“Hey!” The officer snapped his fingers. “Earth to stupid! Are your hands clean?”
“I’ve heard that one before, asshole; I’m not holding your dick for you while you piss. And don’t call me Fannelli …” Then, to himself more than the officer: “I don’t have a last name.”
The officer stood and kicked the base of Arty’s bed, rocking it. “You better watch who you’re calling asshole, Fannelli. Wouldn’t want another ‘accident’ now, would we?”
The officer strolled towards the bathroom, eyes fixed on Arty the whole way. He left the bathroom door open, dropped his pants, and slapped his bare ass for Arty while he took a leak.
The hospital room door swung open, a nurse entered, and the officer quickly hiked up his pants. Arty smirked when he saw a quarter-sized stain on the front of the officer’s trousers. The officer caught the smirk and heightened his previous threat with a glare.
“Medication time,” the nurse said.
The officer grunted, took his seat next to the hospital bed, and lifted a Sports Illustrated up to his face.
The nurse gave Arty his medication and did a quick check of his wounds. She was sure and methodical, neither rude nor friendly, despite her patient. Days ago, Arty would have made a lewd comment to the attractive nurse. However, recent knowledge about who Arty and his late brother truly were had changed all that, and the energy for such juvenile comments grew depleted; rage had siphoned it all.
“How’s your pain?” she asked.
Arty just nodded and the nurse left.
The officer put his magazine down. “Let me ask you something, Fannelli. I heard that a woman kicked your brother’s ass. Is that true?” His grin was huge. “I heard she stabbed him in the fucking balls with one of those metal nail files.” The officer grabbed his own pair and winced. “What kind of pussy would let a woman do that to him?”
Arty looked away and said nothing. This only spurred the officer on.
“Why’d you shoot your mother, Fannelli? Was she kicking your ass too?”
“She’s not my real mother,” Arty said to the wall.
“Yeah, but you didn’t know that at the time, did you?” The officer started to chuckle as he spoke. “You thought she was your real mama. That was your whole big thing you kept babbling about when you got here, wasn’t it? You and your douche bag brother were born to nice people? Raised in their loving home? Yet both of you turned out to be psycho fruitcakes, so you thought that somehow made you special? Nature versus nurture and all that bullshit?”
“Shut up.”
The officer’s chuckling grew to soft laughter; he struggled finishing his sentences whole. “What … what was it you called yourselves? Exceptions … exceptions to the rule?”
“Shut up.”
“You thought … you thought you were gonna be placed in some cushy hospital so shrinks could study how diabolically unique you were? Like you were fucking Hannibal Lecter or something?” The officer put a hand to his mouth to stem further laughter. “So really … why did you shoot your mother, Fannelli?”
“She’s not my real mother.”
The officer continued, his laughter now back to periodic chuckling. “I know, I know …” He then shook his head, disappointed yet still amused, as if hearing about a great party he was forced to miss: “God, how I wish I could’ve been here when you found out. Your face must have been fucking gold.” He grinned. “But still—when you shot her, you thought she was your real mother. So what gives, Fannelli? Oh wait … you were ‘freeing her,’ weren’t you? Isn’t that what you told everyone? Poor mom’s suffering from dementia, and you think it best to ‘free her’ with a bullet to the chest?”
Arty said nothing, kept his eyes on the wall.
“What really happened, Fannelli? Did mommy find out what you and your naughty brother were up to, and take a paddle to ya? Did you end up having to fend off an old lady with a gun like the pussy you are? Come on Fannelli, tell the truth.”
“I told you not to call me Fannelli.”
“Right, right,” he mocked. “Such a touchy issue with you. So what should I call you then, Fannelli?”
Arty finally looked at the officer. “I don’t know. What’s the name of the guy your wife is currently fucking?”
The officer leapt from his seat and punched Arty in the face.
• • •
Monica Kemp put on a modest pair of horn rims with fake lenses, strolled into the Western Pennsylvania Hospital, and headed towards the east wing.
Her attire for a registered nurse was spot-on: navy blue scrubs, ID badge, sneakers, hair pulled tight into a bun, fingernails clipped short, stethoscope around the neck. But these tangibles, while crucial, weren’t the deal-sealers that made her innocuous to the staff. It was her trained intangibles. She knew when to smile and when to look away. Who to speak to and who to avoid. And, in case of emergency, when to become a phantom and vanish. Most people spend their lives trying to be noticed. Monica Kemp was a master at being invisible.
Her contacts had told her everything she needed to know. What floor he was on, shift rounding, medication schedules, and of course, where his adoptive mother was being treated.
Maria Fannelli’s wounds that night had been critical. Sharing a hospital with the son who had tried to kill her was irrelevant to the EMTs on the scene—proximity was crucial if her life was to be saved. The nearby Western Pennsylvania Hospital would have no choice but to house both Arthur and Maria Fannelli.
And that was just fine by Monica. Two birds, one stone.
• • •
Arty held one hand over his throbbing eye.
“You’re lucky that’s all you got … fucking wise-ass.” The officer hoisted his belt and puffed out his chest.
The door opened again, and the officer took his seat and picked up the Sports Illustrated.
“Medication time,” the nurse said, making her way to Arty’s bedside.
The officer put down the magazine. “Huh?”
The nurse kept her back to the officer and repeated: “Medication time.”
“He just got his medication a half hour ago.”
The nurse glanced over her shoulder, barely giving a profile. “I have a STAT order from the doctor for a UTI.”
“A what?”
“UTI—urinary tract infection.”
The officer shrugged and picked his magazine back up.
The nurse handed Arty a small piece of tissue paper. “Take this.”
Arty didn’t look at the nurse. He just frowned and took the tissue paper from her hand. There was writing on it, small but clear. The nurse removed her horn rims as Arty read:
Read this quietly and know that what I write is true. People will suffer for your misfortune. I swear this to you on the same blood that runs through our veins. I am your sister. And before long we will have exacted a vengeance of unthinkable horror onto those who dared cross our family.
Be patient, big brother; our time will come.
Faithfully yours,
Monica
Arty’s frown was now sardonic. This note. A lame attempt at humor from the nursing staff no doubt. He finally looked up at the nurse, keen on crumpling the tissue paper, tossing it in her face, telling her to fuck off. Except what he saw robbed his lungs of even a gasp.
Arty was looking at his own flesh and blood. Of this he was surer than the pulse that now hammered his chest. This woman could have been his dead brother’s twin.
His breath returning, Arty went to speak, but Monica placed a hand over his mouth, took the delicate paper from him, and placed it gently between his lips.
“Come on, take it,” she said, handing him a glass of water. “It’s for your own good.”
Arty quickly chewed the tissue paper and chased it down with the glass of water.
Monica smiled, leaned in to fluff his pillow, whispered: “I’ll be on the telemetry unit in a few moments. I believe Maria Fannelli is being cared for there. How would you like me to handle tha
t?” She stood upright and stared at him.
Arty smiled genuinely for the first time in days. Monica smiled back, nodded once, and then left the room.
Arty began whistling a tune.
“Shut the fuck up,” the officer said.
Arty smiled genuinely again. “Yes, sir.”
• • •
As she exited, Monica winked at the young officer seated outside her brother’s room. He blushed, smiled sheepishly, and quickly looked away.
Fish in a fucking barrel, she thought, putting the horn rims back on and heading towards the telemetry unit.
• • •
Monica stood next to Maria Fannelli’s bed. The room was dark and quiet save for the consistent beeps of Maria’s heart that see-sawed white lines on the monitor’s black screen.
The woman’s eyes were closed, her mouth open a crack, the occasional snore flapping from her throat. An IV snaked its way out of her arm and attached itself to a free standing infusion pump on the side of the bed where Monica stood.
Monica wanted to wake her. Wanted the woman to know what was about to happen. She wanted to savor it; look deep into this woman’s eyes and watch the life drain from them. After all, this was something new—the first step in their path to vengeance. Who knew what ecstasies it might bring?
But alas, this could not be one of those times. Years of discipline extinguished such blissful thoughts, and self-preservation immediately took hold. She was not in someone’s home where she could take her time.
Monica snapped on a pair of latex gloves, hit stop on the infusion pump, withdrew a syringe from her pocket, took hold of the intravenous port, and administered an IV push: a lethal and undetectable injection of potassium into Maria Fannelli’s vein.
• • •
Monica was halfway down the hall when she looked over her shoulder and spotted a young woman from the nurse’s station hurry into Maria Fannelli’s room—no doubt hoping that the one of many monitors she was observing was simply incorrect, and that Mrs. Fannelli had not flat-lined. The last thing Monica heard before she exited the hospital was the commotion surrounding the Code Blue that had just been called.
Upon reaching her car, Monica paused, lit a cigarette, and blew a long satisfying plume into the dark autumn sky. “Resuscitation is futile,” she smirked. “That bitch is dead.”
She entered her car and drove off without suspicion.
• • •
Arty was asleep when the doctor entered the room. The officer on duty was fighting off sleep himself, periodically dropping his head into his chest before it would pop up suddenly as though someone had startled him. When the doctor entered the room, he hopped to his feet and made a subtle attempt at wiping the sleep from his eyes.
“Mr. Fannelli,” the doctor said.
Arty didn’t stir.
“Mr. Fannelli,” the doctor repeated.
Arty spoke without opening his eyes. “Don’t call me Fannelli.”
The doctor exchanged looks with the officer. The officer shrugged.
“I thought you should know,” the doctor continued, obviously deciding to forgo a second guess at an acceptable moniker, “that your mother has succumbed to her injuries. There was nothing we could do.”
The doctor left the room.
“Bra-vo, Fannelli,” the officer said, clapping slowly. “Your mother’s dead … and you killed her. I’d say that just about puts the last nail in your coffin, wouldn’t you?”
Despite the pain it caused his wounds, Arty rolled away from the officer and lay on his side.
The officer grinned and took his seat again. “What’s wrong, Fannelli? You gonna cry?”
Truth be told, Arty was trying not to laugh.
3
The Alaskan Wilderness
One week later
John Brooks watched the homeless man devour the bowl of stew at his kitchen table. “Good?” John asked.
The homeless man lifted his head, stew dripping from his mangy beard, and smiled like a child eating ice cream.
John smiled back. “It’s one of my specialties. Snowshoe hare and fox. Can’t get along out there—” He pointed out his cabin window “—but put ’em together in a pot with some veggies and they get along just fine, don’t they?”
The man lifted his head and smiled again, wider this time. His front teeth were gone.
“More?” John asked when he noticed the man had now abandoned his spoon and begun scraping the inside of the bowl with his fingers in order to sop up every last morsel.
The man licked his fingers and handed the bowl to John. “Yes—please.”
John took the bowl to a small white stove in the corner. Simmering on one of the burners was the black pot that held his specialty. He ladled two big helpings into the man’s bowl and placed it before him again.
The man’s appetite, strong as it was, had not completely vanquished his courtesy. Even as the steaming bowl sat beneath his runny nose, he managed polite small talk before diving into his second helping. “So you live all the way out here by yourself?”
“That’s right.”
The man chewed, swallowed, burped into his fist, then dug in again. “Year long?”
“Pretty much,” John said. “Unless I’m working.”
The man took a mouthful bigger than he could handle, and after a few noble attempts of getting it all down at once, resorted to pulling a chewed hunk of rabbit from his mouth and placing it back in his bowl. “What do you do?”
“Hunter.”
The man kept his eyes on his food as he spoke. “So then what brought you all the way into town today? You need ammo or traps or something?”
John smiled. His black eyes sparkled. Softly, he said, “No.”
For a man as physically imposing as he was, John Brooks could play the big teddy bear when he wanted—embodying a serenity that seemed to oppose the hardened edges of his rough but handsome face; a physique that suggested he bench-pressed oak trees and dead-lifted boulders.
The homeless man finished a mouthful of stew and made eye contact with his host. “So what were you in town for then?” he asked.
John smiled again—the same accommodating smile he’d flashed for his guest when first leaning to his right and opening the passenger door back in town. “Call it an urge,” he said.
The man shrugged and went back to his stew.
John went to the window. The sun was strong, reflecting off the snow and ice covering the earth. John squinted through the glare and looked further out. He saw that even dim, congested areas of forest were pierced with light in various spots. “Perfect,” he whispered. The lighting was perfect. Perfect now.
John turned back towards the man. “How you coming along?”
Smiling, the man held up and displayed his empty bowl, and once again John likened him to a child.
“Excellent,” John said. “Feel good?”
The man nodded.
“Feel strong?”
The man nodded.
“Energetic?”
The man paused, his smile now more polite than genuine, and nodded again.
“Think you can give me my money’s worth?”
No nod this time. Just a quizzical face. “What do you mean?”
John reached into his pocket and pulled out a stopwatch. He pressed a few buttons and placed it on the kitchen table in front of the man. The watch was set for ten minutes.
“That’s how much of a head start I’m going to give you,” John said. He reached forward and pushed a final button. There was a faint beep, and the stopwatch began its countdown.
The man looked up at John. “I—I don’t understand …”
John didn’t reply. He walked to his gun rack fixed next to the mounted head of a grizzly bear, considered his selection, then chose his custom-built Remington.
“Mister, what are you … what are you doing?”
John stayed quiet, but found it impossible to fend off a small smile as he began loading the rifle.
John laughed softly and shook his head. The tranquil demeanor, despite his rough exterior, was still there, but the eyes … the eyes were different now. Intense arousal had dilated his pupils to an extreme, making them more akin to the black marble eyes of the grizzly on his wall. Akin and relevant: both were lethal predators.
John slid the bolt on the chambered round, brought the rifle to his chest and asked: “How much time you got?”
The man stuttered, producing nothing but quick, frenetic breaths. His eyes volleyed back and forth between John’s face and the Remington. Wet stew still hung from the beard surrounding his open mouth, his filthy layers of clothing unable to hide the shakes of his body.
Rifle still in both hands, John poked his chin towards the stopwatch on the table. “How much time?” he asked again.
The man looked fast. “Seven—says seven minutes.”
John booted the man from his chair, sending him hard to the wooden floor.
The homeless man stared up helplessly at his once-generous host. He stared at the now lustful grin that was close to leaking. He stared at the blackest of eyes that were useless windows to a soul that didn’t exist. He stared at it all, unable to look away, his face contorted, frozen—an effigy of absolute fear.
And John rejoiced. He laughed, wiped his mouth, and pointed the rifle towards the front door. “You better get a move on, sport.”
• • •
The homeless man darted through the Alaskan wilderness, his frantic lungs machine-gunning clouds of breath. Branches smacked and sliced his face, the dense underbrush like cruel wooden hands trying to snatch an ankle, making him stumble more than once.
Calls for help were futile in the desolate environment; he knew that, but it didn’t stop panic from shunning reason and trying all the same. So he cried out. A bullet answered just above his head. It thumped into the large spruce behind him, splintering the bark and producing a hole the size of a dime.
Bad Games- The Complete Series Page 27