Back when I was a kid, the concept of right and wrong had been simple. What was right typically resulted in happiness, and wrong ensured suffering.

Unfortunately, I’d suffered ten long years doing the right thing, working a normal job, desperately trying to ignore the screams and nightmares, before I realized how wrong it was for me to continue living in hell, while the men who’d destroyed my life walked free and clear.

The definitions had become convoluted with time, and the empathy I’d groomed by staying connected to humankind had begun to snap like fragile balloon strings. When my uncle finally passed, I no longer had the guidance to keep me on the right path.

A tired blue truck, with Gideon’s in faded white paint along the side of it, clanked to a rolling stop in front of the abandoned house, where I’d called it to. Behind the tailgate sat a large yellow contraption, the sight of which left a sick hollow in my stomach.

I waited inside the house, staring through the window, as the man in the cab hobbled out, gaze sweeping across the vast emptiness that surrounded us, save for the abandoned house. Empty lots on either side held the stumps of homes that’d been burned to the ground, or demolished. He scratched his head and lifted the paper in his hands to his face, as though checking the address.

I’d called him as a prospective client who’d recently purchased the property as a fixer upper, and offered to pay a large sum of money to remove the brush and trees accumulated on the lot. When he’d told me his helper had quit on him a couple weeks prior, I’d offered him double.

He’d put on significantly more weight since the last time I’d seen him, but even with the extra skin around his face, I’d have recognized him anywhere. Sunken brown eyes, too close together. A crooked nose, and a small mouth. Only thing really changed, besides his weight, was the thinning spot of hair atop his head and the hard lines of age. For someone only a few years older than me, he looked like shit. I guessed murdering kids and disposing their bodies had taken its toll over the years.

I’d later learned the reason Gideon had stayed with Fox and assisted in the kidnapping. He was the teenage boy-toy of Fox’s slightly younger brother, Roy, who’d been imprisoned for a brutal assault on a homeless man while drunk. Together, Roy and Gideon had run a little side gig of kidnapping kids off the streets, photographing them, and selling videos of the boys getting tortured. I’d tracked down one of the kids, still living on the streets, who’d joined a gang and had gotten into trouble himself, so the two didn’t always kill their victims. Two years into his reduced sentence, Roy had had his throat ripped out by a fellow inmate, before he’d been fatally stabbed.

Quietly observing, I waited until Gideon fired up the machine. While he adjusted the neck of the wood chipper, I slid on black gloves, and zipped up the white disposable body suit I’d donned. The material would be easy to burn afterward, and covered damn near every inch of my body. Recommended for waste cleanup—I’d laughed when I’d read that on its packaging.

Exiting the front door, I kept my gaze on Gideon’s back, and hustled across the yard toward him.

He whirled around, eyes wide with a gasp, and exhaled on a chuckle, hand to his chest. “Sh-sh-shit man, you scared me.” His stutter had improved a bit, I noticed. “You look like that d-d-d-dude from American Psycho.”

Arm outstretched, I shook his hand, and my fake smile could’ve landed me a billboard spot for Colgate. “Forgive me, I’ve got quite a bit of shit to clean up today.”

“Figured I’d just go ahead and g-g-g-git started on the front. Gonna take me a bit w-w-w-with all that dead brush.” His eyes narrowed, and he stroked his chin, the smile stretching across his face baring two empty spots where teeth should’ve been. “Say, you look kinda … familiar. Where’d y-y-y-you say you’re from?”

“Chicago,” I lied. The pulse in his neck lured my eyes there, and I slid my hand inside my pocket, where a syringe sat in the well. One-handedly unsheathing the cap, I nodded toward the machine behind him. “So, you just toss it all into the wood chipper, huh? And it spits it out in chunks into the back of your truck?” I stepped around him to get a better look, but stilled at the grip of my arm I kept tucked in my pocket.

“C-c-c-careful. Those blades’ll suck you right in, you get too close.”

Watching the grinding rollers brought back images of Eli’s sleeping face, the innocence they’d destroyed for their own amusement.

“Y-y-you don’t ever stand in front of it. Always to the side.” Gideon demonstrated, standing behind the metal housing of the feeding table.

“Ever have someone fall into one of these things?” My thumb sat at the tip of the needle’s plunger, as I made my way back toward him.

His nervous laugh didn’t quite match the tight knit of his brows, telling me I’d hit a trigger button. Backing up one step failed to put enough distance between us, before I stabbed the needle into his neck, pushing the toxins into his bloodstream.

Eyes wide, he stumbled backward, his spine crashing into clanking machinery, hands flying to the emptied syringe still stuck in his neck.

“Th-th-the fuck! What’d you do? What’re you doin’?” The slur at the end told me the toxin had already begun to fuck with his muscles.

Tetrodotoxin was a tasteless, odorless, and potent neurotoxin produced by the poisonous puffer fish. For three hundred bucks on some sketchy internet sites, anyone could buy enough toxin to kill forty adults. I’d only prepared a fraction of a dose—enough to keep ol’ Giddy alive for a couple hours.

He collapsed onto the ground, and the panic in his eyes, as the paralysis crept over his body, brought a smile to my face. A dark blue halo expanded across his crotch as he pissed his jeans.

“In the next couple of minutes, you’re going to lose all function. Your muscles will shut down, and you’ll essentially be a zombie. Might even shit yourself soon.”

Only a whimper escaped his lips, as the poison made its way to his brain. Pupils dilated, he stared up at me like an invalid, but I knew better. In spite of what his body was going through physically, he’d remain conscious and alert.

Sweat beaded across his forehead, his face turning a sickly shade of white, stark against his purpled thinning lips.

“You’re going to panic. That’s normal.”

He sucked in a gasp of air, his body oddly calm in spite of the chaos I imagined inside his head.

“See, I’m imagining that’s how Eli felt when you locked him up in that box. I mean, kid couldn’t move, the way you chained him inside. Must’ve felt like poison in his veins, and when he was violated? Well, I’m imagining he probably felt about as helpless as you do right now.” I unzipped the suit, nabbing the cigarette poking up from my shirt pocket. “Got a light?” Fishing through his pockets, I found a lighter stuffed in his pants, well out of the way of his nasty piss stain, and lit up my smoke. “Once the poison has worked its way through your body, and you’re all nice and tingly, I’m gonna toss you in the wood chipper there. Just like you tossed Eli away. If you’re lucky, I might wait until you die.”

A noise gurgled in his chest, ending on a whimper.

I stood up from my crouch, leaving him on the ground, where the stench told me he’d finally lost his bowels. Sure, I could’ve sat and taunted him some more, but instead, I decided to kill time, rummaging through his truck. The passenger door creaked as I opened it, and I grimaced at the piggish mess scattered all over the cab. Fast food wrappers, soda cans, crumpled papers, and chip bags lay on the seat and the floor, tucked beneath the bench.

“You’re a fucking slob, Gideon,” I said, pushing some of the mess aside. Opening the glove compartment sprang free a handful of condoms. Behind those, I fished around and found a pair of stockings shoved in the back, and a small pocket knife.

In front of the equally cluttered backseat sat a toolbox. I lifted the surprisingly light object to the front and set it down on the trash beside me. Snapping the lock up, I flipped it open and shook my head, lifting a metal J-hook from amid the lubricating jelly, ball gag, two large vibrators, and the gimp mask piled inside. Using the end of the hook, I pushed the mask aside, revealing photos of young boys posed in ways that brought acids shooting up my throat.

Rage got the best of me, as I tossed the objects back into the toolbox and exited the cab. Once again, I knelt beside Gideon, who lay struggling to breathe.

“You have one chance to save your life. The amount toxin I gave you won’t ultimately kill you for a few more hours. With some medical intervention, you could conceivably prevent that from happening, but that depends on you, and how honest you are.” I tipped my head, noticing the red hue of his skin—likely his blood pressure going haywire. “Is there a kid chained somewhere? Breathe once for yes, twice for no.” Hell, I didn’t even know if the poor sap could breathe twice in one go, but he did, shown in the flare of his nostrils each time. Grabbing him by the shirt, I ground my teeth. “You better not be lying to me.”

Again, he breathed twice.

“Those pictures in the toolbox. You took them?”

His chest rose once, and the rage exploded in my veins, pumping a message of pain to every muscle in my body.

“Remember when I said I’d wait until after you died?” Lifting him higher until my mouth was at his ear, I whispered, “I lied.”

He gasped and choked, leaving a trail of vomit along the pavement, as I dragged him to the back of the machine, where the gears of the wood chipper still spun an insatiable hunger to grind something. I lifted Gideon’s body up onto the feeding table and held him there a moment, the tiny spasms of breath telling me the shithead was about two seconds from hyperventilating and blacking out.

That, or having a heart attack.

“Eli sends his regards.” I stepped to the side as he’d shown me, hefting him forward to where the machine caught his shirt, sucking him in.

From the same pocket I’d fished out my smoke, I tugged out a paper folded around a small pencil and opened it to a list of names on the back of a letter, written by a dead kid. A fine mist of blood spattered across the page.

I crossed off The Pawn.