Wicked Things (Chaos & Ruin #3)

by Callie Hart

  I can’t quite seem to make my brain engage. I can’t quite seem to tear my eyes away from the sheet of paper I’m holding in my hands. “Police reports are very easy to come by, Eli,” I say slowly. “Very easy. Any idiot can get a hold of a police report. And this…” I hold up the sheet of paper for him to see. “The information in this report was all supplied to the cops by Sloane and her family. “So…” I narrow my eyes at him. “You took her virginity, forced her to fuck a stranger, for information she already knows?”

  A glimmer of amusement travels over Eli’s bloated, repulsive features. A tiny smile hovers at the corners of his mouth. “Come on, Zeth. You know this game as well as I do. You know how life works. Supply and demand. Survival of the fittest. The strong preying on the weak. It’s the way of the world. The natural order. I have bills to pay. Overheads. I saw an opportunity and I took it. You can’t fault me for that. And...and what do you care, anyway?” he rushes out. “You got to fuck a beautiful woman. A virgin. I didn’t even know she was a virgin. I would have charged double if I had.” He laughs shakily, winking at me, like I ought to be thanking my lucky stars that I got the deal of the century.

  There are no words to describe what’s happening inside me as I contemplate his nervously amused expression. Great chasms of fire are renting open inside me. Night pours in, blackening my vision, clouding my mind. My ears roar, the sound of fury and deafening rage destroying my ability to hear the words that spew out of Eli’s mouth as he shrinks further and further back into his chair, away from me.

  I’m no longer myself. I am something else. I’ve courted the darker side of my own soul for years now, gone toe to toe with it, played a dangerous game of control with it as and when I’ve need to, giving it more of myself than I should in times of anger. I have never, never, not once succumbed to it entirely.

  Until now.

  I wait. The room tilts and spins as everything sharpens, my focus constricting, my senses suddenly alive. The smell pouring from the discarded Chinese food cartons dotted around the office, quietly rotting, is raw and offensive to my nose, but the reek of Eli’s fear is enough to overpower the decay.

  “What…what are you going to do?” Eli’s eyes shuttle toward the door, over my shoulder. He’s planning his escape route, wondering if he can get past me. I almost laugh out loud.

  “What do you think I should do?” I reply.

  “I think…I don’t know. I’ll refund you,” he says quickly. “Yes, I’ll give back your money.” Relief. He looks relieved, as if the promise of my returned money will clearly be enough to staunch the tide of my wrath. It’s what he understands, after all: greed. When I fail to give him the appeased look he’s oh-so-clearly expecting, a twisted realization settles on his face.

  “And what about Sloane?” I ask. “What do you propose to return to her?”

  “Look. You’re the one who fucked her,” Eli retorts. “You’re the one who…who did the deed. If you made it bad for her, then—”

  “I’ll pay for my own sins when I show up at hell’s gates, you sick fuck,” I snap. “For now, let’s just worry about you and your sins.”

  His mouth opens and closes, gulping at the air like a fish. God knows what excuses he’s about to come up with. None of them will be sufficient. None of them will be enough to justify what he has done here.

  The telephone on his desk begins to ring, shrill and loud, cutting the tense silence inside the office in two. Eli eyes me, then lurches forward, hand reaching for the receiver. I get there before him, placing my own hand on the phone. “Let it ring out. No more calls for you, my friend.”

  “I’m still running a business,” he argues. “I have to…” His words die on his lips. He knows it’s pointless now. He must see it written all over me. The phone continues to ring. And ring. And ring. Eventually the answering machine kicks in. A cool, friendly, feminine voice fills the silence.

  “This is the Eli Hofstadter Private Detective and Investigative Agency. I’m afraid no one is available to take your call right now. Please leave your name and number along with a short message after the beep, and we’ll be sure to get back to you as soon as we can.”

  I think I jump as hard as Eli when her voice echoes out of the tinny speaker. Sloane. She sounds desperate. Torn. On the verge of tears. “Eli, this is Sloane Romera. I’ve been calling you for the past twenty-four hours. I really need to speak to you. It really is…vital. I did as I was asked. I went to the hotel. Everything went…smoothly.”

  Bile rises from my stomach, burning at the back of my throat.

  Smoothly. Everything went smoothly. Eli said something truly awful a moment ago. He said, “If you made it bad for her…” I didn’t make it bad. I made it as enjoyable as I could. I was careful. I was gentle. I would never have been so demanding of her if I’d known it was her first time…

  Sloane pauses. It sounds like she’s trying to master her own emotions, to stay calm. “I really need the information you promised me, Eli. I have to go and get my sister. The police aren’t doing anything. She’s out there, all alone, and no one’s looking for her. I have to find her.”

  I glance down at the missing person’s report still sitting in my lap, and something cold and terrifying snakes through my veins. This is what he’s planning on giving her: absolutely nothing. Just more heartbreak and hurt.

  I left my gun in the car down in the parking lot. I didn’t bring a weapon with me. I knew threats alone would be enough to convince Eli to give me what I wanted. Like I told him a moment ago, though, I’m a resourceful guy. I’m still holding the letter opener I used to bust open the filing cabinet. I turn it over in my hand, testing its weight.

  Eli’s eyes go wide. “Please,” he whispers.

  Please isn’t going to cut it. Nothing will. My body is numb as I lunge across the desk, sinking the letter opener into his chest. The blade is dull; it takes an extraordinary amount of pressure to force the steel through the fat fucker’s shirt and into his body. The metal grinds against bone as it scrapes past his ribs.

  The surprise on Eli’s face isn’t something I’ll be forgetting any time soon. He coughs, flecks of blood flying from his mouth. “Fuck…you…” he hisses, looking down at the point where my hand is thrusting the letter opener into his body. “Mother…fucker…”

  “So, yeah. If you could please call me back when you get this message, Eli, I would be really grateful. I’m sure you can understand how…how worried I am. Please. Imagine if it were your sister who’d been taken… I just… I need to find her.”

  Sloane’s sadness must ring in Eli’s ears as he dies. It rings in mine as I withdraw the letter opener and I plunge it back into his body again, this time lower, into his swollen gut. Then again, in his chest, in his side, in his neck. He coughs and gasps as I stab him, his eyes wild with fear. I feel nothing. Over and over again, I drive the steel into his body, until the coughing and the gasping grinds to a halt.

  My vision narrows. I can hardly see straight. The adrenalin, awash in my blood, demands that I keep going, that I keep on forcing the weapon into Eli’s wrecked body. I suck in a shallow breath of air, staggering back from his body.

  Fuck. Holy fucking shit.

  There’s blood everywhere. It’s sprayed all over the walls, pooling on Eli’s desk. His mouth is hanging open, a black maw of shock, displaying yellowed, uneven teeth and a mouth full of filings.

  Goddamn him. And goddamn me, too. There’s no remorse as I remove the missing person’s report from Alexis Romera’s file and place it back into the filing cabinet. I’m about to walk out of the office and leave when I catch sight of something on Eli’s desk. My name. More precisely, the initials, ZM. There aren’t many people with the initials ZM. I shift around the desk, running my hand over the disorganized piles of paper, my stomach rolling uncomfortably when I realize my name appears everywhere: police reports, rap sheets, witness reports, hand written notes, hundreds of them, all documenting facts and information about me that Eli was obviousl
y collecting. No photos, though. That’s why he didn’t recognize me when he answered the door.

  This is seriously damning shit. If I leave the papers here and the cops eventually come knocking, I’m going to be their number one fucking suspect. Groaning, I cast my gaze around, until I find what I’m looking for tucked out of the way beside the ratty, threadbare sofa at the end of the room: a document box. I grab it—mercifully empty—and I quickly gather up the papers on Eli’s desk, along with the ones I dumped on the floor so I could sit down.

  Thanks to my driving gloves I won’t be leaving any fingerprints, and the likelihood I’ll have lost any rogue hair is slim to none thanks to the hood I still have raised over my head. Now that I have all the papers, there will be little to connect me to this crime. I consider closing Eli’s eyes, leaving him in a more dignified death pose, but I quickly discard the idea. Let the fucker remain staring wide-eyed into the abyss.

  No one sees me leave the office. No one sees me throw the document box onto the back seat of the Camaro and drive way. I’m unnoticed as I drive up into the mountains, the roads choked with snow, the Camaro’s wheels slipping and sliding over the treacherous, winding roads.

  I shiver like a madman as I strip out of my blood soaked clothes and burn them amongst the trees. The contents of the documents box add further fuel to the fire. I use handfuls of snow to clean the blood from my skin, and then I get dressed, changing in the set of spare clothes I carry in the Camaro’s trunk for this specific purpose.

  Hours later, a sea of perfectly blonde, perfectly tiny, beautiful women dance and writhe, kissing and licking at each other’s skin, trying to excite me, to garner my attention as I sit in an armchair at the apartment. My head is filled with images of Eli Hofstadter’s last moments, though. It’s filled with the sound of a woman’s voice, begging for the information she earned by selling her body to a stranger.

  I get up and I walk out of the apartment, ignoring the women who stroke their hands over my suit as I pass them by. None of them are good enough. None of them are Sloane Romera.

  As I make my way back to the warehouse, a riot of confusion and emotion tugs me in a thousand different directions all at once, the smell of Afresia haunting my senses—a perfume worn by a woman I have sworn never to lay eyes on again.

  ONE

  MASON

  “The loss of a child is the greatest suffering that can be visited upon a human soul. It’s the cruelest pain a person can ever know. Millie was a bright star upon this earth. She brought warmth and love into the lives of all those she met. Throughout Millie’s short life, she suffered a great deal, but she always wore a smile upon her face. She was a comet, streaking across the sky, brilliant and perfect. A wonder we are blessed to have witnessed with our own eyes before she vanished from the face of this earth. With the deepest fondness and sorrow, we remember her today as a child of laughter and playfulness. A young girl who never allowed anger into her heart, despite the trials and tribulations that were cast upon her shoulders. Millie’s brother, Mason, who cared for Millie alone for the majority of her life—”

  The church smells like freesias. I don’t know shit about flowers. I just picked out the ones that reminded me of Millie—small, fragile, pale blooms, so delicate, so small. On the cards I had printed up for the funeral, I asked people to donate money to the hospital instead of bringing wreaths and arrangements, so I don’t know where the sea of freesias that hang from the pews and the columns have come from, but they truly are beautiful. After the casket and the funeral home’s fees, I had about two hundred bucks left to buy an arrangement for the top of Millie’s tiny coffin. The florist sent a couple of extra bunches to have in vases on either side of the cedar box my little sister is lying inside of at the front of the church. That was nice of her. I know she didn’t charge me for them. As the priest continues on, his voice soft, lilting, and melancholy, filling the cavernous space inside the church, I glance around at the cascading waves of flowers hanging from the backs of the seats in front of me. The white petals are scattered like snow all over the floor. The lectern is covered in them, from the raised wooden stand to its base. The thick marble plinth that Millie’s coffin sits on is choked with white ribbons and freesias, baby’s breath and roses. There must be thousands of dollars’ worth of flowers crammed inside the church right now. Tens of thousands of dollars’ worth.

  I slide my finger down the collar of my shirt, tugging at it, trying to loosen the damn thing. I can’t fucking breathe. The priest is still talking, but his words flow over me like water flowing over a riverbed of stones.

  I am numb.

  The church is almost full to capacity. A couple of hundred people sit quietly in the pews, dabbing at tears that seem to come so easily to them but which stubbornly refuse to visit me at all. The parents of Millie’s school friends. The residents in my building. People my parents knew, people who I haven’t seen or heard from in years. So many broken people, all gathered under the roof of Saint Jude’s church to say good bye to Millie. Where the fuck were they when I was carrying my sister from her bed to the bathroom in the middle of the night, when she was soaked in her own urine and sobbing under her breath, frightened and scared, clinging onto me as though her life depended on it? They’re putting on a good show of being broken-hearted right now, like Millie mattered so much to them, but none of these fuckers ever went out of their way to try and help her or make sure she was okay.

  “The Lord has called Millie home to him. She now sits by his right hand, free from the pain and ill health she suffered during this lifetime.” The priest keeps on talking. He asked me to sit on the front pew, at the very front of the church, but fuck that. The idea of a crowd of people all lining up one by one so they can shake my hand and hug me, tell me how sorry they are for my loss, their shining tears streaking down their faces, their noses running like taps…the entire idea of it was paralyzing. I sit and I stare at the box.

  It’s so fucking tiny.

  “Mason? Mason, it’s time.”

  I look up, blinking, my brain foggy and crowded with too many thoughts, and the priest’s staring at me, his owlish brown eyes shining brightly behind the polished lenses of his horn-rimmed glasses. I get to my feet, using the back of the pew in front of me to steady myself; my legs feel wobbly, like they might give out from underneath me any second now. I have a crumpled piece of paper in my right hand. As I walk slowly down the aisle toward the front of the church, I try to flatten it out. It’s a pointless task, though. I’ve been squeezing it tightly since I sat now and now the piece of paper is ruined.

  My throat feels so fucking tight when I take the priest’s spot behind his lectern. Staring down at the destroyed, misshapen piece of paper, I stand very still and consider my options for a moment. I’ve never had to do anything this hard. Burying my parents was tough, but it didn’t feel like this. Millie was my reason for surviving every day. Making sure she was warm and well fed, that she had clean clothes on her back, that her hair was brushed and she was generally healthy were the only things I cared about on a daily basis. Now that she’s gone…

  “I used to—” My voice breaks. The microphone on the lectern hums with feedback. Fuck. I take a deep breath, trying to calm myself before I talk again.

  …six, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven….

  “I used to give my parents shit for making me look after Millie when they wanted to go out,” I say. My eyes are on my hands, which are laid flat against the lectern, fingers splayed wide, as if I’m trying to hold myself upright with the stand. “I was a young kid. I wanted to go hang with my friends. I’d just learned to drive, so I wanted to burn around Seattle with my boys, impressing girls from school. I liked to drink and smoke. Other…worse things.” I give the priest a sideways glance, but he doesn’t look shocked in the slightest. Clearing my throat, I risk raising my eyes to look into the faces of all the people sitting in somber lines before me. “I resented the fact that they’d had a kid so long after they’d had me. She wa
s annoying. She needed constant attention. She was always stuck to me like glue. Would never leave me alone. She would look at me with this…just…complete adoration. It freaked me out.

  “And then, one day, my parents were out and she got sick. I was trying to play Xbox and she kept telling me her head felt funny, but I ignored her. Not long after that, she was lying on the ground and she was shaking. Her back was bent, her hands balled up, her knuckles white. Her teeth were clenched together, her eyes jittering from side-to-side, her lips going blue. I didn’t know what the hell I was supposed to do, so I scooped her up and I put her in my car, and I drove her to the hospital. Eighteen hours later, after CAT scans we didn’t have insurance to cover and a thousand other tests that freaked Millie out, they came back and told me the news. They told me the news because my parents still hadn’t come home and neither of them were answering their cell phones, so I was the next best thing. They said epilepsy. Not just epilepsy, though. Something complicated and life-threatening that I didn’t understand. They gave me comped meds, a bunch of paperwork, and let me take Millie home. I remember being so fucking relieved…” I laugh, my voice broken again, high and choked with emotion. “I remember thinking, “thank fuck that’s over. I’ll take her home and Mom and Dad can take the reins from here. I can go out and party, get high and forget this shitty night ever happened.”

  “So I go home, but they’re not there. They don’t come home for three days, and then when they did show up and I told them what happened, they brushed it off like it was nothing. Millie was okay by then. She seemed normal, so the frightening information on the sheets and sheets of paper that I handed to them seemed totally unnecessary. Even when they did see Millie have seizure, they didn’t take it seriously. Six months later, both of them were dead, and then it was just me and her.