Page 60 of Ballistic

“Who … are you?”

Instead of answering, I slid out the box cutter blade from its sheath and jabbed it into his crotch, watching as his blood soaked the cloth of his white underwear.

Jasper screamed, a tortured, throaty sound that rippled down my spine, almost as if it searched for that one note of humanity inside of me. For a split second, my nerve faltered, and I thought about him as a boy, a young boy who was likely abused to make him turn out so sadistic and cruel to other girls. And yes, there were others. I’d learn of their vicious attacks through police reports and confessions, but only one of whom he’d attempted to dispose. And she happened to be everything to me.

So, fuck him.

I slapped the towel over his face again, gripping his jaw to hold it tight to his mouth, and saturated it with the hose. Jasper’s legs seized and twitched beneath me, the blood spilling onto the cardboard in pink dilutions, until I threw the hose away and removed the towel from his mouth.

His head swayed in what I surmised as exhaustion, likely due to terror and shock. The same terror and shock he’d subjected Eden to.

Nerves flaring, I lifted the box cutter and clicked the blade in and out in with the nervous energy coursing through me.

“Why drown her?” I asked a second time, leaving the blade unsheathed, just in case.

“I don’t know.” His weak and beaten-down whimper tickled my stomach with repulsion. “Just seemed … easiest. Only takes a second. One breath. Wouldn’t suffer as much.”

Easiest. All the years of teasing out the psychology in play, the sadistic nature of the crime, to find it was merely the easiest means of disposal.

I snickered and slapped the back of my wrist to my mouth, capping the laughter itching to burst free. My chest tickled with a mishmash of amusement, anger, adrenaline, and whatever emotional cocktail I didn’t have the mental capacity to sort out right then.

“I didn’t want to kill her. You gotta believe me. But Kenny …”

Squeezing the towel onto his crotch, where the cold water dripped over his wounds, capped his excuse, and his thigh trembled beneath me.

Kenny—or Pigman, rather—would be next. I didn’t need to hear anything more.

For the next hour, I alternated between the waterboarding and small cuts, making sure to keep as much of the mess onto the thick corrugated cardboard as I could. He eventually grew weak, until he could no longer keep his head up on his own, so oxygen-starved, his body had grown flaccid. I unhooked the cuffs and dragged him atop of the cardboard across the room, toward a roll-up door that let out to a dock. A rusted chain held an equally rusted padlock, weathered by the dampness. I grabbed a hammer I’d seen on a shelf and, with a few heavy hits, busted the lock. Rolling up the door exposed the half-moon set over the Detroit River, and the distant lights of a cargo ship, too far away for them to see the small shack that housed my crime. Every bit of strength went into hauling Jasper’s body onto the dock, where I left him for a moment.

With the flashlight, I searched for something significantly heavy. I found it in an old steel toolbox, filled to the brim with wrenches and screwdrivers, a timeworn sledgehammer, and other items that made it weighted enough that I had to drag it on the canvas tarp upon which it sat. I tied a rope to Jasper’s ankles as he lay moaning, his head rolling against the wooden dock planks.

“You say prayers at night, girl?” Jasper asked, stuffing a cigarette into his mouth as he set his boot against the heavy anchor, beside which the girl stood tied to a bent piece of metal stuck up from the top of it.

Boot set atop the toolbox, I stared down at Jasper, who’d begun to wake up a bit. Bending forward just enough to remove the blindfold, I watched with pointed interest, as his eyes narrowed, undoubtedly gaining focus with each passing second. His brows came together in the kind of confused expression that brought a smile to my face.

“You say your prayers at night?” I asked him, stuffing a cigarette into my mouth.

“You—” Before he could finish his thought, I kicked the toolbox over the edge of the dock, nabbing the cardboard before it slid into the water with him.

His body sank below the surface, eyes staring up at me, hands still bound behind his back as he fell deeper into the water below.

When I could no longer see him, I flicked the cigarette into the water and made my way back toward the building. I tossed the cardboard into a steel trashcan set on a grassy patch alongside the dock and set one of the drier corners aflame with Dax’s lighter I’d acquired. Hungry orange flames consumed the cardboard and Jasper’s fallen blood, swallowing up the evidence.

The remains of my first revenge kill.

It wouldn’t be my last.

24

Nicoleta

It was after midnight, when I parked Dax’s car and snuck back into the apartment.

Dax lay sleeping, just as I’d left him, and after a quick check of his breath against my ear, I made my way toward the bathroom. Dried blood climbed the length of my arm, over the scars to just below my elbow, where my shirt sat bunched up over my bicep.

Good thing I hadn’t gotten pulled over, because there’d have been no denying foul play, looking at the thin red stains across my palms. In a piss poor attempt to clean it off Dax’s steering wheel, I’d wiped it with a few McDonald’s napkins I’d found in the glove compartment. I’d have to clean the rest of it in the morning. I’d grown weak with exhaustion to do any more.

After peeling out of my clothes, I flipped on the shower, and turned off the lights. I didn’t want to see Jasper’s blood pooling on the floor. I didn’t want to see the evidence of my detached and merciless act.