Page 84 of Ballistic

31

Dax

If I thought about it, it made sense why she’d lied to me. Why she’d distanced herself from the crime. Not that I was mad at her for it. Fuck, how else would a person walk away from something like that?

Kenny sat tied to a tree, his bald head slung forward, as I stuffed his tooth inside a plastic baggy, where it clacked beside the others I’d already pulled. I’d propped a flashlight against a small rock to offer some light in the pitch-blackness of the forest. Enough to make out the ruined contours of his scarred face, where he must’ve been burned at one time.

With a groan, he raised his head, eyes squinting, and took three deep breaths. Arm twitching in his binds, he shot his eyes open and frowned. “Where am I?” He dipped his chin, perhaps checking out the ropes securing him tightly to the tree. A wet sound and sucking followed, and with the shift of his jaw, his brow furrowed deeper.

“Da thuck?” His tongue moved beneath his top lip like a wave, crossing over his toothless gums. Realization dawned on his face, his eyes locked on mine, wide and brimming with the kind of fear that made me want to laugh.

I raised the coated-in-blood bag that held the teeth I’d extracted from him while he’d remained passed out. “Hey, pig, piggy pig.”

“I … I know you! Fum Fanks pokuh games.” The slur of his words, even with the missing teeth, told me some of the alcohol still swam through his veins.

“And I know you.” I removed one of the gloves I’d donned earlier, since coated in his blood, and pulled out my cellphone, opening it to the video I couldn’t stand to watch twice.

Something flickered in his eyes as the video played, but he shook his head. “Wathen’t me.”

Lying little cocksucker.

“Wasn’t you? That wasn’t you raping and torturing an innocent young girl?”

“Nuh-uh. I thwear.”

“That’s weird. I could’ve sworn it was you. No matter,” I said, stuffing my phone back into my pocket. “I know for a fact it was you lying naked beside your own little girl.”

His eyes widened even more, if that were possible, and he shook his head again. “I got dunk. Thought it wath my bed, ith all.”

“Which would make sense. If she wasn’t naked, too.”

“Ith jus a game, man. Ath all.”

“Well, I’ve got a game for you, too.” I donned the glove again and lowered myself back down to his level. “See, the girl in that video you just watched? She wanted to kill you herself. In fact, she’ll be pissed to know I did the honors on her behalf.”

His head rolled to the side with his drunkenness, his eyes back to half-mast and squinting with his frown. “The’s dead.”

Well, how the fuck would he had known that? Considering I’d only shown him a small clip of the video.

A smile stretched across my face at the same time his shrank. “I caught you in a lie, Kenny. You lose this round.” From the ground beside me, I nabbed the bolt cutters I’d used to remove his teeth—same cutters I’d used to snip the chain link fence around the property earlier—and holding the tip of his big toe, I sliced right through it.

His scream echoed through the woods as the steel glided easily across his bone. Popped right off his foot.

I tossed the severed toe into the woods. “This little piggy went to market.”

Head back against the tree, he breathed hard, his chest rising and falling in rapid contractions.

“Now, did you murder the girl in the video?”

“No. I tol you. Wathen’t me.”

I rubbed my nose across the non-bloody portion of my arm and shook my head. “’Fuck sake, man.” Without warning, I nabbed his second toe and snipped through it before he could so much as flinch.

A second cry reverberated through the trees.

I chucked the digit out into the surroundings. “This little piggy stayed home.” Even in the dim light, I could see his skin had turned pallid, a slowly dying shade of white. “You raped her. Tortured her. And drowned her. Well, you thought you did, anyway. Isn’t that right?”

His head rocked back and forth, then fell forward like a bowling ball propped on a toothpick.