The Avenger (10 page)

The Avenger stood back to survey his handiwork. That should do the trick. The woman, the lions, the meat. He'd rather arrange the tableaux when the sacrifice was awake, but that was an impractical wish. The important point was that the lions consume the meat and swallow the notes. And the police discover the location of them this time.

Now to let loose the animals.

He felt an overwhelming desire to blow a trumpet or signal the applause of an unseen audience. Damned shame so few people appreciated his work and his mission. There should've been a large crowd to view the spectacle. Some apocryphal, revelatory heralding before the commencement of the entertainment.

Never mind. Jackson Holt, the agent in charge last time, had bungled the job. This time he'd have to work harder.

He surveyed the scene and turned to the cages. By the time he finished fiddling with the lock, the lioness was sniffing quietly at the gate. Languid from sleep, she was still alert enough to gobble the hunk of ground beef that he dropped inside the bars. Good, the old girl was hungry.

The man hoisted his backpack onto his shoulder and slowly scattered a trail of the remaining meat into the arena. He eased backwards from the gate he'd left ajar. When he deemed it safe to turn his back on the animal, he ran like hell and clamored up the rock side to hang from the spiked iron railing.

A few moments later, the lioness ambled gracefully from the den, her magnificent sinews and muscles rolling smoothly beneath her pelt. Her cub trailed behind her. Within minutes they found the athlete's body and began to feast upon the rich sirloin smeared on her tender, vulnerable belly. The Avenger watched as the animals devoured the beef. Good, when the vets put the animals down, the autopsy would produce his message. He'd see if the authorities could extract meaning out of it this time.

The animals finished with the meat of the cow. And then turned to the meat of the young woman.

Chapter Twelve

"You stupid bitch," Diego Vargas snarled.

He lifted his arm and swung backhanded at the young hooker standing by the motel’s circular bed. The edge of his heavy emerald ring cut into her lip.

"Mister, I didn’t mean nothing by it," she said, pressing her hand to her mouth to stem the trickle of blood. "I was just wondering why, that’s all."

She anchored her legs on the carpet, bracing herself for the second blow, and when it came, the force of it toppled her backwards onto the mattress. "Please don’t hurt me," she moaned, blood gushing from her nose.

The blood always excited Vargas.

Santos observed from the doorway as his boss pounced on the girl, pinning her beneath his bulky body. The bodyguard stepped outside the room. At the sounds coming from inside the motel room, he curled his lip in distaste.
Pinche cabron!
Knowing the girl was barely eighteen, he thought of his little sister Corazón in Mexico, and knew what he’d do if
un hermano
did such a thing to her. Such a man would no longer have the equipment to hurt young women.

Santos sighed heavily. Diego Vargas paid him well, so what business was it of his? Still, what a pig!
Cerdo de mierda!

Muffled sobs echoed softly from behind the door. Eventually, when Diego grew tired of the excitement caused by the girl’s fear, they would subside. Next, Santos would hear the distinctive snoring of his boss. And then, when sufficient time had passed, he would enter and see if the girl was alive. This time there would be a mess.

Sometimes Diego did not control himself sufficiently and the cleanup was complicated. Santos thought of Vargas' wife, the beautiful Magdalena. Better that his boss take out his lusts on the hooker than on her.

Dios,
what a pig!

Still, the man paid him very well.

#

Jack had recruited Olivia, met with the county sheriff and Charles Barrington, and by sheer will he'd brought the beast under control again.
Almost.

Barbed shreds of it still flicked over his flesh like slivers of glass as he stripped and stepped into the shower. The hot water sluiced over his worn flesh and the steam clouded the under-sized bathroom. He shaved – yet again – and brushed his teeth before reaching for the bottle of blue tablets, giant pills the color of the sky on a spring day.

He popped one instead of the usual dosage into his mouth, hoping if a vision came on, he'd be ready. He pulled back the spread and fell naked onto the clean sheets of the motel bed, his muscles nearly boneless beneath the remaining pricks of the beast.

He's back in the African jungle. Running, but this time, he's the quarry, and his pursuer a ferocious monster, swifter and more relentless than any enemy he's ever faced. Heat thunders in his head like ancient tribal drums as he zigzags through the undergrowth. The stinging nettles are miniature shards of glass on his feet and legs. Within seconds tiny cuts open into chasms and he looks downward at the torrent of blood gushing from his body. Twin wounds surface on his wrists and feet in catholic retribution.

Jack glances over his shoulder, a rookie mistake, for in that moment a gnarled scrub oak with its toothed leaves rises up to thwart his escape. He tumbles and rolls in one quick movement, grabbing vainly for the knife at his waist. Gone, he realizes at the same moment that he takes in the sight of his naked body, slick with sweat and blood. He blinks moisture from his eyes as he tumbles toward the sudden precipice. Seconds later he's falling, twisting in the air, trying to turn his body into a half-assed dive so he won't break his goddamn neck.

In the irrelevance of dreams, he wonders where he's summoned the temerity to swear so close to entering the presence of the God he doesn't believe in any more. Right before his plummeting makes contact with the torrent of water, he glimpses diaphanous, but distinctly female features and a hand reaching toward him from the edge of the cliff above.

Jack woke up to sheets drenched with the acrid stench of his own sweat. His mouth tasted like cardboard and coffee grounds, and his body ached from the lumpy mattress. He swung his legs over the edge of the bed, staring gloomily at the inadequate length. Even angled sideways, his long body didn't fit. He definitely needed to make other sleeping arrangements.

The sun's dull glare peeked through the motel's nondescript drapes, casting dust motes that danced through the stuffy air. Another motel room, but essentially the same furnishings. He reached for the medication vials on the nightstand, tapped out another blue tablet – half the dosage again – and washed it down with water.

Swiping his hand over his rough beard, he stumbled again to the shower, waiting for the blue tab to fire up the brain synapses so he could make connections from the abstract symbols in the dream-vision. The blue pills were another delightful concoction made especially for the Wonder Boy by Dr. Davis. Trouble was, they sometimes caused anterograde amnesia.

Not that he was so hot to create memories, considering his line of work, but any kind of forgetfulness was troubling. As the water pounded over his sweat-slicked body, he began to deconstruct the dream. The Judge wouldn't approve but Jack was determined to wean himself from the blue meds, so the details of the dream remained fuzzy.

When the dreams first began shortly before his eighteenth birthday, he'd ignored them. During the nights before his high school graduation, he'd experienced a recurring dream that ended in an act of violence. The events on grad night showed him the dreams actually meant something because that particular night culminated in fear and death.

After putting on a clean pair of shorts, he lay down and continued the deconstruction process. First, the jungle. Easy enough. He'd just come off assignment in Africa. Mere thought proximity, having just returned from there. Okay, that could work, but what about the barbs? Thorns, spiny nettles, shard-like leaves – all things that pricked, cut, or tore. He assumed the dream related to the current case, but didn't see a connection. The killer had never used a knife as a weapon. For a few minutes he let his mind wander at will in free association.
Nothing.

He moved on to the second point. In a strange paradox, in the dream he was the prey, not the hunter. He scanned his memory for prior assignments. Again, nothing. Could this dream foreshadow a twist of the hunter-quarry theme? Would the DLK hunt
Jack?
Or would the killer target someone Jack cared about? He had no family, no friends outside of colleagues. Not the Judge, even though Jack was a favored tool of Invictus. In his mind he saw Olivia's face, the dark brows and high cheekbones. She was a possibility. Since he'd been near her, he'd felt his powers increasing at an alarmingly rate as if she were a trigger.
Maybe.
Everything seemed to come back to Olivia.

The final point in the dream – a woman stretching her hand to save him. The filmy tenor of the vision was too indistinct for him to be sure, but presumably it was Olivia. Yeah, he thought, Olivia would reach out to him before he plummeted to his death. Even now, after the distance of years and the stench of betrayal, she'd try to save him. But what the hell did any of it have to do with the case?
Something he couldn't see? Nothing?

He forcibly voided his mind of the dream and thought about the team he'd have to pull together for the investigation. Olivia, helping because she'd given her word. A reluctant Slater and what deputies he could spare because the D.A. forced him to. He'd see if Slater would release Waylon Harris, the deputy who'd found the latest body. The Judge boasted a vast budget and unlimited supply of idealistic young men eager to serve their country, but Jack knew he was on his own for this mission.

He thought of the Invictus motto from an old World War I poet.
"Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori."
Personally, Jack had started to question how sweet and noble dying for one's country was.
Especially if the country was just plain wrong.

Unexpectedly his cell phone rang and he fumbled to retrieve it from the nightstand. He glanced at the readout, a local number he didn't recognize. "Holt."

"Slater."

Jack waited, not minding the dead air of silence over a phone.

"If you're going to be in Bigler County very long, I thought you might want a more hospitable place to stay besides a hotel," Slater offered. Of course, he'd run a check on Jack and knew exactly where he was staying.

Jack glanced around the motel room, thought about having every meal out or ordering room service, the stale stuffy odor of the place. "What'd you have in mind?"

"I have a guest house out back of my place."

"Fancy. Didn't know county sheriffs made that kind of money."

"You don't have to accept the invite."

"Are you being kind hearted or do you just want to keep me in your sights?" Jack asked.

"What do you think?" Slater rattled off an address not far from the university and hung up.

#

Olivia had been a bitch when he'd married her, and her successful career had only made her more of one. An uppity, frigid, freeze-your-balls bitch. From the start she'd thought she was too good for him, and now with a fancy PhD, she acted like she was the queen bee.

He had news for Miss Fancy Pants.

Bill Gant tipped the bottle back and felt the last dribble of Jack Daniels trickle down his throat. Fuck! Now he'd have to get dressed and go out. Forgetting why he needed to move his ass, he sprawled across the saggy hotel mattress a moment. At last his brain climbed out of its stupor. He struggled into his pants and threw a sweater over his wife-beater shirt.

He always got a kick out of that name – wife-beater. Like a man put on a particular kind of undershirt to beat the hell out of his wife. He knew a wife he'd be happy to pound the shit out of. Stuck up Olivia Gant, even though she wasn't legally his wife any more. Gant, because she hadn't taken back her maiden name after he signed the divorce papers. No matter what she said, no matter what the law said, Bill knew that meant she still wanted him.

It meant she was still his.

Groping his way down the hallway, he fumbled for his car keys as he headed for the parking lot. He'd seen a liquor store on the west side of Sacramento and drove at a crawl towards it. Wouldn't pass a breathalyzer, he thought, better go real slow. He cruised the streets, passed barred store windows. Several women teetered on mile-high heels under the garish street lights.

He found the open liquor store and made his purchase, throwing in a carton of milk and cold cereal before handing over his money to the clerk. Back in his car, heading for the seedy hotel room, he stopped at a corner where a girl lounged against a brick wall.

She sidled up to his open passenger window. "Hey, mister, wanna have a good time?"

She looked barely sixteen and Bill Gant had standards. He didn't mess with kids. "Get lost," he growled.

"Come on, honey, don't be like that." She opened the top button on her bright green blouse, thrusting her breasts over the lip of the car window. "Like what you see?"

"Shove off, kid."

"Screw you," she said and flipped the bird as she sauntered off, stumbling in the stilettos like a child playing dress up in mommy's shoes.

The second woman's face sagged beneath vacant eyes, her breath reeked of liquor, and Bill wanted to throw up. He clenched his fists on the steering wheel and thought of Olivia. She'd shoved him out of her life, reduced him to hooking up with sluts on the streets. He eased his car around the corner, parked in an alley outside the range of the street light, and waited, remembering his wife's soft pale skin and small waist. Imagined himself tightening his fingers around her pretty neck while he came inside her. He felt his erection tighten against his jeans.

The third woman was just right. Like Goldilocks, he thought, smirking cruelly inside the dark interior of the car. With long black hair that reminded him of Olivia, although this broad's was clearly a dye job, the woman was pretty in a gaudy, street-wise way. She had an edge that let him know she could take care of herself. They agreed on a fee and she jumped in the car, directing him to a pay-by-the-hour hotel several blocks off Manzanita.