Gun went airborne; clattered to the wooden slats. Brad nabbed it. Quoted some poetry at the Killer.

“It was the last thing I'd read before watching Alison die,” Brad told me. “All I could think of through each punch, jab and kick, were the words: Mark but this flea. It kept me alive."

Then, Brad shot the Killer in the kneecap.

“Right then, I knew what I was going to do,” Brad told me. “I was going to take this pistol, and shoot one bodypart at a time. I was going to make this man die slowly, and screaming, in inverse proportion to the time it took Alison to die. I wanted him to reflect on what he had done, and let the lesson burn into his soul before he left this world. First, the kneecap-I'd read somewhere that rupturing the knee hurts like hell itself, but is non-fatal. Then a wrist. Then, maybe an ankle. A shoulder. The other kneecap.

Brad never got to shooting the wrist, because behind him-out of nowhere-came a blinding pain in his back, as if God himself had decided to stick a cocktail toothpick through his entire body. Brad dropped the pistol.

He hurled his body around, only to receive a similar shock to his upper chest, right above his heart. Is this a heart attack from the stress of it all? he'd thought. Am I being struck down before I can completely devolve into an animal?

Not quite. Brad's eyes managed to focus, and he realized somebody was stabbing him.

He lifted his left arm to shield another blow, but the knife plunged right through his forearm. The blade lingered there, caught between the opposing forces of Brad attempts to dislodge it and the Wielder's attempts to draw it back. Brad saw his attacker: a young woman, with red lips. That's all he saw. Call her Killer Number Two.

The knife ripped free and slid back into Brad's left shoulder. Then out again and across his chest, bisecting his right nipple. Down, across three of his fingers.

At this point, Brad did what any sane person would do: retreated. His legs, still fully operational, shuffled him back, out of harm's way, until he tripped over a wooden slat that was a fraction of an inch higher than its companions and crash-landed on his ass. The knife was on him again, pushing into his stomach. Brad rolled, and started to crawl forward. Sharp blows hit him in the back, the fury and power intensifying with each strike. Killer Number Two was trying to nail him to the floor.

Brad's salvation: the wooden railing, three feet away. He crawled for it, despite repeated blows. His hand reached the middle rung, and grabbed it tight. He looked behind him and saw Killer Number One crawling on the floor, too. Crawling for the gun Brad had dropped.

Brad reached for the top rung, wrapped his fingers around it, and was wracked with the worst pain he'd ever felt in his life. It was as if God had pushed the base of his spinal cord into a food processor. He turned his head, and saw the knife buried to the hilt in his right shoulder. Killer Number Two was walking away.

Brad was able to turn his head once more, and saw Killer Number Two bending over to grab the gun Killer Number One was so desperate to reach. He faced forward again and coughed; felt blood dribble from his lips. He placed both hands on the top rung and somehow managed to pull himself up, resting his full bodyweight on the railing. He rolled around to face his tormentor.

Killer Number Two had the gun. She was an attractive blonde. Full, red lips, taut face, upturned nose. That's all he registered before…

“Cool your tool, fool,” she said, then shot him in the chest.

“Are you sure?” I asked Brad.

“That's what she said."

Notes on Killer Number Two: Aggressive female. Young. Very young.

With those four words, Brad Larsen took a bullet in the head and flipped over the railing, landing in the muddy creek.

Well, not quite in the creek. But close enough.

His body flopped in the wet, packed mud. He waited to die, listening to Killer Number Two drag the whining, complaining body of Killer Number One back into the house. Then all was quiet. Leaves in the trees rustled, water gurgled, the occasional vehicle passed by, motor whirring off in the distance.

Brad tried to crawl to solid ground, but the slow, forceful flow of the creek pushed him further and further downstream. In retrospect, the flowing waters probably kept him alive longer. He spent the majority of the time flailing around, hovering between consciousness and oblivion, wondering about Alison.

It had to be a special kind of hell. I can only imagine what it would be like to lie there, cut to death, unable to breathe without pain, let alone able to stand up and go back up to the house to find out what had happened. It gave me the chills.

In time, Brad gave up the ghost. He wandered about the site for a while, lost. He saw his dead wife in the front room of the witness protection house… but he couldn't find her soul anywhere. He wandered by to his dead body. He cried, then wandered some more. And about 16 hours later, I arrived at his side.

“So,” he said, lighting a Brain cigarette. “Now you know what kind of monsters you're looking for, and what you have to do when you find them."

“What's that?” I asked.

“Put them through the exact same agony Alison and I had to live through."

“Not to be technical, but both of you are dead."

“Ah,” Brad said, smiling for the first time since we'd met. “Now you're starting to see the picture."

Seven

A New Case

So that was the deal. No Association skinny until Brad and Alison Larsen's killers were located, and Brad got the opportunity for a little payback.

Reasoning with him-explaining that crushing the Association was by extension punishing his executioners-wasn't going to ease his suffering one bit. Brad wanted me to deliver the assassins’ severed heads on a drink tray, cups of their blood in drinking glasses nearby.

In other words, now I had a bigger workload than ever.

Of course, if the roles were reversed, I'm sure I would demand the same thing. God knows what kind of punishment he saw inflicted upon his wife's body by those kids. I only saw the aftershocks-blood stains on a piece of ratty carpet. Maybe that's what made it easier to agree to this whole thing.

I'd been running East on reflex. At the moment, it'd seemed like Las Vegas would be first place the Feds would be crawling around. But Brad insisted we head back. No doubt his killers had driven out to Illinois, done the deed, then headed back to collect the bounty. And I couldn't disagree with his logic. It was all so damned reasonable it made me want to vomit.

So I journeyed back west. Whoever the Association had sent to do the deed most likely lived in Vegas, and now that the bodies were stacked up, it was time to head home and collect the reward. Somewhere, I would find two killers living it up. And once I found them, it would be the beginning of the end. For the first time in years-perhaps since Robert first collected me-I felt the warm vibe of optimism.

I drove through the night, routinely looking at my new face-Brad Larsen's face-in the rear view mirror. I am going to find your killers, I told it. And I meant it.

Of course, I was being an idiot.

henderson, nevada

eight months later

“Learning how to operate a soul figures to take time."

— Timothy Leary