4. Grayson
4
GRAYSON
T he group of men gathered around on cheap folding chairs looked as ordinary as any. If anything, they were perhaps more average than the regular Joe.
A clever disguise common with men like them.
None of them wanted attention, and styling yourself as normal as possible was the easiest way to do that. They wore jeans and T-shirts and sneakers. Their hair was brown or blond or black and styled with regular, off-the-barber-shop-wall cuts. Nothing special. They could have been suburban dads. Tradesmen. White-collar office workers. Truck drivers.
You’d pass them on the street and never give any of them a second look. They were underestimated every day by almost every person in their lives.
A dangerous mistake to make.
But one only I knew about.
The group didn’t have a fancy name like Alcoholics Anonymous, though it worked in much the same way. There were some differences, like meeting when a member called, not at a set time.
But if that phone rang, then we went. All of us.
Well, all but one.
I sighed, noting the empty chair Trigger’s absence left. I still set it out for him whenever the group descended upon my home, but it hadn’t been used in a long time.
“He’s not coming, Doc,” Whip commented idly, following my line of sight. “You know he’s not.”
I forced myself to nod. “I know. But there’s always a tiny part of me that hopes he will.”
Whip stirred sugar into his coffee. “You’re going to give yourself an ulcer worrying over him.”
He was right about that.
I glanced over at Torch, X, and Ace, the three of them chatting quietly amongst themselves while they waited for the toaster to pop and deliver their breakfast. These meetings always seemed to get called early in the mornings, and I understood why.
Nights were hard for men like them. The darkness outside whispered seductively in their ears, and it was when temptation was highest. The morning brought regrets.
So I always kept a loaf of bread in the freezer, just in case I suddenly needed to feed the four of them toast.
Five of them, if Trigger had come.
But there was no point waiting for him. Whip was right. He didn’t care if he was breaking the number one rule of the group. Which was if that phone rang, you answered it. You showed up for the others. Because then one day, when you needed them, they’d be there for you the same way you’d been there for them.
Trigger had pissed all over the one damn rule I’d set, and he didn’t give a fuck.
I lifted my arm to glance at my watch and then whistled at the trio still slapping peanut butter on their toast. “Let’s go, guys. I’ve got work this morning.”
To their credit, all three politely nodded and brought their plates to the circle I’d set up in my living room. All four of them looked expectantly at me.
I grinned. “Really? We’re going to start with me?”
X eyed me. “You could have called this meeting as much as any of us.”
The second rule of the group was when someone needed a meeting, we called for it on a private number. Nobody actually answered their phones. There was no need to, nobody but the six of us had those numbers. But a call on those specific phones meant at the top of the hour, we would meet to talk. And that meant all of us talked, not just whoever was in need the most.
In an attempt to gain their trust, I’d started participating in the group as much as running it.
There were things on my mind. Things that seeing another strangled woman on the table of a morgue had brought up. The marks around her neck had been the same as the ones around my wife’s neck years earlier.
Maybe it was a coincidence. Plenty of killers strangled their victims.
But I couldn’t rule out that the person who’d killed my wife and my sister-in-law might also have killed the woman lying dead on that table.
And that Kara could be next.
I wasn’t going to say that to these men though. Or the one so notably missing from the room.
So I shrugged and lied, “Nothing to report here. Just work. The gym. Hockey. All pretty boring.”
Ace tilted his head to one side, studying me. “You’re lying. Something is up with you.”
X nodded in agreement. “You’re being cagey as fuck.”
Unlike most of my patients, who were so self-involved I could have strapped on some fake boobs and sung Dolly Parton songs without them noticing, these guys understood people and human behavior in the same way I did.
My understanding came from years of study.
Theirs did too. Only none of them had cracked a book or attended a lecture. Everything they knew came from the way they studied people.
Psychopaths were good at that. Watching. Waiting. Learning all sorts of things about their victims before they attacked.
I found them endlessly interesting.
“I’ve shared as much as I want to share for today.” I set the boundary firmly. “Whip, how about you?”
The big man cracked his neck and then rubbed at the spot with his thick fingers. “Working on a new target. Haven’t decided if he’s the one yet.”
“Straight off the prison release list?” X took the question out of my mouth.
Whip shrugged.
I squinted at him. “If you’re going rogue, you need to tell me. Let me run some checks on whoever it is.”
Whip stared at me. “They ain’t good people, Gray. I promise.”
“Even still, I want a name. You want someone added to the list, then we all have to agree. That’s how this works.”
Torch chuckled and flicked his cigarette lighter. “Whip wants to keep his new toy all to himself.”
Whip flipped him the bird. “Can you blame me? If I put his name on the list you’ll probably set his fucking house on fire.”
“Come on, Dad!” Torch mocked, ribbing Whip for being the oldest of the group. “Just a little blaze. Nothing crazy.”
We all knew he hadn’t chosen Torch as his group name for no reason. The man was a complete pyromaniac and thought nothing of setting fire to a house while his victim slept inside.
Though he’d admitted many a time that he preferred to block off the exits and hear them scream.
Whip turned to me. “I’ll tell you, but you keep him off the list so fire fingers over there doesn’t get to him before I do.”
I nodded, passing my notepad and pen to the older man and watching him scribble a name across it.
X leaned over to try to sneak a peek, his chair legs lifting off the floor.
Whip shot out one hand so fast X didn’t even see it coming until he’d fallen off his chair.
I hid a laugh as he grumbled and got back up, shooting Whip a dirty look in the process.
Whip just rolled his eyes at me as he handed me back my notepad. He was probably only in his early forties, but he was the unofficial father figure of the group. Anyone else shoving X off a chair like that probably would have ended in a murder, but X, Ace, and Torch all tolerated Whip’s grumpy old-man moves.
He’d earned the right to put them in their place, and we all knew it.
I focused on the younger man with the snake tattoos covering his entire body. Even with a sweatshirt on, they were visible creeping up his neck and across his knuckles. “X, you want to talk?”
“About my bruised ass?” he snarked.
“Or about how you’ve been lately?”
He pulled out a cigarette and leaned over so Torch could light it.
Any excuse for the man to create flame.
X inhaled and then blew out the smoke in a long plume. “Got my hands dirty last night.” He glanced at me. “Thirty-seven on the list, by the way.”
I noted that down, not remembering the name of the person in that slot, or the reason they were there, but I felt no remorse. If they were on the list, they were on it for a reason. They were either a rapist, a child molester, a granny basher, a prostitute killer, or had committed some other crime that had landed them in our sights.
I couldn’t care less about the man who lay dead somewhere, probably buried in a shallow grave in the woods or tossed off the Saint View bluff. But I did care about the man sitting across the circle from me.
Watching him more closely, I noted the way his leg bounced, just the tiniest amount, like he was actively trying to control it and not quite getting there. “You’re triggered,” I suggested softly.
X snapped his gaze to meet mine. “I’m fine.”
“You know you’re not,” Ace disagreed. “You’re twitching. You never fucking twitch.”
X took another drag on his smoke. “Fine. What the fuck ever. I can’t stop thinking about the blood spilling. Every person I walk past I think about slitting their throats and setting free the crimson river…”
“Very poetic,” Whip said dryly.
Torch faked a yawn. “Who cares? Just do it. See what happens.”
I groaned internally and shot him a look. “Don’t say things like that. That’s not helpful in this space, and you know it.”
He sat up a little straighter, suitably abashed. “Fine. X, don’t kill people on the streets, okay? Stick to the list.”
It wasn’t the worst advice, and sometimes, I had to take what I could get. Nobody had ever claimed a support group for psychopaths would be perfect. But these men had found their way to me one by one or were sent to me by Trigger. They came to these meetings, not because they wanted to give up their vices altogether. It was almost impossible for a true murderous psychopath to change who they were at their core.
But these men were trying to channel their urges in more productive places.
And I was trying to help them.
I pointed a pen at X. “I agree with Torch. Focus your energy on the list. Or go cold turkey for a month.”
All four of them gaped at me like that was the most ridiculous suggestion in the world.
Whip shook his head. “Asking him to go cold turkey for a month is like asking a man to give up sex.”
“Or breathing,” Torch added. “Fucking hell.”
I sighed. “Meetings then. Every time you think you’re going to slip, you call us instead.” I sternly focused in X’s direction. “ Every time.”
He gave me a nod and held his hand up like he was a Boy Scout. “I will not poke knife holes in the skin of an innocent just to see how they bleed.”
I squinted at him. “Really?”
He grinned. “You’re the one who likes affirmations.”
I gave up and turned my attention to Ace, knowing I had to wrap this meeting up so I could get to work. “What about you?”
He shrugged. “Shot my neighbor’s rooster yesterday.”
The entire room broke out in a cacophony of shouts.
“Oh, you are messed up in the head.” Whip’s disgust was written all over his face.
Torch rolled the wheel on his lighter so fast it made sparks. “This makes me real fucking unhappy, Ace. Real fucking unhappy.”
“You can’t fucking kill animals, you psychopath!” X shouted.
Though wasn’t that the kettle calling the pot black?
This was exactly why I’d first agreed to start working with men like this. The way their minds worked was endlessly fascinating. There was barely a blink when X had talked about running his blade into another human being or when Whip had admitted to stalking another target, an unapproved one at that. But Ace kills a rooster…
“Humans are all pieces of shit,” Whip explained. “Even the ones not on the list. None of us are innocent. We do bad shit. Lie. Cheat. Steal… Litter.”
I hid a laugh at him throwing in littering with the rest of the list.
“Animals though,” Whip continued. “They don’t know any better. They don’t do bad shit.” He glared at Ace. “Killing them is messed up.”
Ace huffed out an irritated sigh. “The little fucker got into my yard and chased me! What was I supposed to do?” He reached into his duffel bag and pulled out a clear plastic bag.
His neighbor’s dead pet was inside.
“You see the claws on that thing? He was gonna rip my eyes out!” He tossed the bag in my direction. “Here. Thought you could eat it. You’re on that Keto diet thing, aren’t you?”
I stared down at the dead bird on my lap and then around at the group of men all watching me.
Clearly, we still had some work to do.