The Surgeon

by David Beers

  Perhaps not mastery, but close to it.

  And thus, seeing a part of himself in Christian was something he hadn't seen in many people before. An intelligence that rivaled his own, and perhaps, what Luke might have been if he'd found a different purpose—a different master—earlier on.

  "What's your purpose, Christian?" he asked his empty living room.

  Eventually, Luke knew, Christian would come to see the truth about him. All of Luke's cunning and agility wouldn't be able to keep that mind at bay forever. And when he did discover Luke's nature, his master even ...

  "What will I do to you?"

  Luke turned from the window as the car's lights disappeared down the road.

  It was time to act. He knew Bradley Brown would soon overreach himself, even if he thought he still controlled the situation, and Luke needed to put a bow on everything by then.

  He went to his cellphone and typed out a message.

  Charles Ranger has told the FBI.

  Two minutes passed and an answer returned.

  Who is that?

  Luke closed his eyes and smiled, picturing Bradley Brown in his room, his computer the only light shining out across the darkness. He saw Bradley's leg shaking up and down, his brow contorted so hard that it hurt, but still trying to play games. Trying to make Luke think that Bradley needed no one.

  He opened his eyes and typed out another message.

  Have I lied yet? Why do you think they came to your house today? They will be going to talk to Ranger soon.

  Another minute passed.

  Thx.

  Luke placed his phone down. He would rest now. Tomorrow the world would alight with flame, and he planned to enjoy the show.

  The next day Christian asked that the alternate team be removed from rotation, and that he take over tailing Bradley Brown.

  "You're sure?"

  Christian was. He felt a need to be close to Bradley, to understand him more—as sad as the man might be. He wasn't sure if Bradley Brown would die before they could arrest him (as Luke suggested), or if he'd spend the rest of his life behind bars. Other options existed, of course, but in the end, Christian wanted to help stop him.

  To bring chaos to the order he so desperately wants.

  Luke’s words stuck with Christian. When he went home from Luke's, he slept soundly. No dreams. No nightmares. No Bradley Brown. Christian always said what he felt, but Luke had an ability to say what was needed.

  Christian wanted to be near Bradley for a little while, his last few hours of freedom, or life—whichever he chose.

  "We'll do our shifts together, then," Tommy had said about Christian's suggestion. "No way you're ready to tail someone on your own. You come and sit for mine. Sleep some if you want, and then I'll stay for yours. That work?"

  It worked for Christian.

  They both sat in the unmarked FBI car. They were in the condominium complex across from Brown's nursing home. The sun had set an hour ago.

  "How bored is he in there?" Tommy asked. "Geriatrics go to sleep around four PM and he has to stay up all night. I might lose my mind too, with nothing to do all night."

  "I don't think he's bored now," Christian said. "I think his mind is probably whirling."

  "About what?"

  "About who he's going to kill next."

  "You don't think he's worried about us?" Tommy said.

  "Some, but I think he's got a fever and it's not going to break until he kills. That's what's driving him right now."

  Christian was fine with the silence that came in a stakeout. It seemed Tommy was too, as much of the time that passed between them was filled with nothing else.

  "Here he comes," Tommy said.

  Christian saw him, too. He was walking out the front door and appeared to be heading to his car.

  "His shift can't be over. It's only been a few hours," Tommy said.

  Christian was quiet, watching. He didn't feel easy about any of this. A lot of pieces were whizzing around in his head, as if a tornado had grabbed the logical machine which normally ran everything with such precision. He couldn't put the pieces into place yet, but he could see them all flinging around rapidly. Bradley Brown. John Presley. Luke Titan. Veronica Lopez. The only person missing was Tommy; he seemed to be the granite that the team was built on. Luke was too ... aloof, non-caring.

  Yet, that wasn't it. Not completely.

  But Christian couldn't figure out what it was.

  And now he watched Bradley Brown open his trunk and pull something out. Both Tommy and he put binoculars to their eyes.

  "It's a cooler," Tommy said.

  Christian nodded, the larger vision of Bradley moving up and down in his binoculars. "What's in it?"

  "Lunch?" Tommy asked. "I wonder what our killer eats on his night shift."

  "That's the first thing anyone's ever said that's made me not have an appetite. Thanks."

  "Someone has to look after your weight, my friend."

  Bradley had thought all day about how he'd handle Charlie. He knew he had to figure out who was on the other end of the text messages, but that could wait. First Charlie, then the rest.

  And the eyeballs. Bradley needed to take care of them as well.

  He had thought from the early hours of the morning to the early hours of the afternoon, and only one answer seemed to solve all his problems. If Charlie tipped off the FBI, and they knew where he lived, then Bradley needed to disappear. He didn't know for how long—a few years, probably. Canada was the most likely spot, and as long as he crossed the border before a warrant was placed on him, he'd be fine. Maybe he could start again up there, or maybe he'd come back to the states.

  Mother needed to die, he knew. Which would be sad, but necessary.

  Most killers, Bradley knew, couldn't stop. They were compelled to keep going. Bradley now understood why, but he had two more people left to kill before he could make his break for freedom. Two more should stave off the headaches for a time. Two more should give him some space.

  At least he hoped that. This was new territory for Bradley.

  He did as Charlie had said, and carefully bagged up his eyeballs, placing them in the small cooler. Before leaving his house, he walked it out to the trunk, packed full of ice, and set it inside.

  He wouldn't leave the eyeballs with Charlie, of course. No, now that Charlie had betrayed him, he wanted the old man to see what was going to happen to him. Except Charlie and the bitch lying back at his house would both live through it, walking around eyeless for the rest of their days.

  Bradley just wanted to scare the old fuck before he cut him up.

  He walked through the front doors and took a right down the hallway, heading straight to Charlie's room. He said hey to Sarah as he passed her.

  "What's that?" the bitch asked.

  "Oh, just putting some ice in Ranger's cooler. You know how he is with his cokes."

  "He's got a cooler for them now?"

  "Yeah, his kids brought it for him and he's obsessed with it."

  Sarah smiled and finally let Bradley move down the hall. He would be glad to never talk to her again. If he had time, he'd cut her up too, just because she made him stop in the hallway. Bradley's rage grew with each step he took down the hall, furious with Charlie, with the FBI, with Sarah for even speaking to him. All he wanted was something simple, something pure, something he could have for himself—but no, they wouldn't let him. No one wanted him to have it. They were going to try and take it away, and fuck them for it.

  Bradley reached Charlie's room, put the cooler down and opened the door. He pushed the cooler in with his foot, then shut the door behind him.

  Charlie sat on the bed, his tablet open on his lap. The non-talking fuck. Sitting there and listening for months on end, all the while plotting to take away what he knew Bradley cared about so much.

  "How are you, Charlie?"

  Charlie nodded, a smile appearing on his face. And how long had Bradley fell for that smile? One of an old man who wa
s just happy to be around people he liked. A lie.

  "That's good." Bradley slowly walked forward, pushing the cooler across the floor, it scraping against the wood beneath. When he reached the bed, he sat down on it, cooler in between his feet. "Charlie, I've had a stretch of good luck and bad luck recently. The bad luck is that the FBI is on to me." Bradley looked over at Charlie, and yes, he saw fear on the old man's face. Finally. "Yeah, I know, buddy. That's a pretty big piece of bad luck, isn't it? The good luck, though, is that I have someone who has been helping me. And you know what they did for me today?"

  Charlie shook his head. No.

  No, you don't, Bradley thought, and you don't want to know either, you old fucking piss bucket. But you're about to know it all, and then you'll really wish you hadn't known.

  "They told me, Charlie, that you were the one who told the FBI."

  He stared at the old man as all the color drained from Charlie's face. He grew as pale as the sheets he lay on top of. So shocked he couldn't even put up a defense.

  "It's true isn't it?" Bradley asked.

  Finally, Charlie did try to shake his head no again, but the result was so poor it looked more like a spasm than any kind of communication.

  "Yes, it is. You and I both know it." Bradley looked down to his feet and was silent for a second. "I brought what we spoke about. I don't think it would be in my best interest to leave it here anymore, though. You get why, right?" Bradley bent down and hoisted the small container up onto the bed, roughly moving the old man's legs out of the way. He stood so that the cooler was in front of him. "You see, Charlie, no one else knows as much about me as you do. Not even Mother. I told you these things because I thought I could trust you. And now I know I can't."

  Bradley began losing track of the room around him. The cooler grew bigger in his eyes, a large blue bucket full of his most precious possessions. The only possessions that mattered. The rest of the world could burn down, as long as he had these eyeballs.

  "I have to leave, Charlie. You're making me do it. I have to go somewhere else where the FBI can't find me and I won't ever be able to come back here. I have to stop doing this for a while and I don't want to. I like doing this, Charlie. I really fucking like it." He reached forward and took the cooler's top off, not seeing the horror blooming on Charlie's face like some awful rose born in hell's deepest layer. Bradley reached inside and pulled out a plastic sandwich bag, two solid orbs lying inside it. The bag was fogged and iced over, but Bradley could still see the two eyes staring out, one looking up at the ceiling, the other directly at him. They were huge in his mind, the size of planets. The rest of the room had fallen away leaving him with his loves. "I'm not going to keep your eyes, Charlie. You don't deserve to be with the rest. I am going to cut them out, though, and I'm going to do it while you're alive. You're going to feel every single tendon and nerve being snipped away."

  Bradley looked away from the bag and to Charlie.

  "Are you ready to go?"

  Chapter 27

  Luke was in a rental car, sitting in the same apartment complex as Tommy and Christian. The windows were deeply tinted, right at the legal limit, and the car was parked where no street lights illuminated it. He sat motionless in the front seat, his eyes staring directly at his partners.

  He knew what Mr. Brown was doing and also that Tommy would stop him if he went ahead with such a foolish plan. He was going to bring Mr. Ranger right outside, shove him in his car, and just drive home as if he wasn't kidnapping a geriatric patient. Tommy wouldn't let that happen, regardless if he had to break laws to ensure that Mr. Ranger didn't die.

  Luke couldn't allow that to happen, not yet anyway.

  Mr. Brown had walked in the nursing home about an hour ago, carrying his cooler of trophies. Oblivious to the fact that he was being watched. Luke would help, though. Luke would save the day ... at least for a little while.

  He stepped from his car and closed the door silently. He didn't bother locking it, but simply walked away, moving through the back of the complex and out the exit. He walked swiftly and without a sound, like a predator stalking prey through some night jungle. It took him five minutes to walk around the back of the nursing home, making sure that Tommy and Christian couldn't see him.

  He reached the back door and didn't pause, just simply walked in. The world made it easy for predators because they thought that while predators might exist, they were protected. Bad things always happened to other people, but not to them. Not the real bad things anyway. What they didn't know (and truthfully, most never would) was that predators walked around them every day, ready to snatch them up and take them back to painful lairs.

  Luke was the bad things, all of them wrapped into one single body. But that was okay, good even. It took Luke years to understand this, though he didn't ever really fight his nature. There was a God, Luke knew, even if not the one the Jews and Christians prayed to. That God was a thing of goodness, a thing that wanted to keep order in the world. To fight the bad things.

  That's not the way the world should work, though, and Luke was intent on doing his part to destroy the order that God so desperately wanted in place. As if He should have complete say over this dominion.

  A woman sat at a small desk to the right of the door.

  "Hi?" she said. "I'm sorry, sir, but you'll need to go around to the front. But, you'll really have to come back tomorrow. Visiting hours are over."

  Luke said nothing, just moved as swiftly as he had outside. He reached her desk in seconds and just as she opened her mouth to say something with quite a bit more alarm than her first few sentences, he snapped her neck, feeling the bones break beneath the strength of his hands.

  Her body tried to slump forward but Luke held her up. He lifted her as easily as a bulldozer lifted dirt, hoisting her over his shoulder and looking around the large room. Luke saw the closet immediately, brought her to it, and tossed her dead body inside. He shut the door and then turned around to survey the room once more. Everything in order besides the person missing from her station, which would be fine. He'd leave this place long before anyone noticed.

  Luke went to the dead woman's computer, the screen still on and logged in. He found the program detailing the residents’s locations and then Mr. Ranger.

  He left the room as a shadow would, nothing remaining to show he'd ever been there. Luke walked down the hallways. He moved with a purpose that would keep anyone from saying a word to him, though he saw no one as he took the two corridors to Mr. Ranger's room. He didn't knock, but simply opened the door and stepped inside, closing it behind him.

  Mr. Brown stood over Mr. Ranger, a discarded rag lying on the old man's face. Mr. Ranger was unconscious and Mr. Brown in some kind of trance, staring at the geriatric as if the secret to the universe resided inside his decrepit body.

  Mr. Brown looked over to Luke slowly, his brain desperately trying to bring him back to reality.

  Luke put his finger to his lips.

  "Shhh," he said.

  "Here he comes," Tommy said.

  The hours had rolled by slowly. Tommy and Christian sat in the car, silent for the most part. It was four in the morning and Bradley Brown's shift was apparently over.

  "He's got the cooler," Christian said. "What do we do?"

  "What do you think?"

  "Follow him?"

  "Bingo," Tommy said.

  "We just keep following him? That's it? We can't do anything else?" Christian said as he turned the key in the ignition.

  "That's the definition of a stakeout. We watch until we see something that will let us move on him. This is the majority of detective work, kid. This and paperwork. Very little excitement."

  Brown's car left the parking lot and Christian slowly pulled out of their space. He stayed a good distance back without Tommy needing to say anything.

  "I don't like this."

  "What?" Tommy asked as they moved onto the highway.

  "It doesn't feel right. The whole thing. What was that
cooler for?"

  "Could be for anything. Could be his lunch. Could be he brought lunch for the staff. Maybe he's a real nice guy outside of his penchant for cutting people's eyes out of their heads."

  "No. Something's wrong."

  "Maybe, but we can't do anything about it yet."

  "I need to think," Christian said, his voice taking on a tone of worry that Tommy thought bordered on panic. "Look, he's heading home. Can we pull over for just a second and you take the wheel? We'll catch up with him if we're fast."

  Tommy looked over at his partner. "You're serious?"

  "Yes, I'm sorry. I need to think and I can't do it while driving. It's dangerous."

  "I'm starting to wonder about you, Christian. Pull over."

  They made the switch quickly and Tommy roared the car back onto the highway. He moved down the dark road at just under a hundred miles per hour, his eyes searching for the car he wanted.

  "This might look weird," Christian said. "And if you talk to me, I won't answer. But I'm fine."

  Christian didn't go to the room marked Surgeon.

  Instead he stood in his mansion's entrance, a large dual staircase splitting off to the right and left in front of him. A large painting of his mother hung on the wall at the beginning of the staircase, her kind face looking out on Christian's world. Telling him everything was okay, and that it always would be.

  Nothing was okay right now, though, regardless of what the painting tried to tell him.

  Christian couldn't figure out why. He couldn't figure out anything because somehow events were moving too quickly. Christian had never dealt with something that he couldn't see from all angles at once. Not until now.

  Answers were housed in this mansion, somewhere, Christian just needed to figure out where.

  He didn't move with his usual speed inside the mansion, trusting Tommy on the outside to not rush him and leave him be for a bit. He walked up the stairs, looking at how sparsely he'd decorated the place over the years. He knew very little of fashion or interior design, but what he had in here was his and he appreciated it. The stained glass on either side of the staircase, large and full of happy scenes from his life. Those when he was around his mother or by himself, and not facing the outside world which always seemed far too daunting.