Page 88 of PSYCHOlogical

Chapter Thirty-Seven

Vincent

Anxiously, Val stood behind me with my pistol in her hand. I lifted the stainless-steel dermatome from my canvas bag and held it in front of the hostage. “Have you ever seen one of these?”

With his mouth taped shut, I didn’t expect him to respond. I did, however, want to make the entire process of torturing him as dramatic as possible. In my experience and training, I’d learned the more dramatic the process of torture, the more favorable the results.

“It’s a dermatome. It’s like an electronic potato peeler, but for human skin,” I explained. “Surgeons use them to surgically remove a bed of flesh when they do a skin graft. I’m going to shave a ten-inch strip off your stomach, and then we’ll have a question-answer session. Each time I ask a question and you don’t answer it, we’ll shave off another section.”

He thrashed back and forth in opposition.

I lifted the end of the cord. “Would you plug this in for me?”

Val took the cord end and plugged it into the wall outlet. “I don’t think I can watch this.”

“Oh, I wouldn’t expect you to.” I cringed in an overly theatrical manner. “It’s gruesome as hell. They use anesthesia when they do it in the hospital. I can’t fathom how bad something like this is going feel. Imagine having a two-inch wide swath of your entire bed of skin peeled off—all the way to the muscle—by some amateur with an electronic fucking potato peeler.”

Val paced the floor behind me as I sat on his thighs and lifted his tee shirt to his chest. I pressed it firmly against his flesh and turned it on. The rotating wheel forced his flesh against a two-inch wide surgical blade. A thick layer of skin began to peel away from the muscle.

His screams were muffled by the rag I’d stuffed into his mouth. He arched his back until the pain was too intense for him to continue. A few seconds later, his body went limp as he slipped into unconsciousness.

I continued stripping the flesh from his torso until I reached his chest. When the device came to a stop, a foot-long section of flesh was tangled in the rotating wheel. With a gloved hand, I removed the rectangular-shaped section of skin and draped it over his forehead.

I set the device aside, stood, and stretched my legs. I glanced at my bearded hostage. A bloody two-inch by twelve-inch rectangular section of muscle was exposed along his midsection.

“I’ll wake his ass up in a minute,” I said. “We’ll see what he has to say about things.”

“How are you going to wake him up?”

“I’ll give him an epinephrine shot.”

“What are you going to ask him when he wakes up?”

“First, who he works for. Second, where the flash drive is. Third, who gave him the order to kill us.” I glanced over my shoulder. “I think that’s about it.”

“He was saying all kinds of crazy stuff to me, earlier. Just so you know.”

“Like what?”

“He said I was a double agent. That I worked for FBI’s secret intelligence or some crazy crap. That I was working for them and the DNI at the same time. I have no idea what he was talking about. I can’t believe I’ve been friends with them for the last three years.”

“Proves that you never truly know who someone is,” I said without a second thought of what she’d said. “They were checking up on you since the day you started at New Dawn.”

She crossed her arms and glared at the hostage. “I think they’ve been planning to kill me since day one.”

“It wouldn’t surprise me. As soon as you did something to make them feel their security was at risk.”

I got an epinephrine pen from the bag and stabbed it into Jack’s leg. The adrenaline surge caused him to jolt into a hyper state of consciousness.

I folded my arms across my chest and gave him a narrow-eyed glare. “I’m going to ask a question. You’ll give a brief answer. Understand the benefit of being brief. I don’t have the patience to listen to explanations. If you answer briefly and truthfully, we’ll move on to the next question. If not, I’ll shove the rag in your mouth and we’ll start over. Understood?”

He nodded.

I removed the rag. “Who do you work for?”

“The Director…of National…Intelligence.”

“Anyone else?”