The Swan and the Jackal (36 page)

None of the above.

“Look, I didn’t say nothin’ to no one,” he stutters with one hand facing me, palm forward. “I haven’t said shit. I haven’t
did
shit.” He looks around the store. “I’ve got myself a real job here. It doesn’t pay jack, but it’s an honest job.” Then his voice rises and cracks when I still don’t respond: “I haven’t done
anything
!”

“I know,” I finally say. “I’ve been keeping tabs on you since I let you go that night.”

Looking down at a box of gimmicky gum on the counter, each wrapped individually in clear plastic wrappers, I point and say, “Do you mind?”

“Sure, sure, yeah,” he says quickly, gesturing both hands at the gum. “It’s on the house, man. In fact, you can have anything in this fuckin’ store you want.” He smiles squeamishly.

I take a single piece of gum from the box and remove the plastic wrapper, popping it in my mouth.

“I see you got new teeth,” I say and then start chewing.

He nods rapidly. “Y-Yeah, I uhh, well there’s a nice dentist on the other side of town who helps addicts tryin’ to get clean. I didn’t actually lose my teeth because of Meth or anything”—I smile and continue to chew—“but he helped me. Got me a denture for real cheap and put me on a payment plan. I’ll have it paid off in a few more months.”

I slip my hands back inside my pockets.

“How would you like a set of permanent implants?” I ask.

Dante’s eyebrows draw inward confusedly.

“I don’t know what you mean?” He’s extremely nervous.

I think I smell urine.

I make a face. “This gum tastes like shit,” I say.

He nods rapidly again, uncertain and still fearful of my every movement and word. “Yeah, kids like that stuff….”

“Well, Dante,” I go back to the important matter, “I have a job proposal for you. That is, if you’re interested in hearing it.”

Silence.

He doesn’t know what answer he wants to give, but is sure he knows what answer I want to hear.

He opts for the in-between.

“Umm, I’m not sure I understand.”

Bringing the little plastic wrapper up to my lips, I spit the gum back into it and then toss it in the trash can pressed against the counter on the floor.

“I’ve been giving it some thought,” I begin still in the same casual manner I walked in with, “and I believe you’re the right kind of man for the job. You can pay off those dentures with just a fraction of your first paycheck and afford dental implants within a month. Of course, you’ll be put through some tests—medical, among other things—and like with any honest job, you’ll be subject to piss tests every now and then, but I think you’re the right man. What do you say?”

“Umm, well”—he scratches his head—“what exactly is the job? I mean, uh, I guess I’d want to know what was expected of me…well, I mean, if it’s OK I know before I agree?”

Yes, that’s definitely urine I smell.

I pull out a cashier’s check with his name on it and put it on the counter, sliding it into his view.

He glances down nervously, having a difficult time looking only at it with me standing close enough to grab him when his guard is down.

“Holy fuck…,” his voice trails off and finally keeping his attention on me is put on the backburner as the five figures next to his name dance in his line of sight.

He takes the check into his hand as if to make sure that it’s real, then finally he looks back up at me through those blue eyes wide on display underneath his curly black hair.

“You can make that much every month,” I say. “As long as you perform at the job to my complete satisfaction and approval and as long as you stay clean and don’t fuck up.”

His eyes are finally smiling again, just like they had begun to do when I first walked into the store and he hadn’t noticed who I was yet. Now his whole face is smiling. Greedily. Like a pirate standing over a chest of gold. The job could be sucking
me
off once a week and he’d likely agree to it for that much money.

“I’m your guy,” he says.

I smile faintly and pull out my wallet from the other pocket, opening it and fingering a twenty into my hand. I toss it on the counter.

“I’m going to pull my car around to the pump,” I say. “Give me twenty bucks.”

He nods and takes the money.

“Wait, uhh,” he calls out as I start to walk away—I stop and turn to face him. “How do I—?”

“I’ll be in touch,” I say and push open the glass door.

Dante Furlong became my private assistant. He knows a lot of drug dealers and addicts who can never be reformed, and whores, or ‘lot lizards’ who have killed men—truck drivers and husbands looking for some ‘strange’. Dante knows just about everyone in the crime ring not only in Maryland, but most of the surrounding states. He knows the lingo. He knows the ins and outs, and where to find all of the people who will one day end up in my chair.

Sometimes when thinking of Seraphina—because I do think of her as well as Cassia—I wonder why I didn’t just find someone like Dante a long time ago. With him there are no attachments, no risk falling in love, no risk losing love. I can look Dante in the eye and kill him if I have to without thinking twice about it, or regretting it, or hurting over it. And when I want to fuck, I can find the Kate’s and the Kira’s and the Kali’s and the Gwen’s. No attachments. No looking back. Just moving forward. Onto the next willing woman who I can break beneath me.

And every single day of my life, I fight against the pain that tortures my black heart, the pain that I know will never go away. The pain of being alone and without her. Without anyone. My interrogations for Victor’s new Order become more brutal with every job. My tolerance for my victims, lessened. My ability to offer mercy, practically non-existent. And during my personal tortures of those who Dante brings my way, I become more sadistic and let fewer and fewer live.

A part of me—but just a small part—worries that I will someday come to the point when I kill each and every one of them. Because the more I kill, the more I immerse myself in the pain of others, the easier it is to shut out the screams in my head and the images of the two faces of the woman that I loved.

My beautiful swan. My savior and my undoing.

Want to experience Fredrik’s backstory with Seraphina? Well, you can in the fourth installment of the series,
In the Company of Killers
:

SEEDS

OF

INIQUITY

A Prequel: Fredrik Gustavsson

Due out 2014

Check out a sneak peek...

Prologue

January 1, 1979 – Stockholm, Sweden

Holding her rounded belly with both shaking hands, the tall dark-haired woman pressed her back against the glass door of the convenience store and shoved it open. Her dirty running shoes squeaked against the tile floor as she forced her way inside, nearly knocking over the bread stand. Pain seared through the lower half of her body, stopping her in her desperate tracks toward the back of the store in search of the restrooms. She doubled over and bit back the pain, one hand now gripping the wall beside her to help her keep her balance. Only when the agony subsided could she will her legs to move again.

Pushing herself forward she came to another stop when the wall ended.

There were no restrooms.

Deep, heavy, desperate breaths calmed her for a moment, momentarily suffocating the panic inside. She closed her dark eyes and leaned the back of her head against the wall behind her. Her long navy coat hid her filthy clothes beneath it, and her pants drenched with amniotic fluid, but it did nothing to hide her protruding stomach that she thought would hold on for one more month before bringing her to this moment.

Her darkest moment.

Another contraction burned through her body like a scorching-hot fire raging through her insides. Her hips and lower back squeezed in on themselves, heaving her over forward and almost knocking her legs out from beneath her. She cried out in agony, her teeth clenched, her sweating, dirt and tear-stained face contorting in a horrific expression.

“Miss,” the store clerk called out in the Swedish language from behind the counter. “Are you all right? Should I call an ambulance?”

With difficulty, the woman carried herself on her trembling legs back toward the front of the store, both hands latched on to her pregnant stomach as if she was afraid the baby was going to burst through it at any moment and leave her to bleed to death on the floor.

“Var är toaletten?!” she cried through bared teeth and heaved herself against the counter. “Var är toaletten?!”

The clerk pointed reluctantly to the back of the store, his eyes wide and filled with concern. “Utanför,” he said.

The woman stormed back outside and went around the side of the building, the fingers of one hand clinging to the bricks to provide her balance. She could feel the baby’s head already forcing itself through the birth canal, causing her legs to bow and her pain-filled walk awkward and precarious.

“Ahh!” she cried out and curses followed.

Flinging open the restroom door, she struggled to make her way inside the dimly-lit space occupied by only two stalls and one sink with a flickering fluorescent light burning above it. Choosing the larger of the stalls, she fell against the two-way swinging door, shoving it open with a vociferous
bang!
as it slammed against the metal stall wall. She flung herself inside and then sat on the grimy floor beside, furiously tearing at her pants to get them pulled down to her knees.

She pushed. And she screamed. And she pushed again. And she screamed again. She felt faint, but the pain was merciless and wouldn’t allow her to pass out. She reared her head back, banging the back of her skull on the stall door behind her.
Bam! Bam! Bam!
She wanted to knock herself out so she couldn’t feel the pain anymore. But in one’s darkest moment Fate never grants such wishes.

She pushed again and she cried and whimpered and cursed God and the man she thought cursed her with this pregnancy when he emptied his seed inside of her nine months ago. But the baby was coming early. Perhaps she was cursing the wrong man. She didn’t know and she didn’t care anymore. Her hands were wrapped around her thighs from the outside, the tips of her fingers digging into her trembling, sweating flesh. The pressure between her legs was so intense, so all-consuming, she thought she would die from it alone. She hoped that she would.

One more push and the pressure released in a moment of encompassing relief that actually managed to make her laugh with elation.

Everything was quiet as the woman lay with her back pressed awkwardly against the stall door, her knees drawn up, her legs wide open before her. She tried to catch her breath. She didn’t want to look at the child she knew lay in a pool of fluids between her legs. The child that wasn’t crying.

Don’t look at it, Elin. Don’t look at it!

Reluctantly, she looked anyway, raising her back just slightly from the metal. The baby was turning blue, the umbilical cord stretching from his little belly to the placenta still inside the woman named Elin.

With a filthy hand, she wiped the tears from her cheeks.

Leave it to die, Elin. You can’t live with a child. Leave it.

She shook her head, fighting with the voice in her mind that always got its way.

Always. In one way or another.

Instinctively, she reached out for the baby, taking the slippery little boy into her shaking arms and began to rub his chest and clear his throat with her finger. She didn’t know why, or what good it would do, but she did it anyway. She didn’t want him. She knew she couldn’t keep him. But she didn’t want to be a murderer. Of all the things she was—whore, drug addict, waste of air—she
refused
to be a murderer.

Breathing into the baby’s tiny mouth, finally a small cry emitted from his lungs, a small blood-curdling scream that filled her ears both with relief and distress. Holding the screaming child against her swollen breasts, but not letting him eat, she reached for the toilet paper and rolled every last bit of it out onto the dirty floor. She laid him atop it and then fumbled inside her coat for the knife she always carried with her for protection. She cut the umbilical cord and soon after delivered the placenta.

He wouldn’t stop crying. His little fisted hands moved in a mechanical-like motion above his chest. His rounded face and dark head of hair covered in a thin, white cottony film of sorts turned beet red and purple as he wailed perpetually.

Don’t feed it. Leave it, Elin.

Finally, the voice in the back of her mind won the war with her conscience. Like it always did. Like it always would.

She left the baby boy on the floor of the restroom beside a stinking toilet and she never looked back.

Many minutes later, the store clerk entered the restroom with the authorities and found the baby lying atop a pile of toilet paper, and beside the only part of his mother that had been there for him since conception.

After the child was cared for in the hospital and the news of ‘the baby who was birthed and abandoned inside a public restroom’ had died down in the media, he was sent to live in an orphanage where he was named after the store clerk who found him: Fredrik Mikael, later given the surname ‘Gustavsson’ by the treacherous woman who ran the orphanage the children called ‘Mother’.

A child wasn’t born on that day. A child
died
on that day.  His innocence. What he
could
have been.
Who
he could have been. His birth was the beginning of a very long and cruel life.

No, a child wasn’t born that day, but a killer
was
.