Chapter 1
Cormac
July – Present Day - Manhattan
That is one terrible blow job.
With ratty-looking jeans puddled around his ankles, a drug dealer stands in the pocket between two green commercial dumpsters in a dimly lit alley. He’s got a woman on her knees, boxed in so she can’t get away.
“Yeah, baby, suck me,” the dealer groans.
I followed this guy for six blocks and didn’t expect to find him behind a closed nail salon.
His head hangs low, watching the blonde with greasy hair bob up and down on his knob. “God, that’s good.”
Really? Has this guy been blown before? Ever?
I’ve had some good head, from what I can remember. It’s been almost two years since I’ve had any kind of sex. But combined with the smell of the garbage and their unwashed bodies, all I’m feeling is disgust and impatience watching these two.
Waiting in the shadows across the same alley, I’m only stomaching this show to find the right moment to strike.
“Are you close?” his female customer whines, stopping to beg him with blitzed out, mascara-stained red eyes. “I need my fix.”
“Keep sucking, bitch.” He pushes her head down into his hairy crotch.
I can’t even imagine that smell.
Now that drugs no longer have their hooks in me, these two bumbling junkies are a goddamn mind-blowing eye-opener. How low someone can go when they stop giving a fuck about anything else but the next high.
I’ve been on both sides. I’ve been the junkie and the dealer. But now I’m clean and sober, going on a year.
I focus on the sway of the dealer’s hips, the bobbing of his head, and I think, He’s close, sweetheart. Keep at it. Keep him distracted for me.
When he comes, his lateral orbitofrontal cortex will shut down, and his mind will blank out. That’s when I’ll make my move.
I make sure my mask is in place, a vintage leather half-face disguise. Years of performing surgery, I always covered my mouth.
I pat the Sig Sauer sitting in the right pocket on my thigh. That’s just for emergencies. I open my tailored coat and reach for one of the two glass syringes filled with a three-milliliter dose of a drug that, when it hits the bloodstream, will cause near-instant death.
It’s overkill, no pun, but these strung-out drug dealer-types have an unusually high tolerance to most drugs. Plus, I like to take them out with the same poison they’re pedaling.
For the last few months, with leads provided to me by a source from my dubious past, I’ve been working my way through some of Manhattan’s most debauched dealers.
I’m only shaking a few leaves off the tree. There’s always more. I know I have to stop before my luck runs out.
This dealer, J-Rush, as he goes by, keeps a string of prostitutes, like this sad woman, who he made drop to her knees as part of the payment for her next high.
Fuck, man. Blow your load, already.
As I watch, I feel the thirst to slit his throat. But I keep my revenge to deadly injections. Less passion. Less personal.
Killing dealers doesn’t bring me joy. Just satisfaction. Those are two different things.
I can’t find relief. I can’t find peace.
Except when I hold my son. Until the demons start whispering in my brain, telling me I don’t deserve that perfect little human I created out of selfishness and recklessness.
Even before my downfall, I had other problems in Seattle. I left the surgical residency I loved because of politics. Las Vegas was supposed to be a vacation.
Some guy in a casino there, who I didn’t even know was a dealer, offered me free hits.
This takes the edge off better than booze.
Try it, tell me what you think.
Like a moron, I accepted. It started with one hit. Then another. Then it wasn’t optional anymore.
The next thing I knew, I was strung out. Broke and hooked.
That asshole, like this dealer here, helped turn me into the worst version of myself. A man who began to recklessly mistreat the woman I was seeing at the time.
I mentally abused my son’s mother, now my ex.
That included neglecting what she needed when she was pregnant.
She didn’t ask to get married, and I didn’t push it.
But I was so out of it for most of her pregnancy, I barely remember anything.
Whatever Ana recalls I did or said, I accept as the truth, and I’ve been asking for her forgiveness ever since.
I can barely look at myself in the mirror as it is. I sank low, but never as low as J-Rush here.
Still, I spent more than six months in a torture camp being punished for my sins.
I was sent there by my mafia family for putting everyone at risk.
I’d already felt miserable but being that far away from my son hit harder than I ever thought possible.
It was supposed to be for a year, but my twin Darragh convinced Kieran, our oldest brother, the mob king of Astoria, to let me come home early.
With no job, I spent a few months taking care of our mother, who has MS. Every day, I showed up to her condo in Long Island City and learned to be a doctor all over again.
When her health improved, and she didn’t need me every day, I found myself with time on my hands and vengeance running through my blood.
I needed an outlet…
Now here I am. On the streets of New York City, getting even with the same types of assholes who ruined me.
Yeah, I accept responsibility for my own downfall.
But drugs are demons who play you and feed you lies.
And the dealers are the ones who groom you for addictions.
For that, they should pay. And when the system doesn’t do its job and punish them, I show up.
“Yeah, that’s good,” J-Rush groans.
Jesus, did this guy drink an entire bottle of whiskey?
The woman lets his limp dick flop from her mouth. “When the fuck are you going to come? I need my fix.”
Before this chick snaps and bites off his dick and strips me of the satisfaction of killing him, I move in. He’ll be my 62nd victim.
Hooting noises from a nearby bar fill the silence and muffle the sound of my steps as I creep up behind the dealer. I just need access to his neck.
Steps away, I remove the syringe and slide off the plastic cap.
The fentanyl hot-shot I use is so potent that one drop could stop a bull’s heart. Fast. Silent. Perfect.
With thick canvas gloves and a double inner lining to prevent contact from an accidental nick of the needle or a drop on my skin, I carry it carefully. Like when I was a doctor, with finesse and care.
Now I’m an executioner.
This thing is a weapon, and I don’t bother gently looking for a vein or pinching a muscle to lessen the sting.
The dealer doesn’t see me or the syringe until I’m right behind him, my arm curled tightly around his throat, and the tip of the needle jammed into his scrawny neck.
Got you…
The piece of shit straightens and pulls uselessly at my arm. “What the fuck?”
The woman pops off his dick and falls back on her ass, swearing as she hits the hard ground. Looking up, she gasps when she sees me.
It must be surprising to see a masked man dressed in all black show up to kill the guy she’s blowing for a bag of pills.
“You’re fine, sweetheart,” I say. “I’m not going to hurt you. But this scum has to go.”
The dealer sucks in a tattered breath. “Wait!”
“Shhh.” My voice is steady and cold. “Just breathe.”
I firmly depress the plunger with my thumb as I whisper into his ear, “The torture of a bad conscience is the hell of a living soul.”
I doubt this loser knows a famous quote from a 16th-Century French theologian about regret and being locked in your own personal hell until you’ve made amends.
It’s my battle cry and has nothing to do with this asshole. Whether or not he actually goes to hell is above my pay grade. The goal in my past life was to keep people alive in this world.
Where the ones I kill in this life go is up to God.
J-Rush collapses at my feet, but he’s not dead yet. Just foaming at the mouth.
Fuck…
Tonight, I’ll make it personal for what he did to this woman. Anger roiling inside me, I pummel his face until blood explodes from his nose. The beating leaves my knuckles red and raw. With my foot on his throat, I reach for the second syringe and jam the needle into his thigh.
I wait this time until I don’t feel a heartbeat.
It’s done, and I feel nothing. No guilt. No regret. Just the quiet satisfaction that someone won’t die tonight or tomorrow because of this scumbag.
When I stand up, the woman claws her way to get to her feet, clinging to the rusted steel dumpster. The light hits her face, and my stomach clenches.
The exact shade of her blonde hair didn’t register earlier, and I certainly didn’t see those blue eyes and slim nose. My mind better be playing tricks on me.
This chick looks just like…
Ana.
The mother of my child.
I made her help me pull cons on the Vegas strip. We did it for fun at first, two mafia heirs rebelling. Then we started fighting. But we were strung out, broke, and trapped.
Ana has forgiven me, but I haven’t forgiven myself. She married my brother, my identical twin, who treats her as she deserves to be treated, like a queen. They’re raising my son together, while I’m just trying to get through the day without hating myself.
She’s the reason I troll these streets. The reason I’m searching for peace. No matter how many dealers I kill, the voices in my head won’t stop haunting me.
“Who… Who are you?” the prostitute asks, knocking me from my thoughts.
Her smoky voice is nothing like Ana’s, melting away any further resemblance.
“No one,” I say. “But I was like you. Hooked. And one day, scumbags like this will do more than ask for a blow job. Do yourself a favor. Get help. Get treatment. It’s not easy. But you can do it.”
“Fuck you.” She swallows, looking down at the man. “I paid him. I want my score.”
If I give her the money back, she’ll just buy her drugs from someone else who might do the same thing.
I reach into J-Rush’s pocket and take out the bag of pills. “What the hell are these?”
“Percocet. I hurt my back.” She scratches her arms.
“Go to a chiropractor. A doctor.” Preferably not me.
“Give them to me. They’re mine!” She tries to snatch the bag and ends up ripping it open.
The pills scatter to the ground. With a shriek, she drops to her hands and knees, picking up pills from the dirty concrete.
I push down the ache in my heart and back away. There are too many of her for me to help. And addicts can’t be forced.
With the dealer dead, I turn away as if this kill didn’t happen.
A few seconds later, a fresh rain cools the hot midsummer night. I imagine J-Rush’s blood washing away into a nearby drain for the rats to drink. Maybe they’ll die from the poison in it, too.
A win/win. No one will miss a few rats.
I walk several blocks from the scene, troubled by how things went down. Not the killing, but how the scum dealer didn’t die after the first dose. A dose that lethal should have turned him inside out in seconds.
Stuffing the gloves into a plastic bag and the bag into my coat pocket, I hail a cab.
One stops immediately, and when I slide into the back seat, the time flashes on the payment screen: 11 p.m. I need to talk to my supplier right now.
“Monroe Hospital,” I tell the driver. “Stat.”