by Leif Wright
“Uncuff him,” the woman, clearly in charge, said, nodding her head toward Chris. “Mr. Jackson, my name is Detective Bain, and the guy behind that mirror,” she nodded her head toward the obvious double mirror over her shoulder, “is starting a video and audio recording device right now. Do you understand?”
Chris nodded.
“Please answer with words.”
“Yes,” he said. “I understand.”
“Okay,” she said. He couldn’t stop himself from imagining her in another situation, maybe drunk at a bar, responding to his advances, coming home with him and becoming another bounce in his rebound full of escorts and butterfaces. “Today is September twenty-eighth, and it’s, um, seven-thirty p.m. You’ve been in custody since eleven forty-five this morning, when I read your Miranda rights to you, but we haven’t interviewed you yet, is that the case?”
He nodded.
“Words, please.”
“Yes,” he said, closing his eyes and rubbing his wrists. “That is the case.”
“Please state your full name and birthdate, along with your county of residence.”
“Middle name too?”
She nodded.
“Words, please,” he said, half-grinning.
Bain forced a toothy, humorless smile.
“Christopher Reginald Jackson Junior,” he said, grin gone. “I was born March twenty-second, 1966. I live in Osage County, Oklahoma.”
“Thank you,” she said. “Do you know why you’re here?”
“When you arrested me, you said assault and murder,” he responded noncommittally. “I guess that’s why I’m here.”
“You are accused of committing Criminal Felony 5531B, assault and battery with a dangerous weapon resulting in great bodily injury, victim Richard Turner. You are also accused in Criminal Felony 7122, assault and battery with a dangerous weapon, first-degree burglary, and the use of a weapon in the commission of a felony, victim Bishop Sean Brien. You are also accused in Criminal Felony 5686, assault and battery with a dangerous weapon resulting in death, and first-degree premeditated murder with malice, victim Pearl Edwards,” she said. “Do you have anything you’d like to tell us?”
Chris didn’t respond.
“Let me tell you a few things we know, then,” she continued. “We have two witnesses placing you at two of the crime scenes. We have DNA evidence that will put you at the scene of Pearl Edwards’ murder, and we have a murder weapon retrieved from your trash that preliminary tests indicate is the weapon used in all three crimes.” She paused as his eyes widened. Clearly, he hadn’t expected something she had said. She let that sink in for a second before she went on. “We’ve also recovered interesting information you tried to delete from your computer,” she said, watching his eyes widen further. “If you work with us to help us get the person who hired you to commit these crimes, I can’t promise immunity, but I can promise it will help you.” If his eyes widened any further, she thought they might fall right out onto the faux wood of the desktop.
“I don’t know the guy’s name,” he said. “Shit! I need to talk to a lawyer.”
Shit indeed, she thought. Steer him away from that! “Mr. Jackson, are you really asking for a lawyer? If you are, this interview will end and we will take you to the county jail until your arraignment and any good-faith advantage you might gain will be lost. Do you want that to happen, or can we continue to talk?”
“I know I have the right to remain silent,” he said. “If I talk to you is that a de facto waiving of that right, or can I still exercise it after I’ve already started talking to you?”
“You can answer whichever questions you want and stay silent on whichever you want.”
He closed one eye and tilted his head to the left, accentuating his double chin. “Okay,” he said. “Okay. I’ll talk to you, but I might not want to answer everything.”
“Fair enough,” she said, noticing Russell’s eye twitch when she said it.
She could almost hear his voice in her head, quoting his English teacher mother: “There is no such thing as ‘fair enough’. There is fair and not fair. Something is either fair or it is not fair. It can’t be ‘fair enough’.”
“Let’s continue. Is there anything you want to say?”
There was a long pause as he appeared to consider his options.
Finally, he drew in a long breath. “Murder with malice isn’t true,” he half-sighed, half-spoke. “I didn’t have anything against that old lady. Hell, I didn’t even mean to kill her. I just meant to rough her up like the others.”
Confession! Holy FUCK, a confession in my very first murder case! He just confessed to all three crimes in one sentence! Bain’s expression didn’t show the maelstrom of joy that exploded in her brain. “How did it end up going too far?” The goal now was just to keep him talking, now that he had started. Making herself appear sympathetic to him was an important step toward that goal.
“Well, I’m not very good at it, as it turns out,” he said with a dry chuckle as he rubbed his temples with his right hand spread across his forehead. “I was supposed to make sure I hit all of them in the head, but I guess I just hit the old girl too hard. Her dog bit me.”
“Why were you supposed to hit them in the heads?”
“I wasn’t told why. I was just told to hit them in the heads until they were either loopy or unconscious.”
“Told by who?”
“Whom,” Russell’s voice said in her brain. He smiled when she flipped him off under the desk, indicating he knew exactly what she had just thought.
“I don’t know who,” Chris replied. “Some guy on the Internet who replied to my ad and paid with cash in the mail.”
“Your ad?”
“In Soldier For Hire,” he said. “It’s a website where people post ads for stuff like that.”
“Stuff like beating people with a tire thumper.”
“Well, not specifically that. Wet work. Violence for hire. I never really expected anyone to respond.”
“Why’d you place the ad if you didn’t want anyone to respond?”
“Oh, I wanted them to,” he said. “It’s kind of like when somebody tells you you’re going to get something in six weeks through the mail. At first, you totally believe they’ll send it, but after a month, you start to feel like you threw your nineteen ninety-nine away.”
Bain nodded as if she completely understood what the fuck he was talking about. Part of keeping subjects talking was the affirmative nod, she had been taught by someone so forgettable that she only remembered the basest outline of the message.
“When someone finally did respond, I didn’t know what to do,” he continued. “Like, was it some FBI agent trying to entrap me? Then I realized the FBI is all caught up with Guantanamo and North Korean hackers and shit, so I responded. And he started lining up jobs for me. He said there were more, but I guess we’ll never know now.”
“What about the email address?”
“I wondered that too,” he said. “Turns out, he was using an anonymizing service. I looked it up online, because I was curious too, and apparently, even they don’t know who he is. Or at least according to what they say.”
“Did he ever say why they deserved the beatings?”
“He sent pictures, told me to print them out, and show them. He said they’d know,” he said. “One was of a little kid, one was of a kid in a wheelchair, and one was of Santa with a kid on his lap. I couldn’t make heads or tails of it.”
“A kid in a wheelchair?” Turner’s son immediately came to mind. If that picture was sent to show to Turner, it could be significant.
“Yeah,” he replied. “That one was for the old lady. She frowned, then she tore it and started making the weirdest noise. I hit her then because I was afraid she would wake up the neighbor.”
Jessica, Bain thought. You were worried Jessica would hear. “What kind of noise?”
“Like a loud, sad moan, like, ‘Owooooo, owoooooo’.”
Bain paused
. Clearly, if this bald, fat guy was telling the truth, the pictures were intended to communicate to the victims. “How did the other two react to the pictures you showed them?”
“Similarly. The man saw the little kid and he had been fighting back before, but he relaxed and let me hit him after I showed him the picture. The bishop said something like, ‘Forgive me, father,’ and then he let me hit him, too. It was fucking weird. Excuse my French.”
“Were the pictures all of the same person?”
“No,” he replied immediately. “I tried to check that out too. The man’s picture was of a little kid, like a toddler. The old lady’s was like a kid in a wheelchair, and the bishop was a teenager who looked black or maybe Mexican.”
Bain sighed. As much of a stretch as it might have been, the mention of a wheelchair had given her hope that somehow, even implausibly, Robby had been involved. Nothing about this case, however, seemed to unfold so easily. Still, whatever vigilante was behind these beatings might have thought Robby’s father deserved what he got, and that could lead to finding out why the others were targeted. It was at least worth a look-see.
“The email guy never indicated who he was? No personal details, no explanations about why those specific people were targeted?”
“Nothing,” Chris replied. He looked scared. “Believe me, if I could lead you to him, I would.”
“Why did you run an ad on a soldier-for-hire website in the first place? I hope you’ll forgive me for saying, but you don’t exactly look like what I picture a mercenary to look like.”
He laughed. “That was kind of the point,” he said. “When my wife left me for a young stud, I wanted to prove to myself that I was still worth something. Stupid, I know.”
“Not stupid,” she said. “But you are in a whole lot of trouble. I’m going to see if I can get your murder charge reduced to voluntary manslaughter. I’m not promising anything. Meanwhile, is there anywhere we should be looking to help find this guy?”
“His email address was [email protected],” he said. “I looked it up, and they don’t divulge who uses their services.”
“Thank you, Mr. Jackson,” Bain said. “If you think of anything else, get the jailer to ring me specifically.”
“Okay,” he said, head in hands. “I really screwed up.”
25
ROBBY KNEW HE WAS DREAMING—AT LEAST PART OF THE TIME—because he could walk. Run, even. He was at an airport; one of the old style, where passengers lined up on the ground outside the plane and climbed a portable staircase to get on board.
It felt so strange, each leg taking on the weight of his body as he ascended the stairs one by one. Everyone else seemed egg-shaped. Would the plane even be able to get off the ground with so much weight aboard? The lady in front of him was taking her sweet time, long enough for Robby to notice her dress had become caught between her butt cheeks. Didn’t she notice? It must have caught her attention, surely.
If it had, she was ignoring what could only be described as a monster wedgie. Robby was tempted to reach forward and pick it out for her—but better sense prevailed.
“I need a window,” she said to apparently no one. “I don’t want an aisle, and I absolutely cannot sit in the middle. That just will not do!”
Robby’s brow furrowed. She spoke as if right out of a 1940s movie. Her flower-print dress—the part that wasn’t firmly wedged up her behind, anyway—looked like a fashion from the ’60s. Her auburn hair, neatly tucked into a ’70s schoolmarm beehive, jiggled as she spoke.
“Bah!” came from behind him, but when he turned to look, he couldn’t see far enough down the line to see who was speaking, but whoever it was had a lisp. “I thhhaid I didn’t even want to take thith thhhupid flight anyway!”
All the heads behind Robby were also craned around to see who was talking. No dice, at least for Robby. There were too many people between him and the speaker, but he somehow knew he knew whoever it was. Even though he didn’t recognize the voice—or the lisp—whoever it was knew Robby.
He felt the wedgie woman move, so he turned around and climbed a step. Something was wrong. Foreboding overtook him like the shadow from a fast-moving thunderhead. Something was wrong. This flight was the end. He had to get out of here. This was the end.
Robby tried to turn around and leave, but the egg-shaped businessman behind him, plastic smile glued on his face, wouldn’t budge. Robby leaned left to signal he wanted to walk that way. The smiling businessman leaned that way, too. He leaned right. The businessman did too.
“Sir, I can’t board this plane,” Robby tried to say. “This is a huge mistake.”
He tried to say that.
But nothing came out.
The businessman just smiled. Behind him, wedgie woman ascended another step. As if Robby wasn’t even there, the businessman climbed onto his step, his egg-like belly pushing Robby up onto the next step. The smile never changed.
“Goddamn it!” the voice toward the back of the line shouted. “If I have to take thith thhhupid flight, at leatht move it along!”
Robby looked again, but he still couldn’t see who was speaking. The feeling of doom intensified with every word, settling into his bones like ice.
Had he had this dream before? Was it really a dream?
He turned back around and he was on the top step, the stewardess pointing into the bowels of the plane, the same smile as the businessman’s plastered onto her face. Robby tried to shake his head “no”, but his neck wouldn’t do the job. The businessman bumped him from behind, and Robby was inside the plane. Terror began to sink in.
Robby looked down to his legs, but they were gone. He was just a torso—a rotund torso at that—sitting on the ground. Another bump from the businessman and Robby was moving down the aisle, seats on both sides of him, fat people stuffing luggage into overhead compartments all the way down the aisle.
“Can you handle sitting at an emergency exit row?” a stewardess, who appeared from seemingly nowhere, asked. Her smile did not move as she asked. “You can? Oh, good.” She gave him a gentle shove, and Robby was seated next to a window, the plane’s wing jutting out below him.
This is ridiculous, he thought. I have to get out of here.
Robby tried to use his seat’s arm rests to push himself out of the seat, but his arms were gone. He was a fat torso sitting in an exit seat on a flight to certain doom. And there was nothing he could do about it.
“Jesus H. Christ, can’t someone shut that fucking kid up?”
The voice was on the plane now, but Robby still couldn’t see it. Distantly, he heard a child giggling. The child, like the voice, was familiar. That realization hit like a light bulb turning on. The doom wasn’t for Robby. It was for the child. He had to save the child. The voice was getting closer, and Robby had to keep it away from the child.
“Where the hell is my seat?” the voice asked grumpily. “I’ve been working all day. I just want to sit down, have a beer, and relax for two damn minutes! Is that too much to ask?”
Robby looked around again, and horror gripped his entire body as he saw who it was coming from.
The Easter Bunny.
Terror shot through Robby. Sure, he looked harmless enough, with his tweed vest, pointy ears, and pink nose, but the Easter Bunny’s eyes were where the truth came to the surface. Inside, his eyes were dead, crawling with the beasts that writhed in corpses, the cool, pungent smell of decay in fresh graves.
Robby looked away so the Easter Bunny wouldn’t see him.
Too late.
“Well,” he said in that gravelly voice. “If it isn’t Sherry’s effeminate little bastard! Mind if I sit down?”
Robby, eyes wide, did mind. In fact, he could think of nothing on the planet that he minded more. But his voice wouldn’t work. He watched, paralyzed, as the Easter Bunny squeezed his egg-shaped body into the seat next to him.
“Now just keep your stupid pie hole clapped shut and we won’t have any problems,” the bunny leaned in to s
ay. His breath was nauseating, and it was all Robby could do to not gag. His lisp was now gone, but Robby thought better of mentioning it. “Are we clear, cupcake?”
Robby tried to nod, but his entire body just rocked back and forth in the seat. The bunny, however, seemed to get the message. He smelled like sour milk, Robby thought—but did not say, because he was keeping his pie hole clapped shut.
“This is your pilot speaking,” a reassuring, friendly voice said over the plane’s announcement system. “We’re going to fly for a while today, not really sure how long. We’re expecting some turbulence along the way, but if you’re good, I think I can guarantee a few loopty loops as well.”
The entire plane—except for Robby and the Easter Bunny—cheered.
“Goddamn it,” the bunny grumbled as the cheers sounded. “Quiet!”
Everyone ignored him. Everyone except Robby. The plane smoothly started moving forward, and then it was in the air. Robby desperately wanted to lift his arms—oh, yeah, they were gone—and yell “Whee!” with the rest of the plane, but the bunny’s glaring pink eyes warned him to keep his pie hole clapped shut.
The plane rose and fell, all the passengers cheering as it did each.
“I didn’t want to take this damn flight anyway!” the bunny yelled. No one paid attention. “Goddamn it! Goddamn it!” The bunny tried to fold his floppy ears down to mute the noise, but that only seemed to make him madder. His eyes went from pink to red. Robby knew that was a Bad Sign.
“Here we go!” the pilot said.
The plane did a big loopty loop, and Robby couldn’t help himself. He threw his nonexistent hands in the air and shrieked and giggled.
The bunny’s face changed, molded into a horrible monster mask. He seemed to grow larger and much more powerful. “Goddamn it, you little fucking noisy bastard! I told you to keep your fucking trap shut!” The monster-bunny grabbed Robby around the throat and started banging his head against the window, emphasizing each word with a bang. “I told you, you little shit! Shut the fuck UP, shut up! You worthless little cunt!”