Murdergram, Part 2

by Nisa Santiago

  E.P. grunted.

  “Okay, shall we begin?”

  Z placed the knife against E.P.’s face again and twisted the blade into his right cheek, peeling back a piece of his flesh like he was peeling a potato.

  E.P. screamed, “Aaaaaaaaahhhh!”

  “Yes. Scream for me. Scream.”

  Z picked sections of his face to carve up. His warm blood oozed from his wounds. His pain was an icy wind choking the breath from his lungs, and it came like a sudden squall out at sea.

  E.P.’s breathing became ragged. His face became grotesque from the flaying. As the life bit by bit drained out of him in its garish red, his remaining skin took on the pallor of a corpse.

  When there were no more sections to flay from his face, Z started to work on the body—his chest, his nipples, his ribs, and his abs and started to peel away slowly.

  E.P.’s screams echoed out loudly, piercing the air like a siren. His blood flowed like a lazy river. He started to talk, giving them some information on the Cristal Clique and why he’d had Cristal killed.

  After an hour of flaying, Z had everything he needed from E.P. No one had ever lasted this long, down to the waist.

  “Kill me,” E.P. said faintly, his body looking like bloody lunch meat.

  Z looked at him. He was ready to grant E.P. his wish. He reached his hand out, and one of the goons placed a .45 in it.

  “It’s been fun, E.P. But everything must come to an end,” Z said, placing the barrel of the gun to E.P.’s forehead.

  E.P.’s eyes fluttered from the pain, and his body was on fire everywhere. Blackness filled the edges of his vision, and the only thing he could hear was his own fading heartbeat. He yearned for death.

  Poot!

  E.P.’s body lay slumped in its restraints, his blood dripping onto the floor like a leaky faucet.

  “Who’s hungry?” Z asked.

  His men looked at him; it wasn’t anything new to them.

  The men had everything they needed. Next, the Commission planned on doing some extensive investigating using all their connected contacts.

  In the end, they put it together: Melissa Chin was Cristal. She was a threat to their organization, and she was now working for their rival, GHOST Protocol. She had to die.

  But it was complicated. A meeting had to be arranged. An approval needed to be met.

  Twenty-Nine

  Albany, New York

  The sleek, luxurious Rolls-Royce Phantom pulled up to the check-in area of the Hilton Hotel in the heart of the Capital District. The car came to a stop at the entrance, and the chauffeur quickly climbed out of the Phantom to assist his passenger with his exit. He opened the back passenger door and stepped aside.

  Stepping out of the car was a well-dressed man in a $7,000 Brioni suit, clutching a Doyoner walking cane. Alfred Whitlock. His hair was gray, and so was his trimmed goatee. He had an aura of supremacy and mystique to him. He gazed up at the hotel and said to his driver, “Don’t park the car far,” and proceeded toward the hotel entrance alone.

  Ten minutes after Whitlock’s arrival, a pearl-white Rolls-Royce Ghost pulled up to the hotel entrance. Stepping out of the back was a tall white male with thick jet-black hair, piercing blue eyes, and high cheekbones. Jacque Colin was dressed sharply in Armani, and looked intense and powerful, like the head of a Fortune 500 company. He walked into the hotel, also alone.

  Fifteen minutes later, a silver Maybach arrived at the same hotel, and exiting the exotic chariot was a white male in his late sixties, Carlton Birdwell, dressed flawlessly in Tom Ford with diamond cufflinks glimmering and a gold Rolex peeking out from his white shirt.

  The last and final vehicle to arrive was a classic Benz with the black rag-top. It stopped and stepping out was another aging white male dressed in a Jay Kos suit, face wrinkling with his thin hair and hard eyes. Harold Perricone. He walked forward.

  It was the Commission; four very wealthy aging white men who were pillars in their community. The Hilton hotel was a neutral location. A secret meeting had been arranged with GHOST Protocol to discuss a very important matter.

  All four men walked into windowless secured conference room on the first floor, capable of seating twenty people. Already waiting were members of GHOST Protocol. The door had been locked, and each man took a seat at the fourteen-inch racetrack conference table and leaned back in the high-backed leather chairs.

  They all looked like executives and businessmen—which they were—but they were also leaders of organizations that had people killed.

  At the head of the table was GHOST Protocol’s top man, Villa Wellington, a tall, bearded black man dressed Steve Harvey-sharp, standing six foot two and weighing three hundred pounds, with intense eyes and a cigarette-raspy voice. He exuded confidence.

  Also associated with GHOST Protocol were two other well-dressed African-American men, pillars of their communities—multimillionaires with thriving businesses and degrees from Harvard and Yale, but murder for hire was a much more profitable enterprise.

  Anthony Black and Timothy Greenwood were middle-aged men, ex-Marines once turned mercenaries then turned businessmen. They had founded GHOST Protocol twenty-five years ago.

  Seated silently and straight-faced beside Villa was The Bishop. Dressed in a black Alexander Amosu suit, his presence alone was intimidating. He was support. He was quiet and looked each man in the eyes as they sat before his superior.

  “Gentlemen, welcome,” Villa greeted, standing in front of everyone, his height and size towering over the table.

  “Let’s get to this business,” Jacque announced. “I have other affairs to attend to.”

  “And we will.”

  The Commission was there to discuss implementing a green light to have Cristal assassinated. The Bishop felt uneasy about her demise being discussed, but he kept quiet and still, like a servant inside the room.

  “This Cristal, from our understanding, she now works for your organization,” Carlton said. “And she has become a problem and a liability to our organization.”

  “She’s running her damn mouth! She’s writing stories, telling things that do not need to be told. She’s gone rogue! Can you even control this bitch?” Alfred Whitlock chimed.

  The Bishop clenched his jaw, but he kept his cool. It wasn’t his place to speak.

  Villa sat back in his seat and leaned back into the chair. The Commission had his undivided attention. He clasped his hands together, glanced at Anthony and Timothy, and remained silent, allowing the men to voice their concerns to him.

  Jacque said, “As you know, our two organizations have worked in parallel with each other for years now, and we aren’t looking to create any conflict. In respect, we’ve reached out to your organization to correct this problem.”

  “Her being alive is also a threat to GHOST Protocol,” Carlton said.

  “How’s that?” Black asked.

  Alfred slid one of Cristal’s best sellers in Villa’s direction. Villa picked up the thick book and leafed through it silently to the parts highlighted by Alfred.

  “She is Melissa Chin,” Jacque said. “She needs to be silenced.”

  “She’s only writing about the Commission,” The Bishop said, finally breaking his silence, hearing enough. “This is no concern to us.”

  Alfred asked, “And how soon will she betray GHOST Protocol with her words aimed at your organization, spilling your secrets and the way your network works?”

  “Your network is a cesspool,” The Bishop said gruffly. “Murdering their own recruits, lying to them and stealing what is theirs—what kind of organization is that?”

  “The inner workings of their organization are irrelevant to us, Bishop,” Villa interjected evenly. “The only matter before us is Cristal’s fate.”

  The Bishop frowned. If he could, he would have ripped all four men apart with his bare hands.

  “I can foresee this being a problem for us in the future,” Timothy Greenwood said.

  Anthony slightly nod
ded, agreeing with Timothy’s statement.

  The Bishop knew he was losing. His associates were going to vote against him. He leaned back in his seat and continued to frown.

  “Then we must put this to a vote,” Villa said.

  Villa looked at Anthony, who instantly gave the green light.

  He then looked at Timothy, and his vote was the same.

  He looked at Bishop, and Bishop quickly said, “I vote no.”

  Villa also agreed to green light the hit on Cristal, so The Bishop was overruled three to one. “It is done then,” Villa said.

  The men on the Commission smiled.

  “There has to be another way,” The Bishop exclaimed.

  “The only way is for her to die,” Timothy said. “The decision is final.”

  “Then I’ll do it,” The Bishop said. “Let me be the one to take her out. She knows me, and she won’t even see it coming.” In his mind, he would do the hit mercifully, whereas the Commission would undoubtedly torture her.

  Villa looked his way seriously and said, “You have one week to make it happen.”

  The Bishop nodded.

  Thirty

  Cristal had heard about Tamar’s murder right away via the news. She knew the Commission was behind it, her brains blown out by a sniper’s bullet on a crowded ferry. It took extreme skills to execute that contract. The puzzling question for her was, why did they want her dead? What did she do to trigger her demise? Cristal didn’t know what to think.

  Who would be the Commission’s next target? Would they come after her next? Did they even know she was still alive? She tried to keep herself cool, but nothing made sense. Now it was chaos.

  She sat at the kitchen table cleaning her arsenal. Each gun had to work to perfection. She couldn’t afford to have any weapons jamming up on her at a time like this.

  It had been two weeks since she’d last seen Daniel. She missed him a lot. She thought about his marriage proposal and was still unsure if she should say yes or no. The Bishop’s advice was insightful, but her mind was still clouded.

  Daniel thought she was in Uganda this time, overseeing a food drop into a war-torn country. The lies continued, and his trust for her had grown stronger. He couldn’t call her, and she didn’t call him. She thought about him every single day and couldn’t wait to be in his arms again. But before she could go see him, she had to get a few things in order.

  Each gun and rifle was thoroughly cleaned, outside and in. She placed her arsenal in a safe spot and stepped out onto her balcony clad in a robe.

  It was a chilly November day. The crisp copper leaves were falling off the trees swaying gently in the fall wind, the clouds above overlapping each other, making the sky a gloomy gray. She stood on the balcony for a while, watching the city of Boston come alive with activity and traffic.

  Alerted by the sound of her water boiling in the teapot, she went back inside. As she poured the steaming hot water into a coffee cup, she suddenly thought, I’m the last one standing. Mona, Lisa, and Tamar, they’re all dead.

  Sharon was never in the game, so it was safe to say that her future was brighter than all of theirs. A quick sadness came over her, but it was brief. She didn’t have time to grieve or reflect on the past.

  Sipping on her hot tea, Cristal sat at her desk, her laptop open. On screen was the next chapter to her fourth book. She only had one-third of the story written. It was flowing. She arched over her laptop and allowed her fingers to stroke the keyboard, typing herself into a different world. She wrote about her involvement with E.P. and Hugo.

  I stood gazing in the mirror at my disarrayed hair after the wild sexual episode I’d experienced with P.T., and it made me want to cry. I was drowning in guilt.

  P.T. had ravaged my body throughout the night. He did things to me, worked his thumb up my ass as I started using my muscles to coax out another load of cum. He would smack my ass, fucking me doggy-style and pulling my long hair, then reaching around to grab my tits and cup them tightly. His behavior in the bedroom was freakish, but it turned me on. He was rough with my nipples, pinching them, squeezing them, and making me moan with a deep howl.

  Afterwards, the guilt overcame me. I was messing around with two men, but Mason was the one I loved. How could I go back home to Mason after what P.T. did to my body? I was trained by the Syndicate to become whoever I needed to be to get the job done, but this time, I couldn’t come up with the right lie.

  P.T. walked into the bathroom naked. His rock-hard body glistened with sweat, and his muscles flexed as he came up behind me. He pulled me into his arms and held me tight. It felt like I was wrapped up in his personal cocoon of lust and sex.

  Once again, he proclaimed his love for me, sending my fault and shame into a cyclone of emotions. We were two killers in heat. It had to be one of the most dangerous episodes in the bedroom, with his firearm shooting off my orgasm into a fiery craze.

  “You okay?” he asked me.

  “Yes,” I said. “I just have a lot on my mind.”

  “What is it?” He sounded genuinely concerned for my well-being.

  “It’s nothing.”

  I couldn’t tell him I was in love with another man. I wanted to put an end to my affair with him. It was a dangerous liaison.

  But on the flip side, I was benefiting so much by fucking P.T. My affair with him brought me closer to the Syndicate. Sex with him had its perks. I was rising to the top, becoming one of the few femme fatales in the Syndicate. Why rock the boat now? I knew I had things under control, and as long as P.T. was happy, he would never find out about Mason.

  Cristal stopped writing for a moment, feeling a little nostalgic. She took another sip of tea and heaved a sigh. She stood up for a moment and walked to her window.

  Though it was after midnight, she wasn’t tired. She still had a lot more writing she wanted to do. Inside, she felt like a dam that was ready to burst open. The next chapter she started on was the heaviest and most painful to write.

  She sat back at her laptop, determined to tell one of the roughest parts of her life. It had to be told.

  After the slaughter of my family, I was surprised to see that I was still alive. Why? Was it an unwanted gift or a curse thrown upon me?

  I felt blackness all around me. I could feel and smell the death of my family. I could hear the voices of the EMT workers trying to revive me. This was the nightmare I couldn’t wake up from. It was stuck on me like my own skin.

  As the EMT wheeled me out of the apartment, I heard myself uttering in a panicky voice, “My baby!”

  “Ma’am, you’ve been shot four times,” the male said to me. “We need you to relax and get you to a hospital. You’re alive!”

  He’d said it as if he was surprised that I was still alive.

  How did this happen? Tandi! I wondered what her price for her betrayal was and why she had to go after my family. She exclaimed before shooting me at point-blank range that I’d broken the rules. So why did my family have to suffer too?

  Before I got to the hospital, I lost consciousness.

  ...

  I awakened from my coma, losing sense of everything around me. I didn’t know the date or the year, or how I had ended up in the hospital. But I was angry. I felt paralyzed by fear and grief, and then despair.

  It didn’t take long for me to fall into depression. It was an unseen, unheard, silent killer. I couldn’t escape the feeling of guilt no matter how hard I tried. The depression followed me around like a black shadow on the inside, eating me apart and waiting for me to die.

  I stood on the brink of something dreadful. The heaviness of everything seemed to press down on my shoulders. I struggled to take even a single step forward. The memories of my family being slaughtered flooding my brain was too much. It kept coming and coming, deeper and deeper. I sank under a sea of rage. It was too much. All of it.

  But I somehow kept it moving. I couldn’t give up, but every step taken cost me. The darkness grew darker, and my pain grew sharper; it
all seemed to only grow in strength. I began to wonder if it would ever get better.

  What kept me alive was pure hatred and rage. It was the thirst for revenge on those that I had trusted. But the life I chose was a constant nightmare that had no end or happiness.

  Cristal stopped typing and sighed deeply, the pain of that day etched in her mind. She was transfixed by her words on the screen. The words came easily because the pain never went away.

  This chapter in her life—how would that end? Would it end with Daniel and her, happily married? It all seemed too farfetched for her. Could killers like her drift away into some fairytale land to live happily ever after being marked by hell? When would the day come when a sniper’s bullet took her out?

  She stood up from her desk and walked back out onto the balcony. Her fists clamped around the railing, her mind drifting into emptiness. She closed and eyes and simply stood there.

  Her cell phone chimed. She turned but didn’t rush to answer the phone. She entered the apartment and picked up. The caller ID was unknown. She answered anyway. On the other end, a familiar voice was able to snap her out of her gloomy thinking.

  “I need to see you,” The Bishop said.

  “How soon?”

  “Leave now,” he said.

  “I’m on my way.”

  Hanging up, Cristal immediately started to get dressed. His tone sounded uncertain about something. She knew there was something wrong. She threw on her jeans and running shoes, loaded a few pistols into her handbag, and walked out the door.

  Thirty-One

  The Bishop sat in his still cottage feeling uneasy about the contract on Cristal. He couldn’t talk anyone out of it. It was sealed. They wanted her dead within a week, and it was already going on day two. He’d never had any problems carrying out any contracts in the past. Over the years, whoever they said kill, he killed. No hesitation and no regret on his part. His victims were just contracts—almost like business deals.

  He sat in the dark, shirtless, and in a pair of cargo shorts, the Desert Eagle with the suppressor around the barrel in his hand.

  He’d given Cristal a call over two hours ago. She was about two and a half hours away. He wasn’t in any rush to kill her.