Jake had never seen Thorne so animated, so entertained.
“Who do you work for?” Thorne paused for just a beat-barely long enough for the man to have formed an answer, even if he’d wanted to-then loosed a backhand smack that scattered a bloody mist into the air.
Jake felt his stomach turn and moved his head to look away when the most amazing thing happened. Wiggins smiled. His teeth-what was left of them-were shiny with blood, but the son of a bitch thought this was funny.
And that really pissed Thorne off. He fired a kick into the prisoner’s tattered hand. Wiggins’s face knotted up tight against the pain, but as soon as the wave of agony passed, the smile returned.
“Jesus Christ, Thorne,” Jake moaned. “Is this it? You’re just going to beat him to death?”
Thorne stayed poised for another shot but moved his head to see Jake. “Actually, that’s up to him. He doesn’t have to die. I’ll stop as soon as he starts talking.”
Wiggins actually chuckled. And earned himself a kick in the ribs.
It was an obscene cycle. Wiggins seemed to grow stronger through the beating, refusing on the strength of his spirit alone to use the one key Thorne had given him to unlock his dungeon of pain. And the more he held out, the more vicious Thorne’s attacks became.
After maybe three minutes, Jake actually found himself feeling sorry for the son of a bitch. Then he thought of Travis’s face, and he made himself imagine the suffering his son must have endured.
He thought of this animal hanging Carolyn in her jail cell, and he conjured the images of the grief endured by the family of that little girl in the hospital, whose only involvement in any of this was to have the misfortune of getting sick at the same time as a stranger down the hall.
The rage Jake summoned up was enough for him to root Thorne on for another minute, but ultimately, it was of no use. He found himself desperately searching for an alternative to prolonged beating. What was infuriating was the man’s defiance. This asshole’s life lay in their hands, yet his battered, swollen eyes continued to say, screw you.
Standing there, Jake had a kind of epiphany. He realized that in this battle of wills between professional painmongers, winning and losing were not measured by who had a heartbeat at the end of the day. A man won when he denied his adversary the pleasure of witnessing a breakdown. Men like these had inflicted too much pain, too many times, merely to be beaten into submission. Pain didn’t frighten them anymore. Neither, apparently, did the thought of death.
So what did?
Frantically, he scanned the interior of the barn, searching for the answer. The far wall was lined with tools: wordworking, painting, plumbing. Nothing there. Just to the right of those was a narrow shelf stacked high with all manner and types of chemical supplies. All of the labels were turned out just so, with the hazards warnings clearly visible. He looked away, then snapped his head back again. Thats it!
“Stop!” Jake commanded, freezing Thorne in the middle of an open-handed backswing.
“Stay out of this, Jake,” Thorne said. “If you can’t take it-”
“Shut up. It’s my turn.”
“Your turn?” The thought seemed somehow unthinkable.
“Yeah. My turn. He tried to kill my family. I get to take my shot at him. Can’t do worse than you, right, Thorne?”
The battered man actually grinned.
Thorne hesitated, then shrugged and backed off.
With Thorne out of the way, Jake walked past the prisoner toward the storage shelf, out of Wiggins’s field of view. What he needed had to be here somewhere. “Here’s how I see it, buddy,” he said to Wiggins’s back as he rummaged through the containers. “Death is the gold medal for people like you. Pain gives you a hardon. It’s sick, but what the hell? So’s making a living killing women and children.”
He rummaged through all kinds of chemicals, pausing for just a second at a bottle of insecticide before moving on. Ah! He found one that would work perfectly. Now he needed a rag.
“With that arm of yours, I figure you’re pretty much out of business,” he went on. “Once word gets out in your circles, I imagine things’ll get pretty intense for you.”
“What the hell are you doing?” Thorne barked, his hands on his hips.
Here’s one. Jake found an old rag on a bench. “Just pay attention, ace.” He needed gloves, too, and they were right next to the rag. Leave it to Mr. Safety to have rubber gloves in his shop.
He strolled back to the prisoner and stooped down in front of him. “The way I see it, we’re wasting our time here, right? You’re betting you can hold out just long enough for Thorne here to kill you. That lets you off the hook and somehow earns you special bragging rights in hell. Am I close?”
The gunman just stared defiantly, his left eye all but swollen shut, his right one not much better.
Jake’s expression changed as he pulled the black rubber gloves onto his hands and opened up the brown glass bottle. As the cap came off, the faint stench of rotten eggs filled the air.
He held up the bottle and displayed the label as a sommelier might display a good bottle of wine. “Sulfuric acid,” he explained. “Great for cleaning concrete, but man, you’ve got to dilute it. Otherwise, it burns like shit.”
He tipped the bottle and poured a drop of the clear, concentrated liquid onto Wiggins’s pant leg, just above the knee. Instantly, the cotton began to degrade, and the rotten-egg odor became unbearable. Soon it was joined by the smell of burning flesh as the acid ate away a chunk of flesh about the size of a dime.
The man’s eyes were wide now. This clearly was beyond what he’d mentally prepared himself for. Pain he understood. Now his imagination was taking him into uncharted territory.
Jake smiled. “As I said, death comes too easily to you. The consequences don’t mean anything. For all I know, after you finished with my son, you went out and had a pizza.” The very thought of it made Jake’s hands tremble. Wiggins saw the tremors and smirked.
“The hands?” Jake asked. “You think that’s funny? A sign of weakness?” He smiled. “Well, you got me. I’ve never been much of a killer. Even the thought of killing a worthless coward like you makes my stomach flop.”
Thorne had had about all he could stand. “Oh, for Christ’s sake..”
“Shut up, Thorne!” Jake yelled. The suddenness of the outburst made Wiggins jump. Jake turned back to his prisoner. “Seems to me we’re a bad match, Wiggins. I don’t want to kill you, yet you seem content to die.” He moved in very close now, close enough to smell the other man’s bloody breath. And he whispered, “If you don’t talk, I’m gonna make you live.”
Wiggins shot a look to Thorne that said, This guy is nuts.
“You’re right,” Jake said, answering his thoughts. “I’m over the edge. Out of my mind. And here’s my one-time-only offer. You’ve seen how this stuff works. You’ve felt it burn. Well, the next dose goes in your eyes.”
He fell silent, allowing the impact of his threat to settle in. “Really, that’s it. One splash and it’s all over. Ten seconds later your eyeballs are charcoal, and we’re done here. We’ll just let you go.”
Wiggins’s eyes grew wild as he glanced again toward Thorne. Jake caught the glance and smiled. He had him. “Imagine what it would be like not to see. You couldn’t find your victims, even if you had two hands to kill them with.”
He pulled away now, as his words took their toll. He actually enjoyed the look of horror in Wiggins’s eyes. “You’ll be ugly as hell, too. Repulsive burn scars all over your face. Everyone will point and whisper. Get a load of that guy, they’ll say. Not that you’ll be able to see the finger-pointers, of course.”
Wiggins’s breathing picked up, and his red, swollen eyes darted back and forth between Jake’s face and the bottle.
“Okay, then, let’s start with something easy. Who are you working for?”
The man said nothing, looking once again for Thorne to resume the beating. Panic was written all over him.