DAMAGED - A Bad Boy Romance (71 page)

I’m going to bet on the latter, though you’re free to come to your own conclusions.

I recall the pain of being caught outside of the vehicle. Initially, the only pain I felt was gracefully not present in my body. The pain itself had transferred into disturbed visual and aural phenomenon. My head felt injured, and there was blood on my hand when I reached up to touch my forehead. The sounds around me were muted, and strange hallucinatory distortions came into my brain. I thought, for a moment, that I heard someone telling me something, but when I listened closer, the sound ran away from my awareness. The sound was there, but the meaning was absent.

Lights flashed in my vision, and the actual details of the environment around me were lost. I remember the cold feeling of rushing water, and I remember my head going under. By impulse, I pulled myself up once more, though I was only able to bring myself up once before falling back down to the current. The water wasn’t particularly wide, but my strength was failing me. I was certain that I would drown, then and there, somewhere in the Italian countryside — the haunting cause of my undoing, and the final vision in my mind before unconsciousness:

The haunting, double slits of an animal whose place in society was to indulge human beings in their desire for Ricotta.

Right about then, everything went dark. My body began to grow cold, and I felt a strange sense of peace wash over me.

You did it
, I thought.
You saved the girl, and didn’t kill anyone — not even a goat.

Some small, non-visible part of myself was proud for a moment, and I allowed myself to think that there might be some hope for me in judgment. I may have been a trained murderer, but at least the cheese supply for the countryside just south of Rome could enjoy a total absence of interruption.

Death smirk.

Then something awful happened, something even more terrifying than the eyes of the goat.

I retched water and began to cough. I tried to look around, but all I found was darkness. I had a sack placed over my head, and my wrists were bound behind my back. The hum of the car was underneath my body, and my face bounced along the bristly fabric of the trunk.

I was alive, that much was evident, but I had no idea at what the cost. All because of a goddamned goat, here I was, being cast into the wilderness for the sins of the people.

It’s only appropriate
, I thought, waiting for whatever the hell happened to be in store for me at the end of the trip.

God fucking damn it, this is ridiculous
, was a phrase that I found myself repeating over and over that week.

I lost interest in all of my projects at the same time after Piper came over that week. Sure, I fucked the hell out of her, and whenever I start up a sexual relationship like that, my life gets a bit screwy. There is generally a great moment of personal victory — a type of ego boost if you will, knowing that the outside world has validated me in some way, and finds me to be attractive and interesting.

I know very well that this sort of behavior smacks of codependency, and that I shouldn’t validate myself based on the perceptions of others, regardless if they are long time friends or not. Knowing something, and being able to act on it are entirely different things.

In spite of the fact that I have the mind of a genius -  or perhaps because of it — I don’t have quite as strongly developed an emotional level of maturity. Strictly speaking, I mean the ability to independently navigate my life, while still being within the context of a relationship and not actually being swallowed whole by the damn thing.

In this particular case, it was better that I was obsessed, because my attention to detail in the most extreme form ended up being a source of salvation for the object of my desire. In my own mind, I ended up avoiding the consequences of behaving like a stalker, because everything ended up being incredibly useful. In effect, I had the same form of confirmation bias as the NSA. I laughed as I reviewed the nearly endless files that may have been tangentially related to Piper’s former boss.

She owes me a fucking orgasm
, I swore to myself, trying to make myself feel better about the fact that I had not slept properly in days.

If I had some kind of lab bitch to do this work for me, that would have been preferable, but unfortunately, no such person was around. I suppose that is the whole concept of slavery, and autonomy. I had to be my own lab bitch, for better or worse. The only perky sex treats I would get from my lab bitch were exclusively masturbatory, and unfortunately far too predictable to be of any interest at all. I tried to put all of that behind me, and simply analyze the data.

The most difficult part of the whole thing was the initial finding of Maurice. I literally had to go through the police database, as well as the private cellular database. Piper’s history ended up being the best link I had to the man, but they had been pretty discrete about their relationship, and their methods of communication were mostly clandestine and personal.

The trail went dead cold far too many times for that route to be productive, at which point I was basically trolling for silver fishes in an ocean of data and not getting much of anything that was worth any value. What ended up working out was the cell phone I had given to Piper.

Naturally, I had modified the phone so that tit could be easily used as a tracking device. I wanted it to ping back to me her location, as well as be a potential source for her to call me if need be. I knew that she was an independent type of person, but there was no way for me to know whether or not she was going to be in enough trouble to where she would reach out to me once more. I had to be open to that possibility.

As a precautionary measure, I also had a RFID tag placed in the hairpin I gave her. I was going to tell her about it in a week or so if it turned out that she didn’t need the help any longer. Keeping those things that close to your head can be s somewhat of a problem. I didn’t want her to get cancer, but I needed to have some way of tracking whether or not police signals were active in her area.

By ‘in her area’, I mean literally, about her specifically.

The mechanics of the process are a bit complicated, so let’s just say that the hairpin was my failsafe, and the phone was my primary hardware installation. Like a fucking tool, she hadn’t contacted me until she was in trouble, which meant that her phone hadn’t been turned on the whole time.

This is why I was swimming around in the dark as long as I had been.

Sure, I knew roughly of her location, but there is only so much you can do with a RFID chip of that size, in terms of programming capacity. Also, when I gifted her the piece, I had been in somewhat of a hurry. You can’t really make complex spy equipment like that on the fly. Sometimes the simplest solutions are the ones that are the most practical — even if they lack in diverse functionality.

I picked up a series of long-standing pings around the RFID about twelve minutes before Piper finally turned on her fucking phone and called me. She’s lucky, that I was around, and not going out for a walk or taking a nap. When you’re stalking someone, apparently, you don’t have time to rest for a minute, otherwise, you might miss out on your crucial opportunity, and then where would you be?

Nowhere. Fucking nowhere, and with nothing to do but acknowledge that you had wasted all of your time and resources only to be jerking off when you needed to be present the most.

I followed the brief flurry of police exchanges and pieced together the chase as thoroughly as possible. It was a bit exciting, but my job was far from over. Even while Piper was talking to me, I was only giving her part of my attention. I had to use the remainder of my attention to focus on where her boyfriend was headed.

You got to hand it to a man who can throw a woman out of a moving car, off of the edge of a cliff in order to save her life. That takes some serious audacity.

Wouldn’t mind sucking that one off
, I thought, indulging in the lewd train of thought just long enough to where I could focus back on the task at hand.

As far as I was aware, the chase was over. My project, on the other hand, had seamlessly transferred over into the tracking of a new secondary target — Tyler.

Police activity here in Venice had been up in arms searching for Maurice, and everything I had been made aware of indicated that they had looked far and wide, but had not, in fact, managed to pick up on anything. They had gone through Piper’s apartment, and I spent a solid two days in an anxiety ridden panic, thinking my entire operation would have been compromised in the event that they had found some evidence which linked Piper to myself. I opted not to sleep, and instead, decided to stay up doing surveillance on the local police dept. At all hours of the night. It was pretty ridiculous, but fortunately, nothing turned up yet.

In a stroke of peripheral luck, I managed to track down the cell numbers of a few possible leads that were in the immediate area consistently during the Rome police chase. These numbers crossed reference with at least one consistent number that was currently located in Corsica. I would have bet anything that this was where Maurice was spending his time, but I wanted to know for sure. After running the content retrieval systems, I was able to capture a few glimpses into the transcripts between the phone numbers around the police chase, and the number in Corsica. The only relevant information I was able to pull was that the number in Corsica, “wanted the soldier alive,” and to know “Where is the girl?”

Apart from those direct comments, the conversation was stilted in mercenary code or unfruitful in general. Tracing the coordinates on the number in Corsica was the easy part. I had the location down from the onset — the real challenge was discovering whether or not it was Maurice. In order to get that up and going, I had to do a bit of backtracking, which ended up taking more time than I would have preferred.

I went into Maurice’s private file on a database where — let’s just say I should have stayed away from.

I managed to find some recorded voice clips from a court case that he had attended when he was a younger, and supposedly less careful man. Locating voice recognition software was a pain in the ass — Not exactly something you can just pirate from the Internet. However, when I got everything up and running, and fed the sample from the phone through with the sample from the court recording, the software came back with an 87% likelihood of identification.

I guess a few years, and a few more cigarettes could have accounted for the difference.

When I felt confident enough in the fact that I had a lock on where Maurice was, I forwarded the information to Piper via text.

“Corsica,” she replied, calling me back to verify.

“Yep,” I said, not really having anything more to share with her on the subject.

My brain was officially fried, and I felt like if I didn’t succumb to a nap sooner than later, I was going to fall asleep right on my basement floor. I had done that before during another manically obsessive episode of surveillance, and I have to say that though my equipment is top notch, the fuck room upstairs is so much more preferable.

“Damn, Corsica,” she said. “I knew that he had accounts which lead over there, but I had no idea tha--”

“Listen, hun. Everything you need to know is in the text, and to be honest, there isn’t much more that I can do to help you at this point. I’ve been up for about fifty-two hours straight, and if I don’t get to sleep soon, I won’t be able to differentiate between alien contact, and your next phone call — ya dig?”

She laughed at me.

I was grateful.

Sometimes, it's hard to tell people that you love them, but you need to fuck off for a while. The truth of the matter is that love goes a long way, but when you don’t have sleep, your body and mind will probably give out before your compassion.

“So, I’ll just try and capture some intel?” she asked.

I nodded.

“Do it like we talked about, and everything is going to be ok. I’m going to set the system up on auto-pilot over here, and get unconscious. I’ll probably be gone for ten hours or so. I’ll catch you when this is all over.”

Knowing that I truly had done everything within my power to help her out, I finally allowed myself to stumble up the stairs and head to my crash room.

God I hope she knows what she’s doing
, I thought, second-guessing whether or not I had done the right thing in providing her with the information necessary to put her life in more danger.

I knew that what she was going to do was incredibly dangerous. I also knew that if she didn’t take the risks necessary to bring this to a conclusion, she would probably be haunted by that information for the rest of her life. For most people, I wouldn’t have gone out on a limb and made that sort of impact on them. I would have simply opted to stay neutral, and allow them to determine the course of their own fate.

When you involve yourself in the destiny of another person, there is a strange amount of interdependent responsibility present, due to your participation. All of the sudden, your words seem like they have more power and influence than usual. The question of, “What if I'm wrong?” rings out clearly in your head.

I had to do my best to sigh and let my shoulders fall down. At this point, the only thing keeping me awake was the tension in my body from being overworked and anxiety ridden. I needed to close this anxiety out and accept the fact that I did what I could because I loved her. The recognition that my actions had indeed been out of love brought my heart to ease. It was as though the knowledge that I had acted out of compassion had set my conscience right, and as a result, given me permission to let some of that tension and anxiety dissipate.

I didn’t bother to change my clothes or even cover myself completely with the blankets. I was literally delirious with fatigue. After feeling my muscles and bones melt into the floor below me, I closed my eyes and let out a deep breath of resignation.

Your court now, girl
, I thought, and then I was dead to the world.