CHAPTER NINETEEN
Tim Murphy had been the perfect example of health and lived a life even the richest of men could envy.
He had married his high school sweetheart, a woman who couldn't speak of his time on this earth without choking on her tears. Just two weeks ago, they had welcomed their first child—a fat and healthy baby boy with the roundest, cutest face Shawn had ever seen.
They were supposed to have a long, happy life together.
They were supposed to have more babies, raise them in their home, and watch their grandkids play in the yard.
They were supposed to grow old and watch each other wrinkle and wither away until they could be joined again in the kingdom of Heaven.
But fate had had other plans for Tim.
He was never going to witness his son growing up on this side of the soil. He would never hold, kiss, make love to his wife again.
All because a random stranger, a terrible man—a man just like me—had decided to put a bullet through his heart during a gang shoot-out.
It hadn't been intentional. Tim hadn't been a target, and that was what I told myself to make it sting a little less as I pumped his empty shell full of embalming fluid.
Saying I would never kill an innocent man with a young wife and infant son because I was careful, unlike the careless man who had fired several rounds at his rival in the middle of the day on a sidewalk just outside a grocery store.
But what was to say that man hadn't been careful all the other times too? Humans made mistakes by design. We could try our best not to, but even the most calculated killers fucked up sometimes.
They got caught.
I looked down at Tim and the peace that had shrouded his face.
I wondered if he had felt peace when he lay dying on that grocery store floor, or had he been angry that his life was ending at twenty-six before he could see his son take his first steps?
"Life was never meant to be kind," I muttered with apology.
"Leonard always used to say we are born to sin and for sins to be committed against us.
Because people are incapable of perfection, and to be perfect would be the same as being without sin …
or something like that. We're only just people, bound to screw up.
But how unfair is it that someone like you had to fall victim to one of those mistakes while that asshole gets to, what, spend fifteen years in prison, only to get out on good behavior and do it again to some other unsuspecting guy?
When does he get to succumb to someone else's mistake? "
I let out a forlorn sigh and shook my head.
"I don't make mistakes," I said to myself more than him.
"I have my target, and I make sure I get the job done in such a way that there are no innocent casualties.
And I think, for the first time ever, I might be proud of that, knowing that nobody like you is lying on someone else's table because of me. "
Then I laughed. "What the fuck though, right? God, I shouldn't be proud of anything. I never used to be, but listen to me now."
Tim didn't respond in the traditional sense, but I imagined he'd have a lot to say about the things he had accomplished that were truly worthy of his pride.
His father's construction business, where he, too, had made a living.
The sweet but ordinary life he'd built with his young wife.
The sheer moments in which he'd held his newborn baby, the living, breathing proof of the love he'd once experienced.
I hung my head, thinking about that now, and shamefully, an envy flourished from somewhere deep inside my core.
"You're lucky," I muttered, shaken by what I was about to say to the dead man before I even uttered the words. "I've … had feelings for one woman in my entire life. Only one. And she doesn't even know my name. She doesn’t even know my face."
I tipped my head back, staring into the fluorescent lights overhead.
"She's getting married tomorrow," I went on as an overwhelming sense of helpless despair crushed against my chest. "She's getting married to this fucking asshole who is, apparently, our fucking cousin—who knew I had a cousin, right?
Gerald just happened to withhold that tidbit of information this whole time.
I guess it doesn't matter who he is when he's as good as dead to me otherwise, but still. "
Analise hadn't confirmed or denied that Benjamin was the one to hurt her.
But I saw the way she flinched whenever he touched her, saw the way she became withdrawn and tense whenever he was around.
I wasn't sure Gerald hadn't hurt her either, but she didn't act with him the way she did with Benjamin, and what that meant …
Well, I wasn't sure, but I could make an educated guess.
"Maybe Gerry hurt her once upon a time, long ago," I muttered, trying the theory on for size. "I wouldn't put it past him. Or … maybe it wasn't him who hurt her at all. Maybe, as fucked up as he is, he wasn't the one to do it himself, but …"
He had no problem handing people off in exchange for something that he wanted. I knew that firsthand.
"Hmm …" I sucked at my teeth, considering the thought.
I glanced down at Tim, who didn't seem to have much input on the topic.
"Maybe a stray bullet will take me out before I ever put this shit together," I considered with a sigh. "I'd like that, I think, but then I'd have unfinished business, and I'd have to spend the rest of eternity haunting the hell out of my father, and who wants to waste their time like that?"
No, I had to get to the bottom of this shit before that happened, and I had to make sure Analise was taken care of. I couldn't let myself die before I knew she was, at the very least, safe and okay, along with my brothers.
"It was easier when I had just them to worry about," I muttered, brushing the hair from off my forehead.
I'd always known having feelings for a woman would be a royal pain in my ass.
I just hadn’t expected that it could eventually lead to the end of my life … if I wasn't careful.
***
Unlike Tim Murphy, Brody Mathers did deserve to die, and I didn’t need Dean to show me the photo albums of child pornography Brody kept displayed on the bookshelf in his living room to prove it.
I knew it the moment I looked at him and didn’t see an ounce of fear or surprise in his eyes.
He had known I’d come for him eventually, and that told me he knew he deserved this fate.
“I’ve heard about you,” he said as I silently taped his bare ankles to the legs of the chair he sat in.
“A couple of the guys … they’ve mentioned seein’ you around before.
They said you were one creepy motherfucker, and I believed them, but I wasn’t expectin’ this.
What the fuck are you supposed to be anyway? ”
“Have you never seen a plague doctor before?” I inquired casually, setting the duct tape aside on Brody’s kitchen table and taking a step back to assess my handiwork.
After arriving at his house, I had found him in his basement den, watching a home video with his dick in his hand.
The image on the TV screen was enough to make a grown man vomit—if that man possessed any kind of moral soul—and I’d promptly grabbed the remote to pause his movie long enough to secure him to his chair.
“A plague doctor,” Brody repeated, muttering the words like they left a bad taste in his mouth. “The fuck is that? You don’t look like any doctor I’ve ever seen.”
I smiled beneath the mask, remembering a time when I had explained to someone else what a plague doctor was, as I pulled my butterfly knife out of my back pocket and flipped it open.
“Plague doctors date back to the seventeenth century, during epidemics of the bubonic plague,” I explained as I hypnotically watched the blade in my hand spinning around my gloved fingers.
“Unlike regular physicians, they weren’t afraid to face the diseased because of the garments and mask they wore, which they believed would prevent them from falling ill themselves.
“Now, I didn’t think much about it when I first started to wear this thing. I was just thinking I needed to conceal my identity, and it was all that I had on hand. But, man, it’s turned out to be fitting, hasn’t it? Because you are sick, wouldn’t you say?”
Brody huffed a sardonic laugh as he, too, kept his blown-out gaze fixated on the knife twisting and turning around my fingers. The guy was strung out of his mind, high on marijuana and only God knew what else.
“Is something funny?” I asked, glancing in his direction.
He laughed again, his eyes lifting from the knife to the mask, as he shook his head with incredulity. “You’re a goddamn psychopath, yeah? The other guys, they said they thought you were crazy, but, no, you really fuckin’ are. Gerry’s got a loony tune doin’ his dirty deeds now.”
I crouched in front of him and stared straight into his eyes. “Maybe I am. But if I’m a psychopath, Brody, what does that make you?”
He snorted and rolled his eyes, diverting his attention away from me and toward the still image on the TV.
A frozen scene in which he used his own two hands to strangle a young woman while he forced himself upon her.
That woman was dead because of him. Many women, from what I’d learned, were dead … because of him.
“I’m doin’ what I’m supposed to do,” he said, a serene look on his face. “All those ladies? Trash. All of ‘em.”
“And who are you to judge?” I asked, keeping my curious gaze on his expression.
“We’re all judgin’, aren’t we? We all sit back and watch the news, pass ‘em on the streets and wag our fingers … I’m just cleanin’ up the mess over here, friend, and you’re gettin’ in the way.”
Cleaning up the mess. A blinding rage washed over me as the blade slowed in its spinning dance.
My mother had been on those streets, no different from the women Brody thought were better off dead. She could’ve been one of his victims, had she lived long enough. Those women could’ve been her friends.
“You know what, Brody?” I asked with a sigh as I stood, straightening to my full height and towering over him.
“Yeah?” he replied, tipping his head to look around my figure, to keep his sights on his handiwork, displayed proudly on the TV.
“I think we’ve chatted long enough,” I murmured, raising the blade. “Time to say goodbye.”
There was the smallest glimmer of fear in his stare then, right before the sharpened point of my knife plunged through one of his eyes. His scream filled my ears, bouncing off the walls of his dingy basement, and I groaned as I reached over for the duct tape.
“Sorry about that,” I muttered as he wailed, writhing against his binds. “I should’ve taped your mouth shut before I did that. Our riveting conversation must’ve made me forgetful.”
I tore another piece of tape from the roll and slapped it over his mouth, his cries instantly muffled. My gaze dropped to his groin to find his dick standing fully at attention, and I huffed an incredulous chuckle as I pulled my blade from his eye socket with a wet, squelching sound.
“And you have the nerve to call me a psychopath? Brody, please.”
I rolled my eyes before winding my arm back and jabbing the blade into his groin, hoping that the pain I inflicted on him amounted to a fraction of the pain he’d put all those women—the trash he spoke of so fondly—through.
In this moment, the only trash I could see sat in front of me, bleeding out onto the grimy basement floor.