A Blood of Killers Read online

  “I said I wanted a message sent. You did what was expected, killing the others sent after her.”

  Max stared at the girl, then said, “You said you wanted a terrible death.”

  “I wanted you motivated.”

  “You didn’t answer my question.”

  “I don’t have to.” Mr. Jung waited. The woman remained still, holding her breath.

  Max stood his ground. He hadn’t been dismissed.

  Mr. Jung smiled. He leaned forward and seemed relieved at the chance to talk to someone. “She has great potential. Her mother’s death freed the both of us from a terrible fate a long time ago. I’ve looked out for her over the years, in gratitude for her mother’s service. And because she is my blood.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “I did not raise her directly, but she is still my daughter. Under my protection, she’s had all that the world has to offer to youth. And, because of my visits, she’s had her share of unusual experiences. She’s dabbled in our world and is not without some skills. And ambition. She wanted to meet one of my contractors. She thought she might be interested in the work.” Mr. Jung’s smile broadened, and he bowed his head slightly. “And I wanted to see how she would react. One can’t always judge by words or even deeds.”

  Max still couldn’t understand what his handler was talking about. What did being his daughter have to do with anything? She was just another girl. The question came out: “Why do you bother with her?”

  “Like a child, he is,” Mr. Jung told the woman, who pulled her chin in to move her gaze from her knees to her crotch, refusing to make eye contact with Max or acknowledge her father’s comment. “I wanted her exposed. To you, to the others. She had to understand vulnerability. What it feels like to be hunted, to wait for death, feel it coming closer. I had to see how she’d react. Would she run, move to protect herself, freeze. It’s always different when choice is taken away. When death is no longer a game.”

  Mr. Jung put a hand on the back of his daughter’s bare arm and whispered something to her. Laughed.

  She showed no expression.

  “Habits of the trade,” Mr. Tung said. “We always test the merchandise. Even when we’ve had a hand in its making.” He patted her hands. “I’ll always love my daughter.”

  The appetites in the room were a murky stew. The girl’s terror was only inciting the Beast and confusing Max’s reading of the situation. He didn’t think Mr. Jung knew what he meant by love, either.

  “No blood,” Max said.

  “Not today. Bad practice, killing one’s young. At least, in any direct manner. A willingness to sacrifice one’s blood commands respect. However, actually performing the act raises issues of trust among allies.”

  And yet, it seemed everyone in the room wanted someone dead. Max refused to beg. He thought she might die sitting next to her father if she didn’t breathe normally soon.

  “She’ll go back into hiding and be safe once more, now that I see her limitations. And our friends, and enemies, will know something else about us—what we would do, what we are capable of.” Mr. Jung casually pointed at Max’s bag of trophies and winked. “And what we’ve done.”

  Max studied the girl. She’d be safe. She wasn’t going to play with monsters, or try to be one, ever again. He didn’t think she’d talk to her father, anymore.

  Finally, he told Mr. Jung, “You put her in danger and made me protect her. I’m not a bodyguard.”

  “You are what you’re needed to be. Perhaps one day, I won’t have to trick you into doing what’s required.”

  “Maybe one day I won’t have to do what’s required.”

  “As long as our needs coincide, we will serve each other, Max.”

  “I need to kill.” He tasted blood.

  “Then kill the need and find your satisfaction elsewhere.”

  The Beast lurched.

  Max ate his trophies.

  The girl gasped. Urine soaked the couch.

  The cartoon dog flew off into the sunset.

  Mr. Jung smiled.

  Max left.

  It had been the hardest kill of the day.

  DO NOTHING TILL YOU HEAR FROM ME

  “Is your mother still alive?” the old woman asked. Max, sitting by the window watching the street through partially-closed blinds, didn’t answer. The tea and crackers he’d been offered sat on the table by his elbow, untouched. The scent of peppermint lingered in the air, as if reluctant to leave without knowing it had comforted him.

  Billie Holiday’s soft, smoothly cutting voice sang “Solitude” in the background, dissecting the anatomy of sadness like a surgeon with a heart pumping tears instead of blood. The Beast moaned inside Max. Another day of listening to old woman’s 78s and Max didn’t know what he might do. The Beast had moved beyond its normal of rage and hunger, into the gloom of depression, as if it had glimpsed a previously unseen part of itself in a mirror and found it pathetic.

  Max couldn’t imagine what might have upset his demon.

  “It isn’t a hard question,” the old woman said, replacing the cold tea with a fresh cup. Two days. Twenty-seven cups.

  “I’m an orphan,” Max said, talking to the street, to the target who was supposed to come out sometime in the seventy-two hours he’d been assigned to cover. The job was simple: follow and make him disappear.

  The old woman’s apartment had been convenient. Safe.

  She was a General’s mother. Her husband had fought in World War I, in the 369th Infantry Regiment. He’d been informed of her heritage as if it is was supposed to mean something to him. He’d been reminded that she understood orders, duty, responsibility.

  She’d lost sons in battle. She understood death.

  What she didn’t understand was Max, or the Beast.

  It would have been simpler to kill her, use the apartment for the job, even satisfy his appetites in the neighborhood after completing the mission.

  But as the mother of an important piece of the particular brand of political machinery to which he belonged, at the moment, she was a valuable asset. Conveniently established in a tactically optimal location for a crucial assignment. He wasn’t supposed to damage the asset. He wasn’t supposed to kill her.

  The General, for all that was said about him, still loved his mother.

  No matter what side he worked on, collateral damage was a cost of doing business. A part of the game. Within parameters. There were rules. Not, as he’d learned, merely for the sake of having rules, but for the safety and survival of those in power, and their servants.

  There was a cost to breaking those rules. He’d learned, the hard way, what it meant to lose the protection of those requiring his services.

  He’d spent a good portion of his apprenticeship as a POW in Nam and Cambodia, in prisons in China, Rumania, Turkey, Argentina. It was never the torture or the beatings that hurt Max or the Beast. It was the denial of appetite’s fulfillment.

  The jungle of the world had taught him he needed more than killing skills to hunt.

  “It’s a terrible thing, not to have a mother,” she said. As she went into the kitchen, she said, “I lost my mother, too.”

  The record repeated twice before she returned. He’d stood up to more rigorous torture for much longer.

  “They took her into the fields when my father was away,” she said, standing like a lifeless stick of a tree bending to a wind sighing through its bare branches. “And raped her. All of them. And then they took what was left of her and beat her, tied her to a tree and whipped her, laughing. I could hear them laughing, and her screaming, all the way from the place where she’d told me to hide. In case of injuns, she’d always said. But it weren’t Indians that done it. And then they set her on fire. And the next day my Daddy came home, and found her, and we left for the city. He died soon after that. I had to take care of myself.

  “I never told my son that story, Max. I never told my husband. My children. Not anyone. Ever. Except you. Now.”

&nb
sp; The record started over, again.

  Max stared, repeating to himself that he was not supposed to kill her. It was like trying not to kill a mosquito buzzing in his ear.

  The Beast rolled, showing coldness and edges. It didn’t want to hear words. It wanted more of the sadness which tortured it.

  “I wonder why that is, that I’d feel comfortable telling you such a thing. You, of all people, after all these years.”

  He didn’t answer. He didn’t care.

  “What are you going to do if he doesn’t come out?” she asked, pointing to the window.

  She’d been told he was an operative sent to follow someone living in the building across the street.

  Again, he didn’t answer.

  She crept up behind him, as if she had the skill to surprise him. She put her fingers through his hair.

  The Beast withered beneath her touch.

  “Do nothing till you hear from me,” she whispered in his ear, her breath warm and wet, her voice shaking like an Autumn leaf about to fall. She gave him a wink as she left the apartment.

  Insane woman. He’d be doing the son a favor by putting her out of her misery.

  He always asked to work alone. It made what had to be done simpler. These were exactly the kinds of situations that made him stress the importance of his simple requirement. Why wouldn’t anyone listen?

  He’d get the blame if she botched the job for him.

  Max checked the kitchen to make sure she hadn’t left the kettle on the fire. He stopped the record. Quiet, at last.

  These old apartments, with their thick walls and new windows shutting out street sounds, were very peaceful. A fine place for the Beast to play in.

  In the quiet, the Beast shook off its sadness and sniffed the air for prey.

  Evening seeped into the street. Darkness crept into the spaces between the street lamps’ glow. Cars and taxis sped by below.

  He wasn’t tired. He didn’t need to sleep. The Beast kept him up with its hunger.

  The phone rang.

  He ignored it, but the phone continued to ring.

  The device was old, with a rotary dialer, and when he picked up the handset it felt heavy in his hand. A solid weapon, unlike the modern versions.

  “He’s coming down now,” the old woman said, then hung up. Seconds later, she came out of the building he’d been watching, directly across the street.

  He hadn’t seen her go in.

  Max sat up. Knocked the teacup to the floor. He wasn’t supposed to be fooled so easily. Certainly not by an old woman.

  And who was she talking about coming out? Who did she think he was waiting for?

  The Beast picked up the scent of death.

  A minute later, his target came out.

  Max bolted from the apartment, raced downstairs, fell into the track of his intended victim. He activated the device in his pocket that called for cleaners.

  There were guards, unobtrusive, spread out in a loose net mingling with the dinner and theater crowd along the more populated avenue. Max picked them off, one by one, passing them off in a delicate ballet to cleaners and sweepers in a taxi, van, pickup truck, ambulance following along on the street, and waiting in building service entrances. The last two knew he was coming. Call checks had been missed. Back-ups were no doubt on the way.

  A little boy noticed him as he darted out of a doorway and snatched the last, a young woman with sharp elbows, off the street. Children were always noticing him.

  He knocked the female guard out, left her sitting with her back against the wall covered in newspaper sheets. Just another homeless person on the street. No one would see her. The Beast would come back for her later.

  Max reached the target just as he was about to enter his favorite restaurant. The maître d’ talking on the phone looked up, half-smiling, and then the man was gone. The maître d’ went back to his appointment book and the call.

  Max loaded his quarry into the van, already crowded with two dead guards and sweepers. An escorting produce delivery truck provided cover from cars behind the pickup van.

  The vehicles drove off, leaving him alone on the street. Except for the old woman watching him.

  She’d learned a few tricks in her day. No wonder the General loved her.

  “Where is he?” she asked, her wrinkled face slack, loose flesh stretched as if she was already dead.

  “Gone,” he answered, cold and dead.

  “But, you were supposed to follow him,” she said.

  “I did.”

  “My son said … and I told him I knew …” She took in a sharp breath, put a hand to her throat, the other to her chest. “I knew his father. The boys. I worked for his family when mine was gone.”

  “Gone,” he said, intending the word to be a knife to her heart. Instead, it came out as an echo of the old woman’s voice. He’d spent too much time with her.

  Her eyes wide as pools of water after a storm, she said, “I stopped by. He doesn’t take calls. I asked him to meet me here for dinner. For old times’ sake. So you could follow. I wasn’t going in. I just wanted to give you something to do. To make you feel better.”

  Traffic moved to a languid rhythm, stop and start, glide and brake, behind him. People flowed around them in currents, pulsing with words and laughter and life, never noticing the still, dead islands of flesh staring at one another.

  It was the Beast that kept him there, caught between hunger and the haunting ache of loss. Max didn’t understand. He couldn’t remember ever losing anything he cared for. He’d never even cared for anything. Or anyone. And all the Beast had ever shown him was appetite and rage.

  Where had the Beast been, what did the Beast have that he didn’t, to be ensnared in the gossamer threads of a frail and useless feeling? Was it something at the root of its hunger, or its ever-churning wrath?

  The Beast could not answer. Max did not care. He didn’t think the answers would help him hunt. He turned to leave.

  “Just like that,” she said, and also turned, weeping. She stopped suddenly to glare at him, as if he’d forced her to see something she hadn’t wanted to recognize, do something she’d promised never to do again.

  Crazy woman.

  The Beast curled around the trace of a trap. Not Max’s, or even the General’s. They’d only been pawns. But someone with a feeling for the game and the pieces in play had taken a chance. The consequences of the mother’s realization would reverberate through a small circle. There would be pain. Something had been won and lost between contestants far beyond Max’s awareness.

  The Beast growled at being known, and used. Max felt the chill of a draft blowing in through murder’s layered armor.

  “Your son says hi,” he said, catching only a glimpse of her horrified expression.

  She had a song to keep her company, back at her apartment.

  He had the Beast, and the woman under the newspaper sheets he’d saved for them both.

  The rest would keep until the day he no longer needed to hide in the game.

  LET ME TELL YOU A STORY

  “It was a time,” Tracey always began, “when sons kill their fathers and daughters murdered their mothers, and all the children ran wild and free.”

  By that time I was down to my underwear. She’d stripped my clothes off during the suffocating interludes between bumping bodies and flailing limbs, when she had my twisted body locked in one paralyzing hold or another.

  The room was dark except for her face floating above, illuminated by the flashlight she held in her hands. Her eyes bright, lips smiling down on me. I’d still be giggling from the tickling session that always followed her wrestling victory over me. Her weight pinned me to floor as she sat straddling my chest, keeping my arms pinned with her knees. Bone dug into muscle, hurting. Sometimes my feet were cold. But I didn’t mind. Her perfume sweetened the sweat-stinking air. The warmth of her sex burned through to my quick-beating heart.

  Parents loved her. She had a reputation as the best sitter in
the neighborhood. Especially for the wild young boys. The first time she pinned me, when she came over to meet me and talk with my mom and dad, I cried. I’d called her an old lady and grabbed her hair bun to try and loosen it. My mom laughed, my dad rolled his eyes. Then she tickled me, and told me a story, and played some games, and pretty soon I’d forgotten how bad I felt losing her playful challenge in the living room after my parents had introduced me to her. Afterwards, when we were alone, she changed the stories. She changed the games.

  She wasn’t like the girls my age, who teased me and made me sick with the stupid things they did. She wasn’t like the girls her age, either, who ignored me. She called me her little lion. Taught me moves and holds so I could be a tough guy at school, and so I could give her a little competition, she said. She still beat me. Easily. She was older, stronger, and beautiful. She made me feel special. Like I belonged with her. To her. It felt good and warm and safe, being under her after a while, laughing, listening to her voice, to her stories.

  In time, I yielded willingly to her, surrendered with every aching fiber of my body, mind and soul, to her vast and mysterious power. I was in love with her. We all were. Todd, Ray, Michael, all the boys she cared for, though we’d never admit it to each other. Or her.

  After the story’s opening line, she’d tickle me again. Nails dancing up and down from nipples to ribs to stomach to the insides of my thighs. With one eyebrow arched, she’d wiggle and grind into me as I struggled to breath. Gasped. Gulped for air. She wouldn’t stop until I wet myself. Sometimes she’d dip a finger into the stream of tears running down my cheek and taste it. With her tongue. Like out of movies I’d see years later.

  When she was satisfied with my helplessness, she’d continue. “And you were there, Leo. Tall and strong and handsome, singing a war song and holding a knife dripping with blood.”

  “Whose blood?” I’d ask. I always did. And I was desperate to know, to hear the story. Listen to her voice going on and on. Forever. Believing every word of it.