He really was a businessman, trying to make a sale even after I threatened to shove a pencil in his ear.
“We’ll keep you in mind,” I agreed, nodding, then making my way out of the building.
I was pissed at Gunny, sure. The man who actually put his hands on Theo. The one who saw a defenseless woman just trying to head home after work, and raised his hands to her, punched, kicked, and put her in the hospital.
He needed to be handled.
He needed to know what it was like to fuck with someone his own size.
But the real fury festering in my gut was for Frederick Bent-Dick Lasso. Who made it possible for Gunny to cross paths with Theo in the first place.
A man whose greed overshadowed his moral compass.
He was going to die.
Slowly.
Painfully.
In so much fear that he pissed himself and found a god to pray to.
Then I would work on him for a little while as he did that praying before finally sending his ass down to hell.
There was no mercy for a man who preyed on the weak.
There was no heaven for those who put their own greed over the well-being of others.
I was happy to be the one to send that message on home to him.
“Hey, Gunny,” I called about an hour later when I tracked the little shit down to a less-than-stellar town down by the beach, showing off his fancy-ass new sneakers he’d likely bought with the blood money from Frederick.
“Oh, shit,” Gunny said, turning and running.
But not even his new shoes could give him the speed he needed to get away from me.
His head had a little conversation with a brick wall for a couple of minutes, giving him a taste of what he’d done to Theo, before I put the silenced gun to his temple and pulled the trigger.
I could afford to be reckless with a guy like Gunny.
The law wouldn’t go out of their way to look for his killer. They’d clean up the mess, file the report, and move on to other shit.
But Frederick?
In his hideous-ass modular-looking mansion with all his money in the bank?
They’d go looking for his murderer.
Which was why I couldn’t kill him in his house.
“Come on, you fuck,” I said, crouching in the bushes taking a bite of a beef jerky I found in my back pocket. “I thought you were such a go-getter,” I added as he fiddled around his kitchen in the wee early morning hours, making his tea, eating his English muffin that he didn’t even toast. Which, yeah, was evidence enough that he was a fucking psychopath.
“Finally,” I hissed, crawling across his front lawn to crouch behind the passenger door in the back, waiting for the little bleep that said he was coming out, then slipping into the car and getting behind the driver’s seat.
No one looked.
Not men, anyway.
Walking around, thinking they were insulated from the evilness of the world.
I let him pull down his driveway and away from the one camera I saw perched over the garage, before I popped up, putting a rag over his face with one hand and pulling the E-break with the other.
It wasn’t long before he slumped, letting me climb in the front, grab his ass, and drag him into the trunk where I slipped on some cuffs and tape, then slammed the lid.
I wasn’t, by nature, a cautious kind of guy. I was forever doing shit without thinking about the consequences.
But it was different now.
Because it wasn’t just my freedom I stood to lose.
It was Theo.
And the future I was starting to dream about with her.
So I slipped on a cap, pulling it down low over my face to obscure my features if there were any traffic cameras along the way.
Then I drove his car out into the middle of nowhere, to an area we all knew from the past no one could hear a man scream.
I let him thrash around in the trunk for a while as I pulled out some of the supplies from the bag I’d taken the time to pack.
Most of it, I would need for later.
To clean the car.
To wipe off some of the blood on me. To change my clothes.
But there were a few choice items I went ahead and laid out.
A knife, for one.
And a shovel, for two.
He wasn’t going to be coming back out of the woods.
He would be donating his body back to the ground, letting worms eat his useless flesh for a few years.
Which seemed like a fitting end to him.
“Ready to have some fun?” I asked, grinning down at him as I popped the hood.
His screams were still ringing in my ears as I made my way back to the manse late the next evening, after going over my steps, making sure everything was covered up as well as it could be.