At all costs

by John Gilstrap

  “Lauren!” This time it was Nick’s voice, and they were getting closer.

  Soon the woods opened up again, to reveal another cleared field, with a dilapidated barn growing up out of the center. Jake and Thorne stopped at the edge of the clearing.

  “What do you think?” Jake whispered. “Are they inside?”

  Thorne shook his head. “He’s too smart to corner himself.”

  “Then why…”

  A rustle of leaves just inches to their left brought both men around, their guns bearing down on the terrified face of little Lauren. She screamed, yet even at five, she understood the unasked question. “He dropped me!” she shouted.

  Jake saw the flash of steel the instant he broke his aim. Wiggins came from nowhere, lunging out of the foliage, propelling his knife in a huge downward arc. Jake got an arm up but couldn’t deflect it all. He grunted as the glancing blow left a wake of torn flesh down the side of his ribs, and he tumbled for cover in the leaves.

  The speed of the attack caught Thorne off guard, but once he recovered, he struck like a snake, firing two quick punches, one to the stump of what used to be Wiggins’s hand, and the other to his face. The gunman went down hard but rolled fluidly to his feet. As he took a martial-arts stance, or a pitiful imitation of one, he seemed to notice for the first time that his right arm was four inches shorter than his left. He shifted his eyes to the stump, and in that instant, Thorne dropped him with a chilling elbow shot to the jaw.

  Thorne was out of control. He muscled his trophy off the ground and punched him again. “Who are you, you son of a bitch?”

  The man said nothing. For an instant, Jake wondered if the guy was already dead.

  This time Thorne’s fury took the form of a savage kick to the gunman’s testicles. The mystery man made a gagging sound and tried to clutch at himself, but Thorne launched him back with yet another kick, this one to his face.

  “Stop it!” Melissa shrieked, appearing with Nick at the edge of the clearing.

  “What’s your name, asshole?” Thorne yelled, preparing for another kick.

  “Wiggins!” Melissa answered for the gunman, even as she ran to be with her daughter. “He already told me his name is Wiggins!”

  Thorne shook his head. “I want to hear it from him.”

  “Not here!” Nick yelled, clearly torn between joining his wife and confrontingThorne. His skin gray with pain and fear, he chose the latter. “Not in front of my daughter, Thorne!”

  Thorne looked thoroughly disgusted. “Do you know what this rat turd tried to do?”

  It was Jake’s turn. “This isn’t the plan,” he said, shooting a glance toward the terrified little girl who sat hugging her knees at the base of a tree. The blood from her chin left a sweat trail down the front of her neck, which Melissa tried to wipe away with her one good hand. “Let’s stick with the plan.”

  Thorne laughed loud and hard. “Plan! What plan? You don’t have a plan, Jake!”

  Jake felt his face flush. “We agreed-”

  “We didn’t agree to shit!” Thorne declared. “You came up with the pea-brain idea that Mr. Terminator here would spill his guts. All we had to do was say ‘pretty please.’ ” He laughed again and launched another kick to Wiggins’s ribs. “Just like Murder, She Wrote, right, ace?”

  “But my daughter-” Nick said.

  “What about her? Get her outta here, if you want. I’m not stopping you!”

  Nick swallowed hard, then glanced nervously over toward his wife and daughter before whispering, “You can’t do this here. I don’t want that kind of involvement. That’s not what I signed on for.”

  Thorne set his jaw angrily. A long moment passed as he struggled with his temper, and when he finally spoke, his voice trembled. “You’re in this up to your eyeballs, Nick. Remember that. Don’t you dare think even for a minute that you’re not a part of it all.” He leveled a forefinger and lowered his voice. Anger burned in his expression, genuine loathing. “You do yourself a favor and think real long and real hard before you go soft, you hear?” He let the words sink in for a moment. “Now, why don’t you and the missus go back to the house and clean up? Jake and I will take care of what needs to be done. Tomorrow morning, you can tell your kid all about how real nightmares can seem.” He paused again, for effect. “You’ve got a secret now, Nick, and I expect you to keep it. Now get outa here. Go find that hotel you were talking about and make sure it’s a million miles from here.”

  “Suppose someone sees you?”

  That one caught Thorne off guard. He scowled as he considered the question. “What’s inside that barn?” he asked, pointing.

  “It’s just a storage shed,” Nick said as Thorne began dragging his prey in that direction.

  Thorne called over his shoulder, “You’re with me, ace!”

  Jake ignored him and took a step closer to his old friend. In the distance, he could hear children’s voices calling for their mom and dad. “Is that your boys?”

  Nick nodded. “I guess they just got home.”

  Jake nodded back. It was an awkward moment. “Look, Nick…”

  “You’re welcome, Jake, okay? Let’s just leave it at that.”

  Jake stood still for a moment, wanting to say something but unable to construct the sentence. Finally, he nodded. “Okay, Nick. Thanks. And I’m sorry.”

  Nick nodded, too, but looked away. “I’m glad I could do my part. Now, just do us all a favor and end it.”

  “About your wife…”

  “Just end it, Jake. I’ll worry about my wife.”

  It was a sickening thing to watch. Wiggins sat bolt upright in the middle of the dusty skeleton of a barn while Thorne secured the man’s neck directly to the twelve-by-twelve center support column with five loops of duct tape. A tourniquet at the gunman’s wrist, fashioned out of an old rag and a screwdriver, kept him from bleeding to death, even as blood and snot continued to leak freely from his shattered nose. With the man’s neck secured, Thorne went to work on his arms, binding them with loop after loop of tape, just above the elbows.

  “You like to be called Wiggins?” Thorne growled as he worked. “That’s fine with me. What I want to know is who you work for. And why. Every little detail.” Thorne tore off the last piece of tape and tossed the roll aside. “Won’t it be fun?”

  Jake had never seen Thorne so animated, so entertained.

  “Who do you work for?” Thorne paused for just a beat-barely long enough for the man to have formed an answer, even if he’d wanted to-then loosed a backhand smack that scattered a bloody mist into the air.

  Jake felt his stomach turn and moved his head to look away when the most amazing thing happened. Wiggins smiled. His teeth-what was left of them-were shiny with blood, but the son of a bitch thought this was funny.

  And that really pissed Thorne off. He fired a kick into the prisoner’s tattered hand. Wiggins’s face knotted up tight against the pain, but as soon as the wave of agony passed, the smile returned.

  “Jesus Christ, Thorne,” Jake moaned. “Is this it? You’re just going to beat him to death?”

  Thorne stayed poised for another shot but moved his head to see Jake. “Actually, that’s up to him. He doesn’t have to die. I’ll stop as soon as he starts talking.”

  Wiggins actually chuckled. And earned himself a kick in the ribs.

  It was an obscene cycle. Wiggins seemed to grow stronger through the beating, refusing on the strength of his spirit alone to use the one key Thorne had given him to unlock his dungeon of pain. And the more he held out, the more vicious Thorne’s attacks became.

  After maybe three minutes, Jake actually found himself feeling sorry for the son of a bitch. Then he thought of Travis’s face, and he made himself imagine the suffering his son must have endured.

  He thought of this animal hanging Carolyn in her jail cell, and he conjured the images of the grief endured by the family of that little girl in the hospital, whose only involvement in any of this was to have the misfor
tune of getting sick at the same time as a stranger down the hall.

  The rage Jake summoned up was enough for him to root Thorne on for another minute, but ultimately, it was of no use. He found himself desperately searching for an alternative to prolonged beating. What was infuriating was the man’s defiance. This asshole’s life lay in their hands, yet his battered, swollen eyes continued to say, screw you.

  Standing there, Jake had a kind of epiphany. He realized that in this battle of wills between professional painmongers, winning and losing were not measured by who had a heartbeat at the end of the day. A man won when he denied his adversary the pleasure of witnessing a breakdown. Men like these had inflicted too much pain, too many times, merely to be beaten into submission. Pain didn’t frighten them anymore. Neither, apparently, did the thought of death.

  So what did?

  Frantically, he scanned the interior of the barn, searching for the answer. The far wall was lined with tools: wordworking, painting, plumbing. Nothing there. Just to the right of those was a narrow shelf stacked high with all manner and types of chemical supplies. All of the labels were turned out just so, with the hazards warnings clearly visible. He looked away, then snapped his head back again. Thats it!

  “Stop!” Jake commanded, freezing Thorne in the middle of an open-handed backswing.

  “Stay out of this, Jake,” Thorne said. “If you can’t take it-”

  “Shut up. It’s my turn.”

  “Your turn?” The thought seemed somehow unthinkable.

  “Yeah. My turn. He tried to kill my family. I get to take my shot at him. Can’t do worse than you, right, Thorne?”

  The battered man actually grinned.

  Thorne hesitated, then shrugged and backed off.

  With Thorne out of the way, Jake walked past the prisoner toward the storage shelf, out of Wiggins’s field of view. What he needed had to be here somewhere. “Here’s how I see it, buddy,” he said to Wiggins’s back as he rummaged through the containers. “Death is the gold medal for people like you. Pain gives you a hardon. It’s sick, but what the hell? So’s making a living killing women and children.”

  He rummaged through all kinds of chemicals, pausing for just a second at a bottle of insecticide before moving on. Ah! He found one that would work perfectly. Now he needed a rag.

  “With that arm of yours, I figure you’re pretty much out of business,” he went on. “Once word gets out in your circles, I imagine things’ll get pretty intense for you.”

  “What the hell are you doing?” Thorne barked, his hands on his hips.

  Here’s one. Jake found an old rag on a bench. “Just pay attention, ace.” He needed gloves, too, and they were right next to the rag. Leave it to Mr. Safety to have rubber gloves in his shop.

  He strolled back to the prisoner and stooped down in front of him. “The way I see it, we’re wasting our time here, right? You’re betting you can hold out just long enough for Thorne here to kill you. That lets you off the hook and somehow earns you special bragging rights in hell. Am I close?”

  The gunman just stared defiantly, his left eye all but swollen shut, his right one not much better.

  Jake’s expression changed as he pulled the black rubber gloves onto his hands and opened up the brown glass bottle. As the cap came off, the faint stench of rotten eggs filled the air.

  He held up the bottle and displayed the label as a sommelier might display a good bottle of wine. “Sulfuric acid,” he explained. “Great for cleaning concrete, but man, you’ve got to dilute it. Otherwise, it burns like shit.”

  He tipped the bottle and poured a drop of the clear, concentrated liquid onto Wiggins’s pant leg, just above the knee. Instantly, the cotton began to degrade, and the rotten-egg odor became unbearable. Soon it was joined by the smell of burning flesh as the acid ate away a chunk of flesh about the size of a dime.

  The man’s eyes were wide now. This clearly was beyond what he’d mentally prepared himself for. Pain he understood. Now his imagination was taking him into uncharted territory.

  Jake smiled. “As I said, death comes too easily to you. The consequences don’t mean anything. For all I know, after you finished with my son, you went out and had a pizza.” The very thought of it made Jake’s hands tremble. Wiggins saw the tremors and smirked.

  “The hands?” Jake asked. “You think that’s funny? A sign of weakness?” He smiled. “Well, you got me. I’ve never been much of a killer. Even the thought of killing a worthless coward like you makes my stomach flop.”

  Thorne had had about all he could stand. “Oh, for Christ’s sake..”

  “Shut up, Thorne!” Jake yelled. The suddenness of the outburst made Wiggins jump. Jake turned back to his prisoner. “Seems to me we’re a bad match, Wiggins. I don’t want to kill you, yet you seem content to die.” He moved in very close now, close enough to smell the other man’s bloody breath. And he whispered, “If you don’t talk, I’m gonna make you live.”

  Wiggins shot a look to Thorne that said, This guy is nuts.

  “You’re right,” Jake said, answering his thoughts. “I’m over the edge. Out of my mind. And here’s my one-time-only offer. You’ve seen how this stuff works. You’ve felt it burn. Well, the next dose goes in your eyes.”

  He fell silent, allowing the impact of his threat to settle in. “Really, that’s it. One splash and it’s all over. Ten seconds later your eyeballs are charcoal, and we’re done here. We’ll just let you go.”

  Wiggins’s eyes grew wild as he glanced again toward Thorne. Jake caught the glance and smiled. He had him. “Imagine what it would be like not to see. You couldn’t find your victims, even if you had two hands to kill them with.”

  He pulled away now, as his words took their toll. He actually enjoyed the look of horror in Wiggins’s eyes. “You’ll be ugly as hell, too. Repulsive burn scars all over your face. Everyone will point and whisper. Get a load of that guy, they’ll say. Not that you’ll be able to see the finger-pointers, of course.”

  Wiggins’s breathing picked up, and his red, swollen eyes darted back and forth between Jake’s face and the bottle.

  “Okay, then, let’s start with something easy. Who are you working for?”

  The man said nothing, looking once again for Thorne to resume the beating. Panic was written all over him.

  “Don’t look at him, look at me,” Jake said, his face showing cold fury. “It seems so right, don’t you think? I don’t get to see my family again, and you don’t get to see anything. I’ll count down for you. At zero, the lights go out. Five…”

  Wiggins watched with growing terror as Jake soaked the rag with acid. The excess trickled off onto Wiggins’s pants, instantly burning a half dozen holes into his legs.

  “… four…”

  The rag was soaked now, disintegrating under the onslaught of chemical as Jake brought it ever closer to the man’s face. The odor of sulfur brought tears to his eyes.

  “… two… one-”

  “Frankel!” Wiggins yelled it loud, screamed it, really, in case Jake might not have heard it. “Peter Frankel hired me!”

  The rag was only an inch away, and Wiggins shut his eyes tight, as if that would actually stop anything. For just a second, Jake kept the rag suspended there, letting the stench pour off it, then he pulled it away.

  He turned to Thorne, who himself looked unnerved by the display. “Okay, Thorne, I think he’s ready now.”

  Two hours later it was done. A wall of silence, it turned out, was just like any other wall. Once cracked, it just kept crumbling. Wiggins gave them everything they needed, and they never had to lay another hand on him. He was a broken man, and Jake accepted that he’d been the one to break him, though he wasn’t sure how he felt about it.

  When the gut-spilling was done, he pulled Thorne off to a corner of the barn. “So what’s next?”

  “With him?” Thorne said, gesturing without turning his head.

  Jake nodded. “Yeah, with Wiggins or Dalton or whoever he is.” D
uring the interrogation, Wiggins had given up his birth name: Clyde Dalton. “What do we do with him?”

  Thorne gave Jake another one of his condescending looks. “What do you think? Three of us go for a ride, two of us come back.”

  Jake’s stomach knotted. He’d spent nearly half his life running away from a murder charge. It just doesn’t seem right…

  Thorne read the look and rolled his eyes. “Relax, Jake. You won’t have to do shit, okay? This one will be on me.”

  They heard a noise and turned. Wiggins was gone! Disappeared! The tape that had once bound his neck dangled limply off to the side.

  In that split second, Jake had only one thought: How does this guy keep going? He was surprised Wiggins could even stand.

  Thorne stomped the dusty floor. “Shit!”

  They both drew their weapons. “Where’d he go?” Jake asked.

  Thorne glared. “Not far.”

  “Is there a back door?”

  “How would I know? Go look for one.” Then, to the dusty air, he added, “You’re a dead man, Wiggins!”

  It was dark now, inside and out, and the single bank of fluorescent lights overhead did little to lighten the shadows in the barn. Jake couldn’t bring himself to move forward. Death was out there somewhere-his own, in all likelihood, and he didn’t want to face it.

  “Go on,” Thorne ordered. I’ll go-”

  A loud thok- like the sound of a well-hit baseball-cut his words short as Wiggins’s good hand brought an ax handle slicing out of the darkness onto the top of Thorne’s head. Thorne dropped instantly, unconscious even before his knees buckled. In the instant it took for Jake to react and swing his Glock around, Wiggins rewound his swing and let it fly against the muzzle of Jake’s weapon. Another home run, launching the pistol deep into the dark shadows.

  Jake saw the third swing coming from a mile away and ducked, stumbling over Thorne’s thick form on the floor as he scrambled for the chrome. 45. Wiggins kicked it away and brought the makeshift club down hard against the wooden floor. Twice evading the club by inches, Jake brought his arms in close and rolled quickly to his right-a maneuver he hadn’t tried since he was a little kid rolling down his next-door neighbor’s hill.