Page 25 of Freaks
Sera shifted in the chair next to me. She was close enough to feel the baleful energy pouring from my body like a waterfall of hate, but Rabbit…he clearly didn’t feel it. He took a second longer to stare me down, and then he inhaled, straightening his back, clapping his hands together in front of him. “Okay. Fair enough. You caught me.” Picking up the thumb drive, he got to his feet and stepped around Monica, heading for the bar. I watched the fucker like a hawk as he took out a laptop from underneath the counter and plugged the thumb drive into one of the USB ports.
Monica kicked me under the table. “Fix, please…” she whispered. “I know you’re angry, but—”
“Not even close.Angry does not even come close.” If she thought she was going to bargain for mercy on Rabbit’s behalf, she was sorely fucking mistaken. I used to be merciful. Empathetic. Trouble was, my empathy had caused me way too many sleepless nights. The faces of all the men I’d killed would come to me at night, invading my dreams, until in the end I hadn’t known a moment’s peace. I’d faced a decision: either I quit trying to avenge victims of hate, rape, violence and abuse by murdering their attackers, or I hunted down the part of my brain that dealt in empathy and guilt and I figured out how to turn it all off.
The first option had been a clear no-go. I’d spent some time learning how my own brain worked, and I’d found that fucking switch. I’d thrown it without a moment’s thought, and ever since then I’d slept like a baby. No way I was turning that switch back on now for Rabbit’s sake. He could have sold me out, put me in serious danger, caused me to lose everything I owned, my money, my apartment, my fuckingfreedom, and there still would have been a chance I’d have found it in my heart to forgive what he’d done. A slim chance, but still, a chance all the same. But Rabbit had made a fatal fucking error. His actions had endangered Sera’s safety. The stunt he’d pulled could have endedherlife, and no matter how sorry he was, how hard he fucking begged, there was nothing he could do to save himself now. Not that that was even an issue, because the bastard clearly wasn’t sorry.
Monica whimpered, tapping her fingertip against the tabletop. Her tapping matched Rabbit’s as he hammered away at the laptop keyboard by the bar. “It was kinda genius really,” he said. “Oscar’s been sending his guys to this dipshit on the Upper East Side, some rich momma’s boy who’s been undercutting my services for months. I wanted to teach him a lesson about customer loyalty and punish that asshole at the same time, so I whispered a couple of mistruths into a few select ears. Said I had some insider trading info on a thumb drive in my office. Data worth millions to anyone who had a little money to invest. I knew it would get back to Oscar, and whaddya know? Two days later, a guy in a ski mask breaks into my office during a party and steals the drive from my desk.”
“Just get to the fucking point, Rabbit. What’s on it?”
He was unbearably smug as he looked up from the screen in front of him. “An insanely clever trojan. Encrypted so heavily, I knew Oscar’s posh-boy motherfucker wouldn’t be able to resist trying to crack it. And when he did…” He stabbed at a series of keys, hitting the final one with an ostentatious flourish.
Music blared into the booth; sounded like the laptop was connected to the audio system. I knew the song, but it took until the lyrics kicked in for me to place it.
“As I walked through the valley of the shadow of death, I took a look at my life and realized there’s nothing left...”
Gangster’s Paradise, by Coolio.
For fuck’s sake.
Rabbit grinned, spinning the laptop around to reveal a series of spinning numbers and characters that cascaded from the top of the screen to the bottom like something out of the fucking matrix. “The second he bypassed the encryption, the trojan would have taken hold. The virus was designed to crack Oscar’s financial establishments, to drain every single last penny from his accounts. The funds would have been automatically sent to an anonymous holding company in the Caymans. Obviously mine,” he said with a wink. “And the most beautiful part?” He had to raise his voice over the blaring song. “The trojan is unstoppable. It buries itself deeper and deeper into a mainframe as soon as it has access. It would have destroyed that cunt’s entire system in less than a minute. He would have known about it, would have watched it as it happened, and there wouldn’t have been a single thing he could have done about it. It was a beautiful plan.”
I couldn’t care less about his plan. Would have been great to know that Oscar was ruined and penniless, but it didn’t really matter. “You sacrificed that beautiful plan by telling me to go get the drive back. And all because you were pissed at me.” I struggled to keep my voice even.
Rabbit’s expression turned rueful. “Mayfair did pay me a lot of money to orchestrate that complicated little ruse. He badly wanted an in with you so he could take care of your pretty friend and get home as quickly as possible.”
Don’t kill him yet. Don’t fucking kill him yet.
It took every ounce of strength I possessed to listen to the voice in my head. I drew in a steady stream of oxygen through my nose, trying to push down the rage that was burning like bile in the back of my throat. “But you searched him out. Hunted him down and told him we were in New York. He never would have found us otherwise.”
Rabbit came back to the table and slumped down into his seat. An impish light shone in his eyes. “Oh, no. That wasn’t me. Fuck. As if I’ve got time for that shit. It was Monica who—” His eyes went wide.
I couldn’t decide if his sudden hesitation was real or expertly faked. Twin spots of color burned in his cheeks, which made me think that maybe he really was worried about what he’d just let slip.
Slowly, I turned to Monica. She sunk away from the table, her back pressed up against her chair, trying to make herself as small as possible. She had every right to be afraid. Rabbit had fucked me on an unbelievable level, but what she had done was so much worse. She’d reached out to Carver? Told him where we were? She’d done everything in her power to make sure Sera died. The high-pitched whine in my head drowned out all logical thought. I just—I didn’t even know how to wrap my head about the treachery…
“I’m sorry, Fix,” she whispered. The apology burnt in her eyes, but I couldn’t bear to see it. The hurt was more than I could comprehend.
“Don’t speak,” I seethed. “Don’t breathe another fucking word.”
Rabbit drummed his hands against the table, running the tip of his tongue over his teeth. “I, for one, regret sending you to The Barrows. My therapist’s been telling me I need to be a better communicator, and I’m beginning to see that he might be right. In future—”
I reached behind me, into the small of my back. I took hold of the gun that had been sitting there, waiting for its moment to shine. I drew it, my finger hovering over the trigger. With furious calm, I faced Rabbit and said, “What future?”
The crack of the gunshot was deafening.
Monica screamed.
Sera jumped up, her chair toppling to the ground as she pushed away from the table.
And Rabbit’s skull exploded into a cloud of blood, and bone, and brain matter.
“Been spending most our lives living in a gangster’s paradise. Been spending most our lives living in a gangster’s paradise.”
My heart pumped evenly in my chest.
It didn’t even skip a beat.
