Act of Betrayal

To my son Timothy, whose spirit is as large and beautiful as the Ethiopian sky under which he was born

Revenge is a wild kind of justice, which the more a man’s nature runs to, the more ought law to weed it out.

—Francis Bacon, 1561-1626

One

Two

Three

Four

Five

Six

Seven

Eight

Nine

Ten

Eleven

Twelve

Thirteen

Fourteen

Fifteen

Sixteen

Seventeen

Eighteen

Nineteen

Twenty

Twenty-one

Twenty-two

Twenty-three

Twenty-four

Twenty-five

Twenty-six

Twenty-seven

Twenty-eight

Twenty-nine

Thirty

Thirty-one

Thirty-two

Thirty-three

Thirty-four

Thirty-five

Thirty-six

Thirty-seven

Thirty-eight

Thirty-nine

Forty

Forty-one

Forty-two

Forty-three

Forty-four

Epilogue

C
UT DIDN’T HAVE THE
connections to pull off the murder inside the prison, but now his target was on the outside. The timing couldn’t be better. He always associated the summer heat with the day that his boy died.

It was hot in the apartment, but Cut was used to the heat. His lean body sweated freely, and the undershirt he wore was soaked under the arms and down his back. The last week of July in St. Louis was bad enough when a person could lie in the deep shade of a tree and let the breeze take away the sweat. In his long years he’d spent many an hour enjoying such breezes, the kind that left behind a salty taste on the skin and a hope for more than distant thunder from heavy clouds in the west. Compared to an afternoon under a shade tree, the apartment was a little slice of hell.

It would have been nice to open the window.

Though he had rented the apartment months ago, he had only furnished it with two rickety wooden chairs he’d picked up at Goodwill. That was back in February, and he hadn’t noticed that the apartment didn’t have air-conditioning then. No wonder the rent was so cheap. Even in something as important as deciding where the target would die, Cut was a practical man. No need to part with more money than he had to.

The linings of the leather gloves he wore were soaked with sweat. He’d worn the gloves every time he was in the apartment. As the weather turned hotter, his palms, encased in winter gloves, responded like the tongues of eager puppies. Smelled like a wet puppy, too, one that had been rolling to pick up odors that were only attractive to another dog. After being sweated in and dried a few times, the gloves had lost most of their flexibility. He was planning to throw them out afterward, which was a shame because they had cost him fifteen bucks.

Last week he had brought in all the supplies he needed. Securing the chemicals had been an interesting challenge, something he’d never had occasion to do. Cut spent some time putting the weather stripping on the door and sealing the heat vents with plastic bags. He’d found a dead mouse in one of them, dried and stiff, and taken it as a good omen.

On the Big Day, he got to the apartment at seven in the morning, after treating himself to a biscuit breakfast and a cup of coffee at a fast-food place. It was a good thing he remembered to bring the insulated picnic jug of water. He took a sip, the cool water mingling with the sweat on his lips and trickling down his throat. He tilted his head back to enjoy the water, like a bird drinking. He pictured himself carousing in a birdbath, fluffing his feathers and shaking the water down to his skin. It helped some, took his mind off the heat. He wasn’t an imaginative man, but when he did get a good mental image he held onto it.

A couple of years in Vietnam had taught him that heat was a relative thing. An enlistee at the age of thirty-four, Cut was almost rendered helpless by the heat when he stepped off the plane and into the jungle. Then he put it behind him in his practical way and got on with the business of surviving. He stayed in one country’s service or another’s for fourteen years, moving into covert activities after the evacuation. He wasn’t in the US Army after Vietnam, but the action was rewarding and the paychecks were regular. His only complaint was that it seemed that every place he was sent was blazing hot or so cold he began to think that blue was the normal color of his fingertips. He found he had a talent and a love for knife work, both close-in and with throwing knives that flitted like black wings of death, and he earned his nickname time and again. When he started to slow down, he told himself that it was a young man’s work and he should get his bony carcass out of the way and let them carry on. But he kept the name because he liked it.

It was four in the afternoon. Cut’s stomach was empty, but his determination was fueled by thoughts of his only son, who had been so cruelly taken from him. He pulled off one glove and fished into his pocket for a peppermint candy. He popped it into his mouth, then carefully placed the wrapper back in his pocket and tugged the sweaty glove back on.

Released from prison that morning, Cut’s target was on his way to the apartment. It had to be so. When a man got out of prison, he got himself a few drinks and then he got himself a woman. For the past several months, the target had corresponded with a woman, Ginger Miller, who lived in the hot-as-hell apartment on the third floor of an apartment building in south St. Louis. Cut knew all about that, because he wrote the letters himself. Ginger was the name of a teacher he’d had a crush on in sixth grade, and when the opportunity came to choose a woman’s name, he indulged himself. She didn’t really live in the apartment, but the target didn’t know that. Ginger’s letters had started out friendly, then grown hot and encouraging, and the last few had been open invitations to sex.

The young man on the receiving end of those letters would be coming to Ginger’s apartment, as surely as a raccoon to an open garbage can.

He sucked in the heated air, held it in his lungs, and thought that he could open the window for a little while and close it after the target arrived. No good. He’d already used the petroleum jelly, sealing the window glass and the frame as best he could. That hadn’t done his gloves any good, either.

Just when he was berating himself for having weak thoughts of cool breezes and bathing like a bird, he heard the stairs creaking. Exhaling deeply but silently, his lips pursed into an o, Cut flexed his fingers and fought the stiff gloves. It was time.

Perched on one of the chairs near the door of the apartment, he waited for the knock. When it came, he pressed the button on the tape player on the floor next to him.

“Come on in,” the sexy female voice said. “The door’s open.”

He had recorded it from a porno movie.

The door opened and the target stood there with a silly grin on his face and a swelling below the belt that probably wasn’t a wad of money in his pocket. Cut rose and swung his fist in one smooth motion. As he’d guessed, one punch was enough to knock the unsuspecting man out. Even though Cut was sixty-six, he knew he was strong. He kept up his arm strength with push-ups every morning, and the morning of the Big Day had been no exception.

It paid off. The target landed flat on his back in the hall. Cut dragged the unconscious man inside the apartment and over to the other chair, parting the sheets of plastic that he’d thumbtacked to the ceiling. Grasping him under the arms, he lifted the man easily to the chair that stood there. He stripped him of his clothes, thinking that added a nice touch of humiliation, then secured him with leather arm, leg, and chest restraints. He had decided against restraining the head. If his target thrashed around and convulsed, so much the better. Then Cut taped the man’s mouth. No sense taking the chance that anyone would hear him scream. The young woman, on the first floor was home with her baby, but as far as he knew the residents of the other apartments weren’t home. He had watched the building, and on other Wednesday mornings the place had been deserted except for 1B, the woman and baby.

Cut had eliminated lethal injection first thing. Too gentle, although if he left off the anesthetic part of the process, it had possibilities. It would have been interesting to try electrocution, but Cut had feared electricity since the time he had nearly died of a bad shock as a child. He couldn’t set up an electric chair, himself, and he couldn’t very well hire an electrician. Too many questions, and not a clue to what he could answer that didn’t sound bad. Bringing lumber up the three flights of stairs to build a gallows held no appeal at all. He couldn’t do a firing squad properly with only himself to hold a gun, and besides, he didn’t want to be thought of as some kind of cheap-thrills Charles Branson in the
Death Wish
movies.

He picked up the jug of water and doused his captive. As soon as the man got through sputtering and became fully alert, his eyes showed fear.

Good.

After taking a last look at the man’s pleading eyes, and watching him struggle against the restraints, Cut closed the flaps of the tent, walked over to door, and yanked the cord he had strung. He picked up the water jug and tape recorder. No sense wasting perfectly good things.

He would like to stay and watch, but he was worried that gas would escape the makeshift tent and make staying inside the apartment dangerous. He had a fleeting thought for the woman and the baby in 1B, but knew he had sealed up the apartment pretty well, including the windows and vents. They should be okay.

He heard the fizz of the cyanide tablets as they hit the acid, and moments later saw very faint tendrils of vapor rising from the bucket. Standing at the door, watching through the clear plastic, he saw Rick Schultz, Detective Leo Schultz’s son, hold his breath as long as he could, holding onto life. Inevitably, the young man released the pent-up air through his nostrils, and took in his first breath of deadly gas. Cut closed the door tightly and left him to die.