“Good afternoon, Singleton,” Rex said grimly from a shadow of an alleyway. Terrence Singleton nearly leapt out of his skin at the sound and quickly moved to cover his surprise and step into the alley proper.
“You nearly killed me!”Singleton protested. The Reaper’s sinewy fingers gripped Singleton by either side of the windpipe just tight enough to stop him talking but still let him breathe.
“I could have killed you, just like I could have years ago, you Aryan scum!” Rex hissed. He loved playing with men like Singleton; they were so easily intimidated. “But it’s only the big fish who end up in the pan. Small fish like you get thrown back, or used as bait.” Singleton tried to swallow and Rex pulled him close so the criminal could feel hot breath on his face. “Enjoying your parole?!”
“Easy, man! Easy!” Singleton finally gasped when his throat was released. “I’ve been straight, ever since I got out. Still run with my old buddies in the Brotherhood, but we’re not up to anything serious.”
“Then why the message that you needed to see me? Why the urgency?” Rex desperately hoped that Singleton would have a tip on any unusual activity within the city; he wanted to know what had triggered his higher senses.
“We got a job. Some suits, captains of industry types, hired us to move some stuff.” Hardly rumblings from the Other Side, thought Rex.
“How does this interest me exactly? You and your boys got a moving job?!” Rex’s eyes flashed, literally, with red light. Tapping a deep reserve of latent prana energy, he channeled it up his spine and let it out through his optic nerve. It was a lot of work for an essentially aesthetic effect, but the results when used for intimidation were more than worth it. Singleton shrunk into himself and tried not to let it show.
Singleton was remembering Billy the Gimp. Billy had been one of Rex’s informants in the Aryan Brotherhood. He had failed to cooperate fully with the vigilante and had been turned over to the authorities with his face fractured, his jawbone and pelvis each split in half, his hips and shoulders all dislocated, most of his fingers and toes broken, and one of his eyes popped out of the socket and pulped against his cheek. He had come out of the hospital to serve a lengthy prison term as a half-blind, slurring, stuttering cripple who could barely feed himself. His innate defenselessness had made him a natural target in the culture of prison life. He had become a punk: a submissive fuck-toy of truly epic proportions, enjoyed by at least half the convicts at one time or another. Within a couple weeks, his mind was gone, along with his will to live. He had ground his jagged front teeth against the stone wall of cell at night, in the long sleepless hours after his cell-mate’s attentions, until they were sharp like fangs. The other inmates found the look amusing for a few days, and then one morning Billy was found dead in his bunk. He had chewed through the inside of his own wrists and forearms during the night, lacking even the coordination and strength to slash his wrists had he an implement appropriate to the task, and had bled to death over the course of several hours.
Rex had crippled Billy to show the Aryans that their network within the prison system could not always protect them. The word got around: if you crossed the Reaper, make sure that he kills you, or you’ll wish he had. All of this knowledge crashed against the inside of Singleton’s brain and the terror of all those potential years of sodomy and torment rippled through him. His bladder felt very full, and his sphincter weak.
“Moving things at night… uuh, middle of nowhere. They said something about a lab and what they’re paying is CRAZY for the work… buying booze and girls for afterwards, to keep everybody busy, shut us up..!”
Rex smiled. He found that it was the little things in life that meant the most, like abject horror in the face and voice of a white supremacist stoolie as he spilled his guts. Here was a man who would just as soon be out beating and terrorizing a family of working-class blacks for buying a house in the wrong part of town, and instead he was paying off a distantly remembered favor to a supernatural vigilante and nearly soiling himself in the process.
“Slow down, boy,” Rex cautioned. “Your information’s no good to me if I can’t understand what you’re saying. Now, where in the ‘middle of nowhere’? And what’s this about a lab?” Singleton let himself breathe normally for a second to collect his thoughts before continuing:
“Like I said: a bunch of suits, like businessmen or something. They sure got money, whoever they are. They said they were ‘sympathetic to our cause’ and had been for a lot of years. How that is, I don’t know. Maybe they were Bundists back before the war or something. They want us to meet a truck at some building out in the desert, way outside town, in the middle of the night, and unload some scientific supplies.”
“Why the Aryans? Why not just hire professionals?”
“Like I said, they’re some kinda’ upper-class would-be Nazis. They said we would be the only ones able to appreciate what they were doing, that we were the only ones who could be trusted with the job, stuff like that.”
“And they want you to stay quiet about it?”
“Yeah, they said all the booze and hookers we can handle when the job’s over, plus a truckload of cash, but nobody talks about it to anybody. A couple of the Brothers are married, didn’t like the hooker idea too much, but they were told that everyone participates as a show of loyalty. More like they want blackmail material as insurance…”
Rex pondered. It was good intel for an informant like Singleton: a good lead on suspicious activities with the potential to lead to a larger, more sinister organization. The story was consistent, the facts logical, with just enough left out to make a man like Rex want to sink his teeth into it. The only thing missing was any clear connection to the supernatural disturbance that had awakened him that morning. The crime-fighter shook the thought from his head and tried to focus; too many opportunities to do real and lasting good would be missed if he chased one case to the point of distraction. He had time to investigate both. Having squandered most of his fortune over the years, he still had just enough to live on without much need for work, and arrangements put in place years ago kept him supplied with the things he needed to support his unusual occupation, like the answering service that collected messages from his network of informants.
“Okay, Singleton, relax. You brought me something substantial this time. Point me in the direction of these ‘suits’ and I’ll… uncover the nature of their sins. You and your so-called Brothers go along with the job; let me know how these employers get in contact you and when you’re going, and I’ll be watching that night. I am curious to know what Nazi sympathizers are doing building a laboratory out in the desert.”
“So, uh, can I go?” Singleton asked uncomfortably. Rex fixed him with an icy stare, flashed the red light in his eyes again. While Singleton was frozen in fear, Rex clenched a tight fist and drove it deep into the racist’s mid-section, under the abdominal muscles. Years of training in China, India, and Tibet focused the force of the blow into a tiny pinpoint; thus, an impact that could have blown a fist-sized hole through an inch-thick pine plank was concentrated into a spot the size a dime on Singleton’s overfull bladder, which rapidly voided itself in response. From the groin down, the white supremacist was awash in his own hot, reeking urine complete with traces of blood filtered through the capillary walls by the force of impact.
“Just in case,” Rex said as Singleton groaned in pain on the ground, “you thought that a few compliments meant that I could ever be friends with scum like you.” With a characteristic cackle which pealed and reverberated, receding into the distance, The Reaper disappeared around and corner and leapt astride Nosferatu to roar away in a plume of black smoke.
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