Chapter 17 - Only Because She Is

He woke up.  His head thundered like the worst headache he had ever had.  His vision...  He was not sure...  It felt like one of his eyes was not quite aligned with the other anymore.  He started to blink his eyes and then realized he never again wanted to do anything quickly.  The blink stopped with his eyes squeezed shut and he slowly exhaled.  He had no idea how he had gotten here.

He had an idea of where here was.  The smell.  And the concrete.  Too quiet though.  But a prison.  Too many years.  To much time... doing time.  Some sort of jail.  A prison cell.  Too quiet though.  But a jail.

He opened his eyes again.  Nothing hurt.  His eyes seemed to be working together again.  He sat up and looked around.  He was on a cot.  It was against the irregular stone wall of a, yes, a cell.  A metal door was across from the cot.  A table sat between the cot and the metal door.  Never find a table in a prison cell.  The lights were recessed and a bit dim.  But he could still see the items on the table.  A tape recorder and the pink razor the red head had given him. Jamie Suka sat up and spat on the floor.

He rubbed his eyes and ran a hand over his bald head.  He walked over to the table and looked down at the tape recorder.  "Who the hell uses a tape recorder?" he thought.  The sentence, in his own mind, did not have the fake Russian accent draped across each word.  No one heard.

He looked at it for a bit longer and ran a finger across the folded pink razor.  Finally, his curiosity won.  He pressed play.  He heard his own voice raised in anger and disbelief.

"You shot her _______ son!  You shot her ______ son?  Are you out of your ________ mind?" It was his voice.  Thick with the idea of a Russian accent and, strangely, the curse words removed, edited.

His brother was the next to speak from the tape, "Will you let him finish the story?  Dammit Jamie!"  His brother's voice was rising.  It got quite high when he was excited.  It had taken Jamie months to master that.

His voice again,"He killed our best chance to find the damn money!  She got him to kill our best chance to find the money!"

The red head spoke from the recorder," He had his reasons Jamie."

"Yes!  Yes!  He had his reasons!  She scared him.  He acts like she is the scariest mother ________ in the whole damn world!"

"Only because she is," said the man with the gun.

The man with the gun smiled in Jamie's memory and then spoke up from the recorder,"She went to a great deal of effort to paint him as a threat to us.  She laid it out carefully and even convincingly.  She wanted me to go back and kill him for our sakes.  She wanted it to happen."

"Yes! And you did it!"

"I met her son.  He figured out that she had sent me.  He agreed that she meant for me to kill him.  He saw it as clearly as I did.  He just didn't see that he had to die."

This time it was Joey's voice,"Why?  Why did he have to die?"

"You've heard the stories.  You have heard what she has been able to do.  She can reach out and take anybody - ANYBODY.  I bought us time.  If I had met with her son and he walked out of that meeting, she would have known I was on to her.  She might still think I am on to her.  But the only way to buy us any time at all, was to shoot that man in the head."

His own voice again, " She played you!  She let you walk in with a gun and you never took the shot!"

"I told you about the snipers..."

"NO!  No!  She told you about the snipers.  She played to your vanity and you wallowed in it.  You only had her word that there was a single gun out there and that is exactly what she held you at bay with - her word!"

There was silence from the recorder for a bit.  A long bit.  Finally the man with the gun said,"I bought us a little bit of time against the most dangerous person any of us have ever run across.  We can't waste it."

"You bought us time against an old, withered ______ who knows how to intimidate cowards."  And with that last pronouncement, the tape player clacked off at the end of its recording.

A speaker snapped and hissed and Jamie Suka looked up at a speaker in the ceiling.

"'An old, withered bitch,' am I?  Some sort of con artist in your opinion Mr. Suka?  Nothing to fear?  Hmmm.  We'll see."

"You are an interesting man, Mr. Suka.  You like to kill people and yet you like to be funny too.  That is why you kill the way you do.  It is a part of your... 'act'.   You fancy yourself a comedian but a very, very dark one.  If it makes you feel anything at all, I appreciated your sense of humor.  I am interested in what you think of mine."

"I know about your need to mirror your twin.  Its why you have had to make yourself fat like him and talk like a cartoon's idea of a Russian.  I wonder how deeply that need to be exactly the same runs.  Let's see."

With that, the far wall lit up. It was not stone.  It was glass.  The glass was the wall to a matching cell.  The lights were out.  Jamie had only just taken his eyes away from the speaker, when the other room lighted.

Joey sat upright on the cot in the cell that mirrored the once Jamie found himself in.  The same table and the same recorder on the table.  The pink razor, or a copy, (which was the copy?), was on the floor.  It was stained with blood.  As was Joey's shirt and jacket.  As was Joey's throat.  He was quite dead.

Jamie Suka's scream was a thing of rage and murder and violent need.

The voice from the speaker laughed.  "If you don't hurry, the rate of decomposition will be too great and you two will never look alike again."  And laughter danced again from the speaker.