants pockets, his crotch, trying to discover where on his person he was holding her next high.
“Where is it? You got what I need, right?” Toni asked in a raspy, wavering voice.
Savage pushed her away from him and laughed. “Damn, girl. You smell like shit.”
Toni regained her balanced and was back on him again like a magnet to steel. “Come on, Mr. Savage. Don’t do me like that. You know I’m hurting bad.” Her hands continued their desperate search upon his body.
Savage found a spot on the edge of the mattress that wasn’t too badly stained and sat down. He crossed his legs and looked Toni over with a knowing smile as she stood before him, hugging herself, shifting from foot to foot as if she had to pee. After he lit up a Newport, he patted on the bed for her to sit down next to him. He blew out a thick plume of smoke and said, “You know, we need to talk about this habit of yours and how much it’s costing me. H don’t come cheap, baby.”
Toni’s eyes, their pupils mere pinpoints within the faded green of the irises, went wide from fear. “What? What do you mean? I don’t give a fuck how it—”
The Good Kill Page 5
