Foley arrived just in time for Stupid-Face to throw a wild punch at his jaw. It would be nice to report now that the fury of a good man, or at least a not very bad one, fighting for his life and the lives of his children, lent so much power to his swing that it struck the killer down and forever redeemed the world for all innocent men like himself. But Stupid-Face had never been a fighter, not since childhood, and the man in the orange jumpsuit had something broken in him that allowed him to hurt other people as easily as he could breathe. Stupid-Face’s wild punch landed on the bad man’s jaw, to no real effect, and the blow Foley threw in return knocked Stupid-Face flat on his back, to beg and plead as the bad man loomed near, filling his sky.
There was no moment, in the seven minutes the murder required where the man who had lived as Lyle but was fated to die as Stupid-Face stood even a passing chance of turning the tide of battle. He was half conscious and breathing through a smashed nose after only three, battered past the point of brain damage after only four, and likely already dead after five. A professional assassin might have done a cleaner job of it. But Foley was no professional assassin, merely a gifted and enthusiastic amateur.
After seven minutes, the boy said, “Okay. You can stop now.”
Foley stood and watched, his knuckles dripping, while the boy put the corpse back into the box.
“That’s it?” the big man asked. “I done good?”
“I didn’t ask you to do good. But you did what I asked. Thank you.”
“So, umm. What happens now?”
“What do you want to happen now?”
“I sure as shit don’t want to go back in that box, I know that. If you’re the only game in town I’d just as soon work for you. Be your, like, angel of death or whatever. Maybe get myself a little crew, a bitch or two, if you eventually decide that’s okay. Better than nothing.”
“Angel of Death?”
“That don’t have to be my title if you don’t want it to be. Up to you, man. I just figured, you know, if I’m taking the big job, you might as well call it what it is.”
The boy considered all this. “I don’t know if I’ll get you a crew or any bitches, but I’ll think about it. In the meantime, yeah, why not. You can be my angel of death. Go wait where you waited last time, and don‘t bother me unless I wave you over again.”
The boy watched Foley amble off, the increasing distance transforming him from big man to smaller man to tiny receding figure to motionless seated speck.
As of this moment, the boy didn’t think he’d ever have reason to call Foley over again. The man had completely fulfilled all purpose the boy had in mind for him. But promises were promises. Foley would never go back in the box. Nor would he ever flee any further, for fear of losing what he had, or approach any closer, for fear of incurring the boy’s wrath. He would just remain in place, in that spot with nothing worth looking at or doing, as aware of the passage of time as any man.
The boy took out a puppy, small and big-eyed and pleased beyond whatever reason it had to be away from the cold darkness of the box. He played with it for a few minutes. It was a very young puppy and soon it grew tired enough to fall asleep with its chin on his foot. This bored the boy. He picked the puppy up by the scruff of the neck and asked, “That’s all you can do?” It yawned. He dropped it back in the box.
In short order he pulled out, played with, and tired of, a paddleball, a yo-yo, a snow-globe, and a wailing infant, whose senses of sight and hearing he removed at a whim just before he dropped the screaming thing back in the box.
Then he pulled out the same matronly woman from before. She’d been weeping since her last emergence, and she spent the next few minutes on her hands and knees, regressed to some first language the boy failed to recognize. The funny talk amused him at first, and gave him reason to leave her be, but it then began to pall, as it had nothing to do with him and failed to surprise him after the initial novelty of the unfamiliar combination of consonants and vowels.
He made the foreign tongue go away in mid-sentence—prompting a sudden shriek of loss from the figure prostrated on the ground—and waited for her to work up enough nerve to look at him again.
He repeated his past demand. “Tell me how much you love me.”
“What?”
He sighed. “I really don’t like that word. From now on, I’m going to take it away from people before I ask them any questions. There. It’s gone. Try to say it now.”
She choked on empty breath.
“Now tell me how much you love me.”
She cringed for a moment, but then something very interesting, something the boy had not seen before, happened to her face. It sloughed off all the fear and all the hopelessness and all her concern over what the boy was going to do to her, and replaced it with something built of iron. She used the back of her hand to brush the tears from eyes that had banished fear by recognizing that she had nothing left to lose, and said, “No.”
“You have to. Look around you. There’s pretty much nothing, anywhere, not as far as the eyes can see. You could walk away if you wanted to but you’d find nothing out there, and I could bring you back any time I wanted. There’s just the two of us. Tell me how much you love me.”
“Nothing could love you.”
He shook his head. “I’m a boy. I’m a boy who lived in a four bedroom house in a nice neighborhood with lawns and trees. I was loved then, I think, even if my Mom and Dad weren’t very good at it. I need somebody to love me. Tell me how much you love me.”
The woman spit on the ground. “No.”
“You don’t have to mean it. You just have to say it like you mean it. You have to say it in as many ways as you can think of saying it, and not stop until I tell you to stop.”
“No. You’re an evil little shit.”
The boy tilted his head, and chewed on this at length, like it was a flavor he didn’t recognize. “But this is the part that doesn’t make sense to me. How come you’re the one who gets to say what’s good and what’s evil? I’m the one who took you out of the box and I’m the one who can put you back. I’m in charge. I’m the only one who matters. I should be the one who gets to decide.”
“Go to hell.”
He said, “There is no such place. I haven’t built it yet.”
The woman was about to curse him again, this time with words so passionate and so blistering that they might have given even the boy pause. They fled with her ability to speak, leaving her before him, a silent figure whose loathing of everything he stood for continuing to rage behind eyes that conceded her abject helplessness but refused to surrender to it.
There was no doubt in the boy’s mind that had he permitted her to place her hands around his throat, she would have continued to force strength into her fingers long hours after all life had left him. It was a beautiful hatred, the kind that was only possible when its owner had been robbed of everything else. In a way, it was downright beautiful, and the boy spent long minutes admiring it, the way he would have regarded a jewel that sparkled from every facet.
“I have an angel of death,” he said, at long last. “I could bring him over here and make him beat you until you agreed to say you loved me. But that wouldn’t be you, loving me. That would just be you not wanting to be beaten. You could say you loved me forever and I’d still see that look in your eyes. That wouldn’t be satisfying at all.
“But I get to decide what’s good and what’s evil, now. So I’ll just say that from now on, it’s good to love me and evil to feel any other way. If you don’t tell me how much you love me until I get tired of hearing it, you’ll be a bad person who deserves to have bad things happen to her. Whenever you stop, you’ll be more ashamed of yourself than you’ve ever been and you won’t want to live with what you’ve done. The only way to feel better, for even a little while, will be to go back to telling me you love me. As long as you do that, you can stay. But if you have any bad thoughts, you go back in the box. I think that’s fair, and since I decide what’s right here from now on, it is fair. I don’t ever want you to think, even for a moment, that I’ve been less than generous. Okay?”