“No! I’ll delete it all. I won’t touch another girl ever. I promise,” Bryce’s eyes glossed over with tears.
I pulled my cell phone from my pocket and held it up for him to see. “When I send a message to my boy Phantom, he’s going to call the cops from a burner cell. He’s going to tell them his name is Bryce Alexander and you couldn’t live with what you’d done any longer. All the evidence they need will be here, along with your body.”
“No,” he shook his head, his eyes wide. “Janel knows I’d never kill myself.” The bat lowered to his side as he tried to think of a way to outsmart me.
“Like she knows you like to fuck little girls?” I stepped forward again, leaving only a few feet between us. If he swung, he had a good chance at hitting me.
“That’s why my other friend, a crazy asshole by the name of Hangman is sitting outside of your step-mother’s house right now as she drowns herself in tequila, wondering where her life went wrong.” I hit the speed dial and Hangman picked up as I clicked the speaker phone button.
“You want me to put this old bitch out of her misery?” Hangman sounded a little too enthusiastic for his part in the plan.
I eyed Bryce as I thought it over. His shoulder’s slumped and shook as his past finally caught up with him.
“It’s not her fault. It’s none of their faults,” he cried and it made me physically ill to see a grown man reduced to such a pathetic sobbing mess.
“Not yet, Hang. I think Bryce is willing to play ball,” I smirked as I looked down at his bat that he let slip from his fingers, clattering loudly off the wooden laminate floor. He ran his palm over his face, trying desperately to calm himself.
I slipped my cell into my back pocket and used my shirt to wipe my fingerprints from the knife before dropping it to the floor and kicking it toward him. He looked at me in confusion, hesitating before bending down to pick it up.
“You have two minutes to make your peace with God and beg for his forgiveness, because you won’t be getting mine.” My eyes narrowed as another sob wracked his large frame. “Remember to cut vertically. We wouldn’t want you living long enough to hurt anyone else.”
He dropped to his knees. The monster that terrorized so many was reduced to a fucking baby, begging for mercy. His words were incoherent as he pressed the blade to one of his wrists. As blood sprang from around the wound I pulled my phone back out of my pocket and called Hangman. “It’s begun.” I slid it back into my jeans and sank down to eye level, wanting my face to be the last thing he saw before he faded out into nothingness.
“Don’t be a pussy. Press harder. If I have to do it for you, I won’t be gentle. I’ve heard all about the joy you get from inflicting pain,” I watched the blade sink lower as he dragged it up his wrists a few inches. “Now the other.”
Trig stepped beside me and I glanced up at him. He held a bottle of aspirin and a beer. “Trig brought you some parting gifts.” I took the pills from his hand and dumped a pile into my palm while trigger cracked open the beer. “Take these and wash it down with this. It will make this go a little faster, not that I want this to be easier for you. I just don’t want to have to look at your face for any longer than necessary.”
“For the pain?” Bryce held out his bloodied palm as I dumped the pills into his hand. He dropped them into his outh and washed it down greedily with the beer. “Thank you.”
“Don’t thank me. These will thin your blood and make you die faster,” I laughed as I shook my head. “Now finish cutting the other wrist.”
Bryce’s tears were back, running down his face. He wiped them away in an attempt to hide his fear but he only managed to smear blood across his face.
“I’ll be out here reviewing the evidence,” Trig patted me on the shoulder and disappeared toward the living room.
I sank down onto the floor and rested my back against the hallway wall. As the knife pressed into Bryce’s wrist, blood poured from the wound. “You hit an artery. Thank fucking God.” I ran my hand through my hair, banging the back of my head off the wall, lightly.
“She wrote about you all the time, you know,” His voice was like nails on a chalkboard, “in her diary.”
“She had a diary?” My eyes cut to Bryce who was sobbing in his pool of blood. “Dad burned it after she died.”
“Now why would he burn her diary?” I wanted to punch him in the mouth, make him choke on his teeth so he couldn’t talk, but it was important that this looked like a suicide.