But the detective didn’t give up. Since he couldn’t scream for help, Ingles lashed out at me with his fists, raining hard blows down on my chest and arms. The solid impacts made me grunt. But I’d been an assassin a long time, and I’d taken my share of punches from giants, dwarves, and vampires over the years—all of whom were a lot stronger than the human detective in front of me. Ingles’ blows hurt, but not enough to make me let go or drop my knife.
Still, we seesawed back and forth there in the darkness underneath the weeping willow for the better part of a minute before Ingles’ body began to shut down from the massive trauma it had just received. When I felt the fight in him start to ebb, I pushed him deeper into the shadows, until his back was against the rough bark of the tree.
By this point, tears of pain or fear or whatever dripped down Ingles’ fat face and spattered onto my red silk shirt—along with his blood.
“You know,” I said, twisting the knife in a little deeper. “It’s bad enough that you make the vampire hookers give you freebies while you’re on duty, supposedly protecting and serving the good people of Ashland. But to rape and beat that little girl like you did? That was just sick. Evil. And now, it’s going to be the death of you, Cliff.”
Usually, I wasn’t this chatty when I was killing someone. But the soft murmur of my words helped to cover up the detective’s muffled gasps and the scrape of his limbs flailing against the tree. Still, if anyone had been curious enough to look our way, he would have thought that the detective and I were having a grand old time screwing against the tree.
But only one of us was getting fucked over tonight, and it wasn’t me.
I yanked the knife out of Ingles’ chest, and more of his blood splashed onto my clothes. The warm, sticky fluid coated my hand, but I barely noticed it. I’d wash it off later, the way I always did.
By this point, the fight and life was all but gone from Ingles. I let go of him, and the detective slid to the soft ground beneath the tree. His breaths came in shallow, raspy gulps now, and I knew that he’d be dead in another minute. Two, tops.
Still, I crouched down next to him, bloody knife in hand, just in case he made a last-ditch effort to do something stupid—like try to go for his gun and shoot me.
“Who…the hell…are you?” the detective wheezed out the words.
“Some folks call me the Spider,” I said in a soft voice. “Perhaps you’ve heard of me.”
Ingles’ mouth twisted. “Fucking…assassin…bitch.”
“Yeah,” I drawled. “That’s me to a T.”
Those were the last words the detective ever said. Forty-five seconds later, he rasped out his last breath and was still. Ingles’ head lolled to the side, and his brown eyes stared at nothing.
But my job wasn’t through just yet. Because when the girl’s mother had reached out to Fletcher Lane through various anonymous channels, when she’d decided to ask the Spider for help, the mother had made a specific request about what she wanted done to Ingles’ body after the fact. Couldn’t blame her for it. Hell, maybe it would make the next twisted bastard think twice about things.
Rather than fumble with the detective’s belt buckle, I used my knife to cut through the leather, then his pants and boxers. The fabric ripped with a whisper. And then, I used my blood-blackened blade to slice off the thing that Ingles had held most dear.
When that was done, I wiped my knife off in the grass around the body and tucked it back up my sleeve. Then, I slowly stood up and looked around, my eyes once again peering into the darkness.
But no one had noticed me killing the detective or cutting into him after the fact. The scene looked the same as before. People still waited in line to get into the nightclub, still smoked, and still stumbled drunkenly out to their cars.
At this point, I should have been moving through the parking lot and getting the fuck out of Dodge before someone tripped over the detective’s body and raised the inevitable alarm. But instead, I found myself staring down at Cliff Ingles.
The detective’s eyes were now just as empty and soulless as those of the girl that he’d raped. Fletcher Lane had shown me a photo of the girl when he’d asked me to kill Ingles. The girl had had a look in her eyes that I recognized—a shattered, broken expression of lost innocence.
Of everything lost.
I’d had the same look for months after my family had been murdered. Even now, all these years later, sometimes I still caught a glimpse of it whenever I stared into the mirror just a little too long.
Maybe it was because I’d been thirteen—the same age as the girl Ingles had raped—the night my family had been murdered. Maybe it was because in Ashland, there were some people who just deserved killing. Maybe it was because Fletcher Lane hadn’t sent me out on a job in more than a month and I was bored.
But I’d looked at the girl’s photo, and I’d told Fletcher that I’d do the job for free.
Detective Cliff Ingles had broken the girl with his horrid actions, and I’d made him pay for it tonight. Maybe knowing that he was dead would bring the little girl some peace in the end.
Maybe not.
Either way, I’d held up my end of the deadly bargain. The Spider had done her work for the evening. I’d helped in the only violent, bloody way that I knew how.
And now, it was time to go home and wash the blood out of my clothes once again.
So I stepped over Ingles’ body and headed toward the back end of the parking lot away from the lights and noise around the front of the nightclub.
As I walked underneath the weeping willow tree, a mountain breeze rustled the tree’s branches, and the soft, trailing tendrils kissed my face the gentle way a mother might show affection for her child. For some reason, I stopped and waited until the breeze and the tendrils died down before moving on.
The late summer fireflies lit the way as I stepped into the waiting darkness.
Jennifer Estep, Spider’s Bargain
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