Take One With You (14 page)

She nodded and walked out, closing the door behind her.

***

Thane looked at the return text from Anita.

Cant 2 nite. Raincheck?

“Goddamnit,” he yelled, and almost threw his phone out the window. This chick was driving him nuts. She’d been putting him off for weeks now, and he knew damn well she wanted him. All that accidental lust, and then nothing.

Accidental.

Thane had wondered at first about how she just happened to show up at the bar like that, but their conversation that night had pushed all that to the back of his mind. There was something raw and honest about her, and though he wasn’t used to that in a woman, he found it extremely affecting. Anita had brought out that same raw honesty in him, and it surprised him how much he wanted more.

She gave him hope.

Still, he wasn’t about to let some piece of ass completely cloud his judgment. He’d gotten through an official investigation recently after he’d “borrowed” some buy money from the evidence room after a drug bust he had no idea would go to trial so quickly, barely replacing it, misfiled, so that it looked like someone else’s mistake. But he’d had to go to a loan shark to get it back that fast, and it hurt. The fucking ex had been putting the screws to him for spousal support and money for the kid, creating emergencies that would look good in court, trying to get him to fuck up so she could deny visitation. She was the reason he took the money in the first place, the stupid cunt.

The whole thing with the Internal Affairs’ shooflies left him even more suspicious of other cops than he already was.

Anita, however, was different.

Why the hell is she putting me off?

“Aw, fuck it,” he said, and left the house for a scum run. He liked to keep tabs on the ones that got away, just in case the opportunity for a little off-the-books justice presented itself. That’s why he let loose on that asshole in the alley. Stealing from a kid like that pissed him off, but because he’d been under investigation, it had been a long while since he’d risked going out. The candyman had just been in the wrong place at the right time.

Thane pulled up outside the titty bar and cut the engine. One of his lucky rapists was known to frequent the place, so maybe he’d get lucky too and catch him for a beat down. Thane hadn’t killed any of them yet, mostly just scared them the hell out of the area, but he was feeling the old rage building up, and since Officer Goodbody wasn’t letting him aboard, maybe he’d find another way to blow off a little steam.

***

Anita Hellstrom pulled to a stop a half block away and waited for Thane to get out of his car, but instead he just sat there outside the strip club, like he was on a stakeout. She had found herself oddly disappointed when she followed him there, as if they were in a relationship or something. When he didn’t get out of his car, she was not only curious, but also absurdly relieved.

“Come on, Anita. Focus.”

She watched him for another hour before anything happened, and it was nothing like she expected.

After the bar closed, the patrons filed out, followed shortly after by what were obviously the dancers, some alone and some in small groups. The last girl to leave was escorted to her car by a bouncer, who then got in his car and drove away.

Anita watched as Thane stared at the girl, sitting in her car and lighting a cigarette.

Oh, Jesus, no,
Anita thought.

But then a seedy-looking character came out of nowhere and yanked open the dancer’s car door, and that was when Thane flew into the parking lot with his torch, catching the guy in his spotlight just as he was about to hit the girl.

She watched in fascination as Thane cuffed the guy and threw him in the back seat of his car, then leaned in and said something to the girl before letting her drive away.

He’s not calling it in. If this was official he’d need her statement.

Anita followed him as Thane drove around, seemingly in circles, which told her that he was being exceedingly cautious, so she hung back as far as she possibly could and still keep eyes on the vehicle.

After another forty minutes, Thane led her to an industrial area and disappeared between the warehouses. There was no way she could go in there without being detected, so she parked down the street and waited.

A half-hour later, Thane’s vehicle exited the complex the same way he’d come in. There was only one person in the car.

Anita waited until Thane’s car disappeared and then drove into the parking lot and slowly made her way around the decrepit-looking buildings.

She found him almost immediately.

The guy from the strip club was lying next to a trash bin in a fetal position, as if he’d been trying to shield himself from an attacker.

Oh shit.

Anita pulled her service revolver, suddenly aware that she might not be alone with the guy. It wasn’t the best neighborhood to get caught with a corpse. Or anything else, for that matter.

Then the guy moaned, and she ran towards him. She kneeled down and rolled him over. His face was swollen and bleeding, but he was conscious. She found his wallet and wrote down the guy’s name. She noticed he had more than a few twenties in there to go with a cache of ones.

Lousy tipper.

Anita ran to her car and sped away, stopping at a convenience store with a pay phone, and called it in anonymously. Then she drove past the warehouse until she saw the ambulance and a cruiser, and went home, exhausted and intrigued.

When she ran the guy’s name the next day, she was convinced that, despite the beating he took the night before, he was one of the luckiest scumbags she’d ever seen.

His arrest record was longer than her arm, but there were no convictions. She decided not to tell Captain Myers, though. At least not yet.

This might be bigger than some missing buy money.

Child molesters.

Charlie waited, staring at his phone.

Nothing.

He texted her again, this time with three more words he knew would get her interest even more than the jarring phrase that came before, a bastardization of one of the ancient rap songs they’d laughed about online before they’d met in person.

Hack tha police

His phone rang and he nearly dropped it trying to answer.

“Leave me the fuck alone, asshole!”

“Unless you don’t think you can do it,” Charlie challenged. He felt like he was treading a very thin line, but he’d not forgotten how to push her buttons.

“Fuck you,” Sarah said, but she didn’t hang up, and Charlie knew he had her.

“Instead of finding them online, why not go straight to the cops’ files? Throw a few locals to get things started.”

Charlie waited in silence as Sarah considered that. The plan was, before their fight, to put up the TOWY site and start with a list of people they’d gotten from the state sex offender registry, then keep watch in newspapers and social media for cases that fit the criteria: people who deserved to be punished, but were beyond the reach of the legal system. But with access to local police files, they could surprise some people who might otherwise go unnoticed. Scumbags who thought they were safe.

“We can watch,” Sarah said.

“Exactly,” Charlie replied. It was eerie how they were so in sync, sometimes.

“We find the lucky ones,” she said, sounding more and more excited. “The ones who
think
they’re getting away with it.”

“The ones nobody knows about,” Charlie added. “Except the cops.”

There was another long silence on the other end of the line, and it was all Charlie could do to keep from screaming into the phone, but he managed to stay quiet. It was almost like she was testing him, taunting him, waiting to see how long she could keep her response, and herself, just out of his reach.

That only made Charlie want it more, something they both knew.

On second thought, Charlie decided she knew how to push his buttons
a lot
better than he did hers. Probably all girls did.

“Hey,” she said, her voice soft and urgent.

“Yeah?” Charlie answered, trying and failing to sound nonchalant.
She so owns me,
he thought.

“What the fuck are you doing over there?” she demanded more than asked, and then she was gone.

Charlie hung up and jumped in the shower. He was so excited he could barely contain himself, but he still wanted to be nice and clean in case…well, just in case.

It was not, however, only the possibility of Sarah’s body against his own that so inspired him. Even more importantly, his plan for the website and how it would all come together was falling into place even more perfectly than he’d hoped.

He did feel a little guilty for keeping a certain part of his plan secret from Sarah, but he was pretty sure she would approve if she knew. And she would know, eventually.

But as much as he loved her, and he
did
love her, he knew that now, that was one particular detail he couldn’t share with anyone, not even Sarah.

At least not yet.

That didn’t mean they couldn’t have a little fun in the meantime.
Hell, maybe she’ll let me move in with her. Better bring an overnight bag.

***

Brad took another drink and stared out the window.

Does he know?

He ran his hands through his hair, rubbing his scalp like a Magic 8-Ball, but there were no answers forthcoming.

“The fuck am I gonna do?”

He’d been a nervous wreck ever since he’d woken up with his stepson standing over him with a poker. Not because he thought the kid actually had the balls to do something, but because he
didn’t.
At least, he hadn’t when he had the chance. But he was still worried.

In Brad’s experience, if you wanted to hurt somebody but didn’t have the guts, you’d eventually find some other way to do some damage, and there was something strange about how Charlie had been acting lately. Something was up with him, and Brad thought he knew what it was.

The day after Charlie’s friend Sarah came by, Brad had gone down to his office to retrieve the document. A document that basically returned control of his entire business back to him. A document his wife, Charlie’s mother, had signed not long before she died, not knowing it would rob her precious son of his inheritance.

The arrangement had worked beautifully for a while, but more and more Brad had realized it had all been a colossal mistake. It would have been easily fixable, though, except the stupid bitch jumped the gun. Things would have looked a little too suspicious if he’d recorded the document so soon after her suicide. Like he was purposely trying to fuck the kid out of his inheritance.

Which he was.

Brad didn’t need anyone looking too closely at his wife’s death, however. Especially all those prescriptions he’d filled for her at multiple pharmacies, using multiple doctors.

“Goddamnit!” Brad screamed, suddenly so agitated he could barely contain himself. Everything would have been so perfect if the dumb bitch could have just held on a little longer until he had everything in place.

Brad paced around the room, wishing the kid was in front of him so he could strangle the little bastard.

After several minutes pacing around the house like a caged animal, Brad finally began to calm down enough to focus on the problem at hand.

Why should the kid get half just because I went temporarily insane for a piece of ass that passed its sell-by date before our first anniversary?

It had all gone so smoothly till that night. The cold shoulder, the extra pills. He’d planned on a few more months of slowly nudging his wife towards the edge, all the while moving undeclared cash from his insurance scams back to his accounts at a rate the feds wouldn’t notice.

But she’d proven to be even weaker and more worthless than he realized.

It had been such a perfect plan, using his wife’s name on whatever documents he needed to provide himself deniability if he was caught, knowing she’d be dead by the time that happened, if it ever did. She couldn’t be forced to testify against him while she was alive, and he would be protected after she was dead.

Brad had been almost giddy when he’d gone down to the office after a respectable period of mourning to retrieve the paperwork to file with the court that essentially tied up the final loose end, his erstwhile stepson.

But when he opened the safe in his office, the document was gone.

Brad couldn’t believe it. He must have put it someplace else. He had to have that document. There were only two people on earth that knew of its existence, and one of them was no longer
on
the earth, but
in
it.

Fucking bitch. She got it, somehow. How the fuck did she know? There were dozens, maybe hundreds all told, and she signed every last one in a goddamned drug-induced stupor.

How the fuck did she know to take that one?

What all this meant was that Charlie owned half of Brad’s assets, including the business he’d started twenty years before, and Brad couldn’t do anything about it. He couldn’t even transfer those assets now without attracting attention to what he’d been doing.

Brad stared out the window.

Did he know? Did Charlie have the fucking thing?

The kid had been antsy lately. One minute he looked like he owned the world, and the next like he was about to follow in mommy’s footsteps.

If only.

“Goddamnit,” Brad seethed. “Kid’s gonna take my business.”

Unless…

Brad rushed back to his study and pulled out the center drawer of his desk. He looked at the .38 for a moment, then moved it aside and picked up the old business card beneath it.

Brad grabbed his phone and dialed the number on the card, which had been given to him over ten years ago by a former business associate even shadier than himself who warned him not to use it unless he absolutely had to.

“Last resort, Brad,” his partner had told him. “He doesn’t like to be bothered unless you’re serious.”

I’m serious, all right,
Brad thought.
Serious as a heart attack.

“Hello?” a gravelly voice said.

“I have a problem,” Brad said, and picked up the revolver, placing it in his pocket.

As Brad hung up the phone, he heard Charlie bounding down the stairs, and impulsively staggered out of the room and lunged for the front door, beating Charlie by a foot or two.

Charlie stepped back warily, his smile turning to a scowl.

“Where do you think you’re going?” Brad snarled. His hand was fingering the .38 in the pocket of his robe.

Charlie noticed and shook his head in disgust, assuming Brad was fondling a bottle of something.
Asshole is still wearing his fucking pajamas at two in the afternoon.

“None of your business.”

“You fucking piece of shit,” Brad said drunkenly. “I’ll make it my business.”

“Get out of my way,” Charlie said.

“You gotta do what I say, asshole. This is my house.”

“Not for long,” Charlie said, and was surprised when the color seemed to drain from his stepfather’s face. He was very nearly shaking, and for a second Charlie thought the man was going to pass out.

Until he looked deeper into Brad’s eyes.

He wasn’t shaking because he was unsteady; Brad was shaking from pure, unadulterated rage. Charlie had never seen such visceral hatred in another person’s eyes, although had he ever looked into a mirror on one of those nights he lay awake thinking of what had been done to his mother, he would have seen it in his own.

Brad moved his hand in his pocket, and for a crazy moment, Charlie thought he was going to offer him a drink. There was something in his eyes that made Charlie think whatever Brad was fumbling with was for him.

Then something hit Brad from behind in the leg, and he very nearly jumped out of his skin, whirling around to face the door as if he thought he was being attacked. Charlie took his chance and rushed past him, opening and slamming the door behind him before Brad could protest, running past the postman and up the street.

Safe to assume the jerk won’t let me use a car.

Brad looked at the envelopes on the floor, and then stumbled to the window, watching him, not realizing Charlie’s last words had been in response to his first demand, and not the second.

“You gotta do what I say, asshole. This is my house.”

“Not for long.”

At that moment, Brad knew that Charlie knew his secret, or at least he thought he knew, which was effectively the very same thing.

***

The two of them were up all night putting the website together, and it was the next morning before either of them realized they had barely spoken the whole time, merely taking turns at her laptop, making corrections and tweaks until everything was perfect.

“towy dot la,” Sarah said, turning the screen directly toward Charlie as the morning sun streamed through the window behind them. “Awesome.”

Charlie stared at the page, then clicked through the other pages, with mocked up names and pictures of future assholes, which would be followed by pages devoted to user profiles and forums for those users to discuss others to be added to the list.

The forums were the most important part, actually, in Charlie’s opinion. He wanted the pedophiles and murderers and rapists he imagined populating the site to get what was coming to them, but even more, he wanted the idea to spread. Not because he thought it would make the world a better place as Sarah believed, although he kind of agreed, but because he needed it to be big. Big enough to contain his secret, the one detail he was keeping from Sarah, both for her own good and because he didn’t want to scare her off.

In an odd way, Sarah was a bit of a purist with her mayhem. Charlie figured she was willing to be the catalyst for the murders of people she had never met, but if she knew what really motivated him above all else, she might not go along.

Charlie just didn’t quite trust her with his life just yet.

They made love for the first time once the website went active, and for the second, third, and fourth time after that over the course of the afternoon. Charlie counted every time and told her he would continue to do so for the rest of his life, remembering each and every touch and smell and taste and curve of her body.

“Every last kiss,” he promised, his eyes as wide and sincere as a curious child, which, in a sense, he was. “I’ll never be with anyone else.”

Sarah smiled when she heard those words, but she didn’t let him see. She knew full well there would be others for them both, but there was beauty in the illusion and she had seen far too much ugliness in her life.

“Neither will I,” she lied, unaware that there was another lie between them, a lie she would never have suspected given the way they had spent the last several hours.