48. June 23rd-24th

JUNE 23RD-24TH

TB

THUD!THUD! THUD-THUD-THUD! THUD! THUD-THUD!

The sounds of flesh meeting flesh stopped, but it was evident that the pain from the contact did not. Gendry's head was lolling to the right, his breathing full-on wheezing, his face drawn tight in pain.

"Had enough?" TB asked.

The man's response whistled through his missing teeth. "Not even close."

A single naked lightbulb burned in the room that was bare except for a single metal chair. Bound to the chair, Gendry bled out on his Armani suit. His left eye was swollen shut, and the right was on its way to looking the same. His nose was off center, dried rivers of blood caking his top lip, painting over and around his mouth. His upper lip was split, adding blood to his chin and neck. Overall, the flesh of his face was bruised and cut from the punches he'd endured.

In addition to the badly battered face, the man's left shoulder was clearly out of the socket and had to be excruciatingly painful, being wrenched back behind the chair where his hands were zip-tied. His once crisp, white thousand-dollar dress shirt was showing signs of being saturated with sweat and blood, covering what was surely to be an entire torso of bruised ribs. His kidneys were likely severely damaged. His ankles were bound to the legs of the chair with zip-ties tied too tightly, cutting off circulation to the point where his feet were swelling and turning blue-black.

In the shadows, TB leaned himself against the wall in the upper right corner of the room, his hands behind his back, flat to the wall. His ankles were crossed. His eyes were hooded, gaze straight out at the wall across the room. His demeanor was that of a man who had all the time in the world to wait.

"Where do you send the girls?" The giant's tone was one of boredom, as if he'd asked this question hundreds of times already.

"Fuck you," the man snapped.

"Wrong answer. Care to try again?" TB's response showed no emotion whatsoever.

"Fuck. You." The man pushed out the sound louder and clearer, as if he thought TB was hard of hearing. Both men knew that not to be true, just as they knew the second command was a taunt.

"I applaud your strategy, but your tactic won't work."

The man gave a snort of derision. "And what strategy is that?"

TB stepped away from the wall and sauntered over to stand in front of the bound man. "You're hoping that you can make me mad. Make me seethe in a red rage, maybe make a mistake, and attack in anger. You're hoping that will give you an opening to escape. But it won't happen."

The bound man's lips suddenly curled up into a pitiful smile, and a whistling sound escaped as his body shook with laughter. "Everyone has a trigger. Jolie is yours."

"Jolie is nothing to me. She died the day Sylvan escaped you. And since Sylvan is safe, I can't be triggered into making a mistake. But I don't have what I need. The girls were clearly all headed to another place, and they were headed there together. Since that's the case, that means they go somewhere else before being distributed to their owners. What I need is the next stop on the itinerary for the girls you've been selling. So I ask again, where?"

The man's lips turned up slightly, causing the scab on his lip to split open and begin bleeding again. A gurgling sound began from deep within him. As the sound grew, his shoulders began to shake, eventually revealing laughter. The sound that issued from him resembled something like a mad scientist in a bad science fiction movie. His face became even more gruesome as the smile on it broke into a mouth of teeth stained red. What teeth he had left, anyway.

His smile fell, the laughter clearly painful, as he broke into a fit of coughing, which had to be even more tortuous. Minutes later, when the coughing stopped, blood bubbled at the corner of his mouth. He ran his tongue around the inside of his mouth, then spat blood and a tooth to the floor. Three other teeth were already there to greet it.

Another smile formed on the man's crooked mouth. "I'll never tell you."

"We'll see," TB replied with a lack of concern.

His step seemed dismissive of his victim as he moved to his right side. Without warning, he delivered a brutal punch to the man's chin, snapping his head back. That was followed up with a barrage of quick, sharp jabs that pummeled his ribs. There was a distinct snapping sound as another one broke.

The victim muttered, "Mother-fucking asshole," through a groan of pain. "You better hope I don't get free of this chair. Because if I do, I'll kill you."

"Brave words for a man who's about to see what's on the other side."

"Not brave," the man gurgled. "True. I will gut you like a pig."

Standing behind the man and just to his right, TB leaned down to rumble in his ear. "You hear that gurgling sound when you speak or breathe? What you're hearing is the blood collecting in your lungs. I snapped another rib to go with the other three I broke earlier. Right now, the greenstick fractures are turning into shards, puncturing your lungs with little tiny holes. The shattered bits are traveling through your body, and once they make contact with your other organs, your veins, and even your bones, they will burrow their way in, poisoning your body by releasing toxins those organs hold and letting them loose into your body cavity. It will be a long, painful death. Many hours… maybe even days… while you slowly drown in your own blood and bacteria. Even if you got free from that chair, you wouldn't make it two steps before you collapsed."

"You don't scare me."

TB grinned to himself and stood up straight. "Then you're even dumber than I figured."

"Without me, you've got nothing. You won't kill me."

A glint of light blurred in front of the prisoner, and he felt the cold, sharp edge of a blade against the skin of his neck. "Oh, I will kill you. There's no other outcome for you regarding that. The question will be, do you make it easy on yourself, giving me the information I want so that I end you quickly? Or do you continue to resist and eventually die in pain like a wounded animal?"

Choking against the blade, a trickle of blood joining the rest, the man croaked out, "Fuck. You."

TB whirled, grabbing the man by his shoulder-length hair, pulling his head back as far as he could.

Bound, in pain, and dying, Gendry found the energy to smile with perverse glee. His breaths came out in pants. "Not too smart despite all your toys and skills, are you?"

"Tell me or you'll wish you had never met me," TB growled.

A cough that expressed blood came forth. The man closed his eyes, and TB twisted the hair in his grasp and yanked, a chunk of hair and skin coming free in his hand. It made a slapping noise as he threw it to the floor.

The giant reached into a toolbox on the floor, withdrawing a syringe, a vial of clear liquid, and a rubber tourniquet. He approached the prisoner and set down the items on the floor. Removing his knife from his sheath once again, he sliced through the jacket sleeve and shirt sleeve, revealing the man's arm. He tied the tourniquet around his upper arm. A vein began to swell to the surface almost immediately. Holding the vial upside down and to the light, he jabbed the syringe into the bottle, drawing liquid into the reservoir.

TB flicked the syringe, then located the popped vein. "Let's see if we can't augment that pain. Maybe you'll be more cooperative when you start hallucinating your worst nightmares."

Without consideration of the pain he created, he pressed the needle into the vein, depressed the plunger, and when it was empty, released the tourniquet.

The captive hissed at the injection, swearing violently when his captor yanked the needle out of the vein. "Fucking asshole!"

"That would be me." TB cleaned up his materials, then circled around to face his prisoner. "That injection is a special creation of mine. A mixture of heroin, ketamine, and some other surprises. It should take effect in a few minutes. When it does, a friend of mine is going to spend some time with you. He's exceptionally talented with suggestion and other psychological games. If you don't give him what I want, eventually you'll pass out since the primary side effect of my masterpiece is sedation. Impossible to escape the nightmares he'll create for you."

TB turned and walked to the door. When he reached it, he threw over his shoulder, "Resist, and I'll be back with a larger dose. Overdose, and I'll Narcan your ass right back to me until I get what I want. We'll see how long you last. The record is four days before my worst case begged me to kill him. He took another day or two to cough up the information. By then sepsis had settled in from the dirty needles I used. When the pain became too great, he spilled his guts.

"You decide if you want to hold the Guinness World Record or if you'd rather just throw in the towel and go peacefully."

With that, he opened the door. Waiting on the threshold was Midas. TB stepped back, allowing the other man into the room. "He's all yours."

As TB closed the door, he heard his replacement begin. "So. I'm going to tell you a story about a man who visited hell while still alive. Shall we begin? Once upon a time, there was a scumbag who kidnapped a beautiful, red-haired princess…"

In the men's room,TB had just finished washing his hands and was drying them when he was hit with a sudden wave of nausea. It built within him, and he could feel his stomach contents threatening to surge up into his esophagus and spew through his mouth. Locking his elbows, he leaned on the sink's edge, staring down at the countertop, willing his body to maintain control of its systems.

He couldn't unsee it. All his brain could process was the sight of Flame, shackled inside that metal coffin, tears streaming down her cheeks, trying so hard to hold onto her anger and be brave but finally succumbing to the relief that he had reached her in time.

It was no use. He spat bile into the sink, no longer able to keep the rush of the acid from rising.

When he finally felt as if he had some semblance of control again, he turned on the faucet, cupped his hands beneath it to collect water, and then brought his hands to his mouth to take in the water, swish it around in his mouth to rinse out the bitter aftertaste, then spit the tainted water into the sink. He repeated the process three times until, finally, only the barest trace of it remained in the back of his throat.

He washed his hands. Turning off the faucet, he grabbed several paper towels from the dispenser and dried them, as well as swiped a towel across his lips to wipe away the last vestiges of the water he'd splashed on his face. He was just throwing the towels in the garbage can when he heard the door open quietly behind him, then swish shut on its hinges.

He didn't turn around. Instead, he looked into the mirror to see Midas standing behind him. His tag team interrogation partner simply stood in the background, leaning against the wall, arms crossed, studying TB's reflection.

"Well?" TB asked.

"Waters and Steel double-teamed Tabitha and got her whole sordid story. She thought she could use Flame's inexperience to pull you back to her. When it had the opposite effect, she started hatching another plan. That never came to fruition because Gendry waltzed in with an offer to cut her in on the sales of the girls if she helped him secure Flame. She leapt at that opportunity, hoping that her disappearance might drive you back into her arms."

TB snorted. "Would never have happened. Knew somehow that woman was poison." Silence hung between the two men. Finally, TB asked, "What is Waters going to do with her?"

"Waters? Nothing. He left her with Steel in the other interrogation room. When he went back fifteen minutes later, both Steel and the woman were gone, and he took Demon along for disposal."

TB looked down into the sink. He wished he could feel some sympathy for Tabitha's demise, but it just wouldn't come. Instead, he felt bad for the sharks. Hopefully none of them choked on her in their feeding frenzy.

I'm truly a terrible human being.

Midas broke through his musing. "I've got something. No idea what. It doesn't make sense. He said, ‘Salieri.'"

"The composer?"

"I don't think that's how he meant it. But I'll be digging."

TB nodded. "Ready for me to take out the trash?"

"I've got what I need. You okay, or do you want Nemo to take care of it?"

"Nah, that fucker's mine." He sighed. "Will she hate me for this?"

"TB, she knows you're not squeaky clean. She hasn't run screaming for the hills yet. Just don't tell her details. But ridding the world of that assnozzle is not going to change the fact that she loves you."

"I don't deserve her."

"Yeah, you do." Midas pushed off the wall and stepped up to him. In his hand, he held a piece of paper. "I did some unsolicited research for you. Check them out." Then he exited the restroom.

TB looked at the piece of paper with only a web address on it. When he looked at it closer, he didn't recognize the business, but it was clear what type of business it was. Did he dare?

Whatever the answer to that question was, it would have to wait. Pocketing the paper, he looked up at his reflection and ran his fingers through his hair. Time to do some waste management.