Revenant

Chapter 32

The street lamps flitted past my periphery with a regularity that reminded me of heartbeats... slow and lazy, and in a manner that I wished my own heart to emulate. It had done a pretty good job, too. I'd been driving my car around the city for just over an hour, allowing myself to recover and relax, keeping to the residential area up north near Towson, away from the docks.

Yeah, well away from the docks....

I hadn't done a great job of calming down at first, having sped away from both the scene of the brutal crime Stevie had perpetrated and the agonized screaming of the victim he'd chosen to murder this evening.

Well, not 'chosen', as such. In all fairness Stevie had just shown up and done the sort of thing Stevie did. I was technically the one who had chosen his latest victim, in a sense. I did feel kind of bad about that. Not a lot, but a little bit.

That's the nice thing about working a job where using mafioso types as 'bait' was part of the work profile. All of these guys had done some brutal, heinous stuff due to the nature of their employment, and thus you could do pretty much anything you wanted to them and not feel particularly bad about how things turned out. So, when things went horribly wrong with something you planned, well, karma can be a bitch, can't she?

Of course, I'd perpetrated some pretty heinous stuff myself in the past, although my activities had been strictly limited to the execution of violence against men and women who society, if it knew about the sorts of things they'd been involved with, would have called walking human travesties. Still, what was my own karma like? What would society think of me, if it were aware of all the things I'd done? How well balanced were my own karmic scales, exactly?

Bah. Karma. I had no time for thoughts like that. My spontaneous evening drive had relaxed me well enough to start thinking again, and I needed to use this thinking time to figure out what I should do next.

I turned a slow, lazy turn off of the street I was on and headed further north, considered this evening's encounter with Stevie. What had I learned?

Well, I'd learned he could punch his way out of a reinforced metal box, for one. That was both hugely surprising and ridiculously absurd. And terrifying, obviously.

And while I didn't know the precise manner in which he'd learned of Shoe's memorial service, he'd shown up about the time I'd expected him to, marching into the building without stealth or guile, like he was invincible. That had been consistent with my expectations. And when, once he'd arrived, he'd looked around, and... I don't know. It was as though he was the embodiment of anger. I'd never experienced fury just being projected outward like that. He was like...

A revenge spirit.

Yeah, just like that. Everything about him felt just like that feeling that bubbles up and wants to take over when you're looking at something that took something from you, or diminished you somehow. That part of you you're constantly holding back - the one that doesn't care what the odds are, how many people it has to go through, or what sort of things it has to resort to... because it knows deep down that it'll somehow find a way to even the score.

That's what he embodied. That was who he was, plain and simple. And it was terrifying.

And then, when he'd busted out of his metal prison and stormed into the room, despite the shaky reflection of my handheld mirror I had plainly seen that one moment... the one where Stevie had acknowledged the presence of something, like a bloodhound testing the air. He'd slowly looked up, like he was looking through the building's roof, and just like that he knew exactly where he needed to go to find another fellow from his list. He hadn't been able to sense me, despite the fact that he was plenty angry with me, obviously... but he could 'sense' the people he felt were responsible for the fire, for the deaths of his brother Lucas and his sister-in-law.