“How’s the food?”
“Not so great here at Lemuel Shattuck. It would be better if I was at some ritzy place like McClean’s, but my health plan only covers this place.”
“But it’s not too bad.”
“Edible. It’s not like I’m looking forward to eating.”
“What are you looking forward to?”
“Nothing. I have nothing to look forward to.”
“They tell you that’s not true?”
“Yeah.”
“They would.”
A shadow passed repeatedly over the big picture window of the solarium at the Lemuel Shattuck Hospital visiting area. The middle-aged woman was dressed in pajamas and a robe, her face bedraggled and puffy, pretty despite no make-up. The man sitting across from her was a horror of scars on his wreck of a face, shaded drastically in a porkpie hat, his scrawny body engulfed in an overcoat.
He lit a cigarette, and she accepted it gratefully.
“How’s the detox?”
“I’m out of it.”
“Still need a drink, though.”
“Like God needs worshippers.”
The shadow swung past like a pendulum.
“You know it will kill you.”
“I’d like to die, so fine.”
“That’s why you’re here.”
“It’s what I get for being honest in therapy.”
“This time you know it’s not your fault.”
“I don’t know anything.”
“You know who I am?”
“A criminal. A monster. And I made you.”
“You did. But this time you didn’t make what happened.”
“Sure I did. I went after them.”
“You made kiddie porn an OC deal.”
“They needed to be gotten.”
“And did you get them?”
“I got some. It wasn’t enough.”
“There’s a lot of them.”
“There are.”
“And they got to you.”
“They did.”
“They got to Rudy.”
“I don’t need to tell you.”
“You don’t. It was by the numbers: They did some opposition research, found out all about you.”
The cigarette went flying, making sparks on the floor. Her hands were trembling, eyes glazed, darting.
“Rudy’s daycare!” she cried and restrained herself. No one came in response. She was nervously looking for possibly a milieu therapist or a nurse.
“That’s right. Rudy’s daycare. Edward Brooke Child Services. They snatched him. Paid the staff not to know anything, scared them out of their wits with one or two big guns, whisked him away.”
“Don’t say it. Just don’t.”
“But it needs to be said, don’t you think?”
“You can’t hurt me.”
“I’m not trying to hurt you.”
“That’s all you do: pain and death.”
“That’s right. All I do. Sometimes life even makes me do other things, though. This is part of that. It needs to be said; either you do it or I will.”
“No.” Tears now, her frame crumbling into itself, slumped in the robe in her seat, shaking.
“I gave him to you to love. And did you?”
“You know I did.” Trembling. Loud: “I did!”
“Then he had at least some love in his life. More than some ever get.”
“It wasn’t enough.”
“It’s never enough. Just say it.”
“Go fuck yourself.”
“Fine. I will then. It was time to make you stop. So, they took him. They made movies with him. Even left you a thumb drive full of them. They played him out fast. Then they served him up to a special man. If you want to call what he is a man.”
“Shut the fuck up!”
“Right. He anally raped Rudy’s seventy-five-pound little body until the kid went limp. Then, when there was nothing left in him anymore, and he was done, he broke his neck. Must have been like breaking the neck of a chicken. Easy. Clean as you please. No real resistance.”
“They laughed,” she sobbed.
“No. Nobody laughed. It was a job. A somber job. The special man might have smiled, though. Special.”
“It was revenge. I was stupid.”
“No. You were playing by some rules. They play by no rules at all. Big advantage.”
“It’s my fault.”
“No. It’s their fault.”
“And what happens next?”
“Criminal investigation, right? Boston’s best bringing them down—it’s personal now, being one of their own. They’ll take care of it, right?”
“You don’t believe that.”
“Cigarette?”
“No, they disgust me. I disgust me. Why are you here?”
“You know why.”
“Nobody gets your agenda, Null. Nobody. Not even me.”
“Who am I?”
“Joseph Xavier Null. You’re a criminal, a murderer—and I guess now the crystal meth king of Boston.”
“All true, especially the latter. So, who better than me to put the squeeze on KP to find who murdered Rudy?”
“For what? To kill him for me?”
“No. I was hoping you’d do that after I gave him to you.”
“I’m not a murderer, Null.”
“Tell that to Dr. Benway.”
“You know he had to die.”
“I know it. Just as you know the human filth that fucked a child to death for fun has got to die. Only he has to die in pain—a long stretch of agony. Nothing else will do.”
“As if that would solve it.”
“It wouldn’t.”
“And it wouldn’t bring Rudy back.”
“No.” Null gave Boyd his deep, empty look, smacked his lips. “But it might bring you back.”
“So, fine—do it. Go ahead. I don’t care. I can’t stop you. Just leave me alone.”
Null shook his head. “No. I have plans for you.”
“You’re going to try and make me a murderer. No thanks.”
“You’re already that. But you’re going to help me.”
“Help you what? Find the guy?”
“No. I’ll find him. But what I have to do is a bigger job, harder.”
“You’re insane.”
“That was my last clinical diagnosis.”
“I can’t stand this anymore!” She stood wildly, lurching to leave.
Null’s quiet, cheerless voice stopped her: “It’s bigger than one guy. A lot bigger.”
“There’s nothing bigger than that to me.”
“Maybe there is.”
Null looked up at her with a wounded, steely expression on his scarred face, spoke just above a whisper. “I’m coming after them all, you know. All of them. All.”
“All of whom? What are you talking about?”
“The KP operators of Boston—maybe all of New England. Every single one.”
“And do what? Kill them all?”
It was as if he were describing the weather outside: a sun-dappled, gray streaked Boston day. “That’s right. I’m going to kill every single last one of them.”
“You actually think you can do that? You think that’ll work? You’re snorting your own fucking product is what’s happening.”
He nodded. “Every now and then, yes. Doesn’t change the fact.”
“And mass murder will be your justice? Drop the meth!”
“Exactly. And I will make them die in pain, for the sake of an ethical kind of justice.”
“Since when can torture and mass murder be made an ethical justice?”
“What I’ve read in Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Blue and Brown Books asserts that possibility. I’ll test it out. I don’t mind a few—casualties. Similar reasoning worked for George W. Bush.”
“You’re sick! You should be in here, not me!”
“It’s a fair point. But it’s the pre-determined course of my drive to continue living. I will, as you say, torture and murder every single person involved in the kiddie porn business in Boston, no matter who they are, where they are, what they are, even if they just invested in it or acted as a key grip on a movie set. Every single one of them involved will die, screaming in agony, if I’m lucky.”
“It can’t be done. They’ll kill you.”
“If so, then that will solve my end of the problem. But I’ve been very lucky insofar as staying alive. I should have been killed a while back. Chalk it up to God, if you want.
“We both know there is no God.”
“And I’m even luckier with killing.”
“Your luck will run out.”
“Maybe. But fortune favors the favored, now doesn’t it?”
Her eyes narrowed and her posture straightened. The rage was present. She threw up her hands. “What do you want me to do, you sick fuck – give you my goddamn blessing? Well forget it!”
“No. I just wanted you to know what was going to happen. Maybe it’ll help you get out of here. Maybe you’ll want to join in.”
“Why would I?”
“You said revenge is not enough?”
“There is no enough anymore.”
“Bringing you back was a thought.”
“I don’t know. I can’t think. I can never come back.”
“But you will—and none of them will. They’re guilty. They all killed Rudy. And at the very least, I will be avenged.”
“You? What does this have to do with you?”
“You forget. I rescued him from the pedophile gangsters, made them pay. Gave him to you. And now they’ve taken him back and murdered him. Should I let that go?”
“So, you’ll make them pay again?”
“Yes, and this time I’ll take everything from them. I will leave them nothing—nothing for anyone to inherit. Nothing to mourn. Scorched earth.”
“You’ve lost it, Null. You have no idea what you’re going to do, do you? Of course you don’t. You need to check yourself in here. You’re fucked!”
“Oh, I’m beyond the planning stages at this point. I’m good to go.”
“Really? And just how is that going to work?”
“Simple.”
She glared at him with glassy eyes reddening in a spreading vascular pattern, her face flushed, nostrils flaring. “Nothing with you is ever simple. One of the many reasons you suck.”
“Make me a list while you’re in here. Give you something to do.”
“Just don’t do anything, Null. Leave it alone, for Christ’s sake. You’ll only make everything worse.”
“I don’t deny that. Worse for whom, though, would be the issue.”
“You can’t possibly believe you’re going to do this and have it work.”
“I believe in nothing, but I know it will work. Just as I know when it comes time, you’ll help me.”
Her voice shifted to a tone of ironic hope: “You have a place to start, then?”
“Yes, I do.”
“So, what is it?”
“I’m going to start at the top and kill my way down.”