by Marie Marini
“Okay, sure. Both my friends hooked up with a couple of guys so I was just going to have one more drink and hit the road. What are we critiquing, their dancing or their pick-up style?” I stumbled a little as I tried to get up on the bar stool and leaned on his arm to steady myself.
“Let’s start with the dancing and the outfits, then move on from there. I’m Greg by the way.” He smiled as he checked me out.
“Hey Greg, I’m Kris.” He was looking at my cleavage and not being discreet about it either. I wanted to smack him but hey, this was the game I signed up for. Let him have his fun, I would have mine soon enough. I had already crushed the GHB into powder and dissolved it in water. I had two syringes hidden in my purse ready to squirt into his beer. That’s when I saw these two girls dressed up as slutty nurses going around with syringes selling shots of something and squirting them into guys’ mouths. I couldn’t believe my luck! If anyone saw the syringe they would think I had a shot of whatever that was. I asked Greg to watch my drink for me, then threaded my way through the people. I bought a shot from the nurse and headed for the restrooms. This was too easy. Once in the bathroom I emptied the shot and filled it with water, that one would be for me, the other two were for Greg. As I approached Greg I held the syringes up for him to see. “Look what I got!! Want to have a little fun with me, Greg?” I squirted the water shot into my mouth and made a face like it was really strong. “Whoa!! Come on cowboy!” Before he could say yes or no, I squirted it into his beer.
He laughed. “Okay, Kris, what do you usually do for fun?”
“I’m not really a dancer, Greg, but tell you what—let’s finish up these drinks and find somewhere else to have fun. You okay with that? I’m starving.”
He chugged down the beer. “I’m ready, let’s go.” I laughed and left my untouched drink on the bar.
When we got outside he was already starting to sway. “Listen, Greg, I have my van parked close by we could go there and relax for a little while.” I leaned into him suggestively, pushing my boob against his arm. “I don’t think either of us should be driving right now and I have a nice big back cab.”
He was more than willing to let me lead him. His words were slurring and as I tried to get him into the ambulance he passed out. I dragged his ass inside quickly before anyone could see and slammed the doors closed. He opened his eyes as I put the restraints on him and looked at me all groggy. He tried to reach for my boob when he realized he was tied. I was getting ready to gag him when he started laughing and then fell back asleep. I was doing the world a favor by taking this guy out of the gene pool. GBH was some heavy stuff. I didn’t think I would need anything else. It was only a half hour drive to the trailer. This stuff would have him out for hours.
I had plenty of GBH to play with so I thought I wouldn’t have to cut this one’s spinal cord. I really wanted to learn about pain threshold and skin layers, burns, and what it takes to break someone. I can’t learn that if they’re paralyzed. I was excited just thinking of all the things I could learn.
I got Greg home without incident and unloaded the stretcher from the ambulance, I rolled up to the front door and unloaded him. I left him on the step for a minute while I put the stretcher back on the ambulance and parked in back. When I got back Greg was trying to stand up.
“Let me help you there cowboy.”
I ducked under his arm that was holding him up on the door jamb and opened the door. As we both stumbled inside he was laughing and trying to talk but just mumbling really. Still very much out of it. I knew how much GHB he had, but wasn’t sure how many beers. I was trying to estimate the duration of the GHB on his system. It had been about an hour since he drank it and there was no sign of coherent thought. But then maybe he was just dumb as fuck. Time would tell.
I prepped more GHB for him in syringes in the kitchen beside my microscope. I took my time shaving his back, I didn’t want any hair in my slides. He wasn’t super hairy anyway, but I still wanted smooth skin. Occasionally he would move around but nothing that indicated conscious thought or intent. When his back was baby soft, I took the vegetable peeler and peeled off a nice long strip of skin. Just a few layers deep. He squirmed a bit but was still out of it. I prepared my slides and had a look. I had forgotten to get dye. The cell structure doesn’t show up very well without dye. I wasn’t sure I had anything at home that would work but figured I would try beet juice. I had a can of beets in the cupboard. It worked! Sweet! I had a nice set of slides of skin cells. You could see the hair root and the cell structure. Amazing stuff! Then I had the thought of using the Scene Clean XP to see what the chemical does to the cells. Incredible, the cell wall is broken down and the cell contents just spill everywhere. The whole cell just collapses, mitochondria breaks open and the thing loses its structure and …oh, oh Greg was talking.
I went to him and he seemed to be coming around a little bit. It had been about two hours since his shot of GBH. He was confused, couldn’t remember how he got here, his back hurt. I went to him.
“Hey sorry dude, I guess I scratched your back a bit when we were in the heat of it…sorry babe.” I kissed him. “You kind of passed out when you were done.”
“Oh, I’m sorry. Guess I had more beers than I thought. I don’t even remember how we got here. Where is here anyway?” He started to look around.
“Oh, just a little place I like to hang out sometimes. Are you ready to have more fun? You have to stay awake this time, promise?” I bit on my bottom lip. He reached for me and I pulled him on top of me, the whole time I was screaming inside my head but if I put him on his back he would have felt the missing skin and it could get ugly fast. We made out a little bit and when he pulled his pants down, just before he penetrated me, I said, “Wait, wait hold on. I got a little something to make it more fun.”
He seemed confused for a minute until he saw me hold up a little baggy of pills. “I want to make sure it lasts this time Greg. Let’s give your energy a little boost. It’s not called Ecstasy for nothing!” He was a little hesitant but I had just insulted his stamina so he went for it. Of course, it wasn’t E, it was GHB. He took one and we started making out again. I seriously thought I was going to have to kill him when he passed out again. I pushed him off me. Fuck, this was harder than I thought.
Good thing I had plenty of time to prepare. I had found some adult sex web sites and ordered some stuff in Sam’s name. I still had credit on the same card I used to buy the GBH. It’s crazy how kinky some people can get. They have these big old hooks like you see in the butcher’s shop. People will actually puncture their skin and hang their entire body weight on hooks like that. I had bought some hooks for my lab rat. I could use the harness and the track system I already had in place. So while he was unconscious, I took three large, wicked sharp hooks and pierced Greg’s back and connected them to the straps that hung from the ceiling. Then I hoisted him to a standing position. He screamed a bit, but he was still fighting the drugs. By the time the drug wore off, he was hanging by hooks in his back. I had a couple of other hooks I put through his forearms so he looked almost biblical hanging there. I left him naked. If I covered him up he would look too much like Jesus on the cross and that would just be wrong. The hooks were designed to go through skin but not through muscle so that after you remove them they can heal. Just some kinky shit, so although he was hanging, that was just for my safety. He wasn’t in extreme pain. Not yet. I snapped a couple of quick pics.
Over the next two weeks, I tried to break his mind.
There were times when I thought I had, only to hear him begging so I knew he hadn’t given up yet. It is absolutely amazing what the human body can take, what a mind can endure without snapping. I had always been curious about circumcision. My family was catholic and we didn’t have fancy doctors when we were babies so Daddy and Sam weren’t circumcised. I had done some research on it and it seems like the baby is given just a topical cream before the doctor cuts
the skin from his penis. Poor little bastard. That has got to hurt. Why do we do that to babies? Lab rat was already circumcised but I decided to catheterize him just to make it easy to clean up his pee. Then while I was there, I thought I could cut off part of the penis skin and see how painful it was for an adult. How much worse must it be for a baby? Well, I got a bit carried away. All the screaming pissed me off.
After I removed his penis I used a soldering iron to cauterize the squirting blood vessels. In the end, he had a little stubby piece of chewed up skin with a catheter tube coming out of it.
I really wanted to see burn tissue under the microscope so I tried multiple types of burns. I looked at chemical burns, fire burns, and electrical burns. Full thickness and partial thickness. It was the screaming that made it hard to concentrate. In the few days before he stopped screaming I would sometimes hear him pray. I came in to the living room one morning to hear him say the Our Father. I don’t know that I wanted this one to go to heaven but if he was Christian there was a chance at redemption for him. I hung a pair of blue plastic rosary beads around his neck just like Daddy. I had bought a packet of ten pairs, five blue and five pink. The rest were in the dresser drawer in the bedroom. Except that one pink pair I took home to Pompano.
When he finally stopped praying and just kind of blubbered I knew I had broken him and that it was almost over. I was grateful for the peace and quiet. We were almost three weeks into it by that time and I only had a week left. No-one could hear him out there, but I sure was getting sick of hearing him. In a way, it was interesting he went from trying to negotiate to begging for release, to begging for me to kill him. That reminded me of Darren but surely that couldn’t be right. Darren was different, he was special. This guy was a Georgia redneck. Well, I don’t know if he was from Georgia but he reminded me of Sam and his buddies. All those guys who hang out at the rodeo or the country bars are just a bunch of animals. Vicious, nasty beasts.
I had been texting Jesus every other day. It’s weird I cared more for him the less I saw him. If I kept him at a distance, I missed him. I missed having someone care for me. I know that sounds lame but there really were so few people in my life that cared about me. And those few who did, I had lost. Would I lose Jesus too? He would only take my restrictions for so long and I know he wanted kids. He was desperate for me to meet his family. They would hate me. Sooner or later it would end in heartache and that made me think again that maybe I did love him.
I talked all this out with lab rat, not that he was much help, but talking it all out helped. Jesus would break my heart sooner or later or I would break his. It was too good to be true, the way he treated me. The way he looked at me. But someday it would all fall apart. I was becoming more and more certain of that.
It was three weeks and 2 days into my month ‘abroad’ when Jesus said he was coming to visit. He needed to talk to me face to face and it couldn’t wait. I begged and pleaded and told him not to come. I said I would arrange a Skype or something but he couldn’t come here. Shit! If he showed up at the mission and I wasn’t there, and never had been...
I took my laptop out back into the old bean field and set up a Skype call. Hot and sweaty in Bean City is not any different from hot and sweaty in Haiti. I went on a run and got all sweaty, smeared some dirt on me for good measure and got on the call. I really didn’t have time for this but I couldn’t take a chance of Jesus going to Haiti.
When we got past the typical “so good to see you” blah blah blah, he dropped a bomb on me. He had got a hit on Sam. The shock showed on my face and I couldn’t have faked that. He said he just found out all of this but I wasn’t sure I believed him. I wasn’t sure how long he had known about Sam and my family. Thank God he never mentioned Daddy, maybe he didn’t know about him.
Jesus told me that they had hit on a real estate purchase in Sam’s name. Police had a BOLO out on Sam with a composite sketch of what they thought he might look like. Jesus held up the drawing to the laptop and I drew in a breath. Oh My God! The sketch looked just like Daddy in his wedding picture with Mamma. I realized that Sam would now be close to Daddy’s age when he died. Jesus was talking but I wasn’t paying much attention. I was looking at my Daddy’s face that I hadn’t seen in almost 20 years. I didn’t know I was crying until Jesus’s voice finally broke through to me.
“No, no I am okay, Jesus. Seriously I am probably safer here. It’s just a shock is all.” I took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “I’ll be home in a week and we’ll figure it out then, but for now he’s looking for me in South Florida, not in Haiti.”
“You can’t come home Kris, stay there. Stay in Haiti. You’re safer there until I get this under control. I’ll call you. I love you. Please just stay there and stay safe.”
“Okay, but what does he want with me?” Was Sam really looking for me after all this time? How did he find the trailer? All those panic attacks about him coming back I had almost convinced myself that I was safe.
“I don’t know Babe, we’re working on getting the warrant for the trailer but it’s a different jurisdiction and the Bean City boys are territorial country boys. I’ll call you as soon as it is safe to come home.” I nodded and made my excuses and disconnected.
They knew about the trailer.
Kris had been in Haiti about two weeks and I missed her terribly. I’d been working hard on trying to find her father and her brother. I got a hit on a credit check for a Visa card with a starter credit limit of $500. The address for the card was in Florida, in Bean City. A property search gave me a little more information that I wasn’t expecting. Sam Clay bought a double wide trailer in Bean City for $3,000 cash sale eighteen months ago. What had this fucker been doing for the past eighteen months? I didn’t know if he knew where Kris was or even if he knew who she was now. Did he know she was adopted? Maybe it was coincidence but just the fact that this lowlife was in South Florida made me nervous. Then I got another hit. Matthew Clay bought an old used ambulance at auction in Jupiter around the same time. Shit! What had these two been up to?
My main concern was Kris, but I had to do the legwork on the ambulance and trailer sale, see if I could get more information. The property appraiser just had the basic information on seller and buyer. Eventually, I tracked down the seller. Turned out the seller was a lovely country lady. A two-pack-a-day woman who could barely get through a sentence without a coughing jag. Her only comment was, “Had that old trailer out there with a for sale sign for three years, I weren’t gonna ask no questions if someone was crazy enough to buy it. You’ll find people out here don’t remember much Dee-tective.”
She wouldn’t help me if her life depended on it. I was out of my jurisdiction and my chief had given me strict orders not to go near that trailer until we secured a search warrant and sorted out the jurisdictional boundaries. It was killing me! But an order is an order and I really do believe in that.
That’s what I love about Police work, the logic, the order, and the rules. Things make sense in a world where less and less makes sense to me. God, I sounded like my dad! Anyway, I still had a lead at the auction house in Jupiter. I just drove up there one day. The drive was good for me to think things through. Logistically work the timeline. I met with the owner of the auction house, Jeff Campbell, and he took me back to the office. It was neat and tidy. Jeff kept a meticulous filing system and easily retrieved the paperwork for me. He wasn’t working the day the sale went through, his twenty-two year old daughter Marie was covering for him. I asked if I could speak to Marie, but Jeff claimed she was out of town on vacation. I don’t know, but I had a feeling he was hiding something from me. He asked why I was interested in this particular sale. The only thing I could tell him was that we were looking for the guy who bought it. Jeff told me the sale went through on the day before Christmas Eve. It was a Friday and almost everyone had left early that day. Marie stayed back to meet the guy who was buying the ambulance, he was coming in with cash an
d a notarized bill of sale. When Jeff came back to work after Christmas, he filed the paperwork and got the cash from the safe and deposited it in the bank. It was another dead end. I would follow up and talk to Marie when she returned from vacation, but for now, I had to talk to Kris. Face to face.
I had my finger on the mouse, ready to buy the flights to Haiti when I thought that maybe I was being unfair. Kris would know that I knew her past. Could she handle that? Could our relationship survive this? I didn’t know the answer, so I chickened out and called her. We agreed to Skype and I was so excited to see her but so nervous about her reaction to my news. I didn’t want to lose her and I had a feeling that she wouldn’t be able to trust me again after this. She would see this as me lying to her. Maybe she would be right.
God, she looked great. She was sweaty and in need of a shower, but she looked happy. I felt so bad that I was about to burst her bubble and potentially destroy her trust in me. This was no longer about us. This was about Kris’s safety. I led with the stuff about Sam. It broke my heart to see her tears. I wanted to kill that bastard. I felt so guilty for being the one to tell her. I was afraid she was in danger. Her brother was in South Florida. I told her we were working on getting a search warrant. And that we should have it by the weekend. She looked scared for a moment but recovered well. She was so brave. After all that she had been through at the hands of her family.
She argued that she was safer in Haiti and as much as I just wanted to have here right here where I could protect her I knew she was right. I told her not to worry, that I would take care of this and she would be safe. I wouldn’t let anyone hurt her. She zoned out on me a little bit and I got a little emotional before we disconnected. I don’t know how I could ever fix this for her, for us… but first I had to take care of Sam and Matt Clay.
My time with lab rat was limited but I thought I had a week. Now I had only 24 hours. I had to work quickly. If I was going to clean everything in this trailer it would take days. My DNA was everywhere. I’m sure Darren and Meat’s DNA was everywhere too. No, I needed a better plan.