Within this nightmare, Toni once again found herself being held hostage back in the Fantasy Plus sex room, the room where the hell of her present living nightmare had begun. Everything was as it had been: the oppressiveness she had felt from the confining, dank room was the same; the unsettling, lingering sweet smell of too much perfume and cologne mixing with the smell of too much sweat and sex was the same; the bestial men holding her captive were the same.
The pimp Jerome Savage and his bodyguard nephew T-Rex looked on while Lars Blackman lay fully on top of her holding her down. As she struggled to escape from beneath Blackman’s crushing weight, she kept commanding herself to wake up. But she didn’t wake. She couldn’t wake. Not even after a frightening, primal scream penetrated the unconsciousness of her nightmare and sent further chills of horror down her spine was she able to will herself back into consciousness. At first she thought the scream may have been hers, until she realized that, from Blackman’s suffocating weight upon her chest, she could barely breathe. The exertion it took to let out such a resounding scream would have been impossible.
As she struggled futilely to both wake herself from the nightmare and to free herself from beneath Blackman’s massive body, Blackman stabbed a needle deep into her arm and released a syringe-full of heroin into her. The drug made its way through her vein like a venomous snake, slithering up her arm, into the heart, through the lungs, back into the heart, until finally making its viperous way up through the carotid arteries into her brain, where, at last, it struck out, sinking its fangs deep into the vulnerable gray matter and releasing its malevolent venom.
Just as she had when first falling victim to the drug, she looked up through a blurring vision to see Savage and T-Rex towering above her. This time, within the nightmare, instead of looking down at her with a languid sadistic indifference as they had done in reality, they looked down upon her with a hungry, sadistic delight while laughing maniacally. But then they were gone, blocked out by Blackman’s pale face, his green eyes staring lustily into the green of hers. He forced a vicious kiss upon her, his tongue slithering hungrily into her mouth like the heroin snake had the brain. He tasted putrid, toxic. She began to gag, wanting to vomit. In between the disgusting kisses, as his large, vice-like hands began working to spread her legs, he kept demanding that she call him daddy.
Upon hearing a second, louder, more frightening scream, Toni was now absolutely certain it wasn’t she who was doing it. She couldn’t possibly have screamed. Her father’s mouth continued to cover hers in a blasphemous, repulsive kiss, and his piercing tongue continued to snake deep inside it. Even as he forced her legs open and she found she was powerless to prevent his penetration, she couldn’t scream. She could barely gather the air to breathe. The incessant, defiling ramming between her legs felt as if it were splitting her in two. The pain from it burned like fire, with each successive incestual thrust spreading the flame from between her legs to her entire body.
The third scream was so loud and exploded up from the depths below her with such force that it knocked her off the couch and sent her sprawling onto the floor. Uncertain whether she was still trapped within the nightmare or not, she looked around trying to get her bearings. Everything was black. She didn’t know where she was or how she had gotten there. Even though she was alone now, her father’s painful violation throbbed and burned between her legs as if he continued to violate her. But, despite the pain, the screaming that had scared her so that she fell off the couch demanded her attention. It was no longer a far-off abstraction: it was now a constant primal wailing, guttural but piercing, sounding like the death shrieks of a wild beast as it was being slayed. She felt the floor with the palms of her hands. It vibrated. The screams were coming from below.
Even as she was being drawn toward them, she couldn’t tell if the screams were real or if they were part of the nightmare trip she was on. She couldn’t tell even as her sister Whitney stood at the door to the basement and opened it for her. Whitney said nothing to her as Toni approached, she just stood there holding the door, her naked body writhing as if she were dancing some Satanic dance to the beat of the discordant screams. When Toni hesitated at the top of the stairwell, afraid to walk down into the unknown of the depths below, Whitney shoved her. Toni stumbled halfway down the stairs before recovering her balance, her shriek from the sudden fall lost among the screams rising from below. Standing there in the middle of the stairwell with the screams close to driving her mad, all she wanted to do, all she was willing herself to do, was to run, to turn around and run back up the stairs and run out of the house, to run away, run away from it all, run all the way back to the safety and mundanity of her former sober life. But Whitney was there, right behind her, continuing to push her down the steps, demanding Toni to rescue her, to not let her die.
With each unstable step leading her down into the shadows from which the screams emerged, shapes within the shadows also began to emerge. One shape appeared to be towering over the other. As she neared the bottom, she could make out distinctly from which of the two shapes the screams originated. Whitney gave her one final push.
Astaghfirullah!
A long blade just missed Toni’s face as she landed on the back of the larger shape, the one screaming out nonsense, the one swinging the blade at the other shape sitting in the chair screaming out for what little remained of his life. The blade continued on its arc toward those screams, but her impact threw it off its path and it penetrated only partially through the neck of the shape in the chair, just under the chin. As she scratched and clawed at the face of the black, murderous shape whose back she was on, herself screaming unintelligible words into its black ear, she saw the head of the shape in the chair slowly tip over to its right, like the slow-motion felling of a tree. But instead of falling to the floor among where the hacked limbs and pools of blood lay, the head, not completely severed from its neck, hung there by a thin strand of something – muscle? tendons? – and stared at Toni through blank, upside down eyes. Savage’s eyes. The sight took Toni to the deepest depths of horror that she had ever witnessed. She knew that if she didn’t kill the black beast of a shape of whose back she was clung to, the beast that had just killed her only chance of finding her sister, would kill her as well.
Like a possessed beast herself, she ripped at the black shape’s eyes and face, her nails digging into its flesh and tearing off an entire black layer of its skin. She flung the black flesh to the floor and continued her attack. But she wasn’t fast enough to rip out its eyes. The shape reached back and grabbed her by the hair. In an instant, she was flying in the air toward the cinderblock wall. She hit it hard. Her right shoulder took the brunt of it, but still her head gave it a good whack and she fell unconscious to the cold, blood-soaked dirt floor.
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
Without his balaclava, Killian felt exposed, naked. Everything was wrong, had gone wrong from the beginning when he first saw the drugged-out woman upstairs on the couch. She wasn’t supposed to be there. She wasn’t supposed to be anywhere in the house. She wasn’t part of the profile. Savage never brought his women home. With all the pills spilled everywhere around her though, he thought for sure she would never awake, not during the operation. Why the fuck didn’t he chloroform her like he should have?
When Killian was still a whole man before the explosion, he never panicked. He had known fear many times, but he had, through both disposition and training, always managed the fear, never allowing it to become anything more than a focusing adrenaline booster. But right now, with his mission gone awry, he panicked. He looked at the woman lying unconscious on the floor soaked with the pimp’s blood. Why had she attacked him? Didn’t she realize he was there to free her from a life of prostitution and bondage? His balaclava was lying on the floor. He grabbed it and put it back on, as if by wearing it he could magically hide from the shit storm that the operation had become. He didn’t notice that it had been lying in the blood and had absorbed it like a sponge. Hoping she wa
sn’t dead, his only focus was the woman and getting her help.
He knelt into the blood and put two fingers to her neck. She wasn’t dead. He pulled open an eyelid. The pupil was nothing more than a pinprick. He grabbed his bloodied gear and shoved it into the backpack. He slung the backpack on over his shoulders and picked up the naked woman. She was slippery from blood.
His panic intensified. He was back in Mosul. The girl. If he didn’t get her out of there she would die. Just like the others.
Astaghfirullah! Astaghfirullah! Astaghfirullah…
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
Wanting to get himself the hell out of Baltimore as fast as he could, Killian’s initial reaction was to slam his heavy-booted foot down into the Cuda’s accelerator as far as it would go and haul ass out of there. But fortunately for him some modicum of rational thinking was able to scramble its way through the frenzied signals that were pinging around in his head. As was evidenced by the eerie blue glow emanating from nearly every street corner and from the corners of many of the buildings, Baltimore’s inner city was covered end-to-end with closed-circuit television cameras monitoring its crime-weary denizens’ every move. To not draw attention to himself, or to the naked, blood-covered woman sitting unconscious in the seat next to him, and to also keep the roar out of the Barracuda’s powerful 360 cubic inch performance-built motor, he had to force himself to take it slow. Barely placing any pressure on the accelerator, the car grumbled its way slowly through North Baltimore’s sleepy neighborhoods.
Unlike the car’s slow cruising speed, Killian’s mind was still racing dangerously out of control as the Cuda crept its way down East Oliver Street, its haunting abandoned buildings and overgrown vacant lots passing him by unnoticed. Doubtful, paranoid thoughts prevailed. Even if he hadn’t yet fallen under the leery eye of one of the cameras, chances were he had been spotted by someone as he carried the unconscious woman from the back of the pimp’s house through the narrow paths and alleyways that connected the back-to-back row house neighborhoods in a sort of off-the-grid network. If he had been made by someone other than the cameras, he only hoped that the unwritten but highly regulated “no snitching” code of the street would apply to his situation. But he couldn’t count on it.
It wasn’t until he reached the end of Oliver Street and was staring at the scarred and defaced stone wall that surrounded the historic Green Mount Cemetery that he realized he had missed his right turn two blocks back onto Hartford Avenue. This navigational error, yet another costly mistake, meant instead of being able to make a quick exit to North Avenue, the road that would lead him to the expressway and out of the city, he would now have to loop all the way around the cemetery to reach it. All the time he had spent studying his escape route online and casing it out beforehand in his old pickup truck was wasted. He remained stopped in the road for a moment and he tried to mentally glue himself back together before making the left-only turn onto Ensor Street.
After making a slow and cautious way around the cemetery, he was preparing to turn left off Greenmount Avenue onto North Avenue when the traffic light changed from green to yellow. Without thinking, he goosed the gas just enough for him to make the turn before the light changed to red. However, the increased speed sharpened the turn, which caused the unconscious woman to loll over onto him like a lifeless doll. He had been concentrating so hard on keeping the car at a moderate, inconspicuous pace while at the same time straining his ears for the wailing of any sirens, that he had forgotten for a time that she was even there. Her unexpected spill onto his shoulder shocked him out of his focus, causing him to jerk the steering wheel radically farther to the left. This sudden move sent the car careening into the opposite lane and directly into the path of an oncoming delivery truck. The truck flashed on its high beams and laid into its horn. Killian over compensated with another radical jerk to the steering wheel, this time to the right, just as the truck swerved by. While his moved cleared him from the wrath of the truck and returned him fishtailing into his proper lane, the force from the sudden course correction threw the woman off him and whipped her head with a sharp crack into the passenger window. She bounced off the window and, for a split second, appeared to be sitting up and awake, but then her eyes rolled back into her head and she once again returned to unconsciousness as she collapsed back into the chair and slowly slumped over against the passenger door.
Killian regarded the woman only briefly before frantically checking his mirrors. Thankfully, it appeared the truck had been able to avoid sideswiping any of the parked cars that lined the street and was continuing on its way. Satisfied there would be no negative consequences from the truck, he then swiveled his head around in all directions looking for traffic cameras and witnesses. Finding neither, he realized then that because of his anxious adrenaline rush, he was driving way over the speed limit. He immediately laid off the gas and resumed his steady pace. The traffic lights cooperated with him and remained an assuring green as he made the rest of his way west on North Avenue to the Jones Falls Expressway.
Like North Avenue and the rest of the city roads he had just traveled on, the expressway was empty of traffic. Except for the lonely red taillights of a car a quarter mile or so ahead of him, and the occasional passing headlights of cars heading southbound into the city, this relative emptiness of the night-covered highway began to calm his nerves, to quiet his brain and allow it to begin to think rationally again. He took in a deep breath and then let it out as he stole a glance at the unconscious woman slumped awkwardly up against the passenger door. How was it even possible that she was in his car? How did he allow the situation to deteriorate so badly? He had no answers. He tried to think back over the operation, to assess it, but when he did, all he could see was the blood and gore, the limbs on the floor, the head barely hanging from its neck.
There was an unrecoverable gap of time from after the botched beheading until he was driving away from the scene with the unconscious woman sitting next to him. He could no longer recall escaping from the pimp’s house with her. In his mind he could only see the young Yazidi girl lying limp in his arms as he tried to evacuate her from a house exploding all around him. His heart started racing and he could feel the panic attack creeping up within him. He tried to clear the death images from his mind. He couldn’t let them have him, to control him like they had been doing ever since waking from the coma. He tried to return his focus to the road, but his eyes were continually being drawn back to the woman next to him. With a shaky hand, he reached across her naked body and down between the seat and the door, searching until he found the nob that allowed him to lean her seat back. It was an awkward maneuver, one which kept pulling his eyes from the road and steering him off path. But at least when he was finally able to get her to lie back, she now looked more comfortable and was mostly out of sight to any casual observers.
From the yellow glow of the passing streetlights, the dried blood covering her face and body gave her a rusty, demonic hue. He also noticed that her skin was goose fleshed. He turned up the heater and felt around on the backseat for something to cover her with, but found only the backpack. He then began to slip off his shirt, thinking he could use it; but when he grabbed hold of it, he found that it was soaked in blood. This wet, sticky discovery sent another surge of panic through him. Had he somehow been injured? Was he bleeding out without even realizing it? He unconsciously picked up speed, panicking, feeling everywhere on his body for a wound. Without thinking, he saw an exit approaching and took it. He followed the tree covered offramp until it curved around and merged northbound onto Falls Road. Immediately at the merge he did a U-turn, carelessly squawking his tires as he shifted from first to second gear. He headed south on Falls Road until it passed under the expressway, right where the pre-dawn night was at its darkest. There, he skidded to a stop, jammed the car into park and then got out. He rushed to the back of the car and began stripping out of his bloody clothes, looking everywhere on his body for wounds as he did.
There were
no wounds. The blood soaked into his clothes wasn’t his. Caught in a full-on panic attack now, Killian struggled to regain his breath, his sanity. Naked, he stumbled his way back to the front of the idling car and removed the set of keys from the ignition. They slipped from his hand and fell to the floor. He dropped them again on his way back to the trunk. He had to get down on his hands and knees to retrieve them from under the car. Back at the trunk, he couldn’t tell which key was the trunk key. When he found the right one, he couldn’t calm his hand enough for him to be able to insert the key into the lock. After the trunk was opened, he found the large plastic lawn bag with his change of clothes and was somehow able to dress himself. He collected his bloody mission clothes from the ground and stuffed them into the bag. He grabbed his backpack from the back seat and stuffed it into the bag as well. He found an old greasy blanket in the trunk behind the spare tire. He covered the woman with it. She stirred when he did and a pang of fear shot through his heart. What would he do if she were to wake up right now? He ran back to the trunk and dug through his backpack. There was still one chloroform-soaked cloth left in the ziplocked plastic bag. He brought it with him into the car. He took out the cloth and held it briefly over the unconscious woman’s face.
His breathing. He couldn’t control his breathing. Breathe. Instead of heading for the expressway, he did another U-turn and headed north onto Falls Road, deciding to stay on the back roads for the remainder of the trip home. But he couldn’t control his breathing, because he couldn’t control the panic that was attacking him from within, stabbing at him painfully. He cursed his brain and the damage that was done to it. Everything about his thinking, about his thought processes were gone wrong. The clarity, the decisiveness that he never before had to question, had been replaced with a muddled uncertainty. Why didn’t he anticipate that the attention the videos had drawn would necessitate a change in tactics? How could he have been so stupid? If those whom he stalked were now onto him, what about those who most surely were now stalking him – the police, the FBI?
The Good Kill Page 19