Chapter Nineteen

 

Joshua

“Que mierda, what is that smell?”

I sit up and look at Sergeant Ruiz, my eyes bleary. I rub sleep-crusted eyes and try to orient myself. I’m on the couch in the living room of my Manhattan penthouse. Daylight streams through the windows.

Maybe Sergeant Ruiz is just a nightmare. I have them all the time now, and I can rarely tell whether I’m asleep or awake when they’re happening. I’ve seen my father stalk through my living room, dragging Tamara’s dead body by the ankle. Her eyes were vacant, staring at the ceiling, and she left a long trail of blood behind her. I ran over and grabbed at her, but she melted away, and I was standing in the middle of the room alone.

Charlemagne has hacked my limbs off while I lay helpless on the kitchen table. Elizabeth—poor, stunted girl who lived her life for me and died when I couldn’t love her—howled wordlessly and clawed at him, but he didn’t even see her. My mother…she just stays curled up in the corner of the room, hugging her knees, sobbing wordlessly.

I open my eyes again. Sergeant Ruiz is still standing there, looking down at me impatiently. Except he was fired, so now he’s just Alfredo Ruiz.

The answer to his question is, I don’t know. That smell might be me, or it might be the piles of trash lying around me.

I’ve disabled all my security systems and fired my entire security team. Garrett remains on retainer, in case Tamara ever needs anything. That’s it.

I’ve got all the money in the world. I could have anything I want—any woman, any toy, with the snap of my fingers.

It doesn’t matter.

I broke my promise to the person who matters most in the world. I broke her heart.

I haven’t bathed in…days? Weeks?

I drink myself into a stupor every night. In the morning, I wake up and start drinking again.

Ruiz doesn’t look too hot himself. Tired and rumpled, he has circles under his bloodshot eyes. His hair, usually gelled back, is greasy and sticking up in all directions.

“I should get a fucking hazmat team to torch this place,” he growls. He walks away from me and heads into the kitchen. He returns with a box of trash bags and starts picking up half-filled takeout boxes.

“Cut it out,” I snap at him. “And get the fuck out of my house.”

He rakes me with a look of scorn. “Who’s going to make me, princess? You?” And he goes back to work, turning his back on me, dismissing me completely as any kind of threat. The man who should be prey, taunting the predator in his lair. You’re a weak little puppy, is what his scornful gesture says to me.

That’s it.

Fury roars through me.

Nobody speaks to me like that. You’re king or you’re nothing.

I leap up and run at him. He drops the garbage bag and turns to face me, so slowly that it’s insulting.

We start to spar. For the first couple of minutes, I’m dull and sluggish, my hangover clouding my brain, my muscles slack from lack of use.

But then the old instincts come roaring back to life, and the next thing I know, he’s down on the floor, his face purpling as I strangle him.

I almost laugh. This feels like old times. The gurgling noises he’s making are kind of funny, and so is the way his eyes are bulging from his head like a cartoon.

But he’s not prey. He doesn’t fit my requirements, so I let go and he sits up, gasping, wheezing and rubbing his throat.

“Call me princess again,” I challenge as I stagger over to the couch and collapse. There’s a mariachi band marching through my head. I never realized how much I hated mariachi. They’re pounding a brutal rhythm on the inside of my skull with their drumsticks.

“Oh really? Didn’t know that was your thing,” he sneers, his voice raspy from being choked. He remains unafraid and resumes picking up trash.

“I told you, knock it off and get out of my house, you greasy pile of trash.”

He stops. “You’re talking to me about trash?” He picks up a takeout carton and tosses it at me. It splatters on the couch. It’s crawling with maggots.

“What the hell?” I yell at him, jumping up in disgust.

“You want to live like this? Like a pig in slop?”

A killing fury swirls through me like a tornado. Any sane man would run from me right now. Hell, I made even Tamara run from me, the last night I saw her, and she loved me more than the moon and stars. “Get the hell out!”

Ruiz has apparently lost all sense of self-preservation. He stands there, looking around. Still not leaving.

Then his squinty brown eyes focus on me again. “I guess you really did love her. Boo fucking hoo. Poor little baby. Of course she dumped you. What did you expect? You’re a fucking nutjob.”

“I let her go. I sent her away.” Why am I even bothering to explain myself to him?

“Yeah, whatever.” He turns and heads for the door.

“Wait,” I call after him, my voice raspy. He’s the first person I’ve spoken to in days, unless you count the hallucinations who sweep through my house on a regular basis. And I don’t talk to them much—just scream threats or pleas.

He looks back at me with disgust. “Why? I came here to ask for your help. I wasted my time and my subway token. You couldn’t fucking kill a kitten.”

Someone needs killing? I feel vague interest stirring, underneath the heavy blanket of misery that’s wrapped around me like a reeking cloak.

“Hold on. Give me a few minutes. Please.” Saying that word nearly makes me vomit, but he pauses.

I hurry into the bathroom without looking back to see if he’s staying or leaving.

I shower fast, then scrub the foul taste from my mouth with a toothbrush. I dress in wool slacks and a button-down shirt and don’t bother with the cuffs, shove my feet into loafers without socks, and return to the living room. He’s made significant headway with the trash; there are two big garbage bags stuffed full, and a bin filled with empty wine bottles.

I push a pile of dirty clothes off a leather armchair onto the floor, and sit down. “Who do you want me to kill?” I ask him.

“Gideon Culpepper. That little shit who killed my Rosa.” He swallows hard and sets down the third bag. The bravado has vanished, and tears shimmer in his eyes. Gideon was a rich little trustfund brat who introduced Rosa to heroin. She overdosed and he split, leaving her to die. And he never did a day in jail.

I gesture at the chair facing mine, and he sinks into it.

“I can get you a drink,” I say uneasily. A man is crying in front of me, and it’s not because I’m planning on gutting him in the next few minutes. How can I make him stop crying? I don’t want to watch him snivel and I don’t know how to be comforting.

“Nah, I tried that.” He shudders. “I just wake up feeling like shit the next day, and she’s still gone.”

Yeah, been there, done that. For months now.

Ruiz’s tearstained eyes meet mine, and the only reason I don’t puke is because I see the fury shining behind the tears.

“I saw his wedding announcement in the paper, and I thought that maybe he had changed. Maybe he was truly remorseful, maybe my Rosa’s death turned him around, made him rethink how he’s living his life.” His face contorts in grief. “I mean, I thought if he was truly redeemed, then I had to be happy for him. I prayed to God to find the strength to forgive him. I went down on my knees and prayed.”

Yeah, and how’d that work out for you?

It was my cruel, sarcastic voice. Had I said it out loud?

I glance at him.

Nope, doesn’t look like it.

Ruiz’s fists clench. “Then I did some checking around. Nothing’s changed. He’s beating her, and she wants out, but he told her if she cancels the wedding, he’ll kill her little sister and nobody will ever be able to pin it to him. He bragged about getting rid of other girls. Like my Rosa.”

Something clicks inside me. I nod.

Tamara would want me to do this.

I didn’t lie when I told her that I live only for her. I can’t talk to her, I can’t give her false hope, but I can do things that I know would make her proud.

And the grief that drenches his voice and wrecks him every time he speaks of his lost daughter and calls her “my Rosa”, I understand that too—horribly, painfully, in a way I never did before.

Empathy sucks. What a useless, stupid emotion. I hate it. If I could scorch it from my soul, I would. But it’s in me now, and apparently it’s not leaving any time soon.

“All right. Give me his latest location, or I can find it out myself. It’s done,” I tell him.

Alfredo shakes his head vehemently. “No way. It’s my kill.”

I start to argue, but he interrupts me. And I let him. I am not the man that I once was. “This is my revenge. He hurt me. If I let some someone else take my revenge for me, what kind of man am I?”

“So why come to me, then?”

He hesitates. “I don’t know. You’ve done it before. I have to figure out the logistics of transport and all that. How to keep him subdued until I get to where I need to take him. Hell, where to take him. Because I’m going to take my fucking time.”

I think he wants a little more than that. I think he someone to share the burden of sin with him. “All right,” I say. “Let’s start planning.”

“Really?” He’s like a kid who just found out he’s going to Disneyland. He lights up and suddenly looks as if a thousand-ton weight has dropped from his shoulders.

As for me…I still feel vacant. Dull. Thick and ugly. But knowing I’m doing something that would make Tamara happy is enough to cut through my haze of self-pity and get me moving, at least. If only I could tell her about it myself.

A quick glance around the room reminds me why I can’t.

I’ve shattered the mirrors, the vases, and most of the furniture. I’ve stabbed paintings over and over again. Hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of furniture and artwork, destroyed. And I don’t remember doing any of it.

I already broke Tamara’s ribs without meaning to. God only knows what I might do to her if we were together again. And even knowing the danger, she wouldn’t leave me. She’d stay with me, trying to help me, until I killed her.

“Fair warning,” I say to Ruiz, rubbing my numb face with my hand. “I go for days without sleep and then when I finally pass out from exhaustion, I have nightmares and walk in my sleep and smash the shit out of everything around me.”

His gaze sweeps the room. “So you’re not just a serial killer. You’re a ticking time bomb who’s going to go off at any moment and take out everyone around you.”

“That sums it up nicely.” I manage a brittle smile. “Still want to go ahead with this?”

He scowls in disgust. “Like I have a lot of options? ‘Serial killer team member’ isn’t a job category on LinkedIn. Try not to flip your shit until after we take care of Gideon, okay?”

“I can’t make any promises. All right, let’s talk logistics. You’d be the most logical suspect if he disappeared, right? Everyone knows you tried to get him prosecuted after Rosa died, and with you being fired, they’ll be thinking rogue cop on a revenge spree. Which is true. So you need to set yourself up with an ironclad alibi while I grab him, and we can meet up after I’ve held him for a couple of days. It’ll take the heat off you.”

“That’s easy. I work security at a nightclub now.” He frowns in thought. “Tools. I have to think what I’m gonna bring with me.”

I haven’t even searched him to see if he’s wired. I could be handing myself over to him for a prison sentence. But I’m reckless and uncaring now. The hell with it. “I like knives,” I say with a smile that would freeze the blood of a sane man. A man who wasn’t crazed with grief.

Ruiz just nods in appreciation. “I feel like I’m gonna be more of a hammer man.”

“Gonna be”, like this is going to be a regular thing? I wonder. But hey, nothing wrong with hammers. They get the job done.

“Hammers can be very effective tools,” I say. “I’ve got a property in upstate New York you can use. Nothing fancy—a cabin out in the woods, incinerator to dispose of the remains, lots of bleach. Let’s pick a night.”