“One of the women I killed was actually a runaway from a very powerful man.”
“Fredrico Montalvo,” Veritas said.
“Then you know.”
“I know who your victims are, and I know their families, regardless of how unsavory.”
“Then you know Montalvo is a key figure in the Sustantivo cartel. A major distributor in the heroin pipeline here in the States.”
“Yes.”
“Apparently he has investigative skills similar to yours,” said Drew.
“He found out it was you.”
“Surely you know Montalvo is into more than drugs. He could not have cared less about his daughter. She was dead to him. But that didn’t mean just anyone could touch her.”
“You were enlisted to supply women—girls—to Fredrico Montalvo and his operation.”
“Even psychopaths feel the need for self-preservation,” Drew acknowledged.
“But you continued your extracurricular activities on the side.”
“Yes.”
“And you found your tastes had changed?”
“I don’t understand the question.”
Veritas lay the knife down and placed the hook at the nape of Drew’s shirt. He pulled down and the curved blade split through the fabric like a warm spoon through ice cream.
“YES,” said the prisoner. “YES, I found my tastes had changed.”
“You wanted them younger, too. Like your bosses.”
“Yes.”
Veritas didn’t stop slicing the shirt until all of Silas Drew’s front torso was exposed.
“Do you remember Emily Constantine?”
“I remember them all,” Drew said.
Veritas hooked Drew’s left nipple and in one quick movement, severed it from its owner.
“AAAAAAAAH,” Drew screamed. “Jesus. Yes, yes, yes. I remember her.”
“Say her name.”
“Emily. Emily Constantine.”
“You sold her into servitude.”
“Yes. I gave her to Fredrico Montalvo.”
“As payment for your debt.”
“Yes.”
“But not before you had your own fun with her.”
“What—?”
Veritas removed the second nipple as easily as the first. Silas Drew howled, blood now running in two streams down his stomach and into a pool at the top of his pants.
“They say the nipples are two of the least painful extensions to be removed from the human body,” Veritas said. “Something about the way the nerve endings die post-amputation. Fingers, however—”
“I did,” Drew cried. “I did terrible things to her.”
“Raped her.”
“Yes.”
“Tortured her.”
“Yes.”
“But not enough to spoil her for Montalvo.”
“No.”
“Because you already knew Montalvo planned to keep her for himself.”
“How did you—?”
Veritas leaned over Drew until he could smell the previous meal on his prisoner’s breath and the stale sweat then running from every pore. He reversed the hook and pressed the tip into the belly button of the man who had ruined the lives of so many mothers and fathers and sisters and brothers. He pulled upward and the skin gave way as easily as the material of the shirt.
Silas Drew let forth a primal, inhuman groan as his entrails began to spill across his lap.
“I knew all the answers, you fucking monster.”
Shale held the trembling hands of his biographer, tears running down her face and streaking what small amount of makeup she’d used that last morning, coming to the prison to spend the final day with him.
“A powerful first chapter,” he said softly, and wiped away what he could with the back of a finger. “I’m sorry for the pain you’ve felt all these years. And now—”
Francis Constantine looked up, her eyes red and swollen. “And now these are tears of release,” she said. “You gave me that closure and release.”
Veritas nodded.
“I can write the rest of the book now,” Constantine said. “I had to begin this at the end. With Emily.”
“I know.”
“There’s still time,” she said. “You could still file an appeal and be granted at least a stay.”
“It wouldn’t change anything,” he said.
“It would keep you alive.”
“I don’t want that anymore. You have my journals. You know the descent I experienced. The only thing that separates me from them, in my heart, is this.”
“But what is this?” she said.
“Doing the right thing. Accepting who I am, what I did—admitting it, giving myself over to the system that failed me, and accepting my punishment.”
“But that is so contradictory,” she said, no longer crying, cleaning up. “You have to see that.”
“I see the irony,” Veritas said. “But it doesn’t change the fact that I owe someone for what I’ve done. And no one here on earth can judge me. I’ve long since judged myself.”
“I don’t think I can do this,” she said.
“I need you today,” Veritas said. “I don’t remember the last time I felt needy of anyone or anything, but I am now. I need you here with me today. And you need to tell the last chapter as vividly as the first.”
Constantine only nodded. “You know Bertram James still denies your side of the story.”
“I wouldn’t expect anything less from him.”
“I can only go so far in painting him in a good light, you know. He was drummed out of the Rangers.”
“He was given early retirement because he wouldn’t swallow the new regime’s pile of paperwork propaganda. That’s something I can relate to.”
“But why come after you if the two of you are cut from the same material?”
“I didn’t say we were cut from the same cloth. James is old-school lawman. To him, there’s no distinction between what I’ve done and what my victims have done. Both break the law, and the law is all-consuming to a man like Bert James.”
“Well I still believe you should rethink your request of kindness in the way he plays out in your story.”
“It’s not a story, Francis. It’s my life. And I want you to write James the way I believe him to be. That’s all.”
“There’s something else,” she said. “It has nothing to do with Bertram James.”
“I know.”
“You know? What do you mean, you know?”
“I know why you were crying earlier.”
“I told you why.”
“I know about Treanor.”
After disposing of the remains of Silas Drew, and cleaning up, Shale Veritas drove the motorhome to a pad he’d rented at a local campground a week earlier. He sat in a high-back chair with the two boxes of journals that he’d written over the past several years, each detailing the evidence gathered against his victims, the weeks of preparation, and the brutal facets of the execution of every crime he’d committed over the same span of time. The journals and the locations of the bodies were the only hard evidence that existed; Veritas knew that ex-Ranger James had nothing but a lot of threadbare, circumstantial evidence that depended on too many suppositions and gut feelings to be absolute fact in order to make his case.
Shale drove to a storage unit he owned under one of the aliases he knew for certain had not been compromised by James’s investigation. He locked the two boxes of handwritten evidence away. Then he drove to the hotel where ex-Texas Ranger Bert James was staying.
James opened the door and—probably for the first time in his adult life—had nothing to say. He stood there in his robe, hair wet from having just showered, and his mouth literally hung there agape.
“Ranger,” Veritas said out of respect. He could only imagine the thoughts racing through the old lawman’s head. Should he arrest him? Close the door in his face? Speak?
“I—I.”
“Invite me in, Bertram,” Veritas said, smiling. “I’m about to make your millennium.”
James motioned for him to enter.