Take One With You (7 page)

Some of the hate had drained out of him, by that time, but he was still on the edge of slicing the guy’s throat, and told him so.

Except for the kid. The kid was watching.

Thane turned it over in his mind all the way to the hotel, unsure of whether he would have actually killed the guy. He was wearing dog tags and had tattoos that indicated he’d served in the military, so maybe he was fucked up with PTSD or something. Thane wasn’t concerned with all that, though. In an odd way, he understood that he was filled with rage and that he had developed a dangerous habit of taking it out on those he arrested, but he didn’t care.

God help him, he didn’t care.

As far as he was concerned, there were too goddamn many scumbags in the world, and if he could help get rid of a few of them, well, what the hell was wrong with that?

When he rose from his seat at the dinner to receive his award for “innovative community policing”, an award that would never, ever lead to the position within the department he deserved, he looked out into the faces of the brass that had continually passed him over for promotions over the years, and thought of what a service it would be to take a few of them out, as well.

As he sat down to what he considered restrained applause, he thought of Officer Hellstrom and wondered how he could maneuver himself between her legs at his earliest convenience.

Innovative community policing always made him horny.

At that very moment, Officer Hellstrom was thinking of him, too.

Just as he had assumed at the scene, she had indeed watched him walk away, all the way back to his car. Then she’d turned back to the boy, indicating to him that he could continue telling her his story in ASL, otherwise known as American Sign Language.

After that, Detective Thane Parks was very much on her mind.

3 MONTHS AFTER TOWY WEBSITE

Reddit, if you had a

daughter who was gang

raped, would you kill the

pricks? (
self.AskReddit
)

submitted 3 minutes ago by
kola24y

.

134 comments

share

all 134 comments

sorted by: 

new

[–]
Z0omboy
 
1 minute ago

Death. Nothing else need be said. Your talking Turner 3, right? Didnt scroll.

.

permalink

[–]
heruskael
 
1 minute ago

Holy shit. TOWY got them.

.

permalink

parent

[–]
bitatch
 
1 minute ago

two girls even threatening her. those people are shit, i could not even believe anyone would even think to harass their rape victm, much less for a fucking year. got what they deserved. Towy is fukn awesome

.

permalink

parent

[–]
rambler
 
1 minute ago

murder is impossible for rapists. not murder i m4an. Lol fuck cant type. murder always justified for rape.

.

   permalink

[–]
Wawesome
 
1 minute ago

I have a daughter. I would be on trial for wwhen I found out.

.

         permalink

    [–]
Llaster
 
1 minute ago

justifiable homo-side.

.

permalink

parent

[–]
HadoBlade
 
1 minute ago

turner 3. The hockey players that raped that chick. Fuck em. Towy set ‘em up and knocked ‘em down.

.

permalink

[–]
Not4ENT
 
2 minutes ago

Miserable fucks. She had to quit school. Went psycho. Offed herself. dad found her in a tub fulla blood. Jesus fucking Christ. Not gonna find any votes for those a-holes. TOWY RAWKS!! Take one with you. Hell, take two or three, like the Turner 3!

.

permalink

[–]
Byayah
 
2 minutes ago

Terminator style. Wonder who offed them? I heard they couldn’t prosecutr cause she never told anyone at the time.

.

      permalink

   [–]
suriisdumb
 
2 minutes ago

Nuke the whole high school. only way to be sure.

.

permalink

[–]
mixologist2145
[
S
] 
2 minutes ago

reminds me of stubnville.

.

       permalink

      [–]
bewellll
 
2 minutes ago

somebody hacked their shit n posted it on that towy cite.

.

   permalink

[–]
Digitaldoctor
 
3 minutes ago

They should be doing minimum 1000 years gettn raped themselves.

.

permalink

Charlie refused to communicate with Sarah for several months after the death of his mother, even though they still frequented the same message boards. He knew she was stalking him online, though, and took a perverse pleasure in ignoring her presence in threads he started with increasing frequency, musing about things to people who were not at all the type of people with whom he would normally discuss such things.

One of the poor depressed souls Charlie began to communicate with more often wa
s
clairebea
r
, who was extremely depressed about the death of her sister. Charlie had introduce
d
clairebea
r
and Sarah online a few months before, which was one of the reasons Charlie took a renewed interest in her.

clairebea
r
wouldn’t give many details about her depression except that her sister had been murdered and she had been considering suicide ever since. Sarah had taken a hard line position with her on the message boards, annoying others who were much less direct and more openly compassionate, but that had always been Sarah’s style. She definitely leaned towards tough love as opposed to a sympathetic ear.

Charlierefused to tel
l
clairebear
exactly what had happened between himself and Sarah that led to their break, but perhaps because he had always been the “good cop” in his and Sarah’s unofficial online intervention, it was Charlie to whom the depressed girl gravitated.

clairebear
interacted less and less with Sarah and sought out Charlie more and more, in private, direct communications outside the message boards she frequented before. Charlie and the girl grew closer emotionally, but he thought there was something inside her that was dead and irretrievably broken.

Charlie had no doubt that someda
y
clairebear
would simply disappear, failing to respond to messages or frequent the boards, and then he would know that she had finally gathered the courage to end her life.

Since he’d found his mother hanging from a beam in the master bedroom, Charlie’s views on the bravery of suicides had changed drastically. There was a time after his father died when Charlie had contemplated harming himself. The feeling grew strongest when he felt he was losing his mother to his stepfather, which was why he was searching out other depressed people in the first place.

He wasn’t quite aware of it at that time, but he eventually understood he was looking for validation. Permission to take his own life.

But he never found it.

Even to those sympathetic to the darker forces of human nature and privy to the pain so many suffered, suicide was still considered a cowardly act.

It wasn’t described in such stark terms by most of the people with whom he interacted, of course, but there was always an undercurrent that it was “the easy way out,” an opinion Charlie himself shared.

Until the death of his mother.

To think of his mother as weak was something that often crossed Charlie’s mind when she was alive; to be sure, it was the cause of much of the conflict that persisted between them after she remarried. Charlie was a smart kid, but he was still a kid, and he had the typical teenage mentality that he knew more than the adults who raised him.

But after her death, he began to think more seriously about the sacrifices his mother made for him, which included marrying a man like Brad because she wanted to make sure her son was taken care of, and staying with him in spite of his cheating and mental abuse for the same reason.

In his mind, Charlie’s mother was a hero, and heroes did not act in a cowardly fashion.

Charlie couldn’t even consider her demise self-inflicted. For a time he described it as an assisted suicide, but that gave Brad too much credit. Assistance sounded like there was something positive in what he’d done.

So Charlie settled on murder.

As far as he was concerned, his stepfather had murdered his mother.

And that was how the seeds of TOWY began to form in his mind. Out of grief and anger and his own warped sense of his mother, who, like most parents, was neither saint nor sinner, just a woman who tried to do her best for her child. Even her prescription drug abuse became, in the mind of her son, an act of nobility.

The worldwide TOWY movement began because Charlie fervently wished that his mother had thought of one more thing, one more heroic act, to take his stepfather with her.

Sometimes he dreamed of the day his mother died. In his dreams, Charlie wasn’t stopped for speeding mere minutes from his house. He wasn’t held up for those crucial moments. In this dream, he always arrived just as she stepped off the stool, and he would rush in to catch her. She would cry and hug him, and then Charlie would cut her down with a knife that always seemed to appear in his hand, and the two of them would leave the house and never return.

It was a nice dream, a sweet dream, but he never felt satisfied when he woke up. There was no residual good feeling at all, even for a moment. Not because he knew it wasn’t real, but because it did not satisfy his need for revenge.

The dream that haunted his thoughts was a dream that he
wanted to have.
A dream he laid awake at night imagining in the hopes he could will it into being.

In this dream his mother did not live, however. In this dream his mother still committed suicide, but first she killed her husband.

She took Brad with her.

It was a dream that Charlie so desperately wanted to experience, even once, but which never came. Since his mother would still be dead when he awoke, Charlie saw no need for a nice dream to mock his reality. He preferred a nasty, darker dream, something that could give him a taste of what he needed.

Something that would give him the courage to kill Brad.

That was the real reason he never breached the wall he’d built between himself and Sarah after his mother’s death. Sure, he had blamed her for insisting they meet that fateful night, but his anger at Sarah had faded within hours. He knew his mother would have just chosen another day when he wasn’t home. After all, it only took minutes for her to die. She could have even killed herself when he was online in the next room and he never would have known until it was too late.

The real reason he cut off all communication from Sarah was because he knew she would talk him out of what he planned to do.

S
o
clairebear
became his confidant. He was still resentful of Sarah, but that was something, deep down, he knew was illogical. But he kept it alive to keep himself from contacting her. To stay focused. He needed the illusion to stoke the fires of revenge in his heart. He was like a blacksmith holding tongs in the fire, waiting for the right temperature so he could pound and shape the iron into his weapon of choice.

Charlie would never stop hating Brad, but he couldn’t quite manage the strength to kill him, either. He was getting a taste of what had torn his mother apart, a feeling of helplessness.

Ironically, it wa
s
clairebea
r
, a girl who had earlier seemed to him the epitome of weakness, of depression unfettered by will, who both gave Charlie the courage to kill and prevented him from using it.

She also brought Charlie and Sarah back together, in a way.
clairebea
r
and the one who would come to be called the Pioneer did.

***

JT discovered completely by accident that the little old man he knew as Mister Tee, short for Mister Thomas, was actually Rodrigo Umberto Espinosa, also known as El Culo de Arica, also known as the Asshole of Arica. And even if he had known, JT probably would not have had the strength to do what he did, except for a transcontinental phone call that the old man himself had insisted on.

Each morning, Mister Tee was waiting when JT unlocked the doors to the pool room, which was actually more of an enormous lanai that covered the Olympic-style lap pool in which the old man swam.

On the one morning that he was late unlocking the pool, Mister Tee took notice, and JT told him the reason had been a call from the tiny hospital in Spain where his maternal grandmother lived. Her health had taken a turn and JT had spoken only with her caregiver, but the old man wanted to hear all about it.

JT, who had a good relationship with everyone at the club and looked at the older members almost like family elders, was eager to share. He had only recently reconnected with his grandmother, an early widow who’d left for Europe with a wealthy suitor many years before the death of her only daughter, JT’s mother.

JT had discovered his illness about a year before they reconnected, and his symptoms had rapidly worsened. He’d gone through months of panic attacks and irrational fears, dealing with sleepless, sweaty nights with the alarm clock his only salvation.

Recently he’d been hallucinating quite a bit, which made him think more and more of his father and the stories he’d told of his grandfather, who had died with the reputation of mental illness instead of the sickness which had finally overtaken him.

JT could only imagine what it must have been like for someone who went through such turmoil without a diagnosis, as his grandfather did. He also gained new respect for his father, who was spared the genetic malady, but would be waylaid by a much more common enemy of their people, alcohol. As far back as he could remember, his father had been described as a crazy drunk, even by his own relatives, but his old man had always been steadfast in his defense of his father.

“He warn’t crazy, son,” his dad would say, “just bad spirits,” which JT always thought was his dad’s way of saying that JT’s grandfather was also fond of the bottle, but hadn’t been so sure. More and more, JT had seen spirits in the night, hallucinations like the ones he imagined had tormented his grandfather. He dreaded that he would be completely overtaken by them.

JT didn’t want to see anything like that in the light of day.

One night he was visited by the spirit brothers Iktomi and Iya, the shape-shifting trickster and his younger sibling, whose stories JT had heard as a boy.

“Jesus,” Iktomi screeched, “Jesus Two Bears!”

The spirit spread out his arms, which became eight, and his little brother Iya appeared from his loins and sliced a razor-thin finger lengthwise along the flesh of each of his brother’s limbs, releasing the bloody veins like flags unfurled on a windy day.

At the end of each vein was a tiny version of JT, hanging from a noose and laughing and dancing like a crazed marionette. Blood flowed from each tiny eye, which Iya happily sucked through a straw.

JT tried to scream himself awake, but he was not sleeping. He simply had to endure this and other hallucinations as a prisoner of his rapidly deteriorating mind.

Soon he would sleep less and less, eventually remaining awake for weeks or even months, after which the final stage would deliver dementia and death to his doorstep.

Faced with his mortality, he had been thinking more and more of ending his life. JT had no family left that he knew of besides his maternal grandmother, and he had not seen her for many years, not even when his mother died. He was well-liked by the members of the country club, but he had been a drifter for years and so had a loner’s mentality, acquiring not so much friends as many useful acquaintances.

JT had no allusions that he would be missed, but the thought of descending into madness as his grandfather had done bothered him a great deal.

He found suicide a complicated issue, however. Historically the Native community had a high rate of suicide that the elders believed were tied to the historic loss of lands and the slow erosion of their heritage and traditions, and which the younger generation saw as poverty on the reservations and the resulting lack of opportunity. JT had always been proud of the fact that he had risen above his circumstances, and his mother, in particular, had always encouraged him not to be bound by such things. He knew the idea of suicide would disappoint her spirit, and leave his to walk the earth wailing until the date of his natural death arrived.

At least that was what his mother believed.

After her death, his father’s friends held a ceremony to wipe away the tears, as they had for his dad, followed by a good sweat, during which Jesus’ dad had seen his first vision in the small wood and rock structure buried halfway below ground.

He saw the face of his father across the steaming rocks. Once again, he told his son the story of his grandfather’s bravery at Wounded Knee.

As he reached the climax of the tale, his father’s face morphed into that of Iktomi, who repeated the words his father had so often used as both admonishment and encouragement. “Take your stand, boy,” he said. “Look it in the eye, and take your stand.”

“It”, of course, had been the 7
th
Cavalry to his ancestors at Wounded Knee, the U.S. Marshals to his grandfather at the same location, and the bottle to his father, wherever he happened to be at the time.

Evil was many things to many people.

But Jesus Two Bears could not bring himself to do it, if ‘it’ referred to suicide. He could not dishonor the memory of his parents and grandparents in such a way.