Chapter Fifty-Five

Splash.

The bucket of freezing water did exactly what it needed to do – woke Garcia back up again.

This time, not surprisingly, he woke up in a fright, desperately gasping for air. His heart pounded inside his chest with such intensity that he thought it would break through his ribcage and land on his lap. His eyes, bloodshot, blinked frantically as they tried to regain focus.

It wasn't exactly the ‘Neo Burst' that the man was used to, but Garcia also wasn't exactly the kind of victim that he would have down in his cellar. But just like the saying went – there was a first time for everything.

‘And there you are.' The man's voice echoed through the room.

Still unsure of what was really happening, caught somewhere between the stupor of a chemically induced sleep and the rude freezing-water-to-the-face awakening, Garcia's brain was doing all it could to catch up.

Once again, Garcia found himself in a dark room, but this time the room wasn't nearly as dark as the one that he was in the first time that he came to. Still, his eyes had to fight the dim light for a moment before they were able to start refocusing.

The first thing that Garcia realized was that he wasn't in a lying-down position anymore. He was sitting down. His wrists and ankles were still tightly restricted, probably tied to the legs and arms of the chair that he was in, but this time, so was his head, which had been slotted in between two thick wooden sticks that protruded out of the chair's high backrest. A thin strap of something, which Garcia guessed was another zip tie, wrapped itself around his forehead, pressing his head back, completely immobilizing it in place. There was no way that he could turn or move his head in any direction. All that Garcia could do at that specific point in time was to try not to panic.

As his pupils slowly began getting used to the low light, the darkness around him began to disassemble itself into different shapes. His eyes moved left and right to try to identify his surroundings, but without any head movement, his field of vision was extremely limited – mostly just straight ahead, and straight ahead all he could see was a man standing several feet in front of him.

‘Welcome back,' the man said, leaning against something that looked to be a table.

Garcia first took in his entire figure – tall and well built, with broad shoulders – before allowing his eyes to settle on his face. There was something familiar about it, but Garcia couldn't recognize any of the details – small nose, low cheekbones, shaved head, light-brown eyes, and no eyebrows, which simply made his whole face look odd.

Garcia concentrated, his brain trying hard to place him against the image at the forefront of his memory, because he was sure that the man he'd seen standing by the light switch earlier, just before he'd passed out again, had been caterpillar-eyebrows Trevor.

The man read Garcia like an open book.

‘Concentrate on my voice,' he said, folding his arms in front of himself and sounding exactly like Trevor. ‘The face is too different for you to be able to properly place me.' He paused and it looked like if he'd had eyebrows, they would've arched upward, widening his eyes, but since there was absolutely nothing where his eyebrows should've been, his facial movement simply made his already odd face look either comical, or frightening. Garcia couldn't tell which.

‘Plus,' the man continued, his voice calm, ‘I used a trick called "feature attention displacement". Do you know what that is?'

Garcia took a deep breath. That had been something else that Hunter had explained to him years ago, when they were chasing a criminal called Lucien Folter.

Feature attention displacement was when someone would create a disguise and overemphasize one or two aspects of that disguise, to the point of making it look unusual – very thick eyebrows, extra-bushy moustache, a scar, a limp… something out of the ordinary. What that did, in reality, was push others to concentrate their attention on the odd feature. When that happened, their brains would, more often than not, disregard everything else. If anything went wrong and a witness was called upon to give the authorities a description of the person in question, their memories would keep on going back to the odd feature, practically unable to remember anything else.

‘And I fell for it like an amateur,' Garcia replied, his voice barely a whisper. ‘The caterpillar eyebrows, right?' The words hurt his throat as they caught like broken glass against the vulnerable tissue there. But the pain that he was experiencing then felt like nothing compared to the kind of pain he'd felt earlier. The neck spasms had ended… the fireworks of pain had dissipated… the kaleidoscope of razors behind his eyes had vanished.

The man laughed and nodded. ‘The caterpillar eyebrows. That's pretty much all you can remember from Trevor, isn't it?'

Garcia felt like an idiot because the man was right. All that his memory had retained from Trevor's face had been the caterpillar eyebrows.

‘Yeah, you look much better now.' Garcia made no effort to strip the comment of sarcasm. ‘The boiled-egg look suits you.'

The man looked back at him and smiled – another facial expression that didn't match the lack of eyebrows.

Frightening, Garcia had decided. Not comical.

‘So what's your name?' Garcia ventured a question, his voice beginning to regain some of its strength. ‘I mean your real name. Because I'm sure it isn't Trevor… or Michael… or Russell.'

The man was clearly taken aback. He wasn't expecting Garcia to know any of that.

‘I'm impressed.' The man unfolded his arms and took a step to his right. ‘You know more than I would ever have given you credit for.'

As the man stepped right, the light reflected off different objects that had been placed on the table he'd been leaning against.

The only two objects that Garcia recognized from where he was sitting were a pistol and a bottle of water.

The man used his left hand and reached for one of the objects on the table. Not the pistol. Instead, he chose a seven-inch stainless-steel blade.

‘To be honest,' he said, moving the blade around in front of his eyes, as if he was inspecting it. ‘I don't even know anymore, but it doesn't really matter, does it?'

As the man moved the blade around, Garcia finally saw it. His left index and middle fingers both curved outward slightly, bending from the first knuckle. Subtle, but still noticeable.

The man put down the blade before picking up a new one – this time, a large stainless-steel meat cleaver. ‘A name is just a name, isn't it?' He now looked like he was staring at his own reflection in the cleaver. ‘I am who I need to be… and that changes from time to time. Michael… Russell… Trevor… Carlos… whoever. In the end, I'm just the one who gives them what they deserve.' The man's eyes moved from the cleaver to Garcia. ‘I am the bringer of retribution.'

‘Cute,' Garcia said back. ‘Did you come up with that name yourself?'

The man smiled again.

Garcia held the man's stare for an instant. ‘I'm sorry, but is the blade swapping and the stare-down supposed to scare me?'

The man shrugged. ‘I don't know. Is it scaring you?'

‘No, not really.' Garcia paused, his eyebrows lifting ever so slightly. ‘Well, maybe just a little bit. But that's probably because without any eyebrows, your forehead seems to go on for weeks. Do you actually know where it starts and where it ends?'

The man put down the cleaver. ‘Have you ever heard the saying – sarcasm is the lowest form of wit?' He reached for something else on the table – a kitchen blowtorch.

‘Of course I have,' Garcia replied. ‘But that thought is incomplete. What it truly says is, sarcasm is the lowest form of wit, but the highest form of intelligence – Oscar Wilde said that.'

‘Oh.' The man tried to sound impressed. ‘An educated cop. That's surprising.'

‘Really? You should meet my partner, then, Trevor. Can I call you Trevor, or do you prefer one of the other names? I'd rather have a name than not.'

‘Russell.'

‘WHOA!'

The whispered name caught Garcia totally by surprise, making him jump in place. It hadn't come from the man in front of him. It came from somewhere to his right. And it scared him stiff.

Reflexively, he tried to turn his head in that direction, but it just wouldn't move. His eyes, on the other hand, darted hard right, but whoever had spoken was hidden in the dark shadows and way out of his field of vision. Despite his feebleness, Garcia could clearly identify the voice as being female.

‘Who's there?' he asked.

No reply.

Garcia's eyes moved back to the man ahead of him. ‘Who's there? Who's in here with me, Trevor?'

‘Russell,' the female voice said again.

‘Who are you?' Garcia asked.

The man put down the blowtorch. ‘Who is she?' He sounded confused. ‘I thought that you were here for her.'

Garcia's heart sank until it was nothing but a lead weight at the bottom of his stomach. The man could only be talking about a new victim. Someone that he'd already been torturing for days.

‘But you're not here for her, are you?'

‘Listen,' Garcia said, addressing whomever else was in the room with him and trying his best to sound confident. ‘Everything will be all right, OK? I'm a detective with the LAPD. We'll get you out of here.'

Russell laughed. ‘Are you sure about that, Mr. Highest Form of Intelligence, LAPD Detective? Because from where I'm standing, it doesn't look too good for you.'

Garcia kept his eyes on Russell.

‘You have no idea who she is, do you?' Russell asked.

Garcia stayed quiet.

‘OK. Let me show you.'

Russell walked over to where Garcia was sitting and rounded his chair.

‘What are you doing?' Garcia asked.

Instead of answering him, Russell unlocked the wheels and swerved the whole chair ninety degrees to its right.

There was nothing there but darkness.

‘Hello?' Garcia called out tentatively.

Russell moved right and flicked on a new wall switch.

A dim light sprang to life, illuminating a spot about six feet in front of Garcia.

His eyes widened at what he saw. At the same time, he felt a pit open up in his stomach.

Garcia was looking at an animal cage that couldn't be any larger than five feet by five feet. Inside it was what could only be described as the crumbs of a woman. Even if Garcia knew who she was, he doubted he'd be able to recognize her. It really did seem that she had no flesh on her anymore, only skin and bones, some of which looked to be about to rip through her thin skin and protrude out. She was lying on the floor, which was caked with blood, curled up into an ugly ball. Her eyes seemed almost loose inside their sockets… her cheeks had sunk into her mouth… and her lips seemed to have disappeared completely, substituted by a thin, colorless line. The way in which the light reflected off her saggy skin served only to accentuate her dark veins, making her look like a zombie straight out of a Hollywood blockbuster production. Due to the position that she was in, Garcia could see the soles of her feet, which were nothing but a combination of raw flesh and caked blood.

She was dying. There was no question about that.

‘You monstrous sonofabitch,' Garcia said, his gaze on the stick-thin figure inside the animal cage.

‘What?' Russell said from behind him. ‘No sarcastic joke this time? What's the matter, Mr. LAPD Detective? Not funny enough for you?'

The woman on the floor tried to look up at Garcia, but she was so weak that her head just collapsed back to the ground.

Garcia felt his throat constrict.

How evil could one person be?

Russell rotated Garcia's chair back to its original position, locked the wheels and returned to the table of instruments. As he did, he picked up the handheld blowtorch again.

‘I'm going to ask you a few questions,' Russell said, taking two steps toward Garcia and lighting up the blowtorch. ‘How close this fire gets to your skin will depend on your answers.'

Silence.

‘How did you find us?' Russell asked.

Garcia's skin turned into gooseflesh. Us. How did you find ‘us'… not ‘me'. Was he referring to himself and the woman in the cage, or himself and an accomplice?

‘Us?' Garcia tried his luck. ‘Who is us?'

Russell frowned at Garcia, which once again made his face look alien without any eyebrows. ‘You really ain't got a clue about anything, do you?' He walked back to where the table was and returned the blowtorch to it before reaching for another light switch on the other side. This one ignited a bulb several feet to the left of the table, its weak light just falling into Garcia's field of vision.

‘Jesus!' Garcia gasped, his heart now beating at the bottom of his throat. He truly couldn't believe what he was actually looking at.

He and Hunter had been wrong.

There weren't two of them.

There were three.