Rob Thurman - Slashback

I could’ve ducked under his wild swing easy enough, but that meant his momentum would carry him toward the street. I’d have to chase him and while it would be a short chase as he was no better a runner than a fighter, I wasn’t in the mood.

I’d been at this for hours, since the whorehouse pussycat had confirmed it was Jack peeling people like bananas. Nik had obtained a list of the victims from the Internet and split it between us. We didn’t know if Jack thought all humans were wicked or there was an actual reason he was choosing particular victims. Nik was hoping for the latter. Catching a killer with a pattern would be a helluva lot easier than assuming every single human in NYC was fair game. We had skills, but bodyguarding millions of people nightly wasn’t one of them.

That led me here to this particular piece of crap. There are some nuggets of info about the victims that news articles miss. You had to do it the old-fashioned way-talk to the friends and family. This was the first one I’d tracked down and I didn’t know if his sister had been Jacko’s definition of wicked, but her brother was covered head to toe in it. He was a bad, bad boy. I’d gone to the address Niko had traced from the victim’s name, talked with the half-blind and wholly pissy grandma. She’d assumed I was a “customer” and told me Big Mike was at his regular spot. I’d been curious enough to ask how she’d known I wasn’t a cop. Her cackled laughter had followed me down the three flights of tenement stairs.

When the half blind knew what you were and what you weren’t, maybe it was time to stop calling it an identity crisis and just go with identity.

Big Mike was still coming for me with all the speed of a nearly dead, morbidly obese cow and I stepped to one side, extended my arm and clotheslined him. His neck hit my arm with a meaty thud and he was back down. I stood over him as he gasped for breath, his face turning faintly blue. I bent over and nudged him in the ribs with the silencer on my gun. “You know I train every day thanks to an anal-retentive brother? Nah, I know you don’t, but I’m telling you. I could’ve broken your neck. I could’ve hit your nose and driven bone splinters up into what passes for your tiny brain. I could’ve kicked your testicles so far up into your body that you sneezed them out. But I didn’t. I took you down with a move I saw on WWF, you pathetic sack of shit. Here’s some advice: get a new job.”

Big Mike’s current job was drug dealer and occasional leg-breaker for anyone who needed that sort of thing. I glanced at my gun, snorted, and put it away. I’d planned on using it only for the fear factor, but I didn’t even need it for that. I slapped the man’s violet-colored cheek lightly. “This is how it’s going to go, Mikey. When you can breathe again. . if you can breathe again, you’re going to tell me about your sister. What did she do before she was killed? What was she into? Was she like you or was she innocent?” After seeing Big Mike and his grandma, I was on the fence.

Nobody knew better than I did: sometimes genes do tell.

“Hooker,” I said over the steaming plate of Chinese. “Sixteen and new to the trade. That’s probably why it didn’t make the news.” Sixteen and a prostitute. I hadn’t blamed her genes for that. I had blamed her brother though and thoroughly enough that the world’s most dedicated plastic surgeon would pin up a picture of Frankenstein’s monster to aim for as the best possible outcome.

I’d always known I was lucky when it came to brothers, but sometimes I forgot others didn’t have that. It had been the one thing in my life I’d not once had to question and because of that might be my only true blind spot.

I stabbed at the orange chicken with my fork. I’d decided years ago that if you hadn’t grown up with them in your hand, then chopsticks were for posers. The fact that I hadn’t been able to learn to use them was coincidence. “Thanks,” I added.

Niko, who could do that catch-a-fly-with-chopsticks thing and therefore not a poser, tipped his head slightly to one side. “For what?”

I shrugged as the loud chatter in the tiny restaurant ramped up another notch. There were cockroaches in the bathroom big enough to take a plunger to the toilet themselves if it stopped up, but nobody cared. The food, whether it had an antenna or two in it or not, was too good. “Just for doing the brother thing.” And doing it in a way many brothers couldn’t be bothered to. “What’d you find out?”

“Thief and rapist.” He went for a square of tofu that shivered the same as a tiny cube of vomit-flavored Jell-O would. I grimaced and savored my chicken all the more. “I believe we have our pattern. Jack is targeting those with what some would consider to be wicked behavior and with no leniency for the unwilling, those who are actually victims.”

I frowned, not completely convinced. “But that doesn’t explain you. I mean, I get why Jack would want me if I were human. I’m a killer.”

“And you think I’m not?” Niko raised his eyebrows.

I waved my fork, dismissing the words. “You’re lethal as hell, I know, but you kill in self-defense or in defense of others. You drip nobility instead of sweat. You’re Buddha, Jesus, Mother Teresa, and the Easter Bunny rolled into one. You shouldn’t be on Jack’s Naughty versus Nice list.”

“You forget Cherish.” His eyes were clear. He had killed Promise’s daughter, but he didn’t feel guilt over it. I would have known if he did. Damn good thing too. He had not a single reason to feel blame over her.

“She had the supernatural living version of a nuclear bomb and planned on using it. Hell, you saved the world, Nik. If that’s not the definition of noble I don’t know what is.”

“She did, that’s true, but that’s not why I killed her. I killed her for revenge. For what I thought she’d done to you. For what she did do to me. And while she did fight, it wouldn’t have mattered if she’d been unarmed. I would’ve killed her all the same.” Matter-of-fact. He made no apologies.

I understood, and I was glad he did as well. Cherish hadn’t been a person. She’d been a swirling void of sociopathic lies and murder. Whatever made a person or a paien what they were. . their soul if souls existed in that way. . she didn’t have. She killed, manipulated, and then psychically brainwashed anyone who got in her way with visions so terrible they were capable of driving you mad. Niko hadn’t killed her. He’d exterminated her. She’d had far less worth than one of those bathroom cockroaches and far less purpose on this earth.

Not to mention she was a serious bitch.

“Wish you’d let me come. Grabbed some popcorn and cheered from the sidelines. But whether you think that makes you a killer or not”-and it didn’t-“Jack couldn’t know about that. He just hit town. His victims now are obvious, right? He can see them spreading all that wicked far and wide. We haven’t had a job in weeks. You haven’t had to put anyone or anything down. There’s nothing I can think of that would have him all over you. You should be innocent in his beady, psychotic eyes.”

Niko passed me his fortune cookie-a tradition long-standing since the very first time we’d had Chinese food. “It makes no difference. In fact, if he continues to come after me, it would be convenient. Knowing his victims are on the shadier side of the law, moral and otherwise, doesn’t make him much easier to locate. There are still too many. There are over ten thousand prostitutes alone in the city. There’s certainly no way to shadow them all. And when you factor in thieves and rapists and murderers, whatever else Jack considers wicked, it’s impossible. There simply is no way to track him down coming from that angle. But him coming to us, that is useful.”