by mike Evans
“About as solid as my dick was in my twenties. You get on the radio and let people know that we are going to do a drive by out there. We aren’t going in though. I hope that you understand that? I know you want to be the big showboat here that says we are the ones who did the impossible, but I don’t want to be that person. He gets away and out of positions that no one else does, and he knows police procedure by the book.”
“Thanks for that wonderful visual, Dursky. Now I’d like to stab my eyes out. So if he knows that by the book means we won’t go up to his house without an entire swat team maybe we could catch him off guard, maybe we could get him before he has a chance to leave, if he hasn’t already left.”
“I think he might be moving slower than he usually does. Those bullet holes were going from the front to back, and I highly doubt that Hardin was playing chauffeur to the two older men.”
“So you think one of the two men got off a couple shots?” Victoria asked.
“I think they got off a couple and hit Hardin or the man in the mask. I wonder if he thinks of some creepy ass name that he made up for himself.”
She said, “Well, I don’t really care what he thinks of himself as. I just want to see him down on the ground. So what do you think, we go up and see if he’s there first?”
Dursky was tilting his head side to side trying to think of what the best play here was going to be. “Yeah, fuck it. We go out and see what it looks like. There’s no reason that we need to do anything stupid just because we check it out, right? How much further is his house?”
Victoria looked at the GPS in the car not saying out loud what they both knew…that he might have lived in Ankeny for his entire life but he still didn’t know all of the new roads that were springing up. “Just keep going down this road and hang a right turn on Trilein, you’ll be there in like two minutes. There’s a cul-de-sac we can turn around in and not let anyone know that we are there.”
Dursky nodded and the two sped along the street, he didn’t realize how close they were and screeched the tires as he slammed on the brakes and turned the car looking like he was in a performance car instead of an undercover. Dursky cringed as he was doing it and the lights engulfed Hardin’s house. “Don’t even say it, Victoria, I am well aware I just fucked the pooch.”
“So now what do we do?”
“Hope that we live through it. I'm sorry. I really didn’t mean to do that, fuck me.”
Dursky pulled up outside of the house parking on the curb. Britta said, “What do you think our chances are of dying?”
“One hundred percent, it happens to everyone eventually. You got your vest on?”
She nodded, pulling down the top of her shirt and showing it off proudly. He patted his own making sure that it was tight through the rib cage portion and pushed out of the door. He shut the door lightly leaving it unlatched completely. Dursky slid off his suit coat placing it and his pack of smokes on the hood of his car. The two headed up towards the house slowly, trying to stay low and be as quiet as possible.
**
Matt stood watching out the window and then took the belts from each child’s robe. He tied them together making a rope long enough to stretch to each of the doorknobs. He slid one over the first and then the other so it didn’t matter who was trying to get out…they would be in there until someone came and freed their mother at some point. That was, he thought, as long as she wasn’t shot in the crossfire, given any bullets were shot off in the first place.
Matt walked back out slowly, listening to the door seeing it wiggle ever so lightly to see if it was locked. He walked over to his wife smiling and gave her the last kiss he ever would. Matt slid the mask back over his face and she started screaming under the tape. He hushed her and said, “That won’t help me until I take the tape off. Scream like you’ve never done before.”
She looked at him confused and quiet for a moment. He pulled a camouflaged bag up resting it on her chest and removed a machete. He said, “Now I'm going to need you to scream, or those police aren’t going to do anything stupid. You are going to want to have something looking like this current scene because they are going to either think you are lying or a complete idiot about not knowing my history. You probably want them assuming the latter about you.”
He pulled the tape down slowly from her mouth and cupped it quickly. “You can scream now, thank you for your time. You remember to take care of the children or the next time the police come for you they are going to have to spend some serious time piecing you back together.”
She nodded slowly, and he let his hand off her mouth and she began screaming as he’d hoped. “He’s in here, he’s in here, help us!”
“You are a gem, Jamie, thank you.”
Dursky looked to Victoria and nodded trying not to let the shaking in his hands affect the way that he was holding his pistol. Britta smiled nervously, nodded, and Dursky having a hundred pounds on her put up a size eleven and brought it into the door handle kicking it free in one hit. Britta attempted to sprint past him but Joey stuck a beefy arm out pulling her back. He smiled, looking as nervous as she’d ever seen him and said, “If we're gonna do something stupid, Britta, might as well let me go in first.”
She attempted to say something but he didn’t wait and rushed into the house. He swung his gun left clearing the room as he’d done a thousand times before in practice drills. He saw nothing, feeling a bit relieved but the anxious, frightful eyes of the wife taped onto the couch were enough to let him know there was a hell of a chance that he was already dead.
He swung the gun back to the right in a shooter’s stance and that was when a hand like he’d never felt before wrapped around his. The Stranger stared with dead eyes and lifted the gun up and to the side. He hit the release to drop the magazine and used Joey’s own hands to pull back the slide and eject the final bullet. Britta came in gun up, seeing the struggle. She aimed straight at The Stranger but he moved Joey in front of the gunsight. Joey was mouthing, get a fucking shot and shoot the mother fucker!
She nodded but The Stranger kept behind him holding the machete to the man’s neck, deep enough to draw blood from a thin red line across his neck. She spit out, “I don’t have a fucking shot. We can’t let him get away, sir!”
“We aren’t going to let him get away. Do something, now, god damn it!”
She began to say something but the masked man pushed Joey effortlessly in and towards her. She put a hand out to try and stop him but a knife that she was unaware of came from under Joey’s arm pit and stabbed through her palm. Britta screamed at the top of her lungs trying to pull it back, but The Stranger never stopped moving forward and smashed the two of them together up against the wall. Britta only whimpered and when he pulled Joey back off she dropped the gun.
The Stranger pulled Joey back and spun him in a circle letting him go so that he went crashing into the fireplace ten feet away. The Stranger held Britta by the throat squeezing what precious life was still in her away. She clawed at his hands and when he saw Joey trying to rise to his feet he stuck a hand on her thigh lifting the woman up and Joey shook his head no screaming like a maniac, “Don’t do it, don’t fucking do it!”
The Stranger said, “I hope you didn’t have anything you were waiting to tell her.”
That was when he brought her down from above his head and brought her into the ball of his knee splitting something in her back that she knew as well as he did that she very much needed to live. He heard the last gasp for air come and then exhale and he cherished the sweetest sound he’d ever heard. Joey pushed up off the ground running dead straight for The Stranger. Jamie screamed, “Stop, Matt, stop damn it, haven’t you taken enough? Haven’t you done enough?”
Joey bear hugged The Stranger around the waist unsure what his next move was going to be. He’d planned on taking the giant of a man at least a few steps back but when he did not falter he looked up somewhat confused as well as defeated. The Stranger didn’t fight back and when he used all of his
force to move him backwards he brought the machete out and spun it around in his hands.
Just as Joey had a feeling like there was a chance he felt the blade slowly start to enter the top of his neck. The Stranger’s first attempt at his back was met with Kevlar that ended up offering Joey too much protection. The Stranger let it enter slow watching the blood start to trickle from his neck. He brought down a giant of a palm into the butt of the blade and smashed it down until the bottom half of the blade was sticking out of the bottom of Joey’s neck.
Joey’s grip, that had been rock hard, quickly began to grow limp. He fell to the ground taking a knee trying not to fall down completely. The Stranger pulled the machete from Joey’s neck. Jamie could see the violence from her seat and looked like she was going to pass out. She thought the officer was already bleeding more than one man could until the knife came out letting even more of it escape. He fell to the ground. Joey was waiting for the final blow but when he looked up he saw the steel-toed work boot coming down towards his face. The power that came from The Stranger’s kicks was enforced with all of his weight behind them.
Joey tried crawling away but the foot seemed to come down over and over until he could just barely make out colors. He knew something was wrong with his brain and that he was going to bleed out either way. The Stranger brought down one last powerful blow splitting his head open and covering the carpet in the detective’s brain.
Matt stared down loving every minute of it. He looked up to Jamie pulling off the mask and she had never seen such a genuine smile on her husband's face before. She thought that she had no puke left in her stomach and she could not have been more wrong. She bent to the side of the couch puking everything that was left onto the floor until all that came out was stomach bile.
She looked at the two detectives lying dead in her living room and couldn’t get the shock from it to snap. The realization that this actually had just happened in front of her didn’t make sense. “What the hell, Matt? How did you go this long without anyone knowing? How do you just kill them?”
“The heart sees what it wants to. You saw a workaholic husband that wasn’t happy with dangerous jobs. You saw someone that wanted to catch the bad guy. The longer I let them run in each state the more fun that I got to have. It was the greatest thing in the world when they promoted me and put me in charge of the cases. Imagine making the most delicious cookies and then getting to go back day after day to where you made it and lick the batter over and over again.”
“You’re fucking sick. I hope they catch you and—”
Matt slid the mask back on and held an index finger to his mouth. “You should stop now; you’re beginning to make me mad. I don’t think that you want to have that happen. You’re ruining this for me, honey. I never thought that you’d be able to share this with me.”
Jamie held up her hands, at this point she figured if she was going to die then it would have happened by now. “You aren’t sharing anything with me. You are holding me captive in my own house for my own smut or snuff film, whatever they’re called. This is my own horror show and I pray that it is over.”
He picked up a bag heading for the door. He slid the mask off and turned around to say the last words that he would ever utter to her. “You remember to care for those children. The movie rights alone to this are going to put both of them through college and set you all up for life. If I see anything, ever, with them that I don’t like…I will come back, it doesn't matter where you move to I promise you that I can get there. Nod your head, Jamie, if you can understand that.”
She nodded in understanding not for one moment thinking that he was in any way joking, or not fully ready to keep his promise.
Matt headed out the door with extra clothes and a kill bag, which he’d kept very well hidden. He slid back into Gordie’s truck and drove slowly down the road. The sun was beginning to kiss the sky and he knew he needed to get into the hospital and out. There would be very little extra time to piss around. He had no clue how extensive his wound was or what amount of time it would take to sew it up. It was pulsating now and the handful of Ibuprofen did little for the pain.
Chapter 6
Seabolt’s residence
The alarm went off and Pamela rolled over shaking her head. It had been the fourth time it’d sounded and her husband finally said, “Honey, if you don’t get out of the bed and go to work, then I’m going to go and do the surgeries myself. We are going to have a lot of dead people if that is the case.”
“But I'm tired, Henry.”
“Yes, that must have been something you considered when you volunteered to take night shift at the hospital this week. Unfortunately, you are the only one who needs to get up. Your loving husband is supposed to be able to keep sleeping even though you have to get out of bed.”
“Oh isn’t that sweet! You love me so much you’d send me off to work without fresh breakfast and coffee?”
“I’d send you off without a shower or your teeth brushed if it meant that I could get back to sleep. My allergies are fucking killing me, and I want to get some sleep before I have to go to work, at my normal job. I mean unless you were waking me up for a quickie this morning, or evening, or whatever ungodly hour this is considered.”
Pamela rolled out of bed leaving the alarm on to irritate her husband and patted his groin. “You can’t make me coffee, I can’t make you cum, but too little too late I guess. Helluva lot cleaner to just get a Dunkin Donuts to go than having to walk around a little more moist than usual.”
“Nothing says a decade of marriage more than, I’d rather get fast food coffee than screw my husband.”
“Oh, honey, when you say it like that, it loses something. They have donuts, can you blame me?”
“Nah, you better get moving if you want to shower before you go in. You know driving tired is almost as bad as drunk.”
Henry waited for her to slide out of bed and hit the faucets in the shower. When he heard the curtain slide shut, he ran to the kitchen to start a pot of coffee and put together a breakfast and lunch to go. When she came out dressed in her scrubs she wished that she could crawl back in bed. She choked on a laugh when she saw the thermos and a to-go cup of coffee steaming on the counter. Pamela unzipped her lunch bag and yelled back down the hall, “You’re so getting laid later, try not to lose too much of your soul in the office, honey.”
Henry laughed thinking about his reward and how well she knew him. “You know you still have ten minutes before you need to leave…before you even need to worry about being late. We technically could have time, just saying.”
“Ten minutes, huh? So you are saying that we could do it twice?”
He wanted rebut, but the gentle closing of the garage door and an echo of laughter echoed down the hallway. He laid back in bed realizing the hard on he’d been able to obtain at three in the morning had been all for nothing.
**
Pamela drove the half hour commute listening to the radio and getting the creeps the entire way. The only thing that she was thinking the entire way there was, with an entire country why did this psycho have to hang out in the peaceful Midwest?
She pulled into the parking lot to the underground ramp for doctors and specialists and honked twice, getting perturbed having to wait for the guard to come out and hit the button to raise it. After a few minutes, she looked around, unsure what to do, and walked up to see an empty booth with a steaming cup of coffee resting on the small shelf inside. She saw the raise and lower buttons and hit it, running back to her car and driving through before the arm lowered. She parked in her designated spot and started the walk in thinking the guard was maybe out on a patrol but unsure why or how they could possibly leave the damn door closed like that and not have anyone to open it.
Pamela walked past, looking at the cars thinking she might need to upgrade to this year's Cadillac. There were little things more pretty than the CTS4 and she didn’t think it would be too hard to talk Henry into one. She thought of Sunday drives
down to the lake house in one and that it would only make the short few hours trip that much more peaceful. She figured right now would be the best time in the world to go down to the lake after hearing the news reports on the way to work. She had gotten the heebie-jeebies and couldn’t shake them. That creeping feeling that there was someone, or something, watching her was freaking her out to no end.
She pressed her badge against the reader and waited for the door to click open. When it did, she looked around one more time as she entered. She ran into the employee’s hallway entrance feeling relieved because the basement entrance was so much less creepy. She had been so freaked out she had not waited to hear or thought of the click and the electromagnet lock taking hold again.
A hand caught the door keeping it from closing and the masked man slid into the entrance to the hospital. He walked using, or trying to use, the wall to keep himself up. He looked behind him seeing the trail of blood and knew he was having issues and that there would be serious repercussions if he didn’t get fixed up soon. He wasn’t sure if he was going to need blood or not and wasn’t sure if there would be time available to waste on such a thing. He wasn’t ignorant and knew over time that he would replace what he needed but that being on the run, weak and injured, was not ideal, and was not how he wanted to live life.
He was feeling faint and pulled the mask off tucking it into his overalls. He fell to a knee, looking around unsure what he was going to do and how he was going to explain himself if he passed out. Matt saw a women’s locker room sign and pushed in, startling Pamela. He said, “Are you a doctor?”
She’d seen more naked or exposed patients in her life than she’d ever thought she could before but when the tables were turned it was less than pleasant. “You don’t belong in here, sir!”
