“I fucking hate you.”
“I understand—you’ve had enough of love. None of that ever worked out, so hatred would logically be the next thing. I admit I’m quite hate-able. No argument there.”
“Just fuck off, Null. I don’t need to see you.”
“I disagree. You need to see me. You really do.”
“You’re wrong. I haven’t had enough of love. Rudy hadn’t had enough. There was never enough.” Boyd, hair unkempt, void of makeup, slouched back in her chair at the table opposite Null and shakily lit a cigarette.
“Nobody ever has enough. The nature of the beast.”
“You think love is a beast?” She released gouts of smoke without coughing.
“Of a kind.”
“You don’t know anything.”
“Arguable. I do know this, however: You’ve been through hell. You’re angry, and you want to show the fuckers that murdered Rudy and stopped your investigation cold just what hell feels like.”
“They don’t already know? They manufacture hell!” she shouted, getting the attention of one of the milieu therapists. The therapist, a prim woman in casual dress wearing a purple cashmere sweater stopped when she saw the scarred, wounded, and swollen face of Null. She walked off, suspiciously eyeing them both.
“Maybe we can teach them.”
“We can teach them? Are you out of your fucking mind?”
“I thought that was settled long ago. And maybe you’re forgetting your surroundings. They committed you, you know. Court ordered, in fact.”
“So, you’re saying I’m out of my mind?”
“It’s a matter of legal record. What do you want to do about it?”
“Nothing I can do. I admit I’m fucked up.”
“We’re all fucked up. The price of life in civilization.”
“I don’t know what you want, Null. I don’t know what’s on your fucked-up agenda.” She stood up hard and pounded the table harder with both fists. “What do you want? Just what the fuck do you actually want?” She sat down, spent and nearly in tears from that one moment of fulmination. The milieu therapist began prowling back to them. Null stood up and took a few steps forward, presenting a barrier against her progress. The therapist saw something in the eyes set so deep within the scarred and blotchy face—something that made her walk away.
“If I could want anything, and if you know anything, you know I can’t—I would want revenge.”
“You know what they say about revenge—that by the time you’re done, you’ll have to dig two graves.”
“That must be funny, I think, because I surpassed two graves quite a while ago.”
“It’s a high body count alright. I stopped the count at about forty.”
“You saw the web page—resolved it on your phone?”
“You sent me the address. You wanted me to see it.”
“I intended for you to see it. It was meant to make you feel better. Did it?”
Boyd stubbed out her cigarette in a paper foil ashtray, hung her head, and mumbled, “I guess it did.”
“You guess? You’re not sure?”
“I said it fucking made me feel better!” Trembling now with wide, bloodshot eyes, her hair sticking out wild and to the sides.
“Revenge then, digging optional?”
“No, justice. It felt just somehow and right.”
“Really. You don’t think they were treated unfairly? Deprived of their day in court?”
“I decided on that. No, it was fair enough. If they wanted to face the law, they could have given themselves up. They could have surrendered and had full access to the justice system, if they wanted it. They didn’t.”
“Exactly. They didn’t want it. But I think some of them may want it now.”
“You have something in mind.”
“I do, and I suspect so do you. And you know you can get out of this cracker factory whenever you want. If you submit a three-day letter to hospital administration.”
“Yeah. So what.”
“I could use your help.
“You’re talking a partnership?”
“I am.”
“Tell me how.”
“It’s not hard to dope out.”
“Pretend I’m from Mars.”
“I think I bit off more than I can chew with my initial approach. Killing and torturing the KP professionals. There are just too many of them to do it efficiently. Even with help, it’s a problem.”
“And by help you mean those warm and cuddly Gangsta Boyz of yours.”
“You’re being funny again, I think. They’re cold customers, the Gangsta Boyz. Cold but useful. I’m not really sure I can control them for much longer. Something’s always brewing with them.”
“You’re not thinking of having me arrest them, are you?”
“The Gangsta Boyz?”
“No, the fucking perverts.”
“I am. You can give them the option. You can prevent me from killing them all—stop the bloodbath. That agrees with you, doesn’t it? Your sense of justice?”
Boyd brightened up. “You have all the names and addresses—you know where all the playhouses are, don’t you, you fuck?” Null stood silent. She laughed. “You’re unreal, you are!”
“Very real. I killed a couple of upper-level men to get the data. They needed killing, badly.”
“Good cop, bad cop, then?”
“No, not at all.” He paused, thinking of how to put it, then spoke offhandedly, “Bad cop—murderous psychopath.”
* * *
“He’s got their goddamn faces up on our server on the goddamn dark web, for Christ’s sake!”
“This is just one guy?”
“We don’t know how many, but we only got one on tape. He seems to be the main guy.”
“I know. We all saw the tapes.”
“Digital camera recordings. Not really tape.”
“Figure of speech.”
It was a conference room dead center Boston at the top of One Beacon Street—huge imposing and corporate. The conference room was lit by broad windows with an expansive view of the city in fading winter light. They were seated at the long table, each with a laptop computer in front of them. Several of them were smoking. There were six of them and three were smoking using emptied Starbuck’s coffee cups as ashtrays as the offices of the law firm Chattels and Pelf were non-smoking. They didn’t care. Each one of the participants was agitated. The unhappiness was palpable.
“We have a madman on our hands,” observed Steve Privilegiata. “He’s killing profits and ratcheting up expenses.” He looked as if he were dressed for a tennis match.
An older man in khakis, tan cable-knit sweater stood and proclaimed, “Fuck killing profits, sonny—he’s killing people. We’re being targeted by a mass murdering nut job!”
“Where’s Legere? He’s the one that called this meeting!” announced a portly gray-haired woman still wearing her down jacket, despite the more than adequate heating of the law offices. “What’s he doing about this?”
“We don’t know anything about Legere. He’s a shadow that lives amongst the shadows,” offered Martha Privilegiata. “We don’t know anything and what’s worse, we’re not supposed to know anything. Aren’t we all silent partners? Investors who have nothing to do with day-to-day operations, never mind street. Legere should take care of this—he’s street. We’re not street. We don’t know anything about it and it was supposed to be kept that way. All I have to do with this Hebe Group shit is collecting my monthly dividend checks, and that’s it. How can we handle something like this? We can’t. We have got to pull out and cut our losses!” Her chest was heaving, and she was close to hyperventilating. Her husband grabbed her hand to comfort her, and she jerkily sat back down.
“Marty’s right,” said Steve Privilegiata authoritatively.
“We can’t, and you should know that by now,” said the older man in the cable knit sweater, stubbing out his cigarette. “So, go ahead and tell me you don’t know—that the rest of us don’t know. Go ahead.”
“I don’t know. This is a very quiet side financial investment. We just end our minimal involvement, whatever few strands there are remaining, eat the loss of our investment and go on our merry way. Other than the loss, I don’t see the problem.”
An older woman in a hoodie and sweatpants dragging feverishly on her cigarette with a drawn and wizened face stated the case: “I saw the tapes. Whoever this cocksucker is, he knows who we are and where we live. And he basically intends to torture and kill us all.”
“Well, he can’t just go out and do that. Let’s be realistic.” This from a mousy forty-something woman with thick glasses, a puffy face and stringy hair. “You’re fucked in the head, Beatrice.”
“No, the guy that’s coming after us is the one who’s fucked in the head. And it doesn’t seem that he’s so fucked in the head that he can’t do what he claims on the tapes he’s obviously setting out to do, which is fucking why we’re here!” Beatrice screamed back.
“Why don’t we have anyone from management here, taking charge of this situation?” asked cable-knit sweater.
Martha Privilegiata slammed her fist down on the table, startling everyone sitting down at it with a tiny simultaneous jump.
“Legere says they’re all dead!” volunteered Martha. “We all got the same e-mail with the link back to the site of the dead faces, didn’t we? Didn’t you? You didn’t recognize anyone, for god’s sake?”
They all asserted that they did.
“Someone has to be in charge, otherwise we’ll just lose everything we put into this fucking enterprise!” said Steve Privilegiata.
“Maybe if we could just abandon the whole thing and let it fall is exactly what this shitbird wants to leave us the fuck alone!” Beatrice, the wizened woman, offered.
“I think,” said Steve, “from the tape I saw, this sonofabitch is coming for every single one of us no matter what we do.”
“So, you’re saying what?” offered cable-knit sweater.
“I’m saying we have to get somebody to kill this rat bastard while we still can!”
“We already have Legere for that.”
“We do. And he’s supposed to be very capable, from what I understand. Still, I like to hedge my bets. So, to be on the safe side, we’re going to need someone else who’s—even more capable.”
“Who are we going to get to do that? Do you have any idea how many people from the group this mook killed already?”
“About forty, right?”
“Give or take. And don’t forget the fun factory in Allston. Jesus Christ, he not only torched it, but melted steel and brick right down to the fucking ground.”
“It’s true. He’s become our fucking problem, Hal. No joke.”
“Him and his people, whoever he is. Ya. No joke there.”
“Well,” said Steve Privilegiata, as if pondering the issue. “I think I have somebody in mind to take care of this fuckwad.”
“We don’t even know who he is,” complained Beatrice, the woman with the wizened face.
“We don’t have to. When we find him, we can ask him his name right before we blow his fucking brains out.”
“He mentioned his name on the tape,” answered Martha Privilegiata in a questioning tone. “Called himself ‘Null,’ said we didn’t have to worry about finding him—that he was going to find us first.”
“Good to know,” replied Steve. “Let’s make sure he finds somebody else along the way too, yes?”
“And who do you have in mind for that?” The slim man bent over in his chair with a caved-in chest, obviously bald and wearing a cap to hide it, sat up and spoke up. “Just who’s gonna handle a thing like this if it isn’t Manny Legere, whom none of us has ever met or even freakin’ seen?”
“I’ve got a guy in mind—a truly warped, sick and twisted fuck. A fuck to end all fucks, in fact.”
“So, who the fuck is he already?”
“I don’t have a name, really. Just an email and a nickname. It’s what other people call him. According to them, he doesn’t call himself anything at all.”
“Yeah, so what’s that?”
Steve Privilegiata stood up and rubbed his forehead to answer. “They call him ‘The Expert.’ I think you can guess why.”
“Well, I can’t guess, Steve, and I’ve never heard of this guy before,” Martha Privilegiata said sullenly.
“Nobody has, Marty. But from how the rumors go, he’s the best at what he does. I think we can retain him at a price.”
“Good money after bad.”
“Maybe. But with luck we can off Null, take what’s left of Hebe and get it back on track, fix the site and shore up the remaining play-houses. We may not have to sit back and watch it fall at all. In fact, we may not have any further financial need of Mr. Legere either. From what I understand off the PDF files of the books, he’s pricey enough.”
“I’m with ya, kid,” said Hal, the older guy in the maroon cable-knit sweater. “So, what does this guy do that he’s so expert at?”
“Pest control. He kills bugs dead, as the expression goes.”
“Like Raid, for god’s sake?”
“So, he’s an ace hitter, you’re saying.”
“No, I’m saying it’s like fighting fire with fire.”
Hal was irritable and fidgeted in place. “Yeah, okay, so tell me how’s that?”
“Simple. We’re simply going to send in one fucked up dude to put an end to another.”