by Sean Platt
You wanna prove you’re smarter than the cops, don’t get caught.
But not getting caught didn’t mean you couldn’t have fun at the playground. Boricio wasn’t the sort to leave a merry-go-round unspun, and there were plenty of ways to make merry at the scene of a purging. Doodles were a laugh, so was makeup. Sometimes he’d put costumes on people and dress them as famous characters. Other times, he’d not leave a whisper. Point was, you kept shit random, from your methods to victims.
And while Luca had made it so Boricio actually felt compassion for people, for the first time in his life, he didn’t — and couldn’t — turn off Boricio’s need to hunt and purge: an itch that only grew worse the longer it was left unscratched.
While Boricio couldn’t get rid of the itch, he was far more selective in who he chose to hunt. He picked people who deserved it, the assholes and dickheads of the world who just made shit worse for everyone — in other words, people like Boricio once was.
So, he tightened up his game, was more careful than ever.
Wanting a woman for more than her slippery fish was a new thing for Boricio, but it was true and he knew it like the billow of his own breath. Rose was deserving of his fiercest protection, even if that protection was from the knowledge of what he was. There wasn’t much in his life that he truly cared for, but Boricio would bloody his knuckles to keep his most sacred holy. Right now the order went: Boricio, purging, Rose.
Boricio went back into the bathroom, unbuttoned his pants, plopped his already hard cock into his open palm, wrapped it tight, then after 40 or so seconds of squeezing and jacking, blasted a half billion itty, bitty Boricios onto the porcelain, imagining he was cock-sprinkling Rose, just like they liked it.
It was good to free seed from his system, prior to a purging.
Boricio assessed his volume of man oil, nodded, then looked up to the mirror and ran his hand through his hair, admiring his smile without vanity — no different from admiring the gleam on a blade.
He went to the fridge, grabbed a $1,000 bottle of goddamned water, cracked the cap and swigged, thinking that life was a giant load of spunk, with him drinking an expensive bottle of water from an expensive room, without leaving a body behind. He finished swigging, then dropped his empty into the trash and stepped out into the hallway.
Boricio smiled as he closed the door behind him; It had been too long since his last hunt. The trip to California was exactly what he needed. Now that Boricio was living with Rose on Paddock Island, it was harder than ever to purge. This trip came at a perfect time for both Rose and Boricio. She’d seal a deal, he’d flush his system and a couple of fuckers.
He walked the lobby then left the hotel, crossing the street to the Marriott across the way. Hotel bars were perfect for hunting, just not his.
Boricio went to the bar and ordered a Jack, neat. He sipped, wondering if his morning adventure would take him an hour or six, and wishing it didn’t matter. But it did. Boricio didn’t want Rose missing him, at least not for long. He wasn’t a dog, and Rose wasn’t the sort to hold a leash, but she was human, and a girl, which meant Boricio could only stretch his absences so far.
Purging was different than it used to be for Boricio. It had never been easier, or more rewarding, provided he had the time to settle into the job and get things done right. However, there was a new wrinkle to his post-fixed-by-Luca life.
On occasion, Boricio suffered blackouts. He’d just pass out, only to wake a few minutes to a few hours later. So far it had happened twice, and oddly both times during his purges, but he was lucky enough not to get caught either time. He hadn’t told Rose about the blackouts because he didn’t want her worrying, or more closely monitoring him for his safety.
That wasn’t the only weird thing to happen since Luca “fixed” him.
Every now and then, Boricio could hear stuff. Wasn’t no way to explain it other than that. It was like he could hear how others were buzzing, sometimes in colors displayed in auras around them, sometimes he could hear their thoughts, other times he could see their memories. People were opening up like a book to Boricio, always read and maybe bled. It wasn’t a sense that was always on, but it seemed especially heightened during his hunts, as if nature enhancing him for purging.
The heightened senses seemed to always lead him toward the perfect subject; victims who were asking for it, stuffing so many ugly secrets inside them.
Everyone had secrets. When purging, Boricio was drawn to the worst. Depending on whether it was a sound or a sight or a scent that caught his attention, Boricio would get different glimpses into the evil the victim had done, their offenses surfacing with varying levels of clarity. The two clearest Boricio had seen so far was a man who had killed one girlfriend and a pair of hookers; he got away with all three murders, but hung the memories proudly in his mind’s foyer, so he could see them each of the thousands of times he passed each day. The other was a woman, so broken after drowning her baby, she wore her bleeding emotions like an apron on her withered body. Both were excellent kills, leaving Boricio’s soul feeling freshly showered.
Evil was indiscriminate, and Boricio didn’t give a dick about gender one way or the other, at least not anymore. Before his fixing, Boricio preferred honeypot to bratwurst, but then he met Rose and it mattered not at all. The purging was a secret to keep, good and plenty. The scent of sex meant nothing.
Boricio knew how to hide his killing fine, but had no desire to start keeping the sort of secret Rose would be able to smell, and, much to his surprise, found he didn’t want to. Boricio had no need to wax his candle anywhere else. Rose waxed it fine. He wanted only to calm his itching. For the first time ever, killing was almost an honorable profession for Boricio — cleaning the world.
Boricio sat for almost an hour and half, and was nearly about to swap bars since it was stupid to stay in one place too long, when he finally found what he was looking for.
Boricio had already let a pair of smaller fishies swim off. One was a horrible cunt of a woman: in the hotel cheating on her husband, paying for the room with money embezzled from her school, and wearing a stolen dress from Nordstrom’s. The other guppy wasn’t too different, just a husband instead of a wife and stealing from his father’s account instead of a school. Boricio considered paying a visit to both, but his instincts said he could do better, he’d waited this long after all. His instincts were true; a second before Boricio emptied his glass with a final swallow, he saw his subject: a short, balding man who liked to diddle kids with his diggler.
The Diddler’s body burned bright-red, and would until Boricio muted his hue forever to black.
The big, wide world won’t miss this asshole a bit.
Boricio finished his Jack but stayed in the bar. He ordered another one, then waited through another 40 minutes after the crimson-colored cocksucker disappeared from the lobby and into an elevator. Boricio wasn’t sure what he was doing upstairs, but knew as a matter of goddamned fact that it was something worth getting a head removed from his shoulders.
When the Diddler stepped back into the lobby from a bank of elevators Boricio hadn’t moved his eyes from once, he sifted through the asshole’s mind, happy to find that the Diddler was dumb-fuck enough to think about missing a payment on his Infiniti FX35 earlier that morning.
Boricio left the bar, jogged down to the hotel garage, careful to avoid security cameras, climbed inside the back of the Infiniti, and waited for the Diddler.
The drive was short, though Boricio wished it was shorter since the cocksucker wasn’t just a pedophile, he actually listened to the same crap as his victims — bands with pubeless punks. They made two lefts and four rights spread across what the predator’s guess said was about three and a half miles. Boricio stayed tense throughout the drive, ready to strike if Diddler was stupid enough to sense him and search in back. Fortunately, One Direction kept the Diddler engaged enough to not notice Boricio, all the way from the airport hotel until he killed his engine 15 minutes later.
/> Boricio waited until five minutes after his door slammed, then peered up from the backseat at a house that was as nice as the Diddler’s Infiniti. After another five minutes staring at the front porch, Boricio thanked the gate at the start of the community, figuring it was the reason the Diddler didn’t lock his door or set an alarm. He climbed from the cabin, shut the door, and shot like a blur from the SUV to shadows beneath a green awning, over to a giant wall of bright-pink bougainvillea, and finally around to the side of his house.
Boricio peered into Diddler’s window and saw him staring ogle-eyed at his widescreen. He crept low, circled around to the kitchen, then helped himself into the fuckface’s house, like he had helped himself into so many houses before.
Boricio watched Diddler for nearly 10 minutes, that was about nine longer than he was usually willing to devote to assholes, but there was something so mind numbingly pathetic about Diddler, sitting by himself, watching TV with his hands in his pants — the fucking Disney Channel — that Boricio was near hypnotized. Finally, he stepped out into the living room, walked straight to the coffee table, grabbed the remote from in front of a startled Diddler, turned toward the screen, flipped it to black, then spun back to Diddler — who’d not found any words — and hurled the remote hard into the fucker’s face.
The long, rectangular hunk of plastic smacked the asshole hard in his nose, right on the bridge. Though still too dumfounded to say shit, Diddler screamed as if implements of death were dipping deep into his pucker.
Boricio looked at Diddler and, disappointed that the fucker wasn’t bleeding, leaned toward him, grabbed him by a fat handful of hair, pulled his head up from the couch and his face toward him, then launched his fist between the asshole’s eyes, aiming for the same bridge that wasn’t broken by the remote. Boricio kept pounding, over and over until both the bridge and his knuckles were sticky with crimson.
Fuck. Gonna have to explain that to Rose.
“What do you want?” the asshole was sobbing, already seconds from begging for his stupid, worthless, cocksucking, bullshit-of-a-cunt-hair life.
You’ve already said adios, now I’m gonna get you to sing it.
“Well, well,” Boricio sat on the coffee table. He grabbed a box of Kleenex, sitting a half foot from where the remote was sitting a minute before. He handed Diddler a clump of tissues, said, “Wipe yourself off,” and turned toward the TV, noting the time. He reeled back toward Diddler, then smacked him hard on the head just because.
“You’re damned lucky,” Boricio snarled.
“You’re not going to kill me?” Diddler asked.
Boricio laughed, thinking how funny it was that even though he’d said no such thing, the asshole knew what was coming. That’s what happened when you spent most nights lying awake, wondering when the inevitable would knock on your door.
Boricio laughed harder. “Oh you’re deader than the fucking shake weight, but I can’t afford to take nearly the time with you that I’d like. So we’re gonna have to make this quick. You do get a chance, but that chance won’t dictate whether you live or die. We’re gonna decide, the two of us together, exactly how much pain you’re gonna live with before leaving God’s blue marble.”
Diddler stared up at Boricio as if trying to understand him — who was this strange and horrible man who had broken into his house and was going to kill him? Boricio leaned forward, laughed into the asshole’s confusion, then head-butted him, because it felt so goddamned fantastic — up high to keep the bruises from Rose.
“OK, listen, cunt hair, you get one chance and one chance only. Like I said, I’m in a hurry. My girlfriend — peach of a lady and a Tarantino of talent I surely don’t deserve — is probably waiting for me back at our hotel. She just went to meet with the Maris Brothers.” Boricio tried making eyes with Diddler, not caring a hair on his sack if this nugget impressed him, but curious to see if it did. No luck: Diddler was still clasping at his head and trying to see, whimpering through the splayed palm that cradled his face.
“Well, anyway,” Boricio said, his voice back to casual, “I’ve gotta run. But I’m not the sort of man to leave a job anything less than finished, so I’m looking for an excuse to trim my chore list. You tell me why you deserve to die, now I don’t need to know all the details you sick, fucking fuck, just enough to hear you admit what you and I both already know, then I need a reason why you deserve to have the Grim Reaper get to you quick, rather than turning afternoon into night while making you bleed from your dookie hole. Do ya dig?”
Diddler cried.
Boricio head-butted him again, this time harder, then screamed into his face. “I said, do ya dig?!”
Diddler whimpered, “Y-yes … ”
“Why do you deserve to die?” Boricio asked.
For a long minute Diddler cried too hard to make any words. Boricio let him sob since it was part of the show. Then, when tired of the simpering, Boricio started thinking about his own experience with men raping his childhood in one way or another, then grabbed the cockweasel by another clump of hair, this one at the back of his head, and dragged him off of the couch, across his house, and into the bedroom. Boricio dropped him like a sack by the side of his bed and slammed a boot heel into his gut.
The one thing Boricio hated about purging on the road was that most times he had no access to his tools. But Boricio bent down and did it the old-fashioned way, pulling the middle digit from the Diddler’s right hand and bending it back toward his wrist until there was a horrible snap, followed by a shrieking, muffled only by Diddler’s deafening scream. Boricio reached up to the bed, shook a pillow from its case, wadded it up and shoved it into Diddler’s wide-open, and still-screaming, mouth, told him to “Shut the fuck up before I fill your mouth with my shit,” then grabbed his left hand and made the other middle finger match.
“I’ll break every bone in your body the same goddamned way,” Boricio said, “and make you listen to Muskrat Love while I do it if you don’t start talking. You satisfy me, and you can ask any number of the bitches Ol’ Boricio’s left breathing, I’m pretty easy to satisfy, and I’ll kill you quick. Otherwise, I’m drawing blinds and we’re hunkering down.”
Somehow, Diddler found his voice through the sobbing. “Because I hurt people.”
“What?” Boricio asked, leaning in as if he couldn’t hear.
“I deserve to die because I hurt people … children.”
The final word cracked the man’s voice into something awful. Boricio said, “Got a reason I should make it quick?”
Boricio had heard it all before, and expected more of the same from Diddler — any number of reasons why the indefensible was worthy of defense: the same bullshit that had victims spending lifetimes trying to understand what couldn’t be understood, and long lifetimes hoping that one day they would, praying for answers if they were stupid enough to believe in a God, telling themselves over and over like fucking Rain Man that it wasn’t their fault, often while loving the fucker who did shit to them, thinking that maybe they brought it on themselves somehow.
Instead, Diddler surprised him. “I don’t deserve you to make it quick. Please, Demon,” he begged, “make me suffer.”
Boricio had a speech cycling through his mind, all about how he would be doing the world a favor, ridding the planet of a dirtbag, but Diddler disarmed him. All Boricio could think to do was give the cunt hair what he didn’t want.
He kneeled down, wrapped his arms around Diddler in a chokehold, stood straight, snapped the asshole’s neck on his way to standing, then dropped him into a pile on the floor.
Boricio searched the fucker’s place until he found his stash of kiddie-porn — it didn’t take long since Boricio had a decent handle on how most monsters thought — then opened the box and dumped it all over Diddler’s dead body. Boricio cleaned up any evidence of his being there and on his way outside, slammed into a wall of white, right as he opened the front door. Something slithered in between his ears and started screaming.
; Boricio fell to his knees.
No, not again, he thought as he blacked out.
**
When Boricio opened his eyes, the sky outside the half-open door had already traded blue for gloaming. Boricio lay there blinking, trying not to be scared that he’d blacked out again during a purging. That was the sort of shit that could get him caught, dead, or worst of all, make him lose Rose.
Tic-tac-toe, three in a row, your momma got shot by a G.I. Joe.
A car motor rumbled outside. Strong beams from a headlight bathed the house in light.
Fuckity fuck fuck.
Boricio leapt to his feet, heart racing. He slammed the front door, ran to the rear of the house, slipped quietly out the back, hopped the first fence then another two after that, and didn’t stop running until he left the residential neighborhood behind him and was bathed by the bright light of a major L.A. street, scoping his surroundings to figure location.
He had to get to the hotel, and explain shit to Rose.
As he thought about what he’d say, Boricio wondered if he’d managed to keep his prints off the Infiniti while he was hiding inside it. He thought so, but couldn’t be certain. And there was no way in hell he was going back to the scene of the crime.
Boricio hoped his carelessness wouldn’t come back to cost him everything — not now that he had a life worth clinging to.
* * * *
CHAPTER 5 — Steven Warner
Marina wanted Steven to turn his attention from the TV back to her, wanted him to nibble at her ear, fog warm breath onto her neck, or put his mouth all over her, whispering sweet promises as he slid across her skin.
