It’s okay if I’m not the only one, habibi.
My husband’s ghost is being kind, but I control-alt-delete the lustful eyes I saw in those last few seconds.
Not even going to try to parse that one out.
5
Everett
Well, that date was awkward as hell, but I’m glad I got it over with. Anders and Odd, aka the Bash Brothers, a pair of twin, ripped Viking motherfuckers from East Texas whom I call friends, said they were going to call an intervention if I didn’t stop pining over Rafi and get my ass out there again.
This should buy me at least another three or four months. Darren was actually a pretty sweet guy, despite his weird outfit and social ineptitude, but…I don’t have anything in common with him.
When I let him down easy at the end of the evening, he kissed my cheek and said on a half-smile, “Maybe you should ask out your friend Rafi. He seemed interested.”
I patted his shoulder and smiled. “Nah, we’re just really good friends.”
Insert knife, twist.
At least seeing him at Spider House with his work colleagues, despite my weird mid-date vibe, made me feel good. Well, mostly good. I try not to be jealous of his coworker Parker, but she somehow got him to laugh harder than I’ve seen him laugh. And sure, I angled myself so I could keep an eye on him, but that’s just my security training and overprotective nature.
Yeah, right.
Anyway, it’s Sunday evening and I’m finishing up a gorgeous Medusa tattoo on a former corporal in the US Army. She’d more or less given me free rein on the design, simply telling me she wanted her Medusa tattooed in the American Traditional style, beautiful and fierce. I roll back from her to get a better angle on the finished product, proud of the way it turned out. More importantly, she loves it.
I’m glad we were able to do the tattoo because her friend couldn’t make it and she almost canceled. It’s not unusual for female service members to distrust males in the military, not that I blame them. I work almost exclusively on veterans, and nearly all the women have stories that would curl your hair.
I offered to call up my buddies Scout and Evie, which she agreed to. She was thrilled to find out that Scout wastheScout Martinez, WNBA superstar and all-around cool human. Scout is married to Evie, the sweetest and sassiest person on the planet. By the end of the evening, they were exchanging numbers and promising to meet up at the pizza shop Evie runs.
Now that I’m alone, I head to the door markedPortal to Nowhereand hold my palm against the discreet reader to gain entrance. What lies beyond the door is a command center of sorts, though it could use a little straightening.
We have large-screen TVs mounted on the walls, ammo and a bunch of different weapons strewn everywhere, expensive computer equipment and file cabinets pushed up against the walls, and a tiny kill/interrogation area in the back for when you need to ask questions in a hurry. The guy hanging from his ankles is super unhappy, but I couldn’t give a fuck.
I check the in-table display for DB’s instructions and smile when I think about how far we’ve come as a team in the last several months.DB had started out in security work, with a little digital vigilantism on the side, thanks to my buddy Jake. DB’d been bound and determined to keep it mostly above board, having decided after his service that he couldn’t take up arms against another person. Unfortunately, he had a situation go FUBAR and called me in, knowing I have no problem with getting messy. Since then his stance on whether or not some people just need killin’ has…shifted.
On that front, he knows all he has to do is give me a target and a time frame, and I’ll deliver, every time. I can’t imagine how it sounds to anormalperson, but once you’ve opened the door to the kind of human being who should be removed from polite society…it’s hard to pretend they don’t exist. It’s even harder to pretend their victims don’t exist.Normalquickly becomes a lost concept.
When you hang out with like-minded folks, it doesn’t take long to put together a group of people willing to boot that door open and start taking out the trash. We hang out at the gym to blow off steam; we come here to get work done.
Anyway, back to the douchebag I’ve got hanging upside down in the back room. Occasionally, like this evening, I need to get a little information out of someone before I send them on their merry way. I tend to leave these details off my reports to DB since he doesn’t really need to know how the sausage is made.
I’ll admit I’m not a fan of torture, and certainly not as good at information extraction as Anders. That happy asshole is a doctor—a trauma surgeon, actually—and knows exactly what buttons to push to get people to talk. With me, I like to soften them up with discomfort so that maybe we can both be spared unnecessary pain. Thankfully, if the situation requires it, the golden rule of torture applies—everyone cracks, more or less immediately.
I hadn’t even really begun, letting the uncomfortable and headache-inducing position do its job, and sure enough, now that I’ve cut him down, he’s more than willing to give me the location of the kids they stashed. He was an ICE agent and had been using the concentration camps on the border as his very own human trafficking pool. Real humanitarian, this one.
I give him some crappy microwave pizza while waiting for Thane and Odd to verify the whereabouts and health of the children. He had them stashed in a warehouse right outside of Manchaca, Texas, but there were only twenty-three children instead of the twenty-four we’d been tracking.
It’s always so annoying when they think we can’t count.
He’d thrown up the pizza by the time I was finished with him, but we’d put eyes on the missing young man in Westlake, a monied enclave just west of Austin. We also knew which tech millionaire would find himself with an unfortunate case of my-foot-up-his-ass in the near future. The mark had the audacity to act genuinely offended when I drew the blade across his throat, but given the fact I’d only subjected him to really very light torture, little more than an enhanced interrogation, I wasn’t all that upset about lying to him.
Now, like DB, most folks really do struggle with killing other people. Even when it’s in self-defense, or following the rules of engagement, or the person is a shithead and deserves to be disappeared off the face of the earth, most people have a problem with murder. The people who don’t have a problem with murder usually have severe, antisocial personality disorders, but that’s not me.
I know, I’ve been tested.
I just have high job satisfaction, and the tattooing sort of rounds it out for me. Tattooing is pain that people are asking for, whereas the murdering is pain that very specific people deserve. Balance. There’s nothing like the divine sense of peace I get when I lay down beautiful skin art or remove a piece of trash from the world.
As with all things, boundaries are important. For starters, our team has two strict rules: no murder for hire and no unapproved killing. The first one is a bit nebulous because one of the things we do when we kill somebody is take their money. Most of these assholes have some hidden stash of money somewhere, so it’s easy to get away with it. And we’re not trying to take money away from innocent family members or whatever, but we’re happy to wipe out an offshore account or two, redistribute a percentage to the victims—with Jake’s help, of course—and keep the rest for ourselves.
