Chapter Two – Ezra
I stand with Royal in the kitchen. We’re making a right mess of the place, but that’s what the cleanup crew is for. Not once have we ever been this messy, though, and I don’t mean that because of the blood we’re trailing all over the place.
No, I mean it because of the girl. The girl who is currently tied up to a chair we lugged into the bedroom. We had to untie Brock’s body so that we could restrain her and make it so that she couldn’t just stroll out of here like nothing happened.
Blind with memory loss? Right. She tried pulling everything she could from her ass, anything that might let her leave.
If things weren’t so messed up, her falling out of the closet and freaking out over a spider on her forehead would actually be kind of funny, but on a night like tonight, the last thing I’m in the mood to do is laugh.
Tonight had a purpose, and that purpose was not having a girl watch us kill and dismember Brock Hard.
Royal stands a few feet away from me, tapping his blood-soaked knife on the counter.
“Who the fuck is she?” he asks in a huff.
He still wears his mask, as do I; it’s part of the process.
We are simply cogs in the machine, cogs that do our part.
Some people might know us as the Downtown Dismemberer, but there’s so much more to us than they could ever know.
So many more, too, which now that girls knows all about.
“I don’t know,” I mutter. We searched her before we tied her up, and we didn’t find any identification anywhere. The girl was wearing all black, like us. She even had gloves on. She wore a black beanie over her hair, too. She looked like a thief.
But what about that bag beneath the bed?
“What are we going to do?”
“I don’t know,” I say again. “We could call Hawthorne and see what he thinks.” The first rule is to get in and get out, don’t take our time.
Do what we must so the rest of the machine can get to work.
Second rule is not to get caught by anyone, so the girl being here in the first place fucks that right up.
But we don’t kill women and girls. That’s not a rule, but it is unspoken. It’s why we’re all here doing what we do in the first place. The world has enough shit-eating men who hurt women and girls everywhere.
Royal shakes his head. “We don’t have time. We’ve already been here too long. We need to finish up with Brock and get the fuck out of here.”
He’s right. We need to get out of this place ASAP, but that still leaves the girl and her fate in question.
I suggest the only thing that comes to mind in this particular scenario: “Then we finish up and take her with us.” I don’t like the suggestion; what we do isn’t exactly family-friendly, but there is something different about her.
She had some balls to try to leave after what she saw, after seeing us cut through Brock like it was nothing.
“We take her with us,” Royal repeats, “and then figure out where to go from there, with Hawthorne’s help. Yeah, what the fuck could go wrong?”
All I can do is shrug. This isn’t a situation either of us have been in before, so it isn’t like we have previous experience dealing with a woman who’s seen too much. “What else can we do?”
He’s quiet for a moment. “Fuck, I don’t know. I guess you’re right. We take her with us, but first thing’s first: we need to finish cutting up Brock.”
I nod, and together we return to the bedroom, where we find the girl still tied to the chair in the corner of the room, a good ten feet away from the bed, where Brock’s half-mutilated body lays. The moment she sees us, she perks up.
What a strange girl.
“I don’t mean to be a bother,” she says, flashing us a smile, “but could one of you please loosen the rope around my wrist and let me go? I’m getting some rug burn, I think. Or would it be considered rope burn since it’s rope? Either way, it’s starting to burn a bit—”
Royal and I exchange a glance, but we don’t respond to her. We return to our places on either side of the bed, and Royal picks up the forearm he had to set down earlier, when we went to the kitchen.
The sight of Brock half-dismembered would fill most people with unease, be the stuff of nightmares. To us? It’s nothing. We’ve done this before, and we’ll do it again.
And again, and again, and again.
I bring my saw to his knee, using my other hand to brace the lower part of his leg, but across from me, Royal doesn’t do anything other than set down the arm and glance over his shoulder, at the girl watching us with wide, silvery eyes.
Seriously, an unreal set of eyes on her.
“What?” I huff, wanting to be done with this already. The sooner we return to it, the sooner we can get the hell out of here, even if we have to take the girl with us. One step at a time.
“I’m having some performance issues,” Royal mutters. “She’s watching us.”
“Yes, she is—” Before I can say anything else, I watch as Royal goes to grab one of Brock’s pillows, the one behind the others, the only one that doesn’t have any blood splatter on it, though not for long thanks to the blood on his gloves.
In less than thirty seconds, Royal has the pillow case on top of her head, but apparently he decides it isn’t good enough, because after her face is covered, he spins the chair around and angles her toward the corner.
When he returns to the bed, I ask, “Better?”
“Oh, yeah. Much.”
The girl, though, doesn’t know to keep her mouth shut.
She says, “I never knew a serial killer could get stage fright. It’s kind of funny.
” And then she must remember what she told us earlier, because she quickly adds, “Not that I saw anything at all happening here. It’s just a normal night, yeah.
Totally, one hundred and ten percent normal.
And you guys? Complete strangers to me.”
It’s too late, though. She knows who we are. She must know we’re the D.D.K., and that, of course, D.D.K. isn’t a singular person. If seeing us kill Brock wasn’t bad enough, knowing who we are is worse. Unfortunately for her, she’s only digging herself into a bigger, deeper hole here.
I catch Royal’s stare and say, “Just keep going. We’ll handle her later.”
He doesn’t argue with me, surely because he knows I’m right.
The two of us get back to work, and maybe it’s because of the girl in the corner, or maybe it’s simply because we both know we’ve already taken too long here, but we make damn good time.
We finish cutting up Brock and displaying him on the bed, leaving whole inches separating his pieces parts, and then it’s time to pack our bags, hide our blood-soaked saws, and get out.
But, of course, can’t leave without the girl.
So, as Royal slips a chloroform-laced rag beneath the pillowcase on the girl’s head, I go to grab the bag he found beneath the bed. I’m getting the feeling the bag didn’t belong to Brock at all, that it belongs to our third wheel.
The girl’s head limps back as she passes out, and I sling the bag over my shoulder.
Royal unties her, stuffs our rope into our bags, and then picks the girl up.
Together, we leave the house in the dead of night—or, more correctly, in the early morning hours before the sun rises in the horizon.
We only take our masks off once we’re in the car, no longer parked near the house.
On our way home, I shoot a discreet text to Hawthorne, who then will contact the next part of the machine, the ones who’re used to cleaning up messes.
Royal drives, and I sit in the passenger seat, though I do keep shooting glances in the back every now and then. The girl is totally passed out, the pillowcase still on her head. “Should we have buckled her in?” I ask.
“Nah, she’ll be fine,” Royal says.
“What if we get into an accident?”
“If we get into an accident right now, I think the unconscious girl’s health and safety will be the last thing to worry about.” He means the bloodied stuff in our bags, the worst of which would be the blood-soaked saws.
I say dryly, “Then I guess drive safe.”
“Don’t I always?” He sounds annoyed, like I pushed him too far, but then again, sometimes that’s just Royal. He can be an asshole every now and then, especially when things don’t go according to plan—and tonight? Tonight definitely didn’t go according to any plan, just ask the girl in the back.
“What do you think she was doing there?” I ask him. Her bag sits on my lap, and I dig through it and pull out a very sharp, very clean knife. Now that we know she was there the entire time, this little kill kit… there’s no way it belonged to Brock. If it did, Hawthorne would’ve known about it.
“Beats the fuck out of me, but we’ll get to the bottom of her, and then…”
“Then what? It isn’t like we can let her go. She saw too much.”
“Yeah, she’s fucked.”
I frown at him, but since he’s driving and it’s dark out, he doesn’t see it. As I return my attention to the knife in my hand, I mutter, “I wonder if this kill kit is hers. If it is, that means she was there to kill Brock, too.”
Finally, I must’ve said the right thing, because Royal’s demeanor changes a bit. He gets tense, his hands tightening around the wheel, and his voice comes out much deeper than before, “You think she had a vendetta against him? You think she was one of his victims?”
Brock Hard was a serial rapist. He liked to go to bars and drug women, and he knew which bars to go to where the owners would always look the other way. It’s quite possible the girl was a part of it somehow.
“I don’t know,” I say, because I don’t. “But what are the odds she’d be there the same night as us? The odds have to be insanely small.”
“I don’t give a shit about the odds, that’s Hawthorne’s thing.” He groans. “This fucking sucks, man. This shit was supposed to be easy. Give us a target, let us do our thing, and then we duck out and wait until we have our next.”
That’s how it’s been for years, but call me crazy, it feels as though everything is about to change.