Rabid, CH 02 (Patreon)

The building we approach is a small, defunct furniture warehouse.

“They’ve done a good job of covering their trail,” Asyr’s digitized voice told me and Alex as we drove. “The last digital trace from any of them dates back to four days before you found the dead body of Donald Joyner. Jerry Young bought a maple donut along with a tea at the corner donut store and paid with his cash card. In case you are wondering, the coroner placed Donald’s time of death at sometime that afternoon. Since then nothing until this morning when a pharmacy camera caught enough of third member of C, D & J Investigation’s face for my programs to identify and allow me to follow him despite his serious attempt at not being noticed by cameras.”

“Does it speak to how good they are?” Alex asks as he looks the building over, “that this is where they’ve been hiding out. Or of how desperate they are?” He checks the magazine, and that a bullet is chambered before returning the APX to the holster under his arm.

“They weren’t good enough to remain hidden.”

He grins. “Good thing we’re the ones who found them, then?”

“For us.”

“How do you want to do this? I don’t see any cameras, but it’d been easy to have a phone leaning against a window broadcasting to a laptop. You want to look for an entry point that doesn’t have any windows?”

“No.” I head for the door before us. They are welcome to run, if they are able. Carl’s trip to the pharmacy was for broadband antibiotics as well as the strongest anxiety medication available without a prescription [need to find an actual name]. Asyr also mentioned that Carl was limping.

Alex glances at me. “You’re not going to pick the lock, are you?”

I slam my foot under the handle, and the wooden frame splinters as the door opens.

“That’s a no,” Alex says.

The other side of the door is the storage area. A few pieces of furniture wrapped in plastic, a couch someone has used as a bed. Fast food wrappers on a pile of pallets.

The sounds of whimpering come from the other side of the room.

Lumber has been set against the wall, creating a small alcove, and in it, Jerry is curled up in the far corner, whimpering, while Carl points a revolver at us, his hand shaking so badly I doubt he’ll be able to hit either of us from the twenty feet separating us.

“Don’t come any closer,” he orders, his eyes wide in fear. “I said!” he yells as I cross the distance, then wrench the revolver out of his hand. He lets go before I do any damage. I open the cylinder, tip the four .45 bullets out of it and pocket them before tossing it to the side.

“Don’t threaten,” I tell him. “Shoot. Anyone who has gone to the extent of tracking you to this place will not be dissuaded by threats. Your only chance is to reduce their numbers to something you and Jerry can manage.”

“Which, from the looks of it,” Alex adds. “You want to be zero.”

“We didn’t tell them anything,” Carl blurts out.

“Really?” Alex asked. “You let Donald be tortured to the point it killed him to protect us?” the disbelief is loud. “I’m not the expert he is at people, but even I don’t buy it.”

Carl takes a step back in fear and his left leg nearly buckles under him as he puts weight on it. The pant leg is cut from the hip to the bottom. His leg is bandages, but the blood that seeps through isn’t a healthy color.

“What do you want?” Carl asked.

“Everything,” I answer.

“We don’t have anything left,” he replies with a bitter laugh.

“You have information. You will give that to me. I can do far worse than what was done to Donald,” I add, as Carl is about to protest. When he attempts again, I say. “I can keep you alive until you’ve told me everything.”

The color drains from his face. Asyr didn’t give me a detailed report on what was done to Donald, but they mentioned that the coroner’s finding was that the death was most likely accidental, one of the knife cuts intended to hurt Donald went too deep and opened the Brachial Artery.

“So your options,” Alex says, “are basically to let Tristan torture you until you tell us everything, or tell us everything and avoid the torture. I know what I’d go for if it was me.”

“We didn’t want to tell them,” Carl says, defeated.

“You broke,” I reply. “People do that. That’s not why I’m here. I want to know who they are. What you did for them. How you contacted them. How they contacted you. Who tortured you? How they did it. I want to know everything.”

“I…” Carl sits on a stack of pallets. “I don’t know that I know anything.”

“You know what the guys who attacked you in your office wore,” Alex said. “I mean, they weren’t naked, right?”

“Black suits,” Carl said.

“Hockerty,” Jerry whispers, “J. Crew, Brioni, Reiss.”

“Surprised there’s no Armani in there,” Alex comments.

“Jerry likes good suits,” Carl says.

“That’s what they wore?” Alex asks.

“If Jerry says it is.”

“Is he in a state to even know what’s happening right now?”

“The meds are kicking in,” Jerry says. There’s an edge of hysteria to his voice, but the rocking is slowing. “There were nine of them. Carl had two unconscious before they grabbed him. Donald kicked one in the balls. That’s why they tortured him to get us to talk. They wanted to know everything we had on you. We didn’t have much.”

“But you had where we lived.”

The look they exchange is terror. I don’t reassure them.

“We’re detectives,” Jerry says. “We weren’t going to just have you walk in, give us a message to pass along and forget. We weren’t going to do anything with what we found, but we were going to look.”

“Do you understand what your curiosity cost me?” I demand; boxes creating a light show I have trouble bringing under control.

“We didn’t think—”

“Yeah, that’s pretty clear,” Alex said, as a growl escapes me.

Even once I have the boxes quiet again, my breathing is harder than it should be. They are not the ones who destroyed the garage. I doubt it would have been prevented even if they hadn’t had the information to give. The people responsible would have found out in other ways. How hard it is to find them speaks to the kind of resources they have available. With those turned to finding me, Alex and Emil, it was only a question of time until they struck.

I still want to lash out. Someone needs to pay, and I want that payment to start now. I still the unsettled boxes. But if I lash out against these two, I will lose this chance at gaining information.

“How did you start working for them?” I ask, my voice steady again.

“We were hired,” Carl says. “We’re PIs. It’s what people do.”

“You get a name?” Alex asked.

“Orban Domonkos,” Carl replied. “The story he gave us was that he worked for child care, and he’d have us look into missing kids here and there. I think that over the four years we had him as a client, he gave us five cases. We never found any of them.”

“You checked him out?” Alex asks.

“Enough to confirm he was real and did work for Child Care Services.”

“But not who else he might work for?”

“Or if he was who he claimed to be?”

Carl shakes his head. “The money was reasonable. The story made sense, so we took him at face value. Even following you was wrapped around the kid—”

“My son.”

Carl nods. “He coaxed it as needing to know if you’d kidnapped him.”

“Is he who you passed my message along to?”

“No. After that, we told him we were dropping him as a client. And within days, we had someone else from Child Care contacting us. A Sophie Fletcher. When she said she wanted us to look into missing children, red flags went up and we told her no. Her tone changed, and she implied she could have us implicated in a few missing person’s cases, but we know how to do our jobs, so she’d have to fabricate anything implicating us. When we didn’t fold, she ended the call, but at that point we were pretty sure she worked for the same people Orban did. She’s who we gave your message to.”

“Considering what the results were,” Alex says, “it confirms you were right.” He looks up from his phone. “Google gives me a Sophie Fletcher and Orban Domonkos working for Child Care. I’m going to need something better to get anything else.”

“The cases Orban gave you,” I say. “Tell me everything about them.”

* * * * *

Jerry is rocking again by the time Carl is done. Names, families, what they did in their attempt to find the missing children. On the surface, it fits the actions of a concerned Child Care worker acting on his own. The money can be explained by a secondary income source if the detectives had asked about it. Investments would be the least likely to raise suspicion. Knowing he worked for a human trafficking ring, his reasons would be more in line with testing if the method they used could be seen through.

“What happens now?” Carl asks softly. He’s too tired to be scared, but he knows enough to expect retributions. He and his associates found themselves in the crossfire, and they were instrumental in the garage’s destruction. Boxes rattle, and I want revenge. I don’t care about why they had no choice. About how anyone has a breaking point with enough resources that can always be reached.

I still them long enough to turn and walk away.

“What happens now?” Carl asks again, this time fear slipping past his exhaustion.

“Now I think you’re going to want to lie low,” Alex replies. “Well lower, we did find you after all. And get that leg looked after, that looks nasty.” Then he’s at my side.

“Can the names lead you to who is behind this?” I ask as we walk away from the warehouse.

“I won’t know until I’ve looked into it deeper. If not them directly, the names of the kids might give me a clue. If they’re real.”

“They are. The tests wouldn’t work if they weren’t actually taken.”

“Tests…” he thinks it over. “They were putting their methods to the test. These guys aren’t the FBI, but they’re pretty good PIs, were. No matter what happens to them, they’re probably done.”

When we reach the car, Alex places a hand on my arm. “Are you okay?”

“No.”

He nods. “You were a bit rash, I know they weren’t going to be that much of a problem no matter what, but you’re usually more careful.”

“The loss of the garage…” I trail off as the boxes become loud.

“We will find another one,” he says, and one box is suddenly louder, hope. Only for it to be buried under all the other ones.

“We’ll we? Alex, can we really do this?”

“Since I know you aren’t questioning us taking down whoever is behind the trafficking ring, you have to mean living a normal life.”

Boxes flair and I let out a bitter snort. “I’m not normal, Alex.”

“No one is. It’s just a statistic.”

“I’m a killer. I’m a monster. And I think I’ve lost some of my control over myself.”

He presses against me. Rests his head on my shoulder. And the boxes quiet. “If we can’t do this, we’ll do whatever else it is we can do together, Tristan. If that is something that you’re afraid of, among what’s happening, don’t worry. I will not leave you.”

I wrap my arms around him. His box radiating a glow that calms every other one. “That is not something I ever fear, Alex. We will be together until the end.”