When I came to, all of me hurt—my ribs, my stomach, my jaw. Everything.
The house had been trashed. The kitchen cabinets had been opened, doors ripped off, drawers flung around and smashed. The living room was a wild tornado mess. I staggered over to the French doors, looked at the garden, and was relieved to see it hadn’t been touched.
The money Frankie Balls wanted, the price of blood for the three dead, was buried beneath the jasmine bush near the back fence. I’d bought a small safe from Home Depot when I got my tools and ladder to install the cameras and had buried my fortune in the earth like the pirates of old. I mean, who would think to look in the ground?
I left the living room and went to my downstairs bathroom. I almost cried out when I saw the mess I was in. I washed away the map of drying blood, but there was nothing to hide the bruises on my face.
I went back to the ransacked living room. The camera monitoring system was still connected to the power outlet, but it had been tossed onto the floor. The motion sensor had been activated and the hard drive was recording. Its alarm was going off. I pressed a button to deactivate the irritating sound, put the device on the couch, and hobbled outside.
Even the sunshine felt rotten, stinging my tenderized skin as I crossed the driveway to my Range Rover. I was horrified to see they’d keyed my beautiful car, marking the paint with white scores of abstract graffiti. Someone had tried to draw a penis, but it was missing its shaft and just looked like a sick mushroom.
I sighed and regretted it immediately as my ribs joined the chorus of pain. The car was unlocked, and the glove compartment was hanging open. The gun I’d used to kill Richard Gibson was gone. I shuffled along to my mailbox and pulled open the metal door to find a familiar package inside.
Back in the living room, I ripped open the package. It was another message from my murderous and quite obviously deranged patron, the real West Coast Ripper. The money was wrapped in a tight bundle. One hundred hundreds. The paper belt declared $10,000, which meant there would be a million-dollar price on the next head. There was another URL printed on a piece of card.
I opened the browser on my phone. I was too tired and pained to bother with trying to conceal what I was doing anymore, and some part of me wanted to start to build an evidence trail, linking me to my anonymous patron. I wasn’t an assassin anymore, or a murderer. I was a detective. I needed to know who was behind this.
I clicked on the audio recording on the website, and the machine voice came on.
“You now know the people you killed weren’t villains, so we won’t play games anymore,” the recording said.
How? I wondered. How did this grotesque, inhuman voice know that I knew I’d been lied to? Was it the voice of a devil who could see my warped soul?
“The people you’ve been killing are not the criminals you were led to believe, but they have to die. The next is Alice Polmar of Sedona. Kill her and you will receive one million dollars. You can establish a trust fund for your daughter. Refuse, and evidence of your role in the other deaths will be sent to the police. You will die in prison and your daughter will lose everything. Scroll down.”
I did as instructed and saw three photographs. One of me forcing Walter Glaze into his car, the second of me fleeing Farah Younis’s building, and the last showed me shooting Richard Gibson. All three photos were candid, taken by someone who’d been following me.
I laughed a good and hollow chest full of air. Lie with jackals and you get eaten. I was no vigilante. I wasn’t even a killer really. I was just a tool. A puppet. My strings had been pulled by the true villain, someone who would have a hold over me for the rest of my life.
I had to find this person and learn the truth about why he’d killed and mutilated these poor folk. I had to free myself from his grasp. I moved onto the floor and crawled to the solid-state hard drive and small LCD screen that were connected to the motion-activated cameras and pressed buttons that took me to the moment the system had activated.
A car pulled up in the mouth of my driveway and a young woman—black hair cut short like a lioness, no, a panther—jumped out. She wore a flowing white dress. An angel in army surplus boots. Heaven and war combined, like some Valkyrie. She ran to my mailbox, deposited the package, and returned to her ancient silver Honda Prius.
As the Valkyrie’s chariot pulled away, I saw hope.
I’d recorded the car’s license plate.