It took three long days for Null to accomplish what he had set out to do.
It took three days for them to deny.
It took three days for them to confess.
It took three days for them to beg.
It took three days for resolution.
It started out clean and orderly. Null bound up Emmett with handy zip ties from the garage, had Phyllis make phone calls, warning off friends and canceling appointments. Then he bound her up too. He was generous and patient, making sure they were watered and fed, released at first at intervals to go to the bathroom. He even dressed Emmett’s wounded eye appropriately from how Missy once had shown him. These decencies did not last.
Day One was for explanations, and Null patiently listened to them all, not laying a finger on them as they agonized without sleep and bored of telling the same lies over and over. Yet they continued to tell them. “He was a difficult child. We were the best parents we knew how to be at the time. He fell in with a bad crowd at school. He was disobedient and turned his dog against us. His father never beat him and raped him. His mother never covered it up. She would never have allowed it—it was all a lie to gain sympathy. It was nobody’s fault, really. He really was just a bad kid.”
“I was tortured once,” Null replied. “And it ended much worse for me than it will for you.”
Day Two was for atonement, and Null worked on them with tools without relent, but taking little breaks at contrived points to let the magnitude of the pain sink in. There were clippers, calipers, knives, hammers, wrenches, pliers, various irons. They quickly confessed, shouted confessions loudly and desperately, though Null explained that it didn’t matter if they confessed—it simply wouldn’t affect anything. They begged to confess, anyway, to be allowed to tell the truth. He let them up to go to the bathroom, blood draining everywhere, but not too much. He had calculated that it wasn’t to be too much. There needed to be time to fit everything in. Before they could resume their bound positions, Null offered them a task.
He had them write their confessions on the bedroom walls in their own blood, at length. He told them there would be no reward or punishment for their performance, just more of what they were already getting. It wouldn’t affect the outcome.
They went the extra mile to do a thorough and exemplary job regardless, taking hours to do it, painstaking and slow.
Null bound them back up and resumed torturing them, anyway.
No one slept.
Day Three was for forgiveness. Null explained he had none to give, that it wasn’t in his power to forgive them and that their son was dead and in dying he couldn’t forgive them either. “In fact,” he said. “I am here honoring his last request.”
“What was that?” came from the bloody, torn mouth of Emmett Embers.
Phyllis sobbed in incoherent pain.
“That you didn’t get away with it.”
Emmett coughed and spat.
Null went back to working on them until Emmett screamed out for God to help him. Phyllis whined for God in echo, too. They had invoked God all along the torment.
Null stopped and stood over them both, assessing them.
“I guess at this point your thoughts would turn to God,” he stated blankly. “Good. You may well ask why he isn’t intervening in your torture, saving you. There are two answers. The first being the most salient and sensible: There is no God. However, if you choose to believe, then you must conclude that God approves of what’s happening here. Since you believe in God, you no doubt think that what you did to Kenny—raping him, brutalizing him, letting it happen, covering it up, mind fucking him until he could barely function then tossing him out on his ear when you were through—was perfectly fine. You must have thought that God approved of that, letting it happen just like Phyllis, nodding along, sometimes looking the other way. Or again, maybe there is no God.”
They together screamed for God and mercy again.
“But let’s grant the idea that God exists as you believe in him, micromanaging all life everywhere. If that’s true, then you can be sure he sent me. Am I an angel then?”
They groaned pathetically. Mercy again was begged for.
“You might think of me as one, because your belief makes me one. It would make sense in that scheme that I’m here to exact God’s vengeance, to right the moral wrong as part of the judgment of God. Though it might bother me, if I were you, that your precious God allowed it all to happen in the first place. Yes, it must surprise and perplex you that God would approve of the horror you commit one day then, years later, ensure that horror is enacted upon you in payment for that. You thought God was on your side one minute, but were then betrayed by him the next. A believer would say God moves in mysterious ways. A non-believer would mark it as the pure contradictory absurdity in believing in any God.”
They cried again for God, sobbed and begged for Null to stop and think about what he was doing.
“Oh, I’ve thought about it,” he said. “And I’m here to settle the question. For my part, God had nothing to do with it. Chaos brought me here—chaos and a dying breath. That, mixed with the bad chemicals in my brain that make me what I am, brought us to the exact point of where we are now. And where we are now, is at the end. A few more touches and you’ll be able to die slowly from your wounds and no one will be coming to save you. You’ll simply peter out and die in agony. It won’t take years of suffering to kill you as it did your son, but it will feel like years. And when you’re found inevitably, and it will happen, though it may take a week or two, what you have done will be plainly readable on the bedroom wall, and God’s mystery of who tortured and killed you may never be solved.”
He was ignoring their screams all through that.
“Maybe you’ll find forgiveness in heaven, if you still believe on the off-chance that there is one.”
The scent of human despair was palpable, thick and dank. They whined between screams with more begging.
“I’ll have to gag you now—just in case someone might hear you. You are kind of loud for two half-dead old people.”
As he approached Phyllis first, she cried with surprising lucidity, “No, please! I have something you need to know about Kenny. Something important!”
“How important?”
“Important enough to let me live?”
“What about Emmett?”
Phyllis gurgled, drooling blood, and coughed. “You can have him. It’s all his fault, anyway. He was the one who had to use Kenny like a whore. I tried to stop him.”
“No, Phyllis!” Emmett cried, then went back to sobbing and muttering.
“We both know that that isn’t true. And we both know that I’ll make sure you both die, no matter what you tell me.”
“But I have information you really want!” she screamed.
“Tell me then or we continue.”
“First, tell me that if I do, you’ll stop the pain.”
“I can do that,” Null said with something that sounded almost like compassion. “Tell me and I’ll make it stop.”
“You’ll do it fast if I tell you?”
“Quick as mercury,” said Null in a whisper.
“Kenny has a child,” she gasped.
When he broke her neck, she barely let out a sigh.
Benway was sweating, pacing around the drab mauve den and Lumpy was hunched over intently, obsessed with porn on the aunt’s obsolete PC at an old writing table.
“This place sucks, Benway,” he grumbled, ogling nude glamour girls that were beyond him.
“I said we should go,” fumed Benway. “You’re the one wants us to wait on the gum ransom for the dweeb in the basement.”
“You should be more respectful of our man in the basement. He’s doing us a good turn.”
“He’s peeing into a bucket through a catheter whacked out of his mind on my homebrewed hallucinogens and probably slowly starving to death. Not much need for respect there.”
“Ya made him comfortable, right? Probably a sensitive little guy.”
“He wouldn’t know it if I stuck needles in his eyes. He’s too far gone. But what about you, Filmore? How you doin’ on the pain meds?”
“Your stitches itch and I’m crazy bored. Can’t even use the smartphone for entertainment.”
“No, it was your great idea to send a ransom text to the cops from it. Deadman’s phone or not, whenever it’s on they can pinpoint our location by GPS. Just checking for responses alone is a risk.”
Lumpy cleared his throat with a growl. “Doc, I got to party. Get into Cambridge and hunt up some trim. I got to ball!”
“You gotta lay low until they set an exchange of the guy for the gum.”
“And I need more gum too. I feel sick without it. Maybe withdrawal.”
“You acted sick with it. I can’t help you. There’s no lab set up here, and you went through whatever we had.”
“I need it to connect. I’m isolated now, trapped in myself.”
“Now who’s the sensitive little guy?”
“Watch it, Benway, or I isolate your motherfucking teeth.”
“Keep moving around like that and you’re going to get blood all over my aunt’s den. You can’t go anywhere. You seriously believe there isn’t a manhunt on for you? If the Ork doesn’t finally kill you, the cops will pick you up now for certain, thanks to Boyd making the connection.”
“How do you know she has?”
“You want to risk that she hasn’t? She found us at my mother’s house last go ‘round. You really think it’s going to take her that long to connect you with the dweeb kidnapping and find us here at my aunt’s?”
“Maybe you paranoid, Doc?”
“Sure, but can we really afford not to be? How much luck you think we can ride for how long?”
“I got the news, Doc, that Joel Osteen and the Christ both say our time is coming for all good blessings to be bestowed upon us if we just believe and choose faith over facts.”
“And I got the news that cops already raided my mother’s house looking for us. And I’m going to have to explain all the damage when she gets back from Florida, which is going to be a bad scene.”
“Bullshit. They couldn’t of done it so quick!” He got up from the couch and counter-paced Benway.
“Lumpy, you can work it out with God later and send a donation to Osteen after we get away clear, but before that we have to recognize that we may not get away at all, much less score the cops’ supply of gum before we even get to that.”
“We can hold out a couple a days before they get a clue.”
“Are you fucking kidding me? They already raided my mother’s house. It was all over the news and blocking traffic on Mass. Ave. They were only two blocks away. They’re coming for us Lumpy, Ork or Cops and we’ll not survive either when they get here.”
“We hold out for two more days, then we blow. Fine. Gum or no gum. We get a response yet?”
“Not unless you count a bunch of missed calls from One Schroeder a response.”
“You didn’t answer?”
“You want to invite them in right now—send ‘em an invitation?”
“Jesus, this is a fucked-up situation. Just text them our timeframe If they don’t come across with the gum, sensitive boy gets sent to la-la-land permanent.”
“Sure, Lumpy. Fine. I’ll text them now. What the fuck are you doing with my aunt’s sofa?”
Lumpy looked up and beamed. “Hunting up some change to take the 77 bus to Harvard Square.”
Boyd had just finished getting a long, firm dressing down from Captain Parseeman and Chief Inspector Phil LaCuna in unison and disharmony. They had called her every name in the book, including the “C” word. So, in addition to clearing the mass mayhem and murder case of “The Chaw,” she also had to deal with the Shimmel kidnapping, which was about to hit the news in a major way in less than a day, if not that very afternoon, but which still had yet to be leaked.
She had received the text from the deadman’s phone that two days was the limit for negotiations. Two days before they slit Shimmel’s throat and bailed. It was obvious to her that Lumpy was the kidnapper, and that Benway was involved, which is why she couldn’t find them. Meanwhile, Nick Andromeda, potentially her best street asset, was laid up at Mass. General with mysterious gunshot wounds acquired off-duty, and her reliance on available squads of bodies was going to be cut painfully thin by dictum of the new commissioner.
Her greatest hope was that Benway would call and give up Lumpy so he could get off with some light probation. Her next greatest hope was that Null had had nothing to do with it.
She had prayed to God to let her have something with Null—a relationship if you had to call it that—a love affair—anything! Prayed to let it go on until she realized when Null had left her that God said “No!”
The realization went further: God said nothing. There was no God and she had once again been left hanging without resolution, satisfaction or closure. The absence of God spoke loudest of all.
The end had come hard and yet everything else had kept right on going.
Her need for Null kept right on going. Of course she hated him, and of course she prayed into the nothingness and between bombardments of chaos that somehow throughout all the horrible things he did and was going to do that he would remain safe. She wished him dead, and she wished him alive all at once.
Then she went about recruiting from the willing and available crew of detectives to patrolmen on down those who would help her clean up the gum and nail Lumpy and Benway.
Null had left Emmet Embers in the expanded cookie box cottage in New Smyrna Beach, Florida to die of the wounds he had inflicted upon him he knew to be eventually lethal, trussed up good and tight. Phyllis was already gone, but before she had left her body with the broken neck behind, she had given Null a story, a picture and curt directions. She told the story in gasps and sobs of pain.
When Kenny was in high school, due to his sexual confusion, he had a fling with another student, a girl. His last-ditch effort at heterosexuality. She got pregnant and was determined to have the baby, so the Embers, before kicking Kenny out, supported the birth as the mother had no family to speak of but a drunken grandfather to help her during the pregnancy and after. After the birth, they got rid of her and they got rid of Kenny. And when the boy, Rudy Embers, was old enough to be trouble, they got rid of him too.
They moved to New Smyrna Beach, took the kid with them in a seeming compassionate move and then sold him to something called “Boys Farm.” It was in Ocala in the middle of nowhere and with state and federal checks they fostered boys until they were “adopted” by the right men. What was odd was that they actually sold him outright, were paid a fee for delivering him up, which was because it was in reality and fact a holding pen for rich pedophiles, “chickenhawks” and their fresh “chicken.” A preferred clientele of old men would pay for a boy, use him and discard him. It was an open secret, but not open enough for the state or county to intervene or investigate, as plenty of the right bribes went to all the right officials and shut off any interest in right action.
Boys Farm had existed for years under the radar, and no doubt would probably still exist, at least until he visited it.
Even if the boy was delivered, deflowered and dead, Null made a quiet resolution regardless on the open road, the chorus of “Muddy Waters’ “Mannish Boy” screaming in his head—to simply kill them all.
He would kill them all and make sure Boys Farm stood as an example in memory for what became of those who would make sex slaves of children, then snuff them out.
He would snuff Boys Farm out.
He would snuff them all out.
It wasn’t a long ride to Ocala. He took the picture of the five-year-old Rudy and the directions with him.
Null stopped along the way for provisions, burritos, water, bedding—pillows and sheets—and over the counter sleep drugs, just in case Rudy was still alive.
He was going to take him.
Null drove carefully, heading southwest on Washington Street toward the North Dixie Freeway, went down I-95 North and Florida 40 West to Florida 326 West in Marion County, Ocala. It took, with stops, about three hours, so it was still daylight when he arrived at Boys Farm. There was no sign, but the address and description were matched. He was immediately greeted in the gravel parking lot of a low, rectangular and “L”-shaped building like a long, rustic barn by a short, squat, swarthy man in overalls. He looked Hispanic.
Null leaned out the driver’s side window.
“You lost?” asked the man.
“No, I’m where I need to be.”
“You don’t need to be here, man. This is private property.”
“Not even if I want to buy a child?”
The Hispanic man pulled a Smith and Wesson 38 revolver. “You’ve made a mistake, sir. You had better pull back out and make your way back to the highway.”
“No,” said Null, sounding almost tired. “You made a mistake.” Before he had finished speaking, he had blown a hole in the man’s neck with the Glock. He waited a moment in the quiet aftermath where the only sound was the man choking and gagging until the death rattle and was nonplussed that no one else had come out to greet him.
So, he went in to greet them.
After an empty ante-room with a rustic reception area, Null entered a large, high-raftered work room with several work tables. Another man with his pants down was thrusting himself into a boy who was bent over a table, his face flush with it, yelling. The man was making cooing sounds as he took the boy. Null tore the man off of him in a single jerk.
The man said with a southern honking drawl, “What the fuck you doin’, dude?” in shock, void of embarrassment.
“Quiet you,” said Null evenly. “And pull up your pants.”
The boy was sniffling and in tears, his face red and smudged with dirt. Null waited for him to pull up his pants, then from nowhere hit him so hard in the jaw that he passed out on the dirt floor amid strands and tufts of hay. He must have been a bit younger than fourteen.
Null commented on this to him. “You’re too young to have to see what’s going to happen.”
“What the fuck you doing here, man? Didn’t they pay you not to show up?” asked the man, who was somewhat obese with a gray stubble beard, bald, gleaming pate and thick features. He looked like you didn’t want to get close to him as it was likely he stank of some sort of corruption, even though Null smelled nothing near him but the fear-sweat.
“They missed me, I think.”
After a full minute of tense silence, the man screamed, “Help! We got a vigilante here! We’re being invaded! Hey Rube!”
Null had the sawed-off shotgun in his hands with the speed of a magician and methodically pumped two rounds into the fat midsection of the man, knocking him back to the table..
He went down on his back, grunting and groaning, bloody gray viscera exposed from the front of his overalls.
Null wiped spatter from his face and hands.
He swiftly loaded two more rounds and made them count when two more men, both white and lanky with straw colored hair, also in overalls, came running into the room. He downed both of them with the shotgun and they writhed bloodily on the ground just like the man who had been raping the now unconscious boy. Null got out of him that his name was Ephraim. He then strolled over to the two men on the floor and put a single round from the Glock in each man’s forehead. They immediately quieted.
“You killed Manolo, Scott and Stewart!” Ephraim sobbed and wailed.
“I’ve killed you too. You won’t survive that wound.”
“Fuck you, cracker!” he grunted.
“Yes, but no more fucking little boys.”
Ephraim spat.
“Where are the rest of the boys? Where are they kept?”
“We got more hands coming to kill you, cracker! You ain’t got nothing coming!”
Ephraim shrieked in pain when Null inserted his foot into the wound.
Null bent down, showed him the picture. “I’m looking for this one in particular,” he stated.
“You could have just bought the stupid kid through channels,” Ephraim sobbed.
“I’m not good at politics,” replied Null.
“Just let me die!” screamed Ephraim.
“I’ll help you along if you tell me where he is,” said Null. “Kill you clean.”
“He’s in the hotbox in the next room,” Ephraim panted. “Discipline problem.”
“Of course,” Null assented, and then blew his head off with a single round of the sawed-off shotgun.
There were no more bodies manning the farm, but there were cages like dog crates full of filthy boys of varying races, ages and states of undress crowded into the adjoining room which looked like it had once been used for assembly line production of some kind with one long table going down the center of it. This room delivered on the stink that Ephraim’s aspect had formerly promised. The stench almost knocked him back. Null opened the cages fast by breaking the padlocks with rounds from the Glock and fired a single round of the shotgun into the ceiling.
“I don’t know where you’re from, or where you can go or will go, but you had better get going now. I’m calling the heat and if you don’t want to be delivered into their hands for whatever reasons, then you’d better leave quick!
The hot box was easy to find, a padlocked airless square of wood under the long table. Null shot the lock off and extracted a skinny, dirty, spindly little boy with runny nose and eyes from it. He squinted at the photo and at the boy, even as he struggled vainly to get loose from his grip. Null couldn’t feel any surprise when they matched, but he thought it was extremely unlikely. He kept the struggling boy by his side as he strolled through the farm’s physical plant looking for more cages. Other than a crude kitchen, there was nothing but old junk and rusted mechanical implements in the other rooms.
He didn’t start a fire but left the building standing, calling both police and the Marion County Sheriff’s Department on his deadman’s phone to alert them to the strange and criminal goings on at the Boys Farm—not that they didn’t know already. But the recorded call, even though it was anonymous, had to be responded to. And they would certainly find something as he had propped up the corpse of Manolo in a seated position to greet them.
He actually felt a physical itch to burn the place to the ground but instead peeled out on the gravel heading back to the highway, a shrieking, struggling boy of perhaps seven held unstably restrained with his right arm.
Null thought it would have been more efficient if he had had an opioid to tranquilize and knock the kid for a loop, but as it was, he offered him over the counter sleep medications and was violently rebuffed. The only choice left was to stop the van and knock him out with a surprise punch. Then he tucked the boy into the bedding in the back and gunned the van down I-95 North.
It was going to be a long drive back to Boston.
Maintaining legal speed, obeying traffic laws scrupulously to avoid overzealous Florida State Patrol, Null cranked the iPod loud playing Slim Harpo’s “Moody Blues.”
He wondered whether or not the kid would be out long enough to give him some distance. Fracturing his jaw was not a good option.
“We need to kill that wildcat fucker, Null” said Malek, sipping single malt scotch he had no appreciation for from a fat tumbler.
Franchot and Parley, looking tired and haggard in overcoats, shoulder holsters exposed, assented.
“What about the Indian, Padrone?” Franchot asked. “Ain’t he urgent?”
“All our guys are lookin’ for the guy. We put up a bounty. He’ll be trunk music soon enough.”
“Forget it,” said Malek. “He’s low priority.”
“He whacked about ten of our guys and he’s low priority?”
Malek smashed the bottom of the glass down on his desk. “That Null fuck killed just as many, maybe more, and he has a hot million bucks of my meth! Now he thinks him and the Gangsta Boyz crew, which he’s plainly taken over, are running the streets. He’s cutting into business and territory and needs to go right fucking away!”
“But what about the Indian?” whined Parley. “I got a personal beef with that mutt.”
“We forgive that shitbird,” said Malek. “Get the bounty off his head.”
“And Null?” asked Franchot?
“Him too.”
“You’re giving him a pass? The Gangsta Boyz are selling your gak out on the street.”
“I know—it’s a dead loss.”
“So we whack ‘em.”
“No, I’m killing both of them.” Malek shook his head and poured more scotch into the fat tumbler. “With kindness.”
“With kindness?”
“You could say. I’m going to set them after each other. See who kills who first.”
“What about the survivor?” Franchot protested.
“We spoil him. Make him happy, take him back into the fold, give him back our love and trust, make him content and feel safe.”
“And when he feels safe, we whack him!”
“Exactamundo!” Malek exclaimed, draining his glass. “He gets a ticket to Gary Lee Obiodowski’s garage.”
“What if it’s Null?” Franchot posited.
“Then we negotiate for the same result. We work with him, strike a compromise, then we work on him.”
“What about the Gangsta Boyz?”
“Cowboys and indians, Franchot, cowboys and indians.”
“I don’t get you.”
“We go in big and scalp them. Take back the streets.”
“You want a war.”
“It won’t be a war. A few heads on pikes will turn the trick. Then they will come to Jesus!”
“They’re too fuckin’ wild to do that.”
“When they come to worship the crucified Null, we’ll take them all. We’ll offer them what’s left of their leader and when they show, keep taking them out until they get the message. Every one of the Gangsta Boys’ll be on the list to be kissed until we get back what’s mine.”
Franchot was sweating and for once visibly nervous. “You’re talking a full-out bloodbath, Padrone.”
“No, no. Just a good old-fashioned Boston beatdown. The way it used to be.”