5. Chapter 5
Chapter 5
Andy
By the time we get in touch with Oxy, she has the location of the hotel the mercenaries are staying at. The idiots seriously thought if they ran around in those infrared-blocking suits, we wouldn’t be able to trace them to wherever they ended up, even after they got into their car and sped away. But there is a variety of evidence they’ve left behind.
Their biggest mistake was cracking the window of their car to smoke a cigarette and giving us a view of a tattoo on their neck, caught on a nearby Ring camera. After that, everything else fell into place. Oxy didn’t even have to follow their car to the nearby gas station where they ended up because they had taken their masks off at that point and both had the same tattoo. After she found them there, she knew exactly what they looked like, and she was able to put them into facial recognition software.
It was easy after that to find their hotel and everything else about them that was available, although I’m sure the names we have are not real; each of the men have three. But I don’t really expect to get much information out of them from this venture, anyway. This will be purely for Chi’s revenge.
We head over to the hotel they checked into a night ago: some run-of-the-mill budget place they’re using. Apparently they think they can hide out in a big-name chain. Once we get there, we simply wait down the street. Inevitably, they need to go out for more cigarettes, and bam , they’re tased and neatly zip tied in the trunk in seconds. We smack them nice and hard with our guns, too, while making sure they don’t lose too much brain function from the injuries. Might as well keep the possibility of getting something out of them on the off chance they do talk.
We take them to one of Cas’s old safehouses which has a leaky, unfinished basement and is already set up for our activities with a tarp on the floor. Then, we drench them both in buckets of ice water and get to work.
“Wakey, wakey, shitbrains,” Cas says, lifting the hitmen’s drooping heads by their wet, sweaty hair. He likes to play with his food. I just like to get what I need from them and then hear their screams for as long as possible before they die. Once I get to the torture part, I like to keep my silence while they beg.
One starts coming around, only to get tased into full wakefulness. The other is still down for the count, so Cas tases him too, and he wakes with a scream.
“Thanks for joining us. We’ve been waiting patiently.” Cas looks over at me with a wide smile. “Well, maybe not that patiently.”
The men are schooled in their responses to this, and as soon as they are able, they set their jaws and stare hard into space. I know that look. It’s the indignant resignation of knowing they’re going to die and accepting it with grace.
But there will be nothing graceful in what I’m about to do to them.
One of the men looks at the small knife I’m holding with skepticism. I don’t even have my gun out. I’m not interested in using that today.
“You like it? It’s from the Boy Scouts.” One side of my lip turns up into a slightly sinister grin. This grin scared a man so much during my time in Special Ops that he passed out upon seeing it. I mean, he was bleeding out pretty heavily, but as soon as he saw it, he was done.
“I joined up when I was eight. My mom thought I showed good survival instincts and wanted me to nurture them or some shit. I didn’t really care about it until I got this little thing right here.”
I run the blade of the knife lightly along my tongue; it doesn't penetrate the skin at all. “It is a pretty dull edge, I know. But the end is pointed enough to go through the skin.” I prick my finger with the tip, and a dot of blood wells up.
“Most of the other boys just used to slice rope with this. I really liked to figure out all the different things I could cut with it, though. You know, if you put enough effort into it, you can skin a snake with one of these. You just have to press hard enough and put a little more elbow grease into tearing the meat off the bone.” I look up and allow my grin to grow just a tinge wider. “I’ve done it, so I know.” I look at the point in satisfaction and run it quickly across my fingertip. More blood wells up at the site. “I’ve also given it a few upgrades since I was eight years old.”
When I look up after my little soliloquy, the men are staring at me in terrified attentiveness, hanging on my every word. They try to keep their faces blank, of course — they’re professionals, after all — but they can’t hide that anxiety from me. I’ve read far stonier faces than theirs.
I trail the tiny knife across all my favorite points of entry — not the big arteries, but the ones small enough to bleed out slowly and painfully. I’m coming up with a game plan as I go, thinking about which method of execution would be best for each individual. Their own special death plan.
The first guy doesn’t even flinch when I press the blade into his face, right under his eyeball. It’s so dull that no cut is made, but I push it up under his eye so that the globe protrudes slightly. He winces, and I definitely hear his swallow. “Where should I start? By cutting out your eyeballs from the sockets?”
I speak softly and methodically. “It’s harder to do that than you’d think, actually. You have to really dig in there first, pop that fucker out, and then cut all those fine muscles and nerve endings away. Or you can just tear it out completely, but that would likely damage the brain too much. And I want you pieces of shit to be alive for a nice long time to feel every bit of pain I inflict with this tiny, dull, three inch blade.”
My highly nonthreatening weapon might as well be a machete at this point, as the man looks at it without blinking. The very corner of his eye twitches ever so slightly, though, and that makes it clear that I’m having the exact effect I was hoping for.
“How about you, James Eric Michael?” I refer to the idiot in the next seat by the three different names on the licenses Oxy found for him, and his eyes bulge ever so slightly. “What? You think we wouldn’t figure out your alias’s? Who the fuck did you think you were killing? Akio Yano was a multi-billionaire with powerful friends.” I look at him with calm curiosity, head cocked, eyes narrowed. “Did you seriously think we wouldn’t find you?”
His eyes finally falter a little as he thinks about my words. “Ah, or is it that you really didn’t know who he was? What is this, fucking amateur hour? Even with these nifty infrared suits, you morons didn’t think to make sure you weren’t killing someone who would send a man who is super curious to see if his dull blade can saw through an Achilles tendon?” I look back at Cas, eyebrow raised. “I haven’t tried that before.”
Cas is sick of being left out, and he comes over to us brandishing an ax. “I don’t know, man. We could just chop their heads off with this. I know it’s a big motherfucker, but it’s not super sharp, and you usually have to hack it a few times to get through the spinal cord.”
I consider this for a moment as I judge the size and depth of James Eric Michael’s eyeball with the tip of my blade. I let the tip poke deep enough to make just the smallest of cuts, and he lets out a small cry at the pain of all those nerve endings being pushed at once. I smile. “I think eyeballs are the way to go, man. But we have a decent amount of time. We can do both.”
“Don’t you want to ask any questions?” Cas asks, rubbing his stubble with the top of the ax.
I shrug. “I’m sure these fine gentlemen would share pertinent information with us if they were so inclined to keep their heads attached.”
The man whose eyeball I’m not currently cutting out of their face huffs angrily. My eyes dart over to his, like a serpent on the hunt. “You have something you’d like to say?”
“Yeah.” He spits, trying to go for my face but landing on my shirt instead. “Even if you were going to let us live, I wouldn’t tell you shit.”
Cas sucks in breath through his teeth and looks at me, eyebrows raised, then back at the man. “You are in a lot of trouble now.”
I focus on the man calmly, my mask remaining a beacon of calm. “I’m okay with that. I was planning to be covered in your blood soon anyway. A bit of saliva is nothing.” I move suddenly toward him and stab my knife into his eye. He screams in agony immediately. We’ve tied these assholes so tight to the highbacked chairs they sit in that he can barely move, but he tries as hard as he can to squirm around. Cas abandons his neck-chopping idea and comes around to hold his head in place as I pry out his eye with a wet thunk and carefully cut everything that attaches it to his body.
“So? Got anything for me, James Eric Michael?” I ask, far calmer than just moments ago. I feel like I can breathe a little easier once the eye is out and on the side table. The guy whose eye has been removed is screaming his head off as the other looks on, more than a little disgusted. In fact, I’m pretty certain he’s about to vomit. Sometimes watching the show is worse than being a part of it. His friend seems to be going into shock, although I can only tell from the look in one eye now.
“I’m not telling you anything,” he says, holding strong, although visibly terrified now.
“Okay.” I pick up his feet, tied together with zipties, and poke the tip of my otherwise blunt knife into the skin covering the Achilles tendon. Perhaps he remembers what I was saying earlier and realizes I wasn’t just bluffing — I really am curious to see if it will cut through the sinew.
“No! No, stop.”
I laugh, as if the word “no” will stop me. I hit the connective tissues and begin sawing.
“I’ll tell you! I don’t know a lot!”
I continue slowly, narrowing my eyes on my work to focus. “Okay, so shoot.”
“Stop, stop! Ask me anything!”
“I prefer more of an open discussion than an interview format. Just talk to me if you have something to tell me.” I don’t want to bargain with him or pull information out of him slowly as he squirms and tries to resist. I just want him to give me everything he has in hopes that it will stop this. Even though it won’t.
“You—you want names?”
I shrug as I cut through the first big chunk of tendon and revel in the harsh scrape through my dull blade. “Depends on whose names you give me.”
“I know all of them.” He dry heaves before collecting himself. “All those rich assholes. I’m based in Japan!”
I pause and look at him curiously. “You’re not Japanese and have no accent.”
He shivers and looks relieved that I’ve stopped cutting. “They recruited me. I lived here, and I go back and forth.” He slurs his words and snivels, spitting out more vomit between his words, but his filthiness doesn’t bother me. I know it feels a lot worse for him, and it’s all part of effective torture.
I think about what this tells me. “A lot of them go back and forth. That doesn’t really mean much.”
“They work as a unit,” he says, a ghostly white pallor clouding his face. “All those rich Japanese assholes. I know them all. But I never know who hired me, just that someone in the organization did.”
I dart my eyes over to his. “The organization? Like, the Yakuza?”
He shakes his head as he starts to tremble. They are always such tough guys at first, but they fold eventually. I’m glad this session is going so smoothly. I really want to get back to Chi as soon as possible.
He leans over and vomits. Cas sighs and rolls his eyes, but I have no issues with it. It just means I’m closer to getting what I want. “No, no. It’s not the Yakuza. It’s a controlling arm of the Japanese government that sort of…” He shivers and gags again. “They’re like the liaison between the government and the Yakuza.”
I narrow my eyes in cynicism. “What are they called?”
“The Kantoku-sha .”
I know the word. It’s like “boss” or “supervisor.” Someone who oversees the entire operation.
I dig further into his tendon. “I’ve never heard of them,” I say in consternation.
“Wait! Wait, it was one of the higher ups. The way high ups! It was the highest bounty they offer, so it was a quarter of a billion! I was going to retire on this!”
The fucker has the audacity to seem disappointed. I cut in a little further, but I do need to ask more questions after his new reveal.
“One person was going to pay you 25 million dollars?” He takes too long to answer, so I fully cut the tendon and hear the snap. He howls in pain, and tears stream down his face. “Answer me,” I say, placidly putting my knife to the next ankle of his next foot.
“I th—think it was just one. It was top secret clearance. Completely anonymous.”
I shake my head in disbelief. “No way. Someone must know who it was.”
The man takes a moment to try to contain his sobs, and I allow it in hopes that he’ll give me something more when he can gather himself. Unfortunately, it seems to give him the moment he needs to steel himself against what I’m doing and accept his fate: I’m obviously going to torture this fucker for hours, whether he tells me anything or not.
“You might as well kill me, because I don’t know anything else.”
I let out a low, velvety chuckle as I push further into his foot. “Then let the fun begin.”