Take One With You

by Oak Anderson

  Brad had been almost giddy when he’d gone down to the office after a respectable period of mourning to retrieve the paperwork to file with the court that essentially tied up the final loose end, his erstwhile stepson.

  But when he opened the safe in his office, the document was gone.

  Brad couldn’t believe it. He must have put it someplace else. He had to have that document. There were only two people on earth that knew of its existence, and one of them was no longer on the earth, but in it.

  Fucking bitch. She got it, somehow. How the fuck did she know? There were dozens, maybe hundreds all told, and she signed every last one in a goddamned drug-induced stupor.

  How the fuck did she know to take that one?

  What all this meant was that Charlie owned half of Brad’s assets, including the business he’d started twenty years before, and Brad couldn’t do anything about it. He couldn’t even transfer those assets now without attracting attention to what he’d been doing.

  Brad stared out the window.

  Did he know? Did Charlie have the fucking thing?

  The kid had been antsy lately. One minute he looked like he owned the world, and the next like he was about to follow in mommy’s footsteps.

  If only.

  “Goddamnit,” Brad seethed. “Kid’s gonna take my business.”

  Unless…

  Brad rushed back to his study and pulled out the center drawer of his desk. He looked at the .38 for a moment, then moved it aside and picked up the old business card beneath it.

  Brad grabbed his phone and dialed the number on the card, which had been given to him over ten years ago by a former business associate even shadier than himself who warned him not to use it unless he absolutely had to.

  “Last resort, Brad,” his partner had told him. “He doesn’t like to be bothered unless you’re serious.”

  I’m serious, all right, Brad thought. Serious as a heart attack.

  “Hello?” a gravelly voice said.

  “I have a problem,” Brad said, and picked up the revolver, placing it in his pocket.

  As Brad hung up the phone, he heard Charlie bounding down the stairs, and impulsively staggered out of the room and lunged for the front door, beating Charlie by a foot or two.

  Charlie stepped back warily, his smile turning to a scowl.

  “Where do you think you’re going?” Brad snarled. His hand was fingering the .38 in the pocket of his robe.

  Charlie noticed and shook his head in disgust, assuming Brad was fondling a bottle of something. Asshole is still wearing his fucking pajamas at two in the afternoon.

  “None of your business.”

  “You fucking piece of shit,” Brad said drunkenly. “I’ll make it my business.”

  “Get out of my way,” Charlie said.

  “You gotta do what I say, asshole. This is my house.”

  “Not for long,” Charlie said, and was surprised when the color seemed to drain from his stepfather’s face. He was very nearly shaking, and for a second Charlie thought the man was going to pass out.

  Until he looked deeper into Brad’s eyes.

  He wasn’t shaking because he was unsteady; Brad was shaking from pure, unadulterated rage. Charlie had never seen such visceral hatred in another person’s eyes, although had he ever looked into a mirror on one of those nights he lay awake thinking of what had been done to his mother, he would have seen it in his own.

  Brad moved his hand in his pocket, and for a crazy moment, Charlie thought he was going to offer him a drink. There was something in his eyes that made Charlie think whatever Brad was fumbling with was for him.

  Then something hit Brad from behind in the leg, and he very nearly jumped out of his skin, whirling around to face the door as if he thought he was being attacked. Charlie took his chance and rushed past him, opening and slamming the door behind him before Brad could protest, running past the postman and up the street.

  Safe to assume the jerk won’t let me use a car.

  Brad looked at the envelopes on the floor, and then stumbled to the window, watching him, not realizing Charlie’s last words had been in response to his first demand, and not the second.

  “You gotta do what I say, asshole. This is my house.”

  “Not for long.”

  At that moment, Brad knew that Charlie knew his secret, or at least he thought he knew, which was effectively the very same thing.

  ***

  The two of them were up all night putting the website together, and it was the next morning before either of them realized they had barely spoken the whole time, merely taking turns at her laptop, making corrections and tweaks until everything was perfect.

  “towy dot la,” Sarah said, turning the screen directly toward Charlie as the morning sun streamed through the window behind them. “Awesome.”

  Charlie stared at the page, then clicked through the other pages, with mocked up names and pictures of future assholes, which would be followed by pages devoted to user profiles and forums for those users to discuss others to be added to the list.

  The forums were the most important part, actually, in Charlie’s opinion. He wanted the pedophiles and murderers and rapists he imagined populating the site to get what was coming to them, but even more, he wanted the idea to spread. Not because he thought it would make the world a better place as Sarah believed, although he kind of agreed, but because he needed it to be big. Big enough to contain his secret, the one detail he was keeping from Sarah, both for her own good and because he didn’t want to scare her off.

  In an odd way, Sarah was a bit of a purist with her mayhem. Charlie figured she was willing to be the catalyst for the murders of people she had never met, but if she knew what really motivated him above all else, she might not go along.

  Charlie just didn’t quite trust her with his life just yet.

  They made love for the first time once the website went active, and for the second, third, and fourth time after that over the course of the afternoon. Charlie counted every time and told her he would continue to do so for the rest of his life, remembering each and every touch and smell and taste and curve of her body.

  “Every last kiss,” he promised, his eyes as wide and sincere as a curious child, which, in a sense, he was. “I’ll never be with anyone else.”

  Sarah smiled when she heard those words, but she didn’t let him see. She knew full well there would be others for them both, but there was beauty in the illusion and she had seen far too much ugliness in her life.

  “Neither will I,” she lied, unaware that there was another lie between them, a lie she would never have suspected given the way they had spent the last several hours.

  As wizened as she saw herself and as innocent as she saw Charlie by comparison, there was something inside him that was like biting on tin foil, something cold and unreachable that he was right to hide from her, something that even the heat of a first love could never thaw. Something that would have genuinely frightened her.

  Charlie had been forever changed by his mother’s death. He had always been a sweet-tempered kid, a product of two parents whose personalities joined together perfectly to produce a soul as gentle as their own, but something had begun to turn after his father’s death, and he had only recently discovered just how deeply he’d been affected by the added loss of his mother, which seemed to have completed his dark transformation.

  What he was keeping from Sarah was something he had been denying to himself ever since they first began to discuss life and death and Melissa and Jesus Two Bears, something that seemed too awful to contemplate. But recent events had forced him to admit what was driving him all along. The final lie he told himself, the one which he still clung to, was that he would be able to tell her eventually, and that she would understand.

  They spent most of the next three days alternately hacking into police computer files and adding to their memories, but it would be the last time for a long while they would have the luxury of such time to themselves
.

  Once the website gained attention, things would begin to move very quickly, beyond even what they both expected and what Charlie had hoped for, and events would soon spiral out of their control.

  2 MONTHS AFTER TOWY WEBSITE

  Article Details: Title: 3 Bodies Found After Fire, Arson investigators discovered three bodies in the charred remnants of a house in the Windham Heights section of Greenville yesterday. A demolition crew was in the process of cleaning the debris in the three-alarm fire that destroyed most of the structure when a construction supervisor noticed what appeared to be human remains. The bodies were missed during the initial investigation in spite of reports that neighbors testified hearing gunshots just prior to the conflagration. Investigators were called back to the scene and recovered the unknown persons. “Identification is pending, and may be difficult due to chemicals involved that caused the fire to burn extremely hot,” GFD spokesman James Fleisher said. “All we know at this point is that there were three of them.” Public records indicate the property is owned by Bradley J. Connor, but Fleisher refused to confirm whether police had any other information regarding the owner or his whereabouts.

  Chapter Fifteen

  “It seems to be connected to this goddamn website. The victim’s picture was posted just a few days ago, so there’s that, and the weird symbol the perp drew on his own stomach before he offed himself matches a picture on the site. We don’t know what the hell it means, yet.”

  The watch commander turned back to the screen and scrolled down to where the crudely drawn picture had been uploaded by Charlie and Sarah only days before. It roughly matched the tattoo Missy had gotten in a West Covina, California strip mall some time before she attempted to take out Big Max, who was, ironically, now residing in a convalescent hospital only a few miles from the tattoo parlor Missy had visited the day before she scrambled his brains and severed his spinal cord.

  “He drew it in the victim’s blood, by the way,” the watch commander continued, still scrolling through the site. “Upside down. Guy wasn’t bright enough to, you know, do it right-side up for us. Or, whatever.”

  There was scattered laughter until a cop in the back brought up what they had all been thinking.

  “So do we award this douchebag a medal at his grave, or what?”

  The laughter swelled and turned to applause as the watch commander turned around to face the room with a tight grin on his face.

  “Look, we all know the vic was a sex offender – ”

  “Fucking pedo!”

  “No shit, Sherlock,” the watch commander said, taking back the room with his tone. “It’s on the Internet. We all know what he did. But he also did his time, and he registered every year, and this is still a murder investigation, all right?”

  “What’s to investigate? Perp’s dead.”

  “Captain’s worried about copycats. This fucking website’s already getting a lot of traffic, and there’s a lot of chatter from these morons about who’s gonna be next.”

  “I got twenty on the Captain,” a cop in the back whispered loudly, which caused both laughter and a few nervous boos.

  “All right, knock it off!” the watch commander yelled, and this time the room got quiet and stayed that way. “You know that viral shit. Something like this could get out of hand if every dickhead with nothing to lose decides to off somebody. We don’t know if this guy was actually meeting with other like-minds, we don’t know shit. There could be a fucking clubhouse for all we know. So far it’s local, so keep your eyes and ears open. You see this symbol anywhere, or hear anything about ‘taking one with you’, call it in. All right?”

  “Hey, Sarge.” An officer in the back raised his hand as if he was in school.

  “Yeah?

  “Is that website even doing anything illegal?”

  The watch commander sighed. “Probably not. Maybe some hacking.”

  “And it’s on the Internet, like you said, so…”

  “There a point coming anytime soon, Chang?”

  “Well, if whoever put up the site was looking for this result, and it goes viral, there’s not much we can do about it, right?”

  “Jesus, Chang, why don’t we just fucking close up shop and let the lions in? I said keep an ear to the ground. It’s one thing to go out and kill a child molester; it’s something else to fucking organize it in my backyard.”

  ***

  It was only a day later when the second murder-suicide occurred, and to make matters worse, the bodies were discovered in an alley just two blocks from the police station. The victim was another local name taken from the state’s registry of sex offenders, whose information had been posted on the TOWY website.

  At this point, most of the rank-and-file were silently cheering that another local pedophile had been delivered from their midst, but the governor’s office took notice as the details of the crime were leaked and the heinous cause of death drew national attention.

  The man had been choked to death with his own testicles.

  ***

  “What’s so goddamn interesting about the task force?” Thane asked angrily, startling Anita with his sudden aggression.

  The two of them had just finished a perfectly adequate meal around some perfectly adequate conversation, and Thane was feeling mightily pissed off.

  “Excuse me?” Anita said, returning his attitude. She’d been moving slowly, trying to keep his libido at bay while keeping him on the line, which had been looking more and more frayed as the days passed. She used her husband as an excuse when she could, but Thane could easily check the assignment schedules at any precinct and figure out when he was working, so it was getting more and more difficult to put him off.

  On top of that, she was beginning to want him as much as he wanted her, which was even tougher to deal with.

  Anita hadn’t taken kindly to Myers’ little meeting of the minds with her husband, which made her feel like some kind of whore. Basically her boss had gotten the okay from her husband to pimp her out if that’s what it took to prove Thane was dirty, a situation that had put a terrible strain on their marriage.

  “What the fuck did you tell him, John?”

  “Nothing!”

  “Bullshit!”

  “Just that it was okay. You know, you could, like, work him.”

  “Work him?”

  “Like a case. A suspect.”

  “I don’t fuck suspects, John!”

  “Who said anything about fucking? Jesus!”

  “That’s what Myers thinks!”

  “I never said that, Anita. I didn’t.”

  That’s the problem. Nobody’s saying it, but everybody’s thinking it.

  “Anita. Baby.” He put his hand on her shoulder, but she angrily shrugged it off, and her anger was infectious. “Look, you want to move up, don’t you? Get off the street? Well, now’s your chance!”

  John stormed out, probably to fuck around out in the garage with his miniature car collection, a hobby she secretly loathed, and Anita waited until she knew he was gone before she started to cry.

  “You mean your chance.”

  “What?” Thane asked. “What do you mean, my chance? Chance for what?”

  Anita looked up at Thane, whose face now held more confusion than anger. Shit, I said that out loud.

  “I just meant it could be your chance for a promotion, you know, heading up the task force. Especially if this thing blows up.”

  Thane looked at her for a moment and then sat back in his chair. He’d been so wound up he hadn’t realized his fists were planted on either side of his untouched dessert and he was leaning in like he was about to jump across the table.

  “They’ll never promote me,” he said, and slumped back in his chair. The truth was that his interest in the task force was mostly because he was fascinated by the premise of taking out the trash, as the website called it, and it meshed with his “extracurricular activities” of late. The things he did in secret that he told no one about, things he was
sure he’d take to his grave, in spite of the fact he knew others in his position must have felt the same way at times.

  What Thane had always hated most about the job were the ones who got away, the ones he knew were guilty but he couldn’t prove it or got off on a technicality. And suddenly there was someone out there with a plan that perfectly encapsulated that terrible feeling and turned it on its head. Someone who was doing what Thane had always fantasized about. He’d even kept a list of his own with the names of those he thought deserved punishment for crimes that were officially unsolved, although his recent forays into the night were more an anomaly than a habit.

  In spite of everything, Thane still believed in the system. The system that had chewed him up and spit him out, the system that had been his life, the system he could never leave, never divorce, never abandon. In his heart he told himself that the system was everything, that justice was paramount, and that things would always work out, but lately he’d been wondering if it was all just a lie he told himself to get through the days and nights that were starting to bleed together.

  And then he met Anita, who seemed to bring out something in him that he’d always held in check. His emotions. Thane’s ex had always called him the Statue, as if he was made of stone, and there was more truth to that nickname than he liked to admit. What began as a little joke between a husband and wife had eventually become a chasm neither could cross. He hated her for leaving him, but he knew that their break had been mostly on him.

  It was ironic that by the time he met a woman who could revive his passion and bring out his best, he was getting too old and cynical to allow himself to break free of his self-constructed prison.

  And of course, she was married. That had never bothered Thane before, but that was because he’d never really cared before.

  Anita watched as Thane almost seemed to deflate before her eyes. She could almost feel his conflicted feelings on the subject of the task force. Maybe it was because she’d seen the results of such inner turmoil after he nearly beat to death that rapist who’d gotten away with his crimes for too long. Regardless, she sensed that the reasons he’d volunteered for the task force, campaigned for it, were deep and confusing, even to him.