Page 71 of Hard Heart

“Tell me that is not Oryn Jacobs swinging from a fucking girder?”

Now Jester looked annoyingly pleased with himself. “You want a cheeseburger or a pizza?”

“Get him down! What the hell are you doing?”

A smaller man stepped forward, holding a chain in his hand. “Heard he wouldn’t answer your questions. We figured the quickest way to resolve this issue would be to give him some encouragement.”

“No, no, no, no, no. You don’t understand—I’m supposed to uphold the law, not participate in breaking it.”

He winked at me. “We won’t tell if you don’t.”

“That’s not the point,” I snapped, then lowered my voice so Jacobs couldn’t hear. “Did he put you up to this? Levi Sykes? Was this his idea?”

“We decided to show some initiative.” Like Jester, he seemed quite proud. “Much faster this way.”

“Can’t you just let him go and pretend none of this ever happened?”

“That seems like a real waste. You want me to ask the questions? I don’t mind, if it makes you more comfortable.”

“Let’s get one thing clear. On a comfort scale of one”—I pointed to the floor—“to ten”—I pointed to the ceiling—“I’m in the bowels of hell.”

“I’ll ask the questions,” Chain Guy decided aloud, then turned back to the prisoner. “Why’d you kill August Groveland, motherfucker?”

When Jacobs didn’t answer, the psycho whacked him across the kidneys with the chain.

“Stop!”

“You got a hearing problem?”

Thwack.

I slumped against a workbench, and in a gesture reminiscent of Sykes at our last meeting, I put my head in my hands.

The depraved freak with the chain had obviously done this before. Within twenty minutes, Oryn Jacobs was sobbing like a baby and spilling his guts. Not literally, thank goodness. At one point, another guy whispered, “The boss said no blood,” but bruises were apparently fine, and broken teeth too.

“I got paid, okay? I got paid.”

“How much?”

“Fifteen hundred bucks. We were just supposed to scare him, I swear. Make a mess of the house. Everyone has insurance these days, don’t they? The roof looked like it needed replacing anyway, so I figured I was doing him a favour.”

Only a complete sociopath could twist an arson attack into a favour. Darcy was right—there was something very wrong with this man.

“Who paid you?”

“Some guy.”

“Name.”

“Stark.”

“That a first name or a last name?”

“I don’t know.” Thwack. “I don’t know! Just Stark.”

“Where does this Stark live?”

“I don’t know, I swear! We used to race cars around the old cement works, and he’d show up in an Audi, a real fancy one. Air-ride suspension, body kit, straight pipe exhausts, cat delete, a NOS system… He said Groveland screwed his mama, and he wanted to teach him a lesson.”