A Blood of Killers

by Gerard Houarner

  Paul went around the house, removing all the family’s faces from every picture he found. He placed the faces in the small pile of skin next to the corpse to which it belonged: the kids in their rooms, the wife in the shower, Nate in the living room.

  A car passed outside, slowly, and he knew it was time to go.

  My son. Seed of darkness in him so dark it’s bright. On the podium accepting the award from the President. Tall, handsome. Smiling at us watching, holding the gleaming trophy above his head. Applause thunders in the hall. His name is called, chanted. Which is my name. Our names. My son. He bows. Deeply. Face serious, eyes glistening as he looks up. And his first words are thank you, father. My son.

  It wasn’t possible. So much blood, so much excitement. Alive. He had felt so alive.

  “Fucking asshole,” Kessler said, prodding Paul with a thick finger. “Hurry it up.”

  The smell of plastic assaulted Paul. He was hot and sweaty in his coveralls. The tiny plastic-sheet isolation cube set up in the back of the cable repair van that had come to pick him up was also hot and humid. Kessler, standing just outside cube, staring in at Paul, seemed to radiate heat.

  The floor vibrated with the van’s motion. He fought to keep his balance. Suddenly, he recalled Kessler’s instructions. With a glance at Kessler, he began to strip.

  The evening squirmed through Paul’s mind in fits and spurts as he removed his clothes. His heart beat rapidly; sweat poured from his brow even though his veins felt ice-bound, his bones frozen brittle. Images exploded in his mind, sounds came back like music samples. His fingers were clumsy and weak, his legs shook. He thought he might collapse at any moment. He stopped for a moment and closed his eyes against the memory of what he had done. And opened them wide again as he felt the backwash of feelings that had passed through him when he was in Nate’s house.

  How could he have been so dead inside, to feel so alive with death.

  He continued to undress. Easier to think about the van cruising slowly through the neighborhood, just as he had been told it would be doing. Easier to remember the driver humming along with a Frank Sinatra CD when Paul jumped into the back after Kessler opened the door for him on a dark, curving, tree lined stretch of street. Simpler to think of himself crashing against the hard metal van floor, in the plastic cube so there wouldn’t be any traces of what the driver had borrowed.

  The driver, after all, was just a tourist. He preferred to watch, with as few complications as possible. The van had to go back, after all. There couldn’t be any questions.

  “You did them all, didn’t you,” Kessler said, voice low and dangerous. His mouth was set into a grim, thin line. “Didn’t leave any for the rest of us, for later, did you.”

  Paul didn’t answer. Cold, his testicles draw up into his body, Paul could barely control his trembling as he packed his blood-soaked clothes into a plastic bag. He tried to avoid touching the blood. He looked up at Kessler when he was finished, tears burning his eyes. “I—I’m sorry,” he whispered. “I didn’t … couldn’t …” He coughed, then gasped for breath.

  “Oh, leave him be, Kessler,” the travel agent said from the front of the van. “It’s his first time. He had so much locked up inside of him. Remember your first?”

  The driver turned to the travel agent. “I gotta be getting this thing back, Mr. Sorrel.”

  “One,” Kessler said. “That’s all I did. I left something for the others. So did you, I’m sure. So does everybody else.”

  “Yes,” Sorrel said, and for a moment Paul was not sure if he was answering the driver or Kessler. Then the travel agent continued. “But you know how these new ones are. Buried so deeply in the normal strata, they can’t help but explode when their little minds are pricked by truth. The pressures, you know. We were different. We always knew what we wanted to do. Before we were ready to let go completely we found outlets for our urges. We were just waiting for the right time, the right place, just waiting for a little push. These new ones, Kessler, I’m telling you, they’ll outdo us all in the long run. They’re so eager, so hungry. Like a wave of immigrants discovering a new land, desperate to conquer the language, the culture. He was never a tourist, Kessler. He came to stay. He just didn’t know that was what he was going to do.” Sorrel’s high-pitched giggle pierced the plastic enclosure surrounding Paul like a dagger. “Turn there,” Sorrel said to the driver when he settled down. “We’ll be through in a few minutes.”

  They drove for a short while over a bumpy road. Paul knelt on a clean towel and washed himself with a sponge and a splashing bucket of cold water Kessler thrust into the cube. He glanced at Kessler several times, searched for something to say, but found no answer to the detective’s hard, implacable stare. The van rolled to a stop. Kessler motioned for Paul to get out.

  Paul emerged from the back of the van naked, trembling. Night enveloped him, caressed him, seeped through every pore of his body. Darkness blanked his mind, numbed his emotions. He curled his toes into the earth, trying to root himself into ground like one of the trees surrounding them. He watched, hands over his genitals, as Kessler and Sorrel collapsed the plastic cube containing the coveralls, gloves, weighted shoes, socks, nylon stocking and cap and packed the mass in a duffel bag. They sealed the bucket of water Paul had used to wash himself with a lid. When they were finished and out of the van, they waved the driver off. As the van, headlights off, drove away on the narrow dirt road, Kessler walked off deeper into the woods, away from the road. He slung the bag over his shoulder. Sorrel motioned for Paul to follow.

  Moments later, as low tree branches scratched Paul’s face and prickly underbrush pinched his legs, the rumble of an idling truck engine reverberated through the woods. They came out on a two lane highway with a tractor trailer truck parked on the shoulder. Its massive form was outlined by tiny red running lights. The cab door opened and Kessler threw the duffel bag and bucket up. Large, tattooed hands grabbed the bag and closed the door. The truck took off with a sigh of brakes and an engine roar. Sorrel and Kessler waited restlessly by the road. Paul, gazing after the massive rig fading into the night, withdrew behind a tree. He hugged the trunk desperately, trying to draw its strength into himself like sap. The bark scratched his skin.

  Headlights appeared on the highway, blinked twice. Sorrel flashed his flashlight back twice. Paul’s car came to a stop on the shoulder in front of Sorrel and Kessler. John Garland stepped out and tossed a beer to Kessler, waved one at Sorrel, who refused.

  “Well, how did it go?” he asked anxiously, stepping around the front.

  “You should have seen him use the cutter,” Sorrel answered. He opened the door, took out a bundle and tossed it to Paul with a wink.

  “Surplus military optics. I could only see into one of the kids’ bedrooms, but what I saw was very impressive. Taking the faces was a nice touch.”

  Kessler drained his can in one long gulp and tossed the empty in Paul’s direction. Paul undid the bundle and hurried into his clothes. As he finished, he looked at Kessler. The detective’s face, partly lit by the car’s ceiling light, looked like a half moon beaming down on him.

  “He did them all,” Kessler said flatly. “Didn’t leave anything for the rest.”

  Garland coughed, stared at Paul wide-eyed. A slight grin tugged at the corner of his mouth before he turned his face away from the light. “All of them? Well, he knew them, Kessler. He’d the right. Next time they’ll be strangers, and you’ll be able to control yourself, right? Sure. We’ll talk on the way back. About how it felt.”

  Paul came out from under the trees, uncomfortable in his own clothes. They no longer seemed to fit, and irritated the minor cuts he had suffered going through the woods. The night spun around him, stars jerked sideways in the sky. Trees bordering the highway loomed over him. Disoriented, his stomach lurching, Paul hesitated as he passed the detective. He turned to him, searched the man’s stony expression for some sign of comfort, support, guidance.

  “Let him tell you how th
is feels,” Kessler said, and then punched Paul in the face.

  Paul fell backwards. The force of Kessler’s blow passed through him, stealing away the last of his strength. Numbed by dreams and by reality, he hardly noticed when he landed hard on the ground. Everything that happened to him, and everything he had done, appeared as a revelation, a new truth about himself and the world. He accepted the new truths, let them soak into his awareness, into his self. As the detective systematically beat and kicked his face and body, Paul lived once again through everything that had happened at Nate’s house. Took the events in, accepted them as a part of himself. Forever.

  He remembered the spark of rage that had ignited as he stood outside the house thinking about Nate’s promotion, his inevitable success and arrogance, his perfect little family so afraid of death. Paul’s anger fed with his own life and family.

  Then the old, odd dreams had come back: his father dead beneath him, his mother tantalizingly out of reach, himself innocent, vulnerable, waiting to die in a crib by his own hand. Blood dreams after cable fights, the football games, the kinds of movies he liked to watch. Dreams that left him sweaty, muscles tightened, heart beating when he woke from them in the middle of the night, still feeling shadows stalking, still himself a shadow stalking. Hurtful dreams that left him hungry and aching from the emptiness they excavated. Dreams he had buried in the routine of work, eating, television, sex, sleep.

  As he took the beating, he remembered dreams coming to life in Nate’s house. The rage exploding in sheets of blood. He remembered Nate’s shocked expression when Paul suddenly came into the living room, ran up to Nate and stabbed him through the heart while trying to get up; he remembered Nate’s wife’s face as his fingers around her throat strangled her after she had called out to Nate and asked if he’d fallen. The kids upstairs had screamed when he came for them.

  When he was through, when he was completely finished and the last of the rage had drained away, the nightmares had stopped haunting him.

  As Kessler beat him, they returned.

  Howling, running free over the damp, clipped lawn grass of an endless suburban back yard, houses lined up on either side of me like faces peering over a fence at a trapped animal, I search for the road, I aim for the distant towers, I wait for the shadows to lengthen so I can hide within them. Legs stretching over the manicured territories of daylight, I yearn to leap over the moon and escape into the night.

  “… you to forget them,” Kessler said, waving photographs of three men in front of them. “These are the guys who beat you up. Say it again, say the story.”

  The story reverberated in Paul’s mind, accented by flashes of pain. Of course he knew the story. How could he forget Kessler beating the cover story into him. “I … I saw this guy with his hood up on Route 3,” Paul mumbled through a swollen lip and dull, throbbing pain. “I pulled over. Another guy hits me from behind. I’m on the ground, they’re beating me. Three guys, I think. Those three. They take my money, rip my clothes, try to take my car keys. I run away. Come back later, find my car. Drive to the police station.”

  “Okay. That’s your alibi. It’ll stick. These guys are known, and they’re not going to be caught. They’re … conveniently on the loose.” Kessler stood up and brushed dirt from the knee he had been down on while talking to Paul. “You’re not going to do anybody you know ever again. Do you understand? And if you do everyone in a place again, your cover will be gone. Nothing will be there. Do you understand?”

  Paul grunted.

  Sorrel and Garland helped him up and brought him to his car. “Remember to drive on Route 3 first,” Sorrel said.

  “I was there, before …” Paul said, then spit blood.

  “I know,” Sorrel continued, his voice hushed as he glanced at Kessler, “but he likes to make the connections. You’ll be seen on Route 3, you’ll come into the station off that road. Things will fit.”

  “Come on, let him go,” Kessler said, heading back into the woods. “Let’s pick up the cars. I think that plumber should be paid a visit. He’s got a kid I want to meet. Depressed, maybe even suicidal, you know? He’s with some friends tonight who’re trying to help. I’d like to be waiting for him on the way back to the family’s hide out. Give him some help. Drive up next to him in that stolen car we got. You know?”

  “Welcome home,” Sorrel said, patting Paul on the hand as he closed the driver’s side door.

  “I’ll be in touch,” Garland said through the other window. “We still have to do an in-depth interview. Off the record, of course.” He laughed, then followed the others into the darkness.

  Paul did as he’d been told. In the hospital, his wife told him about Nate. Detectives interviewed him. He was released, went back to work, allowed others to comfort him. He argued with his kids, with his wife, and complained about his job.

  And when the next time came, he made sure he killed only one, and left the others for the rest of the blood.

  THE HARD KILL

  Max met Mr. Jung at Katz’s Deli on Houston Street. The Beast growled at the pastrami meat in his contact’s sandwich. Max’s back ached with tension from the protocol break. Business was conducted through dead drops. Emergencies meant fuck-ups.

  A pair of ten year olds chased each other around the empty tables while their parents argued over what kind of bagels to order. Max wanted to give the kids tips.

  Jung handed him a manila envelope containing the location and picture of a young, beautiful Asian woman.

  The Beast stirred listlessly. Max had indulged both of their appetites in the Pine Barrens last night. There was no urgency to go out on another hunt.

  “A message needs to be delivered,” Mr. Jung said.

  “Obstacles?”

  “The people who don’t want to hear the message.”

  “Yes.”

  “Enemies, and allies, who want to claim the kill. You must be the one to get the job done.”

  “You’ll want a trophy.”

  “Of course.”

  The children had stopped playing nearby and were listening.

  Jung smiled at them like an indulgent uncle.

  He could go straight for the kill. But a message had to be sent. Jung wasn’t always direct, but Max understood what was to be done.

  He made a few phone calls, then a list. Max called Lee first.

  “You’re on this shit?” Lee said, “You got it, brother. Sid’s running me these days, and he gave me three other gigs to do before that one. My bosses ain’t got the stomach for it.”

  “Good.”

  “You would’ve tried to kill me if I went after her, right Max?”

  “I’d hate to lose such a good wing man.”

  “Fuck you, too, mother fucker.”

  At least the job wasn’t going to cost him someone who’d proved useful so often to him.

  The rest he didn’t bother calling. He tracked them down, picking up their trails as they closed on their mutual prey. Hunters were predictable. He had to watch that tendency in himself.

  In a Second Avenue bar, he positioned himself near the basement door, drinking a club soda with lemon. The woman came up from below, where she’d set up her base. He swept her off her feet, back down the stairs. She hadn’t been expecting him. Not that fast. The Beast was aroused by her musky scent, spiky hair, but Max didn’t have time. He took her scalp, and her tattooed arms.

  In Union Square, Max visited the office of a building superintendent. A part-timer, he was only just starting on the job and was ill-prepared. He would have had to do the work on his lunch hour. Max took only a diamond ring and its thick finger.

  The bike messenger vanished downtown, somewhere between one end of Wall Street and the other, heading for the target’s hotel. Max liked his nose. He didn’t want to take anything from the homeless man sneaking aboard a delivery truck to get to the target’s hotel, but settled on the traditional ear, after he washed the caked dirt off. He took the two foreign visitors in the target’s Chinatown hotel,
one at the service entrance, the other in the lobby bathroom. He collected an impressively studded cock and a beautiful pair of lips.

  He had a deal with local chefs for the parts he didn’t want.

  He took his bag of trophies to the target’s room. Wary. There were always surprises. But the Beast, its appetite aroused by the fast work, was eager for the girl. After all, he’d given up perfectly good prey the first time out.

  Jung was waiting for him, along with the girl, on the couch facing the television console. A muted cartoon about a costumed dog flickered colorfully, begging for attention. Mr. Jung wore his usual dark suit, the woman, a bright, sleeveless dress.

  “I only asked for one trophy.” Mr. Jung leaned his head toward the girl.

  Max emptied the bag on a coffee table. “They’re mine.”

  The girl looked younger than in her picture. Her body trembled, and her face had constricted into a frozen expression of absolute terror. He hadn’t made a move against her, yet. It was the Beast raging in his eyes and clenched fists, the hunger in his voice that frightened her.

  “Please,” she said, “be quick.”

  The room smelled of blood and raw meat.

  Mr. Jung didn’t move away.

  Max took in the imbalance of the pair, sitting close, almost intimately, in front of the TV. The Beast pushed him to jump. Instead, he said, “You don’t want me to kill her.”

  “No.”

  Every muscle in her body locked. Her face relaxed, lost all emotion. She might have been a statue being smuggled into the country. The Beast howled. Max shuddered. “Why?”

  “She’s my daughter.”

  “Why did you ask me to kill her?”