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“Appreciate it.”
“And Ranger?”
“Yeah?” I asked, turning to find him watching me with an odd, thoughtful look.
“It won’t help.”
“What won’t help?”
“Making him pay. There will be a certain sense of justice in it, sure. But it won’t help.”
“Help what?”
“That feeling in your chest,” he told me before turning and walking away.
It was a movie dramatic fucking exit, leaving me sitting there with a lukewarm coffee and a file folder full of more information than I needed about the bastard. So much information, in fact, that Nia had somehow found high school records and his most recent physical results.
I owed her one.
I didn’t know what she liked. Maybe, if Miller ever stopped hating my ass, I could ask her. Or Finn. Then send her a shitton of it. Because without her, his name would never be known. He would be left to walk free. And men like him, who had sick cravings, who got away with it, they didn’t stop. They kept going, kept perfecting it. The next time, there would be no hesitation marks on the belly. The knife would plunge, pierce, kill.
Because of her, a monster would be taken out. And the world would be better for it.
Mentally, I weighed the options.
Going back to the woods, shoring up the animals for me to head out of town for a day or so. I’d done it before.
Or leave them for the better part of just this one day, drive upstate, grab that mother fucker out of his bed, bring him back down with me, and get this done while the rage was fresh.
And, well, you can imagine which way I leaned.
The idea that the bastard got to breathe easy for even one more night didn’t exactly sit well with me.
I finished my coffee.
I discarded the file in a recycling bin behind an office supply store, lost amongst a million other copies of various printed projects, never to be seen again.
I hopped into my truck, drove it to the outskirts of town, slipped fake plates over my real ones, got on a hat and shades, and started my drive.
He lived at the kind of place I had expected. A neighborhood of soulless mini-mansions, manicured lawns, ornamental shrubbery, big spotlights cemented into the lawns to shine on the fronts of the houses at night just in case you almost missed the grandeur of it all.
Men who lived all alone in places like this were just like the men who owned a car that could go zero to sixty in three-point-two seconds and boasted a top speed of two-forty when all they used it for was driving back and forth to the office at forty miles per hour.
It was all about the external validation, needing everyone else to know how wealthy they were and, therefore, how much better they were.
This was the kind of man who checked the time just so you saw the Rolex on his wrist.
Vincent Westcourt lived at number seven Colts Wood Drive – a cold stone-front two-story house with a built-in pool out back, a pair of lion ceramic lawn ornaments flanking the driveway, and a giant crystal chandelier in the window.
I took a pathetic sort of pleasure in the fact that two of the bulbs had burned out.
A man like Vincent Westcourt likely had to hire someone to change them out, didn’t know where the ladder was, let alone had the balls to get up on it.
The ADT plaque in the yard was probably a fake. Even if it was real, it would hardly stop me. I’d dealt with higher levels of security before. Sure, it had been a while, but I could do it.
My truck was parked down the street at a house with all the blinds drawn, their mailbox overflowing. People in neighborhoods like this always had people over doing tasks – taking care of the lawn, the sprinkler systems, the pools. It wouldn’t be out of place for a busted up truck like mine to be there to handle something when the owners were out of town. I would head back down and get it once I got Vincent unconscious.
Then we would be taking a little road trip.
I needed to get him somewhere that no one could hear him scream.
Luckily, I knew just the place.
It didn’t take that long.
Just after seven, the sun still battling to stay up in the sky.
He’d clicked the garage door button before he even pulled in the drive, letting me sneak into the dark depths unseen, waiting.
The door closed with a loud grumble.
It was only a beat or two before the door opened, slammed closed.
From there, it was all of, say, five seconds before his head met the wall with a sickening thud, sending his body crumbling to the ground.
Unconsciousness was a tricky thing. Because brains were unpredictable. Some people could take a massive blow and only be out for a couple minutes. Others took a baby tap and were out for an hour. There was no way to tell. So if your plan involved illegally transporting them in the backseat floor of your cab for several long hours, well, there wasn’t much of a margin for error.
