her parental inadequacies with a cry of defeat that masqueraded as a threat, but only symbolized failure and imminent resignation to all those who heard it, including the delinquent it was meant to correct. “Wait ’til your father gets home! Do you want me to call Daddy?”
This was followed immediately by words that told all that witnessed the irksome spectacle that there was no respite in sight. “Do you want a time out?!”
Darrell’s stomach rolled. What the hell had happened to parents? He had tried that tactic himself. The fool who invented it should be roasted alive on a spit, in Darrell’s opinion. It was just another admission of the parent’s loss of control.
The boy answered his mother predictably and appropriately. “Fuck you!” The words flew out of his mouth along with a spray of spittle.
The child began to punch at its mother again. Darrell could take no more. The woman was staring up at the ceiling, as if praying to god to rescue her from her own child, when Darrell charged down the isle, looking like a troll from under a bridge in some long forgotten fairytale.
The ankle-biting little rug-rat was still yelling and screaming. Darrell pushed the mother aside and slapped the child to the floor with a backhanded swing that collided with his mouth with the sound of a gunshot. The kid’s head bounced off the tile with a loud smack that effectively cut off his shrill ranting. A trickle of blood ran down from the crack that bisected his lip. With eyes glazed in shock and dizzy from the blow, he looked up at Darrell. The child trembled as he met Darrell’s feral gaze, feeling like a rabbit cornered by a voracious wolf.
The little redheaded monster screamed for his mother. Darrell drew back and backhanded him again, this time with a closed fist. The force of the blow knocked the boy over backwards. He landed face down on the tile floor. When he looked up, his left eye was nearly swollen shut with a tremendous black and purple bruise that went from cheek to temple. It looked as if he’d just gone twelve rounds in a boxing match.
Darrell leaned over and pointed a long gnarled finger into the boy’s face. His eyes seethed with rage and madness burning like an electrical fire. “You yell one more time and I will beat the life out of you. Do you hear me?”
The child nodded, his jaw still hanging open in shock. He looked over Darrell’s shoulder, searching for his mother.
She finally overcame her own shock enough to protest. “What the hell are you doing to my baby!”
She charged the gray-haired old man who’d just battered her son, swinging a fist and hooking her fingernails into claws, reaching out for Darrell’s face, determined to make him pay for hurting her child.
Darrell turned and casually caught the woman by her throat, pinching her windpipe closed just enough to guarantee her silence.
“Shhhhh!” he said, then turned back to the child, still holding his mother in an iron grip. He had to concentrate to keep his rage in check so that he didn’t crush her esophagus.
“I want you to apologize to your mother for disobeying her and embarrassing her like that in public. SAY IT!!!”
“I–I’m sorry mommy!” the child cried and tears began to flow from his eyes steadily.
“And if you ever disobey your mother again, I’ll be back for you. Do you understand?”
“Yes.”
Darrell released the kid’s mother and she rushed to scoop up her son.
They held each other and cried as Darrell turned and walked toward the exit. On his way, he passed a cherubic, blonde-haired, three-year-old baby girl sitting in a stroller with a pacifier in her mouth. She was being pushed along by an overweight woman, roughly Darrell’s age, who was obviously her grandmother. The child’s real mother was probably little more than a teenager. As Darrell passed, he reached down and overturned the stroller, dumping the child out onto the floor and leaving the toddler screaming as if it had been fatally assaulted. Darrell bent over and retrieved the baby’s pacifier, adding it to his necklace. He carried the stroller away with him as both parent and child screamed at his back.
“The sooner they learn the better,” he muttered, twisting the stroller into a mass of warped metal and plastic. The little girl had been nearly four years old, at least three years too old to be riding in a stroller and sucking on a pacifier.
“The sooner they learn,” he repeated.
He walked out of the mall and tossed that tortured relic of some years ago baby shower into the dumpster, wondering almost casually if he was perhaps taking his crusade too far. He reassured himself that all the kids he had disciplined were bad kids who would have only gotten worse if not for his intervention, that he was doing it for their own good. But, he wondered if he was also getting a little pleasure out of it, if perhaps he was not seeking to save the children but to punish them, to hurt them. He wondered if he was seeking revenge. Maybe, it was the parents he should have been punishing and not the children? Parents like him, who had failed their children, allowing them to become the brats that they were. Maybe, it wasn’t enough to teach the kids? Maybe, he needed to include the parents in his education?
“Let me get another hit off that, mom.”
Darrell’s head whipped around so fast he nearly broke his own neck.
There stood the answer to his musings in the form of a mother and daughter dressed identically in skintight halter-tops, sans brassieres, and mini-skirts so short that you could tell they were not wearing panties beneath them and that they had recently shaved. They were both smoking cigarettes and passing a bottle of Crown Royal back and forth. The girl couldn’t have been more than twelve years old. It was obvious that she and her mother were prostitutes, just like Darrell’s baby girl Linda, who’d died in an alley with a needle in her arm and the semen of the more than a dozen different men she’d fucked that night still leaking out of her. Darrell wanted to scream. He wanted to yell at the top of his lungs. A parent was supposed to want better for their child than what they had. They were supposed to guide them, steer them away from making the same mistakes they made. What this mother was doing was abominable. She had to be punished.
How could she let her child do that?!!!
He wanted to rip her apart. He would show that little girl what became of women who sold themselves on street corners. He reached into his coat and closed his hands around the hunting knife in his left pocket and the Colt revolver in the other.
“The sooner they learn,” he muttered as he stalked after them.
“Let’s go back to the motel, relax, and smoke these last couple of rocks before we hit the stroll again tonight. Okay baby?”
“Cool! I need a little pick me up. I feel like shit tonight.”
“Get it together honey! There’s a convention in town tonight. There’ll be twice as many tricks on the strip tonight and that means mo’ money.”
Acid roiled in Darrell’s stomach as he fought to hold in his rage and revulsion. As much as he wanted to attack them right then and there, he needed to be alone with them.
He followed closely, matching their footsteps as he slipped from shadow to shadow. He ducked behind some bushes just yards from where the mother stopped to squat by the curb and relieve herself. He could smell the acrid ammonia of her urine wafting from the gutter. His stomach lurched and this time he did regurgitate. Luckily, they had already moved off down the road and did not see him drop to his knees and throw up his lunch in the same gutter where the whore had just urinated. His body trembled with fury as he rose and continued his pursuit.
Darrell kept thinking of his little girl. Her anus and vagina had been bruised and torn, her nipples bitten, there were welts and cuts on her back and buttocks, livid blue and purple contusions around her throat from manual strangulation. He couldn’t believe that she hadn’t been murdered. Darrell had gotten sick then too, when the coroner told him that many of the bruises were old and healing at different rates. They’d been acquired at different times and most likely at the hands of different men. Trophies of her profession. This is what that little girl had in store, the path her mother was leading her toward. A life where a needle full of heroin and a cardiac arrest would be the greatest kindness she could hope for. Darrell gritted his teeth and flicked open the blade of his hunting knife.
The little girl kept looking back over her shoulder, peering into the darkness as if she could sense him there. Most likely, it was just her normal paranoia, heightened by cocaine use. Finally, they turned the corner and the
