“Just take it easy with that cute piece there, Janis, alright?”
“Take him down, Expert,” she ordered.
“Let’s discuss it first.”
“You don’t know his real name?” Null asked.
“That’s all this fuck goes by,” she replied. “Nobody ever wanted to get close enough to find out more.”
“All I know is that he’s an expert at boredom.”
“You know, for a dead man, you got a mouth,” the Expert sneered.
“Is that a compliment? I’m not sure,” Null said, perplexed and no longer breathing very hard. He seemed relaxed.
“You’re siding with a corpse, Janis, when you should be making a deal with me,” the Expert whined.
“What kind of deal?”
“How to squeeze money out of a dead man.”
“You think that’ll happen?”
“We can fix it to make it happen.”
“You’re live streaming this, genius. How the fuck do you think you can fix that?” she taunted.
The Expert sighed and slouched a little. “Yeah, you have a point.”
“Like I said, cut him loose.”
“But I like him that way, and maybe I can still make a go of torturing him before I get tired of it and just whack him out. Maybe if I throw you in as a bonus, that’ll make up for the lack of suffering. You’re not really showing yourself to be very loyal to the cause here, you know. I don’t think Hebe Group will consider hiring you again after this feed.”
“Fuck the feed.”
“We could do that.”
“You’re stalling.”
“You gonna shoot me?”
“You know I will.”
The Expert shrugged. “Yeah. I know you will.” He slowly raised his hands up, and Janis suddenly fell to the concrete basement floor twitching.
Lead wires were extending out of the Expert’s pants pockets and he produced a giddy laugh, watching Janis helpless on the floor. The leads were now attached to her.
“It’s amazing what a nine-volt battery can do. Multiple transformers and components in the little doohickey boost the voltage in the circuit to at least 20,000 volts and reduces the amperage. Could go up to about one-hundred-fifty thousand, if you like. What do you think?”
Janis made choking noises.
The Expert set the mini-taser down, the leads still connected to Janis, and turned his attention to Null. “It’s a puzzle, I admit,” he said, rubbing his chin and looking thoughtful. “Just what to do with it. Shrugging his shoulders again, The Expert reached into his capacious khaki pockets and produced the switchblade again. It made a curt “snick” sound opening.
“I guess I’ll just have to wing the torture part. At least they can’t say I didn’t try.”
“Forgive me if I fall asleep.”
“A wit to the end, aren’t we?”
“Who’s we?”
“I’ll show you.”
In a clumsy move meant to show insouciant grace, the Expert slashed a line across Null’s stomach.
“Jesus, you didn’t even fucking flinch. What the fuck is the matter with you? Don’t you know how to suffer?”
“They broke me of the habit, The Family. I repaid the debt. I broke them of the habit of being alive.”
“You’re going to require some work,” the Expert replied.
“You won’t.”
“Spoken like a man who doesn’t realize he’s going to die—the dead man walking actually becoming a true corpse.”
“No. Spoken like a man who doesn’t give a shit.”
“I don’t understand.”
“You’d better see to Janis before her heart stops.”
The Expert grunted. “Fine.” He saw to Janis quickly, kneeling down, powering off the unit, removing the leads and pocketing the Pico Lavender Beretta. Janis just lay there panting and twitching every few minutes.
“Back to you, Mr. Null. Where were we?”
“You were about to slice me up for the benefit of the continuous dark web stream.”
“It’s for a torrent, Mr. Null. You know what a torrent is, don’t you? To be downloaded, viewed and enjoyed later by all involved.”
“More illegal sharing software.”
“Yes, and this will be quite illegal. But you don’t really care about that, do you?”
“I’m beyond caring.”
“Try and make it look good, Mr. Null. Give us a scream or two, some writhing maybe. At least pretend you’re engaged and in the moment, please.”
“Sorry, you’ll have to take me as I am.”
The Expert shrugged.
“It’ll have to do then.”
“What was that?”
“What was what, Mr. Null? I didn’t hear anything.”
“It sounded like a shot.”
“If you don’t care, Mr. Null, then why the corny dodge? It’s all just so disappointing.”
As the Expert raised his arm to slash at Null again, he stopped mid-motion.
“Fuck. I heard that.”
“Two shots now, I think.”
The Expert turned, blocking Null’s vision, but he recognized the voice.
“Make another move, fuck-o, and the next bullet goes in your head.”
“Who the fuck are you?”
Null gave an uninflected answer. “Chaos gets the better of us all.”
“What the fuck is that supposed to mean?” The Expert cried in exasperated frustration.
Null’s response lacked humor. “It means that Lieutenant Detective Kay Boyd of the Boston PD Organized Crime Task Force has you square in the sights of her non-regulation Sig-Sauer. She’s a pretty fair shot even with a Kalashnikov KR9. Actually, I remember her hitting a target a fair distance away once upon a time on George’s Island.”
“Don’t you ever shut up?”
“He likes to talk, or haven’t you realized that by now?” sneered Boyd. “Now take that nice purple Beretta Pico out of your pocket and toss it on the floor or I’ll shoot your eyes out. Slowly, please.”
The Expert grudgingly obliged, moving carefully. He cleared his throat.
“So, are you really going to arrest me now? Really?”
“You have any alternative ideas?
“I have an external drive on my laptop. Take it and go and let me finish up with numbnuts here.”
“And why would I ever do that—Expert is it? That’s the alias you go by?”
“Hey, it’s my work ID, okay? This is business. Just take the fucking drive and go.”
“Why, what’s on it?”
“It houses my Bitcoin wallet. I have enough blockchains stored to translate to a tidy sum on any one of a number of exchanges. Virtually untraceable, it’s the perfect dark web payout. Nobody knows from nothin’.”
“I heard it’s volatile. Goes up, down and sideways. Hither, thither and yon.”
“Whatever. It still has value so you should hurry and cash it in though, before the next big drop in the market.”
“No, I think I’ll just kill you now and take the drive anyway.”
“You don’t know where it is.”
“After I kill you, I can take my time finding it, though, can’t I?”
“You don’t really want to kill him, Boyd, do you?” Null asked placidly.
“Great. This guy just won’t shut up!”
“Don’t make me fire the Sig again, Expert. I might not miss.”
“Can I put my arms down at least? They’re getting tired.”
“Keep them up till I say otherwise, fuck-o.”
“Fuck!”
“No, Null, I suppose I really don’t want to kill him. Not really.”
“I thought not. That’s okay.”
“Why is that okay? Why is anything about this okay?” the Expert whined.
“It’s okay because we’re both live streaming and being recorded for widely distributed torrent downloads.”
“So? They’ll use it to blackmail me or something?”
“I doubt it.”
“Will you two just get a room already? Jesus!” the Expert shouted.
“It would be tempting to shoot him.”
“I can understand that. But it wouldn’t be the best idea to be recorded doing that.”
“I see your point.”
Janis began moaning from the floor, slowly coming around.
“You should help Janis get up and have her release me while you keep the Expert in line with the Sig.
With that, Janis made more noises, forcing herself up into a seated position on the dusty concrete, looking dazed.
“Okay. Then what? Since we’re live streaming and being recorded for torrent downloads, whatever the fuck that is.”
“Well, everybody in Boston knows about me, even if they claim not to know about me.”
“So? What does that have to do with the price of tea in China?”
“I don’t think I’ll be surprising anybody, do you?”
“I think you’re always a surprise.”
“Jesus, you two!”
“Shut up, Expert. You’ll speak when I tell you to.”
He nodded shakily, squinting his eyes as the wheels of his mind began spinning. He was calculating a way out of the situation all too obviously. He looked feral with a smoldering anger.
“As I said, it’ll come as no surprise.”
“I’ll bite. What will?”
“When I kill the Expert, live streaming and stored for torrent downloads to get a message to Hebe Group and, more importantly, to a man named Legere.”
“Who the fuck is he?”
“He’s my kiddie porn counterpart who wants us both dead.”