Page 21 of Ship Happens
I’m not here to debate our penal system and where it fails. My job is to get the bad guys off the streets. I can’t stop them from getting out again. If this is his gripe, he’d do better to pack the scavenger hunt with defense attorneys instead of federal agents.
In answer to his question, I aim the gun and pull the trigger.
Click.
The man strapped to the chair squeals and braces for impact, but no bullet jets from the gun. A sprig of disappointment blossoms inside me, disgusting me. I need to be careful that their sickness isn’t catching. I’m not a fucking killer.
With a shrug of my shoulders, I offer the gun to Jim, but he shakes his head.
“No, dear child. You get to keep going until the gun fires.” Glee glimmers in his eyes as he pushes the gun against my chest. “You can drag this out for as long as you’d like, but he will die by your hand. That’s your prize for answering correctly.”
“Lucky!” someone shouts.
I don’t know. I don’t feel very lucky. And neither does the Cattle.
Shit. I mean themanin front of me. Now I’m starting to think like one of them.
He strains against the restraints until the thin metal edge cuts into the top of his left wrist, sheering the skin from his hand as he pulls it free. With no blood going to the flap, the skin turns a sickly whitish-yellow as it dangles and flops over tendons and flashes of bluish-white bone.
Remembering Maverick’s new cover story—and fuck him for that—I smile before I step forward and pull the trigger multiple times. This has to end, and quickly.
Click.Click.Click.
On the next pull, fire explodes from the barrel, and my wrist snaps backward. The Cattle’s head jerks in the oppositedirection, and a bloody waterfall flows from the side of his skull facing away from me. His chest rises and falls a few more times, weaker and weaker, before he stills.
A hand clamps over my shoulder, and another raucous cheer erupts from the people seated before me, but I hear, see, and feel so little. Everything is a blur or a murmur or a numbness.
On robotic legs, I march off the stage with my fake smile held before me like a shield. My fist rises in the air in a show of feigned triumph, and they cheer again.
But not Maverick. Still not Maverick.
The girls rise from the table and surround me, welcoming me into the fold, my previous misstep forgotten. As far as they’re concerned, I’m one of them. Only Maverick seems to be outside of my spell.
“Settle down, everyone. Settle down,” Jim says from the stage. He turns to the next table with their question.
I’m deaf to all of it. My ass slides into my seat on autopilot when all I want to do is run down the hallway and warn every agent to head for a lifeboat. This ship is sinking, and we don’t even have a life vest.
The game continues, and a few more Cattle—human beings—are dispatched. As each new victim comes out, I study the face, searching for Castle, but he isn’t among the dead by the end of the third round. Meanwhile, my anxiety continues to rise. Maverick studies me each time someone makes a kill, likely looking for a crack in my veneer.
Cracks run through me, but he won’t see them. I’m careful to keep my nervous fidgeting to a minimum, now that I know he’s wising up. If I can avoid killing him, I’d prefer that, but if he forces my hand...
If he forces my hand, I’ll end him without hesitation.
A loud bang pulls my attention from the maze of thoughts I’ve lost myself in, and I turn toward the stage. Aven’s teamlanded on Russian Roulette, and they’ve just claimed their prize. I wish I felt worse about watching someone get murdered for fun, but it’s hard to mentally defend people who’ve done some pretty indefensible things.
As the staff drags the body away, our team focuses on the stage. Our turn is next.
Jim clears his throat and steps around a large puddle of blood as he shuffles the notecards. Then he raises the mic to his lips and looks at us. “Table two, before the I-90 killer went dormant, the feds postulated that it was actually the work of three men, not one. What tipped them off?”
This is a tricky question. King, our division’s director, believed it was the work of three men because of the bodies—the bodies we’ve discovered, anyway, and there haven’t been many. It wasn’t so much the condition they were left in, however, which was the same every time: dressed to impress, and clean, despite several victims coming back as known vagrants. What struck King as odd was that while the majority of the victims were buried in the same manner, on rare occasions, we’d discover flowers left on the dirt mound, and in one instance, piss.
But King only shared his suspicions with our team. No one else.
I’ll have to play dumb this time. As the girls begin to formulate theories, I just nod and agree. Maverick stays silent, watching me as the seconds tick down.
“I’ve never even heard of the I-90 Killer,” Eve whispers, “so how the fuck am I supposed to know what tipped off anyone to anything?”
The pretty blonde—Cat—leans forward, sending a lock of hair into her eyes. “He picked up sex workers and killed them. No rhyme or reason other than that. They’ve only found five of his victims, but there are believed to be about four times that many.”
