Page 95 of Barristers & Bones

Kilian shook his head as he watched. “For fuck’s sake. You two look like you’re getting ready to do a little gardening in those boots. It’s disturbing.”

Fenn put on a plastic apron and a face shield, then turned and grinned at us like we were getting ready to finger paint. Over the next hour, Fenn helped us work over Lionel Strack, and Kilian leaned against the wall and played a game on his phone while we worked.

Sylvie did the honors with Lionel’s tongue, and the smell of burned flesh, blood, and urine saturated the air. I leaned over his bloated, red face and looked into his pain-filled wild eyes after Sylvie finished cauterizing the stump.

“Now I’m going to cap one of your eyes with this cement-based glue.” I held up the glue and flesh-colored eye cap for him to see. “Do you know why we’re only doing one eye? Oh, that’s right. You can’t talk and spew your filth anymore because you don’t have a tongue. So I’ll just tell you.” I studied his snotty, tear-stained face. “We’re only capping one eye because we want you to see the instruments we plan to use on you. You love to rape and cut women up, so it’s ironic two women are the ones who are going to torture you to death.”

Fenn held Lionel’s head still while I carefully glued his eyelid shut and capped it. The glue must have stung because he screamed when I applied it, then quieted down to a blubbering whimper.

While Fenn continued to hold his head, Sylvie and I stitched his lips up with long, curved suture needles using thick black thread. We didn’t worry about these stitches showing. Instead, we sewed big X’s across his mouth. “This is for Misty, and all the other women you and your family have brutalized or killed,” I whispered as we sewed.

The sounds coming from him now were ghoulish and disturbing, and Lionel seemed to break at some point. He started sobbing and choking through his nose.

We gave him a few minutes to calm down, and then Sylvie held up the trocar to Lionel’s one good eye. “See this? Do you know what the open needle at the end of this aspirating tube is for? It’s used to suck the liquids, blood, and organs out of a body. Once that’s done, embalming fluid is pumped back inside, which is mostly formaldehyde.”

I patted Lionel’s shoulder. “To a living person, formaldehyde is like acid. It’ll eat you from the inside, and I’ve read it’s an excruciating way to die. Almost like getting your vagina and anus ripped open with broken glass.”

The zip ties Fenn used to secure his head cut across Lionel’s brow as he tried to shake his head, sending blood into his eyes. He looked pretty ghoulish at this point, with black X’s across his lips, one eye capped, and the other wide and terrorized.

Sylvie turned the trocar on, holding it comfortably in her hand. “First, I’m going to use this on your minuscule little testicles. We’ll puncture your scrotum first, then stick this inside, and suck out your balls. They’re small enough, it shouldn’t take long.”

Lionel went still for a few seconds, then convulsed and retched. He tried to force his mouth open, ripping a few sutures across his lips and causing his skin to tear in places. But his mouth stayed shut. Blood, mucus, and tears covered his face as he aspirated vomit into his lungs. Some of it oozed out his nostrils, and I gagged a little just watching him.

Kilian pocketed his phone and walked over, studying Lionel’s face clinically. “He’s going to asphyxiate and die from his own vomit. Do you want me to rip his stitches out and revive him?”

I stared down at Lionel and contemplated our options. Maybe he’d suffered enough, and we should just let him die. His face looked almost purple under all the bodily fluids. But then I thought of Misty, laying in a hospital bed with stab wounds and a contusion on her face from being kicked by this man.

I shook my head. “Sylvie, if we create a space between his stitches, maybe you could suck out enough vomit.”

“Good idea.” Sylvie turned to Fenn. “Clip a couple of stitches on the left side of his lips, will you?” He grabbed a small pair of steel scissors and clipped the threads. Then Sylvie shoved the trocar into Lionel’s mouth and turned it on just enough to get most of the liquid out. Lionel’s breathing stabilized.

Sylvie leaned over the gurney enough so he could see her out of his uncapped eye. “You and your family are a scourge to women. You stabbed Misty and kicked her in the face, then bragged about raping and torturing women. And you’ve tried to kidnap Luna–twice. So we’re going to enjoy this. There are countless nerve endings in the male testicles, so this is going tohurt.”

I looked at Sylvie with wide eyes. “What do you want me to do?”

She nodded to her scalpel over on the counter. “Make an incision in his scrotum and I’ll do the rest.”

My lips curled up in disgust, but I grabbed the scalpel, and before I could think too much about it, I leaned over Lionel’s sweaty, stinky body, grabbed his scrotum with my rubber-glove-covered hands, and made a cut. Lionel screeched in pain and rocked on the gurney. I stepped back to give Sylvie room to work and looked down in time to see blood dripping off the scalpel onto my cheery yellow polka-dot boots.

Sylvie grabbed Lionel’s scrotum at the base with one gloved hand to keep his testicles from retracting, stuck her trocar into the incision, and turned it on.

His back bowed off the table, and a terrible muffled, high-pitched scream came from his mouth as his scrotum emptied with a sick, sucking sound. I glanced over at Kilian and Fenn who both had disgusted, pained expressions on their faces, and Fenn held his hands over his crotch.

Kilian shook his head. “This is going to put me off my dinner,andgive me nightmares.”

Sylvie stepped back and studied Lionel. He was sobbing and choking now, and a few seconds later, he started retching again.

Kilian pocketed his phone. “Do you want to revive him for another round?” he asked. “You still haven’t injected him with embalming fluid.”

Sighing, I stepped back. This was probably going to put me off my food, too. “No, let it happen. It’s somehow fitting he chokes on his own vomit.” Kilian nodded and put his arm around my shoulder, knowing somehow I needed a little comfort.

But Sylvie huffed. “Come on, don’t be a quitter. I wanted to see his reaction to embalming fluid.”

Fenn pointed to Lionel’s purple face. “If we’re going to revive him, you need to do it now.”

Sylvie glanced at me, then sighed. “Fine. I guess we’re done.” She turned off her trocar.

Over the next few minutes, we stood back and watched Lionel die of pulmonary aspiration. When he stopped convulsing and thrashing, then lay still for several minutes, Sylvie stepped forward and placed her fingers on his neck. His body twitched a little, and gas bubbles foamed out of his nose. I started and drew back. Even with the Spade cousins standing around me, I felt a little jumpy.

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