Two days after completing the mission, Hugo got a second phone call.
“Omega, go to Vic’s.”
Vic’s was a local tattoo parlor.
They were expecting him, and gave him his second blue tear.
Tear #3
PO is for Police
Robbing people at cash stations gave Hugo enough money, but it didn’t fulfill his deep-seated need to inflict pain and distress.
Hugo didn’t know why hurting others gave him pleasure. His father was an abusive alcoholic, and Hugo weathered his share of beatings, and worse, until his younger brother Phineas was born and took the brunt of Dad’s wrath. Maybe Hugo inherited the meanness gene. Or maybe humanity had been molested out of him at a young age. Maybe a little of both. Hugo didn’t dwell on it, or question it. He just followed his nature.
His nature led him to preying upon Decatur’s gay population. Not that Hugo had anything against queers, but the cops, and the community, didn’t care as much when one turned up dead, and with his muscles Hugo found it easy to attract guys. That was when he began cutting his shin for each murder, as a way of keeping track. In his first year, Hugo murdered six men, varying the cause of death (sometimes making it look like a hate crime, other times like a robbery gone bad, other times like a hit and run) so the authorities didn’t catch on.
Until the authorities did catch on, and Hugo became a subject of interest.
This apparently didn’t sit well with his CN handlers, who no doubt preferred to keep Hugo off the radar, and again he was sent to the PO box. The name on the post card was the lead detective investigating him.
Like the lawyer, the cop was a white guy (which didn’t make sense, why was a white nationalist group killing other white people when there were so many schlammensch in the world?) and Hugo followed him to a local mall. While the pig shopped, Hugo slashed one of his tires. As he was preoccupied changing his tire, Hugo was able to walk right up to him, clamp a hand over his mouth and nose until he passed out, disarm him, and shove him into his trunk, all in less than a minute.
The cop was ready for a fight when Hugo let him out of the trunk, but his one hundred and seventy pounds couldn’t do much against three-forty. Hugo beat him into submission, duct taped him to a chair in the middle of a cornfield, and then poured gasoline all over him.
Then Hugo opened up a pack of Camels he’d purchased for the occasion, sucked one to life, and slapped the cop into awareness.
“Got a smoke for you,” Hugo said.
“Please…”
“Open your mouth, or I’ll set you on fire.”
The pig followed orders.
“Careful with the ash,” Hugo warned. “I can see the gas fumes coming up from you.”
Then Hugo did it with another cigarette.
And another.
When he got to fourteen, he stopped.
“Look at this,” Hugo said, making a show out of reading the warning label on the pack. “It says cigarettes may be dangerous to your health.”
The cop didn’t answer. His mouth was full.
Then Hugo stepped away and watched. Watched as the cigarettes burned down.
Camels were unfiltered. As the first one reached the cop’s lips, he began to moan in agony. His moaning became a keening wail when the second and third ones burned down. When four cigarettes began blistering and cracking his lips, he finally tried to spit them out.
They fell onto his legs. He went up like a dried-out Christmas tree.
No Decatur cop ever bothered Hugo again.
Hugo kept the man’s handcuffs as a souvenir.
It was the first pair of more than forty that he would acquire, and discard.
Tear # 4
HO is for Holy Man
Being a sleeper cell for the Caucasian Nation was, in many ways, a lot like being in prison. Hugo’s trailer was small, bare bones. He was being monitored; Hugo found listening devices in his home phone, his bedroom, and his kitchen. He was fed, spent most of his time pumping iron, and had no choice but to follow orders.
An advantage to being on the outside was his extracurricular murder activities. But a major disadvantage was solitude. In jail, Hugo always had lackeys fluttering around him, attending to his needs.
Freedom was much lonelier.
No sex on demand. No one to fetch him anything he wanted. No adulation. And he even missed the warped and contradictory mentorship of Whitman. Hugo had zero contact with Whitman since being paroled. His new commanding officer was a man named Packer, who attained the rank of Gruppenführer in the Caucasian Nation and demanded to be addressed as General.
Hugo first met General Packer at a CN meeting in Carbondale, and found him to be surprisingly rigid. Where Whitman had energy, passion, and an opinion on many things, Packer was like a mindless, by-the-book drill sergeant who stepped out of some old black-and-white war movie, but no one told him the war had ended. He was the same type of barking orders asshole as the guards at Stateville.
One more thing to help blur the line between freedom and incarceration.
“You’re a soldier,” Packer told him. “Soldiers don’t think. Soldiers don’t question. Soldiers don’t act on their own. Soldiers follow orders.”
Packer had three blue tears. While he was on the CN payroll, same as Hugo, he suspected the older man had a second job. Gossip hinted at everything from CIA spook to hitman to private security contractor.
Fueled by a combination of curiosity and boredom, Hugo tailed Packer home from a rally, and the next morning followed him to work.
General Packer was a junior high school gym teacher.
He covered up his tears with make-up. Or maybe his tears were make-up, and he drew them on for meetings.
While Hugo had never met a person he respected, his opinion of Packer actually went up once he discovered his double life. Many of the white nationalists that Hugo knew would laugh at it, probably call Packer a poseur. But Hugo was intrigued by his ability to blend in.
Hugo had trouble blending in.
He tried his best. Experimenting with disguises and identities. But no matter where he went, Hugo stood out in the crowd. Even wearing make-up and baggy clothing.
So he kept to himself. Robbing. Killing. Buying steroids and handcuffs.
Doing his time, like the world was his prison.
After over a year without any assignments, Hugo asked Packer what was taking so long. During that time, he’d racked up quite a string of robberies and murders in Decatur and the surrounding areas, and two months earlier Packer had ordered him to stop his extracurricular activities, doubling his weekly allowance so Hugo could pay for juice.
“Be patient.”
“Do you get laid, General?”
“What kind of question is that? Of course I do.”
The General seemed to protest a bit too much, but Hugo let it slide. “Then you understand the sex-drive. I’ve got a hurt-drive. If I’m not allowed to do something soon, I’m quitting.”
“Quitting would be a mistake, Hugo. The CN might consider it treason.”
“Who would they send after me?” Hugo asked, snorting in amusement. “You?”
“Your devotion to the cause hasn’t gone unnoticed. The Supreme Caucasian has his eye on you.”
“I don’t even know if that guy is real.”
“He’s real. I’ve met him.”
“Who is he?”
“I took an oath of secrecy. But you’ll meet him. In time. I’ll talk to the CN and see if they have any work for you.”
The next day, Hugo got a phone call. The post card provided the name and address of a man in Chicago.
Fr. Michael Chaucer.
A priest.
Hugo visited a hardware store, then took a bus to the city, crammed into a tiny seat behind a screaming toddler who came so close to death so many times that Hugo lost count of the different ways he imagined killing the little brat. The only thing that saved him was the fact that Hugo was under cover, complete with face m
ake-up and a wig. As per orders, Hugo never discussed his missions with anyone, but Packer had called him with the bus ticket info, and had filled in some normally empty blanks.
“You’re taking a Greyhound, and you need to dress like a civilian. Cover up the tatts, wear a hairpiece and a hat. The CN is having some issues with the Chicago Archdiocese paying what they owe, so this guy needs to be an example. The messier, the better. We want this to be high profile. But no one can know you are linked to it. This isn’t beating up old ladies for money at the ATM, or strangling homos in parking lots. This is a big one. You need to make sure there are no mistakes.”
So Hugo didn’t kill the baby, or his mother, or every single person on the bus. Instead he ground his molars so tightly they could chew through steel, and three hours later he was in Chicago.
The priest lived in an apartment, which seemed weird. Hugo always assumed they lived in church. His original plan was to watch the priest for a few days, follow him around, learn his schedule, and then find the best time and place to murder him in a messy, memorable way.
But still high on anger from the bus ride, Hugo decided to knock on the man’s door and wing it.
Apparently the Catholic church didn’t treat its members any better than the Caucasian Nation did, because the priest’s neighborhood was lower middle class, and his apartment building was more rundown than Hugo’s shitty trailer. Hugo bypassed the lobby security door with a firm tug on the handle, and went to the second floor, the industrial carpet on the stairs smelling like rat piss. He knocked shave-and-a-haircut on the priest’s door and put his face close to the peephole so his victim couldn’t see how big Hugo was.
After a few seconds, a voice came from inside. Male, kind of squeaky, but confident.
“Can I help you?”
Hugo liked confident people. Their faith in their own abilities made them easy to trick.
“Sorry to disturb you at home, Father Michael. I have to talk to you.”
Hugo expected the door to open. But it didn’t.
“I’m kind of busy right now,” he said.
What kind of asshole priest would turn away a member of the flock?
“It’ll only take a minute,” Hugo told him. “You can say no if you have to.”
That last bit was a little psychological trick. People were more likely to say yes to something if you tell them they can say no. Strange, but true.
“Okay. Come in.”
Humans. So predictable.
The door opened, and Hugo quickly stepped in, filling the doorway, blocking the doorway. As Father Michael’s eyes went wide, Hugo shut the door behind him and turned the deadbolt. Then he eyed the priest, a slight man in jeans and a polo shirt, hair thinning, an Adam’s apple large enough to hang a coat on. He didn’t have on his robes or Roman collar, but was wearing a cross around his neck.
“I never understood, why do Christians wear crosses?” Hugo asked.
“To remind us of our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ, and how he died.”
“You don’t find that stupid? If I wanted to remember Kennedy, would I wear a bullet around my neck?”
His initial shock apparently over, the priest still didn’t understand the danger he was in. “The Passion of Christ is the central tenant of Christianity. He suffered and died for our sins.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means that Jesus took the blame for all of the evil we’ve committed, so God forgives us.”
“So I’m forgiven for all of the evil I’ve done, because Jesus died?”
“Exactly.”
Hugo smiled. “That’s good. Because I’ve done a lot of evil.”
He set down his bag and unzipped the top.
“What is it you seek, my son?” Father Michael asked, his voice losing some of its confidence.
“I’m not your son. I’m the son of an alcoholic son of a bitch who beat the shit out of me every day until I was thirteen years old. Which, according to you, was okay because God forgave him.”
“I’m sorry to hear that. I’m sure it was rough, but you survived. The Lord only gives us what He knows we can handle.”
“That’s good to know. Because I’m about to do some things to you that most people wouldn’t be able to handle.”
Hugo let the hate flow in, filling him up.
Then he took the hammer and nails out of the bag.
“Have you ever wondered what it’s like to be crucified, Father?”
Turns out, crucifying someone isn’t easy without a cross. Drywall won’t hold a man’s weight.
Hugo had to make due with nailing the priest to the floor.
When he ran out of nails, he used a cheap steak knife set he found in the kitchen. So cheap, the blades broke off when he was hammering them in.
After the priest finally kicked off, Hugo took a well-deserved shower and considered the meaning of life. Father Michael had believed his faith was strong, and that the Lord would save him. He was wrong on both counts. It had been child’s play to make the priest denounce God and pledge his allegiance to Hugo. An entire life, wasted, just because of a few nails in some sensitive spots.
Hugo wondered if his existence was every bit as meaningless. What was the point of anything? He was serving a stupid, meaningless cause, and in return had certain basic needs provided for him. Just like every other person with a job. He ate. He slept. He worked out. He killed. Before the steroids shrank his balls to the size of marbles, he had sex. But none of it meant anything.
Killing the priest meant a fourth tear. And he didn’t care at all.
In a way, he envied the priest. His belief in God was foolish, but at least he believed in something.
When he got back to Decatur, Hugo had a package waiting for him in the trailer. It was a box containing fifteen hundred dollars in cash, and a paperback copy of Mein Kampf by Adolf Hitler.
Hugo burned the box and its contents.
Tear #5
ZOM is for Zionist Occupational Media
A year after killing the priest, Hugo was permanently moved from Decatur to St. Louis. No reason was given.
His new trailer home was slightly bigger than his previous one, but it had rats. They ate his food and pissed and shit on the floors and counters and ran through the walls at night, scratching and thumping.
For some reason Hugo didn’t mind.
He was never the type to seek out companionship, with either people or animals, but the ingenuity and destructive abilities of his rat roommates amused Hugo. After several weeks, the rats seemed to sense that Hugo wasn’t the enemy, and they came out during the day. Some even approached him as he ate, begging for scraps like dogs. It wasn’t unusual for Hugo to wake up and find one sleeping on his chest.
A year passed. Eighteen months. More handcuffs. To ease the boredom of waiting for his next assignment, Hugo began a game. He would pick someone out of the St. Louis phonebook, and give himself a week to find them and kill them.
First, he’d try to locate the person, which often wasn’t easy. People moved. Went on vacation. Got married. Lived with others. Sometimes Hugo followed the wrong person for days before realizing the mistake.
After finding the one he was after, Hugo would switch to surveillance mode. Watching. Waiting. Planning.
Then, on day seven, he’d strike when the person was alone. If the person never was alone, they got away, and Hugo picked a new person for the next round.
The game helped to focus Hugo, give him purpose. During the discovery phase, he was usually forced to interact with people, to ask questions, to make simple conversation. Which meant he couldn’t be scary or intimidating. So he worked on looking, and acting, non-threatening. Learned small talk. How to fake a smile.
Once he identified the potential victim, he followed them for a few days. It wasn’t easy for a man his size to blend in, but Hugo became pretty good at it. The secret wasn’t concealment. In fact, the opposite was what worked best. Hugo took to wearing a pair of headphones, pretendi
ng to bop his head to an imaginary beat. People automatically dismissed him, thinking he was into his music and not paying them any mind. Hugo got so good at it that he sometimes left his tattoos uncovered. He could ride the bus, jailhouse tatts exposed, and no one would give him a second glance.
Except children. Children always stared. Like they knew what he really was.
During that year, Hugo stalked twenty-eight people, and killed seven. Strangely, the game remained satisfying whether or not it ended in a death. Hugo didn’t get upset if someone got away. He just moved along to the next name.
He was going through the phone book, looking for twenty-nine, when Packer called.
“You missed the last few rallies.”
“Been busy.”
“I told you to go to the last one.”
“Look in the mirror, General. How many tears do you have? Last I checked, four is more than three.”
“This isn’t about rank, Hugo. You’re the sleeper. I’m the handler. You have to listen.”
“Unless you wanted me to kill everyone at the rally, I’m sure I didn’t miss anything.”
“Open line, Hugo. Don’t talk like that.”
“We both know the only one tapping this phone is the CN. Who listens to these recordings, Packer? The Supreme Caucasian?”
“He listens to the relevant ones.”
Hugo snorted. “I don’t think that guy even exists. He’s like the Easter Bunny. Or Jesus. Some stupid fairy tale to keep the kids in line.”
“He knows about you, and wants to meet you. But the time isn’t right.”
Hugo didn’t want to have that conversation again. He’d believe in the SC when they were in the same room, face-to-face. Which was probably never going to happen.
“Why are you calling, Packer? Some other dumb rally? Need me to teach the drunk skins how to burn a cross?”
“Go to your PO Box.”
An assignment. Hugo hadn’t had one since moving to Missouri.
“How many people in the CN have five tears?” he asked Packer.
“I’ve never met any. Heard there’s a guy in California.”
Phineas Troutt Series - Three Thriller Novels (Dead On My Feet #1, Dying Breath #2, Everybody Dies #3) Page 62