The Closer (5 page)

“Tonight would be fine.”

“I’ll see you then.”

He took out his piercings and changed into a suit at the motel, then took a cab to a corner six blocks away from the warehouse. He walked the rest of the way, enjoying the late summer evening. The air smelled of diesel fumes and hot asphalt, but that was always a smell he’d liked; it reminded him of playing basketball on tarmac as a kid, on one of the many army bases his father had been stationed on.

The sheep was waiting for him outside. She was just as Deathkiss had described her, tall and blond and gorgeous, wearing a miniskirt that didn’t leave much to the imagination. He had a sudden, powerful flash of her on her knees, begging for her life. The smile on his face as he approached her was genuine.

“Hi, you must be Mr. Simkack.”

“Call me Todd.”

“All right, Todd. Right this way—oh, dear. It looks like someone’s broken in. I’m afraid we have problems with squatters sometimes—”

“That’s all right. They’re not dangerous, are they?”

“Oh, no, it’s usually just runaways with no place to stay, but be careful where you step. There might be needles.”

“I’ll keep my eyes open. Boy, it sure is dark in here. Is the electricity still on?”

“Shut up, you piece of shit.”

“…What?”

The world suddenly jumped like a bad video edit. Somehow, he was on his back, staring up at a bright light while his muscles twitched uncontrollably. A man’s voice said, “Don’t move. Nikki, get his weapon.”

Strong, impersonal hands found the knife tucked in the small of his back, under his shirt. The voice behind the flashlight said, “Do you recognize this moment?”

“What the fuck are you talking about?” he gasped. “Look, if you want to rob me—”

“This is the moment of control. The pivot that your relationship with the victim turns on, when everything changes. Except this time, you’re on the other side.”

“Deathkiss?” he whispered.

“No. I’m the one who killed him.”

A familiar feeling settled slowly in Djinn-X’s gut. Betrayal.

“And now you’re gonna kill me, right?”

“No. I’m not going to kill you. I just want to talk to you….”

INTERLUDE

The first thing Djinn-X saw when the bag was removed from his head was a bright light shining directly into his eyes. He squinted past the glare and said, “Kind of a cliché, don’t you think?”

“I prefer to think of it as traditional,” the Closer answered.

“Yeah, like dumping me in your van and hauling me out here,” Djinn-X sneered. “Where are we, your basement?” He glanced from side to side, but all he could see beyond the glare was darkness. “You should have kept me at the warehouse, you know—empty, deserted, no connection to you unless you’re even dumber than you seem. Now you have to worry about traces: fibers, blood, my whole fucking body. Maybe even witnesses. You’re a bigger idiot than Jeffrey fucking Dahmer was.”

“I caught
you,
didn’t I?”

“Only because I trusted you, you traitorous mother-fucker. Killing sluts wasn’t enough, huh? You had to come after one of your
own.”

He heard steps as his captor moved through the darkness. A rectangle of softer, colored light blinked into existence beyond the harsh brightness. He recognized it immediately: a computer screen.

“The first reason you’re here is because I needed a phone line,” the Closer said. “To access your website. You’re going to give me the passwords that will let me into your system files.”

“Not a chance in hell, asshole.”

“The second reason you’re here is because I knew it would take some time to get those passwords from you. I needed a place I could work without being disturbed.”

Djinn-X felt his stomach twist the way it did when he was flying and the plane hit an air pocket.

The light was suddenly moved. He blinked spots out of his eyes, trying to readjust his vision. When he could see clearly again, he wished he couldn’t.

The instruments gleamed, laid out in neat rows on a plastic sheet draped over a table. The walls of the room were hung with sheets of black plastic, eerily like the plastic-lined corridors of Djinn-X’s self-created video game. They reflected the light like dark, wet flesh.

“Okay,” Djinn-X said. “You’re a cop. You caught Deathkiss, and he gave me up. You think this voodoo inquisition bullshit is gonna make me roll over, too? You’re bluffing.
Fuck
you.”

“I’m not a cop,” the Closer said. He picked up a small butane torch, not much larger than a cigarette lighter, and lit it with a wooden match. It hissed to life with a flickering tongue of blue flame. “The papers keep saying I must be, but I’m not. I’m just someone who closes cases.”

“The Closer, huh?” Djinn-X knew the name, of course—he’d just never believed the Closer actually existed. It was a boogeyman, created by the police to scare the ones they were hunting. He figured the corpses were either suicides mutilated by the cops or actual suspects they just executed because they didn’t have the evidence to prosecute them. But the idea of a lone man, able to actually track and catch
real
predators like himself? It was ludicrous….

“I can see you don’t believe me,” the Closer said. “Maybe I can change your mind.” He set the torch down on the table. Its hissing glow was hypnotic; Djinn-X’s eyes kept returning to it.

“The real reason they call me the Closer hasn’t been reported in the papers. I do more than kill killers; I get them to confess. The bodies I leave behind haven’t been mutilated, as the press claims—they’ve been
coerced.
Persuaded, over the course of many hours, to give up the secrets of their owners.”

“That how you get
your
kicks? A little psychotic revenge?” Djinn-X asked. “Let me guess: one of us killed your innocent little sister, who wasn’t
really
a whore like everybody said.”

“This isn’t about revenge,” the Closer said calmly. “Not as much as you might think, anyway. It’s about holes. That’s what serial killers leave: great big holes in people’s lives. I can’t fix the big ones, the ones left by a daughter or a sister or a wife. But I
can
fix the smaller ones. The holes left by unanswered questions: Is my child alive or dead? Where is her body buried? What lie did that man say to make my son trust him?”

The Closer picked up a pair of needle-nose pliers. He held them over the tip of the torch, watching the ends turn a glowing orange.

“What I provide …is
closure.
The only kind the families of your victims are likely to get. You see, nothing in life is free; everybody pays, sometime, somehow. The answers you’re going to give me are simply payment for what you owe.”

Djinn-X couldn’t take his eyes off the pliers. The tips were white-hot now. “You—you don’t have to do that. I’ll give you answers.”

“That’s only half of what you owe. How I get the
right
answers—that’s the other half.”

The Closer removed the pliers from the flame. He grabbed Djinn-X by the hair with his other hand. “It works best if you have to watch what’s being done to you….”

The pliers were suddenly right there, so close he could hardly focus on them. He could feel the heat coming off them. He could smell the scorched metal.

“Please,” Djinn-X whispered.

“I don’t want you closing your eyes. So I’ll just make sure you can’t.”

Jack snapped off the surgical gloves. It used to feel like shedding armor, getting rid of a bloodstained layer of protection; but lately if felt more like stripping away a second skin, throwing away some essential part of himself. His hands felt naked and exposed, trembling slightly as he placed them on the keyboard. For an instant he thought he’d gotten blood on the keys, but it was just the crimson light from the screen.

“Spell it,” Jack said.

“Ragnarok. R—A—G—N—A—R—O—K,” Djinn-X gasped. “I swear.”

Jack studied the laptop in front of him, angled so that Djinn-X couldn’t see it. There was a rectangular gray window imposed in the center of the screen over a constantly shifting background, blinking a single request over and over.

Password.

Password.

Password.

Jack found the shifting images in the background hypnotic. Grotesque in content, they were arranged in a graceful ballet of colors and shapes. Photos of victims’ faces were layered row upon row so that only their wide staring eyes were visible, a mosaic of pleading and terror that morphed into a collection of body parts dancing a jig with gleaming scalpels and chromed handguns.

It was well done, Jack decided, but would be more effective if the audio was integrated as well. Screams set to something bouncy, perhaps…

He tapped a few keys. “Hmm. I guess I should have expected that,” he said. “The screen just went blank.”

Djinn-X made a huge, bubbling sigh.

“Some kind of universal delete, right?” Jack said. “I wonder how many you programmed in.”

“One is all it takes, motherfucker. You lose.”

Jack turned the laptop so that Djinn-X could see it. The gray rectangle was still onscreen. “I guess I would have—if I’d actually entered that code.”

He stretched on a fresh pair of gloves, then picked up the can of lighter fluid and a syringe. “I guess we’ll just have to start all over again….”

“You’re stronger than I thought.”

“Huh. Huh. Huh.”

“Give me the password.”

“F-fuck you.”

“Why do you care what happens to them? They don’t care about you.”

“You’re wrong. Wrong.”

“They’re sociopaths. Murderers. The only thing that matters to them is the taking of life.”

“Us.”

“What?”

Djinn-X grinned up at him with bloody teeth. “Us. The only thing that matters to
us
is the taking of life.”

“Give me the password.”

“Why? You already
have
access. You want names, dates, places? It’s all there, right on the website—you don’t have to torture anybody. That’s what the Stalking Ground is
about,
the exchange of information. The other hunters are more than happy to brag about their kills.”

“My method is more reliable.”

“No. Your method is more
fun
—AAAAAAAAAHH!
Fuck, don’t do that!”

“Give me the password.”

“It won’t do you any good. I don’t know the real identity of
any
of them.”

“I don’t believe you.”

“That’s not what you’re after at all, is it? You just want to get into the system so you can pose as
me
—so you can hide behind my name and betray them, one by one. No. No way. I’ll never let you do that.”

“Why?”

“Fuck you—NNNO! NO! OH
CHRIST!”

“Tell me why.”

“THEY’RE MY FAMILY!” Djinn-X screamed.

The Closer stopped what he was doing.

“They’re my
family,”
Djinn-X sobbed. “Don’t you get it? None of us ever belonged, not
anywhere.
But in The Pack,
all of us belong.
We’re not
alone
anymore….”

The Closer stared at Djinn-X for a long moment.

Then he turned and left the room.

After two years with Jack, Nikki had evolved a routine. She slept until noon, then got up and went to a local gym. She spent at least three hours there, working out and taking a sauna if they had one. Then she’d grab some takeout food and bring it back to Jack. For the first part of the evening, they’d work on strategy: studying Dangerous John lists, newspaper and police reports. Most serial killers targeted a specific type of victim—Ted Bundy had preferred girls with long, straight brown hair. They’d try to figure out where and when a given killer might strike, and what type he preferred. Nikki had gotten proficient enough with wigs, contact lenses, and makeup to portray anyone from a blond amazon to a black transsexual.

Around nine, they’d go to work. She’d walk the streets, and Jack would shadow her. She had a spycam and a transmitter in her purse—the same device Stanley Dupreiss had used to block her cell phone had also messed with the bug, letting Jack know something was wrong.

Usually all he got to eavesdrop on was her trading blow jobs and quickies for cash—but five times now, they’d caught something else.

When that happened, she left Jack alone. If Jack did the interrogation on-site, she’d stay in another room— if they’d lured the killer to where they were staying, she’d go out. They’d moved from the airport motel to a small house in a low-rent part of town so Jack would have the privacy to question Djinn-X; he’d set up an interrogation chamber in the basement.

Today she’d decided to go shopping, but her heart just wasn’t in it. She wandered from mall to mall aimlessly, unable to find anything she wanted. She didn’t see clothes anymore; she saw disguises.

And somehow, she found herself outside a church.

Before she knew it, she was inside. Nikki had been raised Catholic, but she’d shaken off all the rites and thou-shalt-nots when puberty hit. She hadn’t been back since—but it was impossible to do what she was doing without thinking about life and death, good and evil. Justice and retribution.

The church was beautiful, in the way only a Catholic church could be: a high, vaulted ceiling, long rows of solemn pews, a central aisle that led, inevitably, to the burnished wooden pulpit with its ornate golden cross. The whole thing lit by elaborate stained-glass windows, sunlight filtering through saints in frozen tableaus of pain.

She walked down the aisle. There were two old women lighting votive candles up at the front; she walked around them and to the side. To where the confessionals were.

She opened the door hesitantly, then swallowed and stepped inside.

She believed in what they were doing, believed in the rightness and necessity of it, but there was a big difference between her role and Jack’s. When they first started their partnership, she thought she was taking all the risks and Jack was getting all the satisfaction—but that stopped the very first time she spied on him while he was working.

She was just risking her body. Jack was risking much more.

She sat down. The panel separating her from the priest slid aside, leaving a wooden screen between them. How did the ritual go again? “Bless me Father, for I have sinned. It’s been …a long time since my last confession.”

She stopped, unsure what to say next. When she’d seen what Jack was capable of, she’d felt an overpowering mix of emotion: shock, disgust, fear—and yes, satisfaction. She was glad his victim was dead, glad that he’d suffered; but she’d never have been able to do the things Jack had done to him.

But this last time, with Stanley Dupreiss—she hadn’t been nearly as sickened when Jack had killed him in front of her. A part of her had felt more than satisfaction; it had felt
hungry.

What did Jack feel, after all
he
had done?

The shadowy figure on the other side of the confessional screen prompted her. “Yes?” His voice was low, soothing. Gentle.

“There’s someone I work with. A man. I’m worried about him.”

“Why are you worried?”

“It’s his job. He’s forced to do… unpleasant things. I’m afraid of what it’s turning him into.”

“What kinds of things is he forced to do?”

“He has to… hurt people.”

“Is he a criminal?”

“Not like you think. He doesn’t hurt people for money.”

“Are other people making him do it?”

“No. It’s his own choice.”

“If he can choose to start, he can choose to stop. God will always be waiting to forgive him—”

“It’s not that simple. He has very good reasons for what he does. But—” She stopped, trying to put her thoughts into words. “What he does, I think it
needs
to be done. But every time he hurts someone, it hurts
him,
too. I know there’s a good man in there somewhere—he’s just buried under all this pain. And he keeps adding more and more.”

“He sounds like he considers himself a martyr. One who suffers for the sins of others.”

“Yeah. Yeah, I guess so.”

“Martyrs usually believe they deserve to be punished. Could your friend be taking on all this pain because of something in his past?”