phone.
“We have a problem. We have a customer who overstepped his boundary. What shall I do?”
The voice on the other end said, “Whatever is necessary”.
Bradley snapped his phone shut. He closed his eyes and smiled. This was the favorite part of his job. He removed his hand from the door. Thirty seconds later, he was walking down the hall.
Dr. Bernard Buck, forty-four and overweight, married with no children. Found dead in a ditch the next morning. They found his severed tongue deep in his anus. The fingers and toes were missing. They found his wallet, his credit cards and his hat in his engorged belly. A terrible mess. They found his wife at home, a gouge where her throat had once been. The missing fingers and toes were scattered around her corpse. The neighbors said they had been a normal couple; the husband was always away on business. Mrs. Buck has been an exemplary social figure. The events were a mystery.
Bradley blew out a stream of cigarette smoke, pocketed his pen and closed his notebook. He wondered how long it would be before the press printed that article, with little or no detail.
The sack of shit had it coming. He made me think of her…of Danielle.
Bradley closed his eyes, cleared his thoughts.
No distractions, you know the rules.
Observe – that'll calm you down.
He liked to observe, it relaxed him.
He liked to problem solve even more so.
He closed his eyes, pushing the memory of the lovely Danielle from his brain – after all, she was dead, no one could survive that attack, especially a teenager – and smiled.
She's dead. It's been over a year. Forget her .
TWELVE
Corey Cross, Alan Cahill, Jorge Sanchez, and Philip Andrews, the lackeys.
Bradley Innis; the right hand man. The man who killed her family and mutilated her.
Their boss, Ross Rhodes.
Dani scanned her weary eyes down the piece of paper in her hand, the off-white sheet crinkled from multiple handlings over the past year. It held six names, the six responsible for her family's demise. Her father had scrawled them in red ink, neatly and tightly. It detailed their activity and their respective role in their organisation, the organisation her father had worked for until his brutal murder.
His name was next to Corey and Alan, a solid black line through it.
Her handiwork.
After all, he was dead now.
Face facts. He wasn’t coming back to help her.
Dani grunted and sat up. The mattress beneath her creaked as she adjusted her lithe frame. She placed the list on her bedside cabinet next to her parent's platinum wedding rings, linked together via a small silver chain. Her smooth, tanned legs rolled over and her sock covered feet plodded onto the laminate floor. She crossed her apartment, wearing only a pair of blue panties and a sports bra – and the socks – and entered her walk-in shower, a concrete rectangle with a wet floor and wall. She slipped her garments off and tossed them into the hamper, walked behind the partition and started to shower.
Every morning the same.
Washing the tragedy off her skin.
She ran the water to near boiling, until she felt her skin object to the level of heat and stayed there for eleven minutes, as she did every morning. The tingle of searing pain crawled beneath her skin. Her scars itched beneath the heat. Two seconds had extended to thirty seconds and that had extended to one minute, then two, then three. Gradually, over the next year, she'd extended her mini ordeal to eleven full minutes. This time, she didn’t flinch. A murky mist rose around her. Dani inhaled, clearing her sinuses with a deep lungful of steam. Her back became numb under the scorching water. Still, she didn't flinch.
Not once.
A year ago, she'd have cried tears and probably ran cold water over the burned area immediately.
Now, no such action was necessary.
Progress.
After all, routine was important. As was discipline.
Emerging from the shower with hot, pink skin, she wrapped a
“We have a problem. We have a customer who overstepped his boundary. What shall I do?”
The voice on the other end said, “Whatever is necessary”.
Bradley snapped his phone shut. He closed his eyes and smiled. This was the favorite part of his job. He removed his hand from the door. Thirty seconds later, he was walking down the hall.
Dr. Bernard Buck, forty-four and overweight, married with no children. Found dead in a ditch the next morning. They found his severed tongue deep in his anus. The fingers and toes were missing. They found his wallet, his credit cards and his hat in his engorged belly. A terrible mess. They found his wife at home, a gouge where her throat had once been. The missing fingers and toes were scattered around her corpse. The neighbors said they had been a normal couple; the husband was always away on business. Mrs. Buck has been an exemplary social figure. The events were a mystery.
Bradley blew out a stream of cigarette smoke, pocketed his pen and closed his notebook. He wondered how long it would be before the press printed that article, with little or no detail.
The sack of shit had it coming. He made me think of her…of Danielle.
Bradley closed his eyes, cleared his thoughts.
No distractions, you know the rules.
Observe – that'll calm you down.
He liked to observe, it relaxed him.
He liked to problem solve even more so.
He closed his eyes, pushing the memory of the lovely Danielle from his brain – after all, she was dead, no one could survive that attack, especially a teenager – and smiled.
She's dead. It's been over a year. Forget her .
TWELVE
Corey Cross, Alan Cahill, Jorge Sanchez, and Philip Andrews, the lackeys.
Bradley Innis; the right hand man. The man who killed her family and mutilated her.
Their boss, Ross Rhodes.
Dani scanned her weary eyes down the piece of paper in her hand, the off-white sheet crinkled from multiple handlings over the past year. It held six names, the six responsible for her family's demise. Her father had scrawled them in red ink, neatly and tightly. It detailed their activity and their respective role in their organisation, the organisation her father had worked for until his brutal murder.
His name was next to Corey and Alan, a solid black line through it.
Her handiwork.
After all, he was dead now.
Face facts. He wasn’t coming back to help her.
Dani grunted and sat up. The mattress beneath her creaked as she adjusted her lithe frame. She placed the list on her bedside cabinet next to her parent's platinum wedding rings, linked together via a small silver chain. Her smooth, tanned legs rolled over and her sock covered feet plodded onto the laminate floor. She crossed her apartment, wearing only a pair of blue panties and a sports bra – and the socks – and entered her walk-in shower, a concrete rectangle with a wet floor and wall. She slipped her garments off and tossed them into the hamper, walked behind the partition and started to shower.
Every morning the same.
Washing the tragedy off her skin.
She ran the water to near boiling, until she felt her skin object to the level of heat and stayed there for eleven minutes, as she did every morning. The tingle of searing pain crawled beneath her skin. Her scars itched beneath the heat. Two seconds had extended to thirty seconds and that had extended to one minute, then two, then three. Gradually, over the next year, she'd extended her mini ordeal to eleven full minutes. This time, she didn’t flinch. A murky mist rose around her. Dani inhaled, clearing her sinuses with a deep lungful of steam. Her back became numb under the scorching water. Still, she didn't flinch.
Not once.
A year ago, she'd have cried tears and probably ran cold water over the burned area immediately.
Now, no such action was necessary.
Progress.
After all, routine was important. As was discipline.
Emerging from the shower with hot, pink skin, she wrapped a
Similar Books
