F*ckboy Psychos

by Stunich, C. M.

  Alexei, focus, I remind myself, and, rather than use the code to get in the back door, I use my key. I don’t want any of my father’s guests to know that I’m here. Most especially, I don’t want them to know that I’m in the house or that I plan on eavesdropping on their conversation.

  I notice several things right away.

  First off, there are no staff members here. None at all. Someone—maybe my father, maybe not—must’ve dismissed them. The lights down here are off, leaving the first floor cloaked in darkness. I also notice as I pass the front door that it’s partially open. Cigarette smoke wafts in as I pause in the foyer.

  There was nobody out there when I passed by in the car, but I’m starting to wonder if that wasn’t sheer, dumb luck. When I cautiously move forward and peer past the sheer curtains bordering the front windows, I see two men in suits outside.

  Hmm.

  I don’t like that, not at all.

  A cold chill creeps down my spine as I tap the middle finger and thumb of my right hand together, nervously toying with the poisoned thimble. I’d best be careful not to stab myself with it—the batrachotoxin would kill me within ten minutes.

  I move silently through the downstairs, past the main staircase and into a separate hallway, around the corner, and then up the narrow ‘servants’ staircase at the back of the house. It’s hidden behind a bookshelf door so as not to be unsightly, and therefore not something one would notice if they didn’t think to look for it.

  I make sure that it’s closed behind me before easing my way up the steps. I crack the second bookcase door at the top of the stairs and peer out into a well-lit hallway. Already, I can hear my father’s booming voice, speaking in English rather than Russian.

  After several minutes of listening and watching, I slip out and close that door as quietly and carefully as I can. The voices seem to be coming from Papa’s office which gives me few options for spying on him and whoever it is that’s paying us a visit this late at night.

  There’s the panic room at the end of the hall, but I’m concerned that whoever this is might’ve covered up the security cameras, so even though it’s possible that I could view the office from the safety of that room, I decide against it.

  Instead, I use one of the guest rooms along that same hall, leaving the lights off as I head for the window. I lift it up and crawl onto the roof, shivering at the idea of dirtying my custom-made suit on the filthy roof tiles.

  As particular as I am, I’m also not entirely impractical.

  Whatever’s going on tonight, it might be dangerous.

  I can’t allow my phobias to shift my good judgment.

  Crouched low, and with my poisoned thimble held carefully away from me, I make my way over to the wall between the guest room and the office, putting my back to it and closing my eyes.

  When we first moved in here a few months ago, I stuck a very small piece of metal into the track of the window. It keeps it from closing fully, but it looks as if it’s closed, and that’s what matters.

  While it’s not easy to hear what’s being said in the room, it’s possible. I open my eyes and take my phone out, ensuring first that it’s still set to silent and that the brightness is fully turned down, and then I turn the camera on. I make sure it’s not only facing me but also recording, and then I tilt it to the right so that I can see into the room without exposing myself.

  “You haven’t bid on a single contract in the last several weeks, why is that?” a man asks, and I recognize him almost immediately. His name is Ernest Bolin, the Springfield Chief of Police. He’s here with several other men, all of them dressed in suits, none of them recognizable.

  Hired guns. Goons. Lackeys.

  I grit my teeth as my father tries to stand up from his desk and then is abruptly pushed back into a seated position, one of the goon’s meaty hands on his shoulders. He’s clearly still drunk but sobering up quickly.

  What is the police chief doing here in the middle of the night? And why would he give any fucks about whether my father bids on development contracts? What business is it of his?

  The chief’s reason for being here in the middle of the night?

  As I said, nefarious.

  So fucking nefarious.

  “My son,” Papa starts, looking between the men pleadingly. “He wants me to step back, downsize my business, start spending more time together. I’ve been trying to rein things in.”

  I grit my teeth.

  “You expect me to believe that?” Ernest asks, putting his hands on the front of my father’s desk. “That you want to spend time with your son? Over running a company with assets totaling in the billions? That seems absurd, Pavel.”

  “I care about my son, Ernest,” my father repeats quietly, staring down at his desk. “He’s more important to me than my business.”

  Ernest laughs and then reaches a hand down to his belt, removing a Glock from its holster and holding it up to my father’s forehead. Pavel lifts his head up slowly, eyes wide with surprise.

  “What are you doing?” he asks, blinking several times, as if he can’t quite believe what he’s seeing. Generally, my father keeps a bodyguard or two around, but not at the house usually. If he does, they’re generally posted outside, so where are they?

  I’m sweating now, and I’m too upset to be disturbed by the idea of it, my hand trembling slightly as I keep the phone lifted up and tilted toward the window.

  “I’ll give you two choices here, Pavel. Because somebody’s dying here tonight. You can call your son home and tell me all about what it is that you’re up to on the side. Or”—the police chief presses the barrel of the Glock against my father’s head as he swallows hard, eyes darting around the room frantically as if searching for help that won’t come—“I can shoot you now. How about it?”

  I debate on how I can best help my papa. Could I call someone? But who? The police chief himself is standing right there with a gun to my father’s forehead. I don’t trust either Jonas Kelly or Chet Archer whatsoever. Who does that leave?

  Could I grab one of our guns from the other room and make it back here in time? I could fire on several of the men if I shoved this window open and started firing, if I took them by surprise.

  “I would never give up my son,” Pavel says softly, and Ernest smiles.

  “I didn’t think so,” he replies easily, and then he pulls the trigger.

  Just like that.

  That quickly.

  That unceremoniously.

  My eyes go wide as I watch the horror unfolding on the darkened screen of my phone, of the gun firing, of the bullet hitting my father, the way his head snaps back, the pink and red of blood and brain misting the wall behind him. He slumps forward, twitching violently for several seconds, and then goes still.

  I can hardly breathe. I’m shaking so much now that the phone threatens to fall from my hand.

  “Sir,” a man says, knocking briefly on the door before opening it. “We just noticed that the boy’s car is parked around back, but he doesn’t seem to be in the guesthouse.”

  “Find him.” Ernest lowers his weapon as the men scatter, and my heart begins to beat so rapidly that I can hardly think straight.

  You need to get off of this property—now.

  I turn off the recording and slip my phone into my pocket, noting just before I do that I have no signal and no Wi-Fi. So, just like Scarlett Force and her merry band of thieves, they’re using a signal jammer. But a much better one than Scarlett had.

  I crawl on my belly across the roof, heading for the covered porch on the far end of the house. If I can get there and hop onto it, I can find a way down to the ground. Next step is, I need to grab one of the cars, whatever is most easily accessible, and in particular, one that can’t be hacked or traced.

  The Miura, I think to myself. I’ve used it recently which means it’s parked near the front of the garage.

  I just have to make it there first.

  It takes a while to get to the covered
porch, but once I do, I lower myself down by grabbing the edge of the roof and letting the muscles in my arms slow my descent. Once I’m hanging just a few feet above the porch roof, I let go and land in a crouch.

  I’ve been taking martial arts lessons of all varieties and nationalities since I was a child. I’m in good enough physical shape to take on tasks that a normal person would balk at, including hopping down to the deck with the same method.

  My fingers clench the edge of the roof, and I lower myself down like I’m in the middle of a pull-up. My feet hit the Trex decking with a small thump, and I freeze, eyes searching the darkness for the police chief’s goons.

  When nobody steps forward to stop me, I turn and head into the trees, intending on circling around behind the guesthouse to the garage. I’ve not made it fifteen feet when someone tackles me.

  My first instinct is to stab the poisoned needle of my thimble into the side of the man’s neck as we roll across the forest floor. He grunts, but it’s a relatively small amount of pain. I mean, it is right now. Within ten minutes, he’ll be dead.

  I don’t wait for that, throwing a hard punch at his throat à la Scarlett Force. It serves two purposes: it keeps him relatively quiet and keeps his blood from touching me.

  On the outside, I’m calm. On the inside, I’m screaming. This man is touching me all over, sweating on me, and his breath … it smells stale and dirty, and I find myself gagging even as I manage to get the upper hand, ending our roll with me on top.

  My hands find his throat, squeezing hard as he scrambles to free himself. Seeing as he doesn’t execute a single proper move to get me off of him or stop the chokehold I have on his neck, I determine that he’s just cheap muscle.

  Damn.

  I wasted my thimble’s poison on a fool such as this?

  He starts choking and thrashing, and I release him, standing up and replacing the cap on the thimble. I’m shuddering and shivering with disgust even as the man on the ground begins to twitch and seize.

  The batrachotoxin—a substance obtained from golden poison frogs in South America—is deadly and has no known cure or antidote. It does its job as I take off through the woods, desperately pushing back at the thoughts screaming in the back of my head.

  Dirty, filthy, he touched you all over; you’re contaminated; his sweat is on you; it’s sick; you’re polluted, tainted, befouled.

  I ignore those thoughts by, oddly enough, remembering Scarlett Force and the soft brush of her lips. Just that minute amount of touch set me on fire. Certainly I was disturbed by the very idea of another person’s mouth making contact with mine, but it awoke a need inside of me that I wasn’t even certain that I would ever have.

  The need for touch.

  Thoughts of Scarlett Force work their magic, giving me enough strength to get around the back of the guesthouse and into the garage. I snatch the keys for the Miura from the wall and turn around only to find another man entering the building from the side door.

  Fuck. I shove the keys into my pocket, wrenching my needles out. I place a fresh one in the cork beneath the sharp thimble nail, and duck down between the cars to avoid being shot.

  Weaving between the vehicles, I find the man before he can find me, lunging forward and shoving the needle into his thigh until it’s fully buried in his muscle. He lets out a howl of pain as I rise to my feet, swinging my hand into his throat to cut off the sound. He stumbles back into the black Lamborghini, trying to raise his weapon up so that he can take a shot at me.

  I grab his arm, twisting it sharply until I feel a satisfying crack, and the gun clatters to the ground. I kick it away, sending it spinning across the cement floor beneath another of the dozen vehicles in the garage.

  The next thing I do is throw the man forward so that he stumbles and falls hard into the side of the Lambo, and then I wrap my arm around him to put him in a chokehold, cutting off his air and keeping him as quiet as I can. Hopefully, his initial scream of pain hasn’t called any of the other goons over to us.

  He bucks around, trying to throw me off, but once again, he’s all meat and muscle with poor training. When he starts to stumble and then sags to the floor, I let him go, taking the knife from the sheath inside my jacket and sliding it across his throat from behind.

  Even though I hate, hate, hate blood, I’m not leaving one of the men who killed my father alive. Not a chance. Red sprays out as the man chokes and, already deprived of oxygen from the chokehold, falls forward, oozing crimson across the garage floor.

  I ignore him—him and my almost overwhelming disgust—and then I unlock the door to the Miura, hit the button for the garage door, and take off with a squeal of tires. Keeping quiet right now is pointless; the garage door is loud enough.

  Several of the remaining men scramble for their own vehicles, intending on chasing me down, but while I might’ve lost to Scarlett Force, I certainly won’t have any trouble outdriving these morons.

  I hit the gas, rocketing down the driveway, the slight bump near the end of the road causing me to catch air before I crash back down on the street. I yank the wheel to the side, squealing and sliding across the pavement before I gun it and take off down McKenzie View Drive in the direction of Springfield’s sister city, Eugene.

  I easily outpace my father’s murderers, slowing down only when I’ve blended into city traffic. The first thing I do is find a safe place to pull over, breathing hard and staring down at the bright red on my white gloves. I strip them off and toss them to the floor on the passenger side of the car, digging my fingers into my hair and fighting back a wave of grief and panic.

  I’m dirty. I’m so dirty.

  And my papa is dead. My papa. Papa.

  “Oh Papa,” I murmur, yanking at my hair with both hands. “Papa.”

  I feel so completely and utterly lost and alone; my mind begins to spiral down into despair. Where do I go? What do I do? I pull my phone from my pocket, staring at the video I just took. I could post this all over the internet, couldn’t I?

  Would that help? Would that get justice for my father? Maybe.

  Or maybe I’d just draw the attention of whoever else was behind this my way. Because there’s no way in hell that the chief of police is acting alone. Oh no, I’d bet my life on Chet Archer and Jonas Kelly being involved in this.

  Family and friends are out of the question until I deal with this. If I go to them now, I’ll be bringing death to their doorstep. Conversely, Papa’s side of the family has connections to the mob. Could they be involved in this, too? I can’t be sure.

  So.

  Where can I go?

  I scroll through my contacts, pausing on one name in particular.

  Scarlett Force.

  Scarlett Force, who wants to kill Ash Kelly. Scarlett Force who looks at that glittering sea of genteel socialites like she’d set fire to them all if she could. Scarlett Force, who robs rich men at gunpoint and has a gang of girls who obey her every command.

  I swallow hard, pushing my pride and disgust and despair down, and then I make the call.

  “Alexei?” she queries in surprise. I can hear the sound of other people laughing, the murmur of a television. “What’s up?”

  “I need your help,” I whisper, my voice cracked and thick with strain.

  There’s a pause there, as if she’s carefully considering my words.

  “Something happen tonight, Alexei Grove?” she inquires, her own voice darkening at the distraught, broken quality in mine.

  “Can you meet me tomorrow?” I ask, trying to school my voice into something at least resembling normal. In reality, I want to scream. I want to dip my body in bleach. I want to cry.

  Papa. Papa, no. Oh, Papa.

  I close my eyes against the pain, desperate to keep Scarlett Force from hearing the deep vulnerability inside of me. I loved my papa more than anyone or anything in this world; I can’t even begin to fathom the hole his loss is going to leave inside my heart.

  “Um, sure,” she offers up, her voice th
ick with suspicion. “Where at?”

  “The Oak Park Country Club,” I say, my breathing coming in rapid pants. If this is a conspiracy, I’ll see it there in the faces of those highborn snakes. But they won’t be able to touch me, not in public like that. It’s a gamble, but one that I have to take. “Ten o’clock.”

  “Ten?” she replies with a small laugh. “How about five? I got a lot of shit to get done tomorrow.”

  Fuck.

  I frown, trying to figure out if I’m making the right decision or not. I need a night to think about this anyway.

  “Fine. Five. I’ll see you there for dinner; it’s on me.” I hang up before I can second-guess myself, and then put my forehead to the steering wheel as the pain overwhelms me. “Papa,” I groan, tears running down my face that I find grotesque. Not as disgusting as the blood on the front of my suit, but filthy, nonetheless.

  I need to find somewhere to wash up, somewhere to hide for the time being.

  In the few months since I came to town, I’ve been learning everything I can about the locals. Intel, if you will. I know all about Prescott High and Scarlett Force, the Crimson Crew … and the neighborhood’s resident fixer.

  I head over to the track, hoping beyond all hope that I haven’t gotten here too late to catch him.

  Much as I hate the mud, much as I feel like my skin is rotting and falling off of my bones, I make myself get out.

  “Do you know where I can find Bohnes?” I ask one of the guys, my suit jacket abandoned in the car, the majority of the blood scrubbed clean with antiseptic wipes. I’m shaking, halfway to having a mental breakdown, but somehow keeping myself together.

  Because I can’t let my papa’s death be in vain.

  I will punish every person involved in his execution—whether they were present or not.

  The guy directs me over to a man with shock-white hair, smoking a cigarette on the hood of what looks to be a ‘69 Chevelle.

  “Excuse me,” I ask, fighting back wave after wave of revulsion as the man turns his pale face over to me, his eyes the color of arctic glaciers, his expression similarly warm. “Are you Kellin Bohnes?”