“You’re not an equity partner, Legere,” said Steve nervously, unconsciously rubbing his smooth, spatulate hands. “You got no say.”
“I got a stake in this fucking thing.”
“You blew your stake when you failed to make the kill on Null, blew a wad of our drastically diminished cash straight down the toilet.”
“Can he actually vote on this?” challenged Hortense. “From Franking’s numbers, I don’t see he owns jack shit.”
“I got papers if ya want ‘em, girlie, otherwise, I got no time for your mouth.”
“How do we break the tie?” asked Mike, both irritated and bewildered.
“Easy-Peasy,” said Legere. “Fuck the tie. We kill him, then we bust up his crew and scatter ‘em. That’s how.” Legere was a rough man with a fat, jowly face, pig-slit eyes, no discernable neck and a bulbous nose long past broken. His cheeks were full of rum-blossoms, but not from alcohol. No, they were there from a lifetime continuum of hardcore violence. When he spoke, it sounded like a foghorn blasting right in your face. He was pushing sixty but looked older. His hair was gray, thin and slicked back. If there was one word to describe him, it would be imposing. He stood a broad, thick six-six.
“Can’t we buy him off?”
“That’d be great, Steve,” said Beatrice before entering a coughing jag in a gout of her own cigarette smoke. “Hasn’t that cocksucker taken enough of our money, costing us money, basically just about wiping us right the fuck out? Ya think?”
“You can’t buy off a sick fuck like Null, so save your pennies, boys and girls.”
“We are saving our pennies, Legere, because we’re not paying you a dime anymore.”
“That don’t matter. I’ll do it for my equity stake in the profits once we’re back online. You can vote to give me a bonus if you think I deserve one by then.”
“Can’t we just vote to get rid of this jamoke?” whined Hortense.
“Sure, but you can’t do that legally. Not that any of what we’re doin’ here is legal by any stretch.”
“But we have ethics,” said Steve absently, distracted by the hunt for a solution. “If Legere has papers showing an equity stake, then he has voting power, and that means we’re deadlocked.”
“Not necessarily. There’s one voice we haven’t heard from. He has the largest equity stake remaining. Maybe we should get in touch with him. Ain’t he like a Skype call away from any laptop with good WIFI or what?”
“We’re not doing that.”
“Why not? Wouldn’t he just love to hear from us?”
“You know he wouldn’t,” Steve said gravely.
“Get to the point. Nobody wants to contact him, nobody wants to disturb him at all. Just what are you trying to get at, Manny?” Mike asked, trying to contain his unrest.
“Simple. We kill the fucking mutt.”
“What do you mean we?” Steve sneered.
“I’ll do it.”
“Like you’ve had so much luck with that up till now,” Beatrice countered.
“I’ve learned a few things since then,” Legere grunted.
“Why should anyone have to kill him?” asked Martha with seeming innocence, smoothing back strawberry blonde hair. “Isn’t there some sort of deal we can make? You said he’s the meth king of Boston, right? So he does business. Maybe we need to do business with him.”
“He’s doing business with us already, in case you didn’t already know it—his kind of business.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“You’re inexperienced, Steve. You just don’t know, so let me lay it out for you. This guy’s a psycho. He’s not like a regular human being, more like a machine. A cyborg, a fucking zombie. Boston PD has him listed as officially dead, info I got from a friendly uniform down at One Schroeder. He does what he does because he does it and for no other reason than that. He doesn’t care about money, he doesn’t mind pain, and he doesn’t make deals. He’s like an act of god. Maybe he even thinks of himself as god.”
“He’s an agent of chaos, like the Joker in that Batman movie? Doing it just because he can? For its own sake?” Martha asked, actually fascinated.
“That’s just a fantasy out of a comic book. This mutt’s got a purpose, that much is clear. He’s got one fuck of a king-sized vendetta against kiddie porn, against the trafficking we do, and he’s not going to stop until Hebe Group goes belly up. Maybe a relative, maybe his own kid, somebody he knew was affected by it. So, he focuses on us.”
“Maybe it was a lost love,” sighed Hortense.
“That’s what you don’t get. That’s why he’s such a problem. He doesn’t love, he doesn’t hate, he doesn’t feel anything. Just like his name. Null. That’s what this fucker is—Mr. Nobody. Which doesn’t at all stop him from being a man with a plan.”
“Yeah. Some plan. Take us down. Well, this is one fuck of a way to go about it!” Steve said, getting up to pace about the conference room and walk off some of his mounting frustration. “Just brilliant!”
“Ain’t it though?” Legere asked ruefully. “Lemme give you an education.”
“Just dandy,” shouted Steve. “Go ahead, professor, educate us.”
“Gladly, Steve, gladly,” Legere said with a smirk and winked. “We’ve all seen the streaming video captures from the playhouse in Brookline to the twink hotel on Soldier’s Field Road. He’s a capable sick fuck, handy with weapons, good in a brawl, and he’s got heavy funding from a meth operation we can’t touch with a crew of vicious niggers backing his play. He’s got one of the not-so-clueless BPD ranking cops to play along with him. So far, he’s killed off management and just about every Hebe employee of record, including the comptroller so that our cash transfers and Bitcoin conversions are fucked, just about all the playhouses are down, either whacked out by Null or turning themselves in voluntarily to the cop. I still don’t get what their deal is.”
“Is that it, Legere—is that what you’ve come to tell us? As someone once said, it’s a null set.”
“Funny. You’re a freakin’ comedian.”
“I try.”
“No, Steve, there’s more.” Legere spoke like he was reading items off a to-do list, instead of Null’s successful assault against Hebe Group. “Null’s burned down most of the dark web servers; the chatrooms are disabled and the most heavily trafficked of our websites is a page showing cell phone cam shots of all the people this fucker whacked out. Worse, he co-opted a hitwoman I hired to ambush him who’s now palling around with him and the cop. Meanwhile, your independent hitman’s up on the page, my two snipers are down at Mass General and Hebe Group at this very moment is officially cash poor. That do it for ya?”
“Like we didn’t know that?” Steve answered.
“Yeah, well, here’s an item or two that may have escaped your notice. He’s not done yet.”
“What do you mean?” Martha asked in a small voice.
“Zombie fuck Null, as they call him on the street, is coming after everyone that’s left, and that means all of you and definitely me. He won’t stop until we’re dead. And if he’s the kind of psycho I think he is, he’ll go after your children and relatives too. Even your grandparents. He’s got time, money, a crew and a psychosis we can’t even begin to understand. If we don’t stop him, nobody will.”
“But doesn’t he realize all the good we do for the children and even the teens?” Martha asked with genuine conviction. “Without us, they’d starve and freeze to death out on the street, overdose on drugs and die, or get into foster care and wind up sexually abused. Can’t he see that we give them a purpose and hope for the future? Medical care, nice clothes, food, shelter, even toys? He doesn’t get what an actual blessing we are to them!”
“No, Martha. He don’t see it that way. He thinks that if you pimp children out as whores and profit from it, you should die for the privilege. That’s the long and the short of it.”
“But we’re not even involved—we’re just equity partners, investors. We don’t do any of that.”
“Problem is, Martha, he thinks that by making money on pedophiles fucking kiddies or getting off watching that on the dark web, you’re just as guilty as the ones doing the fucking.”
“But we aren’t.”
“What about Hal?” said Steve. “He was a little more, um, involved, you know?”
“Funny thing,” Legere intoned with his foghorn voice. “I don’t see Hal here at all. Wasn’t he supposed to be in on this meeting?”
“He never showed,” Steve said, puzzled.
Martha’s eyes went wide, and she spoke in a loud whisper, “Jesus Christ, you don’t really think that—?”
“Yeah,” Legere interrupted, blowing hard on the foghorn. “I really do.”
* * *
“What the hell happened to you?” asked Janis, expressing seeming motherly concern. “You’re sweaty, filthy, and bloody as fuck!”
“It’s not my blood,” said Null.
“I guessed that.”
“Do you think I should shower?”
“Definitely. How many years has it been do you think?”
“I lost count. Better go and do it then.”
“Sure. But first, where’s Kay?”
“Down at One Schroeder, having her KP investigation taken away from her.”
“They got wind of the dark web activities, didn’t they?”
“You mean the FBI?”
“Who else?”
“Well, it wouldn’t be BPD, and that’s for sure. They were all happy making KP OC. But the FBI wants their cut, take over the operation.”
“That could cause problems, although nothing too terrible.”
“Why do you say that? You do stink, by the way.”
“You covered that already. I say that because we’re just about done.”
“Really, I don’t feel like we’ve done very much of anything.”
“Oh but we have. Hebe Group senior management are all dead. Their US server backbone and cloud pretty much shut down, most employees deceased. Their dark web presence has been whittled down to a few small sites and their main site carries the faces of the dead, courtesy of Gangsta Boyz IT whiz Brother Ray.”
“Who’s he?”
“He works for me. They all work for me.”
“They don’t give a shit a white guy is the shot caller?”
“They do. But they claim to give more of a shit about the money. I make sure it comes pumping in and I also make sure everyone slinging meth, and even those who don’t, get a fair cut. I pay generously. Sure, at least one or two of them want me in the ground – but they don’t want to screw up their cashflow. And they also don’t want to die in the process. So I’m good. For now.”
“Good luck with that. I have no use for a crew—I work alone.”
“Maybe in the past, but right now, you’re in my crew. I paid you already, didn’t I?”
“Yeah, and thanks for that. A little nervous black kid with a red bandana around his head dropped by with a shopping bag full of kale, and not the kind you make soup with.”
“That would be Do-rag, a most useful guy. My fixer.”
“So, what’s on the agenda now, Mr. shot caller?”
“As you so sagely pointed out, a shower for me. Then we have to figure out how Kay is going to deal with the feebs nipping at her heels down at One Schroeder. There are, by my last count, twelve playhouses left. We’ll divide them up. I’ll take one half, you and Kay take the other.”
“What if I want to partner with you instead of Kay?”
“It makes no difference to me. Just as long as you can handle what I’m going to do when I do it.”
“What do you mean?”
“Janis. I only do one thing. Just one thing.”
“Oh. That. Yeah, I think I can handle it now. Hell, I’ll even pitch in.”
“You can put the Beretta away, you know, unless you’re planning to shoot me.”
“I forgot. I’ve been a bit jumpy, knowing Legere and his little helpers are out to get me.”
“You’re right. They are. We’re down to the wire now. If it wasn’t this way before, this is how it is now: It’s either us or them. And Legere is going to be particularly aggressive. He won’t go after a Boston cop though, not directly, so you’re safer here in Kay’s place than you’d be anywhere else.”
Janis put the lavender Beretta Pico down on the coffee table and gazed at Null, evaluating him. She could only imagine the things he had done during the past two nights, but whatever they were, she was sure they contained all his favorite elements (if Null could be said to have any favorites about anything at all): blood, gore, violence, torture and finally death. She didn’t want to think about it, yet it strongly invaded her thoughts, nonetheless. She couldn’t stop it.
Being close to Null for any length of time inspired in Janis an odd combination of queasiness and attraction. The fact of it made her tremble ever so slightly.
“Maybe he’s cooled off. He hasn’t tried anything since the snipers, you know.”
“No, he’s already started, and he’s going to figure a way to come at us and come at us heavy.”
“You mean he’s coming after you.”
“No, I mean all of us.”
“Well, so far there’s been nothing.”
“I wouldn’t say that.”
“No, what would you say then?”
“I’d say that Kay’s problem down at One Schroeder facing down the feebs is Legere’s final opening gambit.”