of no use. He found himself desperately searching for an alternative to prolonged beating. What was infuriating was the man’s defiance. This asshole’s life lay in their hands, yet his battered, swollen eyes continued to say, screw you.
Standing there, Jake had a kind of epiphany. He realized that in this battle of wills between professional painmongers, winning and losing were not measured by who had a heartbeat at the end of the day. A man won when he denied his adversary the pleasure of witnessing a breakdown. Men like these had inflicted too much pain, too many times, merely to be beaten into submission. Pain didn’t frighten them anymore. Neither, apparently, did the thought of death.
So what did?
Frantically, he scanned the interior of the barn, searching for the answer. The far wall was lined with tools: wordworking, painting, plumbing. Nothing there. Just to the right of those was a narrow shelf stacked high with all manner and types of chemical supplies. All of the labels were turned out just so, with the hazards warnings clearly visible. He looked away, then snapped his head back again. Thats it!
“Stop!” Jake commanded, freezing Thorne in the middle of an open-handed backswing.
“Stay out of this, Jake,” Thorne said. “If you can’t take it-”
“Shut up. It’s my turn.”
“Your turn?” The thought seemed somehow unthinkable.
“Yeah. My turn. He tried to kill my family. I get to take my shot at him. Can’t do worse than you, right, Thorne?”
The battered man actually grinned.
Thorne hesitated, then shrugged and backed off.
With Thorne out of the way, Jake walked past the prisoner toward the storage shelf, out of Wiggins’s field of view. What he needed had to be here somewhere. “Here’s how I see it, buddy,” he said to Wiggins’s back as he rummaged through the containers. “Death is the gold medal for people like you. Pain gives you a hardon. It’s sick, but what the hell? So’s making a living killing women and children.”
He rummaged through all kinds of chemicals, pausing for just a second at a bottle of insecticide before moving on. Ah! He found one that would work perfectly. Now he needed a rag.
“With that arm of yours, I figure you’re pretty much out of business,” he went on. “Once word gets out in your circles, I imagine things’ll get pretty intense for you.”
“What the hell are you doing?” Thorne barked, his hands on his hips.
Here’s one. Jake found an old rag on a bench. “Just pay attention, ace.” He needed gloves, too, and they were right next to the rag. Leave it to Mr. Safety to have rubber gloves in his shop.
He strolled back to the prisoner and stooped down in front of him. “The way I see it, we’re wasting our time here, right? You’re betting you can hold out just long enough for Thorne here to kill you. That lets you off the hook and somehow earns you special bragging rights in hell. Am I close?”
The gunman just stared defiantly, his left eye all but swollen shut, his right one not much better.
Jake’s expression changed as he pulled the black rubber gloves onto his hands and opened up the brown glass bottle. As the cap came off, the faint stench of rotten eggs filled the air.
He held up the bottle and displayed the label as a sommelier might display a good bottle of wine. “Sulfuric acid,” he explained. “Great for cleaning concrete, but man, you’ve got to dilute it. Otherwise, it burns like shit.”
He tipped the bottle and poured a drop of the clear, concentrated liquid onto Wiggins’s pant leg, just above the knee. Instantly, the cotton began to degrade, and the rotten-egg odor became unbearable. Soon it was joined by the smell of burning flesh as the acid ate away a chunk of flesh about the size of a dime.
The man’s eyes were wide now. This clearly was beyond what he’d mentally prepared himself for. Pain he understood. Now his imagination was taking him into uncharted territory.
Jake smiled. “As I said, death comes too easily to you. The consequences don’t mean anything. For all I know, after you finished with my son, you went out and had a pizza.” The very thought of it made Jake’s hands tremble. Wiggins saw the tremors and smirked.
“The hands?” Jake asked. “You think that’s funny? A sign of weakness?” He smiled. “Well, you got me. I’ve never been much of a killer. Even the thought of killing a worthless coward like you makes my stomach flop.”
Thorne had had about all he could stand. “Oh, for Christ’s sake..”
“Shut up, Thorne!” Jake yelled. The suddenness of the outburst made Wiggins jump. Jake turned back to his prisoner. “Seems to me we’re a bad match, Wiggins. I don’t want to kill you, yet you seem content to die.” He moved in very close now, close enough to smell the other man’s bloody breath. And he whispered, “If you don’t talk, I’m gonna make you live.”
Wiggins shot a look to Thorne that said, This guy is nuts.
“You’re right,” Jake said, answering his thoughts. “I’m over the edge. Out of my mind. And here’s my one- time-only offer. You’ve seen how this stuff works. You’ve felt it burn. Well, the next dose goes in your eyes.”
He fell silent, allowing the impact of his threat to settle in. “Really, that’s it. One splash and it’s all over. Ten seconds later your eyeballs are charcoal, and we’re done here. We’ll just let you go.”
Wiggins’s eyes grew wild as he glanced again toward Thorne. Jake caught the glance and smiled. He had him. “Imagine what it would be like not to see. You couldn’t find your victims, even if you had two hands to kill them with.”
He pulled away now, as his words took their toll. He actually enjoyed the look of horror in Wiggins’s eyes. “You’ll be ugly as hell, too. Repulsive burn scars all over your face. Everyone will point and whisper. Get a load of that guy, they’ll say. Not that you’ll be able to see the finger-pointers, of course.”
Wiggins’s breathing picked up, and his red, swollen eyes darted back and forth between Jake’s face and the bottle.
“Okay, then, let’s start with something easy. Who are you working for?”
The man said nothing, looking once again for Thorne to resume the beating. Panic was written all over him.
“Don’t look at him, look at me,” Jake said, his face showing cold fury. “It seems so right, don’t you think? I don’t get to see my family again, and you don’t get to see anything. I’ll count down for you. At zero, the lights go out. Five…”
Wiggins watched with growing terror as Jake soaked the rag with acid. The excess trickled off onto Wiggins’s pants, instantly burning a half dozen holes into his legs.
“… four…”
The rag was soaked now, disintegrating under the onslaught of chemical as Jake brought it ever closer to the man’s face. The odor of sulfur brought tears to his eyes.
“… two… one-”
“Frankel!” Wiggins yelled it loud, screamed it, really, in case Jake might not have heard it. “Peter Frankel hired me!”
The rag was only an inch away, and Wiggins shut his eyes tight, as if that would actually stop anything. For just a second, Jake kept the rag suspended there, letting the stench pour off it, then he pulled it away.
He turned to Thorne, who himself looked unnerved by the display. “Okay, Thorne, I think he’s ready now.”
Two hours later it was done. A wall of silence, it turned out, was just like any other wall. Once cracked, it just kept crumbling. Wiggins gave them everything they needed, and they never had to lay another hand on him. He was a broken man, and Jake accepted that he’d been the one to break him, though he wasn’t sure how he felt about it.
When the gut-spilling was done, he pulled Thorne off to a corner of the barn. “So what’s next?”
“With him?” Thorne said, gesturing without turning his head.
Jake nodded. “Yeah, with Wiggins or Dalton or whoever he is.” During the interrogation, Wiggins had given up his birth name: Clyde Dalton. “What do we do with him?”
Thorne gave Jake another one of his condescending looks. “What do you think? Three of us go for a ride, two of us come back.”
Jake’s stomach knotted. He’d spent nearly half his life running away from a murder charge. It just doesn’t seem right…
Thorne read the look and rolled his eyes. “Relax, Jake. You won’t have to do shit, okay? This one will be on
