Darknet (6 page)

“One day we’ll live somewhere else, Juicy. We’ll run away, and we’ll be able to go someplace where nobody knows us and we can be happy. We just need to be a bit bigger.”

Avril looked back at the chess game and frowned. She’d never really liked that opening. She moved the pieces back to their starting position and decided to read a book in bed about mid-game strategies instead. Juicy lay in bed beside her, keeping her company.

She read for about a half hour before falling asleep.

It’s the day
, Cindy decided.

DarkNet had been calling to her all day, vague rumblings rolling through her mind. Drugs, gun running, child pornography, livers available to purchase . . .

Assassins for hire.

There was still a part of her who refused to believe that what she was looking at was real. How was it possible to actually hire somebody to commit murder? How in God’s name could they actually advertise their services?

But they did. She clicked back and forth between a couple of the sites.

Why don’t the police shut these places down?

By now she knew the answer. It was the magic of encryption. She’d done her fair share of Googling over the past couple of days and learned more about security and secrecy than she ever imagined she’d need to know.

She wanted to be sure nobody could trace what she was doing, and now she was convinced. It was why killers hid in the deep web, accessible only by Tor, which took care of its users.

Including me.

She surfed over to Assassins Inc.

* * *

Got a problem you need taken care of? We’ll do it for you! No blood on your hands and no clue who ordered the hit.

We are a full-service professional firm that specializes in total eradication of your problems. Just check out our references.

* * *

Of course the references were anonymous and there was no way to be sure they were real, but they sure sounded like it.

There were more than a dozen testimonials listed on the website.

It was another late night visit to DarkNet for Cindy. She’d come down to her office at 3:00 a.m., limping.

The evening’s terror had started after she and Tony had watched the late news. Cindy was a news fanatic, wanting to keep up to date with the world because she needed a good understanding of current events to properly run her radio show. Her listeners expected she’d always know what they were talking about when they called, and she always did.

Tonight the lead story was about a woman who’d been found dead the night before. Her husband was missing and so was their two-year-old son. The dead woman’s throat had been sliced open with a steak knife.

“Bitch probably deserved it,” muttered Tony. They were sitting at opposite ends of the couch.

Cindy knew better but couldn’t help herself. She turned to stare at him in disbelief. Her face must have shown the disgust she felt.

An image popped into Cindy’s mind—her stabbing Tony repeatedly with one of her own steak knives. In her fantasy, blood spurted from his chest and neck as she slammed the blade into him over and over again.

He glanced at her and glowered at her. “What’s your problem?”

Tony had polished off three bottles of beer. He had never been good at holding his liquor and Cindy did her best to undo the damage.

“Nothing. I’m sure you’re right.”

“Don’t fuckin’ sound like it.”

She shrugged, staring at the photo of the dead woman on the television. Nobody knew where the two-year-old was. Again, she thought of Tony, this time of him stealing Avril from her. It wasn’t impossible.

“Don’t turn your back on me.”

She forced a smile and looked at him. “Sorry, I just got distracted, I guess.”

He could move fast when he wanted, and now was one of those times. He grabbed her wrist and twisted it, almost sitting on top of her.

She knew he wanted her to cry out, but she’d been trying not to do that. Avril was getting older and noticing things more and more.

“Please, don’t,” she whispered. “You don’t have to do this.”

“Now you’re telling me what I should do?”

“No, I just . . . please, Tony. Let’s just have a drink and—”

He pushed her back hard into the back of the couch.

“Sometimes you make me sick,” he said.

She tried to plead with her eyes, but he didn’t notice. Or he didn’t care. She wasn’t sure which sometimes. He punched her hard in the stomach and knocked the wind out of her. She bent over and tried to breathe, but she couldn’t get any air. A part of her began to panic, thinking she was going to suffocate. She found herself on the floor, her head banged and sore, but that didn’t matter. The pain in her stomach didn’t matter, either, as she gasped for air.

Soon, she could feel that she was breathing again. She wasn’t going to suffocate.

Ohmygod, please help me.

Cindy took a few more minutes to get her breathing back to normal. She was still on the floor and could see Tony’s legs. He was standing in front of her.

It’s not over
, she knew. She closed her eyes and tried to be somewhere else. There was a beach that she’d been to when she was a teenager. It was the only time her parents had ever taken her on a holiday and the trip down the Oregon coast was magical. She’d loved the shoreline and the forests, and her dad even let her tune the car radio to whatever rock station was clearest as they drove. Wilson Phillips, Mariah Carey, Janet Jackson, and Paula Abdul drove down the coast with them.

Cindy thought of that wonderful summer as Tony beat the shit out of her.

Through the pain, she remembered the waves, the beautiful huge waves that she could body surf on. Oregon was magical that summer, and she decided she wanted to take Avril back there one day, so she could experience some of the same magic.

Her back was bleeding, she knew, and he was cracking a leather belt on her legs. She thought only of the sand and surf and the trees and camping and hiking trails and all the other things Oregon gave her that summer. In her mind she was swimming in the ocean when she passed out from the pain.

* * *

Cindy stared again at the testimonials. Of the dozen she skimmed, several were from women who had hired Assassins Inc. to murder their husbands, and according to the grateful comments, they escaped from the pain and sorrow of their awful lives.

Before she even knew what she was doing, she clicked the button labeled, “Need Help?”

A pop-up screen appeared. It looked like an old-fashioned DOS prompt that she’d seen when she was a kid on the then-old Compaq computer her parents had.

“Chat time,” she said.

Part of her wanted to click the close button. She could feel her heart beating, and she subconsciously pushed her chair back and stood up.

The cursor blinked on and off in the corner of the blue window.

Pain scorched through her legs, and she sat back down. She hardened her resolve. What could it hurt to just chat?

At the top of the screen, there was a flashing line of text. “Please wait a moment and somebody will be with you shortly.”

At least they’re polite
, she thought.

She stood again, this time more slowly, and walked out to the kitchen to get herself a beer. She needed something to calm her nerves. She took the opportunity to listen to the rest of the house. Nothing. If she’d heard either Tony or Avril, she would have hurried back to her computer and closed the screen. Fate would have solved her dilemma.

But there was no noise. She took a long drink and walked back to the computer, where a message was waiting for her.

“I can help you.”

* * *

Cindy stared at the message, and for some reason she struggled to understand, she started to cry.

“How did I get here?” she asked the silence. There was no answer except the thundering truth of her own inability to act.

When she married Tony, she thought she’d hit the lucky ticket on the train of life. He was strong, handsome, funny, and everybody liked him. He could make anybody laugh and there was simply nothing not to like.

On top of that, he’d written
Summer Drive
, one of the most popular songs of the decade. For months, when she was a nothing DJ in a peewee radio station, he’d phone her and talk about his song, but he’d also talk about the future he planned for himself and his band. He never sounded arrogant—just realistic. Cindy liked that he was forward-thinking and planned for his future. She believed the funny, self-deprecating song was the first in a long unbroken chain of hits yet to come, and she loved being part of the ground floor.

She believed him. Everything. And she loved the idea that she could be part of the dream along with him. When he proposed to her, she jumped into his arms and never wanted him to let go of her.

Cindy often asked herself how she could have been so wrong, but she knew that Tony only let people see what he wanted them to see. Even to this day, nobody knew the side of him that she lived with, and nobody would believe her if she told them. There was no way he could be the monster she would describe.

For the first two years, she didn’t leave because of a jumbled combination of bad emotions. She felt the beatings must be her fault, that she deserved them and needed to meet his needs better (somehow). Other times, she thought he was just going through a phase and she’d soon have the man back that she wanted, and in the darkest of times, she thought maybe this was just the way marriage worked and nobody talked about it.

The truth was, she was afraid. If she left, he’d hunt her down. She knew that as much as she knew anything at all. He’d never let her leave him. It wasn’t in his nature to lose, ever. If she left . . . he’d kill her. Plain and simple.

Then she was pregnant, and she grew up very fast.

Tony never beat her when she was expecting, although he came close a few times. Avril was her protection, and sometimes she daydreamed that the baby might change him.

A month after she was born, Tony broke two of Cindy’s ribs. It was as if the pent up need to hurt her had been brooding inside him and growing bigger with every missed opportunity.

Once Avril was safely out of the way, Cindy was fair game again. She knew she was a helpless victim, but that didn’t allow her a way out.

Now, she had another reason not to leave. Not only would he kill Cindy, he’d kill the baby. He told her that one day. They were sitting watching the World Series (an activity only slightly less boring than watching the grass grow in Cindy’s mind, but that’s what Tony wanted to watch).

Suddenly he looked at her and said, “If you ever leave me, I’ll kill you both.”

There was no emotion in his words. He was just stating a fact. He then turned back to the ball game. The Yankees were leading 3-0 in the fifth.

Cindy didn’t react, but she never forgot, either. She believed.

* * *

“Are you there? I can help you.”

She still found it hard to believe she was talking to a murderer.

“Who are you?” she typed.

“You can call me the Manipulator. I can make things happen to make your life better.”

“How?”

She felt stupid asking, but she didn’t know what else to say.

“I’ll take care of your problem. Whoever he or she is, I can have them eliminated. They’ll never bother you again. You have my word.”

“What good is your word when I don’t know who you are?”

“The only way this can work is anonymously. Surely you know that. It’s why you came here.”

“Yeah . . .”

“My rates are very reasonable. You pay half up front and the other half when you’re happy with the results.”

“How much?”

“Assuming the victim isn’t a politician or other public figure, twenty grand. Ten now, ten later.”

Cindy stopped and stared. Is that what somebody’s life is worth? $20,000? She knew that her bank account held only a tiny bit and so she’d have trouble affording that . . . but that was just her trying to fool herself. She would get the money.

“I don’t think I can do it.”

There was a long pause before she got the next reply from the Manipulator.

“I know how you feel. I do. You think about how easy it would be to send the money and how it causes another person to be . . . gone. It’s like you’re playing God and deciding who gets to live and who gets to die.”

Yes
, Cindy thought.
That’s exactly what it’s like
.

“But,” continued the anonymous stranger, “what’s YOUR life worth? How much life is he sucking away from you? How much has he hurt you? How much will he hurt the people around you?”