The Good Kill

by Kurt Brindley

  “What do you mean?”

  “Oh, Killian, I don’t have the strength to talk about this right now. Please, it’s nothing you need to hear anyway, it’s all so far in the past. Let’s just focus on you right now, okay?”

  “Wait, RJ. This is about me, about us. I know it happened a long time ago, I know we were only teenagers, but you breaking things off between us the way you did was devastating to me. By that time I had lost so much in my life... my mother, my god, then you abandoning me the way you did... it just tore me apart. I deserve to know what happened between us, RJ. Please.”

  Through her tears, reluctantly, she told Killian everything, everything that she had been carrying around with her since then, its weight like the largest mountain on her back. She began by telling him how much she had loved him back then, how it had hurt her to have to turn her back on him just as much as it hurt him. Then she grew quiet for a moment and the tears fell harder as she drew up the strength and courage she needed to go on. She then wiped the tears from her eyes, stiffened herself straight within her seat, and, while looking off somewhere just above Killian’s head, she explained how her father had always been affectionate toward her. Even as a child, he would come into her room and, after reading to her, lie with her in bed while she slept. To keep away the nightmares he would tell her. She grew up thinking it was normal for a father to sleep with his daughter. Then, as she got older, came the massages, massages to her shoulders, then to her back, then to her legs, to help her get a better night sleep he would explain. Then finally, right before her sixteen birthday, came the night that the intimate massages were no longer enough for her father and he began—

  Killian couldn’t bear to hear the rest. “Why didn’t you tell me, RJ?” he said cutting her off.

  “Because I knew you, Killian. I knew what you would do to him if I had told you. I couldn’t let you ruin your life over some piece of shit like my father.”

  There was an uncomfortable silence between them until Killian finally said, “What about your mother? Didn’t she suspect anything?”

  “I’m sure of it. But she just kept burying herself deeper and deeper into the bottle until finally, after my father’s death, I guess she just couldn’t face it any longer.” She looked up at Killian guiltily after she said this.

  They were quiet for a long time, lost in their own sad reflections, until Killian looked up at RJ suddenly and said, “Your father’s death. The car falling on him in the garage. It happened our junior year, right around the time you stopped seeing me... stopped seeing everyone.” He took her hands in his. “RJ, his death wasn’t an accident was it?”

  RJ’s tears fell harder now. Unable to look at Killian, her lips quivered as she said in a whisper, “No, Killian, it wasn’t an—” She gasped, unable to speak the words. It appeared that she was going to lose herself in her tears when she took in a deep breath and somehow found the strength to look the boyfriend of her youth directly in the eye. She stared at him for a moment and a brief smile crossed her lips momentarily as she remembered fondly what they once had together. But then the smile disappeared and she withdrew her hands from his. With firm resolution and not one shred of shame, she said, “No, Killian, it was no accident. I murdered Reggie Joe Gunther, the piece of shit I once regarded as my father.”

  PART TWO

  They carried all they could bear, and then some, including a silent awe for all the terrible power of the things they carried.

  Tim O’Brien, THE THINGS THEY CARRIED

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  Savage watched the crowd’s reaction closely as Toni completed her dance routine and walked off the stage like a naked queen. All at once just about everyone in the club transitioned from leaning forward in their chairs as if they were magnetized, being drawn to her while she was on stage, to collapsing back in their chairs, satiated, spent, contented after she had exited. He could also tell by Cheri’s demeanor as she danced her way onto the stage as the next act, that she too could feel the flaccidity of the crowd, a crowd now seemingly more interested in their drinks and in hustling outside to grab a smoke than in her routine. Savage, too, felt the same way. It was as if he had just had the most satisfying sex and now all he wanted was to be left alone to smoke and reflect. Smiling, he sat down at his desk and lit a Newport so he could smoke while reliving in his mind the pure sexual delight of Toni’s performance. He smiled because, despite all the men and women in the club who lusted after her so obviously, he knew that he alone would be the one who would be making love with her tonight.

  He took a long drag on his cigarette and realized that he had just said in his mind the actual words “making love.” He laughed at himself derisively. Making love. What the fuck did he know about it? Not a god damned thing. A pimp ain’t got no time for no cracker-ass love making bullshit. Leave that weak-ass game to all the soft mother fuckers out there and their bitch-ass hos.

  There was a knock at the door. Upon Savage’s command, Blackman entered the office.

  “We tight?” Savage asked quickly, startled by the sudden interruption of his frustrated reveries.

  Blackman closed the door and stood at semi-attention. “Well, we are as far as Toni is concerned. A crew from New Orleans will pick her up at Druid Hill Park tomorrow at ten a.m. sharp. Just like last time.”

  “Damn that’s early. I was planning on working that ass all night long. You gonna need to come by my crib to make sure she’s ready.”

  “Wait,” Blackman said as a look of concern shot across his face. “You’re bringing her to your house? You never bring any of your girls to your house.”

  “Damn right I am,” Savage shot back. “What the fuck’s it to you whether I’m bringing the bitch back to my crib or not anyways?”

  “Well, for one thing,” Blackman explained, “it’s not part of the original plan. Last minute changes always add additional risk. Especially since New Orleans already has her credentials. By eight a.m. tomorrow, the protocols will trigger which will enable them to begin tracking her. If things go sideways, we don’t want those bastards showing up at your doorstep first thing in the morning looking for her.”

  “What the fuck you talkin’ about if things go sideways,” Savage said as he sat up in his chair and leaned in toward his security manager. “You mean those thugs can track her down right now if they wanted to? They could, right now, show up in my club with mother fucking guns blazing. What kind of bullshit is that, you dumb mother fucker?”

  “No, Mr. Savage,” Blackman said, his patience obviously thinning. “They can’t track her right at this moment. Like I just said, it’s set up so that beginning at eight a.m. tomorrow, they’ll have access to the satellite signal that tracks the chip we implanted into her. It’s the same system we’ve been using to track all of your prostitutes ever since I took over as club security, except that once the transaction has been completed, they’ll be able to track her and we won’t.”

  Savage grounded out his cigarette in an ashtray on his desk and blew out a thick plume of smoke with a sigh. “Shit, Black,” he said behind the cloud, “whatever happened to the days when all a pimp had to do to claim a ho was tat his name across her titty?”

  “Well,” Blackman said after a moment of thoughtful consideration of the question, “you’re no longer just in the business of local retail sales, Mr. Savage. You’re in the business of international trade now, so you have to be able to track your product and transactions accordingly.”

  Savage nodded. “True that,” he said softly. He then sat in silent reflection for a moment before saying, “As much as I hate to lose that piece of ass, it sure is bringing us a nice return.” But then, as if having second thoughts, he said. “Can we still track her though? I mean, even after they pick her up, is there a way we can still keep tabs on her? Just to see where she ends up.”

  Blackman shook his head. “No, Mr. Savage. Just like you don’t want them to be able to track her to you prior to purchase, they don’t want you to be able to
track her to them afterwards. Once the money is transferred, protocols will automatically kick in that will terminate our access to her credentials.”

  “Damn,” Savage said dejectedly.

  “But speaking of returns,” Blackman said, changing the subject. “Like I’ve been telling you all along, I think you need to get more aggressive on your expansion strategy. Even with how well this club is doing now, it’s not near enough to clean all the cash you got coming in from all the Chinese fentanyl you’ve been moving.”

  “Yeah, yeah, I know. My head’s been so wrapped up in Toni’s sweet pussy that I’ve been letting things slip. You still think we should stay away from The Block?”

  “Definitely. Don’t want anything downtown. Too high profile. I found a couple of suitable locations that you could get up and running for around $250K.”

  “Two-fitty? What the fuck, Black?”

  “Not your money, Mr. Savage. The bank’s money. You’ll get a loan. Let the bank take the risk. Just like we did for the club.”

  “Fuck that. We already making our own bank. Why I want more white-collar crooks up in my business?”

  Blackman ignored the question, having had heard Savage’s ghetto argument against the man many times before. “I’ve also found two additional laundromats that would fit perfectly within our portfolio. I’m sure you could convince the current owners to sell at a price to your liking. With another club and several laundromats in operation, you should have no problem cleaning the money from all the additional product you’re moving.”

  Savage lit up another Newport and blew out the smoke from his first drag with a laugh. “Look at my man, Black. Brought him on as a favor to run security for me, and now he’s actin’ all Bill Gates on me up in here. Fuckin’ washed up beat cop turned business manager. Go ahead on, Mr. Lars Blackman.”

  “That’s right, Mr. Savage. You did do me a favor. One that I won’t forget and one I would like to make sure you receive a significant return on your investment for.”

  There was a knock at the door.

  “Okay then,” Savage said, “you make sure everything’s tight for tomorrow. And you damn well make sure those bitcoins or whatever the fuck you call them—”

  “No, no. It’s not bitcoins anymore,” Blackman said, cutting his boss off to explain. “Monero is the virtual currency that we’re—”

  “Well, whatever the fuck you wanna call it,” Savage said, cutting Blackman off in return, “just make damn sure the damn funds are transferred to our account before they get anywhere close to Toni. After the money’s good, then maybe we talk about your ideas for expanding my business. Now go ahead on and open that door.”

  Blackman opened the door and Toni entered wearing a sheer silk kimono with nothing on underneath. She walked straight over to Savage and sat on his lap.

  Savage smacked her bottom. “Now how rude is that? You walk by your daddy and don’t even tell him hello.”

  Toni took Savage’s face in her hands and kissed him deeply. “You’re the only daddy I have,” she said softly into his ear.

  ✽ ✽ ✽

  Back in his office, after a cursory scan over the video feeds, Blackman leaned back in his chair, kicked his feet up on the desk, and took out his phone. He considered playing a quick couple hands of poker, but he instead opened up the photo album app and navigated to a folder simply labeled “RB.” He opened the folder and began flipping slowly through the many photos he had discreetly taken of his daughter performing on stage back before Savage had decided to put her on the market. There were many photos, hundreds maybe, most in which she was completely naked. It took him a long time to go through them all.

  Afterward he opened up the GPS tracking app and tapped the input box at the top of the screen labeled “Asset Tracking ID.” A list of previously entered IDs dropped down below the box, with each ID correlating to each woman and girl who belonged to Savage’s stable of prostitutes. Not only did Blackman lie to his boss about his ability to track Toni after the sale at the auction site had gone through, he never told him that he had been tracking her sister Ruby Black’s movements ever since she had been sold off earlier in the year.

  The way the auction site was supposed to work was that once the buyer had transferred into the seller’s account the agreed upon cryptocurrency price for the purchase of the product – the products in the case for the auction site Blackman was currently using to execute sales on behalf of Savage varied anywhere from illicit arms and ammunition to the most dangerous narcotics to highly priced women, girls, and boys – the automated system security protocols were set to automatically terminate the seller’s ability to track the product while simultaneously activating the buyer’s tracking ability. However, once Savage had decided to sell off Ruby Black, Blackman had secretly instructed dr34d0nyx, the hacker he had been keeping on retainer long before being hired on by Savage, to hack into the auction site and set it up so that Blackman could continue to track Ruby’s whereabouts, even after the transaction for her purchase had been completed.

  While dr34d0nyx was used primarily to run identity theft schemes for Savage, via Blackman’s handling, he – or her; Blackman had no idea whether the hacker was male or female; however, mentally he always pictured the hacker as a he and, because of onyx being part of the hacker’s handle, he had always assumed the hacker was black – was also tapped from time to time for other illicit online activities, activities such as finding the sites hidden deep within the Dark Web that could be used for trafficking both Savage’s girls and his drugs. Once Savage had decided to put Toni on the selling block, Blackman had once again instructed dr34d0nyx to do the same technological magic that would allow him to continue to track Toni, just as he was able to still track her sister Ruby.

  Blackman selected the top entry on the dropdown list of IDs, the ID which correlated to the chip implanted into Ruby’s left breast. Once her ID was inputted into the app and, once the GPS satellite locked onto the chip’s signal, the map of the globe that was revolving slowly on the screen began to zoom down fast as it tracked the signal’s location, eventually landing on a coordinate that turned out to be right in the heart of downtown New Orleans.

  The GPS tracking system Blackman was using to track Savage’s chip-implanted product also provided a wide variety of other useful data other than just current location, data such as: a history of the product’s movements; the date and time the product moved from one location to another; the speed which the product moved from one location to another; and the length of time the product remained at a single location.

  Blackman copied the coordinates of the blinking green blip and then opened up the phone’s native navigation app. He pasted the coordinates into the app’s search bar. Similar to the GPS tracking app, the map for the navigation app zoomed quickly down onto the coordinates’ exact location. A red animated navigation pin now identified the target location instead of a blinking green blip. He switched the map from street to satellite mode. With his fingers he zoomed the view down farther until he could see that Ruby was located somewhere within The Shops of Canal Place. He zoomed the map view around the outside of the upscale mall for a while, looking at it from various angles and heights as he tried to imagine what his daughter was doing right at that moment, what she was wearing, whom she was with.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  Just about anywhere else, McKnight’s massive size would have drawn the attention of those around him, as he was impossible not to notice. However, he wasn’t anywhere else; he was in the largest casino east of the Mississippi, and those around him now wouldn’t have noticed if King Kong was walking by as they all were singularly focused on their singular pursuit of winning house money. Only the small army of sexy servers making their continual rounds with complimentary drinks had any chance of being noticed by the gamblers. Besides, McKnight wasn’t the only large man in the casino: there were a whole security team of men, far from McKnight’s overgrown size, but still large nonetheless, patrolling not just t
he casino, but throughout the entire resort. With so many large, severe men clad in blue blazers and khaki pants roaming around, their abundance had made them mostly invisible to the gamblers.

  And while McKnight may have not been noticed by the gamblers as he made his way through the glitzy casino, he was far from being unseen. He knew from the three years he had worked security for the resort that every inch of the casino – its lobby, its moon-shaped bar and lounge area, its world-class restaurant, its large, noisy area off the lobby filled with hundreds of perpetually manned slot machines, and especially its crowded gambling floor – was covered from top-to-bottom, side-to-side, by the all-seeing eyes and all-hearing ears of high-resolution security cameras, each with pan, zoom, and highly sensitive audio monitoring capabilities that were monitored by a six-man team twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, three-hundred-and-sixty-five days a year.

  Back when working the casino he used to get bored silly whenever he pulled a shift on the security monitors. Ostensibly, his job on the monitors was to be on the wary lookout for any of the many ways gamblers might try to cheat the house – part of the indoctrination for new hires to the security team was for them to receive instruction by reformed gambling cheats on the ploys they had used, ploys such as card switching, or hand mucking as it’s known in the industry, working with a partner to pull off roulette color ups, how to recognize slot machine bill validator devices, how to perform dice slides, among many other illegal gambling systems – however, mostly what he did during his eight-hour shifts monitoring the security cameras was watch as gambler after desperate gambler threw away money he or she could ill afford to lose. Well, actually they weren’t throwing their money away: they were throwing it right into Petite Louie’s already well-resourced coffers, making the already insanely-rich daddy’s boy even richer. McKnight had to smile when thinking back how it always used to drive him nuts when working the monitors how, regardless who it was he was pulling duty with, they would always have to point whenever someone was spotted on the floor picking their nose or digging into their ass. Things could get pretty silly during those eight hours, especially during the night shifts.