“We have time, so don’t stress, Marty,” said Steve Privilegiata, dragging an American Tourister Bedford suitcase down mauve carpeted steps to the light-filled, airy den of his split-level house in Wollaston. His wife, Martha, was in the upstairs bedroom packing, frantic. Her voice was a keening wail when she responded, stuffing clothes in another American Tourister bag.
“How can you say we have time? Didn’t you see the streams? The motherfucking streams!”
“He only got Hal. Not the rest of the partners, and you know what he was doing down at the twink hotel. Don’t worry. We have plenty of time to bail.”
“You’re underestimating the guy who destroyed our business, our income, and put us in the hole. He’s killed everybody involved—why not us?”
“The other partners aren’t showing up on the dead-face page yet or in the streaming emails, you know.”
“Legere did! Your fucking so-called “Expert” did! We’d better get the fuck out of here before we do too!”
“I don’t think this Null fuck wants us. Did you check with Hortense and Beatrice?”
“I just got voice mail.”
“Do you need any help with the other bags?”
“What do you think? Of course I do; get your ass up here!”
“I will. Did you get a hold of Mike?”
“Voicemail there too. He’s probably long gone by now. Where we should be!”
“You see? That asshole didn’t get any of them.”
Steve’s chuckling was cut short.
“Oh, but actually I did,” Null said calmly, standing in the center of the room, making a long shadow in the sunlight. “My IT guy Brother Ray hasn’t had time to update what you call the dead-face page yet. Good name for that, by the way. He’s been busy helping me run the twink hotel, helping me get it ready for conversion to new management. As for the videos, there couldn’t be any of your friends, or even of Legere. It wasn’t expedient at the time to capture their final moments. But even if there were any, you wouldn’t be able to view them. No matter.”
Panicking, but holding it together weakly, Steve said with quiet rage, “You’ve got a wounded shoulder, Null. That says I can take you.”
Null leveled the Heckler at him, the silencer still attached. “Ten rounds a second says you can’t.”
“Is that actually even true?”
“Give or take.”
“That suppressor will still make a loud noise. What will the neighbors think?” Steve didn’t notice it himself, but Null did. He was hyperventilating very quietly.
“It’s louder than I would like, that’s true, but through these walls it should just sound like a prominent popping. And I won’t need too many pops to deal with you. Response time won’t be all that fast, regardless.”
“Jesus, Steve, are you coming up here to help me or what?!” called Martha from the upstairs bedroom in exasperation.
“Tell her to come down, Steve. Nicely, if you please.”
With a hesitant lack of cheer, Steve did exactly that.
Martha didn’t come down.
They stood there silently for a minute, the only sound being a slight, wooden creaking.
“Oh, you two are just so sly,” said Null in his flat lack of inflection. “Stay there for a moment, won’t you?”
“Umm, sure.”
“No, I suppose you won’t.”
Null fired two quick rounds from the Heckler into Steve’s midsection, which caused him to topple down immediately to the plush mauve carpeting, groaning and clutching at his abdomen. Blood pumped out in a thick gout from his belly and stained the mauve rug a brighter color red than that of Null’s injured right shoulder.
“That’ll hold you.”
Null walked out the front door where he had first entered and stepped off the flagstone walkway onto the freshly trimmed lawn to survey the perimeter of the house. He found Martha dragging herself forward like an arm baby, one of her legs visibly twisted and swollen. She made grunting sounds, moving herself forward toward the street. Null blocked her progress.
“You won’t make it that way, Martha.”
“I can try, can’t I?” she grunted.
“No, Martha, you can’t.”
Null knelt down, maneuvered both his arms under her, cradled her, rose up and carried her over the threshold like a bride and deposited her onto the bloodied mauve rug near the wailing, writhing Steve.
“You’re a smart one, Martha. You sized up the situation right away and made the best move you could. You had something like a twenty-five percent chance of not injuring one or both of your legs when you hit the ground. A reasonable risk, considering that right now you have a zero percent chance of getting out of this alive.”
“Fuck you, sonofabitch!”
“I suppose I’d feel the same if I could feel anything.”
“Please, call nine-one-one! Get me to a fucking hospital!”
“No, Steve, that would only happen if you had any expectation of recovery. Let me make it clear—you don’t.”
“Jesus Christ, help me!”
“No one’s coming to help you, Steve. Call to your god all you want. I’m the only answer you’ll get.”
“You’re no fucking answer!”
“Well, I’m certainly not the question. Maybe the question was what you were actually doing to make such easy profit for so long. If not me, then maybe this moment is the answer to that. I don’t believe in god, or anything for that matter. But if you want to believe god answers the cries of the wounded, abused and tormented, don’t you think he might have heard the cries of the children you whored out to pedophiliac perverts and scum? And if your god doesn’t answer your cries for help, don’t you think it might just be because he’s answering their cries instead? And maybe, just maybe, I’m the actual answer to your cries as well?”
“You’re the cause of the problem, you fucking lunatic!”
“No, Steve. I think you caused the problem by selling the rape of children for money six ways to Sunday. If it weren’t for that, I’d be no problem at all.”
“We’ll just pay the fucker!” Martha cried from the rug, moving herself to the nearest chair—a Bentwood rocker—and awkwardly hoisting herself into it, nearly falling off as it tipped abruptly forward. “Steve, give him the accounts, whatever we’ve got. Pay him off and get rid of him!”
Steve interrupted his loud wailing to say with pinched grunting, “I’m dying!”
“No, Steve,” replied Null casually. “You’re just in pain—terrific pain, no doubt. But just pain. You have quite a few hours before you actually die, and I intend to make good use of them.”
“Hospital! Get me to a hospital, for God’s sake!”
“No, it appears God has other plans for you.”
“Hey, fuckbag, address your attention over here to me. I’m the coherent one. Steve’s out of his mind with pain. He can’t help you.”
Steve returned to inarticulate wailing and sobbing.
“It’s a matter of opinion, but you have a point.”
“I’m the lucid one. Poor Steve can’t handle it.”
“It shouldn’t be that bad—he’s certainly in shock by now. Endorphins should already have been dulling some of the pain.”
“Steve’s always been a bit too sensitive for his own good.”
“I don’t doubt it. But not very sensitive to the needs of children, though, was he? No, he was perfectly callous enough to make bank on kiddie porn, kiddie sex trafficking, white slavery. That was all just a matter of business. Nothing personal.”
“It wasn’t personal! Not ever! We never touched a single child. Not once!”
“Oh, I haven’t forgotten about you, don’t’ worry.”
“I didn’t think you did.”
“You felt okay about that, then?”
“Why not? Who knows what atrocities a money market fund underwrites these days? For all we know, Fidelity Investments makes recurring gains off Boko Haram and ISIS straight into some wage-slave’s 401k.”
Steve continued writhing noisily on the ruined carpeting.
“How’s the leg?”
“Broken, I think.”
“Comminuted fracture, probably, judging from the petechiae on the lower thigh. Should be painful, shock or not.”
“So I guess I’m in shock too.”
“I guess you are.”
“It’s not that bad.”
“You’re tougher than Steve.”
“Who isn’t?”
“Okay, Martha, tell me how you were all right profiting off kiddie porn, how—”
“Oh fucking save it, Null, will you? Grow up! Do you want to hear my spiel about how we’re actually helping the little rug rats? Giving them a better life than they might have had otherwise? How we saved them from terrible abuse in foster care and a living death on the street? You wouldn’t buy that, would you?”
“No, probably not.”
“Of course not. You’ve heard it all before, right?”
“Sure. Something about kids as commodities like loaves of bread?”
“Bread? Are you fucking kidding me? They’re livestock, baby! And you’re a pussy if you feel sorry for the pig you eat. You’re not a pussy, Null, are you?”
“No, I don’t think so.”
“Right fucking on! This is capitalism, you fucking cretin! Capitalism, do you get it? The savvy, the advantaged, the predators, the alphas—us! The ones with the real balls! We make fantastic money on the backs of sad human victims. Workers, wage-slaves, laborers, disgusting dregs, human sweatshop livestock suffering all over the world, from here to China! The lowest of the low. It’s a ginormous pyramid scheme and unwanted, abandoned children are at the very base of it, just like their parents, uncles and aunts. Is it class warfare? Fuck, this is the real new world order. Winners and losers, makers and takers. That’s the new world order. That’s how it’s done. Don’t you get it?”
“I get it. You’re the actual takers and preschool children violated on the cheap, whored out on the dark web, then sold into slavery in their teens are the actual makers.”
“Ya think? That’s the big joke, you stupid schmuck. We flipped Marx: we’re the takers and we grind the makers into the dust. We even have them believing that they’re the parasites! The takers! It’s a fucking feeding frenzy, a goddamn party, and you had to come in and piss all over it. You’re a fucking menace to society. You’re the one who should be bleeding on the rug.”
“I admire your honesty.”
“I knew you would.” Martha smiled at Null flirtatiously, opened liquid green eyes wide. “Now can we talk deal?”
“Sure we can. What do you have in mind?
“What is it you need?”
“I’m a funny kind of guy you can’t really understand. I don’t need anything you have. I definitely don’t need your money. You can keep that.”
“Terrific. Okay, then. So, what do you want? Me maybe? I’m pretty great in the hay, you know, fractured leg notwithstanding.” She smiled and winked in a strained way.
“You have me there too. I really don’t want for anything in that way either, no offense meant.”
“None taken.”
“We’re somewhere near an agreement,” Null conceded.
“See? This is progress. The art of the deal. Tell me, what can I interest you in, then?”
“Interest me? Oh, Martha, you’re definitely the shrewder one of the two. No doubt.”
“So tell me.”
“Well, I’m curious about something. How can someone who has all the human feeling in the world, all sorts of empathy, someone who cries at sad movies and adores babies—”
“You know that’s true. And Steve and I were getting ready to try to have a baby of our own too, now that you mention it.”
“I knew that about you right away, Martha. Indeed. So, please tell me then. People say I’m an unfeeling, sadistic monster, which really can’t be true, by the way, since you have to feel something in order to be a sadist. And I don’t. Now, how is it that someone like you with all that feeling can be completely indifferent and cold about processing children through a virtual meat grinder for profit. It doesn’t affect you at all. And you don’t even enjoy it.”
“Well, I’m really not all that unfeeling, to be truthful. I actually do sort of enjoy our position in the food chain, so to speak.”
“That would make me the apex predator in this case, then.”
“Exactly.”
“An excellent answer! Absolutely wonderful. Well done, Martha.”
“Thanks. So, like, is that it?”
“That’s it.”
“You’re right, Null. I really don’t understand you.”
“I have an annoying habit of being right most of the time.”
“You’re right again—irony. And that’s double fucking annoying in itself.”
“I’m tautological.”
“So, we’re all done now? I can call an ambulance now to get us both to the hospital so Steve doesn’t croak on the rug? You’ll go?”
Null walked over to the window by the upright piano and gazed out at the afternoon skyline for a moment. It was a pleasant, pastoral scene, with a beautiful sunset coming.
“What are you doing?”
“I’m drawing the blinds.”
Martha suddenly felt a knot in her stomach. She grabbed hard at the arms of the rocker and her voice went shrill.
“But, but I thought you said we had a deal!”
“No, we never said we had any deal. I said we were close to agreement. And we still are. But you did interest me. Anyway, we don’t want the neighbors peeping in.”
“What are you going to do?”
“Nothing much. I’m going to give you the same chance you gave to those children.”
“But what did we agree to then?”
“That I am the apex predator.”
“You can’t be serious!”
“The truth is, Martha, I honestly can’t be anything but serious. Back to business, though. You obviously like doing business, so, here, let me start you off.”
Null drew the Heckler again from the copious pocket of his formless topcoat and matter-of-factly put two nine-millimeter rounds in Martha’s stomach. She rolled forward off the Bentwood rocker (that rocked with her) like a comical rag doll. She quickly joined Steve in being well beyond speech, writhing on the rug, blending with him into a dissonant, pinched noise.
Null located the stereo, which had a five CD changer, popped in a disk of Otis Rush’s Cobra recordings he spied easily, cranked the volume up high and went back over to Martha and Steve. He removed his coat, folded it neatly and put it on the plush off-white easy chair, rested the Heckler, the Browning and the Bushmaster both on top of it. Then he removed the machete from his neck where it hung from a lanyard, grabbed its handle with the lanyard swinging like a whip, and squatted down on the rug next to the writhing Steve, saying to him gently, though loud enough and close enough to be heard.
“We’ll give Martha some time to reflect. Let’s start with you.”