Page 54 of Intrepid

A fine mist coated my eyes at the thought of going home. Not out of relief, though, because my life would never be normal again. It would stop the unknowns. The fear of the blackness. The question mark sitting at the end of my mind, leaving me to wonder if home was any better than death.

“I’m gonna let you in on a secret. Let you stew on this. That fancy dressed man from before? He wanted me to kill you. Both of you. He thought you might get a wild hair up your ass to go after him. Tell everyone what he did to Eli.” He popped the screen of the camcorder shut. “See, that’s how men in power work. They do what they want because they can. Us little guys? Well, we get fucked, don’t we? All boils down to money. Tryin’ to survive. We’re all just lyin’ in our coffins waitin’ for some motherfucker with more power, more money to come along and close the lid over us.” Another deep snort and he spat an arc of phlegm that landed a few feet away. “I don’t think I gotta kill you, son. I think you’ll keep your mouth shut, or every fucking cop in this city will be at your door. You don’t want that. Your daddy sure as fuck don’t want that.” He pushed Trevi’s foot off my cheek and wiped the grit away. “So you promise me you’ll keep your mouth shut. Or I’ll send this tape to the boy’s momma. I don’t think you want her seeing that, do you?”

I shook my head. I’d been broken. For as long as I’d held tight to my wits, they’d finally broken me.

“Good. Now, there’s one thing I gotta do before I can let you go. I don’t think you’re gonna like it much.”

18

Ty

Present day …

Back when I was a kid, the concept of right and wrong had been simple. What was right typically resulted in happiness, and wrong ensured suffering.

Unfortunately, I’d suffered ten long years doing the right thing, working a normal job, desperately trying to ignore the screams and nightmares, before I realized how wrong it was for me to continue living in hell, while the men who’d destroyed my life walked free and clear.

The definitions had become convoluted with time, and the empathy I’d groomed by staying connected to humankind had begun to snap like fragile balloon strings. When my uncle finally passed, I no longer had the guidance to keep me on the right path.

A tired blue truck, with Gideon’s in faded white paint along the side of it, clanked to a rolling stop in front of the abandoned house, where I’d called it to. Behind the tailgate sat a large yellow contraption, the sight of which left a sick hollow in my stomach.

I waited inside the house, staring through the window, as the man in the cab hobbled out, gaze sweeping across the vast emptiness that surrounded us, save for the abandoned house. Empty lots on either side held the stumps of homes that’d been burned to the ground, or demolished. He scratched his head and lifted the paper in his hands to his face, as though checking the address.

I’d called him as a prospective client who’d recently purchased the property as a fixer upper, and offered to pay a large sum of money to remove the brush and trees accumulated on the lot. When he’d told me his helper had quit on him a couple weeks prior, I’d offered him double.

He’d put on significantly more weight since the last time I’d seen him, but even with the extra skin around his face, I’d have recognized him anywhere. Sunken brown eyes, too close together. A crooked nose, and a small mouth. Only thing really changed, besides his weight, was the thinning spot of hair atop his head and the hard lines of age. For someone only a few years older than me, he looked like shit. I guessed murdering kids and disposing their bodies had taken its toll over the years.

I’d later learned the reason Gideon had stayed with Fox and assisted in the kidnapping. He was the teenage boy-toy of Fox’s slightly younger brother, Roy, who’d been imprisoned for a brutal assault on a homeless man while drunk. Together, Roy and Gideon had run a little side gig of kidnapping kids off the streets, photographing them, and selling videos of the boys getting tortured. I’d tracked down one of the kids, still living on the streets, who’d joined a gang and had gotten into trouble himself, so the two didn’t always kill their victims. Two years into his reduced sentence, Roy had had his throat ripped out by a fellow inmate, before he’d been fatally stabbed.

Quietly observing, I waited until Gideon fired up the machine. While he adjusted the neck of the wood chipper, I slid on black gloves, and zipped up the white disposable body suit I’d donned. The material would be easy to burn afterward, and covered damn near every inch of my body. Recommended for waste cleanup—I’d laughed when I’d read that on its packaging.

Exiting the front door, I kept my gaze on Gideon’s back, and hustled across the yard toward him.

He whirled around, eyes wide with a gasp, and exhaled on a chuckle, hand to his chest. “Sh-sh-shit man, you scared me.” His stutter had improved a bit, I noticed. “You look like that d-d-d-dude from American Psycho.”

Arm outstretched, I shook his hand, and my fake smile could’ve landed me a billboard spot for Colgate. “Forgive me, I’ve got quite a bit of shit to clean up today.”

“Figured I’d just go ahead and g-g-g-git started on the front. Gonna take me a bit w-w-w-with all that dead brush.” His eyes narrowed, and he stroked his chin, the smile stretching across his face baring two empty spots where teeth should’ve been. “Say, you look kinda … familiar. Where’d y-y-y-you say you’re from?”

“Chicago,” I lied. The pulse in his neck lured my eyes there, and I slid my hand inside my pocket, where a syringe sat in the well. One-handedly unsheathing the cap, I nodded toward the machine behind him. “So, you just toss it all into the wood chipper, huh? And it spits it out in chunks into the back of your truck?” I stepped around him to get a better look, but stilled at the grip of my arm I kept tucked in my pocket.

“C-c-c-careful. Those blades’ll suck you right in, you get too close.”

Watching the grinding rollers brought back images of Eli’s sleeping face, the innocence they’d destroyed for their own amusement.

“Y-y-you don’t ever stand in front of it. Always to the side.” Gideon demonstrated, standing behind the metal housing of the feeding table.

“Ever have someone fall into one of these things?” My thumb sat at the tip of the needle’s plunger, as I made my way back toward him.

His nervous laugh didn’t quite match the tight knit of his brows, telling me I’d hit a trigger button. Backing up one step failed to put enough distance between us, before I stabbed the needle into his neck, pushing the toxins into his bloodstream.

Eyes wide, he stumbled backward, his spine crashing into clanking machinery, hands flying to the emptied syringe still stuck in his neck.

“Th-th-the fuck! What’d you do? What’re you doin’?” The slur at the end told me the toxin had already begun to fuck with his muscles.

Tetrodotoxin was a tasteless, odorless, and potent neurotoxin produced by the poisonous puffer fish. For three hundred bucks on some sketchy internet sites, anyone could buy enough toxin to kill forty adults. I’d only prepared a fraction of a dose—enough to keep ol’ Giddy alive for a couple hours.

He collapsed onto the ground, and the panic in his eyes, as the paralysis crept over his body, brought a smile to my face. A dark blue halo expanded across his crotch as he pissed his jeans.