Pain shot around the lower half of my face. The top layer of my skin felt raw. “Fuck you,” I hissed after stretching my jaw out a bit.
He squinted. “You both talk a lot of shit. You’re not so damn tough.”
“Untie me from this chair, and let’s find out who’s tougher.”
He crouched in front of me. “You’d like that wouldn’t you?”
I stared into his eyes, and there it was—the unhidden psychopath. How had I missed it before?
“You’re wondering how I did it, aren’t you?”
“I’m curious,” I said, hoping to keep him talking to buy myself some time. I didn’t know what his plan was but the I knew by the stacks of old newspapers and gas can on the floor, I knew it couldn’t be anything good.
“You have no idea how easy it is to buy a new identification these days.” He shrugged and rose to his full height. “Or maybe you do. Randy Carson. I don’t know who the hell he is. Some poor bastard that died a long time ago. I don’t give a shit. I needed a new name after I quit that wretched department and could fully set my plan into motion.”
“What plan is that?”
“To expose all of the schmucks down at Rescue Four. Hell, the entire fire department. They think everything is a game. Everything’s not a laughing matter, and they need to know that.”
With a shake of my head, I asked, “I don’t understand. What about Mike? Your boyfriend.”
A dry, humorless laugh fell from his lips. “Some unemployed actor. I hired him to pretend to be my boyfriend for months. We took pictures and posted them on social media sites so you would see them when you did your little background check on me.” He rolled his eyes. “Worked out perfectly. Anyway, poor Mike had a real boyfriend who became suspicious. Thank God, you’d told me myboyfriendwas a cheater by then. Mike and his real boyfriend had to go.”
“You killed them?”
“What was I supposed to do?” he asked as if sincerely baffled by the question. “Let them live? No. I can’t have any loose ends.”
“Why was it necessary to go through such lengths?”
He thrust the gun in my direction. “Because they killed him!”
My heart raced as I shifted my gaze between his finger, too close to the trigger, and his eyes.
“Killed who?” I asked cautiously.
He glared at me, his jaw tightening in undeniable anger. “My brother. They killed my brother.”
That day in my office, when I’d told him about what I thought was his boyfriend’s cheating, he’d mentioned a brother who’d died. I also recalled how, for a second, I’d caught sight of his façade slipping. Foolishly, I’d attributed it to grief over his relationship, but I’d been so wrong.
“Russell was only five years old. He went with me everywhere. Stuck to my side like glue, especially when that bitch left us alone every night.” Benjamin looked around the room as if the memory replayed out in front of him.
I peered around the room, noting the old stains on the torn carpet.
“She left us alone, leaving us to fend for ourselves. But I took care of Russell. No one else. Just me.” He beat his chest with the hand holding the gun for emphasis. “One night, I used the microwave to warm up our dinner, and it exploded. Just like that. Fire trapped Russell in the kitchen. I ran out to call for help, but none of our fucking neighbors would let me use their phones, so I had to run to the convenience store across the street. That bitch hadn’t even paid the phone bill. By the time the firefighters got to our apartment, the entire thing was in flames. Russell burnt up in that shitty apartment.”
He looked up toward the ceiling.
“We’re two floors below where he died.”
I felt my eyes water. The pain in his voice was almost a living, breathing entity, but that didn’t give him a right to do what he was doing.
“I’m sorry about your brother, but what does that have to do with Rescue Four?”
“It was Rescue Four that responded to the call. They’re supposed to be one of the best stations in the whole fucking department, and they didn’t help him.”
“It wasn’t their fault,” I replied, trying to reason with the unreasonable.
He kneeled in front of me again. “Maybe not. Maybe what happened to Russell was my fault, but maybe if those bastards were doing their job, they could’ve saved him. Weeks after Russell died, me and that bitch were living in a homeless shelter. She told me every day that his death was my fault.”
