Chapter 9
Chapter Nine
Frankie
W ell, fuck. My cover is about to be blown, and I have no one to blame but myself.
Is it too late to hope that a new car is on the prize wheel?
Ugh, fuck me for being such a smarty pants.
The answer just came out of me, and I was still shocked from witnessing a brutal murder.
I didn’t consider what my prize might entail.
On shaking legs, I rise and head toward the stage. I risk one backward glance toward Maverick, who clearly knows more than he’s letting on. He has me pegged as a fed, that much is clear.
So why hasn’t he killed me?
“Come on, come on.” Jim waves his hand through the air, encouraging me to move my legs. “No need to be shy, Frankie. Everyone will get a chance to make a kill, so you don’t have to feel bad about earning this one.”
The room falls silent as I grip the narrow metal railing and climb the first step.
I steel my nerves as Jim clutches my arm and hauls me toward the wheel of disaster.
As we draw closer, my brain tries to understand the words written within each glittering triangle, but it’s as if I’ve forgotten how to read. The letters jumble together.
This isn’t who I was trained to be. I have nerves of fucking steel.
I was chosen for this mission for a reason, and that reason is my skill.
Since arriving on this ship, I’ve gotten everything incorrect, and that shook my confidence.
If I want to survive the next few days, I need to find that confidence again.
I step up to the wheel and grip the edge for one hell of a spin, but Jim places his hand over mine and smiles down at me.
“This one’s a little eager to make the kill, isn’t she?”
The crowd offers an obligatory chuckle in response to his weak-ass joke.
I smile at the crowd and fake a laugh, then lean closer to the mic. “We came here to kill these assholes, didn’t we?”
A few cheers rise from the tables, including the women seated at mine.
But Maverick doesn’t cheer. He doesn’t even smile.
He just sits there with his arms folded over his chest, watching me with a straight face.
I’m glad I’ve gotten the girls back on my side, but something tells me Maverick is far too suspicious now.
“Very well. Spin the wheel, my dear.” Jim takes a step back and stretches his arm toward the monstrous circle.
With an entirely falsified grin, I step forward and grip the side of the wheel once more, then give it a spin with all my weight.
The metal tines poking from the center of each slice slap against the plastic arrow that points to the words I can’t read.
The ticking sound slows, and the wheel comes to a stop on a glittering red sliver.
“Russian roulette! How exciting!” Jim shouts into the mic, and now we’re deaf. “Please bring a red Cattle and the revolver to the stage.”
The curtain behind us rustles, and two men with orange wristbands wrestle a man in a red jumpsuit onto the platform on which we stand. Another staff member appears with a chair, and the three of them set to work. Within only a few minutes, they’ve strapped the man down.
Metal bindings secure his wrists, ankles, and neck to the thick wooden beams that make up his death throne.
The seat looks suspiciously similar to an antique electric chair, minus the metal cap.
One of the workers scurries behind the curtain, then returns with a revolver, which they place into my hands.
I study the worker’s face and notice tiny scars around his lips, almost as if his mouth had been sewn shut at some point.
Do they allow some of their victim pool to become workers? I file this question away for later. If there is a later. Maverick is cute, but he’s going to throw a big wrench into my plans if he tries to kill me.
Which means I’ll have to take him out before he can take me out.
I test the heft of the gun in my hand, then step toward the Cattle. It isn’t Castle. That’s what I keep repeating in my mind as I press the gun’s barrel against the man’s temple.
He pulls his head away and screams through his nose. His lips have been glued shut instead of sewn shut, but the effect is essentially the same. Sweat gathers on his forehead and drips into his eyes.
“What did he do?” I ask Jim.
He waggles his eyebrows and looks into the crowd.
“Oh, do we have another Confessor in our midst? She wants to know what this vile creature has done.” Jim walks around the seated man.
“This monster kidnapped his sixteen-year-old niece and assaulted her for three weeks before police discovered her body. He’s been in prison for ten years, and he’s up for parole in twenty.
Thirty years for taking a life and abusing a corpse.
Do you think that’s fair, Frankie? Our government certainly does. ”
I’m not here to debate our penal system and where it fails. My job is to get the bad guys off the streets. I can’t stop them from getting out again. If this is his gripe, he’d do better to pack the scavenger hunt with defense attorneys instead of federal agents.
In answer to his question, I aim the gun and pull the trigger.
Click .
The man strapped to the chair squeals and braces for impact, but no bullet jets from the gun. A sprig of disappointment blossoms inside me, disgusting me. I need to be careful that their sickness isn’t catching. I’m not a fucking killer.
With a shrug of my shoulders, I offer the gun to Jim, but he shakes his head.
“No, dear child. You get to keep going until the gun fires.” Glee glimmers in his eyes as he pushes the gun against my chest. “You can drag this out for as long as you’d like, but he will die by your hand. That’s your prize for answering correctly.”
“Lucky!” someone shouts.
I don’t know. I don’t feel very lucky. And neither does the Cattle.
Shit. I mean the man in front of me. Now I’m starting to think like one of them.
He strains against the restraints until the thin metal edge cuts into the top of his left wrist, sheering the skin from his hand as he pulls it free. With no blood going to the flap, the skin turns a sickly whitish-yellow as it dangles and flops over tendons and flashes of bluish-white bone.
Remembering Maverick’s new cover story—and fuck him for that—I smile before I step forward and pull the trigger multiple times. This has to end, and quickly.
Click . Click . Click .
On the next pull, fire explodes from the barrel, and my wrist snaps backward. The Cattle’s head jerks in the opposite direction, and a bloody waterfall flows from the side of his skull facing away from me. His chest rises and falls a few more times, weaker and weaker, before he stills.
A hand clamps over my shoulder, and another raucous cheer erupts from the people seated before me, but I hear, see, and feel so little. Everything is a blur or a murmur or a numbness.
On robotic legs, I march off the stage with my fake smile held before me like a shield. My fist rises in the air in a show of feigned triumph, and they cheer again.
But not Maverick. Still not Maverick.
The girls rise from the table and surround me, welcoming me into the fold, my previous misstep forgotten. As far as they’re concerned, I’m one of them. Only Maverick seems to be outside of my spell.
“Settle down, everyone. Settle down,” Jim says from the stage. He turns to the next table with their question.
I’m deaf to all of it. My ass slides into my seat on autopilot when all I want to do is run down the hallway and warn every agent to head for a lifeboat. This ship is sinking, and we don’t even have a life vest.
The game continues, and a few more Cattle— human beings —are dispatched.
As each new victim comes out, I study the face, searching for Castle, but he isn’t among the dead by the end of the third round.
Meanwhile, my anxiety continues to rise.
Maverick studies me each time someone makes a kill, likely looking for a crack in my veneer.
Cracks run through me, but he won’t see them. I’m careful to keep my nervous fidgeting to a minimum, now that I know he’s wising up. If I can avoid killing him, I’d prefer that, but if he forces my hand...
If he forces my hand, I’ll end him without hesitation.
A loud bang pulls my attention from the maze of thoughts I’ve lost myself in, and I turn toward the stage.
Aven’s team landed on Russian Roulette, and they’ve just claimed their prize.
I wish I felt worse about watching someone get murdered for fun, but it’s hard to mentally defend people who’ve done some pretty indefensible things.
As the staff drags the body away, our team focuses on the stage. Our turn is next.
Jim clears his throat and steps around a large puddle of blood as he shuffles the notecards. Then he raises the mic to his lips and looks at us. “Table two, before the I-90 killer went dormant, the feds postulated that it was actually the work of three men, not one. What tipped them off?”
This is a tricky question. King, our division’s director, believed it was the work of three men because of the bodies—the bodies we’ve discovered, anyway, and there haven’t been many.
It wasn’t so much the condition they were left in, however, which was the same every time: dressed to impress, and clean, despite several victims coming back as known vagrants.
What struck King as odd was that while the majority of the victims were buried in the same manner, on rare occasions, we’d discover flowers left on the dirt mound, and in one instance, piss.
But King only shared his suspicions with our team. No one else.
I’ll have to play dumb this time. As the girls begin to formulate theories, I just nod and agree. Maverick stays silent, watching me as the seconds tick down.
“I’ve never even heard of the I-90 Killer,” Eve whispers, “so how the fuck am I supposed to know what tipped off anyone to anything?”
The pretty blonde—Cat—leans forward, sending a lock of hair into her eyes. “He picked up sex workers and killed them. No rhyme or reason other than that. They’ve only found five of his victims, but there are believed to be about four times that many.”
“Answer?” Jim prods.
“Give us a moment?” Kindra pleads. “This is kind of a tough one.”
“Frankie, do you have any input?” Eve asks me, her voice low. “You seem to have a pretty deep knowledge base here. I guess I slept through Serial Killer History in school.”
“You and me both,” Kindra whispers.
Maverick leans forward. “Kindra, considering your line of work, I’d think you’d know more than you do. How does Cat have all the answers?”
“Are you saying that because I’m blonde?” Cat squeals.
Maverick sighs. “Cat . . . I’m blond as well.”
I lean forward, breaking Cat’s line of sight to her intended target. “Guys, let’s focus. How specific do we need to be here?”
Eve looks up at Jim, then repeats my question.
“Just ballpark.” Jim rolls his hand through the air. “If you get anywhere near the vicinity of correctness, I’ll be a magnanimous host and let you have it.”
I can’t give them the answer, but maybe I can guide them in the right direction. “Okay, let’s consider what we know about how they profile us,” I whisper. “Usually, they nail us with a common way we kill, but sometimes there are other tells.”
“Like the location,” Kindra says.
I nod, then raise my finger as if I’ve just had an epiphany. “Or the way the bodies are disposed of.”
“Ooh, what about Satan’s Fury?” Cat says. “He’s a Japanese serial killer who got his name because of the mask he wears.”
“And the brutality of his kills.” Eve shivers. “I met him at Rakuten Fashion Week in Tokyo, and?—”
“Table two?” Jim taps his wristband. “Time is wasting.”
Maverick finally speaks. “Maybe it has something to do with the time of day when he takes his kills.”
“Or when he disposes of them,” I say, trying once more to lead the horses to water.
Cat slaps her palms on the table and stands. “It has something to do with his M.O., but there are too many things that make up a killer’s profile, Jim. This is the sort of question that only a government agent would know, and we clearly don’t have one of those at our table. This game is rigged.”
Jim smiles and looks directly at me as he raises the mic to his lips. “I’m sorry, Catarina, but that answer is incorrect. Thank you for playing.”
As he turns to the next table and asks their question, a nail runs up my spine. It’s clear Jim knows I’m a fed, especially if he set up this scavenger hunt. I might be in more trouble than I realized. I have to get off this ship.
I’ll make my escape tonight, when Maverick falls asleep. A little fake snoring should do the trick, and once he’s out, so am I.