30. Chapter 30
Chapter 30
L una
As we walked out of the law firm, I stopped at Brenna’s desk, and my serious expression must have given her pause. “One of the dancers at Euphoria was stabbed and beaten in their parking lot today. Don’t go to your car alone, and when you get to the office next week, call one of the partners or Gideon to walk you inside, okay?”
Her hands froze over her keyboard, and she stared back at me.
“Promise me,” I urged.
She slowly nodded. “I promise.” Brenna brought her hands down to her lap. “Luna, are you alright? Are you safe?” Her eyes flicked to the collar at my throat.
Her concern seemed genuine, but I didn’t understand where it was coming from. “As safe as I can be with one of the Stracks after me.”
“You be careful too.” She searched my face. “Not that I care or anything.” This time, there was no bite behind her words.
When we were safely in Fenn’s vehicle, he turned to me. “What do you want to do, Lou?”
Fury and helplessness roiled through me. “I want to take Lionel Strack out in the most brutal, vicious way possible.”
Fenn blew out a breath. “Kilian texted me on the way over. He knows where Lionel is.”
“Where is that fucking bastard?” Sylvie growled.
“About five blocks away from Euphoria. What do you want to do?” he asked me again.
My mind raced as hatred and relief flooded through me. I didn’t know if I could voice what I really wanted to do. “How’d you find him?”
“His father owns a nail salon and a ‘massage’ parlor between Flamingo and Spring Mountain Road–one of those ‘happy endings’ parlors with apartments on the second floor. They use it to launder money, and Kilian has one of their regular customers on his payroll. The guy saw one of Lionel’s men there.”
I wasn’t surprised Kilian found him first. Information was his currency, and he’d told me once that certain information could be more valuable than any tangible good.
Ivan and Kilian were both geniuses at gathering secrets, but Ivan seemed to have one flaw. He relied heavily on technology, whereas Kilian didn’t have a favored method. He was an equal-opportunity collector, and he had people all over Sin City on his payroll.
Fenn glanced at us. “I’ll drop you two off at my house, then we’ll pick him up.”
I leaned forward. “Should we tell Roman and Drakos?”
He shrugged. “It’s up to you. Maybe tell them after we have him.”
Sylvie’s eyes narrowed. “We might even want to wait until after we eliminate the fucker. And you’re not dropping us off at your house.”
We talked Fenn into taking us to the mortuary and bringing Lionel to us when they picked him up.
I called Samuel to check up on Misty while we waited. “She just got out of surgery.” He sounded like he’d been crying.
“Tell me honestly, how bad is it?”
“She’s still alive, and they say she’ll recover, but it was close. Between her collapsed lung, perforated bowel, and blood loss, it was touch and go. She’s going to be recovering for a while, and Strack kicked her in the fucking face.”
“I want to kill him slowly, Samuel.”
He exhaled and pulled himself together. “Me too. One good thing–her cheekbone isn’t broken, but she’ll need more surgeries and a lot of time off.”
Angry tears filled my eyes. I hated Lionel Strack almost as much as I hated my father. “Tell her we’ll come see her as soon as she’s up for visitors.”
“I will. Luna, thank you for telling the girls to demand health insurance. The doctor just came in–I need to go.”
I hung up and stared at my phone for a few seconds, adrenaline and hatred boiling through me. When Fenn dropped us off at the mortuary, I turned to Sylvie. “Do you remember the Tales from the Crypt episode where that dead man’s wife wished he were still alive, and he came back thrashing and screaming from the embalming fluid burning in his veins?”
“I remember. That was a good one.”
“Lionel needs to suffer, and I want to really hurt him.”
Sylvie nodded slowly. “I have a few ideas.”
“Like what?”
She rubbed her hands together. “Like playing show-and-tell before we torture him. There’s that wicked-looking aneurysm hook, and the artery forceps.”
“Your big suction needle would work too.”
She gave me a creepy, happy smile. “My trocar. We’ll start there and see how it goes.”
An hour later, Kilian honked twice at the mortuary garage door with an unconscious and slightly dented Lionel Strack in the back of his vehicle. Sylvie opened the garage, and Kilian pulled inside. Fenn and Kilian pulled Lionel out of the back cargo area by his duct-taped hands. He groaned a little and started coming around.
“How’d you get him?” Sylvie asked.
Kilian grunted under Lionel’s weight. “I sent a man in pretending to be with Door Dash. He tasered Lionel, and then we drugged him. Where do you want the ugly asshole?”
Sylvie studied the man. He was rotund and probably weighed three hundred pounds. “Let me get a gurney and we can load him onto it and take him to the embalming room.”
Fenn stared at my tear-stained face and determined look while Sylvie grabbed a gurney from against the garage wall. “What are you two planning?” he asked cautiously.
“Do you really want to know?” My conscience told me I should feel guilty about wanting to torture Lionel before we killed him, but the guilt wouldn’t come. Lionel had attacked Misty and he probably would have kicked her to death if Samuel hadn’t been watching for her.
The men hoisted Lionel onto the gurney, and Kilian pulled out a knife and expertly sliced off the duct tape and his shirt. Fenn pulled his shoes and pants off, and then Kilian cut off his boxers. They were suspiciously efficient at cutting off his clothes.
Lionel’s thigh was bandaged where Roman had shot him, and when Kilian disturbed the area, the man groaned and started waking up.
“Do you have any handcuffs?” I asked.
Kilian walked over to the SUV and rummaged through the glove compartment. He pulled out two pairs and a pack of thick zip ties.
I looked at him when he handed the items to me. “Do I want to know what else you have in there?”
He shrugged. “It’s better to be prepared. Why don’t you let Fenn and me take care of him? We’d do a straightforward BTK. Cut off a few fingers, maybe an ear, then kill and cremate the fucker and be done with it.”
I glared at him. “He stabbed Misty twice, then kicked her in the face while she bled on the ground.”
Kilian held up a hand. “We could also cut off his testicles, pour alcohol over the wound, and then kill him if that makes you feel better.”
Sylvie cuffed Lionel’s wrists to the gurney. “Save that for his father. This one’s personal.”
I pulled a few zip ties out and tried to get one around an ankle to secure it to the gurney leg. But Lionel had swollen, thick cankles, and the lone zip tie wouldn’t make it all the way around both the gurney and his leg.
Fenn watched me with a pained expression, then took the zip ties out of my hands. “Here. Combine two together like this, then make sure it’s tight enough.” He deftly added one zip tie to another and secured it around Lionel’s ankle, then repeated the process so there were two zip ties holding his leg down, and motioned me to do the other leg.
I combined the ties and secured his other ankle just like he’d shown me. “Okay, I think we have him.”
My heart rate spiked, and queasy determination coursed through me. Sylvie and I wheeled him into the embalming room, and the men followed.
“You aren’t licensed, you two can’t come in here,” she protested.
Fenn smirked and ruffled her hair. “That’s the least of our problems, Syl. Besides, I want to watch you two work. You coming or not?” He asked Kilian.
Kilian sighed. “Fine, but this better not put me off my dinner.”
I shot Sylvie a furtive eye roll. Kilian had come to family dinners with bloody hands and gore on his clothes countless times. The Spade family had a DIY approach to crime and punishment, and after watching my father twist and corrupt the judicial system to suit his own needs, I didn’t entirely disagree with their philosophy.
We pushed Lionel’s gurney into the embalming room, and Kilian looked around, shaking his head. “This area of the mortuary gives me the creeps. Some people don’t like abandoned houses, graveyards, or sewer grates with red balloons. Those places don’t have anything on embalming rooms.”
Sylvie looked around as if trying to see it through Kilian’s eyes. “Huh. It’s like a second home to me. Okay, let’s get started.” She sounded almost chipper.
Performance nerves crawled through me at having an audience. I’d never purposefully tortured or killed someone before when it wasn't in self-defense, and Fenn didn’t look like he was going anywhere. Sylvie and I put on protective gear as Lionel started waking up. I was by his head, and he saw me first.
“Well, if it isn’t Fowler’s little whore, Luna Cross. You stupid bitch. How’s your face, sweetheart? Did I break your jaw when I punched you? And how’s that stripper friend of yours doing after our little visit this morning? My brother wanted to play with her first, and I should have listened to him. He likes to have his women gang-raped, then he shoves broken bottles up their cunts and asses and watches them bleed out. How’d you like that, huh?”
I pulled down my face shield as he spewed insults and turned to Sylvie. “New plan–let’s get the largest scalpel blade you have and a couple of suture needles, then cut his tongue out, cauterize the wound, and stitch his mouth closed. I don’t want to listen to his garbage while we work on him.”
Sylvie leaned over the other side of Lionel and snapped one of her rubber gloves next to his ear. “I like the plan–cauterizing the stump so he doesn’t bleed back into his throat and drown in his own blood before we’re done. Smart.”
Lionel’s ruddy face went from red and splotchy to pale and bloodless when he finally noticed the three Spades standing in the room with me.
Fenn grinned and handed Sylvie a wicked-looking scalpel with her name engraved on it, then looked across the gurney to me. “Can I help? I know this is your kill, but this fucker really needs to feel pain before he dies.”
Lionel started rocking on the gurney and tried to spit at me, but it dribbled down his chin. “You worthless fucking bitch! I’ll torture and piss on you, then violate your corpse. Silas will hunt you down and–ah!” He screeched in pain as Sylvie slapped his bullet wound, then stabbed him with the scalpel in his other thigh.
I flinched at the shrill sound and turned to Fenn. “If you want. We need to secure his head and find a spreader to keep his teeth out of the way.”
Sylvie motioned to the PPE closet. “We’ll definitely need rubber boots today. I don’t want his urine and blood getting into my shoes.” We left Lionel screaming and rocking on the gurney as I switched out my shoes for my yellow polka dot rubber boots, and Sylvie put on her glittery pink ones.
Kilian shook his head as he watched. “For fuck’s sake. You two look like you’re getting ready to do a little gardening in those boots. It’s disturbing.”
Fenn put on a plastic apron and a face shield, then turned and grinned at us like we were getting ready to finger paint. Over the next hour, Fenn helped us work over Lionel Strack, and Kilian leaned against the wall and played a game on his phone while we worked.
Sylvie did the honors with Lionel’s tongue, and the smell of burned flesh, blood, and urine saturated the air. I leaned over his bloated, red face and looked into his pain-filled wild eyes after Sylvie finished cauterizing the stump.
“Now I’m going to cap one of your eyes with this cement-based glue.” I held up the glue and flesh-colored eye cap for him to see. “Do you know why we’re only doing one eye? Oh, that’s right. You can’t talk and spew your filth anymore because you don’t have a tongue. So I’ll just tell you.” I studied his snotty, tear-stained face. “We’re only capping one eye because we want you to see the instruments we plan to use on you. You love to rape and cut women up, so it’s ironic two women are the ones who are going to torture you to death.”
Fenn held Lionel’s head still while I carefully glued his eyelid shut and capped it. The glue must have stung because he screamed when I applied it, then quieted down to a blubbering whimper.
While Fenn continued to hold his head, Sylvie and I stitched his lips up with long, curved suture needles using thick black thread. We didn’t worry about these stitches showing. Instead, we sewed big X’s across his mouth. “This is for Misty, and all the other women you and your family have brutalized or killed,” I whispered as we sewed.
The sounds coming from him now were ghoulish and disturbing, and Lionel seemed to break at some point. He started sobbing and choking through his nose.
We gave him a few minutes to calm down, and then Sylvie held up the trocar to Lionel’s one good eye. “See this? Do you know what the open needle at the end of this aspirating tube is for? It’s used to suck the liquids, blood, and organs out of a body. Once that’s done, embalming fluid is pumped back inside, which is mostly formaldehyde.”
I patted Lionel’s shoulder. “To a living person, formaldehyde is like acid. It’ll eat you from the inside, and I’ve read it’s an excruciating way to die. Almost like getting your vagina and anus ripped open with broken glass.”
The zip ties Fenn used to secure his head cut across Lionel’s brow as he tried to shake his head, sending blood into his eyes. He looked pretty ghoulish at this point, with black X’s across his lips, one eye capped, and the other wide and terrorized.
Sylvie turned the trocar on, holding it comfortably in her hand. “First, I’m going to use this on your minuscule little testicles. We’ll puncture your scrotum first, then stick this inside, and suck out your balls. They’re small enough, it shouldn’t take long.”
Lionel went still for a few seconds, then convulsed and retched. He tried to force his mouth open, ripping a few sutures across his lips and causing his skin to tear in places. But his mouth stayed shut. Blood, mucus, and tears covered his face as he aspirated vomit into his lungs. Some of it oozed out his nostrils, and I gagged a little just watching him.
Kilian pocketed his phone and walked over, studying Lionel’s face clinically. “He’s going to asphyxiate and die from his own vomit. Do you want me to rip his stitches out and revive him?”
I stared down at Lionel and contemplated our options. Maybe he’d suffered enough, and we should just let him die. His face looked almost purple under all the bodily fluids. But then I thought of Misty, laying in a hospital bed with stab wounds and a contusion on her face from being kicked by this man.
I shook my head. “Sylvie, if we create a space between his stitches, maybe you could suck out enough vomit.”
“Good idea.” Sylvie turned to Fenn. “Clip a couple of stitches on the left side of his lips, will you?” He grabbed a small pair of steel scissors and clipped the threads. Then Sylvie shoved the trocar into Lionel’s mouth and turned it on just enough to get most of the liquid out. Lionel’s breathing stabilized.
Sylvie leaned over the gurney enough so he could see her out of his uncapped eye. “You and your family are a scourge to women. You stabbed Misty and kicked her in the face, then bragged about raping and torturing women. And you’ve tried to kidnap Luna–twice. So we’re going to enjoy this. There are countless nerve endings in the male testicles, so this is going to hurt .”
I looked at Sylvie with wide eyes. “What do you want me to do?”
She nodded to her scalpel over on the counter. “Make an incision in his scrotum and I’ll do the rest.”
My lips curled up in disgust, but I grabbed the scalpel, and before I could think too much about it, I leaned over Lionel’s sweaty, stinky body, grabbed his scrotum with my rubber-glove-covered hands, and made a cut. Lionel screeched in pain and rocked on the gurney. I stepped back to give Sylvie room to work and looked down in time to see blood dripping off the scalpel onto my cheery yellow polka-dot boots.
Sylvie grabbed Lionel’s scrotum at the base with one gloved hand to keep his testicles from retracting, stuck her trocar into the incision, and turned it on.
His back bowed off the table, and a terrible muffled, high-pitched scream came from his mouth as his scrotum emptied with a sick, sucking sound. I glanced over at Kilian and Fenn who both had disgusted, pained expressions on their faces, and Fenn held his hands over his crotch.
Kilian shook his head. “This is going to put me off my dinner, and give me nightmares.”
Sylvie stepped back and studied Lionel. He was sobbing and choking now, and a few seconds later, he started retching again.
Kilian pocketed his phone. “Do you want to revive him for another round?” he asked. “You still haven’t injected him with embalming fluid.”
Sighing, I stepped back. This was probably going to put me off my food, too. “No, let it happen. It’s somehow fitting he chokes on his own vomit.” Kilian nodded and put his arm around my shoulder, knowing somehow I needed a little comfort.
But Sylvie huffed. “Come on, don’t be a quitter. I wanted to see his reaction to embalming fluid.”
Fenn pointed to Lionel’s purple face. “If we’re going to revive him, you need to do it now.”
Sylvie glanced at me, then sighed. “ Fine . I guess we’re done.” She turned off her trocar.
Over the next few minutes, we stood back and watched Lionel die of pulmonary aspiration. When he stopped convulsing and thrashing, then lay still for several minutes, Sylvie stepped forward and placed her fingers on his neck. His body twitched a little, and gas bubbles foamed out of his nose. I started and drew back. Even with the Spade cousins standing around me, I felt a little jumpy.
Fenn gazed down at the corpse and smiled. “From now on, when I need information out of someone, I’m going to use this threat.”
Kilian winced. “You people worry me sometimes.”
We started cleaning up and stripping off our protective gear when Fenn’s phone buzzed. He pulled it out of his pocket and glanced at me. “Roman’s on his way here, and he’s pissing mad.”
My mind raced, and I wondered how Roman knew where we were. Then my hand drifted up to my tracker. “What’d he say?”
He handed me his phone.
Roman Fowler: Why is my fucking wife at the fucking mortuary?
I started handing the phone back to Fenn but decided to answer.
Luna: This is your fucking wife. You told me to stay with Fenn and Kilian, and I did.
Roman Fowler: Do not FUCK with me right now. I set up a fucking meeting with the fucking Vegas drug syndicate and was about to walk in when Ivan informed me Fennick and Kilian Spade took Lionel Strack out the back of a fucking massage parlor.
Luna: Oh
As soon as I sent that text, I winced. Roman’s frustration and fury seemed to vibrate through Fenn’s phone, and there were a lot of f-bombs in his texts.
Roman Fowler: Oh? That’s all you have? I’ll be there in five minutes. Don’t fucking move from where you are standing right now.
I winced and handed Fenn’s phone back. “He said he’ll be here in five minutes. What should we do?”
Sylvie started forward. “Hide the body, lie while the cremator heats up, then burn the evidence. Let’s get cleaned up and meet them in Ezra’s office.”
Fenn grinned and folded his arms. “Or just own up to the fact that you nice people tortured and killed someone.”
I pointed at him. “You helped us.”
“Yes, but I’m not a nice person.”
Sylvie waved her hand. “He was a psychotic murderer who got off on torturing and killing women. We did the world a favor. We’re wasting time, what do you want to do?”
Sighing, I started putting the surgical tools into the bin to be cleaned and disinfected. “I prefer option one–hide the evidence and lie.”
Kilian folded his arms and gazed around the room. “It looks like a butcher shop in here with all the blood and sharp instruments, and he’ll want to see Lionel’s body. There’s no way you can hide all this before he gets here.”
Pulling off her face guard, Sylvie sighed. “Damn it, you’re right. Let’s clean up a little and make it look less like an episode from Dexter though. I’ll turn on the cremator.”
A few minutes later, we heard sharp, impatient raps at the back door while we worked. Kilian walked out and came back with Roman and Drakos. Roman’s eyes narrowed on me and his lips were slashed into a narrow line.
His palpable fury riled me, and I smiled sweetly at him. “Hi, Honey. How was your day?”