17. Cal Walker
Y ou know how in TV shows, the serial killer always has the same persona they show the world, then the persona they have while they’re killing? I don’t really have that. I’m pretty much just Cal one hundred percent of the time unless you’re extra special and are somehow able to actually piss me off.
When I’m killing someone for Damian, it’s all business. It’s almost impossible for a mark to piss me off in those instances. They can say or do whatever they want, and it just rolls off my back because, honestly, I get it. I wouldn’t take my impending death lying down, either. So, if some nameless John Doe wants to call me a faggot, I let it slide. If you want your last words to be homophobic slurs, who am I to take that away from you?
When I’m killing someone like Kyle, I’m even more myself. Murdering scum like Kyle doesn’t make me angry. It brings me so much fucking joy.
So much so that I typically draw these kills out. I make them last. I think the longest I’ve ever taken to kill a child abuser was three days, and that was because I had literally caught the woman in the act.
That bitch lit up my dopamine centers like a fucking Christmas tree, and she had paid for it.
The only time I really got mad was if someone stumbled across one of my triggers. For example, a big trigger of mine is Cass and Naomi’s safety (for obvious reasons.) I went full blackout on some dude from Apex once when he implied he was going to fuck Cass against her will.
I’m sure you can guess where that fucking guy is right now.
If you guessed six feet under, then congrats. Big fat, shiny gold star for you. No one has said a word about my sisters since.
Another big one for me is being called the devil. Anything biblical that’s meant to paint me as evil tends to make my brain go kaboom. My therapist says it’s because my mother was screaming those words at me when she died, but what the fuck do I know. I just know I don’t like it.
I also tend to get a little pissed off if someone puts me in a position where I might hurt a child.
Remember, I told you Damian had once tried to put me on a job where the child was a mark, and I had lost my shit?
Yeah. That was angry Cal.
You don’t want to meet angry Cal.
And right now, sitting at Kyle’s plastic-wrapped kitchen table, staring at the scans of ownership papers Vox had pulled up, I was doing my best to keep angry Cal in his fucking cage.
The trading number on almost all of these slips was 2739.
I wouldn’t have noticed it, but it had just occurred to me that if I wanted to find my next target, it would be a lot easier to hunt down the scum that ran this ring than camp out in parks using Naomi as a scout.
What is the significance of 2739, you ask? Well, it’s the same code that I use to confirm the completion of my jobs for Damian.
It could be a coincidence that my code was written on these slips… However, I didn’t believe in fucking coincidence. Not in my line of work.
Kyle groaned, snapping me out of the dark turn my thoughts had taken me, and I glanced up at him.
I had made good on my promise and cut out his right eye. He was also missing all his fingers on his left hand.
He was left-handed, so it was the hand I had seen him hit Caleb with the most in the security footage. I started with his ring finger. Bye-bye wedding ring.
“You ready to tell me where Amanda is, big guy?” I asked, shoving down the boiling pot of rage that was brewing in my chest.
2739, 2739, 2739…
I was going to have to talk to Damian to get this cleared up. If this had anything to do with Apex, I would lose it.
Kyle whimpered and rolled his head back; his mouth fell open as he moaned, and I rolled my eyes, getting up from the table and grabbing a pair of pliers from my row of tools on his counter.
“Alright. Don’t tell me.”
I straddled his lap and squeezed his jaw farther open, exposing his teeth to me. His right eye tooth was pearly white and just begging to be soaked in blood.
He seized beneath me and tried to turn his head away, but I held him still and pinched his tooth between the pliers before ripping it clean out of his gums.
He screamed, and blood spurted out of his mouth, but I paid it no mind as I held my prize up before me, grinning like some sort of deranged tooth fairy.
“Can’t wait to add this one to my collection.” I smirked, getting off of him and making my way to the sink to rinse off my new trophy.
“You’re a lunatic!” he roared, spitting blood all over himself.
I shrugged. “And you’re a rapist.”
“Fuck you!”
“What? I thought we were just swapping facts?”
Kyle’s one remaining eye was swimming with tears. His hand was dripping blood in a steady pattern on the thick plastic under his chair, and his entire chin was crimson from his bleeding gums.
“You don’t look so good, Kyle. Shall we continue? Or have you had enough?”
His lip trembled, and I smiled. I was so close to breaking him. He didn’t have much fight left in him, and I was honestly surprised he had lasted this long.
I stuffed his clean tooth into my pocket next to the weird little pouch Iris had given me and leaned forward, meeting Kyle’s eye.
“Please… stop,” he whimpered.
“You know how to make it stop, Kyle. Tell me where Amanda is, and this all ends. I’ll let you rest.”
He looked at me with so much desperate hope that I would have felt bad for him if he wasn’t a child-beating rapist.
But alas, I felt nothing but happiness that he was suffering so much.
“In the basement. There’s a hidden panel behind the bar. You need my fingerprint to open the door.”
My eye twitched.
The basement.
“You’re all the fucking same, aren’t you?” I growled, the smile slipping off my face.
I had checked the basement thoroughly. But not ‘ I’m looking for a secret underground sex trafficking room’ thoroughly.
“You’re fucking disgusting,” I told him as I circled behind him. I positioned one hand on his forehead and the other on his jaw.
“I thought you said you were going to stop! You said you would let me go!” he cried, and I shook my head even though he couldn’t see me.
“Shh. Shh. No Kyle. I said I would let you rest. And rest you shall. Night night.” Then I twisted his neck until it snapped.
The life seeped out of him. He slumped in his chair immediately, and I found that I was smiling again.
I loved a good neck snap. So much less cleanup than an arterial bleed. I already had my hands full with the amount of blood that had spilled from his left hand, but serendipitously, I had already cut off a bunch of fingers to try out on the control panel for the secret door.
Dope.
Being careful to wipe the fingers off so they wouldn’t dribble blood all over the floor, I collected them and headed downstairs.
Kyle’s basement was enormous and just as bougie as the rest of his house. There was a full home theatre and a massive bar crafted from white marble. Slipping behind the bar, I examined the wall until I found a small, unassuming black scanner. I guessed right the first time when I pressed his thumb against it, and I heard a series of clicks as the locking mechanism sprang to life. The door, which happened to be the entire liquor display of the bar, began to slowly open inward, revealing one of the most sickening sights I had seen since I escaped my own basement prison.
A strange, cold feeling rushed through me as I took in the various cages in this dark, secret room. There were also tripods and staged areas that I didn’t even want to fucking look at.
I walked right by them as I made my way deeper into the room and found Amanda blindfolded and chained to a tiny, single bed in the back. She was frail, blond, and wearing a long white nightgown that had seen better days.
“Mr. Bradshaw. Please. Let me see him. I’m so sorry. It’s my fault he got out. I wasn’t watching him. Please don’t hurt him.” She was begging, and relief flooded through me as I realized I had been right. This woman was Caleb’s mother, and she was clearly just as much of a victim as he was.
“Hey,” I said softly, and she stiffened. Though she couldn’t see me, she could tell by my voice that I wasn’t her captor. She began to cower and pull away from me. I noticed how she clenched her legs together tightly, and I gritted my teeth together at the sight.
She thought I was here to rape her.
“Amanda... I’m not here to hurt you. I’m here to set you free,” I told her softly, and her lip trembled slightly. She shook her head and shrunk farther into the wall by her bed.
“No… no. I don’t believe you. It’s a trick,” she whimpered. “Kyle!” I winced as she started screaming for her captor. Did she think he had sent me down as some sort of twisted test?
“Kyle is dead, sweetie,” I murmured, crouching down and tugging down her blindfold so she could see my face. I held out my hand, showing her his dismembered fingers. His wedding ring was still on the ring finger, and her eyes widened in shock.
She swallowed so hard I could hear it before turning those big blue eyes back up to me.
“H-he’s dead?” she whispered, and I nodded.
“Yeah. He’s dead. And your son is safe. I’m going to get you out of here, okay? I will have to touch you, but just so I can unchain you. I won’t touch you anywhere else. Do you know where he keeps the keys?” I asked, gesturing toward her manacles.
“With his car keys.”
My eye twitched again. Of course he kept the keys to his belongings together. Fuck. I was glad I killed him. Even more glad I made him cry like a bitch the whole time.
“Alright. I’m going to go find the keys. Once I untie you, you can come upstairs if you want, but I’ll warn you it’s a bit of a mess. I haven’t cleaned up Kyle yet, and things got a little messy,” I said, standing up, and she met my gaze head-on, her eyes burning with the type of fire only survivors seemed to possess.
“Good,” was all she said, and I smirked before turning away.