The Devil's Dream: A Nightmare (9 page)

* * *

J
oe Welch held
the letter in his hand. He had printed it off a hotel computer earlier this morning.

Joe traced his fingers over the lettering. The man’s handwriting truly was beautiful, awesomely so. Joe even liked the way Brand constructed prose. Every word both flippant and of all importance. He had read it a hundred times, at least, and thought that he might read it a hundred more before the evening was over. He printed the thing off around nine in the morning, had a single egg for breakfast, and then came back up to his bedroom to sleep. It was the first time in forty-eight hours he had closed his eyes outside of blinking. Joe was no longer in Boston, but had followed the crucifixes out to the small New England town of Licent. He found a bed and breakfast, swiped his credit card, and then went directly to the site where the crucifixes were found.

Just a day after ten dead girls were posted on crosses, it all was cleaned up. The only things left in the field were the holes left from the wood. Joe was close to Brand but needed to be closer. He didn’t know how to get there yet.

It didn’t trouble him though, that he didn’t know exactly what he was going to do. This wasn’t an
if
thing for Joe, it was a
when
.

A year after Patricia’s death, his mindset changed from if to when. He decided the direction the rest of his life would take and forsook everything outside of that direction.

He had lived with his brother for a year, the year after Patricia’s death, the year after his son, Jason, turned into a science experiment with holes poked into his body. Joe hadn’t started using cocaine yet, instead he lived in his brother’s basement—his life nothing but darkness and television reruns. His brother’s wife might have had some problems with him being there, but either she kept her mouth closed or Larry kept her misgivings from Joe. She couldn’t understand, and really, neither could Larry. Larry wasn’t exactly a brother, not if the DNA and bloodline were to be consulted; he was a distant cousin that had come to live with Joe and his mother a couple years after Brand killed Joe’s father. Maybe Brand knew about him, maybe he didn’t, but he had left Larry alone, so neither he nor his wife could know the terror that Joe had lived with much of his life or the sorrow he lived with now. That first year had been dark. Comparatively, the cocaine and rushing around the country for evidence was a tiny piece of heaven.

Joe watched a lot of television, if watching meant lying in bed while images streamed over his eyes. The screen was small, little bigger than a computer monitor, and he watched sitcoms. Every one that seemingly existed, both in and out of production. He knew every character’s name; he knew their back stories; he had predictions on where the show would take them. It became, or rather the people in the shows became, his family. The brother and sister-in-law that lived upstairs were roommates. People he saw from time to time if he decided to join them for dinner, which was a rare, rare thing.

Dinner, during that first year, had been awkward at best.

Joe didn’t know what to say to these people. He didn’t know what they wanted to talk about and he knew he didn’t have a single topic worthy of discussion. If they wanted to talk sitcoms, he might be able to add some value, but other than that, what did he have? He could talk about feelings. They tried that the first few times, Larry asking how Joe
felt
.

Joe told him, and the dinner ended with Joe’s plate on the floor, tears streaming down his and Larry’s wife’s face with the vast majority of the meal going uneaten. So they quit talking about feelings when Joe came to dinner and tried to move onto other things. Eventually, Larry and Sara-Beth spoke as Joe ate in silence. Which was fine with him. The awkwardness abated some, and he needn’t wait until they were finished eating before he cleared his plate and headed back down to the basement.

He couldn’t sleep back then, which turned out to be ironic, because that’s all he wanted to do now. Besides find Brand. That took precedence, of course.

The first year, he tried to sleep, but he only saw Patricia when he closed his eyes. He saw her in front of him again. Her eyes wide, sweat blossoming across her forehead and upper lip. Pain lit through her eyes, pain and fear. Then the knife came down. Joe knew it would come, knew it each time he dreamed of her, that the knife was going to drop and she couldn’t escape it even if he begged the knife to stop. The knife came down, began separating flesh directly under Patricia’s left ear, and had it been only that one poke, maybe everything would have ended fine. Instead, the knife pulled across her throat, opening it as if it was a Ziploc bag. Blood poured out like it had simply been waiting for someone to give it the go-ahead, like it actually
wanted
out of his wife’s body. The blood was a traitor.

That’s what he saw every time he tried to sleep and so he finally stopped trying. Even if he did fall asleep, he woke up soon after, as soon as that blood started to drop. It occurred to him at this point that he may need to develop a drug habit. He didn’t get his brother’s permission, didn’t mention it to them despite living in their house. He paid his rent and he didn’t cause trouble. During that first year he sold his landscaping business for a nice sum, given that he had contracts locked up on multiple business parks for the next four years. He didn’t spend money, besides his rent and his portion of the utilities, so he could afford to develop the habit, and he needed one because he needed to not see his wife dying nightly.

The question was, what habit to develop? He tried drinking, which put him to sleep, but did nothing to squelch the dreams. They still came, only now he couldn’t wake up because of the drunken stupor he created inside himself. So alcohol was out. The next two logical choices were heroin or cocaine. He tried cocaine first because needles just seemed a bit too far, which was kind of funny when he thought about it: searching for an addiction, but would rather avoid needles if possible--it sounded like some kind of Craigslist ad. He would have gone to heroin, without a doubt, had the cocaine not done the job. Maybe had he tried heroin first, he wouldn’t be sitting in this small town, searching for a man who looked completely different than the one that killed his wife. Maybe he would have overdosed in Larry’s basement, and maybe that would have been for the best.

Alas, it turned out he liked cocaine.

Dopamine and serotonin filled his brain in a way he didn’t know possible. The sadness of his loss was immediately replaced by the happiness of the time he had been able to spend with both his wife and son. Even watching her sit tied up while her throat was slit paled some, unable to reach the full crescendo of pain that he felt when sober. There wasn’t anything else he could do to match the feeling and he realized he had found his habit. He didn’t want to go back to the darkness of the room, go back to the constant and pervasive thoughts of his lost family.

So Joe picked up an addiction, and decided to figure out what he would do with the rest of his life.

Looking at the letter, fresh up from his nap and no cocaine ingested yet, Joe wondered if Brand knew he was coming for him. Probably not, and if he did, he wouldn’t care. Brand thought himself invincible. The letter showed that, if nothing else. The man thought the world was created for him, and because it didn’t give him exactly what he wanted, it had somehow betrayed him. So he would punish the world, and in his mind, what could one man do against him? Nothing. Joe hoped Brand was thinking like that; it would leave him vulnerable. It left him only looking for the big things, not the small ones, and he would make mistakes then. Small ones, but mistakes.

Joe understood that the FBI was hunting Brand too, but Joe and the FBI had very different ideas of what should happen once someone found him. Joe made his decision, the decision of what he would do if he found Brand, early on. The FBI had failed to truly avenge his father’s death, his wife’s death, his son’s death. Each time they tried, somehow, improbably, impossibly even, Brand came out on top. Joe decided that he wouldn’t allow that to happen again. That if the FBI was incapable or unwilling to kill Matthew Brand, as they seemed to be, then he would do the job himself. He would kill Brand and there needn’t be any law enforcement involvement for that to happen—indeed, Joe preferred they stay out of his way.

I
t had taken
Matthew three years to make this drive.

Three years ago Matthew began putting out feelers, searching for what he thought might be the best way to quietly amass the number of people he would need. He thought about the homeless, that had been his first thought actually—but it was too risky. People looked for the homeless, even if they looked less than for almost any other demographic. They still looked. If twenty people came up missing in New York City, twenty people that had inhabited the same spot for years, the FBI might hear about it. Too risky. He couldn’t have risk now. Risk had gotten him to this point. Risk had gotten his son killed again and his wife killed for the first time. Risk, and Matthew’s own damnable pride, had put him in this position and he wouldn’t allow those two things to rise again.

So he thought and he searched for six months. He came to a conclusion right before he showed up and gave Dillan what was owed him.

There was one group that people didn’t look for at all. One group that even parents, if they were around, would disown.

Prostitutes.

They were the scourge of society. The women that threw away one of the most sacred of civilization’s morals: that women shouldn’t sleep around. More, they shouldn’t be paid to sleep around. Parents raised children, especially girls, with that specifically in mind. Keep your legs closed until you find a man who loves you. So the ones that opened their legs for a few dollars,
oh, Lord, they couldn’t be forgiven
.

Matthew’s thought process didn’t end there though. He couldn’t start pulling call-girls off the street; their absence would be recognized perhaps quicker than the homeless. What he needed was the sex trade. He needed people that were so lost, so drugged up, so completely forgotten that they could barely remember their own names, let alone someone writing it down in a police precinct somewhere.

Today, three years later, with four bodies hanging in his lighthouse, Matthew arrived at one of the three men who ran the sex trade in North America. He parked his van outside of a building, the parking lot full of cars, and a sign at the top of the building, which said
StraightAire
—a business name that Matthew had found out wasn’t just a front. They had legitimate revenues and the cars here weren’t just for show. People worked inside the building, even if it was conveniently set off from the main highway by about five hundred feet of road and a security guard. Matthew didn’t ask questions when he was told to arrive though, didn’t ask how they were going to get the people he needed into his van and didn’t ask what the people working at
StraightAire
would think if they happened to witness someone dressed in rags being shoveled into a van.

He only showed up, because this was a business you didn’t ask questions in, and this was his first time meeting any of these people in person. Plus, he was already going to ask something outrageous, and he needed to save whatever small amount of political capital he might have. When he first came up with this plan, low risk was all-important. Time was not a factor because as long as he gathered the people he needed, he could dim the sun at any time. That theory had changed this past week, had changed drastically when Matthew woke up with blood covering much of his kitchen table and a distinct memory of having being shoved by a black woman who no longer existed. Something was taking place in his mind, and he didn’t know what the end result would be. He couldn’t control it. Matthew had only felt that way once before, felt that he had no control over his life when he watched those four cops go to trial for Hilman’s murder. He sat in the courtroom every day, right next to Rally, holding her hand, and listening as they lied repeatedly.

He was behaving aggressively.

He was cursing.

He was using racial epithets and making threats.

It had gone on and on, and the prosecutor seemed to care, but seemed to be fighting a machine that would just as soon eat him as let him live. Matthew felt helpless the day they read the verdict of not-guilty. He felt like a newborn, with strange light filling up his vision, now in a new world that he didn’t understand. He wouldn’t feel that way again, though, not until now.

This week, when he woke up from that daydream, he felt comparable to the way he had in the courtroom. Not as deeply, but a vague similarity that this was something outside of his sphere of influence. So what could he influence? The speed at which he operated. Or at least, he could try to, which is what he wanted to ask these people today.
Would it be possible to turn the assembly line’s pace up just a bit?

Matthew stepped outside of the van and closed the door. He walked to the hood, just as he had been instructed to, and placed a cigarette in his mouth, just as he had been instructed to. He lit it and smoked. He tried smoking in college but this was the first one he had lit since then. It felt, strangely, good. He blew the smoke out into the sky and took another puff. He was told to wait here until someone came for him. Matthew didn’t think that someone would be a law enforcement agent; he had done as much investigating as humanly possible on the people he was dealing with, as surely they had him. Maybe they knew who he really was, or maybe they believed the spurious life he had created and allowed to circulate through the various regulatory agencies. He’d even popped in some contacts to cover up the blue of his eyes, making them the more natural brown of African-Americans. Either way, he was here, and you didn’t get here unless they thought you were serious. No one arrived to this business and ended up dead right away. You got here because you had money to give and they had people to sell.

The door to
StraightAire
opened up and a man walked outside. He had a blazer on, a button down shirt with the top two buttons left unbuttoned. No tie. He walked across the parking lot, his eyes looking more at the ground than anything else, certainly not sweeping the lot.

“Jamal?” The man asked as he arrived.

“Yes, sir. Mr. Bolden?”

“That would be me. How was the drive?”

“Not bad at all. Eighteen hours is never good, but it wasn’t bad either,” Matthew said.

“Good, good. The drives can really be the worst sometimes. If you need a pick-me-up for the drive home, let me know and we can probably find you something.”

“I should be okay, but I appreciate it.”

The man nodded. “Alright, let’s get to it.” He turned and started walking back across the parking lot. Matthew dropped the cigarette and followed.

They went through the building, winding upwards, taking the stairs each time, and covering each floor. The floors were full of people in cubicles, apparently working, as if nothing out of the ordinary was going on. And, really, nothing abnormal
was
happening yet, but why was Matthew being led upstairs? Upstairs meant they had to come back down, and back down meant they had to travel in front of all these people again. Matthew kept his mouth shut until they reached the top floor, where they walked all the way to the end and met what appeared to be a closet.

“Here we are,” Mr. Bolden said.

He didn’t put a key into the doorknob, but simply turned it, and opened the door. The room was dark, but as he flipped a switch, the ceiling rained down light. They both stepped in, and Mr. Bolden closed the door behind them, though anyone could have looked in to see what this room held.

The Room of Illegitimacy
, Matthew thought.

Four people were attached against a wall. Their legs tied to pipes that ran around the base, and their arms to pipes that ran at about waist level. Two sets of pipes, four people attached to them with zip-ties.

Matthew turned around to look at Bolden. “Those people out there, the one’s you just paraded me through, they know?”

“Of course. They’re paid their usual salary, and then they receive a bonus once a year just like any other corporation. Their bonus is tied to their performance and tied to their knowledge of this room.”

“And if someone leaves the company?” Matthew asked.

“Once you work for StraightAire, you receive your bonus for the rest of your life. If at any time you feel the bonus isn’t enough, then an unfortunate accident may occur. Trust me, Jamal, we vetted you, we vetted these people, too. You can guess why I walked you through the way I did rather than simply taking an elevator.”

“It’s a smooth operation,” Matthew said, before turning around to look at his purchases. All four were Asians. One boy, three women. The boy was just that, a boy. He might have been fourteen, probably having started puberty, but not very far into it. The three women were young, eighteen tops. One had a bruised eye and Matthew walked over to her. He had to look down just a bit so that he could see her face. She didn’t look up.

Matthew saw nothing in those black, slightly slanted eyes. A blankness comparable to what he had seen in Marley Moore.

“Sometimes accidents happen, but it’s only a bruise. It will heal in a day or so,” Bolden said from behind him. Matthew realized Bolden thought he was looking at the girl like he was checking inventory. Matthew was looking because he had never seen a sex slave before. He was looking because he wanted to try and understand perhaps a sliver of what these people went through. Not out of compassion, but out of that singular curiosity that drove him so far in life. The curiosity to ask why. To continually ask why. There weren’t any answers in the girl’s eyes though. No answers to her past or her current mind.

“There’s a problem,” Matthew said, still staring at the girl.

“And what’s that?”

“These aren’t enough.”

Matthew turned around and saw that Mr. Bolden held a gun, as if it had dropped from the ceiling and landed in his hand with the silence of a butterfly.

“I don’t like problems, Jamal.”

“Neither do I, but you don’t need that gun to solve this one. I need more people is all. I’ll pay. I’ll pay a premium above what I’m already paying because I realize it’s going to put more pressure on your operation.” Matthew’s hands hung at his sides, the rest of him not moving at all.

Bolden’s gun faced the floor, but Matthew saw his finger wrapped around the trigger. “This is my first time meeting you. We had a deal. Four people for a certain amount of money. We have your money, you have your people, but you show up now and say that you want to change the deal. You’re saying that you want more. How many more, Jamal?”

“As many as you can get at once. Twenty, maybe.”

“You want twenty people at once, as opposed to the four we agreed on. How do you think that looks to me?”

Matthew said nothing.

“It looks suspicious, like maybe you’re wanting me to find more people because you’re wanting to build a stronger case against me. Like maybe a life sentence wouldn’t be enough for you and your friends.”

Matthew laughed loud and heavy. “I see. I see. I’m going to turn around here, if you don’t mind, and look back at the merchandise for a second. Try not to let the gun fire into my back if you can.” He turned and stepped closer to the girl. “Mr. Bolden, I can promise, I’m not interested in either a life sentence or a death sentence for you.”

In an instant, Matthew brought a blade from his pocket and opened the girl’s throat. He stepped back quickly to avoid being splashed too much, and her life flooded to the floor. He hadn’t escaped all of it though, some having sprayed immediately onto his white shirt and face. He didn’t move to wipe any of it off.

He turned around and looked at the man holding the gun. Turning his palms towards Bolden, the blade still in his right hand, the girl hanging limply behind him, Matthew said, “I’m not too interested in getting the authorities involved at all.”

* * *

A
rt heard
his phone ringing and turned on his side to look at it. He was in his office, lying on a couch against the wall. Jake was outside, sleeping on the floor with his undershirt as a pillow. Both men had flights so early in the morning it would make a dairy farmer embarrassed at the time he woke up, so the two decided to stay here, work until they couldn’t any longer, and then leave from the office. Art’s phone said it was two in the morning and they would be waking up in the next thirty minutes anyway. He picked the phone up, still ringing with an unknown number, and put it to his ear.

“Hello,” he said and then cleared his throat.

“Art! Matthew! Did I catch you sleeping?”

The voice sounded entirely too happy to be up this early. Art thought, haphazardly, but thought nonetheless, about what they had done with his phone. He told IT the last time Brand called and they put a tracer on it, so Art didn’t need to worry about that.

“Was just waking. How can I help you?” Art said, sitting up on the couch.

“Just calling to check in. Got some really good news today from one of my partners, wanted to see how things were going on your end. Splendidly, I hope?”

Art leaned forward to look out his office door, and saw Jake sprawled on his stomach, the t-shirt forgotten to the right of his head.

“If sleeping in my office is splendid, then yes, you would be correct. What the fuck are you calling me for?”