Chapter 3
Timber
This is my first time working with Wolfman, and it absolutely proves that you can never really know everything about a person.
I genuinely like the guy. Always have. My past is riddled with jobs like collections and enforcement, but what I did and how I worked is like comparing pee wee sports to professional level all-stars.
Give me a bat, and I can come back with a bag of cash.
It’s been a day since we intercepted the Brookhavens and their driver, but I shake my head, thinking of how put together they looked yesterday. Before he recited that children’s rhyme…
*
“Besides indulging your husband’s pedophile tendencies, I understand you are quite the Francophile,” Wolfman says to Jayne. His face is like a dark mask compared to the man I know. I hesitate for a moment, trying to place the unfamiliar word. “Oh, the look Joey gave Parker when he called her Josephine one time .”
Jayne’s eyes narrow, but I can see the intelligence in them. Unable to speak, she’s undoubtedly playing through angles to use when her gag is removed.
“Timber, did you know that the nursery rhyme Jack and Jill is actually in reference to the fate of French monarchs during the Reign of Terror in 1793?” he asks, not bothering to spare me a glance.
“Jack and Jill went up the hill, To fetch a pail of water. Jack fell down, And broke his crown; And Jill came tumbling after.”
The inflection in his voice is something I hope never to hear again. Guys my size like to feel immune to the threats that other people pose; while we’re close in height, Wolfman is lean where I’m bulky, but that doesn't stop a chill from dancing down my spine.
“Jayne might know this. You see, it’s in reference to King Louis XVI’s beheading and later, his Queen, Marie Antoinette’s death,” he continues before turning to Percy and there’s no missing the terror in that man’s eyes. “Not to worry, you’ll be relieved when I get to the beheading part. Just like your brother was.”
There’s a flash of rage in Percy’s eyes at the mention of his brother. Just then, a low buzz sounds from the pile of their belongings, but it stops soon enough.
I flick the button on the taser I’m holding, causing both him and his wife to flinch. They felt its sting earlier and, understandably, don’t want to feel that again.
Barking out a laugh, I shake my head when I see I have everyone’s attention. They’ll soon realize the jolt of electricity running through their bodies was the easy part of our time together.
“We get it,” Wolfman says, sounding agreeable. “We’re too small to ever impact the operation you’re a part of. You have money, connections, and resources we never will.”
Percy and Jayne are tied and strung up, facing one another with their driver tied to a chair across the room from us. Wolfman approaches Percy, making several light cuts across his back and chest, before motioning me forward.
I bring him the container, hoping the shudder I feel isn’t noticeable. Jayne starts screaming into her gag as Wolfman places leeches over the small cuts he made. When he turns to smile at her, we hear the buzzing again.
“They must have a burner with them,” I say, knowing we left a bag with their devices at the resort.
Digging through Jayne’s purse, I find a flip phone and check the call log. The same number has been trying to reach them a few times today.
“Are we keeping you from something?” I ask the beautiful and terrified woman in front of me.
I can’t make out her words, so I remove the gag.
“Please, let me go! I’ll tell you who is calling. He helped set up Parker. It’s worth my life! I won’t tell anyone,” she rambles out until I shove the ball back into her mouth and secure it. Motioning to Wolfman, he and I go to the far corner of the cabin.
“Why do I have a sneaking suspicion of who has been calling them?”
“Same reason I do,” I reply, getting angrier by the second.
“Give me the phone, I’ll have their driver return the call and then you go pick him up,” Wolfman says after a moment. It’s on the tip of my tongue to ask if it’s safe to leave him here, outnumbered.
Then I realize it would take a lot more than these three to outnumber him.
It occurs to me I still don’t know the driver’s name, but he convincingly manipulates the man who used to be one of us to meet him, not knowing that the Brookhaven’s Navigator has a new driver.
“Should I bring Tonic back here, or just finish him?” I ask Wolfman.
“We’ll keep him alive long enough to know we don’t need anything from him,” he answers with a shrug.
It’s when I’m driving to the meet I realize something I thought earlier was entirely wrong.
Wolfman wasn’t wearing a mask when he was toying with Percy and Jayne. He wears a mask every day of his life, the perfect imitation of a normal person.
Later that day, I consider things like: How exhausting hiding his true nature must be. What if he ever snaps? How can a man go so dark and still care about anyone?
Little questions, when compared to my initial concern.
If that’s who Wolfman truly is, and I know damn well how devoted he and Rose are to each other, then what is Rose actually like?
Wolfman
This is why I work alone. I think as Timber heads out to intercept Tonic.
While he kept his face completely passive when I started toying with Percy, I could feel his attention shift from encompassing the room to narrowing down on me. Understandable, but unfortunate, nonetheless.
Now that I have some privacy, I make the most of it. Pulling on a pair of surgical gloves, I lower Percy’s boxers and angling myself so the driver and Jayne can openly see what I’m doing …
“Wait,” I say, in the same tone I recited the rhyme in. “You don’t close your eyes when you’re violating others, why are your eyes closed now?”
Reaching into my bag, I’m disappointed that I only have two eye speculums, but they’ll have to do. Crossing first to Jayne, then to their accomplice, I prop both of their right eyes open before walking back to Percy.
“I’m not worried about you keeping your eyes open. You’re probably going to pass out a time or two, just at the thought of what these guys are doing,” I tell him as I open the container with the leeches again.
After I get a few of those little suckers attached to his dick, I look all three in the eye in turn.
“Now, maybe you’re thinking, ‘Oh, there are medicinal purposes for leeches. Maybe that’s not so bad.’ But leeches can ingest five times their body weight and I have a couple dozen of them. Y’know, the reason that the blood flows so freely after their three teeth sink into flesh is because of a peptide called hirudin. It is an anticoagulant,” I continue on, until I notice Percy has passed out. Then I reach up to remove his gag, hoping he’ll feel like talking when he wakes up again.
Next, I cross back to Jayne and see if she has any sins that are weighing her down.
“Please, I’m Joey’s mother. Please call her and she’ll tell you none of this was my fault,” she starts blubbering on. It’s on the tip of my tongue to tell her that her daughter gave me her blessing, but I don’t want to play that card too early.
“About Joey,” I start, preparing my initial questions. “There was a video feed in her bedroom back at your house. Did you sell videos of her? Who, exactly, had access to the feed? And how long had that been going on?”
Her head is whipping back and forth so fast that she nearly knocks off the speculum. “No! No, there wasn’t! I never would have allowed Josephine—Joey—to be touched. That was never permitted. They all understood that.”
When I continue to stare at her, her panic and confusion turn to anger. By not trying to justify my questions, she controls herself long enough to see that I am not playing around. I only saw a few short minutes of an old feed from before Joey graduated from high school, but she was clearly in the process of pulling out pajamas as she prepared for bed.
“No! NO! Percy, goddamnit! Wake up, you bastard!” Jayne’s cries and pleas turn into bellows of rage when she realizes her husband betrayed her. “No. We, Percy and I, had similar fetishes and met through those who shared our interests, but we had a deal. From day one, he knew Josephine could not be touched—or anything else. I had it in a secret prenup for fuck’s sake. Not Josephine, not ever .”
“So, your daughter was untouchable, but everyone else’s child was fair game?” I ask, keeping my voice low in order to control it from breaking.
“When did he, how long had it been going on?” she asks, suddenly full of tears and remorse.
From what Diesel figures, it started after Jayne’s father died and thankfully, Joey was moved to boarding school. I can’t imagine how violated Joey felt when Diesel showed them the feeds he found on the Brookhaven’s server, and I can’t ever change that.
What I can do is something I have never had any interest in before now.
I instantly decide to change my tactic with her. There’s nothing that Jayne has to give anyone, so she might as well die the way her ex-husband did.
Removing the speculum from her face, I decide to wait until Timber gets back with Tonic and then I’ll do them together. Making sure that these three are secure, I go out back to the fire pit and check that there’s plenty of empty land between the cabin and tree line before I begin piling up wood for their pyre.
When Timber returns, I motion for him to meet me around back and I tell him my plan. Belatedly realizing that I didn’t factor in his response.
The big guy turns nearly as white as I am and that’s when my brain snaps into focus. I’d forgotten that he had come face-to-face with Parker’s charred remains and that he’s in no hurry to experience that again.
“You stay inside,” I tell him, squeezing his shoulder. “I’ll take care of it.”
Not wanting to waste a good fire, I end up leaving Timber inside with the driver and bring Percy out to watch his wife and Tonic die in one of the most excruciating ways possible. Their wails are audible even with their mouths gagged and the eye speculums ensure that Percy has to watch their final moments.
Percy might not give a damn about Tonic, but that motherfucker has to pay for setting up Me’ansome and I know damn well he’s not high enough on anyone’s totem pole to be of use to us.
Once they’ve expired, I add more wood to the fire and toss in extra pieces of Duraflame to keep it burning hot enough to get rid of most of their remains. My bandana barely helps with the smell of the bodies, so I know it’s the best time to start questioning Percy.
Turning back to him, I remove the speculums before his gag and the man just starts crying.
When he starts begging for an easy death, I hold a finger up and grin when he quickly stops talking.
“While I appreciate that you’re smart enough to understand you aren’t walking away from this,” I say, in what I’ve found to be a tone that others find comforting. “You have to understand that there’s a price to be paid for an easy death.”
“Anything,” he rasps out the word.
“Who do you have covering for you in the government?” I ask the question that’s been bugging our own contacts.
“It’s on my drive,” he says, his voice weakening.
The minute we got them secured earlier, we used Percy’s finger to login to his laptop and gave remote access to Diesel. A quick look at my phone, tells me he hasn’t found anything yet.
“My guy would have told me if there was anything …”
“No, the quill pen in my suit pocket,” Percy interrupts me. “That’s a drive, you have to plug it into my compute and then you need me to activate it. Biometrics, my eye and finger.”
I nod before walking inside to locate the pen. It takes me a few minutes to figure out how to open it and that’s when I call Diesel to get clearance to proceed with it.
“My advice? Be ready to run, just in case it sends out a beacon of some sort,” he tells us, running through worst case scenarios.
“Okay, give us about an hour to get things loaded up and then I’ll give it a whirl,” I reply before hanging up.
Timber joins me at my kit and I hand him a syringe. “Give this to the driver in about twenty minutes, then get him secured in the drawer under my truck bed. Clean house, I’m going to go put out the fire.”
Grabbing an oversized duffle bag and the fire extinguisher from the small kitchen, I head outside to wrap up the remains. Only looking up when Timber comes out to bring Percy back inside, telling me that he’s ready on his end.
While this job is more rushed than I prefer them to be, we luckily had a secondary location prepared. Even if any trace of our crimes are found in the original cabin, we have a six hour drive ahead of us before we continue our little spree.
After Diesel confirms that he has access to the drive, I make quick work of removing Percy’s eye and finger before Timber loads him into the second drawer.
“What’s your plan for him?” he asks as I use a different syringe to give Percy a shot.
“Oh, that one wasn’t a sedative,” I answer with a shrug. “That was Boomslang venom. He’s about to have the worst ride of his life.”
“What the fuck is a Boomslang?”
“Daylight’s burning, let’s get on the road,” I reply, getting into my truck and giving him a shooing motion to head toward the Navigator. “I’ll tell you when we’re burying his body tonight.”