ONE
Tuesday, January 1
He hummed as he worked.
An old folk tune he’d learned in El Calabozo as a child.
He couldn’t remember the words, which was odd; as a rule, he remembered everything. Memories tortured Vincente Carpio, and his tortured mind gave him a special kind of madness. The leadership recognized it early on. That was why they’d sent him to America—because he was willing to do the things that others weren’t. It was a decision many in the leadership now questioned. Now the madness seemed to have taken over.
He was sweating, and his bald, tattooed head was slick. This one was the eighth he’d done this way, and by far the hardest. He wouldn’t have thought it to look at her. She was young and thin, shorter than him, with a punk haircut: shaved on one side and dyed multiple colors on the other. At first he’d thought she was probably a junkie; Cambridge had its fair share, a consequence of the ultra-liberal orthodoxy of the city that viewed tolerance of everything as an imperative.
He’d realized quickly that she wasn’t. Junkies put up little resistance. They were so unhappy with their lives that they simply couldn’t find a reason to fight. This girl, though, had been full of fight. She fought so hard he considered aborting the attack and moving on, but that wasn’t a realistic option. If she’d escaped, the police would have combed through the area immediately, and there was little doubt that he would be found. He couldn’t let that happen.
Eventually she had succumbed, as they all did in the end. Even now, though, she continued to resist in her own way. The sinew around her vertebrae was stringier and less cooperative than he had found with the others, forcing him to work harder, and his perspiration mixed with the blood on his hands, making the task all the more difficult. He found the work invigorating, though, and the blood sliding down the crosses adorning his wrists made him think of the graveyard in his home town—fields of crosses covered in blood.
He was surprised that he could sweat in the cold. Growing up, he’d thought that the winter in El Calabozo was frigid. The temperatures could sometimes dip into the fifties in January and February. He’d never experienced any cold like a New England winter. He’d left the upstairs windows in the little house open, mainly to keep the flesh refrigerated, and with the outside temperatures below zero, the house was an icebox.
And yet, still, he was sweating.
Finally, he finished with the knife and started with the ropes, tying her up the same way he’d done with the others. When he was done with that, he stepped back and examined his work.
He was satisfied.
He wondered how long it would take for his work to be found. Two days, he thought. Maybe three. The police were already looking for two of them. And he was a priority for the FBI and the other federal authorities. Even with the cold, the stench was overpowering in the basement. With the windows left open, it would not take long for one of the neighbors to decide that their civic tolerance ended with the smell of rotting flesh, and they would call the authorities. Then the real madness would begin. America would realize what it had wrought unto itself.
He walked to the basement sink and washed the blood and sweat from his arms and his face. He gave the place one last look. His fingerprints would be everywhere, as would other identifying evidence.
He didn’t care. He wanted them to know it was him.
He needed them to know it was him.
TWO
Wednesday, January 16
The dream returned.
Her little boy had come back to her, with a smile that melted her heart and made her long for the chance to hold him just once more. They were by the shore, near the Nantasket motel south of Boston where they’d spent a week every summer of his life—just the three of them, the perfect young family.
She tried to run to him, but the ground slipped beneath her feet, like a great terrestrial treadmill. She called out to him, begged him to come to her, but he just smiled.
A foghorn blared in the background. She called to him again, pleading with him to say something—anything—to her. His lips were moving, but the foghorn grew louder, drowning him out. He was slipping away, and she could feel her panic growing.…
She opened her eyes. The dream was gone, but the foghorn droned on, beating in time to the dull throb in her skull until she reached over and grabbed her phone. She looked at the caller ID, recognized the number, and was instantly awake.
“Yeah, it’s Steele.” She listened for a moment, her heart rate climbing, the blood pumping through her body, clearing away the last of the dream-fog as anticipation took root. “OK, I’ll be there.”
She hung up and looked over at the body next to her—a silhouette draped in a sheet. For a moment it brought to mind all the crime scenes she’d worked over the years. She swung her legs off the bed, pulled on her underwear and jeans, a blouse and a jacket.
“Your tip panned out,” she said. “I gotta go.”
“So go,” the body replied. She’d hoped he was asleep. It would have been easier.
“Thanks for last night. It was nice.”
“Always is.” He didn’t turn to face her.
Kit Steele opened her mouth to say something, but could think of nothing appropriate. She grabbed her gun and her bag and headed out of the apartment.
THREE
Vincente crept along the pier, careful with every step to avoid a slip. The fall wouldn’t kill him, but the water probably would. Not right away, but within a matter of minutes. Even in the dark he could see the chunks of ice floating in Boston Harbor, gathering at the edge of the shoreline as though conspiring to take over the waterway—choke it off, force it to grow still. Carpio had heard that it had happened once, a few years before, when the ice floats had become so large that ships had to be diverted, and the harbor had to be closed for two days as icebreakers were called in.
He was the hunted now. Every newscast flashed his picture and pleaded with the public to join the chase—to feed the police information regarding his whereabouts. The skulls tattooed over his entire head captured the imagination like a horror film, and he was regarded as a supernatural predator by all of Boston. It was understandable, given the carnage he’d brought down upon the surrounding area. What none of them understood was that everything up to now had been a prelude. He was growing stronger, and he would continue to take his revenge until he’d killed as many as he could.
He was looking for a new area in which to hunt. It was getting more difficult with his growing notoriety. It would be hard for anyone not to recognize him. Images of the dead and blood and bones and carnage covered his entire body. Even his eyeballs had ink in them—two crosses flanking both irises. He could keep his hood up, but that wouldn’t work to hide his identity for long. He’d now taken to sleeping during the days and hunting at night in the deserted areas of Boston, where his work would attract less attention.
The pier ran along the side of the harbor, in what was known as the Seaport District. It was a patchwork of high-end developments at the edge of South Boston, just across Fort Point Channel from the Financial District and Downtown. Five years before it had been a wasteland of warehouses and parking lots, but now it was the hottest growth area in the city. A dozen high-rises were already up, with a mixture of office space and luxury condos nestled around the federal courthouse, which for a decade had been the area’s lonely architectural sentinel. Seven more complexes were under construction and the shoreline was pocked with construction sites.
It was a perfect hunting ground. There was enough development to provide prey, but it was still new enough that there were few people who walked the streets at night. He’d had little luck on this night, though, and he decided to go down to the water to see whether there might be a drunk passed out by the shore. He’d gotten lucky in such ways before.
He’d been forced to hop a chain-link fence to climb onto the pier, which was nearby one of the newest developments. He saw the boat approaching and his hopes rose. If the vessel was pulling in, he might be able to overpower those on board. Perhaps his luck had changed.
Suddenly a spotlight on the front of the boat flashed so bright that it felt like an explosion. He was looking straight into it, and it blinded him, almost knocked him to the ground. He stumbled back into a piling, his hand defending his eyes as they adjusted and tried to make out shapes.
It was futile. A siren screamed, and the hands protecting his eyes flew to his ears. It continued for a few seconds, and then cut off abruptly. A voice came over a bullhorn. “Freeze!” It was a woman’s voice, and he recognized it instantly. “FBI! You are under arrest!”
The voice spurred him to run. He had always known the risks of capture, but to be captured by her was too much to bear. He stumbled in the direction of the shore, still blinded, unable to see the rotted wood beneath him. It was only twenty yards from the edge of the pier to solid ground, but the pier was only ten feet wide, so there was precious little room for error. The odds were low that he would make it, but he was willing to take that chance.
* * *
On the lead boat, Kit held the megaphone. There were two other vessels in the group—all boats currently at the disposal of the joint task force through the Coast Guard and the Boston Police Department. Some of the brass had grumbled at the excess. There was a sense that it was overkill, but the tip indicated that Vincente Carpio was crawling the shoreline at night, looking for fresh meat. No one was willing to risk him slipping through their fingers once more. He was the most wanted man in the United States, and, of greater political importance, he had previously escaped from their custody. His escape had been an embarrassment that had tarnished every branch of law enforcement. No one wanted to be the one who called for fewer resources in the effort to bring him to justice, so Kit had gotten everything she’d asked for.
Now she had him again. She could see him running, his hands covering his bald, tattooed head, crashing into the fence by the edge of the pier, scurrying like a cockroach in the brightness of the spotlight. As the boat approached the pier she felt every muscle in her body tense, adrenaline driving through her veins. There was a special operations detail on land, closing in from the other side of the construction site, so there should be no way for Carpio to escape, but his elusiveness had taken law enforcement by surprise before, and she was unwilling to take chances. As the boat came within a few feet of the pier, Rich Alvarez, the Coast Guard commander captaining the vessel, cut the engine, and Steele dropped the megaphone, took three strong strides, and launched herself toward the pier.
“Shit!” Alvarez shouted. “Steele! What the hell are you doing?”
Bill McCaughey, a captain in the Boston Police Department also on board, barked angrily, “Get back here, missy!”
She ignored them both.
She could hear the commotion behind her as guardsmen lashed the boats to the pier, but she didn’t look back. As soon as her feet hit the splintered wood she drove forward. Her gun was drawn, and she focused on the dark figure just now clearing the fence at the edge of the pier. She ran faster than she ever had before, possessed by the need to capture and to punish. She would not let him escape. She was no longer motivated by her job; she needed to fulfill a moral imperative, and as she pushed herself to the edge of her physical abilities, she knew that she had crossed a dangerous line where her perspective and her judgment had been compromised. Even that realization was not enough to stem her obsession, though, and she pushed on faster.
Copyright © 2019 by Jack Flynn.
