27. Chapter 25
Chapter 25
Tripp
It was a small wonder that no one had called the cops already. Anna's place stunk to high heaven. June's cousin was probably dead before the bitch ever took Barry out. She'd not only killed her cousin brutally but had apparently been living in her place ever since.
"Tripp, you need to see this," Mack stated, and I knew whatever it was would be bad because the man had a cast iron stomach, but looked like he was about to puke.
When I made my way through the only clean spots on the floor to the other room it only took a second for me to find what Mack wanted me to see. There, hung on the wall in the spare bedroom was the picture that a club girl had taken of me and Kim on our last trip to Sturgis. It appeared as though June had tried to desecrate the image. There was a red "X" drawn across Kim's beautiful face, but there was something hanging down from her neck and it looked almost like a cutout doll in a wedding dress had been pasted over the rest of my dead wife's body. When I got closer, I flipped up the sagging bit and found June's face smiling back at me. She had taken her wedding photo, blown it up to match Kim's size in the picture of us, and then taped herself overtop of Kim as if it was some crude wedding portrait for June and me.
"What the absolute nutball shit is that?" Breakneck asked.
"This, the blown-up photo of Kim and me from Sturgis was taken from my house before the fire. That means there's no doubt this bitch killed my wife. This used to hang on our mantel in our house," I informed Breakneck. "I want her in our fucking clubhouse. Find her, man."
Breakneck put his hand on my shoulder in a calming gesture but there wasn't anything that could bring me back from my homicidal state after seeing the evidence that meant I'd entertained dating the woman who killed my fucking wife.
I ripped June's mock wedding photo down and wanted to cry because there were little burn marks and more red exes all over Kim's image. If there had been one thing I missed from that house fire, besides my wife, it was our picture.
"Over here!" Someone shouted. The sounds of a scuffle barely reached my brain as I was stuck somewhere between the past and present and the horrific scene we had to navigate through to find the cunt who had made such a fucking mess of so many lives.
After a minute, Grady and Mack came out with a grinning June in their arms. She fought them until she saw me. "Are you ready to take me back to the clubhouse and make me your old lady?" She asked.
"We're definitely going back to the clubhouse, June."
I turned and walked out while the other men followed quickly on my heels. I looked back at Breakneck then and gave one last order. "Burn it to the ground."
I took a few minutes to myself before I went into the house of horrors. We did not take June back to the clubhouse because she didn't deserve to step foot in our place, not even as a fucking prisoner. Instead, we unanimously decided to take her to the house of horrors where the serial killing bastard who used to rent a room to Kip's nanny had resided. It was luck that between Breakneck and Kip they discovered the conditions that Nova was living in before she became one of the asshole's victims.
"It's fitting that we brought you here," I said to June as they tied her to the rafters in the basement.
"Where are we? This isn't the clubhouse, Tripp. We're supposed to be together now. You need to take me there and give me my patch and your ink. That's what you do, right? That's what Kim told me you did to her."
I stepped forward and backhanded June. "Don't you ever say her name again or I will start keeping count of the teeth I knock out of your mouth. One for every time you dare to spill her name from your vile mouth."
"What the hell are you saying?" June screeched. "You're mine! Not hers! Never hers! Fuck Kim. Fuck that filthy whore who tried to take you from me."
I struck out faster than even I anticipated and kept my word. A tooth came flying out of June's mouth and thankfully shut her up momentarily. Well, kept her from talking, though she started to cry hysterically.
"Tripp, it's me, June, the love of your life."
"You are nothing to me. I don't even know who the fuck you are. I once dated a girl named June in high school," I mentioned to fuck with her. "She went to Europe on vacation and never came back."
"Yes I did. I'm right here. You never stopped loving me."
"I never loved June. She was just a teenage experiment gone wrong. I've loved two women in my life. One of them was Kim. The other is Davina. I'm not counting my daughters here, obviously since this is the romantic kind of love."
"You don't love those whores. None of them. YOU ARE MINE!" June screamed. I punched her in the mouth again, and true to my word, I knocked another one of her teeth out. She hadn't exactly said my dead wife's name, but she did call both of my old ladies (past and present) a whore.
"Tripp, sthop!" She lisped badly on the last word, and I pretended not to hear her anyway.
"I want to know where your buddy Ken is. If you have any hope of getting out of this basement with any of your teeth left, you need to start talking."
"Ken?" June questioned.
"Kenneth Winslow, otherwise known as Anton Oslav."
"Anton?" She asked, clearly not knowing that the bastard had been going by an alias the entire time she knew him.
"You knew he was into human trafficking, June. You tried to sell my daughter and her friend to him."
She laughed then. "Too bad he never took them as payment. Then maybe your dumbass son wouldn't have knocked that other whore up. Then again, he seems to only have a thing for whores. Like father, like son, Tripp."
I punched her again. "That's three, June. How quickly do you think you'll run out of teeth? Better yet, what do you think I'll start taking away once you run out?"
"You wouldn't. You love me."
I bent down and picked up one of the teeth. "Does this look like I love you?"
"You're just angry. That bitch wife of yours had you brainwashed. We can fix you."
I punched her again. That time, two teeth flew out. They must have all loosened up quite a bit with the previous blows.
"Twipp!" June cried as best she could as blood ran down her chin.
"Tell me where Ken is."
She slumped forward for a minute to spit out more blood. "He's headed to my family's cabin near the Tallulah Gorge."
"On it," Scout called out.
"Keys' people are closer. Want me to have Angel Girl go pick him up?"
"Sure thing. That way we don't have to worry about him slipping through our hands. It'll take too long for us to get there."
I turned back to June. "Now, that wasn't so hard, was it?" I asked, though I didn't really want an answer. I unsheathed the knife that hung from my belt and held it up in what dim light there was in the basement.
"I wonder how long it will take you to die of sepsis if I give you a bunch of cuts and just leave you to hang here?" I pretended to ponder that for a minute. "Do you think you'd die of dehydration or starvation first?"
"Twipp!" June pleaded.
"Nah, that wouldn't work for me. There would always be a chance that you could escape, and we can't have that." I reached out and sliced one of her arms. I watched as the blood trickled slowly from the wound, down her arm, to the tip of her finger, and then dripped to the ground with the tiniest of noises.
"How are you enjoying your time at the clubhouse, June?" I taunted her. "Too bad you never did fit in there."
"Twipp, no!" She moaned. I sliced her other arm. Before I knew what I was doing, there were superficial wounds up and down her legs and arms. Every inch of skin that was exposed had at least a nick, if not a cut. None of them would kill her, at least not right away. "Do you think my wife felt it when the fire started to consume her?"
"I hope tho," June hissed in her lispy way.
"Mmm, well you'd be disappointed to know that the blow to her head killed her almost instantly and the fire never touched her while she was alive."
"Noo!" June yelled.
"That probably means that you weren't the one who killed her after all."
"Fuck you!" June screamed at me. "I burned her. It was me who did it."
"Nah, you were just the cleanup crew. She was already dead. Your little buddy took that kill from you."
"Noooo! The crazy bitch screamed again.
"Yes!" I informed her gleefully as I stuck the knife into her gut and twisted before bringing it back out. I glanced down and watched her blood and other nastiness fall to the floor. "Oops, looks like I might have perforated your bowels. Guess it won't be long now, but you will suffer before you go, bitch. While you suffer, you're going to watch this little movie Scout made up for you."
When I nodded toward Scout, she used the same projection device we had used in our meeting. This time, she projected some of the home movies and pictures that I still had of my time with Kim and the kids. June screamed and cried through the whole thing and when we ran out of material to play for her, Scout was kind enough to play it all again.
It took five hours for June to die a slow, agonizing death. I stayed for the whole thing. During that time, we got word that Angel Girl and her crew were able to secure Anton Oslav. Since they had been on the lookout for him as well, we sent a member of the club to go oversee his death and disposal.
"I need to get back to my girls," I finally told Mack who stood there staring at what was left of June. He nodded to me and then clapped a hand on my back.
"Hold them tight tonight, Tripp. Don't let this shit drag you into someplace dark."
I shook my head. It was a little too late for that, but I'd never let the dark shit touch my girls. They were my life now, along with Kip and Knox.