Page 17 of Freaks
“I’d stop talking right fucking now if I were you.” His words were laden with ice. Dead, cold, unfeeling words. The kind of words that came out of my mouth all the time. He fiddled with something for a second, and then he straightened, placing a hand on the cold water tap. He cranked it all the way to the left. Water roared out of the faucet, drenching my socked feet first, then quickly pooling in the bottom of the tub, hitting my thighs, my ass, my back. It was fucking freezing.
I didn’t say a word.
Fix stood, detached gaze scanning over me, and I imagined what was taking place inside his head. It was so, so easy to imagine, too, because I’d watching him recede into that dark, quiet place—the same dark, still, quiet place I withdrew into whenever I was about to do something seriously fucked up. He was going to fill the tub up with cold water, dump a couple of bags of ice in here with me, and then he was going to leave me for a couple of hours. Let me freeze for a while. Nothing made a person more malleable than a brutal case of hypothermia.
Or maybe he was going to try and waterboard me. Cover my face with a cloth, hold a funnel over my mouth, and start pouring. Being stuck in a full bathtub would make the process even shittier for me, but it would makehislife easier. Plenty of precious H2O on hand to partially drown me with, until I gave him whatever it was he wanted.
Of course, he could just be planning on straight up drowning me. My hands were trussed behind my back, and my ankles were bound so tight I couldn’t even feel my toes anymore. If he’d left it at that, I would have been able to launch myself out of the fucking tub and free myself pretty easily, even if it meant dislocating a shoulder, but no. The fucker had been far too smart for that. He’d connected my restraints together behind my back via a rigid, thick piece of reinforced steel cabling. I’d already nearly flayed the skin from my wrists trying to wrestle myself free, and I hadn’t gotten anywhere. So, I was stuck in the fucking bath, and I was about to die. However Fix decided to end me, it wasn’t going to be fucking pleasant.
I watched him with detached curiosity as he paced to a cupboard on the other side of the bathroom, opened it up and began pulling clean towels out of it and dumping them unceremoniously onto the floor.
This day had been coming for a very long time. You didn’t do what I did for a living, or work for the kind of man I worked for, without expecting to die a horrible, painful, terrible death at some point in the future yourself. I’d wondered often enough how it was going to happen and when, and now that we were here I couldn’t muster any sort of emotion beyond a slight sense of annoyance as the icy water inched its way up the sides of the bath, filling the tub quicker and quicker, covering more and more of me as the surface rose.
“Back in a minute,” Fix said casually. He stalked out of the bathroom, leaving the door yawning wide open. That’s when I saw the girl standing in the hallway, leaning against the wall with her head resting against a framed picture of Trinity Church. The straight edge of her dark hair barely grazed the tops of her shoulders.
“Come to watch the show? I’m impressed,” I ground out. “Most women wouldn’t want to witness a man being tortured to death.”
“I’m not most women,” she replied stiffly. “I don’t relish the sight of someone suffering. But I’m a pragmatist. You came here to hurt me. I need to make sure you’re not going to be able to do that, which means I have to watch. I have toseewhat he does to you with my own two eyes, so I know you’re not a threat anymore.”
“You think that way you won’t see me lurking in the shadows every time you walk down a dark alleyway?” I bit back the laughter burning at the back of my throat. “You think if you watch me die, you won’t still see my face every time you’re lying in bed at night and you can’t get to sleep?”
A slight wrinkle formed in the center of her forehead. “Something like that.”
The water continued to spew from the faucet; it had nearly filled the tub all the way to the rim. I allowed myself to feel the cold instead of shivering against it. I embraced it, letting it seep into my bones, forming shards of ice within the blood that was slowly pumping through my veins. “Then you’re fooling yourself, Sera. I will be the only thing you see for a long time to come.”
She shifted, moving her weight from one foot to the other. “You flatter yourself. I’m sure I’ll have forgotten all about you by the time Fix drags your carcass out of this penthouse and dumps it down the garbage chute.”
“Hmm.” The water rose up over my shoulders, hitting the back of my neck. I tipped my head to one side, resting my temple against the side of the bath. “How long did it take you to forget that other guy’s face? The guy you killed back in Montmorenci when you were sixteen?”
Her face lost what little color it had as she fidgeted, her eyes rounding, doubling in size. She pulled the sleeves of her oversized shirt down over her hands. Unnerved. Shaken.
Bingo.You’re not as strong as you think you are, little girl.
Still, she didn’t run away. “If you think I’ll talk Fix out of this, you’re wrong, asshole. You can’t appeal to my conscience. You can’t stop this.”
Rolling my head so that I was staring up at the high ceilings above, I admired the intricate crown molding around the light fitting. “Never said anything about you stopping it. I’m just reminding you of the bad taste I’m gonna leave in your mouth. You can scrub and scrub and scrub all you like, Lady Macbeth, but this damn spot won’t be coming out. At least for a while anyway. Until you’ve killed a bunch more people andnothingmatters anymore.”
I returned my gaze to her, peering past her caution and her hesitation. How long would it be before she picked up a gun or a knife and she used it? She’d been willing to shoot me with that assault rifle; she’d fucking tried to. It had only been her shitty aim that had saved my head from being blown off my shoulders. I didn’t lift my chin to avoid the water as it finally reached the lip of the bath and began to spill over the sides. I remained still, the surface of the water lapping at my top lip as I looked at her. No, it wasn’t going to be long before Sera Lafferty became the monster this Carver guy was trying to sell her as.
Not very long at all.
Fix appeared behind her, then, carrying something in his arms. Small. Cube-shaped. Black. A set of black leads with clamps attached to either end was slung over his shoulder.
Jumper cables. Jumper cables, and a brand-new car battery.
Sothatwas how I was going to die: he was going to electrocute me.
Fix didn’t look at me as he stepped into the bathroom, unfazed by the water that was all over the floor. He turned the tap off, movements measured and unhurried, and then he kicked at the towels he’d dumped on the floor, arranging them haphazardly around the bathtub with the toe of his boot.
“Make sure you mop up good.” Opening my mouth, I let the water rush inside. I swirled it around my teeth. Swallowed. “Electricity doesn’t discriminate. One little spark, one little pool of water touches your foot, and boom. You’re one crispy padre.”
Pulling the jumper cables from over his shoulder, Fix shot me a winning smile. Perfect white teeth. Motherfucker. “The soles on these boots are an inch thick. Rubber. I’m sure I’ll be just fine. Thanks, though.”
I shrugged. “Just doing my civic duty. Wouldn’t want you getting hurt now.” Somewhere, deep within the cavernous black space where my heart would have been located (if I’d had one) something fluttered, coughed…and then died. Nope. I really couldn’t muster up a single fuck to give right now. How depressing. It wasn’t as if working for Charlie was very rewarding on a day to day basis. My right hand guy, Michael, would notice if I was suddenly no longer around and I stopped sending him lists of tasks to complete and people to hurt, but apart from that…
I was hardly going to be missed. And I was okay with it.
Against my will, an image flashed into my mind: a woman with long, dark hair. Tall, with fire in her eyes. A white jacket. A stethoscope looped around the back of her neck. A heavy, stifling mantle of sadness weighing her down as she stood in front of an elevator, waiting for the doors to roll back.
