“You
two won’t get away with this,” Tyrell said.
Sweat clinging to his forehead, Dexter Tyrell’s face was a mask of pain, but he didn’t feel the pain Josh felt.
Josh lunged for Tyrell in his chair. The vice president flinched, anticipating a beating. He turned his head away and raised his hands up to his face. His body collapsed into a fetal position. Josh held a fist above the executive’s head, ready to strike, but hesitated when he saw the picture on Tyrell’s desk.
Josh snatched up the framed photograph. It wasn’t a picture of his wife or a loved one, but the cover of some business magazine featuring Tyrell. Josh smashed the picture frame down on the corner of the desk. The frame shattered and pieces of glass and broken wood fell from Josh’s grasp. Josh dropped what was left of the frame. He picked up the largest of the pieces of broken glass and held it like a knife.
“Give me your arm,” Josh snarled.
“What?”
“Give me your fucking arm!” Josh barked.
Tyrell remained curled in a ball. He yelped like a wounded dog when Josh grabbed the man’s unwounded arm. He banged Tyrell’s left arm onto the
desk blotter.
Bob rushed forward. “What the hell are you doing, Josh? We have him. He’s finished.”
“Don’t come any closer, Bob.”
Bob did as he was told and looked on in fear.
Raising the shard of glass, Josh slashed it across Dexter Tyrell’s wrist. He yelped again. Blood filled the laceration and crimson poured down the sides of his arm onto the blotter.
“Don’t fucking move!” Josh bellowed at Tyrell.
Josh jammed his foot into the pit of the vice president’s stomach. He put his right arm on his right knee
and drew the makeshift knife across his own wrist.
“Josh,” Bob said.
Dropping the glass fragment, Josh took his foot out of Tyrell’s gut. He interlaced his fingers with Tyrell’s fingers so both cut wrists touched. The two men’s blood mixed. Josh pressed down on their wrists with his other hand, ensuring their blood mingled.
Tyrell looked on in disbelief. He fixed his gaze on Josh, then at the bizarre ritual being performed upon him. Slack-jawed, he said nothing.
“Good. We’re blood brothers, Tyrell.” Josh applied more pressure to their joined wounds. Blood oozed out from between their arms like jam squeezed from an overfilled sandwich. “I’m infected, Mr. Tyrell, and if luck is on my side, so are you.”
“Oh, my God.” Bob fell into one of Tyrell’s club
chairs.
“What have you done?” Tyrell demanded.
Josh enjoyed seeing the fear in Tyrell’s eyes.
“My blackmailer, my ex-mistress, murdered by your boy, told me one important fact before she died. She was diagnosed HIV positive.” Josh relished the moment.
The words HIV positive struck terror into all those who had contracted the virus and it was no different for Dexter Tyrell. Josh smiled at the fear in Tyrell’s eyes.
Tyrell fought Josh to wrench his arm free. Josh gripped tighter onto the vice president’s hand. He pressed down even harder onto Tyrell’s arm and head butted him, ending his struggle.
.; Tyrell yelped, and the blood drained from his face.
His resistance dissipated and Josh relinquished his grip on the vice president’s arm.
“Regardless of what happens to you or me, I have
the satisfaction of knowing your life is as uncertain as mine,” Josh said to Tyrell.
Dexter Tyrell stared at his wounded arm, then at
Josh. His panicked expression said it all. He was trying to comprehend what had happened to him and was
coming up short. Things like this happened to other people, not him.
Bob stared at the executive then, at his friend. “Oh, Josh.” “Call the police. Let’s finish this,” Josh said.
Bob started to say something, but let his thoughts die on his lips. He rested the pistol on the desk. He treated the weapon like it was made of glass. He wanted nothing to do with the gun anymore. He got up from the
chair and left the office.
Josh righted the chair he’d knocked over and sat
down on it. He picked up the pistol and took it out of harm’s reach, then sat back and waited for the police.
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
The commercials finished and a talk show took over.
The first half of the show would retrace Pinnacle Investments’s downfall and the second half would be an
open forum on the rights and wrongs of the viatical settlement system.
“Leave it alone. Don’t you people know when to
stop?” Josh said to the TV.
Josh reached across the couch for the remote and
switched the channel. He couldn’t bear to watch yet another show about the appalling truth he’d uncovered.
The subject had been done to death by the television networks, but they insisted on resurrecting the story.
He couldn’t go anywhere without seeing the word “viatical.”
It would be on cereal boxes next. He stopped
channel-hopping when he came to the cartoons. He
couldn’t see Tom and Jerry making a viatical settlement on Butch.
Cartoons. Thank God for cartoons. They were a
welcome distraction. He’d seen it all unfold on television.
The Sacramento Police Department had tracked
down John Kelso’s address book from the River City Inn. In the book, fifty-seven names and addresses were listed. All but one, Mark Keegan, were clients of Pinnacle Investments. All had been victims of unusual accidents that appeared to be have been choreographed
by John Kelso. Josh realized Kelso hadn’t gotten the chance to report his final victim’s name, Belinda Wong.
If the networks weren’t discussing John Kelso, they were discussing Dexter Tyrell. News programs showed stills of the successful executive from financial publications.
The images were a stark contrast to the broken
man the police paraded before the media. It looked like he had lost twenty pounds since his arrest. Dexter Tyrell never made it to court. On his way to his arraignment, in front of the television cameras, he broke
away from the police officer holding him and ran full pelt into the path of an oncoming bus. The executive was killed instantly. Josh watched Tyrell’s death on television. He saw a look of total bliss when the vice president saw the bus bearing down on him. Josh had never seen anyone happier.
Josh’s eyes registered the cartoon characters on the television, but his mind was elsewhere. The talk show forced him to relive recent events. The last two weeks since his return from Pinnacle Investments had been a blur. Police from two states, along with the FBI, quizzed him about the deaths of Mark Keegan, Margaret Macey, Joseph Henderson—aka Tom Jenks, Belinda
Wong and John Kelso. They also questioned him
about Dexter Tyrell and Pinnacle Investments’s involvement.
Josh held nothing back. There was no point
in lying any more. Once he started talking, nothing could stop him, and in less than two hours he’d said it all.
