Page 29 of Psycho Obsession
I pull out three pristine cards. The Ace of Spades. The Joker. And the Queen of Hearts—a fresh one, without the smudge.
I walk to the first body. I use a stapler I “liberated” from an office building and chunk—the Ace goes right into the centre of his forehead.
“For the muscle,” I mutter.
I move to the second. Chunk—the Joker goes right over his heart, the staple biting through the paper and into the purple muscle beneath.
“For the laughs.”
I stop at the leader. His eyes are still open, staring at the neon signs of the city, fixed in a permanent state of “oh fuck.” I take the Queen of Hearts and I press it into the bloody mess of his chest. I don’t use a staple this time. I just let the blood act as the glue.
“And this one… this one is for the promise.”
I stand up, wiping my hands on my purple lapels, leaving long, dark streaks on the velvet. I look toward the Hillside Sanitarium. The white walls are calling.
“Alright, boys! That’s a wrap!” I shout to the corpses, spreading my arms wide. “I’ve got a date with a Doctor, and I’d hate to be late for the autopsy.”
I hop over the ledge, sliding down the fire escape like a shadow.
Chapter
Ten
JEX
People always ask me, “Jex, how’d you get so… festive?”
They want a sob story. They want to hear about the mommy who didn’t hug me or the daddy who used me as a cigarette butt for his unfiltered Camels. They want a neat little psychological bow to tie around my neck so they can tuck me into a file folder and feel safe.
But life isn’t a tragedy, babe. It’s a comedy. It’s just that most people have a really shitty sense of humour.
I’m sitting in my “office”—which is actually a condemned funhouse in an abandoned pier district. The air smells like wet salt, rusted gears, and the faint, sweet rot of dead things under the boardwalk. A giant, cracked fibreglass clown head hangs from the ceiling, its jaw missing, staring at me with one bulbous, flickering eye.
“Don’t look at me like that, Giggles,”I mutter, throwing a dart at a map of the Hillside Sanitarium pinned to his nose. Thwack. Bullseye. Right on the laundry intake.
Do I have friends?
Depends on your definition. If you mean people I share a beer with and talk about the weather, then fuck no. People are boring. They’re predictable. They’re meat with opinions. But if you mean “The Choir”? Well, they’re a different story.
They’re the ones the city spat out. The ones who realised that the law is just a suggestion written by guys in suits who pay for their sins in instalments.
There’s Knuckles, a seven-foot-tall wall of scar tissue who hasn’t spoken a word since he was ten; and Pip, a twelve-year-old girl who can pick a lock with a piece of gum and a prayer.
They don’t help me because they love me. They help me because I’m the only one who doesn’t try to “fix” them. I just give them a match and tell them which way the wind is blowing.
I wasn’t always the Dealer.
I remember being a suit. Can you imagine it? Jex in a tie. Jex with a briefcase. Jex worrying about the interest rate on a mortgage. I worked for the city. I was one of the guys who processed the “Section 8” detentions. I was the one who signed the papers that sent girls like Hallow to places like Hillside.
I thought I was helping. I thought I was part of the “clean hands” brigade.
Then I saw the ledger. Not the official one, but the real one. The one where Aris’s name appeared next to “Research Grants” that looked an awful lot like bribes. Isaw the photos of what happened to the girls who didn’t “recover.” I saw the way the system didn’t just break people—it harvested them.
I tried to be a hero. I went to my boss. I went to the cops.
They laughed at me. Then they took me into a back room and showed me what happens to heroes. They didn’t kill me. They just broke my jaw and left me in the gutter.
I remember laying in the rain, tasting my own blood, looking up at the neon signs of the city. And that’s when it hit me. The Big Joke.
