Linwood Barclay - Parting Shot

He passed the scissors back to Alastair, then stuck his arm back under the bed and drew the jar out. Then he got to his knees and, still holding it in his hand, rested it atop the bed.

“Sweet Jesus, what the hell is that?” Alastair asked.

Duckworth checked the lid to see that it was on tight. The liquid in the jar had a yellowish tinge. Sitting on the bottom was a wrinkled, fleshy mass about the size of two small chicken gizzards. But they did not look like gizzards to Duckworth.

“What do they look like to you?” he asked Alastair.

“They look like... My God, they appear to be testicles.”

“That’s what they look like to me,” Duckworth said. “And I think I know who these just might belong to.”

So maybe the dog hadn’t swallowed everything after all.

Cory Calder felt energized. A nice way to feel, after so many missteps.

He’d met Jeremy Pilford. Face to face. Shook his hand. Looked him right in the eye! Well, almost. Jeremy seemed a little preoccupied at that moment, like maybe that guy with him had told him something he didn’t want to hear. Whatever. It didn’t matter.

This was so different than what had happened with Craig Pierce, or even Brian Gaffney, although the less said about that one the better. Cory had to admit, he felt bad about Gaffney.

Gaffney had looked, at a glance, so much like Jeremy Pilford. He was even dressed more or less the same. Cory and Dolly had watched Jeremy go into Knight’s and were waiting for him to come out. And when he did, or when someone who looked very much like him did, Dolly said, “Hey, how ya doing, can you help me out here? I dropped a contact.”

The dude stepped into the alley, Cory came up behind him, chloroformed him. They dragged him to the van, which they’d left parked at the end of the alley.

Would have been so much better if it had been the right guy.

And then, to make matters worse, someone recognized Dolly as Cory was getting Gaffney tucked away. Fucking chatted with her.

Anyway, what was done was done. Sometimes, trying to do the right thing, innocent people got hurt.

Tell me about it.

At least Gaffney had never seen them, never had a real look at them. Not even Dolly, who’d called him into the alley. It was dark, and they were confident he’d never be able to describe her for the cops. The whole time they had him in the barn at Dolly’s place, he was out of it, but they’d kept him blindfolded, just in case. So they were able to let him go. Dumped him out of the van two days later in the same place they’d found him, and took off.

Man, they sure fucked that one up. And after all the trouble Dolly had gone to steal the necessary equipment from her boss.

The Pilford kid was still out there, with no idea how close he’d come to having to pay for what he’d done.

Cory felt committed to correcting his mistake.

They’d gotten it so right with Craig Pierce. Wow, had they ever. Man, when that dog made a meal of him, boy, that was something else. Dolly threw up, but Cory was blown away by what they’d accomplished. For a moment, he thought maybe they’d gone too far, that Pierce was actually dead, because that was not what he wanted. Cory believed, at least at the time, that it was better for bad people to endure their punishments.

So he chased off the dog and went back to see if Pierce had survived. The son of a bitch was still breathing, but Jesus, what a mess. And there was even a little something left behind, that must have fallen out of the dog’s mouth. Cory had taken some pictures, but here was an actual souvenir. (He was proud of the fact that he’d never been a particularly squeamish kid.)

The real payoff had been the attention the deed garnered. Cory uploaded the pictures to Just Deserts, careful not to leave any digital trail that would lead back to him, with plenty of information about what Pierce had done. He thought very carefully about the words that would accompany the pictures, about how “revenj” had been exacted upon this disgusting pervert.

The website ran with it. Scores of other sites picked it up.

Seeing the response was without question the most exciting thing that had ever happened to Cory Calder. He sat on the website non-stop for several days, watching the fallout. First, the site tracked the number of visitors. There were thousands of them, and that didn’t even count the other sites that carried the story.

And then there were the comments. Every few minutes, more people weighed in. Some thought that whoever’d done this to Craig Pierce, an act described as everything from despicable to worthy of a Nobel prize, should be prosecuted to the full extent of the law. Others lauded him, called him the best kind of vigilante, a hero who was stepping in to do what was right when the courts had failed to live up to their obligations.

One person went to so far as to compare him to Batman, even though Batman was not known particularly for using a dog to bite off a bad guy’s junk.

Cory even went on the site himself and left a comment, saying that whoever this guy was, he was terrific.

When he was at home, up in his bedroom, his father down the hall, he had to keep a lid on his enthusiasm during his repeated checks of the site. But when he was at Dolly’s place, he was uncontrolled in his excitement, letting out whoops of delight as he sat in front of her computer.

“Look at this!” he’d cry, calling her again and again to look at the screen. “Look what they’re saying!”

She wasn’t always as excited about it as he was, and that troubled him some. But after all, he was the mastermind of this operation. It made sense that the enthusiasm levels were somewhat lopsided.

Even though his name never appeared — and a good thing too — he reveled in the attention. He wished there were some way to tell the world with impunity that he was the one responsible.

Very quickly, the online adulation became addictive. As the comments began to wane in the weeks following the attack on Craig Pierce, Cory became agitated and restless. He needed to keep the interest alive, to maintain the debate. Praise or condemnation, it didn’t matter. What mattered was that the world was talking about him .

So he started to think about his next project.

How he wanted to rub the noses of his goddamn brother and his goddamn sister in it.

How Daddy loved them. So fucking proud.

There was Caitlin over in Europe, helping those people who’d fled Syria with little more than the clothes on their back, taking perilous boat journeys, half of them drowning. That little kid on the beach. One night, Cory and his father were watching CNN when a story came on about the refugees. They were literally walking out of the water, their boat having gone down about a hundred feet offshore, carrying babies in their arms, everyone crying and screaming. There were aid workers on the beach, waiting for them. Doctors and care workers and all that shit, and suddenly Alastair pointed to the screen and shouted, “It’s Caitlin! Look, it’s Caitlin! It’s your sister!”

Yep. It was Caitlin. Running up to a man with a limp little girl in his arms. She took the child away, worked frantically on her, getting air into her lungs, bringing her back to life.

His father didn’t stop talking about it for days.

Then there was his brother, Miles, who at least didn’t make it to CNN, but he was doing great work, oh yes he was. Big-shot scientist halfway around the world, finding ways to make seawater drinkable. Your basic save-the-world kind of thing. No biggie. Quoted in Scientific American , even the New York Times once or twice. A genius, they called him. Yeah, well, Cory could remember the time he locked the keys in his Infiniti with the engine running. Didn’t seem like any great genius that day.