Vigilante

by Jessica Gadziala

  But when I got closer and looked him over, I'd be damned if that white rosary set in his hand wasn't missing a fucking bead.

  Cyanide.

  I wasn't disappointed that he was dead. That was always the plan anyway. But I wanted to hear them fess up first, to admit to their wrongdoings. I don't know why. I didn't need them to. I always had more than enough evidence before I even thought of bringing them in. But I liked to hear it. It validated that I was doing the right thing.

  He took that away from me.

  I was in a pissy ass mood the entire time I had to get his body dissolved.

  I mean, I guess him killing himself was all the proof I needed that he had committed the crimes I laid before him. But still, he ruined the whole thing for me.

  There was the frantic slam of heels on steps as she came thundering back down, her hair flying all around her face.

  "What do you mean he 'died in your bunker'?"

  "That it was the place he took his last breath," I said, inwardly grinning that she was smart enough to pick up on that small nuance.

  "Where you killed him, you mean."

  "I didn't say that."

  "Would you? If you killed someone, would you own up to it?"

  "Well, when you picked me up, I was fresh off of taking Harold Grains off the surface of the earth." Literally. He was below it in a sewage pipe. Where pieces of shit like him belonged.

  "Harold Grains," she repeated, trying not to sound surprised with how forthcoming I was being.

  "Yeah. Disgusting pedo with a penchant for young boys. He had to go. He was nothing but a waste of perfectly good oxygen on a planet that, quite frankly, could use about five billion fewer people than it currently has."

  "So you killed him because he was a child molester."

  "Didn't you hear? That's what I do. I'm the vigilante, baby," I declared, smirking.

  "Did you kill my father?"

  "Unfortunately, no."

  Shit.

  That was harsh.

  I didn't interact enough with people to remember to watch the way I phrased things sometimes.

  In fact, the only reason I realized it was the wrong thing to say was that she shocked back from my words like I had struck her.

  "Why should I even believe you?"

  "I'm a lot of things, Evangeline, but a liar isn't one of them. I didn't kill your father."

  "Then... what? He had a sudden heart attack while in your custody?" she spat, disbelief clear not only in her tone, but her face.

  "He bit into an emergency cyanide pill he kept in his rosary when I left him alone for a couple minutes."

  Everything about her changed in that moment.

  Her lips parted; her eyes went hollow; her shoulders dropped.

  Because she knew it was the truth.

  Maybe she didn't trust my words fully per se, but there must have been a recognition of the truth in them, in the reality of him having a pill of cyanide. In his willingness to use it.

  "Why would he do that?" she hissed, her voice barely audible despite being just a few feet from me.

  "Guess he didn't want to face up the punishment for his crimes."

  That was, apparently, enough reality for her.

  Her chin jerked upward, she spun on her heel, and she flew back up the stairs again.

  I wish I could say that I felt sympathy right then, but that would be a lie.

  First, because what I did, I had no guilt about. Scumbags like Alejandro Cruz deserved the end I planned to give him. Second, because if she knew his crimes and she still supported him, that made her a real shitty person as well. Third, well, I just wasn't good with all those squishy emotions.

  I learned to lock that shit down from the cradle.

  I wasn't raised in an environment that would allow me to show weakness. And sympathy, as noble as it might have been, was a weakness. It exposed an Achilles heel. It showed where someone could cut you.

  Of course there were innocents affected by my actions. Most scumbags weren't lone wolfs, weren't freaks doing dirty deeds all alone in their basements. No. Most of them were your next-door neighbors. Most of them had wives, mothers, sisters, brothers, friends, co-workers. Most of them were surrounded by people who loved them and were completely oblivious to their often heinous crimes.

  Harold Grains for example.

  He wasn't some freak trolling the dark web in his basement.

  Harold Grains was a successful businessman with ten people in his office who thought he was a great co-worker. He had a wife of twenty years at home. He had an almost-grown daughter who wasn't his biggest fan, but judging by the full-on goth look to her, it was more teenage rebellion than actual dislike of the man who had raised her. He had a brother and parents he saw at every holiday. He had friends he saw in church every third Sunday.

  If you looked at the man from the outside, he was just your average guy.

  The sad thing was, most child molesters and rapists came off that way.

  Everyone was always shocked.

  What? No! Not my son! Not my Charlie-boy! He'd never lock women up in his basement for a decade and rape them. That's not possible.

  Meanwhile, the sick fuck did.

  And they had visited his house with women suffering one floor below.

  It was only a matter of days before Harold's friends and family figured out he was truly missing. A few months before they likely decided he was dead. And they would grieve. And they even had the right. Because they didn't know the depth of his depravity.

  I often wondered if I should compile up all the evidence and ship it out to them. I debated whether that was a kindness or the ultimate cruelty. A part of me wanted them to know that the man they were hurting over was nothing like the man they thought he was, that he had caused misery to countless others, that he wasn't worthy of it.

  But then I remembered how I watched a couple of girlfriends inside She's Bean Around one afternoon. One, a pretty strawberry blonde, obviously more shy, more timid, was trying to clearly, calmly, and emotionlessly explain to her brunette best friend that the latter's boyfriend had been coming on to her for months. It didn't matter that the strawberry blonde had explicit texts from said boyfriend, had proof that all she had ever done was tell him to stop texting her. The friend stood up, shrieking about minding her own goddamn business and leading him on and all kinds of bullshit.

  People were many things in many different situations.

  But, a great percentage of them the vast majority of the time were irrational and reactionary.

  Harold's family would likely scramble to discredit the evidence, claim it was some cruel joke, defend the man they knew. Because to not, they would have to admit that they were so fully, so completely deaf, dumb, and blind to the truth.

  So I just kept that shit to myself.

  It was fine.

  I was used to shouldering the knowledge of peoples' evilness.

  I had been doing it since I was a child.

  What was a few more years?

  If I lived that long.

  The longer she kept me alive, the better chance I had for getting away. Not because she would necessarily slack. It was more likely that she would lose her nerve to kill me. Now that I knew she wasn't a professional, that this was a personal mission, I knew a lot more about Evangeline Cruz than she would think I did.

  Once she got over the shock of my honesty, she would likely lose whatever nerve, whatever righteous anger had fueled her enough to follow through with her kidnapping plan.

  What then?

  Well, that was the question, wasn't it?

  She knew I was a merciless killer. She knew I had done it before and would do it again if left to my own devices. Would she risk opening that door and letting me go? Thinking, wrongly, that I might kill her. Maybe she would dose me, unlock the door, and run. Or, possibly, dose me, load me up back in her car again, and drive me back to my place so I was never any the wiser about her place. In case I got any ideas to come after her
.

  I wouldn't, of course.

  But I would have to respect that level of prudence.

  As I heard the distinct clicking of heels one floor above me, my head angled up to look at the ceiling, listening to the long stride, then a pause, then the stride again.

  She was pacing.

  I wasn't sure I had ever met an actual, real-life person who paced when they were stressed. I was mostly convinced it was a dramatic device used in film and TV.

  It went on for almost a half an hour too, only muffled occasionally by what I assumed was carpet, and the scream of a macaw that was all the proof I needed to show me that I wasn't losing my touch.

  Not having a lot of friends, or really any at all, I had a lot of free time. So I studied shit. At first, things useful to my lifestyle- how to navigate the dark web, basic coding, advanced hacking, disposal of remains, best killing methods, how to interrogate. You name it, I studied it. I was a motherfucking crime encyclopedia.

  But when that got stale, I just read random shit.

  I learned more tapping and scrolling away in front of my laptop than I did in all the years of school put together.

  Anything could be click-bait to me.

  How to write a horror film? Sure, why not.

  Migration patterns of North American birds? Eh, could be useful.

  How to dismantle a car fully and put it back together? I rarely drove, but why not learn that vital life skill anyway, right?

  And because they generally weren't topics of normal discussion on the rare occasion that I engaged in such a thing, it was good to know my brain hadn't done an Etch-a-Sketch and deleted all that old, less-than-useful information.

  I called that macaw, damnit.

  That was good if I do say so myself.

  Considering I had absolutely nothing to occupy myself with in the bare walls of my cell, I had to turn my attention to the one and only Evangeline Cruz to keep myself from going insane.

  I had heard of her, of course, when I had researched her father. Though, I didn't think she truly even knew the whole story of her life. If she did, I didn't think she'd be so broken up about her old man.

  It was possible she did know, but was too programmed to see how warped he was. It happened a fuckuva lot more often than people realized. It was becoming harder and harder in modern times for parents to get away with forcing children to believe antiquated or downright awful beliefs with public schools, the internet, and the fact that most people weren't ignorant assholes.

  But Alejandro Cruz had a unique opportunity with Evangeline that most parents no longer have. He raised her away from most outside influences. Judging by how little an online footprint I could find of him, and absolutely none of Evangeline, it was safe to say he just... kept that part of the world away from her. Which wouldn't be too hard given the remote parts of the world he generally traveled through with her in tow. There wasn't wifi or cell towers.

  She only knew what he wanted her to know.

  Because all it would take is ten minutes into a basic Google search to find out what I found out. You didn't even need the dark web.

  So she obviously never got the chance to do that.

  And when a beloved parent died, it wasn't exactly a common thought to go online and dig up their dirt.

  Had she not come after me, she likely would have been able to live a long life and go to her grave never knowing the true nature of the man who had obviously only shown her his good side.

  Even the vilest pieces of pond scum human beings often had a good side.

  They'd never be able to get away with what they got away with otherwise.

  I was starting to wonder if she was going to let things lie as her pacing got slower above me. But then there was a pause before the clicks moved in the telltale direction across the house over my head. A door. Then another. Then the click right above the stairs. Another pause. It was so quiet I could swear I could hear her taking, then letting out, a deep breath before she started moving downward, her pace slow and deliberate.

  "It's ironic," she said, moving toward me, hatred a burning thing in her eyes, "that you would bring him in for crimes you yourself are guilty of."

  I shook my head at that. "No, doll, his crimes are sure as fuck not my crimes."

  "He killed people. You kill people."

  "I don't give a fuck about criminals killing other criminals."

  "Then I don't know what his crimes were," she said, eyes squinting, head shaking.

  Right then, I felt it.

  It was so unfamiliar I almost didn't recognize it.

  Dread.

  I was dreading telling her the truth.

  Of all the asinine things to be feeling.

  And, at the end of the day, I believed in honesty when asked for it.

  So, even if my stomach was clenched up oddly at the idea, I gave it to her.

  "Across three continents and spanning three decades, Alejandro Cruz was known as a notorious, and viciously brutal, serial rapist."

  FIVE

  Evan

  It was like everything inside me shut down at once.

  My brain just blanketed, blocking out every thought except one.

  No.

  Just... no.

  He was lying. He had to be lying.

  There was no way my father, my good, giving, gentle, loving father was some piece of shit serial rapist. No freaking way. That wasn't possible.

  This was a man I had been beside daily my entire life. I had never seen him even catcall a woman before. He didn't leer. He didn't threaten. He didn't grab-ass, or make unwanted advances. In fact, I had only seen him dance or share a drink with a woman before. Everything was always friendly.

  Was my father a 'good' man in the traditional sense? Well, he killed people. So no.

  But I absolutely refused to believe he was some evil monster like Luce was suggesting. He had to have the name wrong. He had to have been mistaken.

  "Can't help you accept the truth if you are going to slip right into ignorant denial."

  "I'm not ignorant," I spat immediately, feeling my pulse start to pound in my throat and temples, making me immediately feel overheated even in the cool basement. "You're mistaken."

  "If you did any research at all into me, Evangeline, you would know what a ridiculous thing that is to say. I am never mistaken. I don't ever pull somebody in unless I know with one-hundred-and-ten percent certainty that they did what was accused of them."

  "Your math was off this time."

  "Get me a phone or laptop, and I can prove otherwise."

  The crazy thing was, even through the layer of denial, I heard nothing but a confident sincerity in his tone.

  But that being said, he thought he was fighting for his life. He would say anything to save his skin. And being that he was a lifelong criminal, it went to follow that he knew how to lie well. It wasn't like he could just walk around his life answering the typical 'hey, whatcha up to today' with the truth. Oh, hey Bill. Just dismembering some bodies with a hacksaw. Then maybe some Chinese takeout. You know, the usual.

  He was playing me.

  Case closed.

  And, hell, I couldn't even blame him for that.

  He probably lied about the cyanide too.

  True, my father did always carry it. And, yes, it was hidden in his rosary. But that was for situations where he was caught by a cartel and tortured or whatnot. Luce probably found out about it after he killed him, when he was going through his personal effects. He was almost scarily observant; he would have noticed that the one bead wasn't shiny and smooth like the others. He likely just cataloged that information and spewed it back at me to try to make me think twice about keeping him captive and, eventually, getting my vengeance.

  "Right. Like I would trust you with a laptop. The man who could make a weapon out of tinfoil."

  "While true, any laptop connected to the internet can be turned into an incendiary device, you need another device to activate that. So, what am I gonna d
o with it? Knock you over the head? Get real."

  Being a prisoner, he was supposed to be begging for my mercy, kissing my ass, trying to get on my good side.

  But was he doing that?

  No, of course not. Because I had to have the cocky, condescending, know-it-all, jackass prisoner.

  "No?" he asked, watching me with those deep, fathomless eyes in a way that I swear seemed to see right through me somehow, see into all my dark, cobwebbed corners, see all the things I wanted to keep hidden. And why that thought made a shiver of not discomfort, but anticipation, course through me was wildly beyond my comprehension. "Well, do yourself a favor, and power up a laptop, and do a quick search. It really won't take long to send you back down here to me. For some real answers. There are a lot of blanks I can fill in."

  "Because I should trust anything you have to say. You would do anything to try to save your own ass right now."

  "Would I?" he asked, lips quirking up ever-so-slightly. "You know, you ran out of here in such a hissy fit the last time that you forgot to make sure I threw out the tinfoil. But as you can see," he said, waving a hand toward the floor outside his cell where the foil could clearly be seen, "I tossed it out anyway."

  "Probably part of your grand plan," I grumbled. I was losing my argument and I knew it.

  "Right, because I could have anticipated exactly how this conversation would go. I must be a fucking genius."

  Honestly, I was starting to think he just might be.

  And that was a bit terrifying.

  Some two-bit brute, some mindless muscle, I could handle that. I had been around that a lot in my life. It was easy to outsmart someone who thought more with his dick than his brain.

  But Luce, this elusive, lethal, intimidatingly observant so-called vigilante was not a mindless brute. In fact, he wasn't brutish at all. A little abrasive? Sure. Maybe kinda cool? Yeah, that too. But in the brain department, I was pretty sure I was out of my league.

  I didn't like that at all.

  "Hardly," I said with a dramatic eye-roll. "Well, why don't you go ahead and get nice and cozy," I offered sarcastically, waving a hand to the cold, unyielding cement floor. "We can talk some more when you decide to stop being such a smartass."