by Lake, Keri
Blondie ripped through the bar door, flanked by two burly men, and pointed at us as we passed. For good measure, I lifted the blade higher, sneering at the whimper that escaped Jalen.
It pained me to think that, if I’d only had the training, the conditioning, the sense of calm I’d come to possess— so many things I could’ve done with that. I stuffed the thought aside—plenty of time to ruin myself later. For then, it was a celebration—before moving on to bigger and better kills.
“Who are you?” He kept stealing glances as I half-heartedly propped the knife to his nuts.
“In time,” was all I said, watching the city pass through the window.
“Y-y-you want money? Drugs? I-I-I got connections. Whatever you need.”
“Your connections want to kill you as much as I do, Jalen.” I tipped my head back and, smirking, directed my attention back his way. “Thought I’d put your dick in a jar to set on my mantle.”
There was a quiver in his laugh, and out of the corner of my eye, I saw his head whip between me and the road. “You’re a funny guy, eh? Jokester.”
“No. Not a jokester.”
Within minutes, we reached the dock, where I’d already taken care of the lock on the fence. He pulled in where I directed him, alongside the abandoned building. Much as the city had turned its shit around, Detroit still boasted a good share of abandonment.
“Park here.” I pointed to a spot where grass had grown up through the cracks in the pavement, beside my Mustang. I’d walked from the dock to the bar, planning to switch out his sore thumb of a ride that would have assholes chasing us through the streets. “Get out. And don’t bother to run.”
He slid out of the driver’s seat and yanked his loosened pants up as he hobbled along toward the fence in a pathetic break for it—exactly as I’d anticipated he would.
Idiot. Gun cocked, I shot him in the ankle, blowing bits of bone onto the pavement.
He collapsed, clutching his leg. “Fuck! Awww, fuck!”
“I told you.” I shook my head as I approached him. “No running.”
Gripping his collar, I dragged him back across the parking lot, against the kicking of his good foot and his screaming. No one could hear him. Even if they could, no one would care.
I opened the passenger door on my Mustang and tossed him into the seat, hating the idea that I’d have blood to clean later. After rounding the vehicle, I plopped in the driver’s seat and drove the Mustang out of the parking lot.
His sobbing beside me, trembling as he clutched his mangled ankle, had me about two seconds from knocking the bastard out. “You wouldn’t happen to be diabetic, would you? That wound looks like it’s gonna be a nasty one.”
“Fuck … you.” I couldn’t help but smile at the shaky threat in his voice. More sobbing, and goddamn if my hands didn’t instinctively ball into fists. “What … did I do … to you?”
I glanced across to see him hunched over his legs, hand supporting his head. “Funny you should ask.”
He lifted his gaze to mine, and his brows pinched. “What?” He scanned the interior. “Do I know you, man?”
“I wouldn’t say you know me. I wouldn’t say any of you fucks knew me. Or my wife. Or my son.” Instinctively, my lip curled at the mention of them. “But it’s better that way, isn’t it? You can kill indiscriminately without care or conscience.” I rested my elbow on the back of the seat, casually, as if we were having a normal conversation that wouldn’t ultimately end in death. “Nasty thing, a conscience, isn’t it? Keeps us aware of what’s right and wrong.” I patted his back, and he flinched. “Good thing I no longer have one.”
He rocked in the seat beside me, rubbing his skull back and forth, back and forth, while Detroit’s cityscape passed beside him in a blur. Didn’t take long for him to contemplate his next predictable move. He grappled for the door handle, but it broke off in his hands. He whimpered when it tumbled out of his opened palm.
“Broken on the inside.” I sighed. “I know the feeling.”
He screamed. Like a bitch.
In what must’ve been a moment of insanity, he leapt across the console, fumbling at the holster hugging my hunting blade.
I gripped his wrist and elbowed him square in his cheekbone, knocking his nose along the way.
He fell backward into his seat. “You bwoke my fuckin’ nose!”
“My apologies, if I’ve given you the impression that I don’t plan to hurt you.”
Within a couple of minutes, we arrived at the metal stamping factory. Taking my time, I dragged my finger across the hood of the car as I rounded the vehicle and opened the passenger door. “I have a surprise for you.” Squeezing his nape, I yanked him from the seat, and he fell in a heap on the ground. Fuck if I was gonna carry him. Instead, I cocked the hammer back with a click and pointed the gun at his good ankle, smirking when he squirmed like a worm caught on a hook.
“C’mon, man! C’mon!”
“Get up. Or I’ll make you crawl with two blown out ankles.”
Wheezes of panic ended on a long sob, but he dropped forward and pushed, propping himself on his good foot. Once upright, he pogo’d in front of me, and I gripped his arm, guided him over the rubble with my gun pressed into his skull. With some effort, he climbed over the charred brick and debris piled outside of a back entrance, while I easily stepped behind him.
I’d already taken the liberty of setting up a chair beside the huge hydraulic press in the back of the factory, and with a nudge, he collapsed onto it. His bloodied hands trembled when I chained them behind his back, and he bucked as I wrestled secure a blindfold over his eyes.
“How does that bullet feel?” I knelt down and examined the hole in his tennis shoe, slapped his shin. I laughed when he curled his foot up under the chair.
“Don’t touch it!”
“Hurts, doesn’t it?” I pushed to a stand. “Man, wait till you see what one feels like lodged inside your skull.”
His cheeks lifted, as if he cringed behind the blindfold. “Look, whatever … whatever I did …”
“If you think you’re going to win me over with your useless, artificial apologies, you’re wrong.” I shrugged. “You’re lucky. We’re just here to … mutilate you mercilessly until you die. No talking.”
He let out a long and drawn out scream that echoed into the surroundings, reverberating off of the cement walls.
Through a black haze, I hear Lena screaming, but I can’t see her. I don’t know if I’m passed out, blindfolded, or on the verge of death, with a ticket to hell where my suffering will be hearing her pain for eternity.
“God, please no!”
The crackle is followed by the smell of burning flesh.
Wake up, wake up! I can’t move my limbs. Like being buried alive. Lena! Lena!
“Nick! Please!” She screams for me, and it’s in those moments that shards of agony rake across my heart, threatening to pull me into madness.
“He can’t hear you.” A male’s voice taunts. “Scream, little piggy, scream!”
Knuckles to my temples, I paced in front of Jalen, coming to a stop when the screaming finally ended. Flames of fury rocketed through my body, leaving a wake of adrenaline, a need for violence and pain. Jalen’s pain.
“Scream, little piggy. Scream.” I drove my fists into his face, cracking my knuckles against his cheekbone with a spray of blood, sending his head kicking to the side. Another hit snapped teeth from his mouth. Picking one up from the floor, I turned the yellowing tooth in my hand and flicked it at his face.
His muscles twitched with my every step.
“Are you scared?” I asked.
“Fuck … you.”
Cartilage cracked beneath the fist I drove into his nose. “Are you scared?”
“Yes!” He spat blood toward my boot. “You sick fuck!” The nasally words brought a smile to my face.
I yanked his blindfold away from his eyes and tugged my mask up, revealing my face.
His gaze popped. Alway
s amusing, that moment when realization finally kicked in. Sometimes, I wished I could’ve recorded the shit to play over and over for laughs.
“Y-y-you. I shot … we killed … and burned the house.”
Against my better judgment and, likely, the advisement of my therapist, I asked, “Do you remember what you did to her?”
He sank into the chair and frantically shook his head, as if he was on the verge of sobbing. “I’m sorry, man. I’m … sorry.”
“I didn’t ask you what you’re feeling now. Frankly, I couldn’t give a flying fuck how sorry you are. I asked if you remember what you did to her.”
Rolling his head against his shoulders, he whimpered. “It … wasn’t what you … think. I didn’t do … anything. She fuckin’ taunted us, man. She was … a stripper, right? Took her robe … off. Offered to suck—”
Rage erupted in my veins like flaming bullets of fury, and I hammered his face, over and over, until his eye swelled with my punches.
Stop. Stop. I could hear Alec’s words as if he stood there beside me, and I had to coax myself to quit hitting the sorry bastard.
He’s supposed to die slow. Mercilessly. In truth, I already knew what he’d done. I knew that Jalen raped her, not only with his dick, but with the barrel of his gun. I knew they burned her with cigars. Cut her. Beat her. Until, at last, they finally shot her. All while I lay bleeding, half-conscious, right there in the fucking room.
Those images alone had landed me in the hospital for overdosing. Had I not been a coward, I’d have injected my own veins with sulphuric acid to burn the memory right out of me from the inside. Except, that’d leave the asshole in front of me running free.
I still had a job to do.
Rocking my head side to side, I cracked my neck, and took deep breaths.
“I’m … I’m sorry. For what I did.” His words arrived on a snort, as though the blood had backed up into his throat.
“I’m not your fucking priest. Everyone’s sorry just before they die. How many times did she ask you for mercy? How many times did she apologize?”
His lip quivered. “I’m sorry, man.”
Curls of anger tore through my body like a hurricane, and I gripped his face with a snarl and removed my blade. With a wave of adrenaline surging through my veins, I sliced his ear away, my muscles tight as he jerked and fought my grasp. I wished I could’ve said that the kills moved me somehow. That the tortures touched some part of my soul—however dark it may be. They didn’t. I’d disconnected myself, watching the kills through the eyes of an impassive assassin. There was nothing but a hollow inside of me, and the sooner he was dead, the quicker I could fill that hollow with the alcohol I so desperately needed.
How quickly a man could be reduced to an animal. A psychopath, disconnecting all sense of morals.
With some wrangling, his ear came loose, and I held it up like a trophy, while his guttural cries reverberated throughout the building. “Perhaps you’re not hearing me, Jalen. I don’t give a fuck how sorry you are.”
Coughing and choking broke his screams, and I tossed his bloody ear in his face. Three years ago, I’d have been appalled by such a crime. Sickened.
Right then, I felt nothing. Except raw.
I couldn’t look at the guy without seeing my wife—the tears streaming down her face. Begging them to stop. The helplessness knotted my stomach, and my hands balled into fists at my sides.
I took deep breaths. Tamp it down. His death was supposed to be slow and merciless, like the many hours he’d tortured her.
Can’t. I’d clamped my teeth so hard it felt as if they’d crumble in my mouth.
I unchained then lifted his hands, keeping the cuffs attached to his wrists, and strung his arms across the flat surface, as I rounded the hydraulic press to the side opposite of where he sat. “Ever watch how bullets are made?”
My question was met by the increasing intensity of his whimpers.
“I always thought they melted the lead to mold a bullet." A good tug on the chain killed his pathetic mewling. "They don’t! A heavy billet of lead is loaded into a press, and using a shit ton of pressure, they form it by compressing the metal together.” I slapped my hands together, and as the chains rattled, he flinched, before his lips quivered then soured with his sobbing. “Interesting shit.”
Returning to his side, I knelt to the floor. “So, you’re an arms dealer, huh? Ever wonder what they’d call you if you didn’t have arms?” At the reverberating pitch of his scream, I smiled, reveling in his obvious fear—the same horrific sound that had torn from my chest just moments before the bullet hit my wife and son. “The fucking irony, right? You might want to go by arms broker after this.” My laughter bounced off the walls.
“Please don’t … do this, man. Whatever you want … I’ll give you whatever you want.”
“The night you broke into my house, you had a choice. Of right and wrong.” I gripped the lever of the press. “You chose wrong.”
Closing my eyes summoned the blackness from the dark shadows of my mind. His screams jarred my muscles to flip the switch.
27
Chief Cox
“So, who called on this one?” Cox circled the man strapped to a chair with his forehead pressed against the hydraulic machine. Like the first two crime scenes, Eye for an Eye had been painted near the victim, in this case, across the machine above him.
“First shift. One of the factory workers found him.” Burke knelt beside him, as the coroner tipped the man’s head back. “Looks like he was beaten pretty bad. His face is swelled up like a balloon. Ear’s been cut clean off.”
“He has swelling all throughout,” the coroner said as he continued his exam. “Compartment syndrome. Often the case in crushing injuries.”
Burke peered up at the bullet wound just above where the guy’s ear used to be. “Gunshot to the head. What’d you say, that’s a twenty-two, Chief?”
“Probably.” Cox turned to the manager and owner of the building, both keeping their distance outside of the investigation circle. “Can we flip this on? We want to lift this press. See what we got under here.”
“Yeah, there’s a switch. On the side of it.”
“You ready?” Cox directed the question to the coroner, still manipulating the man’s face with gloved hands.
“Yes.”
With that, Cox signaled for the manager to fire up the machine, and a burst of air preceded the lift of the press.
“Ah, fuck! Fuck!” Burke spun around, hand covering his mouth, as the gore beneath was revealed. “Who the fuck?”
“You throw up on my crime scene, and I’ll have you filling out parking tickets until you fucking retire,” Cox barked.
“Crushing injury to both arms and hands.” The coroner continued with his assessment, dictating as he examined the victim. “Bones appear to be completely broken, comminuted fracture, I’d say no more than one inch fragments. Skin is split, exposing the fascia beneath. Joint capsules and ligaments appear to have ruptured, dislocating the joint altogether.”
Blood coated the surface of the press, over the edges and onto the floor, but trapped in the crushed hand, beneath a sickly twisted, thick finger, Cox eyed a white scrap. “Gimme the tweezers, Burke.” After donning a pair of gloves, he lifted the scrap like a game of Operation.
Unfolding it revealed the number three.
28
Aubree
Shouts yanked me from dreams, and I shot upright, head whipping back and forth, my breaths rapid and muscles trembling. I took in the stillness of my room, the darkness that seemed undisturbed, aside from the flutter of drapes dancing in the breeze created by my cracked window.
Just a dream.
Laying back against the pillow, I settled into the warmth of my blanket —until another outcry, tortured and pained, echoed beyond my door.
Nick.
I shot out of bed and padded across the room, toward the door, placing my ear against the wooden panel.
“Lena! Le
na! No! Fucking bastards! No! We’ll kill you! We’ll kill you all!”
We?
I opened the door to find Blue with his head perked, as if to say, you hear what’s going on? His whine told me he worried for his master, and he didn’t so much as snarl when I tiptoed past him to Nick’s opened bedroom door.
Clutching his doorframe, I watched the way his thrashing body had the bed pounding into the wall. The sheets lay in a white tangle across him. He arched his back, creating a perfect arc of agony, muscles so tight they looked as if they’d snap beneath his skin. His kicks and grunts clutched my heart, as I observed his sufferance in dreams.
The yearning to go to him, soothe him, had me pushing against the door, widening the crack.
No. Don’t do it.
“Don’t do this! Jay!” His bellow bounced off the walls and halted my steps.
Who were those names he called out in his sleep? Why did he sound as if he’d been immersed in something real, truly enduring some kind of pain and torment?
A glisten of sweat coated his skin, discernible in the moon’s light. His brows creased to a frown heavy with pain, and his body trembled, along with my own.
“Nick,” I murmured. The draw to lie beside him, to calm him, pulled me further into the room, as instinct beckoned me to go to him and quiet his agony.
He planked on the bed as his curses filled the air.
Backing away toward the door, I slipped out of the room the moment his eyes flipped open. My heart slammed into my ribs, and I gasped at the near miss.
From the hallway, I peeked through the crack, watching him jolt upright, to the edge of the bed, where he held his head, rocking back and forth. His rapid breaths were broken by whimpers, and I caught a glint of something he snatched off the nightstand beside him.
His arm shook as he held it outright and sliced his skin with a long blade.
