“And you stood by and watched,” Cockroach said.
Aston nodded. “That’s right. I didn’t touch you. Not once.”
“You always were the loudest and biggest liar. It wasn’t you who defecated in my bed and then shoved my face in it and held my head down so that I couldn’t scream?”
“Come on. We were kids. Kids do stupid shit all the time.”
“Have you ever had your face shoved in someone else’s shit and held there until you passed out?”
“No, but you weren’t the only one it happened to.”
“Ah. So that makes it all okay,” Cockroach said without emotion.
Aston’s heart was racing now. Cockroach meant business. He should have listened to the journalist. If he had, he could have at least been prepared. He had two pistols locked up in a safe at home. This was crazy. “I’m sorry. Is that what you want to hear?”
“It would be a good start.”
“You need to leave. Get out of here before I call the police.”
The corners of Cockroach’s mouth turned upward.
“What do you want?” Aston asked. “Is it money you need?”
“Get on your knees and beg forgiveness.”
Wrong answer. Adrenaline rushed through Aston’s body as he cracked his neck from side to side. Like a linebacker going for a sack, he rushed headfirst into Cockroach’s chest.
Cockroach grunted and fell backward into the counter.
Aston’s eye stung. He thought maybe he had slammed into Cockroach’s zipper or the sharp edge of a button until he raised a hand to his face to see if he was bleeding and felt an object poking out of his left socket. He yanked it out, surprised to see that he was holding a syringe. He tossed it aside. “What the fuck did you do?”
Aston headed for the office phone to call the police, but fell to the floor before he reached the door. His breathing was erratic. He felt dizzy. What the hell was happening to him? He clutched his throat.
Cockroach walked over and hovered, staring down at him with the same fascination Aston had when he was just a kid watching Nick and Bruce do their worst.
Why hadn’t he stopped them, he wondered? He could have run for help. He hadn’t thought of Cockroach in years, if ever. Not until the journalist had come to see him. He wasn’t a bad guy, he told himself.
He wanted to live, wanted to beg for his life. He was ready to do that, but when he opened his mouth, nothing came forth. He couldn’t speak. Opening and closing his mouth like a fish, he tried to push the words out. It was no use.
There was nothing he could do to stop Cockroach from taking hold of his ankles and dragging him across the garage floor. Aston felt the upper half of his body being lifted onto a creeper that was then rolled under a car held up by a jack. How many times had he told his guys not to use the old car jacks? But nobody listened.
“Remember what you said to me after Nick and Bruce tied me to a tree?” Cockroach asked.
Even if he had remembered, what good would it do? Would Cockroach leave him alone?
“You said, stop your blubbering, kid, it will all be over soon. You were wrong.” Cockroach stood up, then grunted and groaned while pushing hard on the side of the Hyundai Genesis, but nothing happened.
Maybe, just maybe, Aston thought, he might live to see another sunrise.
Then Cockroach smiled, and that’s when Aston knew all that groaning and moaning and pushing of the car was just for show, to build tension and give Aston false hope.
Aston knew all that because of the smile. It was a fuck-you smile that said, “Look at me, I’m all grown up now, and I’m getting the last laugh.”
Cockroach then moseyed on over to where the jack was and gave it a good hard kick.
It was dark when Sawyer parked in front of the auto shop where Aston Newell worked. It had been a very long day. After working late, she’d picked up the flash drive at Purple House Digital. The video had been lightened and brightened, leaving no doubt that Otto Radley was the man who had approached a woman sitting on a bench in the park wearing a short black wig.
She would show the newly enhanced video to Detective Perez in the morning. Right now, though, she had one more question for Aston Newell. She wanted the names of the boys who had been bullied. Boys who had grown into men and who might be motivated to seek revenge. Hoping to bribe him, she’d stopped at the grocery store to buy cookies. She would come by the auto shop every day and every night until she wore him down and he gave her the names. Someone out there, someone Aston probably knew, was killing his friends. She needed to make him see that this was truly a matter of life and death.
There was a light on in his office, and she assumed Aston Newell would be the one to close down the shop since he owned the place. With cookies in hand, she climbed out of the car and shut the door. As she approached the office door, she heard a loud crash come from inside the garage. The noise rattled her and she hurried inside, set the cookies on the counter, and went straight to the garage where she saw a man wedged beneath a car.
“Aston!”
The overhead lights flicked off.
She couldn’t see a thing. Her heart pounded against her ribs.
Tools crashed to the ground. A tire flew through the air, hitting her upper body and flinging her to the ground. Next came a metal tool that bounced off her head, but not before leaving a gash near her hairline. Her fingers went to her head where she felt blood.
A shadowy figure ran past her, footfalls pounding against the floor as the person ran through the office.
She jumped to her feet and followed, sweeping a pair of scissors off the desk in the office on her way out, just in time to see the person round the corner and make their way through a parking lot behind the auto shop.
Thankful to be wearing flats, she rushed after the person, running through the parking lot and over an expanse of dead grass and weeds until she realized she was on the train tracks. She was gaining ground, getting closer. There was no way she was giving up now. She ran between the two solid steel rails, concentrating on the railroad ties so she wouldn’t trip and fall.
The person was less than twenty feet ahead of her when she felt the earth rumble beneath her feet. A train was coming. She could see lights in the not-too-far distance, coming straight for her. The freight trains were faster than they seemed, and she jumped to the side, then watched the person she’d been chasing look over their shoulder and jump to the opposite side right before the train passed by, horn blaring.
She leaned over and sucked air into her lungs. Fuck. Whoever it was would be long gone by the time the train passed. She hurried back the way she came. Her cell phone was in the car. She grabbed it and called for help as she made her way back through the office to the garage. Flicking on the light, she went to where Aston lay, unmoving. One of his arms lay still beside his body. She felt his wrist for a pulse. He was gone.
Sawyer sat in the back of an ambulance as an EMT cleaned her up. She had two cuts, one on the side of her face close to her ear and the other at the hairline. He used butterfly strips to close her up, then told her she might need stitches.
Detective Kevin Grumley was on the scene. Sawyer had never met him before. He held a notebook and pen, something Detective Perez never did, and he asked Sawyer why she was there. She told him everything, starting with the write-up she was doing on the Black Wigs and how she believed the recent killings were the work of a copycat.