It wasn’t exactly the ‘Neo Burst’ that the man was used to, but Garcia also wasn’t exactly the kind of victim that he would have down in his cellar. But just like the saying went – there was a first time for everything.
‘And there you are.’ The man’s voice echoed through the room.
Still unsure of what was really happening, caught somewhere between the stupor of a chemically induced sleep and the rude freezing-water-to-the-face awakening, Garcia’s brain was doing all it could to catch up.
Once again, Garcia found himself in a dark room, but this time the room wasn’t nearly as dark as the one that he was in the first time that he came to. Still, his eyes had to fight the dim light for a moment before they were able to start refocusing.
The first thing that Garcia realized was that he wasn’t in a lying-down position anymore. He was sitting down. His wristsand ankles were still tightly restricted, probably tied to the legs and arms of the chair that he was in, but this time, so was his head, which had been slotted in between two thick wooden sticks that protruded out of the chair’s high backrest. A thin strap of something, which Garcia guessed was another zip tie, wrapped itself around his forehead, pressing his head back, completely immobilizing it in place. There was no way that he could turn or move his head in any direction. All that Garcia could do at that specific point in time was to try not to panic.
As his pupils slowly began getting used to the low light, the darkness around him began to disassemble itself into different shapes. His eyes moved left and right to try to identify his surroundings, but without any head movement, his field of vision was extremely limited – mostly just straight ahead, and straight ahead all he could see was a man standing several feet in front of him.
‘Welcome back,’ the man said, leaning against something that looked to be a table.
Garcia first took in his entire figure – tall and well built, with broad shoulders – before allowing his eyes to settle on his face. There was something familiar about it, but Garcia couldn’t recognize any of the details – small nose, low cheekbones, shaved head, light-brown eyes, and no eyebrows, which simply made his whole face look odd.
Garcia concentrated, his brain trying hard to place him against the image at the forefront of his memory, because he was sure that the man he’d seen standing by the light switch earlier, just before he’d passed out again, had been caterpillar-eyebrows Trevor.
The man read Garcia like an open book.
‘Concentrate on my voice,’ he said, folding his arms in front of himself and sounding exactly like Trevor. ‘The face is too different for you to be able to properly place me.’ He paused and it looked like if he’d had eyebrows, they would’ve arched upward, widening his eyes, but since there was absolutely nothing wherehis eyebrows should’ve been, his facial movement simply made his already odd face look either comical, or frightening. Garcia couldn’t tell which.
‘Plus,’ the man continued, his voice calm, ‘I used a trick called “feature attention displacement”. Do you know what that is?’
Garcia took a deep breath. That had been something else that Hunter had explained to him years ago, when they were chasing a criminal called Lucien Folter.
Feature attention displacement was when someone would create a disguise and overemphasize one or two aspects of that disguise, to the point of making it look unusual – very thick eyebrows, extra-bushy moustache, a scar, a limp… something out of the ordinary. What that did, in reality, was push others to concentrate their attention on the odd feature. When that happened, their brains would, more often than not, disregard everything else. If anything went wrong and a witness was called upon to give the authorities a description of the person in question, their memories would keep on going back to the odd feature, practically unable to remember anything else.
‘And I fell for it like an amateur,’ Garcia replied, his voice barely a whisper. ‘The caterpillar eyebrows, right?’ The words hurt his throat as they caught like broken glass against the vulnerable tissue there. But the pain that he was experiencing then felt like nothing compared to the kind of pain he’d felt earlier. The neck spasms had ended… the fireworks of pain had dissipated… the kaleidoscope of razors behind his eyes had vanished.
The man laughed and nodded. ‘The caterpillar eyebrows. That’s pretty much all you can remember from Trevor, isn’t it?’
Garcia felt like an idiot because the man was right. All that his memory had retained from Trevor’s face had been the caterpillar eyebrows.
‘Yeah, you look much better now.’ Garcia made no effort to strip the comment of sarcasm. ‘The boiled-egg look suits you.’
The man looked back at him and smiled – another facial expression that didn’t match the lack of eyebrows.
Frightening, Garcia had decided. Not comical.
‘So what’s your name?’ Garcia ventured a question, his voice beginning to regain some of its strength. ‘I mean your real name. Because I’m sure it isn’t Trevor… or Michael… or Russell.’
The man was clearly taken aback. He wasn’t expecting Garcia to know any of that.
‘I’m impressed.’ The man unfolded his arms and took a step to his right. ‘You know more than I would ever have given you credit for.’
As the man stepped right, the light reflected off different objects that had been placed on the table he’d been leaning against.
The only two objects that Garcia recognized from where he was sitting were a pistol and a bottle of water.
The man used his left hand and reached for one of the objects on the table. Not the pistol. Instead, he chose a seven-inch stainless-steel blade.
‘To be honest,’ he said, moving the blade around in front of his eyes, as if he was inspecting it. ‘I don’t even know anymore, but it doesn’t really matter, does it?’
As the man moved the blade around, Garcia finally saw it. His left index and middle fingers both curved outward slightly, bending from the first knuckle. Subtle, but still noticeable.
The man put down the blade before picking up a new one – this time, a large stainless-steel meat cleaver. ‘A name is just a name, isn’t it?’ He now looked like he was staring at his own reflection in the cleaver. ‘I am who I need to be… and that changes from time to time. Michael… Russell… Trevor…Carlos… whoever. In the end, I’m just the one who gives them what they deserve.’ The man’s eyes moved from the cleaver to Garcia. ‘I am the bringer of retribution.’
‘Cute,’ Garcia said back. ‘Did you come up with that name yourself?’
