by Hadena James
“The fact that her brain isn’t entirely wired right never raised red flags?” Gabriel snarked. “What’s going to happen if she has to draw a gun on someone? She can’t identify herself or tell them not to move.” I smiled.
“Yeah, right, like she enjoys that part of her job, she might fake aphasia to make excuses to Taser people more often,” Lucas said.
“Let’s just get through the next couple of hours. She’s metabolizing the stuff faster than she should be, as she does with everything, so the side effects should be wearing off soon. You can crucify me later,” Xavier said. I nodded in agreement. I wouldn’t crucify him, but I might Taser him.
“I don’t mean to overstep, but can you guys work with her like that?” The driver asked. I nodded.
“Yes,” Lucas answered. “If she really wants us to know exactly what she’s saying she finds a way. Besides, she’s more…” He didn’t finish his thought. Instead, he looked at me. I had dug out my cell phone and was furiously typing on it. “She’s resourceful,” Lucas said turning away from the screen.
“If you say so.” Aside from my fingers hitting the screen on my phone, we rode the rest of the way in silence. I was working on a threatening text message to send to Xavier and using words I did not let escape my lips. I wasn’t much of a lady, but my mother had ingrained in me a sense of something that made some words absolutely out of bounds. She didn’t even like the f-word, which was why I had found substitutes over the years. Even as an adult, I tried not to use the word around her for fear of having my mouth washed out with soap. I hit send. Xavier’s phone went off. He read the screen, a smile spreading over his face.
Sometimes, Xavier had odd emotional reactions. Sometimes, he had inappropriate emotional reactions. Both were caused by taking a bullet to the brain years earlier. However, at this moment, he was amused by my language choices. Just because I didn’t say them out loud, didn’t mean I couldn’t swear the barn down. I had words and phrases in my vocabulary that would make pirates blush and feel dirty.
“Have you spoken with Brady Wilchek?” Gabriel asked.
“Yes,” the marshal answered.
“How traumatized is he?”
“He’s having the worst couple of days of his entire life,” the marshal answered. I texted Lucas asking the marshal’s name. Lucas texted me back that I had not missed introductions, because they hadn’t been done.
“What kind of guy is he?” Lucas asked the marshal. “How would you describe him?”
“Freaked out,” the marshal answered.
“Yes, but why exactly is he freaked out? Is it the missing time? His stay in the hospital? The fact that he was attacked? The cuts to his face? I need to know exactly what he is most focused on, so I can figure out how to approach the situation.” Lucas informed him.
“I don’t know,” the marshal answered. I texted Gabriel asking for the marshal’s name. Gabriel ignored my message.
“I will have to evaluate him upon arrival. If we get it wrong, he may shut down and feel as though we are attacking him a second time. Or he may become defiant and feel we are being judgmental, which wouldn’t work in our favor either. Do we know where he was last seen?”
“His credit card was recovered from a bar in the French Quarter where he was running a tab. He didn’t pay his tab or attempt to get his card back from the bar.”
This meant he was drugged before he left the bar. Someone had needed him compliant. There wasn’t any indication of sexual assault, which ruled out a man attempting to prey on other men for sexual superiority. However, drugging him before he left the bar would help a man to convince him to go with him. From his before picture, I was guessing the guy thought he was a ladies’ man. He had a wide smile and very white, perfectly straight teeth. A smile like that cost money. It screamed he had amazing dental insurance or a lot of money. My vote was on money. His eyes were a medium brown, his hair a sandy blond, his tan was beach related, and his torso had muscle definition. Even if his file hadn’t said he was a tourist, it would have been a solid bet.
Not only was heterosexual men low risk victims, but this guy was among the lowest. He was fit. He was young. He had money. The trifecta of terrible victims. Serial killers didn’t go for these types of victims unless they were ultimate thrill seekers that could be very dominant. History showed only a handful of serial killers willing to prey upon this type of victim, and the majority had been captured because of it. Immediately, Adolfo Constanzo came to mind. The cult leader had done fine as long as he was using poor Mexicans for his rituals. It was only after he grabbed a rich, college kid on vacation that someone was willing to go after him.
This brought another thought to my mind; we were in New Orleans. It was the magic capital of the US. Most people were familiar with voodoo in the sense that they knew it existed, but there were many other religions in the south that dealt with magic. Of course, our victims weren’t dead, so that ruled out the darker religions like Palo Mayombe, but blood was used in other religions. I couldn’t think of any right off the top of my head that would approve of this sort of mutilation to get the blood though. Most used willing donors, preferably those involved with the spell they wanted to cast, because it made the magic stronger. Also, mutilation when ritualistic was more controlled than these gashes. It seemed unlikely we had an enraged voodoo priest running around, slashing people up, unless someone had raised Marie Laveau from the dead. I shrugged and realized I hadn’t vocalized anything, not even in aphasia gibberish.
We turned into the parking lot of a huge hospital. The lot was packed. Hospitals were busy places. There was something tragic about a hospital parking lot. The amount of cars was not a reflection of the amount of people inside, since most patients weren’t driving themselves to be admitted. It was a reflection of visitors and staff. Visitors always outnumbered patients and staff. People stacked on top of each other with no privacy led to a decrease in dignity. No one enjoyed tossing their cookies or using a bedpan in a room full of other people. Closing the curtains was supposed to offer privacy, but the illusion failed to live up to the reality.
My list of reasons to hate hospitals was long, but this was at the top of the list. Sometimes a person just needed privacy, real privacy. I firmly believed that privacy led to faster recovery times, because one did not have to deal with a roommate or their roommate’s visitors, or doing things behind a closed curtain that would normally be done in a private setting without any embarrassment or stigma.
Balance
The biceps in Valerie’s arms ached. Her hands felt as if they had been put in a vice. The scrapes and bruises she could ignore. The damage she did to herself was what screamed for her attention. Drugged, dead weight required a lot of lifting and jerking, and it took its toll on her muscles, but it would go away.
Her trophy soaked in chemicals. It had been the first thing she had done when she got home in the wee hours of the morning. She checked its progress. The fat was dissolving nicely. The skin was drying out, despite the moisture and darkening in color. It would make a wonderful addition. So few men these days appreciated a good skull tattoo, at least not those from the upper class. They all got tribal art or names, or some other crap.
This skull looked as if it had erupted from the skin. It was smoking a cigar. She considered the options. It would complement the demon tattoo, but it would provide a nice contrast to the Bugs Bunny tattoo she had collected a few years ago in Los Angeles. Her memory brought up the owner of the Bugs Bunny tattoo. She hadn’t even been sure he was old enough actually to know who Bugs Bunny was.
Of course, this was not a decision that had to be made today. It would take a few days to cure and tan. She also didn’t have enough of them yet. That was the other problem. People were going smaller with tattoos. The days of full sleeves and large, glaring tattoos were out of fashion, replaced by small, concealable tattoos.
Or like the one she had taken from a hand a few weeks ago, they were a little feminine. That tattoo was a heart designe
d to look like a musical symbol. She didn’t remember which one, but it had been girly. Especially, since she had taken it from a man well over six feet tall and two hundred pounds who proclaimed he had played football in college. What a football player was doing with such a tattoo was beyond her, but over the last ten years, she had noticed a change in men.
The term metrosexual had been popular to throw around at the end of the 1990s, but she hadn’t understood it until the early 2000s. Now, she understood it, but had no idea why it had been applied to men of either time. The younger generations weren’t becoming more metrosexual either. It was once again okay to participate in physical and emotional abuse of a loved one. Sure, there were commercials proclaiming it was bad, but the commercials were proof more than deterrent that something had gone seriously wrong.
The young twenty-somethings that she dealt with every day were idiots. They were entitled. They were vicious. They were the future leaders and that terrified her.
One of these stupid brats had come into her office just the other day. His hands were in his pockets, his chin held high, with an attitude. She had wanted to knock his teeth down his throat. He had given her all the stupid lines that abusers give. In the end, she had left the interrogation room, found the nearest detective and suggested they look deeper into his background.
In the years since she was cut up in Los Angeles, she had gotten a degree in psychology. When a person was arrested for domestic assault in the city of New Orleans, after dark, it was her job to interview them and see if she could find a reason. A real reason, not that bullshit they shoveled. Most of the time, it was because of alcohol, drugs, or entitlement. Then she would visit the abused and try to convince them to get away from the situation, set them up with a shelter or outreach group, help them file restraining orders, and suggest pressing charges to the full extent of the law.
Most of her clients were women. The occasional male came into her case files. This new generation punched first and thought second, and this did include females. However, it was still an area dominated by male aggressors. It didn’t matter because she abhorred them all. They were all worthless. They all deserved to put down. They were no better than rabid raccoons. They were just as violent, just as aggressive, and just as destructive to society, and they spread their disease.
She was balancing the scales; reversing some of the damage done by these parasitic human beings. Once they spent some time facing life from a scarred and scared state, they would think twice before raising their fist to another person. It was impossible to ask them to walk a mile in another’s shoes. They had to be forced.
She swirled the chemicals and let the skin swatch continue the process. She moved to her box. Inside were all the tattoos she had ever claimed. She took scars and birthmarks too, but they went somewhere else. They didn’t tan as well, nor did they show the character of the wearer nearly as well. She had found those with the most violent tattoos were the least nasty. The ones with naked women and cartoon characters were the most dangerous. She was getting closer.
For a moment, she sat back, her hand in the box and remembered. There had been six in Los Angeles; all of them gang tattoos. She wasn’t even sure those crimes had been reported to the police. These new crimes were though. Well, some of them. The man missing the demon on a motorcycle hadn’t reported the incident. A few others were in the box that had not shown up in an ER or a police station. She wondered why. Everyone had a story. She wondered what their story was. If it hadn’t been reported, it was because they had secrets; secrets that were bigger than getting skin grafts or filling out police paperwork. Same with the scars. It was part of the reason she wasn’t as keen on taking scars; they told stories. Only one of them had ever been reported and that had been years ago.
She stood up and dressed. The clock told it was a little after two in the afternoon. She needed to eat, go to the gym, hit her yoga class, and then head to work. She would manage because she was never late and rarely missed. Once in a great while, she would wake up with the pain searing through her body so intensely that she would call in, but it was rare and her boss always gave her a sympathetic tone.
Some of the pain was real. The scars crossed nerves, muscles, ligaments, tendons, and not just flesh. Not stretching every day caused them to stiffen. However, there were times that stretching caused the repaired inner workings of her body to ache as if they were on fire. She had enough of those spots that if they all started doing it, it was impossible to do much more than lay in bed and cry.
She was also aware that some of the pain was psychological. It didn’t hurt any less. It was like a phantom limb that still experienced pain. There was no reason for them to hurt, but they did. They drew whimpers from her, as they had on the day they had happened. It was somehow worse than the real pain. Thankfully, it usually didn’t last more than a few hours, whereas, the other could last for days, slowly retreating instead of disappearing.
A professional had taught her to apply make-up for daytime wear. It minimalized the scars to a degree, and any degree was better than her natural look. Staring at the mirror, she counted the deep gashes that crisscrossed her cheeks, forehead, and even her mouth. She had sixteen of them. Another two dozen were more superficial and could be hidden completely with a dabbling of concealer. Before undressing, she moved away from the mirror. She refused to see the rest of her body. Her mind could ignore them if she didn’t look. Special shower mitts went over her hands so that she couldn’t feel them on her chest, stomach, and legs. Her eyes stared at the wall the entire time she washed her scarred flesh. Her doctors told her that she had over a hundred of those deep, crevice like wounds on her body. She had tried never to see, never to feel them. If she did, she was sure she would go crazy. Their aching and burning was all the reminder she needed of them.
One stupid mistake, just one, and her life had been reset. Her dreams of being an actress had gone down the drain. She had to endure months of surgeries and physical therapy to get to this point. Then there had been college to attend, and that had been difficult. She had been a few years older than most students were and closer in age to the grad students that taught her classes. In theory, kids were supposed to grow out of the pointing and staring phase. This had not been the case in college. Students had picked up their belongings to move away from her as if they might somehow catch whatever had caused the red, shiny, developing scars they could see. So much for being more sensitive to the needs of others in modern society. She had not made a single friend in college, even when she tried. People shied away from her when she attempted to interact with them. Her professors had been the only ones that had treated her as if there was nothing wrong with her.
Now, she helped the police. They treated her good. They didn’t ask questions or pry into her history. They had probably looked up the case and she knew that, but they never mentioned it. They acted as if the scars didn’t exist. Of course, they weren’t inviting her over for dinner with their small children or to hang out and have beers after work, but they at least tried to act as if she was normal. She could appreciate that. She loathed herself. It was impossible to think that others wouldn’t find her appearance loathsome. The fact that they tried meant something to her. Not enough, but something. It had taken too many years to find this job with these coworkers for it to have too much of an impact.
Five
Having aphasia requires listeners to have a Babel fish. Sadly, the Babel fish is restricted to the works of Douglas Adams. However, a real life Babel fish would rank right up there with the wheel as far as greatest things ever invented. I had spent seven very long hours with some strange form of aphasia caused by black mamba proteins being injected into my blood stream. It had helped the migraine, for a short time, but not long enough to justify needing someone to invent a Babel fish. When my ability to speak did finally return, the process reminded me of a Monty Python sketch.
Twelve hours had now passed since I had first been injected with the new, experimental painkille
r. My head hurt worse than it did before. My blood pressure was a touch high. My eyes were extremely dry and the urge to Taser someone had become a biological imperative. Unfortunately for me, my usual release for this urge was lying in a hospital bed quite some distance from my current location. I couldn’t Taser Xavier for fear of injuring him. I could Taser Lucas, but that would have been mean. Fiona and Gabriel were off the list for the same reason as Lucas. I was a sociopath, but I tried not to be unnecessarily violent. For the average person, being Tasered hurt, but we didn’t deal with average people and my Taser would send out a whopping 250,000 volts compared to the normal 150,000. It also didn’t send an intermittent current. As long as my finger was on the trigger, the electricity was flowing. My Taser could set clothing on fire, but it did its job and dropped raging psychopaths.
That left one option and while it sounded insane, I had never actually taken a jolt from this amped up monster. It was possible that the sudden electrical impulse would help my headache. I’d used electroshock therapy in the past as a migraine tool, usually in the form of acupuncture. However, those little machines didn’t carry the voltage to do a good job. The theory behind electroshock for migraines was that the stimulation of muscles increased blood flow. My blood flow was just fine. I thought it did some sort of reboot on my brain. However, hitting myself with 250,000 volts seemed like overkill for a simple reboot. I could turn it down, but that would take time.
Gabriel and Lucas were still with Brady Wilchek. Fiona, Xavier, and I were in the van. Fiona was driving and Xavier had the passenger’s seat. Our mission was food, most likely served in wrappers with fries on the side. The hospital had a cafeteria, but it had closed hours ago.
The city of New Orleans was even less dark than Kansas City. The sky overhead was a dingy brownish-gray. There were no stars, not even the North Star or Morning Star was willing to attempt to penetrate the light pollution over this city. There were plenty of people out and about. I was surprised by this since we were not in the French Quarter. Of course, this area wasn’t exactly residential either. A few large, looming buildings a few blocks away from us, suggested we were near a college campus. The ages of those wandering the streets reinforced the notion.