Diary of a Teenage Serial Killer

by Jem Fox

  “Thanks.” Some guys bring you flowers or candy, but there’s nothing like a boy who will cover up your felony.

  He reached out and tentatively touched my arm, then pulled his hand back. “It wasn’t your fault he died. It was the other guy’s fault.”

  I stabbed him. But I would have bandaged him up. So I acknowledged the truth of it. But Flunky’s name is written on my account. He died because Glenn wouldn’t let us tape up his wound, sure, but he also died because I stabbed him. Hard to say, but I believe it goes on my reckoning. Still, I nodded. I let Lucas say it wasn’t my fault.

  The cops were suspicious, of course. They poked into Lucas’s life looking for drugs or some other kind of trouble. But he came up clean. The professor dad and the attorney mom thanked God to have their son again, and the authorities couldn’t find a single connection between him and the Bad Men. So they wrote it off as an unresolved question, a permanent mystery. Maybe it was meant to be a kidnapping. Maybe it was a case of mistaken identity. No one would ever know.

  They would never know, because everyone at the building was dead.

  Everyone except the geek.

  I have no techno-skills. There may have been some way to trace him through all that computer equipment in his office. But I wasn’t looking to crack his password; I was looking to set his world on fire.

  I knew he probably walked out with everything on a laptop. He could just go somewhere else and start over. Find new thugs. Rent a new office. The economy’s so bad, there are plenty of places to start up a new business in some rundown, out-of-the-way corner.

  But he had to be looking over his shoulder. He had to be wondering.

  It was more than a month later when he came for me.

  I rode the bus over to the prof’s house and Lucas was waiting for me. He’d already walked Horatio. We threw a bag of popcorn into the microwave and collapsed on the couch. I pulled my homework out of my backpack.

  Horatio growled low in his throat and I looked up and there he was. It’s seriously the worst house for letting in creeps. We may as well leave the door wide open.

  The microwave pinged and there he was, standing in the doorway with a gun.

  I muted the TV and set the clicker down on the cushion between us, and I saw the dark spot spread across the leg of Lucas’s jeans. He pissed himself out of fear. There was no shame in it. Most men waver when they see their own mortality. Especially when they’ve recently slipped away from it and then it shows back up looking extra-determined.

  The geek didn’t look good. Slimy white things that belong in their shell never look good when they’re dragged into the daylight.

  “You fucking bitch. You ruined everything.”

  “Me? I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  I could hear Lucas’s teeth chattering. The geek edged over in front of us.

  “You think I don’t know it was you?” His voice ramped up till he was shouting. “Who the fuck do you work for?”

  I was slumped back on that soft couch. That couch is ten times more comfortable than my bed. “I work at the cafeteria.”

  Horatio stood up from the carpet real slow. His hackles were raised and his hair was on end. He was making a sound from way down deep in his throat. I thought about that first time when he saw Flunky, when he was all happy we had a visitor. He’d learned better.

  The geek swung his arm to point the gun at the dog. “Put that fucking dog away!”

  I raised my hand up. “No problem. Calm down. He’s a retriever, not a pit bull.” I stood up and he whipped the gun back on me. “Wait! Have the kid do it.”

  Lucas was in shock. He could no more put the dog away than he could get up and do a cartwheel. I looked down at him. “He’s not feeling too good right now. I’ll do it.” I grabbed Horatio’s collar. Somehow my doing that revved him up even more and he lunged toward the geek and started barking in that crazed way he’d done I put him in the pantry before. I dragged him backward toward the kitchen, but he had dug down for some superdog strength. He really wanted to kill the geek.

  Didn’t we all.

  It took everything I had to shove Horatio in the pantry and shut the door on him. Right before I let go of his collar I looked at the cans of soup lined up on the shelves and thought — Maybe?

  Nah.

  When I came back in the den, the geek was standing right in front of Lucas with the gun pointed directly at his forehead. Lucas’s eyes were closed.

  Good thing I didn’t bring the can.

  “Show me your hands — up high!”

  I held them limply in the air. “Calm down.”

  “I’m not going to fucking calm down, you fucking bitch! Get over here!”

  I stayed where I was. “What do you want, anyway? Did you come over here to kill us or what?”

  The room was starting to smell of urine. The geek grimaced and took a step back from Lucas, picking his way around to the other side of the coffee table. A cartoon played silently behind his head on the prof’s big-screen TV.

  “I’m here for the money.” His voice was like metal grating on metal.

  What money? I opened my mouth then shut it again. Telling him I didn’t have his money seemed like a bad idea.

  “Yeah. Well, I don’t have it here.”

  “No fucking duh. Where is it? Who has it?”

  I glanced up at the ceiling. Evidently when you lie you look up and to the left and when you remember, you look up and to the right. Or maybe it’s the opposite — I can never remember. In case the geek knew, I looked both ways. But I looked left first, so that must be where you look when you lie.

  “Cuchillo.”

  “Who the fuck is that?”

  I shrugged. “He’s the guy who paid me to burn your operation.”

  The geek had a full-on fit, screaming curse words and flinging his arms around. I just stood there, eyebrows raised, waiting for him to come back to earth.

  “Listen to me, you fucking bitch, I want you to take me to my money right now—”

  “Fine.” I reached over for my backpack.

  “No!” He pointed the gun at my center of mass. He talked like his teeth were superglued together. “Don’t you touch that fucking backpack. We’re leaving right now and you’re bringing nothing with you.”

  “Fine.” I rolled my eyes. “Lead on, Macduff.”

  “Him, too.” He pointed the gun at Lucas.

  “No.”

  He was apoplectic with rage. He could barely stutter out his threats and obscenities. I interrupted him.

  “Listen to what I’m saying to you. I can take you straight to the money. I know where Cuchillo hid it. But I can’t bring him.” I thumbed back at Lucas, who wasn’t even looking at us. He was staring at the silent cartoon. “If you want to bring him, you’re going to have to carry him, anyway.”

  The geek walked over to Lucas, leaned over, and spoke directly into his face. “If you call the cops, little boy, I’m going to come back and tear you up, do you hear me?”

  Lucas nodded.

  The geek stood up and looked at Lucas. His gun wavered a little.

  “Hey, ho," I said, waggling my fingers at him. “Remember me? Shoot the kid and I won’t take you to the money.”

  The geek’s face darkened. “You’ll do whatever I tell you to do.”

  “Well, let’s start with getting your money. How’s that?”

  He looked back down at Lucas, who was flinching and angling his face away. Then he raised his gun and crashed it into Lucas’s skull.

  I was worried about Lucas having a concussion or even dying from being hit that hard. I wanted to call 9-1-1. I thought about killing the geek right there. The cops would buy it, right? Self-defense. He was in the house.

  Of course, they might go back and look at the whole Flunky thing again.

  I stalked over and put two fingers against the side of Lucas’s neck to feel his pulse. It was nice and strong. I peeled open his eyelids to check his pupils. They looked fine.
Meanwhile the geek was hopping mad and screaming at me to go right now or he’d kill me.

  I looked up at him and spoke in a quiet voice. “You’re not going to kill me because you don’t have your money yet.”

  He stopped jumping around and got quiet as well. “I don’t have to kill you to make you very, very sorry.”

  “Make me sorry enough, and I won’t want to take you to your money anymore.”

  “How about this, then?” He pointed the gun at Lucas’s head. “We leave right now or I shoot your friend in the head and then we leave.”

  I waited a full ten Mississippis before I said, “Let’s just get it over with, then.” And we left.

  I rode shotgun in his car. I told him where to drive and where to make the turns.

  He drove with one hand and kept the other in his lap, pointing the gun at me. He was left-handed.

  “Where are we going?”

  I sat back, relaxed. “A barn just outside of town.”

  “A barn?”

  “Yep.”

  “Will there be anybody there?”

  “Nope.”

  “Why should I believe you?”

  I shrugged, looking out the window. “I don’t really care whether you believe me or not.”

  We drove along and after several minutes of nothing momentous happening, the geek seemed to relax a little.

  I spoke casually. “What’s that scar on your wrist?”

  “What?” He angled his wrist away. “We’re not talking about me, you fucking bitch.”

  “I’ve seen a lot of scars. I’ve got a collection myself. It looks like a burn to me.”

  “Shut up.”

  I let the car fill up with silence before I spoke again.

  “It’s distinctive. I noticed it right away when I saw it on Ramón’s DVD.”

  I was looking out the front window, squinting a little in the sunshine, but that female peripheral vision showed me how he froze when I said it.

  “It was in the picture with the little boy. He looked about two. He was wearing a diaper. You couldn’t see your face, of course, but a scar like that’s as good as a fingerprint.”

  His knuckles were white on the steering wheel and his words came out like he was chewing glass. “What do you want?”

  What did I want? I wanted the girls’ pictures and videos erased from the internet and the minds of ten thousand dirty men. I wanted to rewind the tape on those little kids’ lives and give them mothers and fathers that protected and loved them. I wanted a lot of things.

  I couldn’t have what I wanted.

  I spoke easily. “I want half the money.”

  Anger burned through every cell of his body, then suddenly it was released. “Done.”

  I knew why he was so calm. He’d decided to kill me.

  I directed him to turn down a weedy lane with a canted-over mailbox at the end. He drove slow down the deep ruts to a clearing of tall, weedy grass. Straight ahead was a burned-out trailer. Off to the right side was a falling down wood barn.

  In the movies, the serial killer has his victim hanging from the rafters, bound. He has metal trays full of surgical tools, a pair of garden shears, maybe a chainsaw. He’s going to take his time and do things no human body should ever have to endure. Because that’s what gives him pleasure.

  That wasn’t Daddy. He took men out the way you’d cull a crippled animal from the herd. No chit-chat, no games, no science experiments, no joy. Just identification and then death.

  That’s how I took out the geek.

  I know you want me to say that I took him into the abandoned barn and strung him up and tortured him the way he deserved to be tortured. But really, no one deserves torture, not even the worst of us. His torture had already happened at the beginning. Somewhere on the internet, Bad Men are trading old pictures of crimes against children, and one of those little boy babies is the geek. He already got his torture.

  Because I’d known he was coming, I was prepared. I had a new gun and it was so much a part of me by then, it was like it grew out of my own skin. I’d slept with it, ate with it, bathed with it. I’d practiced till I could give a gnat a haircut with it.

  I didn’t say, “You deserve to die.” I didn’t say, “You’re a terrible thing that needs to be expunged from the earth.” I just pulled the gun out of the waistband of my pants and shot him in the head. I’m not even sure he had time to see it coming.

  He didn’t need a few seconds of bladder-emptying fear before he took his leave. His whole life was made of fear and hate. It felt good to punch the button and end it. It was better for him, and it was a whole hell of a lot better for humanity.

  I had a bag with cleaning materials and fresh clothes in the barn. I removed every bit of blood and bone from my skin and hair, then I changed my clothes.

  I was sure I’d left a CSI episode’s worth of evidence in the car, so I burned that with the geek and my clothes and everything else inside. Was it good enough? I don’t know. By that point, I didn’t really care. You do what you can, then you move on.

  I hiked back to town. It took a long time, but that was okay. I needed the exercise and the fresh air.

  I called the professor’s house and found out Lucas was at the hospital with a concussion, but he was going to be okay. I thought maybe I’d get back before they found him, but they’re nervous since the whole dead guy/kidnapping incident and they check in on him a lot more often.

  I felt bad that Lucas would be thinking about the geek and feeling fear that he would come back, but the alternative was to tell him the geek wasn’t going to be a problem for either one of us ever again, and that wasn’t really an option.

  Instead, I decided to teach him how to take care of himself a little, so he wouldn’t have to be so afraid. Some of the lessons I learned from my father I can’t pass on, obviously. But some of them are just common sense. Just useful knowledge, acquirable skill. You can teach someone to fight without teaching them how to kill. I’m sure it can be done.

  I plan to prove it to myself.

  It’s a terrible thing to slaughter a being that knows and loves you.

  Farmers do it all the time. They raise an animal from birth, like a family pet, then slaughter it like so much meat. Literally, from love to meat in a single day. A single hour. A moment.

  The worst is when the animal has time to feel fear. He’s in the auction barn or the slaughterhouse and he picks up the scent of terror from the other animals. He shakes. He looks to the face of his owner for comfort and reassurance. You’re getting me out of here, right? Right?

  The best, if you can call it that, is when there’s no moment of fear. The warm head nuzzles into the hand for a familiar caress. The knife slips in and death comes too fast for the recognition of betrayal.

  My father did not trust a living soul on this earth other than me, his daughter. His blood. I often think back and wonder that he bestowed that trust on me. It seems more in keeping with his character that distrust would bloom.

  The road where I directed the geek to drive was familiar to me. I’d lived there with my father; it was the last home we’d shared. I rode down those weedy ruts in perfect equilibrium, knowing that there was no one for miles that would hear the gun, no one around to see me wipe down the surfaces in the car and then set it to burning.

  I burned the geek in his car the way I had burned my father in that trailer. I had come full circle, from my first kill to my last. Hopefully my last. And they rested less than a hundred feet apart. I couldn’t help but appreciate the symmetry.

  I did not let my father feel that moment of fear and betrayal. I waited until target practice in the woods so the cock of the trigger would signify nothing. He was simply staring at the sun just settling into the tops of the far trees when I shot him in the back of the head. From life to death in one heartbeat.

  That was my gift to him.

  James said I had to take charge of my own story and decide what the narrative would be. He said your whole life, peop
le will be trying to make you part of their story, make your part smaller, decide what your lines will be. You have to write your own story or they’ll write it for you.

  I knew my father had tried to write my story. When I was about eight, he started referring to the future time when I would have to kill someone. “Have to” being the operative phrase. There was never any doubt that the time would come. And eventually I understood that even if the Bad Men never came for me, then there would still be a time when my father’s luck would run out and I would have to back him up. The older I got, the more full of pride he was, just thinking about it. His own built-in army of one skinny girl backing him up. His ace up the sleeve. His secret weapon. She shoots, she knifes, she punches and kicks. He might slip up — surely he would have to slip up sometime? — but there I’d be to pick up the slack. The day was coming. It was always on the horizon. He talked about it like it had already happened. A sure thing.

  My father had written out the story and it was him and me against the world, but I can see that he gave himself the starring part and I was best supporting daughter. He’d assigned me my role, trained me up for it, and it was going to play out the way he wanted it to, if he stayed in control.

  One hot July day he told me to start packing up. I froze, thinking something had already happened. I liked the trailer. I liked the woods. I’d planted a little garden and I had my first little hard green tomatoes on the vine.

  It hadn’t happened yet, and he told me who it was who had to die. Our landlord. A man with a tired-looking wife and three or four children under the age of ten, a man who drove a truck that was more rust than paint but kept the old appliances in the trailer running. A man with more troubles than most but a ready smile. A man who still calls me every three months to check in on me, still sorry about the tragedy that befell my daddy while he was living in the trailer, even though the man’s trailer burned and he had no insurance.

  Better than dying, mister.

  My father was close-mouthed about what crimes our landlord had committed to earn his death sentence. He and my father had had some kind of run-in, an argument about something. My father hinted that the man had a patch of weed growing somewhere way out toward the back of the property. And maybe Daddy saw something or thought he’d seen something that indicated he was not the upstanding family man he seemed.