I drove like a placid old lady.
Oh, little fawn. I know you want to ask me for help. I can see it in your eyes every time you look at me, your gaze glowing with hope and desperation.
I want you to gather enough courage to ask. And to know what you can expect when you do.
Because I don’t put a Band-Aid over cancer. I excise it.
And I want you to be my bait. My willing bait.
Roy Wilks thinks he’s a lion, but he’s really a jackal that’s very good at staying out of my reach. I could go to where he is, but that is inconvenient and poses too many unknown variables, such as where to do my work and dispose the trash afterward cleanly and efficiently. Besides, my traveling to where he is would leave a trail and leave Lizochka and Thomas unprotected in L.A. for far too long.
I want Roy Wilks to come out of his den and make his way to Los Angeles, where I plan to snatch him and fulfill the wish my son made on his tenth birthday.
Plus, if I must be honest—and it’s good to be honest with oneself—I want my little fawn to be grateful. If I use her regardless of her preferences, she might not be. I’m not sure why it matters enough that I’m putting so much effort into winning her cooperation, but…for some reason, it does. It started to matter the moment I saw her picture while researching Roy Wilks’s background.
I park my car and pull on my work gloves. I like to keep my fingerprints to myself and my hands pristine. The material is thin but strong. The back of the hands have zero grip, so nobody can try to scratch or tear my skin. That’s quite inconvenient.
I walk toward the house, which is a disaster. If it were mine, the lawn wouldn’t be sporting tire tracks from police cars or have the mailbox knocked over and lying on the ground.
My home would be neat. Secure. Impenetrable.
I break out a pick and a torsion bar, stick them into the lock and work them a bit. Barely forty seconds pass before it opens with a click.
Pathetic.
The interior of the house is as sloppy and unkempt as the outside. Stale air. Actual dirty footprints on the non-carpeted areas. A few old pizza boxes and Chinese takeout cartons. No discarded chopsticks, though. Rick Owen doesn’t know how to use them.
But he knows how to use his fists. And he has an excellent backhand, so long as he’s raising it against his estranged wife and their son Jason.
His wife left him because he’s a piece of shit who kept escalating. Anger management and couples counseling didn’t help. But then, they rarely do. Most people don’t want to be helped. They want validation and understanding for their past actions.
Rick Owen happens to be a member of that majority. So he’s going to find a way to show that he’s right and everyone else is wrong. Left unchecked, that will end in the death of his wife and child, because they’re a wall between his truth and the people whose validation and understanding he seeks. I’ve seen it more times than I can remember.
I don’t, as a rule, intervene. Too many interventions bring unwanted attention. But Rick Owen crossed a line when he did what he did when Lizochka’s son was around and traumatized the child. Since Rick Owen is a cancer that doesn’t keep to its corner of the world, I have to do something about him before he really hurts the people I’m responsible for.
A cat dashes across my path. It looks filthy and uncared for. And slightly too thin. Rick hates cats, but he kept it because his wife loves it. Claimed it was only fair he got the cat if she was going to take the kid.
Why he wants to keep what he can’t bother to care for…
Then kidnaps his own son when he knows better…
The cops should have arrested him when they came for the child, but they didn’t. He is well connected to the right people in the city. And that buys him liberty that little people can’t have in the same circumstances.
Life is unfair, and there’s nothing I can do about that.
But I can do something about this cancer.
I go to the kitchen and take a small knife. Like everything else in the house, the knife is uncared for and—I test it against the edge of a paper towel—rather dull. But it will do. It isn’t like Rick Owen is made of Kevlar.
I walk upstairs. Loud voices come from the surround system attached to his TV. He’s laughing at some joke, sounding smug. Mr. Untouchable. Mr. Above the Law. He feels so secure in his small kingdom that he hasn’t even bothered to install a decent security system in his home.
Which is fine. Less work for me.
I step over the creaky spot between the master bedroom and full bathroom across the hall, having already scouted the house for this little visit. My target is facing the TV. On the giant screen, a pie flies through the air.
I step into the bedroom, pulling out a cloth I prepped during the drive. It’s been doused with chloroform and a few other choice chemicals. I put the fabric over his mouth and nose and press. Hard.
He spasms in surprise, and then his thick, sausagelike fingers come up, scrabbling to take my hands from his face and then gripping my wrists—but they lack force and I have an extremely strong grip. He should’ve spent more time in the gym rather than wasting it beating up his family.