Chapter 28 - Ryker
TWENTY-EIGHT
RYKER
I resist the urge to throw my phone.
I need a new phone number.
I can’t have the FBI or whoever tracing Liam’s calls back to me. My phone is prepaid, and I only pay with prepaid cash cards so there’s no way to trace the number back to my name, but there’s still a chance they can figure out it was me.
Shit. Shit!
I pace my motel room. Paid in cash, of course, with a fake driver’s license, and I was looking forward to grabbing Liam and fucking him hard against his bedroom wall to erase some of the feelings inside of me.
My brother is dead.
His wife probably had him killed.
I give zero shits, but I’m supposed to care, and my parents are grieving and making me feel guilty for not mourning the loss.
I check the tracker app on the phone.
Liam is close to me right now, near the river.
That FBI agent is chasing him. He’ll arrest Liam.
If Liam is arrested, can I count on him not to talk?
What will the FBI agent do when he gets his hands on Liam?
Rationally, all he’ll do is take Liam in for questioning. But Liam had sounded extremely upset.
He’d sounded afraid.
Liam isn’t even afraid of me, even though he should be.
The smart thing for me to do is to pack up and keep driving, away from New Bristol. I’ll skip over NB for the next few months until the heat has calmed down. I won’t return home either, because I don’t need whatever’s going on there to splash back on me.
But if I leave now, I won’t see Liam ever again.
I look at the little dot on the tracker that hasn’t moved in a few minutes.
With another frustrated growl, I grab my keys, coat, and duffel bag and head out to my sedan.
I don’t check to see what I’ve got in the trunk of my car. I already know all the supplies are there.
It doesn’t take long for me to reach the area Liam is holed up in. It’s dank and miserable, like all the worst parts of New Bristol.
I park in an isolated spot. The dot on the tracker still hasn’t moved.
He’d better not be dead.
If anyone is killing Liam, it’s me.
I pop the trunk and grab my backpack of supplies. Rope, tarp, hammer, and of course knives.
I keep my favorite knife in hand as I start following the trail to Liam’s phone.
I’m going to absolutely murder him if he dropped it somewhere.
The closer I get to the dot, the louder I can hear the sounds of a scuffle.
Someone cries out, and I recognize the voice as Liam’s. “Stop! Stop, I’ll go, okay? I’ll go!”
I tighten my grip on my knife.
“You’ll confess everything,” a deep voice growls. “You’ll tell them you murdered those people.”
I grind my teeth. Liam is doing no such thing.
It’s pitch black in here, so I’m forced to tread slowly to avoid making noise while I approach Liam.
I glance up once to note the open beams on the ceiling.
Steel beams. They’re very sturdy. They’d easily be able to hold an adult man’s weight.
“But I di—” Liam’s voice cuts off as he lets out a grunt.
Someone is hurting him.
Someone who isn’t me.
I turn the corner.
The sound of flesh on flesh gets louder, and Liam grunts again. His pained groan echoes off the steel shell of the building.
A single cell phone flashlight illuminates the scene.
An older man, about Liam’s height but much heavier, punches Liam across the face.
Redding, if the name Liam had given me is accurate.
Liam cries out again, trying to huddle back, away from the beating he’s currently taking from who I assume is the agent, but his back is almost up against the wall. He doesn’t appear to have noticed me; neither of them have.
“Admit it!” Redding shouts as he knocks Liam back.
My vision goes red.
I approach the man from behind.
Liam whimpers, the sound reverberating in my ears.
Those are my sounds. They don’t belong to this despicable little ant.
Thanks to my years of practice, I know exactly where to strike to kill a man instantly.
I also know where to strike to prolong the death.
I unsheathe the knife and stab directly into Redding’s side, right as he raises his arms to deliver another punch to Liam.
Redding cries out in pain, and I remove the knife. Blood gushes out, spilling onto Liam.
“Who gave you permission?” I ask as I grab the man by his hair. “Who the fuck gave you the right to touch him?”
Liam gasps, and I can barely make out the way his eyes go wide when he sees me.
“You came,” he wheezes. He takes a step toward me, but he winces.
I can’t see much from the light from the phone’s flashlight alone, but I think his face has already begun to swell from the hits he’d taken. “I didn’t think you would.”
“Neither did I,” I admit.
Redding cries out. “Wha… what?” He struggles against me, despite how much pain he must be in.
I kick him away and drop my backpack to the floor. “Are you going to stand there like an idiot or are you going to help me?” I ask Liam.
“Tell me what to do,” Liam says. He goes to my pack, rummaging around in it. He pulls out the rope. “This?” he asks, and despite the pain he has to be feeling, there’s anticipation in his voice now.
“Yes.” I take the rope from him. “Lay down the tarp.”
It’s a bit late for that, with the blood already on the floor of the abandoned building, but we can try to contain the mess a bit. I’ll have to do some cleanup later to hide the evidence of the crime.
This is what being emotional gets me. Sloppiness.
Liam hurries to get the tarp open. Redding is trying to crawl away, his hand over his gut. I easily catch up to him and grab his collar to drag him back. Unfortunately, despite the wound, he’s still an adult man with some basic training.
Redding struggles against me, and I hiss as I dodge a punch.
“You… you realize who I am?” he growls at me. “I’m FBI. You’re going to get caught.”
I shake my head and grin. “Only if they find your body.”
That’s cocky of me, but I’ve done a great job of making bodies disappear so far.
Liam gets the tarp spread out, though it’s over a pool of blood that’s already been left behind. Still, there’s no sense of getting more blood everywhere. “God, you’re hot like this,” he mutters.
I kick the agent onto the tarp. He grunts as he lands on his knees, then screams when I stab his other side.
“I’m going to disembowel you,” I whisper against his ear. “You think Liam over there has the strength to do anything like that? No. The murderer you were looking for is here now, though.”
Liam, for once, keeps his mouth shut. He gets closer, and the light from the phone illuminates his face. As I’d expected, his face is a mess of bruises, but there’s still fire in his eyes as he stares down at Redding.
Redding’s mouth is open and gasping in pain. I grab his wrists and yank them behind him so I can tie them together with the rope.
“Look,” I tell Liam. “You don’t want a flimsy knot that comes undone. This is how you tie a secure one.”
I demonstrate the knot for him as I tie the agent’s wrists.
He watches in rapt attention. “I’ll have to practice,” he says.
Redding makes a choked sound.
I sigh, reminded that we aren’t out in the woods. “Get the towel from my bag.”
Liam rushes to obey, pulling out a black towel. I use it to gag Redding. His subsequent sounds are annoyingly dampened.
Liam smiles down at him. “You really pulled something stupid,” he says, wiping at his mouth. Blood comes away from a split lip, and my vision hazes over red.
No one else is allowed to make Liam bleed.
Redding makes muffled noises.
He must be in so much pain.
I pull the length of rope around his torso, then toss the remaining length over the ceiling beam.
Liam watches with rapt fascination. “What are you doing?”
I grin at him. “They bleed out more if gravity helps.” I pull on the rope. It takes me a few tries, and Redding cries out again, but I get him suspended a few inches above the ground. Then I tie the remaining rope around a nearby steel pillar.
It’s not as good as when I have somebody suspended from a tree, but it’ll do.
The blood drips down Redding’s body and onto the tarp below him.
“Sometimes I watch them bleed out like this,” I tell Liam.
Liam shivers, and he links his arm in mine before nuzzling my throat. He doesn’t look away from the scene for long, returning his gaze to the soon-to-be corpse. He licks his lips. “This is gonna be a bitch to clean up,” he remarks. “And I’m not in the best shape to help.”
He grimaces.
“I really can’t see Maggie or Gran for a little while. They’ll have too many questions.” His eyes flit to me before returning to the agent’s body. “They’d probably blame you, and it’s not like I can say it was Redding if he’s gone.”
I glance up at the man. His head lolls from side to side, his eyes blinking open and shut like he’s trying to maintain consciousness.
I raise my knife to the wound on one side. “I promised a disemboweling.” I glance at Liam. “You’d better not have a weak stomach.”
“I don’t think I do,” he says, tilting his head to the side. “I guess we’re about to find out. Don’t worry. I won’t throw up on you.”
“Or at all.” I push my knife against the edge of the first cut. Redding’s shirt is soaked through already.
I drive my knife in deep and pull it across his stomach.
His shirt splits.
More blood gushes out.
We get the first hazy glimpse of his viscera, gleaming under the phone’s flashlight.
Redding screams, the sound muffled in the makeshift gag. It would have been lovely to hear him at full volume, under the stars, with nothing around us but wildlife ready to consume his carcass.
“Maybe there’s something to be said for the forest,” Liam says, yearning thick in his voice. “It sucks that I can’t hear him properly.” He lets out an exasperated sigh. “Oh well.”
“I drug some of them first,” I tell Liam. “They’re in better shape than this guy. But they think because they’re men, nobody will try anything with them. I string them up and wait for them to wake before I start playing.”
Copper invades my nostrils, filling all my senses.
I reach into the giant, gaping maw in Redding’s stomach to pull out his entrails.