A criminal couple reflect on their motivations as they work on their latest victim.
Image generated with OpenAIHot. Even the windows are sweating, and the air around us feels as sticky as barbecue sauce. Inside the mask, my face, melting. Shoot a glance at her, my… Sometimes she is like my twin but she is not my twin. That would make what we are doing disgusting and it is not disgusting. It is righteous.
My partner in crime senses me looking. Swings her head round. Our eyes meet and what passes between them is as complicated as the docking procedure between two space-crafts in orbit.
Ellie nods and I squeeze the trigger.
The bang is mostly swallowed by the egg-boxes on the walls. The bullet mostly swallows the guy’s right knee-cap.
The guy’s screaming doesn’t sound real. I’m not sure even he believes it is coming from him. Eventually I grow tired of the pantomime. I go over to him and he flinches. I wrestle his head a little, then pinch his nose until he opens his mouth, then jam a rag inside. He makes a noise like a seal through the rag and it is much realer.
At last, he stops and he tries to summon up who he is… who he used to be. I don’t care about that. He is now but a cipher. Or a message embodied. Or disembodied.
Cipher Guy shoots me a defiant glare but it quickly disappears when I take a step forward. Now his eyes flick to her. The guy thinks she is the good-cop now because I pulled the trigger and because I jammed the rag in his mouth. She’ll set him straight soon enough. His plaintive eyes are as wide as oceans.
But he is still not ready. Ellie wants to let him cook some more. She goes to the furnace and once again adjusts the settings. Hotter than hell in here now, and yet he is shivering.
We leave him to sweat. Go outside to share a cigarette. Our third of the morning already. When we came out for the first one, dawn was breaking like an egg, spreading yolkily across the horizon. We watched folk – mostly men – slinking out of their big houses and into their big cars, chugging off to the station where they’d leave their cars and board the trains into the city: work. This isn’t our city, but it works the same way. Everywhere works the same way.
When we came out for the second cigarette, it was later, and this time it was mostly women and children escaping the big houses and into their even bigger cars – SUVs and people-carriers – tanking it to nursery or school and then the gym and lunch-dates. Now the suburbs are filling up again; they are being re-stocked. Gardeners and builders, cleaners and cooks arrive at the houses in smaller cars and bigger vans. Our own van, parked up a couple streets away now, has CHERRY’S LANDSCAPE GARDENERS etched on the side and thus is unremarkable. Hell, it’s even got all the proper gardening tools and whatnot in back if anyone were to look.
It is ten o’ clock in the morning and Ellie reminds me that this is the time most burglaries are committed, when everyone else is out of the ‘burbs and off doing their things elsewhere.
We aren’t committing a burglary. We won’t take anything from the house. We’re here for something else.
Ellie wets the tips of her fingers and pinches the cherry end of the cigarette. It hisses. She doesn’t flinch. Then she tucks the dead soldier away in the top pocket of her boiler suit, where it joins the other two and the shell-casing from the bullet.
Then, back on with the masks. Today she’s rocking a panda mask. A real cutesy one; reminds me of a picture used to be on our daughter’s wall. I’m wearing a tiger one because big cat masks are always the coolest. But when I catch sight of her eyes – fiercer than the bright cherry at the end of the cigarette – framed within that panda mask, I realise she’s got this one nailed. It’s the incongruity of it.
Anyway, back to the business at hand.
The trick to doing what we do is to allow yourself to hate. Right now, we hate the guy in the cellar. Even when we’re not on a job, we always work best with a common enemy. When we have an external agency to rage against, bitch about, and plot (sometimes imaginary, sometimes visceral) revenge on. It’s better that way, when our focus is turned outwards. For when the lighthouse-beam of our focus is switched inwards, into ourselves, the cracks in the building blocks which comprise us start to appear and we can’t help ourselves but we work and work at those cracks with our fingernails, bitten to the quick though they might be, until the bricks come loose and we can see through, into the secret core of us. The secret core of us isn’t a small place. It’s not like removing the building blocks reveals something as inconsequential as a bricked-up skeleton in the closet of us; rather it reveals a vast, dark hinterland which is populous with beasts.
Some of the best sports coaches in the world encourage a siege mentality amongst their teams. And what works for them works for us, too. For we’re a team. And this guy is only making us stronger. Earlier, he kept asking the same question over and over: who do you work for? As though he couldn’t contemplate the fact that anyone other than him had the brains or the cojones to go out and make it and do it for themselves.
When we find a nemesis we become one entity, cemented together. At first, while the cement sets, it feels awkward, like the gun’s just started a three-legged race, but eventually we fuse, and it begins to feel like we have the same brain. We finish each other’s sentences just like we used to. We never think for one minute about our daughter. Not when we’re in siege-mode, when it’s the two of us against the world, baby. It’s what keeps us going, props us up.
He wants mercy, but at the same time he does not want to beg, to lessen himself too much because he is a man of means and he’s used to commanding a room. Ellie already has him pegged as both a manspreader and a mansplainer.
“But why?” he begs. “I never did anything to deserve this… Why?”
The questions frustrate Ellie. She rolls a tut over her tongue. While back, she suggested we should get business cards printed up with that quote from Kurt Vonnegut on them: There is no why, since the moment simply is, and since all of us are simply trapped in the moment, like bugs in amber.
But that ain’t our style. Our house style is much less philosophical, much more visceral… more hands-on. And, of course, leaving evidence like a goddamn calling card is the kind of thing gives the kind of folk who do the kind of stuff we do a bad name. It’s not our wheelhouse; our wheelhouse is chaos. Clawing down the white picket fence of plain old suburban reality and forcing folk to look at the wolves that are hunkered down, ready to pounce.
It’s shocking, that realisation we make them plunge into. We had it too with our daughter. And we could have gone many ways in the aftermath. But after a time, we chose to go feral and we never looked back.
We go looking for trouble. Folk looking at us wrong, saying the wrong thing. We hot-house grudges with neighbours, work colleagues; the fella in the supermarket who gazumps us for the last parking-bay. Our ‘friends’ on social media who don’t support us when we wage war on the trolls – or sometimes when we’re the trolls ourselves – become our sworn enemies. We create nemeses for ourselves, and these people become our raison d’etre. Sometimes they don’t even know they’re our nemeses because we can be sneaky, and we only make-believe the vengeance we dole out, but other times they do. When we really go for it with a nemesis things can get serious.
If Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie amalgamate into Brangelina we consolidate ourselves into Hellie. We really do. My name’s Harrison. Yeah, my mum had a thing for Harrison Ford and I was born in ’77, just after Star Wars was released. I can pull off Ford’s curled-lipped look of distain down to a T, but otherwise I’m nothing like as remarkable, and most people call me Harry now. The other side of the coin is Eleanor – Ellie. She’s always been an Ellie. Harry and Ellie: makes us sound like a romcom. We’re not. We’re Hell(ie): a regular Bonnie and Clyde act and no mistake.
The guy’s screaming doesn’t sound real. And it definitely ain’t manly. Reminds me of a doll our daughter used to have. Cherry, she called it. We’d tug on a string which came out the back of it and at first it would make all these cutesy gurgling sounds and mumble “Mama, Mama” which Ellie used to love (and I felt kinda left out on account of there was no “Dada” function), but after a gazillion yanks we broke something in the mechanism and the sound started coming out inhuman. Spooky. For some reason our daughter loved the new, warped sounds even more than she did the old ones. But that was her – she always marched to the beat of her own drum. And in the end that beat marched her right on out into the middle of the street, where she met a gazillion pounds of metal and chrome.
Ellie had let go of her hand, only for a second while she checked her phone, but that was all it took. Naturally, it hit her harder on account of that – the guilt and a bad case of the maybes and what-ifs mixed in with the terrible, terrible grief. And for a whole chunk of time I felt excluded. Like she was inside a reinforced glass cubicle I couldn’t penetrate. Like what I said or did couldn’t touch her. But eventually I found a skeleton key which opened the door: violence. Not random violence though: it’s all kinds of targeted. It’s just nobody can make the links.
We know from past experience we’re fast approaching the payoff. The guy is still stuck on the why, but he’s now trying to find the answers for himself rather than us provide them for him. A life lesson learnt far, far too late. He’s just now admitted to an affair. Someone at work. Standard. Tell us something we don’t know already. Also: don’t care.
Soon – and again we know this from experience – he’ll start showing (maybe even feeling) remorse for that selfsame affair. Maybe he’ll appeal to our human side: we’re all flawed, cut me some slack. Some do – another guy who’d embezzled funds, effectively stealing from his business partner (and best man at his wedding) when their startup started going south – even went as far as repenting his actions and promising to dedicate the rest of his life to giving the money back and doing all kinds of charitable works. And it’s nice to see, it really is – gives us what we didn’t have with Linklater, the original. But even that’s not the point of what we do.
Another soundbite for you, quote-fans: Start with why. It’s from a book by Simon Sinek about leadership. He posits that people don’t buy what you do, they buy why you do it. Our why is never revealed to our ciphers, but they can read our passion for it – how it has become the integral cog in our value system – and know it cannot be reckoned with. It is relentless.
Our real audience though, the person we want to inspire to take action, will eventually get the message, get with the programme. He can’t fail not to. It is OUR why, not theirs. People are so fucking solipsistic.
Imagine switching on the radio or the TV or checking your phone or laptop in the morning and the first thing you hear in the headlines is that you’ve been brutally attacked in your own home. Well, not you exactly but someone with your name. Shake you up a tad, wouldn’t it? Inject you with a case of the flaming heebie-jeebies. Stab cold, steely reality right into your guts.
Time’s a-ticking. Ellie gives me the eyes – shifting a little to the left. And I get the message. It’s time to go get the tools from the van. She’ll babysit Mr. Suddenly Wants to Talk a Lot. I crunch down a loose gravel path between bushes which have been manicured and topiarised to within an inch of their lives. They’re cut to form these elaborate spirals, like the skin of the apples I used to remove in one continuous cut with my blade so our daughter could eat the softer flesh inside.
Other than the crunch of the gravel and the faraway buzz of a lawnmower, there is no sound. The eggboxes in the basement have done their job. And I start to feel weird, like I’m operating in two realities. There’s this one, calm and ordinary. And there’s another, which is Hell. I thought I’d be torn between the two – like, the duality of the soul or somesuch horseshit – but never once have I wanted to hightail it to the van, career outta here never to return. Because that, that, would be like chainsawing myself in half. Because without Ellie I am Squat-Diddley. I am El Zilcho, the magical nothing man.
What’s in a name? Everything is in a name.
I don’t think Ellie ever contemplates stuff like ‘operating in two realities’. As I say, if the guy inside was thinking he was getting good-cop with her he was all kinds of wrong. He had no idea who he was dealing with. Ellie didn’t just hate people. She cultivated hate like an artisanal garden of spite, with the care and patience of a master. That’s what kept us together in the aftermath. The fire, the rage – it was the glue.
As I say, it was my idea straight off the bat. After the trial, when Ellie was at her worst (and I was too), I thought about waiting at the end of his (long – overcompensating much?) driveway and simply mowing him down when he traipsed out in his tailored housecoat to collect the mail. I did wait at the end of his driveway for him. Probably a hundred times. But when he appeared I slunk down in the driver seat, like a threatened tortoise.
Guilt overwhelmed me. But it wasn’t on account of I was a yellowbelly, unable to follow-through. I realised it was because I wasn’t involving Ellie. What satisfaction, really, would she have gotten out of me going out Lone Wolf-style. We shared the pain; we needed to share the vengeance.
So I told her. Not knowing what reaction to expect. But I saw the spark in her eyes – rather than dousing the flames of my revenge fantasies, she threw petrol on them.
We started small with him. In some way even then I think we knew that if we just killed him – bang! – and then that was it, what else would we have left in our lives? We’d just slink back into our silos of despair and eventually we’d find ourselves unable to crawl back out again. We fucked with his head like he’d fucked with ours. We left a dead bird in his mailbox. Smashed his windows. We messed with his sprinklers. We signed him up to so many funeral plans online that the mailman had to ring his doorbell to hand-deliver the sackfuls of coffin brochures. Thousands and thousands of crank calls.
We escalated. We broke into his house, moved things around. We broke into his online accounts and moved stuff too. We emailed his colleagues, his extended family, some very shameful stuff from his account. We left dead things behind his radiators and under his floorboards.
We followed him. We made it so he was looking over his shoulder so much it was a wonder he didn’t have to go see a physio for neck problems. This one time, on the Metro, he got off at the wrong stop and just ran headlong down a blind alley, and we could have gotten him – ended him – then. But we were enjoying this disintegration on the slow-slow.
Enjoying it probably too much. Hence the blues-and-twos out to our place. The knock on the door at the crack of dawn. Linklater had gone to the boys in blue and they bent over backwards to help him as they hadn’t us. He (and they) had identified us as potentials who ‘might want to do him harm’.
In the shake-up they couldn’t find any evidence against us, but they knew. We’d shot our load too early. He took out a restraining order. Moved. And disappeared entirely, online. He made himself untouchable – too many eyes, too much scrutiny – and other folk may have called it quits then, but we didn’t. We found a whole new way to fuck with him. This guy, the guy in the chair, this middleman, was close enough to him to keep sending our message.
I step back inside, mask on. The sweat is sticking to me like flypaper. And I’m dragging the edge of the spade I retrieved from the van over the concrete floor of the basement and it is the noise of an undertaker. The guy – another Linklater; there’s surprisingly loads of them when you take a deep-dive into the online directories – must hear it. He’s groaning, snot and drool mixed with tears pooling under the rag in his mouth. What has Ellie done to him while I’ve been away?
She steps forward now, slow and deliberate, panda mask somehow making it worse. Cute is cruel when it’s grinning at you while you’re broken on a chair.
“Why?” he manages to get out through a whimper, eyes flicking from me to her, then back again, hoping for something resembling mercy. She bends down to his level, placing her hands on his broken knee, and whispers:
“Because we need you to be the message.”
Then she laughs. It’s dark, sharp – just a hint of madness laced with joy. I almost crack up too. It’s not funny. But that’s the thing about this life: you start laughing because the alternative is screaming.
The driver was called Thomas Linklater. Yes, our daughter had stepped out in front of his Audi, but at the trial we found out he’d been three times over the limit on the way back from a business lunch. His reaction-time had been impaired. He barely showed any regret in the dock. He was handed a suspended sentence and banned from driving. He kept his job. We plunged into despair.
This guy is a different Thomas Linklater. Let’s call him Thomas Linklater the Fourth. Or let’s call him Collateral Damage. Any will do.
He begs, one more time. One last time. And I scrape the spade on the floor again, making that undertaker-rasp sound for the last time.
And then…
And then we leave him in there, tied up, bleeding, cooked. He’ll live. That’s part of the plan. He’s going to crawl to the police, to the media, and tell them exactly what happened, and then another Thomas Linklater (the First) will hear, and his fear will start all over again. And we will be watching.
The real fun is in watching someone unravel. The paranoid looks over his shoulder. The sleepless nights wondering, are they coming for me next? That’s when Ellie and I thrive. In those quiet, desperate moments when someone realizes they’re helpless, completely at the mercy of something they can’t understand or predict. Or maybe ol’ Thomas is now coming to that understanding. Maybe ol’ Tommy Boy is now starting to feel remorse…
We ain’t Bonnie and Clyde. We don’t do it for the money. It’s the thrill, the connection. The way Ellie’s eyes light up when the plan’s in motion. The other time I saw that lovelight? When we first met our daughter at the hospital way back when.
Outside the basement as we pack up, ready to move on to the next stage, the next Linklater, she turns to me. There’s blood on her cheek, smeared from wiping her face with a gloved hand. “You bring the other thing?”
I rifle through my pockets, past the cigarettes and the lighter. Draw out the piece of the old doll, Cherry. After our daughter died, in a fit of rage I stamped the damned thing to pieces because I couldn’t have her. But we kept the pieces, and now, like reverse serial killers we leave our tokens, our totems at the house of every Thomas Linklater we monster. It’s what the spade’s for. We’re not stupid enough to just leave it out for the boys in blue to swab for evidence are we? No: we bury the pieces of Cherry in the garden. We are, after all, CHERRY’S LANDSCAPE GARDENERS. It says so on the van.
We drive out of the ‘burbs, leaving behind the pristine lawns and Stepford families who have no idea what’s lurking underneath their perfect little lives. No idea how fragile it all is. The van rattles along, and I steal a glance at her, the panda mask now sitting on the dash. She’s already thinking about the next one, I can tell.
And so am I.
Because hate, once you get a taste for it, becomes something you can’t quit. It binds you to people. It makes you feel alive, like nothing else matters. Not even love.
