Bayani sits back and signs, “I’ll wait.”
They smile dopily at each other. John’s phone vibrates inside his pocket—unusual for this hour—and the lines on John’s face tell Bayani this is not a call from a friend.
“Tonight?” John asks the caller in a gruff voice. He glances at Bayani briefly before saying into the phone, “I need thirty minutes…. Fine, see you then.”
“What’s wrong?”Bayani signs.
“Special delivery,” John answers.
“What does that mean?”Bayani asks, feeling nervous and out-of-sorts. John pauses, seeming to consider his next words.
“You were a special delivery,”John signs.
Bayani understands his meaning and nods gravely. “Emile?”
“No, a different…”John must not know the gesture because he says the word, “customer.” “You stay up here out of the way.”
“Will you be okay?”Bayani’s hands are shaking. He’s suddenly fearful. He can’t lose John.
“I’ll be fine. They need me, remember?”
Bayani launches himself at John and embraces him fiercely. John rubs a steady hand up and down his back in an attempt to soothe him. Bayani doesn’t want to let him go, but he must. After they part, John heads to the bedroom and comes back out wearing a pair of old coveralls. He puts on the boots he keeps by the door, the same ones he wears while butchering animal carcasses. Bayani has seen the locked door to the basement and wonders if that might be where the “special deliveries” are handled.
“Keep your gun nearby,”John signs. “And lock the door.”
John tromps downstairs, his footsteps echoing up to the apartment. Bayani grabs his gun and goes to the window that overlooks the alleyway out back. Not long after, he sees a black SUV pull up, not one that he recognizes, and a man—or is it a woman—climbs out of the driver’s side cab. Tall and slender, the stranger wears tight leather pants and a clingy t-shirt. Their long hair is pulled back into a high ponytail, accentuating their chiseled cheekbones. It’s a man, Bayani thinks, only one with feminine features–pale skin and their lips painted a dark blood-red. The stranger glances up suddenly to catch Bayani in the window. He waves a hello, but Bayani ignores him, already determined to provide cover for John should he need it.
Bayani watches as John steers the wheelbarrow from the back door to the hatch of the SUV. The stranger opens it and the two of them haul something into the wheelbarrow, the shape and heft of which can only be a body. Bayani knows he should feel worse about what John does for the Hand, but it’s not like John has a choice. If he were to refuse, they would kill him.
It’s the reason why Bayani let Emile do all manner of disgusting things to him, like relieve himself in Bayani’s mouth. The first time, Emile did it without warning, gripping Bayani’s head in both hands so that he couldn’t get away, choking him with his hot, rancid urine until Bayani felt as though he might drown. To make matters worse, Emile wouldn’t let Bayani drink water or brush his teeth afterward because he wanted Bayani to dwell in that particular humiliation, so that he’d feel soiled inside and out.
“You’re a dirty, disgusting little whore, Bayani. You’d better get used to that flavor… I don’t care if you don’t like it. Cry about it all you want, you ungrateful little brat. You should be thanking me for keeping you fed and housed in this luxurious suite… Keep it up and I will make you sorry…
As punishment for crying, Emile made him lick the porcelain bowl of the toilet and drink from the inside of it like a dog, threatening him with an even worse punishment if he dared to disobey. Bayani learned his lesson, and the next time Emile treated him like a human urinal, he didn’t so much as gag.
Bayani shudders at the memory and mentally dims the light on those hellish few months. That wasn’t him, not really, just like the man currently carting around a dead body isn’t John either. John is a prisoner of the Hand, just as Bayani had been a prisoner of Emile’s.
John isinnocent.
The stranger follows John inside the building, and even though Bayani was told to stay behind the locked door of the apartment, he doesn’t trust the stranger not to hurt John, so he sneaks down the stairwell on socked feet and hides in the shadows, still gripping his gun with both hands. The two men continue to the padlocked door, the only place in the building Bayani has never been, at least, not while he was conscious. Soon enough, both men and the wheelbarrow are through the door, and it is shut and locked behind them.
To ease the pressure on his knee, Bayani sits on the bottom steps and contemplates whether it would be better to go back upstairs like John said or wait for him here. Ultimately, he decides to disobey. At the first sign of trouble, Bayani will bust into the basement and gun down the stranger. And if Bayani can’t get inside, he’ll wait for the stranger to emerge and take care of him then.
John needs someone to watch his back too.
9
JOHN
“It seems I interrupted you,”the assassin says to John upon greeting. An androgynous man with elegant features and a lethal presence, he is known to John only by his code name, Nightingale. And to the assassin, John is simply the Butcher.
John was introduced to Nightingale by Matthieu a few years ago as one of the Hand’s own, and John has encountered the assassin a few times since under these same circumstances. He’s has studied Nightingale’s work on the bodies he leaves behind–gunshots, stabbing, strangulation, poison too. His methods are varied, but whatever the medium, the assassin delivers death swiftly and without evidence of torture. John respects him more for it.
“You didn’t interrupt anything,” John says. The assassin has followed him into the basement in order to help lift the body onto the table. This one weighs two hundred pounds at least, and though John is strong, he’d prefer not to throw out his back, especially not with the long night ahead of him.
“I saw your house guest in the upstairs window,” the assassin says glibly.
John bites back a growl. “I don’t discuss my personal life with strangers.”
