Текст книги "An Evil Mind"

Автор книги: Chris (2) Carter

сообщить о нарушении

Текущая страница: 11 (всего у книги 22 страниц)

‘How do you know Lucien’s psychopathy isn’t victim-centered?’ Taylor finally asked.

Hunter finished his coffee and used a paper napkin to dab his mouth.

‘Because of what we have so far.’

Taylor leaned in slightly and cocked her head.

‘The tokens that were found inside that box in Lucien’s house, remember?’ Hunter elaborated. ‘Not all of them came from women, and the ones that did drastically varied in size. That tells us that the victim’s physical type and even the gender aren’t that important to him. But Lucien also told us so himself . . . twice.’

Taylor paused, and Hunter could tell that she was searching her mental record of that morning’s interview.

‘He told us that when he was in high school he dreamed of hurting people.’ Hunter reminded her. ‘Sometimes people he knew, sometimes people he had never seen before . . . just random creations of his imagination – not a specific type.

Taylor remembered Lucien saying that, but she hadn’t fully made the connection.

‘Then he told us that when he started fantasizing while wide-awake, the star roles in his violent fantasies usually belonged to people he disliked. Sometimes teachers, sometimes school bullies, sometimes family members . . . but not always. No physical attributes, or gender came into play. In Lucien’s dreams and fantasies, who he was hurting made no difference to him. What excited him was the act of murder, itself.’

Hunter consulted his watch. It was time to get going.

‘Trust me, Courtney, whatever feelings Lucien felt for Susan wouldn’t have stopped him. Not even love.’

Forty-Nine

For lunch Lucien had been given an aluminum tray containing one portion of bread, lumpy mashed potatoes, a small amount of vegetables, and two pieces of chicken, which were swimming in some sort of yellowish sauce. Everything lacked salt and seemed to have been seasoned with an extra pinch of absolutely nothing at all. Lucien was convinced that the FBI had redefined tasteless food, but he didn’t really mind. He wasn’t eating for taste or pleasure. He ate to keep his body and mind fed, to give his muscles at least some of the nutrients they needed. And he ate every last scrap.

Just ten minutes after he’d finished his lunch, Lucien heard the familiar buzzing and unlocking sound that came from the door at the end of the corridor.

‘Two hours almost to the second,’ he said, as Hunter and Taylor came into his line of sight. ‘I had a feeling you two would be punctual.’ Lucien waited for them to sit down. ‘Do you mind if I stand up and walk about a little while we talk? It gets the blood flowing to my brain better, and it helps me digest that crap you guys call food around here.’ He jabbed his head toward the empty tray.

No one had any objections.

‘So,’ Lucien said. ‘Where were we?’

Hunter and Taylor both knew that Lucien hadn’t forgotten where they’d left off. The question was just part of his game.

‘Susan Richards,’ Taylor said, calmly crossing her legs, interlacing her fingers together, and resting her right elbow on one of the chair’s arms.

‘Oh, yeah,’ Lucien replied as he slowly started pacing from left to right at the front of the cell. ‘What about her again?’

‘Her remains, Lucien,’ Hunter said in a firm but unthreatening tone. ‘Where are they?’

‘Oh, that’s right. I was about to tell you, wasn’t I?’ There was a perverse quality to Lucien’s new smile. ‘Have you contacted her parents yet, Robert? Are they still alive?’

‘What?’

‘Susan’s parents. We met them a couple of times, remember? Are they still alive?’

‘Yes. They’re still alive,’ Hunter confirmed.

Lucien nodded his understanding. ‘They seemed to be nice people. Will you be the one in charge of giving them the news?’

Hunter suspected he would be, but he was getting tired of Lucien’s games. The way he saw it, right then, any answer was an answer, as long as it got Lucien talking.

‘Yes.’

‘Will you be doing it over the phone, or do you intend to do it face to face?’

Any answer.

‘Face to face.’

Lucien chewed on that for a beat before returning to Hunter’s original question. ‘You know, Robert, that night I experienced things . . . feelings, actually, that until then I had only read about in criminology books, interview transcripts, and accounts from apprehended offenders. Personal and intimate feelings that the more I read about them, the more I wanted to experience them for myself, because that’d be the only real way to find out if they’d be true for me or not.’

He paused and stared at the wall in front of him, as if fascinated by some invisible work of art hanging from it.

‘That night, Robert, I could actually feel Susan’s life-light fading away right at my fingertips.’ Lucien’s gaze moved down toward his hands before continuing. ‘I could feel her heart pulsating in my palms, and the more I squeezed, the weaker it got.’ He turned and faced Hunter and Taylor one more time. ‘And that was when I was elevated, like an out-of-body experience. That was when I realized that what so many had testified to, the feeling we read about so many times, was indeed true.’

Taylor’s eyes darted toward Hunter and then back to Lucien. ‘What feeling are you talking about?’

Lucien didn’t answer, but his eyes passed the question over to Hunter.

‘The “God-like feeling”,’ Hunter said.

Lucien nodded once. ‘Right again, Robert. The “God-like feeling”. A feeling of such supreme power that until then I believed it was reserved only for God. The power to extinguish life. And let me tell you, it’s true what they say. That feeling changes your life forever. It’s intoxicating, Robert, addictive, hypnotizing even. Especially if you’re looking straight into their eyes as you squeeze the life out of their bodies. That’s the moment when you become God.’

No, Hunter thought. That’s the moment when you delude yourself that you had, for the quickest of instants, equated yourself to God. Only a deluded person would believe that he or she could become God, however briefly. He said nothing, but noticed Lucien’s fingers slowly closing into fists before he turned and faced Taylor.

‘Tell me, Agent Taylor, have you ever killed someone?’

The question caught Taylor completely by surprise, and in a whirlwind of memory, her heartbeat took off like a fighter jet.

Fifty

It’d happened three years after Taylor had graduated from the FBI Academy. She’d been assigned to the New York field office, but the events that took place that night had nothing to do with any of the investigations she’d been working on at that time.

That night, Taylor had spent hours poring over NYPD’s and New Jersey PD’s combined investigation files into a serial killer that they had named ‘The Ad Killer’, or TAK for short.

In the past ten months, TAK had sodomized and killed six women – four in New York and two in New Jersey. All six of them had been private sex workers. All six of them fitted a specific physical profile – dark, shoulder-length hair, brown eyes, aged between nineteen and thirty-five, average weight, average height. The pseudonym ‘The Ad Killer’ was used because the only solid fact that the police had been able to gather over nine months of investigations was that all six women had placed private advertisements, offering their ‘tantric massage’ services, in the back pages of free local newspapers.

After nine months and not much to show for it, the Mayor of New York had demanded that the chief of police requested the assistance of the FBI. Courtney Taylor was one of the two agents assigned to assist with the case.

It was past midnight by the time Taylor left the FBI office on the twenty-third floor of the Federal Plaza building that late October night. She drove slowly through Manhattan before crossing the Midtown Tunnel in the direction of her small one-bedroom apartment in Astoria, in the northwest corner of Queens. Her mind had been so busy, sifting through an earthquake of thoughts and trying to piece together a few aspects of the investigation, that it was only after spotting a 24-hour grocery store on 21st Avenue, that she remembered she had completely run out of several supplies back home.

‘Oh, damn!’ she breathed out, quickly swinging her car right and taking a parking spot just past the store. As she turned off the engine, her stomach also decided to remind her of how hungry she was by demonstrating its own version of a whale’s mating call.

At that time in the morning the store wasn’t busy at all – two, maybe three customers browsing the aisles. The young clerk at the counter nodded a robotic ‘good morning’ at Taylor, before returning his attention to whatever paperback he was reading.

Taylor grabbed a basket by the entrance and, without putting too much thought into what she needed, started throwing items into it. She’d just picked up a half-gallon of milk from one of the fridges at the back of the store when she heard some sort of loud commotion up front. She frowned and took a glance around the corner but saw nothing out of the ordinary. Still, her instincts told her that something wasn’t right, and Taylor had learned a long time ago to always trust her instincts. She put the basket on the floor and walked around to the next aisle along.

‘Hurry the fuck up, man, or I’ll blow your fucking brains all over this dirty floor. I ain’t got all fucking night,’ she heard somebody say in a very anxious voice, even before she had a chance to peek around the corner again.

Instantly, Taylor reached for her Glock 22, thumbed the safety off, and very quietly chambered a round. Her stomach’s mating whales had gone quiet all of a sudden, giving way to a heavy-metal drum solo from her heart. This was no well-prepared and thought-out FBI operation. This was no drill. This was sheer bad luck. This was real, and this was happening right there and then.

Crouching down to keep herself hidden from view from the front counter, Taylor moved stealthily up the aisle. She paused before reaching the end of it, and through a gap between some items on one of the shelves, was able to check the round surveillance mirror in one of the ceiling corners.

‘Motherfucker, you think I’m playing wit’ you?’ she heard the anxious voice say again. ‘You think this is a fucking game? You better speed the fuck up or I’ll pop a cap in your ugly ass. You dig what I’m saying, holmes?’

The drum solo in Taylor’s heart gathered momentum. Through the mirror she could see a single perpetrator. He looked young. He was tall and skinny, wearing blue jeans, a dark, loose, New York Yankees sweatshirt, and had a red and black bandana covering most of his face. He was pointing a Beretta 92 semi-automatic pistol directly at the terrified store clerk’s head.

Like a frantic chicken, the perpetrator kept on quickly turning his head every few seconds to check the store’s entrance and aisles. Even from a distance, Taylor could tell that he was completely wasted, wired up on some kind of drug. And that made everything a lot worse.

Despite his incessant checking, the kid with the Beretta was so out of it that he didn’t even notice the police car that had parked just outside the shop.

Officer Turkowski wasn’t responding to a distress call. That small grocery store, stashed away in a dark corner of Queens, had no silent alarm or panic button hidden behind the counter. No, Officer Turkowski simply got hungry and decided to grab a couple of donuts and maybe a few Twinkies to keep him going for the next hour or so. He thought about grabbing a burrito from the Taco Bell on Jackson Avenue, but he was just around the corner from the 24-hour grocery store, and he decided that he fancied something sweet.

Turkowski was a young officer who had been with the NYPD for two and a half years. He’d only started doing solo patrols – twice a week – in the past two months. Tonight, as luck would have it, was a solo-patrol night.

He stepped out of his Crown Vic and, for once, closed the driver’s door without slamming it shut – no noise.

Inside the shop, the terrified store clerk had finished placing all the cash from the register into a paper bag, and was about to hand it over to his assailant when he saw the young police officer appear at the shop’s door.

Turkowski saw the kid with the Beretta a second before the kid saw him. No time to call for backup. Hardcore police training kicked in, and in a flash he had unholstered his gun and, in a two-hand grip, had it aimed at the kid.

‘Drop it,’ he called out in a steady voice.

The kid had already forgotten everything about the money and the store clerk. His only concern now was the cop with the gun. He swung his body around, and in a split second he had his Beretta aimed at Turkowski’s chest.

‘Fuck that, cop. You drop it,’ the kid said, holding his gun sideways in a one-hand grip – street gangster-style.

It was obvious the kid was nervous, but he was no first-timer. In a very agile move, as he pivoted his body to face the police officer, he had taken a step back and strategically positioned himself with his back to the front of the shop. He now had the store clerk slightly to his left, the police officer slightly to his right, and the shop aisles directly in front of him, giving him, out of the three of them, the best overall viewpoint of the entire scene.

Hiding in the aisle, Taylor had the kid’s inverse viewpoint.

‘I said drop it,’ Turkowski repeated, easing himself one step to his right. ‘Put your weapon on the ground, take a step forward, and kneel down with your hands behind your head.’

Still crouching down, Taylor had silently moved up the aisle and was now almost at the front of the shop. No one had noticed her yet. From her hidden position, she got a better look at the entire scene, especially the perpetrator. The kid’s eyes were wild with a mixture of adrenaline, anxiety and drugs. His posture was rigid, but fearless, as if he’d been in that position before. As if he had everything under total control. Turkowski, on the other hand, seemed edgier.

‘Fuck you, cop,’ the kid said, using his left hand to pull the red and black bandana down from his nose and mouth, allowing it to hang loosely around his neck, and revealing his face.

Taylor instantly knew that that was a bad sign. She instantly knew it was time to act before the whole situation got out of control.

Too late.

Like a film on the big screen, as Taylor started getting up from her crouching position, the entire scene switched into slow motion. The kid hadn’t yet noticed her, and no one will ever know if he sensed her presence before she revealed herself, but he gave Officer Turkowski no chance . . . no warning. He squeezed the trigger on his Beretta 92 three times in quick succession.

The first bullet hit Turkowski on his right shoulder, rupturing tendons, shattering bone, and blowing up a red mist of blood. The second and third hit him square on the chest, directly over his heart, destroying the organ’s left and right atria, and the pulmonary artery and veins. Turkowski was dead before he hit the ground.

Despite the mess and the blood, the kid didn’t panic. He quickly swung on the balls of his feet to face the store clerk again, grabbed the bag with the cash, and raised his gun. The way he saw it, since he’d already killed a cop, why leave a living witness?

Taylor had read that resolve in the kid’s crazed eyes and movement. She could foresee what was coming, and before he could turn the nightmare into a reality, Taylor was up on her feet. She had stepped away from her aisle cover and into clear view, her Glock 22 firmly aimed at the kid with the Beretta.

Through the corner of his eye, the kid caught a glimpse of movement coming from his right. Instinctively he began spinning his body around, his finger already starting to apply pressure to the trigger.

Taylor had no time to shout out a command or a warning, but she also knew that it would make no difference. The kid wouldn’t have responded. He would’ve shot her with the same determination with which he had shot the police officer.

Taylor squeezed her trigger only once.

The .40 Smith & Wesson bullet was intended to just wound. To hit the kid on the upper arm or shoulder. To force him to drop his weapon, but the shot had been hurried and the kid was in mid-movement. The bullet hit him higher than intended and a few inches to the right. The kid fell back. A chunk of his throat splattered onto the wall behind him. It took him three and a half minutes to bleed out. It took the ambulance ten minutes to get to the store.

He was only eighteen years old.

Fifty-One

Doing her best to keep her face and movements as steady as she could manage, Taylor blinked away the memory.

‘Excuse me?’ She angled her head in a way that suggested she hadn’t heard Lucien’s question properly.

‘I’m sure you’ve been involved in hundreds of FBI investigations, Agent Taylor,’ Lucien said. ‘What I want to know is: have you, in any of them, had to pull out your gun and kill someone, even if in “self-defense”?’

Taylor wasn’t prepared to go through any of what had happened that night all those years ago with Lucien, but she knew that if she answered truthfully he would pick at that wound until it bled again. Trying to concentrate on her breathing, her eyes, and everything else that could give her away, she gave him her answer.

‘No.’

Lucien was observing Taylor, but this time her poker face worked. If anything had betrayed her answer, he didn’t seem to notice it.

‘Robert?’ Lucien moved the question over. His head skewed sideways. ‘Don’t lie to me now.’

Once again, Hunter had the feeling that somehow Lucien already knew the answer.

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Unfortunately, I’ve killed people in the line of duty.’

‘How many?’

Hunter didn’t have to think about it. ‘I’ve shot and killed six people.’

Lucien savored those words for an instant. ‘And you weren’t overcome by a feeling of tremendous power? You didn’t get the “God-like feeling”? Not even once?’

‘No, I didn’t.’ Hunter didn’t hesitate. ‘If I could have avoided it, I would’ve.’

For several seconds, they exchanged a fierce stare, as if their eyes were fighting their own private tug-of-war.

‘Susan’s remains, Lucien,’ Hunter finally said. ‘Where are they?’

‘Very well,’ Lucien agreed, breaking eye contact. He breathed in deeply. ‘Like I said before, Robert, the place I used in La Honda is still there. Once the magic of the moment had worn off that night, once I stopped shaking from the adrenaline rush, I knew I had to dispose of the body in a way that no one would find it. But I had already given that a lot of thought. That was just another reason why I chose that place – it was surrounded by wild woods.’ A careless shrug. ‘I didn’t know it would happen that night though,’ he added. ‘It wasn’t my intention when I left the dorm to go meet Susan. As I said, it just turned out that way.’

He started pacing his cell again, his hands behind his back.

‘So I dug for the rest of the night, all the way until morning. Ended up with a four, maybe five-foot-deep grave. I had already bought bags and bags of coffee powder and a few bottles of mountain lion urine.’

Both Hunter and Taylor knew that coffee powder is a very strong animal scent distractor. It confuses them, and usually makes them lose a scent trail, if they were on to one. Mountain lion urine can be easily bought in several shops around America, and it’s used for its predator scent quality. Its smell scares away a multitude of other animals, like foxes, wolves and coyotes. It’s a simple law of nature – the stronger and deadlier the predator, the more animals its scent will scare off.

‘I buried her body in the woods behind the house,’ Lucien said, ‘under layers of dirt, coffee powder and mountain lion urine. Covered it all with some leaves and sticks. And I can tell you, it’s never been disturbed by man or animal.’

‘So where is this house?’ Hunter asked.

Lucien spent the next two minutes giving Hunter and Taylor specific instructions of how to get to it from Sears Ranch Road.

Lucien paused directly in front of Hunter. ‘Will you tell them everything? Will you tell them the truth?’

Hunter knew Lucien was talking about Susan’s parents again.

‘Yes.’

‘Um . . . I wonder how they’ll feel. What their reaction will be?’

‘What do you care?’ Taylor spat the words. ‘At least they’ll have closure at last. They’ll be able to bury their daughter’s remains with dignity. And they’ll also have the certainty that the monster who took her away from them will be locked up for the rest of his natural life.’

Lucien was still pacing his cell, but instead of moving from left to right, he’d started walking back and forth between the back wall and the Plexiglas at the front.

‘Oh, no, I wasn’t talking about that, Agent Taylor.’ Lucien’s lips broke into something that looked like half a smirk, half an amused smile. ‘I meant . . . I wonder how they’ll feel when they find out that they ate their own daughter.’

Fifty-Two

Adrian Kennedy had decided to cancel all of his appointments back in Washington, DC and stay at the FBI Academy in Quantico, at least for another day or so. In all his years with the Bureau, no single investigation or suspect had intrigued him as much as Lucien Folter had.

He’d ordered a check on Susan Richards’ parents late last night. That was how Hunter knew they were still alive. Her father was now seventy-one and her mother sixty-nine, both retired. Kennedy had also told Hunter that they were still living in the same old house in Boulder City, Nevada, and they were still calling the police departments in Palo Alto and Santa Clara County at least once a month asking for any news.

Kennedy and Doctor Lambert had been following all the interviews through the monitors in the holding cells’ control room. Every once in a while one of them would make a brief comment on something that was said, but mostly they watched in silence. As soon as Kennedy heard Lucien’s instruction of how to get to Susan Richards’ grave behind the house in La Honda, he reached for the phone on the desk in front of him.

‘Get me the Special Agent in charge of our field office in San Francisco . . . ASAP!’

Within seconds Kennedy was speaking to Special Agent Bradley Simmons, a softly spoken man who had been with the FBI for twenty years, nine of those with the San Francisco office. He still had a strong southern Texas accent.

Kennedy had paid intense attention to Lucien’s instructions. He didn’t even need to listen back to the recording or check his notes. He could easily recount word for word.

‘Get in touch with the La Honda Police Department and County Sheriff’s office only if you need to, you understand?’ Kennedy said, once Agent Simmons had taken everything down. ‘This is exclusively an FBI operation. From what we understand the location is isolated by woods, no neighbors, no one around, that was the main reason why it was chosen, so if there’s no need for you to let anyone else know . . . don’t let anyone else know. Get on to it now, and get back to me the second you find anything.’

Kennedy put the phone down and returned his attention to the monitors and the interview just in time to hear Lucien’s last comment. His body tensed and he looked at Doctor Lambert.

‘Did he just say that they ate their own daughter?’

Doctor Lambert was sitting before one of the monitors with a disbelieving look on his face. He wanted to play back the recording just to be sure, but he knew he didn’t need to. He knew he’d heard right. Without diverting his attention from the monitor, he nodded slowly.

At that precise moment there was a knock on the door to the control room. The person didn’t wait for a reply, pushing the door open.

‘Director Kennedy,’ the man said, stepping into the room.

Chris Welch was in his early forties with short blond hair that was brushed back off his forehead. He was carrying what looked to be a notebook of some sort.

‘Sorry to disturb you, sir.’ Welch was with the FBI’s Behavioral Analysis Unit. ‘You asked me to notify you immediately if we came across anything that seemed relevant in any of these books.’ He nodded at the notebook he was holding. It was a regular 8x10.5-inch notebook, with a marbled brown and black hardcover.

All the books and notebooks that were retrieved from Lucien’s house in Murphy had been handed in to the FBI’s BAU. Their task was to scrutinize their content.

‘I thought you’d like to have a look at this.’ Welch Hipped the notebook open and handed it to Kennedy.

Kennedy’s eyes scanned through several pages before he let out a heavy breath.

‘Jesus!’

Fifty-Three

Even with the ventilation system on full blast, the heat down in sublevel five of the Behavioral Science Unit building seemed oppressive. Hunter felt beads of sweat form on the nape of his neck and slowly start to trickle down his back, only to be frozen in place by Lucien’s words. They seemed to have chilled the air like an arctic blast.

‘They what?’ he asked, his voice puncturing the silence that had clouded the air since Lucien last spoke.

Lucien had reached the back wall again and had stopped pacing. His back was toward Hunter and Taylor.

‘Yes, you heard right, Robert,’ he said. ‘Susan’s parents ate her . . .’ He bobbed his head to one side. ‘I mean . . . not all of her, of course, just a few diced-up organs.’

Taylor felt something start to spin circles inside her stomach.

‘How?’ Hunter asked. ‘By then they’d already traveled back to Nevada after her graduation.’

‘Yes, I know,’ Lucien said. ‘I visited them.’

‘You what?’ Taylor this time.

Lucien faced them. ‘I visited them two days after that night . . . took a gift with me . . . a pie I baked myself.’

The circles inside Taylor’s stomach became scary roller coasters.

‘A trip from Stanford to Boulder City in Nevada doesn’t take that long,’ Lucien said to Taylor. ‘Susan had introduced them to us – Robert and I, that is – a year or two before. We met them again after the graduation ceremony. Susan and I had both graduated cum laude, and they were very proud of her. Any parent would be.’

It was barely noticeable, but Hunter picked up a sting of pain in Lucien’s last few words.

‘They were a sweet couple,’ Lucien proceeded. ‘Susan was a sweet girl. I decided it was the right thing to do.’

‘The right thing to do?’ Taylor had been knocked off balance so hard that she couldn’t contain herself. She had to ask. ‘How could that be the right thing to do?’

‘You’re the investigator in this case, Agent Taylor. You tell me.’ Lucien sounded condescending. ‘Let me throw you a pop quiz. Let’s say this was a completely different investigation. Let’s say that you didn’t have me in custody. Let’s say that you had a case where you found out that the UNSUB had fed some of his victim’s organs to her family, what would your conclusion be, Agent Taylor? I’m interested to know.’

‘Play his game. Let him believe he’s winning.’ Hunter’s words came back to Taylor. She knew that what Lucien wanted was to get under her skin, to shake her confidence. She now understood that every time she lost her temper, Lucien felt like he’d won another battle. ‘Give him what he wants.’

‘Because you’re a deranged psychopath?’ she said. ‘Because to you it sounded like something fun to do? Because it fed your “God” delusion?’

Lucien crossed his arms over his chest and looked at Taylor, intrigued. A challenging smile threatened to stretch his lips.

‘That’s a very interesting conclusion, Agent Taylor,’ he replied, sarcasm dripping off his words. ‘Spoken like a true professional. You know, I always found that there’s nothing as entertaining as seeing people feed off their emotions. The problem with it is that it takes away objectivity. It clouds judgment. It opens the door to a world of mistakes. I learned that a long time ago.’

As if he didn’t have a care in the world, Lucien pulled his sleeve up and again looked at his wrist as if he had a watch.

‘Anyway, I’m quite bored of all these questions, and I guess you two have got a lot of work to do now, don’t you? You know . . . bones to dig up, explanations to make, stories to tell.’

Leisurely, Lucien lay down on the bed and interlaced his fingers behind his head.

‘Give Susan’s parents my best for me, will you, Robert? Oh, and by the way, if you’re wondering . . . yes, I did sit down and have dinner with them that night.’

Fifty-Four

Hunter’s fist connected with the punch bag with so much force, it sent it swinging backward almost a whole meter. He’d been hitting one of the 45-kilo leather bags that hung from the ceiling in the BSU building’s boxing gym for a little under an hour. His shirt and shorts were drenched in sweat, which was pouring down from his forehead like rain. His whole body was sore from the grueling workout and he felt mentally exhausted. But he needed some time to think, to try to organize the mess of thoughts inside his head, to disconnect, even if only for a few minutes, and for Hunter, more times than not, heavy exercise did the trick.

Today was not one of those times. Frustration ran through his body like bad blood, and no matter how hard Hunter punched that bag or how much weight he lifted, he just couldn’t seem to get rid of it.

‘If I were thirty years younger, I’d spot you with that punch bag,’ Kennedy said, standing at the door to the gym. The place was deserted, except for Hunter. ‘But even so, the way you’re punching that thing, you’d probably put me through the wall. I’m surprised your hand isn’t broken yet.’

The long day and a full pack of cigarettes made Kennedy’s hoarse voice sound even weaker, even more guttural.

Hunter delivered one quick final series of heavy punches to the bag – jab, jab, cross, left hook, cross. The bag swung back and sideways awkwardly, as if it’d had enough and had been finally defeated, before Hunter embraced it into a stop. His breath was tortured, his face a dark shade of pink, the veins on his arms and shoulders swollen from the whole effort and the extra blood flow. Panting, he rested his head against the bag for a moment, taking his time, waiting for his breathing to slowly return to normal. Sweat dripped from his chin onto his shoes and the floor.