Vigilante

by Jessica Gadziala

  But sometimes you didn't need to say anything to give something away.

  "Oh yeah?" he asked, mouth pressing into a firm line. "He was a fucking kiddie diddler? That was his thing?" he asked, tone angry. "I don't mess with that shit. Those fucks deserve to be put down. You did God's work there, kid. Though, it would have been just as poetic for him to end up in the penn with some burly ass biker with five kids at home he loves and hasn't been able to protect in a decade who doesn't take kindly to people on the streets who could prey on kids like his own. Ass full of countless dicks, that is the only fair payment for those shitheads. Aight. Aight. Well, your situation sucks. Know what else sucks? Dragging my ass out of the city where I got a fine piece just waiting to suck me dry every night."

  "G... for fuck's sake," Mickey hissed, shaking his head apologetically.

  "Oh fuck off. He's old enough. Yeah, so I don't like leaving a chick who could suck the paint off my truck, less she get any ideas of doing some shopping around in my absence. And I sure as fuck don't like ruining these kicks in that fucking wilderness," he said, waving a hand toward the door. "But we got product to protect up here."

  I was fourteen. I barely had enough 'street knowledge' to understand what he meant by 'product,' but I was still somehow putting it together.

  He didn't want to make the trek out of the city to come and check on his pot. But it needed to be watched. So people didn't come picking. So the weather or bugs didn't destroy it.

  And I was in no position to turn them down.

  First, because I was going to die in the wilderness without shelter and possible food coming to me.

  Second, I couldn't go back out of the mountains because I was technically missing.

  Third, as G said... I had shown them my hand.

  He owned me.

  "You want me to watch your pot," I guessed.

  "In exchange, you can have all the food we can have one of the boys trek up here. And this shack. I mean... dunno what the fuck to do with you after summer, but that's not our problem. For now, you can keep a roof and a full stomach. It's more than you'd get out there. And if you come out of these mountains, begging for food or money, it's only a matter of time before you're found. Then they'll question you. You're weak still, kid, you'd crack and give it all up. You'd be put away. Maybe in juvie. Maybe in a nuthouse. But away. That what you want?"

  "No." I wasn't trading one prison for another, not if I could help it anyway.

  "Good. Then Mickey here will give you the lowdown on growing the product. And harvesting it and shit. You'll do it. And you won't smoke any of it," he added with a look. "And you can stay here and eat and get some meat on your bones again, think about your future. Hell, I'll even be nice and give you a little slice once we get the product on the street. Deal?"

  Was there really any way I was going to turn that down?

  In my situation?

  There wasn't really even a choice.

  "Deal."

  So then I became a pot farmer.

  I got my crash course from Mickey. I was told to help myself to the food around and that more provisions would come up with Mickey and some guy named Ace in a couple weeks.

  "You know, we need to make sure you didn't croak on us or some shit," was his reasoning for the visit.

  I took care of the plants.

  I harvested and packaged it for distribution.

  Then I pack-muled it back with Mickey and Ace early that fall to where G was waiting in some nearby town.

  I pulled my hood up, and kept my head down, eating the McDonalds they bought me, pretending to not be listening.

  "You can't send him back into the woods, G. I know you're a vicious fuck, but he's just a kid."

  "He's a killer," G said nonchalantly. "He can handle himself."

  "Being a killer won't help him not freeze to death in the fucking mountains, G. He dies, we have no one to help next season."

  Appealing to G's business sense, Mickey knew, was always the best bet.

  "Alright, fuck, yes," G said, sighing somewhat dramatically. "He can come crash. But he doesn't leave the fucking building, got it? He's the new house cat."

  And I was. I was shuffled into the back of his SUV whose blackout windows made me relax slightly. Then we drove into New York City, a place even a child daddy-killer could disappear in. I was shuffled into what had to have been an abandoned office building in Washington Heights. I was given a room, a bed, some clothes - everything black like I preferred anyway- a laptop, a cell, and a - believe this shit or not - pile of dirty magazines.

  "Know your old man fucked you up," G had said when I eyed them skeptically. "But therein lays your salvation. Tits, ass, and pussy. That's all you need in life man - a good bitch, and money to spend. So, ah, yeah... don't leave the fucking building."

  That was about all the supervision I got.

  I learned this wasn't odd about two days later when I finally ventured downstairs to the sound of the men in G's operation hanging out. Half of his dealers were my age. It was no wonder he didn't see me as a kid.

  And that day, I stopped seeing myself as one too.

  And if I wasn't a kid anymore, I was responsible for myself. That meant I needed to get my head right; I needed to learn about this world I was suddenly in.

  So I read the manual, and got started on the laptop. I researched my father's murder. I researched a phrase I didn't understand about my father's friend whose name turned out to be Bill.

  Allegations of child molestation.

  Then I understood. I read article after article, website after website, about the topic.

  Child abuse.

  Molestation.

  Rape.

  I understood the concept that, while I had personally experienced them hands-on, I hadn't understood them intellectually.

  I puked for twenty-four hours straight once it sank in. Once I realized how fucked up it truly was.

  That December, just shy of Christmas, G came into my room, dropping a stack of money on my desk without a word.

  The 'slice' he had promised me.

  My 'slice' was five grand.

  Five thousand dollars.

  I may have just turned fifteen, but I wasn't stupid. That was a lot of fucking money.

  And because I wasn't stupid, I knew better than to do what all the other dealers G had did - blow it. No. I stashed it. I carved up the floorboards under my bed, stashed it in a backpack, and piled all my shit under the bed to make sure no curious eyes and thieving fingers got ideas.

  That winter, I studied the internet, the things I could find.

  By spring, I was ready to head back into the Adirondacks. I stacked a backpack full of books. I brought as much food as the three of us could carry. Then I holed up for six months in the shack in the woods.

  Then back to the city.

  Where I learned about the dark web from some of G's men who bought their guns there, who found new buyers for product there.

  Then back to the mountains.

  Shower. Rinse. Repeat.

  Until I was eighteen, fresh back from the mountains, excited to have my laptop back because I was eyeballs deep in my obsession with the dark web, with all the secrets that lay within it.

  I found the men.

  You know, the other men who had run a train on me six years before? Yeah, I fucking found them.

  And I had an idea...

  See, even though I spent half my year in a cabin in the mountains, the other half was inside the belly of a criminal enterprise. G was a ruthless leader. I had seen a lot of torture and dying in the years I spent with him.

  Necessary evils, Mickey had defended with a shrug.

  And those words, they buried deep. They rooted. Eventually, they stretched out and broke the surface again.

  Necessary evil.

  Yes, I believed that.

  I believed that some evil was necessary in life.

  Like taking out baby rapers.

  So you might call it fate then.


  Almost as soon as the thought first formed in my mind, there was a crash.

  And all you heard was people yelling.

  NYPD. Get down. Get your hands up, motherfucker. We got you now, G.

  I heard them making their way around the lower floor, knew they would be coming up next.

  I threw myself down, ripping the floorboards up, grabbing the backpack that had needed to be upgraded to a hiking one to hold all the cash, shoved the laptop inside, threw the straps on, grabbed my cell, tossed myself out onto the fire escape, and made my way up.

  Because G was smart. The roof was only a three-foot jump from the one next door. That one was only four feet from the next. And once you were two buildings over, you could rush down the fire escape there, and disappear down a back alley.

  I had no record.

  I was the house cat.

  No one knew who I was.

  I barely ever went outside.

  Once I was on the street, I was safe.

  I was getting ready to make the jump to the second building when I caught sight of G on the street below, looking up at me, his hands cuffed behind his back. I froze, unsure, feeling like a traitor. G might not have been a father, or even a proper big brother figure, but he was someone who gave me a way out, who saved me. It felt disloyal to run.

  But he looked at me for a long second before his face broke into a smile. He gave me a reassuring nod before he was led away.

  It took away the guilt.

  Six months later, after finding he had been sentenced and shipped to - gotta love the irony here - the Adirondack Correctional Facility, I took my new fake, top-of-the-line IDs, and I took my ass for a visit.

  I owed him that at least.

  "Got your balls finally, kid," he said as soon as he sat down, grinning.

  G wasn't the kind of man who was miserable he got sent upstate. Because G had spent a lot of his young adulthood in and out of jail and prison. To him, it was almost like coming home.

  But he got a dime this time, and his whole organization got rounded up with him, so I wasn't sure he would be taking it in stride.

  "That shit was fucked," I said, it being my emotionally crippled way of expressing my sympathy and my sadness at losing my sort of makeshift family.

  "Fucked, yeah. Inevitable, maybe," he said, shrugging. "I got my hustle going here already. Shit will be comfy cozy for the next ten years. What about you?"

  "What about me?" I asked, confused. Was he... worried about me?

  "Asking some odd questions lately," he said, giving me a look because we knew we could be overheard. I knew exactly what he was talking about. Because most normal eighteen-year-olds don't ask about where to buy lye in the neighborhood. And any hardened criminal would know what that was about.

  "It's time for some people to... show their penitence."

  He snorted at that. "Thought you handled that as a kid, yo."

  "Two out of eight," I agreed, nodding.

  "Shit," he hissed, looking disgusted. "Aight. Tell you what," he said, all business, making me stiffen a bit. "I got my hustle," he said, and I knew better than to ask what it was. "But I want my commissary filled every week," he said, and I had a feeling there was going to be something interesting to follow. G wasn't the type to ask for shit for free. He wasn't expecting me to take the money I earned over the years, and funnel it to him through his prison account. "Remember that place you vacationed every summer?" he asked, obviously meaning the shack.

  "Hard to forget."

  "Maybe I took a cue from you and your clever hiding technique." He knew about my stash under my bed. That didn't surprise me. You couldn't piss in his place without him knowing. And I was away for long stretches of time. So he was telling me that he had something - money or pot or both - stashed under the bed in the shack in the mountains. "Do the math. Cap on my commissary is one-fifty a week. Fifty-two weeks a year, ten years."

  Almost eighty grand.

  That number maybe should have been shocking. But one had to figure that each pot crop each year made G pure profit of over two million. And that was only part of his operation. He also bought from others and sold.

  "The rest..." he said, waving a hand casually. "You did me good. You've been through shit. I support your life goals. Make it happen."

  "What about when you get out?" I asked, not wanting him, the person who gave me a shot in life, to leave with nothing.

  His smile, though, was wicked. "You aren't the only good saver, kid. I got me plenty to get back on my feet. Don't you worry. You do you. And don't forget my commissary. Oh, and kid," he said as he went to stand, turning back. "Eddy's on 23rd." At my quizzical look, he shrugged. "Answer to one of those strange questions you were asking." Where to get lye. I felt myself smile, unable to help it. "Cash is always smart." With that, he was led toward the door. "Don't forget my commissary."

  I never did.

  G got out for good behavior in eight years.

  But every week, I was putting in the one-fifty. Fifty-two weeks a year, no excuses. A little over sixty-two grand, all said and done.

  What was stashed under the shack in the woods, under the actual shack itself, it turned out, since there was nothing under the floorboards but dirt, was over two-hundred k.

  It funded my mission as I tracked down and killed the men who hurt me and countless others.

  Then, worried, I took off to China for a spell, studied some more, did some more research.

  Then I came back.

  I got good.

  I got so good that I never needed to run anymore.

  I got so good that I could lure them to Navesink Bank, bring them back to my place, one after another, and never even have one cop sniff around me.

  I had the dark web to thank for that.

  And I had G and Mickey to thank for the dark web.

  They became my number one and number two contacts in my pager system. I didn't hear from them often, but every once in a while, they heard about, as G insisted on calling them, a 'kiddie diddler,' knowing those were my favorite bastards to take down.

  G got free and started a new operation in the city. So far, never getting caught. I didn't know, and didn't need to, who he had farming the pot in the mountains where I had spent so much of my time. I wished him nothing but the best, as odd as maybe that was given he wasn't exactly a good man.

  That being said, neither was I.

  I was as bad as they came really.

  But I did some good, just as G and Mickey had done.

  Eventually, I did seek out counseling, when the dreams made me wake up retching, when I couldn't sleep for weeks on end. Most were quacks, complete and utter wastes of time and money. But there were two or three who gave some insight, who helped me get over some of the shame.

  Some.

  I was convinced there was no way to get rid of it all.

  There was a part of me that would always be that little boy with his face in a pillow, the slightly older, but still small, boy with six men using him brutally, the young teen who had his body carved up by a man while he raped me.

  I would always be that kid, somewhere underneath.

  There would always be that ugliness, those wounds that could never truly heal.

  And I had done a good job most of my life never letting anyone see that, never letting anyone see what I kept behind the vigilante persona. I never let many people see the damage, both physical in the form of the scars, or psychological in the form of the memories.

  "Until you," I concluded, taking what felt like the first deep breath I had in over an hour. That was how long it took to give her all the dark, ugly details of my life. An hour. We were almost going to be late.

  Evan pressed her lips together, taking several long, deep breaths. She had tried, I would give her all the credit in the world, not to show any emotion during my story. She had held her breath or slow-breathed. She had blinked frantically.

  In the end, her emotions won out. The tears streamed as I spoke,
ones she didn't even bother trying to swat away because just as soon as she would, new ones would replace them.

  But she didn't sob.

  She didn't ask me to stop.

  She took it in.

  Then she did the healthy thing, she purged it through her tears.

  It was the only way a well-adjusted person could receive that information.

  I didn't blame her.

  In fact, I had reached out as I finished to swipe away the remaining streaks on her cheeks.

  She moved inward, curling in against my chest, nuzzling her face into my neck, planting a sweet kiss to the side of the column of my throat.

  "I meant what I said," she said, arm around my back squeezing me tight.

  "What, doll?"

  "I meant it when I said it doesn't matter," she said, making my stomach tighten. She couldn't have meant that, not really. Right? "I'm sorry that happened to you. That is wrong on levels I can't even express, Luce. But it is even more proof of what a good man you are. That you were able to survive that, to break the cycle. So many abused kids become abusers. But not you. You were stronger than that. And you didn't curl up in a ball either. You went out there and you systematically rid the world of all the others like your father and his friends."

  "By killing them," I specified, not wanting to mince words.

  "A fitting punishment," she insisted.

  "Why?" I asked, the word choked-sounding.

  "Why what?" she asked, kissing me under my ear.

  "Why would you accept a guy like me, Ev?"

  "I don't seem to have a choice."

  "What the fuck is that supposed to mean?" I asked, stiffening. Did she think I would somehow... force her to stay with me? Christ, did she actually think I was someone who would...

  "It means I'm in love with you, Luce," she said, shocking the shit out of me enough to completely shut up my swirling thoughts. "So of course I accept you. Sad, dark, twisted," she went on, shrugging. "Scars and all. I love it all, Luce."

  I had led a colorful life.

  I had seen things most would never see.

  I had done unspeakable things, but had seen just as many wonderful ones.

  I had had a family.

  I had made friends.

  Never before.

  Never once before, not in my entire life.