Everybody Dies - A Thriller (Phineas Troutt Mysteries Book 3) Page 8

  Had one broken finger changed her that much? Was the only thing needed to change a person’s viewpoint a focused application of pain?

  She saw immediately how ineffective torture was as a way to get information. She would say or do anything to prevent Hugo from touching her again. Make up any lie he wanted to hear, to make the pain stop.

  “It was just one, little finger,” Hugo said, staring at her. “You’re acting like I broke both of your knees.”

  “What happens after you kill Phin?” Pasha said. Desperate or not, she didn’t want to expire just yet. And as long as the giant was talking, he wasn’t hurting her.

  “You mean, will I let you go? We both know that isn’t going to happen.”

  “I mean, you get your eighth tear, and what do you think happens next? You think the Supreme Caucasian is going to suddenly turn over all of his wealth and power to you? That some billionaire, who no doubt earned all of his money from Daddy, is going to share his empire with an ex-con covered in hate tattoos? You’re being used, Hugo. This organization is dangling carrots in front of you. You’ll never rise to a position of power. That would be like promoting a guard dog to the board of directors.”

  Pasha knew that last bit was harsh, and she waited for the repercussion.

  But it didn’t come. Hugo didn’t look angry. He looked bored.

  “You think the CN is using me. You’re mistaken, Doctor. I’m using them. I get all of my needs met. I get protected. I get free reign to do the things I want to do. And I have no ties. No responsibilities. Now look at you. Look at all you’re tied to. How many hours do you work per week, deluding yourself that you’re living the American dream? You convince yourself that you’re happy. That you’re helping others. Making a difference. But when you die, nothing will change. You won’t be missed. Maybe someone will take your place here. Maybe they won’t. But the world will go on, and you’ll be forgotten.”

  “So will you.”

  Hugo smiled. “In twenty years, the last whore you gave an abortion to won’t remember your name. But the world will remember me, when I kill forty thousand people. This is the land of opportunity. A dot head bitch can grow up to practice medicine. And a white trash loser can grow up to start a second civil war.”

  “Why?”

  Hugo squinted at her. “Everyone is so big on why. Do you question a hurricane? It just comes in and destroys. If your house is blown away, you can’t make sense of it. Don’t try to make sense of me. Deal with your own shit. You’re scared of more pain. Scared you’re going to die. What is this fear doing for you? Is it making you happy? You’ve built up this life, where you have needs and hopes and dreams and love, and now it’s all going to be taken away from you, and you’re helpless. Maybe you’re asking yourself what the point was. That’s the thing; there is no point.”

  “Life is precious.”

  “Life has two guarantees. You will be hurt. And you will die. Explain how that’s precious.”

  “There’s wonder. There’s joy. There’s love.”

  “Do you love my brother?”

  “Yes.”

  “And what good has that done you?”

  Hugo was correct. Her relationship with Phin had brought a lot of pain. But there was happiness, too. Phin had taught her that life was precious, and worth fighting for. The fact that it was brief made it valuable, not worthless.

  “You think you’re a nihilist. That everything sucks, and nothing affects you. I call bullshit. Why do you go to those white power rallies if they’re pointless?”

  “We all need something to do.”

  “Exactly. You’re just as needy as I am. And I know why.”

  Hugo leaned closer. His breath was rank, like a carnivore with rotting meat stuck in his teeth.

  “Tell me why.”

  “Why should I?”

  “Tell me or I’ll break another finger.”

  Pasha knew this was a do or die moment. She had him interested. As long as he was interested, he wouldn’t kill her.

  “You’re going to do that anyway. What I say or do won’t change anything.”

  “I can make you tell me.” Hugo reached around, for Pasha’s hands.

  Then the girl, the one who Pasha had let in at closing time, came into the room. “We need to get going,” she said.

  Hugo looked at her, then turned to Pasha and reached down—

  —hoisting her onto his shoulder, chair and all.

  A moment later, the girl was slapping duct tape over Pasha’s mouth and eyes. She was carried through her office, out the back door, and thrown into a vehicle, on her side. It was a van or a truck, something with cold metal panel floors.

  Then it was in motion, and Pasha realized her bad situation had just gotten a whole magnitude worse.

  PHIN

  Waiting.

  Life is made of moments. There are the everyday high points, eating and spending time with people and engaging in some form of entertainment, and there are the mundane duties that had to get done, working and shopping and going to the toilet, and then there are bad parts, being hurt and sick and sad and afraid.

  But all of that isn’t what we spend most of our time on. It’s what happens between those moments; that’s the majority of life.

  When something isn’t happening, we’re waiting for something to happen.

  We sleep. We travel. We sit around, doing nothing.

  There’s a whole lot of nothing between the all-too-few somethings.

  That’s why hope is bad. Not only are you putting life on hold, waiting for something to happen, but that thing you’re waiting for might never, ever arrive.

  Pasha once asked me how I seem to cope so well with my illness. She asked when I was in remission, feeling healthy, my mind unburdened by pain and worry. I told her I lived in the moment. That life wasn’t about getting from point A to point B. Life was the journey from A to B.

  It was bullshit. A hopeful, optimistic lie that maybe I believed when things were going well, but meant shit when I was in pain and depressed and afraid and only wanted to dull my senses to oblivion.

  Life was hard. And all the waiting around made it even worse.

  I’d managed to con myself into thinking that I had a future. Maybe marriage and children. Maybe something to focus on other than fighting to live when life was nothing but agony.

  That was meaningless delusion on my part. I could have been in a hotel somewhere, drunk and stoned and unable to feel or hear Earl, not worried about anyone, including myself.

  Instead, I was waiting for my Nazi brother to arrive and kill me and the woman I was stupid enough to love.

  What did you expect? That it would all work out?

  Maybe I did.

  We can still get out of here. We have some money. Round up a few whores, score some coke, have a penthouse party.

  I pressed my hand against Earl, trying to shut him up.

  Pasha’s as good as dead. There’s nothing you can do to stop that. You remember Hugo. How big he is. How mean. You think your little shotgun is going to stop him?

  I didn’t think anything. I was hurt, exhausted, insane with worry, and had no delusions that anything I could do would make any sort of difference.

  But that was the point. The measure of a man isn’t what makes him succeed. The measure of a man is how much he can take before he finally gives up.

  And I wasn’t ready to give up yet.

  “What are you going to do with me?”

  I stared at the kid on the floor. I’d had the barrel of the gun to his head for a few minutes. Maybe longer.

  “Where could they have taken the girl?” I asked.

  “I dunno.”

  “Think real hard. Think like someone is going to kill you if you don’t give a good answer.”

  His face scrunched up, making him look like a confused child. How old could he have been? Probably no more than eighteen. “There’s… there’s a place we meet. In southern Illinois. We have rallies there. Do training. A
n old football stadium. We call it The Bunker.”

  I asked where it was, and he told me.

  “Please don’t kill me.” He began to sob. “I don’t want to die,”

  “Nobody does,” I said. “But everybody dies.”

  “I don’t want to die today.”

  Join the club.

  “You ever hear the expression that you’re only as good as the company you keep?”

  He sniffled. “What does that mean?”

  “It means if you hang out with scumbags, it makes you a scumbag.”

  “Wanting to… wanting to preserve the purity of your race doesn’t make you a scumbag.”

  “That’s pretty much the textbook definition of scumbag. You’re just reciting shit you memorized. You don’t even know what that means.”

  “It means whites are superior.”

  “Whites aren’t superior. No one is superior. Being different doesn’t make you better, or worse. It makes you different.”

  “Whites are smarter.”

  “You’re proof that ain’t the case.”

  “Whites are stronger.”

  “Have you ever seen the Olympics? Or any sport at all?”

  “I once saw Truppenführer—”

  I gave the gun a nudge. “Enough with the Nazi bullshit.”

  “Hugo. I once saw Hugo… he skinned a man. Alive. He has a razor, he calls it Göth. He sliced off the man’s chest and… and fed it to him.”

  “Fun little club you guys have.”

  “It was only a schlammensch—”

  “I warned you about the Nazi talk.”

  “A mongrel. A mud person.”

  If this kid wanted to live through the next forty minutes, he wasn’t helping his cause much.

  “Do you know anyone other than whites?” I asked.

  “Sure. We fight with the Clan all the time.”

  “I didn’t say fight. I said know. Do you know any?”

  “No.”

  “Know any blacks? Mexicans? Iraqis?”

  “Why would I mix with schlammensch?”

  I gave him a sharp smack in the nose with the shotgun barrel. “Wrong question. The question you need to ask is: why do you hate people you don’t even know?”

  He pouted. “You don’t understand our struggle.”

  “What struggle? The struggle to be a white male growing up in the United States?”

  “This is our country. We were here first.”

  “Wrong. It was stolen from the people who’d been living here for tens of thousands of years.”

  “Those were Indians. They weren’t people.”

  I considered my options. If I pulled the trigger, the world wouldn’t miss this little prick, and I doubted guilt would keep me awake at night. But it would get back to me. Kenny’s car would be traced, and my prints were all over it, and my cop friend, Jack, would put two and two together. She had done me a favor, and so had Detective Mankowski, and I didn’t want to repay them by adding to their workload.

  So instead of killing the little Nazi, I told him to get up and put his hands on the wall. He did, starting to sob again, and I set the shotgun on the floor between us, and placed the penlight next to it.

  “Turn around,” I said.

  “You’re going to shoot me in the face.”

  “I put the gun down. Turn around.”

  He peeked at me, over his shoulder.

  “Here’s your chance,” I told him. “You can try to grab the gun. Then you can keep me here until Hugo arrives. You’ll be a hero.”

  He seemed dubious. “And what are you going to do?”

  “I’m going to slap you until there isn’t a square inch of white left on your racist little body.”

  “I’m not afraid of you.”

  “That’s because you’re an idiot. Have you ever been in a fight?”

  “Lots of times.”

  “I’m not talking about throwing beer bottles across a parking lot, or trading elbows in a mosh pit, or stomping on someone already on the ground. This isn’t martial arts bullshit, with rules and a ref. This is a fight.”

  He made a move for the gun, and I smacked him in the face, sending him back into the wall.

  “That’s about five square inches,” I said. “Only three thousand left to go.”

  I was in lousy physical shape, but this kid couldn’t fight for shit. He swung a punch that was so slow I could have fried an egg before it landed, and then he flinched at a feint and left his body open. I hit him in the kidney, hard enough for him to remember it the next thirty times he pissed blood, and then drove an uppercut into his chin that laid him out flat.

  Nice job, Phin. You beat up a seventeen year-old-kid. That make you feel better?

  It did, actually. A little bit.

  I checked his pulse. Strong and steady.

  Then I considered my next move. In the past, I’d broken gang-bangers fingers. You can’t shoot someone when your hand is in a splint. But my worry was less about getting shot, and more about this guy running off and alerting Hugo before he showed up.

  So make sure he can’t run off.

  You know those old cartoons where a little angel appears on one shoulder, giving advice, and then a little devil appeared on the other shoulder?

  Earl was both.

  I didn’t have handcuffs. But I did have cowboy boots.

  Without thinking about it too much, I grabbed the kid by the ankle, raised his leg, and brought a heel down on his knee.

  It woke him up, and he screamed and sobbed, and I got tired of hearing it so I left him where he sat, grabbed the shotgun, and went downstairs to wait for Hugo.

  More waiting.

  Waiting by a broken first-floor window, staring at the street.

  Waiting for my brother to come.

  How’d it feel? Breaking that kid’s leg?

  “Had to be done,” I mumbled to Earl. To myself. I was pretty sure the cancer hadn’t reached my brain yet, so Earl was more of a way my subconscious dealt with death, making my tumor an enemy that I could fight. I knew Earl didn’t really talk to me.

  And yet you just spoke out loud.

  I didn’t reply.

  You’re a cliché, Phin. When you’re a kid, you’re abused. Then you grow up to be the abuser.

  “Violence is part of my job.”

  Wrong. You chose this job as an excuse to be violent.

  “It’s all I know.”

  It’s all you’ve ever wanted to know.

  I chose not to respond. If this was a conversation I was having with my subconscious, I wanted to end it.

  Except Earl kept at it.

  You think you’re better than your brother. Or better than that Nazi kid whose ass you just kicked. Why? Because you’re not racist? You think this is about ideologies? They hurt people. You hurt people. They kill people. You kill people. You’re the same kind of trash.

  “I don’t hurt innocents.”

  Semantics. Hypocrisy. Bullshit. You know what? Hugo can justify everything he’s done, too.

  “He doesn’t have to deal with you.”

  You really think I’m an excuse for your behavior? It’s okay to beat people up, to break their bones, to kill them, all because you’ve been dealt a shitty hand?

  Upstairs, I could hear the Nazi crying.

  “Keep ranting. I’m starting another round of chemo, as soon as this is over.”

  No, you’re not. We both know that’s bullshit.

  I didn’t answer.

  And you know why it’s bullshit, don’t you, Phineas? Because I’m exactly what you deserve.

  Drugs would usually shut Earl up. I had a few codeine pills left. Opiates would dull my senses, but it’s not like I could be on full alert with Earl droning on and on.

  I tugged the baggies out of my pocket, took out two pills, swallowed them dry.

  So now you’re blaming me for your drug addiction?

  I took a third pill.

  Good idea. You fight so much better when y
ou’re high as a kite. That’s sarcasm, by the way.

  I took a fourth pill.

  Okay, this isn’t about me. It’s not about the pain you’re in, or the voices in your head.

  This is about Hugo.

  You’re scared.

  “Shut up,” I said.

  You worried he’s going to beat you up? Hurt you? Kill you?

  I reached for more pills, but I didn’t have any.

  No, you’re worried about him doing something else. Are you still blaming yourself?

  “I don’t want to talk about this.”

  Maybe you should. Why haven’t you ever gone to therapy? You’re ashamed? You were eight. He was twice your size. It wasn’t your fault.

  “I could have fought back.”

  Really? Victim blaming? You’re angry with yourself because your brother pinned you down and—

  “Enough!”

  I had my shotgun raised, and I had no idea where to point it.

  That’s how scared you are. And you blame me for the addiction. You were damaged goods before I ever came into your life, pal.

  The pills were kicking in. Earl was getting softer.

  Here’s a tip. Kick the drugs. Join a support group.

  Upstairs, I heard the Nazi crying.

  My cheeks were wet, too. I wiped them off.

  Have your little breakdown later, Earl whispered. Hugo’s here.

  I stared out the window, hadn’t even noticed that a van had pulled up next to Kenny’s totaled car.

  I waited for all the troops to storm out and rush the factory, but the only one that exited the vehicle was Hugo.

  He was… massive.

  So much larger than I remembered.

  But he was alone. And as he walked over to Kenny’s car, looking it over, his back was to me.

  I gripped the shotgun, my hands sweaty.

  I was shaking all over.

  What are you waiting for? Kill him!

  Could I kill him?

  Pasha’s probably in the truck. Just kill the son of a bitch.

  Could I kill him?

  Point the gun and shoot, you idiot!

  Could I kill him?

  It wasn’t a moral question. I had no issue at all with destroying my brother. The world would be a better place.

  Maybe it would even stop the nightmares.

  But seeing him, standing there, a towering, massive giant, I didn’t know if killing him was even possible. The weapons I had weren’t enough.