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“Or he needs the key,” Justice says, speaking slowly and clearly as if I am missing the point.
“But I have the key.”
“Exactly.”
“Oh. Fuck. No. I see where you’re going with this. There’s no way I am going to be held out as bait.”
“Either you are bait, or he finds other food.”
“Not with his hands cuffed together, he won’t. It’s going to be a lot harder for him to hunt. I might very well have saved a lot of lives tonight.”
“You’ll save even more when you give him the key.”
“He’s not going to be able to find me, though, is he?”
“He is, because I am going to call him, tell him that I have the human he crossed today in my custody, and that she will unlock him if he turns himself in.”
“That’s…. He’s not going to go for that.”
“Why not?”
“Because he doesn’t want to just be unlocked. He wants flesh and vengeance. God. Have you ever baited a murderer before? Tell him he can eat my face right off. Give him a little something to look forward to. Tell him you’re gonna slice me up and share me around like a sushi platter. Tell him I just ate sushi.”
I am getting into this a little too much, but once the creativity starts, it just doesn’t stop.
“There’s something wrong with you,” Justice says after a very long pause, the kind of pause in which intense judgements form.
“There’s not. You do the work I do, see the things I do, you either get used to them and start talking about them real casually, or you stress the fuck out and they cart you away. So. Tell your crazy cannibalistic brother that you have a hundred sixty pounds of prime meat here waiting to uncuff him.”
“I thought you would be more disturbed by this. Afraid of it.”
“Eh,” I shrug. “This is the easiest way of solving everybody’s problems. Lives get saved, yadda yadda. Happy outcomes. Let’s do this. Make the call. Break out your flip phone, buddy. We’ll do this.”
6
We wait for Rage in the moonlit shadow of Order’s web. It’s getting cold out. The holiday season is starting to edge its way toward us in a tentative sort of way. I forget about that, because I never participate anymore. Christmas is one of those things that just sort of happens around me, like Valentine’s Day, and Halloween, and every other mass vacation event. I sit at the edges of it all, somewhat aware of it because I have to be, but not at all engaged with it.
“I should have brought a warmer jacket,” I say. “Didn’t expect to be out here so long. Thought I might have some chance at getting home before midnight.”
“What home?” He snorts the question with a particular kind of derision.
“What do you mean?”
“I followed your scent. You have no home. You have a room.”
“Dude. That is not cool. Have you heard of the concept of privacy? You had no right to break into my house! The fuck!”
“I was curious about you.”
“Stalkers are curious about people too. Your curiosity doesn’t excuse your creepiness. I don’t go breaking into your home. I could have come back here during the day and snooped around here, and I didn’t. I respected your space. I…”
He’s holding one of his hands up almost all the way in my face. It’s good that he has four hands, because if he does that gesture to stop me from talking, he’s gonna lose one.
“Calm down,” he says, uttering the only two words guaranteed to make someone lose their shit. “I had to investigate you.”
“And what did you learn, asshole?”
“I learned that apart from your profession, you have no ties to the world. There is no evidence of even a tenuous familial connection. No pictures. Nothing but piles of books, most of which tell tales of things that never happened. You are a fantasist escaping the repeated horrors inflicted upon you by a job that exposes you to the worst of humanity and the utmost suffering. You are a broken little thing, and you deserve to be looked after better than you are.”
