by Julian Folk
Nikki and Ayelet communicate in covert glances. About Bud, they agree. The man is a killer clown, minus the costume and makeup. Nikki reads his mind: Bud is biding his time, keeping them alive as bait; he salivates at the prospect of killing whoever’s left standing.
An ethical person wouldn’t create No Touch Kill. That’s why Jasper hired Vincent.
A moral person wouldn’t babysit Vincent. That’s why Jasper hired Bud.
So long as Bud’s around, everyone else dies. Kill Bud, and possibilities arise. Nikki could use Bud’s phone to tweet names and pictures of the survivors. She could ask Jasper to please not murder them. That would impose a public price on him for doing so.
Ayelet nurses the infant on the black leather sofa.
Bud paces, surveilling backyard and front.
His boredom and restlessness menace Nikki.
Jasper kills in the name of National Security. Vincent kills in the name of Justice. This psychopath just kills. To Bud, shooting someone in the head is the moral equivalent of swallowing a donut hole.
“Oh shit,” Bud says. He crinkles a blind and peers onto the street. Nothing doing. “I forgot to show you sluts the picture of Robert and me.” He shoves his phone in Ayelet’s face. She averts her eyes. The phone follows her eyes. She closes them.
He does the same thing with Nikki. She pushes him away. He plays video of the event, in which Bud plops down on the floor next to Robert’s corpse and inflates his cheeks, forming a worried expression, mimicking and mocking Robert’s dead stuffed mouth. “Not my work, sluts,” he says. “I won’t touch another guy’s junk to make a point.”
Nikki and Ayelet exchange glances again as Bud surveils the back and completes another lap around the house.
“I wish I could help,” Ayelet whispers.
No big deal.
Killing Bud is a cinch. His indifference to the preciousness of life extends to his own. His antics suggest he welcomes an attempt on his life. If she went for it, it’d merely be a game for him. A means of resisting boredom.
Nikki could kill Bud in her sleep. He may or may not know it. She doubts he cares either way. His gun complicates things, though. She has to take the weapon out of play, or discharge it harmlessly.
Without a moment’s warning, Bud’s restlessness tears the fabric of his composure.
“Alright sluts, the buttbuddies are late to the party,” he says and flings his t-shirt to the ground.
Shaved gut, shaved chest, furry back.
“Connor’s safe somewhere,” Ayelet says.
“Prettyboy’s dead at the bottom of Boston Harbor,” Bud says. “Boston PD don’t know shit. Jasper’s ninety-four. He don’t know shit.”
Bud’s gun trained on Nikki, he unzips his fly, shimmies out of his jeans and kicks them against the wall.
“Mommy should go to the basement,” he says.
“No,” Nikki and Ayelet say.
The basement is where you go to get shot.
“Have it your way,” he says. “Daddy’s gettin’ laaaaid.” He trains the gun on Nikki again. “Stand in front of the coffee table, strip, kneel, lean on it and get wet for me.”
Nikki strips. Easy, smooth, gentle movements. Her clothes pile on the ebonized hardwood floor. She stands naked. Arms at her sides. In front of the coffee table. Facing the living room windows. Her back to Bud. Ayelet rocking the baby on her knee.
“I told you to kneel,” Bud says.
Ayelet groans. Nikki hears. Bud shoots.
The bullet grazes Nikki’s hip. The shot surprises and unnerves her. The gash stings beyond comparison. Tears of blood trickle down her leg. Nikki kneels on the hardwood floor, leans over the coffee table and masturbates.
Ayelet breathes disturbingly loud.
“I’m gonna shoot you every couple minutes,” Bud says. “Make minor wounds. They’ll graduate to major ones. You’ll be conscious ’til after I finish, at least. If you do good, I’ll keep you alive for another couple rounds. If you do bad, I’ll kill you and go necro on your corpse.”
Bud’s calm but his voice booms. It announces his position when you can’t see him. Nikki hears his boxers drop.
“Wouldn’t you like to see the front of my body before it’s…drenched in blood?” she asks, voice cracking, shoulders crumpling.
“Yeah, why not? Cover your busted-up face,” he says. “Use both hands.”
Bud wants me to face him? Now she knows what he thinks of her fighting skills. NOT VERY MUCH.
She quits masturbating, stands, places her hands over her nose and eyes and the bruises around them, and turns.
Her pussy is shaved inhumanly smooth. Bud’s predator gaze plays with it, savors the sight of Nikki’s thin labia. Her girl’s not quite a fat cat. She detects a change in the flow of the room’s energy. The view overstimulates the pleasure center of his brain. Dopamine surges, causing a relaxation of his body. She smiles. Peeking through her fingers, she witnesses his grip on the gun slacken ever-so-slightly. His aim deviates a couple inches to his right. If he pulled the trigger he would graze her thigh again or miss.
In a fraction of a second, Nikki takes flight. Her whole body. She drops to a squat and blasts off. Bud’s gun fires twice, erratically. The shots miss her but stimulate her adrenals to unsustainable highs, maximizing her strength. Her thighs form a vise that constricts Bud’s neck. The man is so tall and strong he remains standing as her six foot body becomes a boa constrictor. She keeps the gun hand away from Ayelet as he empties the clip. Bud cranes his neck to bite her thigh. His teeth dig in deep. They draw blood and tear muscle. Her thighs constrict his neck tighter, ignoring the scrape of his brillo beard, and swing her mass toward the ground.
Bud’s body, a thick tower, fights its demolition.
Nikki’s grandfather taught: Move faster than the eyes can see.
She swings her torso up, his teeth tear deeper, and she gouges out his eyes. Bud maintains the bite of her thigh as he roars. He pistol whips Nikki’s abused face and then bashes it weakly with his other hand. Nikki snatches his forearm and fingers. She twists, breaking his wrist. This time his teeth let go, she releases his neck, he thinks he’s breaking free, she slides her legs down his neck, nauseated by their friction against his beard and constricts them again when her knees have passed his neck and her hair touches the ground and her hands stabilize her body. Remembering Bud’s attempt to snap Robert’s neck, Nikki’s calves twist left and snap his. The nude corpse crashes onto her and drives her body into the hardwood floor.
Motherfucker must be three hundred pounds.
Nikki slides out and stands. Her inner thigh gushes. Bud’s teeth punctured a minor vein.
Veins are bullshit.
Though the loss of flesh concerns her.
Ayelet exhales stale air.
“Are you a ninja?” Ayelet asks.
“I’m a nondenominational killer,” Nikki says, “but I have ninja legs.”
She steals Bud’s gun, clip and phone and drapes a throw blanket on the body.
“You check the backyard,” she says. “I’ll check the front.”
Neither sees anything.
“You killed Bud,” Ayelet says. “I killed Maisie. Connor’ll kill Vincent out there. I know it.”
How? By magic? Come on…
Nikki wakes up Bud’s phone. The flaw in her plan exposes itself. She has no idea what his passcode is. Then she smiles like the Cheshire Cat.
“A fingerprint sensor,” Nikki says.
Ayelet high fives her.
“Where do you keep the knives?” Nikki asks.
She pulls the blanket off Bud’s dead hand.
“One time I spotted a handsaw in the basement,” Ayelet says.
Chapter 37
Main Street burns. Vincent tastes smoke in the air. What a shame Maisie’s not here to taste it, too. Her death hurts. His massive investment in Maisie won’t yield further returns. He gave that chick good years of his life—her decade with Vincent was more valuable than ten li
fetimes without him.
The blasts come at five minute intervals. The emergency responders create a racket. The blasts pop close to the end of Main Street now.
Sucks. Martha brews a good cup. Bud spent thirty bucks on pastries in one visit. Pastries for himself, not Arun and the hired help. That was when the team renovated Connor’s house.
The contagious nature of the Main Street blasts means a lot to Vincent. Things are going his way. Although the resulting illumination of the snowy sky bothers him.
The light steals his stealth from him.
He trudges to a wide clearing. Or, an apparent clearing. The lake. Buried under almost three feet of snow.
No adventurers in the woods. No sign of footsteps. The northeasterly winds blow above the businesses and around the tree branches, depositing the snow unevenly. People, even teenagers and college kids, heeded the weather reports and behaved responsibly.
A chopper hovers above the town, attentive to the explosions and fires.
The temperature dips below twenty. The wind chill penetrates Vincent’s stolen pants and jacket. Connor’s house is a mile west and a quarter mile north. Frostbite poses little risk so far. But the situation demands efficiency and effectiveness on Vincent’s part, and nature…fucks his head up.
If he could walk across this lake…
But the ice is shallow. Freezing temperatures descended on North Berkshire only this morning. And snow slows the thickening of ice.
No. The ice won’t hold him. The boots enable him to wade through the shallow part of the lake, so he avoids slipping and sliding on the roots of the trees lining the Main Street fence.
He steps in up to his ankles. Beautiful. His feet feel dry and warm. The snowplow driver’s boots seem well-insulated. Vincent can go in up to his knees. So he plays it safe and goes out to his shins. With a relatively flat surface on which to advance, he wades fast.
At this pace, he’ll be at Connor’s spiked wood fence in twelve minutes.
His mind wanders. A man of Vincent’s intelligence, of his caliber, a Top Tier Person, must be pushed to his limit. These woods had daunted him. Tonight, though, he navigates them like a master naturalist. The ease fortifies his confidence. Minutes ago he was afraid. Now he’s bored.
He remembers the first night Bud crashed at the condo. The creep behaved dissolutely, and maybe he was dissolute, but he had this unshakeable confidence to him. Vincent liked it. He saw his own confidence reflected in Bud. But Bud is muscle, an enforcer, and not the best one. Bud is a Second Tier Person. The type of man who assists the Vincents of the world. On second thought, he shouldn’t have let Bud ravish Maisie.
“Be careful around Bud,” Jasper said. “The beautiful women he fancies tend to disappear.”
Vincent bets that Jasper instructed Bud to set up base camp in Connor’s house.
Bud must have raped and killed Nikki in front of Ayelet. No doubt he plans to do the same to Ayelet and possibly Connor. With Jasper’s tacit approval. One problem eliminating another. What depraved men. Justice isn’t served by such depravity.
Plunk!
Fuck no.
A hole in the lake bottom. Shit. Vincent’s right leg plunged in up to his thigh. Ice water pours into his right boot, stings his foot and leg. That’s his good kicking leg.
He senses swift movements under water and feels a bite at his other ankle. Ouch! Snapping turtle. He pulls his right leg out of the hole, feels ice water spill into the bottom of the left boot, and kicks in every direction, only for his left leg now to plunge into the hole. He jumps out and runs to the shallower part. Both legs, both feet, freeze.
Fucking snapper…
He promises to kill one, clean it and eat it when this is over.
Suddenly, nothing looks familiar.
He overshot Connor’s house.
A hundred feet past. Due to the snow accumulation, hopping the fence doesn’t call for as high a vertical leap as it did before. He pokes out the snow between two spikes and observes the house.
No lights. No sign of life. Winds blowing north from yard-to-yard leave massively uneven snowdrifts. The snow looks virginal. He pokes out a few more crevices and observes. No difference.
Could be they just didn’t want to go up against him. Vincent’s too good. They’re hoping he’ll run and hide.
But that doesn’t sound acceptable to the likes of Jasper.
Vincent scans the neighbors’ backyards and the backsides of the neighbor’s houses. Nothing. Looks like North Berkshire was vacated, except for the first responders tied up on Main Street.
Keeping his gloves on, Vincent jumps, grabs the sides of the spikes, and in a fluid movement that surprises him, he spins his body over the spikes, lets go and falls on a snow-softened shrub.
Vincent dispenses of his gloves, reaches in for his gun, takes a knee in a snow drift and aims at the porch door, kitchen window, bedroom window.
Nothing stirs.
Somebody must be home. There’s a debt. It’s time to pay.
The wind forms a whip of snow and lashes him. The cold pervades the bones of his legs and feet. Through and through. In his lower extremities, the nerves sleep. The hole bitten by the snapping turtle exposes his ankle directly to snow.
They’ll amputate.
His gun hand goes numb.
In the woods, the Main Street fence and spruce trees impeded the northeasterly wind. Here the whip keeps on cracking. The real feel is ten, if not twenty, below zero. Vincent’s nose and cheeks go numb. A vision of himself losing his looks to frostbite afflicts him.
He’s an enemy of the state who’ll need radical plastic surgery.
Bud waits inside ready to ambush him. Please don’t kill the baby, Bud. A son of Vincent DeSantis possesses infinite potential. Regardless of who raises the boy, he mustn’t die. Vincent’s got no choice but to hurl himself headfirst into the ambush. Him against Bud.
He passes under the tree. Its branches, not totally barren, catch the snow coming down but the northeasterly winds deposit even more and some of the recent deposits are dark with soot from Main Street. He notices a millimeter of plastic gleaming in the snow. He bends down and picks it up.
A straw?
He tastes more smoke and feels a sudden onset of nausea. Bean-to-Martha’s just went boom. The wind must’ve carried the straw up from her dumpster.
Vincent takes two more steps. The numbness of his feet and toes penetrates deeper. His boot lands on the stoop. His foot feels like…a prosthesis. The prosthesis I’ll eventually have to wear. The atmosphere shifts. This shift unsettles him. Nausea rises and, bizarrely, his forehead sweats. He needs to get out of the stupid cold but something restrains him. Vincent’s thirty-two years of nightmares batter him simultaneously. Nightmares in which he’s stark naked in front of huge groups of people—his high school class, college lecture halls, holiday shoppers at the mall, the cafeteria at Langley—with the effects of steroids and plastic surgery erased from his body. Naked as he was in his childhood and adolescence.
Naked like a loser.
That’s how he feels.
The only person in the world who could make Vincent feel that way is his bully. Connor Yard. The guy who trashed his reputation in high school and got him institutionalized. The guy who blogged about Vincent in college and forced him to fake his death. The guy who wrote a book totally reversing their bully/victim relationship and built a fucking career on that lie, married a best-selling author on that lie...
The plastic straw was bitten at the tip.
Connor was sitting up in the snow breathing through it.
He’s not smart enough to think of a plan worthy of a man.
So he did this.
He’s right behind Vincent.
Connor attacks the air supply. He loops his arm around Vincent’s neck and fastens it. A strong flesh noose that tightens and drags Vincent to the snow.
The gun.
The wind whips them with snow. The nerves in Vincent’s fingers shut down. Whet
her he dropped the gun or it’s still in his hand, he’s clueless. He tries to pull his index finger. Nothing happens.
Vincent wiggles free of the chokehold.
The look on Connor’s face, the look of Connor’s face, mortifies him. The whites of Connor’s eyes erupted in reddish black. Every blood vessel from two inches beneath his eyes to his eyebrows erupted, too. This is what Connor’s hatred looks like; it’s finally manifest on his face. This is the authentic Connor Yard. Connor as a boy, Connor as a teenager, Connor as an adult.
Connor before he was born and after he dies.
His original face. His true nature. It mortifies and astonishes Vincent.
How hideous is the bulging side of Connor’s mouth?
But then Vincent sees a fist. He sees the same one again…and again.
Ice cold, expressionless, Connor thrashes Vincent’s surgically-altered, implant-teeming features.
Unless the Programmer gets his mojo back, this is it.
Vincent’s hands reach up to Connor’s neck. His fingers are stiff and unresponsive to his commands. But enough strength resides in his arms to induce unconsciousness. Like levers, the arms close in on Connor’s throat.
The bully’s eyes shut.
It’s working.
The bully’s eyes open.
Connor thrusts his body forward, slipping out of Vincent’s lever-hold and rams his skull against Vincent’s. Bone cracks. Vincent bites off a piece of his own tongue. Connor moans. He hovers just above Vincent. The huge bulge on the side of Connor’s mouth looks juicy. Vincent’s jaws fly up and his teeth chomp onto the bulge. He takes Connor back down with him. He gnashes his hardest. He tastes Connor’s blood and pus and drinks it and chomps down harder and draws more blood.
But Connor endures it in silent peace.
Oh, shit. His fucking face is numb. Vincent could tear the whole thing off and not hurt him.