Alejandro wanted to scream. He couldn’t kill her by poisoning her favorite drink, but some junkie could shoot her. He watched it all from the front of the building, where they were trying to make a hole so people could exit.
Lucas ran at the junkie, tackling him. For a moment, they were both airborne, before slamming into the ground, with the little guy on bottom. Alejandro half expected the earth to shake under his feet. He couldn’t be sure that even he could take a full on tackle from Lucas.
Others were rushing towards the commotion. He had been expecting Lucas and Aislinn to confront him once he walked outside. They had noticed him, probably because of his incredible height, and they had tried to be discreet about it, but he had picked up on it.
Gigantism ran in his family, there was nothing to be done about that. It was why his parents had gotten together. They had both suffered from it. Now he and all his siblings did too. It had directly caused the death of their father, who at only forty-seven, had died of heart failure. He and his three brothers were all over seven feet tall. His two sisters were both well over six feet in height. It was hard to blend in with a crowd when you towered over it.
He considered standing around, waiting to see if she had been wearing a vest, but there were two other people he had to think about. Alejandro headed towards his truck. It was easy; the crowd was in a panic. A few were too shocked to move, but they were the exception. Most people were running away, unwilling to be guilty by association. The SCTU had a reputation for being violent and unpredictable.
When he’d been in the SCTU, he hadn’t known about this reputation. Now that he wasn’t, it was whispered around him. They were all crazy, unhinged, wild cards with guns. To the average person, they were harbingers of chaos. The SCTU was better than the serial killers that roamed the streets, but they walked a thin line. It didn’t help that the crowd was still getting over the news reports that Marshal Aislinn Cain had eviscerated the woman that released bubonic plague in Texas.
Now, they were witnessing her demise. They had watched her get shot. They had watched Lucas tackle the shooter. They had watched and become terrified of how the SCTU would respond.
Leaving wasn’t a great loss. He would find out on TV if she lived or died. They would report it with the same zealous enthusiasm that they had when she had killed a killer. She was their favorite subject. The pint-sized pretty girl that kicked serial killer ass made for good headlines. She was more notorious than the serial killers were; America’s most dangerous sweetheart. Live or die, Aislinn Cain would be front-page news tomorrow morning. It made him feel ill just to think about it.
No matter, he had to get home. He had to get the mask off, remove the make-up, and get ready. He had a date tonight. Not like a regular date, Maya Hudson wasn’t worthy of affection, but she didn’t know that. She honestly believed that Alejandro might be interested in her for some reason.
Alejandro knew how to string it along to get what he wanted. Maya was the key to that. As Anita’s cousin, she had raised Anita and Gavin’s son, Tyler. This meant the only way for Alejandro to have a relationship with Tyler was to have on with Maya.
Then, there was Rachel Cross, she had dated Tyler, for more than a year and then, without warning, she had dumped him. His nephew had responded by running away. If anyone knew where Tyler had gone, it was Maya. Tyler didn’t even know yet that Alejandro was his uncle. It was decided that it was a secret worth keeping, for at least a while longer.
Alejandro wasn’t happy with that situation, but he understood it, so he let it be. Instead, he had started dating Maya and befriended Tyler. Tyler had him help with repairs around the house and sometimes the fence line, even though Alejandro was capable of doing it himself.
Of course, Alejandro was still trying to piece together what had happened between Gavin and Anita. They had been an item and then she had run off, despite being pregnant with Gavin’s child. Gavin and Anita’s murders didn’t make it any easier to figure out. Maya seemed to know why Anita had come to South Dakota, but she wasn’t willing to give that secret up, yet. Alejandro was pretty sure another night of wining and dining the older woman would get her to loosen her tongue.
Alejandro had been working for years with the theory that Anita couldn’t handle Gavin’s work with the government. It was hard to be an informant on your own people for dealing drugs. However, lately, he’d begun to wonder if it wasn’t actually Kevin Hyder. It was possible that he was the reason Anita had left.
For Alejandro, there were many questions left unanswered. However, he didn’t trust the SCTU to come up with the answers. The same things that had tripped up the original investigation would blind them. Gavin had seen Anita within a few hours of her death. Of that, Alejandro was sure. He also believed it was the reason Gavin had been murdered.
Of course, the police believed that Gavin was the last person to see Anita alive and had killed her. He matched the witness descriptions. They hadn’t bothered to solve it after Gavin had been murdered, because in their opinion, the murderer was dead.
Since it was daylight, Alejandro stopped at a deserted road and pulled the latex from his hands and face. He used a cotton cleansing cloth for make-up removal on his eyelids, ears, and anywhere else the pale base had touched. It wouldn’t do to return home still covered in this stuff during the day. It might raise a few eyebrows. Lastly, he removed the colored contacts.
He stuffed it all in a bag and shoved it under his seat, before he began driving again. The sequence of events that had brought him to this point were still strange to him. It had started with Gavin’s murder, continued through his sister’s psychotic break, and then became his quest after that bitch, Aislinn Cain, had poisoned him. He imagined there were worse things he could be doing with his ample amount of time. At least the killings were mercifully. He wasn’t torturing the women before he killed them.
Besides, the world could use a few less women. They were nothing but trouble. They were uppity, snobbish, controlling, warmongers. They ran their big fat mouths without ever thinking of the consequences. He’d gotten into plenty of fights in his younger days because of his sisters and his girlfriends.
Society encouraged this behavior. Society had told them that they could do anything and so they did. It didn’t matter that their logic was often flawed and clouded with emotions. It didn’t matter that their intelligence, no matter how high, was constantly being dampened by their need to compete with anyone superior to themselves. They wanted to be in control. It didn’t matter how they got that control. It wasn’t enough for them to be at the forefront of domestic tranquility. It wasn’t enough for them to have children to raise and a husband to keep happy. They wanted to go out into the world and start arguments over their lack of equality in the job place. However, a woman couldn’t do most of the jobs Alejandro had done.
Even Aislinn Cain was still alive because of the men in her life, not because of her skills. They even let her take credit for capturing the bad guys because she was pretty on the front page. He knew that no matter what had been reported, Aislinn Cain had not eviscerated a serial killer in Texas. Just like she hadn’t killed the guy in Alaska. Most likely, they were Lucas’s work, but he was willing to let her take credit for them, because he was a nice guy. And because he was nice, he was easy for women like Aislinn Cain to manipulate.
Women like Aislinn Cain and Rachel Caldwell were useless. They wouldn’t be having children. They wouldn’t be getting married. They wouldn’t be contributing to society in positive ways. Tyler had gotten into a couple of fights because of Rachel. She had been pretty, and like most pretty women, she used her looks to her advantage. She and her uppity friends, they had all deserved to die. They were too busy with careers to be home. They were too busy stabbing their colleagues in the back to have children. These weren’t the kinds of women the world needed making babies anyway. They wouldn’t raise them, they’d just create another generation of latchkey kids, who didn’t understand the concepts of love and nurturing enough not to become serial killers. Those children would grow up resentful of their mothers. They would take their frustrations out on good women, women who were raising their children.
He should get a medal.