The Trials of Tamara (Blue Eyed Monster Book 2)

by Ginger Talbot

  He knows me well enough to know that I wouldn’t accept anything at all from him—not money, not new clothes, not a fucking bus pass. I could ask him for everything he owned, and he’d give it to me. I know that with a dull, aching certainty. But he won’t give me the one thing I want.

  He won’t let me stay.

  There’s one thing that he left me that I will use—a fake ID, and a card with an appointment at a beauty salon.

  I know what he’s doing. He’s giving me a way to change my appearance, and a new name, because my face has been all over the news and it will be hard for me to start over as Tamara Bennett. The fake ID identifies me as Jennifer Dawson

  Whatever. I’ll use the name for now.

  I check out of the hospital that day and stand on the street with my suitcases at my feet and a yawning sense of emptiness ballooning inside me.

  With nowhere else to go, I call a cab and head to the beauty salon. A stylist named Esme seems to have been expecting me.

  She does an expert job of bleaching my hair blonde, straightening and layering it so I look nothing like myself. She offers me green contact lenses.

  Sure. Why not? Green eyes, purple, silver—who gives a damn?

  I’m like a robot, moving and answering mechanically, with no feelings behind my words or actions. Feeling hurts too much.

  I spend the night in a hostel, then use my money to buy a bus ticket to Illinois. New York has too many memories for me. I can’t stand to be here anymore.

  Once I’m there, it’s not hard for me to get an off-the-books job waitressing, and I rent a room in a weekly motel. I work night and day. I save every cent that I earn.

  I call Astrid and Sarah the first week I’m there, but I refuse to tell them where I am. I just tell them I’m okay and I hang up when they try to ask questions.

  I used to be Tam with a plan. I knew what I was going to do with my life. I would live a life of meaning and service. I’d shield the people who were most vulnerable. I knew that was why I’d been put here on this Earth.

  And then I met Joshua.

  Joshua swooped down on me and carried me off and forced me to live for him, only for him, every minute of the day. He invaded my body and my mind, demanding I give up all my secrets to him. I was deprived of companionship and any sense of purpose except that of pleasing him.

  I fought and I fought, but on a level far deeper than I realized, I surrendered completely. I believed him when he said I belonged to him. I came to depend on his strength and his possessiveness and the way he made me know that I was precious to him.

  He was my higher purpose.

  Without that now, I feel like nothing. I feel like I was a fool to believe he ever loved me.

  Days drift by, and I keep thinking he’ll change his mind and come for me, but he never does. Days melt into weeks. I spend Christmas and the New Year alone. I spend Valentine’s Day in my room, staring at a phone that doesn’t ring and hating myself for my weakness.

  I get to know some shady characters. I buy a gun without serial numbers and pay Z, the sleazeball who sold it to me, to give me lessons out in the woods where nobody will spot us.

  As time drags on, I start to understand why I decided on Springfield, Illinois as my new location. It was subconscious on my part, but now I remember why this particular location appealed to me.

  Joshua stripped everything away from me, and I don’t have the will to go back to school, but there’s still one thing I can do with my life.

  One way I can make the world a better place, just like I used to dream of.

  One thing that will make Joshua remember the girl he crumpled up and threw away like trash.

  Chapter Nineteen

  Joshua

  “Que mierda, what is that smell?”

  I sit up and look at Sergeant Ruiz, my eyes bleary. I rub sleep-crusted eyes and try to orient myself. I’m on the couch in the living room of my Manhattan penthouse. Daylight streams through the windows.

  Maybe Sergeant Ruiz is just a nightmare. I have them all the time now, and I can rarely tell whether I’m asleep or awake when they’re happening. I’ve seen my father stalk through my living room, dragging Tamara’s dead body by the ankle. Her eyes were vacant, staring at the ceiling, and she left a long trail of blood behind her. I ran over and grabbed at her, but she melted away, and I was standing in the middle of the room alone.

  Charlemagne has hacked my limbs off while I lay helpless on the kitchen table. Elizabeth—poor, stunted girl who lived her life for me and died when I couldn’t love her—howled wordlessly and clawed at him, but he didn’t even see her. My mother…she just stays curled up in the corner of the room, hugging her knees, sobbing wordlessly.

  I open my eyes again. Sergeant Ruiz is still standing there, looking down at me impatiently. Except he was fired, so now he’s just Alfredo Ruiz.

  The answer to his question is, I don’t know. That smell might be me, or it might be the piles of trash lying around me.

  I’ve disabled all my security systems and fired my entire security team. Garrett remains on retainer, in case Tamara ever needs anything. That’s it.

  I’ve got all the money in the world. I could have anything I want—any woman, any toy, with the snap of my fingers.

  It doesn’t matter.

  I broke my promise to the person who matters most in the world. I broke her heart.

  I haven’t bathed in…days? Weeks?

  I drink myself into a stupor every night. In the morning, I wake up and start drinking again.

  Ruiz doesn’t look too hot himself. Tired and rumpled, he has circles under his bloodshot eyes. His hair, usually gelled back, is greasy and sticking up in all directions.

  “I should get a fucking hazmat team to torch this place,” he growls. He walks away from me and heads into the kitchen. He returns with a box of trash bags and starts picking up half-filled takeout boxes.

  “Cut it out,” I snap at him. “And get the fuck out of my house.”

  He rakes me with a look of scorn. “Who’s going to make me, princess? You?” And he goes back to work, turning his back on me, dismissing me completely as any kind of threat. The man who should be prey, taunting the predator in his lair. You’re a weak little puppy, is what his scornful gesture says to me.

  That’s it.

  Fury roars through me.

  Nobody speaks to me like that. You’re king or you’re nothing.

  I leap up and run at him. He drops the garbage bag and turns to face me, so slowly that it’s insulting.

  We start to spar. For the first couple of minutes, I’m dull and sluggish, my hangover clouding my brain, my muscles slack from lack of use.

  But then the old instincts come roaring back to life, and the next thing I know, he’s down on the floor, his face purpling as I strangle him.

  I almost laugh. This feels like old times. The gurgling noises he’s making are kind of funny, and so is the way his eyes are bulging from his head like a cartoon.

  But he’s not prey. He doesn’t fit my requirements, so I let go and he sits up, gasping, wheezing and rubbing his throat.

  “Call me princess again,” I challenge as I stagger over to the couch and collapse. There’s a mariachi band marching through my head. I never realized how much I hated mariachi. They’re pounding a brutal rhythm on the inside of my skull with their drumsticks.

  “Oh really? Didn’t know that was your thing,” he sneers, his voice raspy from being choked. He remains unafraid and resumes picking up trash.

  “I told you, knock it off and get out of my house, you greasy pile of trash.”

  He stops. “You’re talking to me about trash?” He picks up a takeout carton and tosses it at me. It splatters on the couch. It’s crawling with maggots.

  “What the hell?” I yell at him, jumping up in disgust.

  “You want to live like this? Like a pig in slop?”

  A killing fury swirls through me like a tornado. Any sane man would run from me right now. Hell,
I made even Tamara run from me, the last night I saw her, and she loved me more than the moon and stars. “Get the hell out!”

  Ruiz has apparently lost all sense of self-preservation. He stands there, looking around. Still not leaving.

  Then his squinty brown eyes focus on me again. “I guess you really did love her. Boo fucking hoo. Poor little baby. Of course she dumped you. What did you expect? You’re a fucking nutjob.”

  “I let her go. I sent her away.” Why am I even bothering to explain myself to him?

  “Yeah, whatever.” He turns and heads for the door.

  “Wait,” I call after him, my voice raspy. He’s the first person I’ve spoken to in days, unless you count the hallucinations who sweep through my house on a regular basis. And I don’t talk to them much—just scream threats or pleas.

  He looks back at me with disgust. “Why? I came here to ask for your help. I wasted my time and my subway token. You couldn’t fucking kill a kitten.”

  Someone needs killing? I feel vague interest stirring, underneath the heavy blanket of misery that’s wrapped around me like a reeking cloak.

  “Hold on. Give me a few minutes. Please.” Saying that word nearly makes me vomit, but he pauses.

  I hurry into the bathroom without looking back to see if he’s staying or leaving.

  I shower fast, then scrub the foul taste from my mouth with a toothbrush. I dress in wool slacks and a button-down shirt and don’t bother with the cuffs, shove my feet into loafers without socks, and return to the living room. He’s made significant headway with the trash; there are two big garbage bags stuffed full, and a bin filled with empty wine bottles.

  I push a pile of dirty clothes off a leather armchair onto the floor, and sit down. “Who do you want me to kill?” I ask him.

  “Gideon Culpepper. That little shit who killed my Rosa.” He swallows hard and sets down the third bag. The bravado has vanished, and tears shimmer in his eyes. Gideon was a rich little trustfund brat who introduced Rosa to heroin. She overdosed and he split, leaving her to die. And he never did a day in jail.

  I gesture at the chair facing mine, and he sinks into it.

  “I can get you a drink,” I say uneasily. A man is crying in front of me, and it’s not because I’m planning on gutting him in the next few minutes. How can I make him stop crying? I don’t want to watch him snivel and I don’t know how to be comforting.

  “Nah, I tried that.” He shudders. “I just wake up feeling like shit the next day, and she’s still gone.”

  Yeah, been there, done that. For months now.

  Ruiz’s tearstained eyes meet mine, and the only reason I don’t puke is because I see the fury shining behind the tears.

  “I saw his wedding announcement in the paper, and I thought that maybe he had changed. Maybe he was truly remorseful, maybe my Rosa’s death turned him around, made him rethink how he’s living his life.” His face contorts in grief. “I mean, I thought if he was truly redeemed, then I had to be happy for him. I prayed to God to find the strength to forgive him. I went down on my knees and prayed.”

  Yeah, and how’d that work out for you?

  It was my cruel, sarcastic voice. Had I said it out loud?

  I glance at him.

  Nope, doesn’t look like it.

  Ruiz’s fists clench. “Then I did some checking around. Nothing’s changed. He’s beating her, and she wants out, but he told her if she cancels the wedding, he’ll kill her little sister and nobody will ever be able to pin it to him. He bragged about getting rid of other girls. Like my Rosa.”

  Something clicks inside me. I nod.

  Tamara would want me to do this.

  I didn’t lie when I told her that I live only for her. I can’t talk to her, I can’t give her false hope, but I can do things that I know would make her proud.

  And the grief that drenches his voice and wrecks him every time he speaks of his lost daughter and calls her “my Rosa”, I understand that too—horribly, painfully, in a way I never did before.

  Empathy sucks. What a useless, stupid emotion. I hate it. If I could scorch it from my soul, I would. But it’s in me now, and apparently it’s not leaving any time soon.

  “All right. Give me his latest location, or I can find it out myself. It’s done,” I tell him.

  Alfredo shakes his head vehemently. “No way. It’s my kill.”

  I start to argue, but he interrupts me. And I let him. I am not the man that I once was. “This is my revenge. He hurt me. If I let some someone else take my revenge for me, what kind of man am I?”

  “So why come to me, then?”

  He hesitates. “I don’t know. You’ve done it before. I have to figure out the logistics of transport and all that. How to keep him subdued until I get to where I need to take him. Hell, where to take him. Because I’m going to take my fucking time.”

  I think he wants a little more than that. I think he someone to share the burden of sin with him. “All right,” I say. “Let’s start planning.”

  “Really?” He’s like a kid who just found out he’s going to Disneyland. He lights up and suddenly looks as if a thousand-ton weight has dropped from his shoulders.

  As for me…I still feel vacant. Dull. Thick and ugly. But knowing I’m doing something that would make Tamara happy is enough to cut through my haze of self-pity and get me moving, at least. If only I could tell her about it myself.

  A quick glance around the room reminds me why I can’t.

  I’ve shattered the mirrors, the vases, and most of the furniture. I’ve stabbed paintings over and over again. Hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of furniture and artwork, destroyed. And I don’t remember doing any of it.

  I already broke Tamara’s ribs without meaning to. God only knows what I might do to her if we were together again. And even knowing the danger, she wouldn’t leave me. She’d stay with me, trying to help me, until I killed her.

  “Fair warning,” I say to Ruiz, rubbing my numb face with my hand. “I go for days without sleep and then when I finally pass out from exhaustion, I have nightmares and walk in my sleep and smash the shit out of everything around me.”

  His gaze sweeps the room. “So you’re not just a serial killer. You’re a ticking time bomb who’s going to go off at any moment and take out everyone around you.”

  “That sums it up nicely.” I manage a brittle smile. “Still want to go ahead with this?”

  He scowls in disgust. “Like I have a lot of options? ‘Serial killer team member’ isn’t a job category on LinkedIn. Try not to flip your shit until after we take care of Gideon, okay?”

  “I can’t make any promises. All right, let’s talk logistics. You’d be the most logical suspect if he disappeared, right? Everyone knows you tried to get him prosecuted after Rosa died, and with you being fired, they’ll be thinking rogue cop on a revenge spree. Which is true. So you need to set yourself up with an ironclad alibi while I grab him, and we can meet up after I’ve held him for a couple of days. It’ll take the heat off you.”

  “That’s easy. I work security at a nightclub now.” He frowns in thought. “Tools. I have to think what I’m gonna bring with me.”

  I haven’t even searched him to see if he’s wired. I could be handing myself over to him for a prison sentence. But I’m reckless and uncaring now. The hell with it. “I like knives,” I say with a smile that would freeze the blood of a sane man. A man who wasn’t crazed with grief.

  Ruiz just nods in appreciation. “I feel like I’m gonna be more of a hammer man.”

  “Gonna be”, like this is going to be a regular thing? I wonder. But hey, nothing wrong with hammers. They get the job done.

  “Hammers can be very effective tools,” I say. “I’ve got a property in upstate New York you can use. Nothing fancy—a cabin out in the woods, incinerator to dispose of the remains, lots of bleach. Let’s pick a night.”

  Chapter Twenty

  Joshua

  Gideon’s been chained up to the wall of m
y cellar for two days now. I let him drink bottles of water and I feed him; it’s no fun killing someone who’s ready to pass out from hunger and dehydration. Weak prey is boring. The prey needs its strength so it can put up a good fight.

  Gideon mistook my feeding him for mercy.

  He started out arrogant, threatening me, sneering, telling me I didn’t know who I was fucking with. That was funny. If the loss of Tamara hadn’t burned away my ability to feel happiness, I’d have laughed my ass off.

  Gideon moved on pretty quickly to desperation. He wanted to know how much ransom I was asking for, how the negotiations were going, and how much longer he’d be here.

  I didn’t speak to him. Not one word.

  That’s started to scare him.

  He’s begun offering bribes, throwing in more and more money until, just as Ruiz walks in the door, he’s weeping like a little girl and promising everything he has and a lot of shit he doesn’t if I’ll just let him go and please, please, he’ll never say a word about who took him, and…

  When his eyes light on Ruiz, his face goes fish-belly white.

  “Remember me? Remember Rosa?” Ruiz’s eyes have a crazy light I recognize all too well. It’s almost a shame. Ruiz was a very good man, once upon a time. And now he’s my spiritual brother.

  Ruiz and I unchain Gideon, then carry him over to the table in the middle of the room as he struggles and screams. I was hoping for more fight. Gideon’s much weaker than the type of prey I normally hunt, but then again, he’s Ruiz’s prize, not mine.

  I pull the chains up from the table legs, and Ruiz and I chain Gideon down. His pale, skinny body convulses, and when Ruiz sets a toolbox down next to Gideon’s head and opens it, Gideon makes beautiful music with his screams.

  I settle back to watch as Ruiz goes to work.

  He starts with the hands, mashing Gideon’s fingers to pulp. He moves on to his ribcage, his arms, his nose. He takes his time, drawing it out, savoring every moment.

  He’s good. He knows where all the pain points are.

  I stand by with a bucket of ice water, dumping it on Gideon’s head whenever he passes out.