Stillness before one more violent convulsion that seemed to have come out of nowhere. Cassandra’s mouth fell half-open and she began drooling from the right corner of her lips. Muscle spasm caused her shoulders to heave back and forth a couple of times before her body finally came to a complete stop.
This time, Mr. J was the one paralyzed. His eyes were glued to the small screen. His breathing was heavy and labored.
Letting go of the hammer and chisel, the demon allowed the image of a lifeless Cassandra to grace the screen for several seconds before he brought two fingers to the right side of her neck. A moment later, he tried the other side.
From his hotel room, Mr. J did the same. He extended two fingers and gently placed them on his cellphone screen, moving them around delicately, as if he were really touching his wife’s face.
‘I’m... so sorry.’ The painful words came in a murmur. ‘I’m so, so sorry, my love. I love you so much. Please forgive me.’
‘Congratulations, John,’ the demon said. He had already moved away from behind Cassandra. ‘You succeeded in letting your wife die.’
A single tear rolled down Mr. J’s face. He closed his eyes and breathed in hate. When he reopened them, they were as void of life as his wife’s. His hand moved away from his cellphone screen.
All of a sudden, in one quick movement, the camera panned again, left and up, and Mr. J’s screen was filled by something that he wasn’t expecting — the demon’s face — only it wasn’t a face, it was a mask. But despite how real and grotesque it looked, with its lacerated and melted flesh, its deformed, devil-looking eyes, its ripped nose, and its blood-smeared sharp teeth, Mr. J didn’t blink. He didn’t move. He didn’t look away.
‘Now that your little game is over,’ he said in a tone so calm and cold, he could’ve frosted the windows in his hotel room, ‘you and I are going to play a new one. A game in which I’m the best there is. A game that I’ve been playing for years and I have never lost. Are you listening to me?’
The demon said nothing in return.
‘Do you really think that hiding behind a camera,’ Mr. J continued, ‘hiding behind an ugly mask, will somehow keep you safe?’ He paused, holding the demon’s eyes. ‘Every single mark I’m sent to deal with is a runaway. They all make the same mistake you are making right now. They believe that if they run away, if they move cities, or states, or countries... if they change their names, their appearances... if they obtain new documents... whatever. They all believe that that somehow will keep them safe. They all believe that disappearing is the key to a whole new life and all their old problems will be left behind.’ A new, pregnant pause. ‘They are all wrong. Let me tell you something else you didn’t know about me, whoever you are. The first part of the job I do is to track these runaways down, wherever they might be...’ Mr. J leaned forward, getting closer to his cellphone. ‘And I am the absolute best at what I do. So know this. Wherever you go, wherever you hide, whoever you become after this. I will find you... and I will rip your heart from your chest. Do you hear me, you sick freak?’
Surprisingly, the demon kept the call connected throughout Mr. J’s entire speech.
‘Ha, ha, ha, ha.’ The demon laughed. At first it was a subdued laugh, as if he was trying to control it, but it soon got louder. Much louder.
‘Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha!’
The horror-clown mouth of the vile mask twisted awkwardly out of shape as the laugh became almost hysterical.
‘Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha.’
As if hypnotized, Mr. J found it impossible to drag his eyes away from the small screen. He knew he’d seen things in his life that no one else had ever seen. Ugly, horrific things that would’ve unsettled the sturdiest of individuals, but he’d never seen anything like this before.
Suddenly, without any warning, the demon simply stopped laughing.
A split second later the call disconnected.
Forty-Seven
Mr. J was born John Louis Goodwin, the unplanned only child to the parents of Bruce and Sally Goodwin. He was born in Madison, Nebraska, under the sign of the Crab, which was intriguing, because according to recent research done by the FBI, Cancerians were by far the most dangerous and the most cunning criminals of all the zodiac signs. The really peculiar fact was that in second place came Taurus, followed by Sagittarius then Aries. Mr. J’s father was Taurus, his mother, Aries.
The birth of a child was supposed to bring joy to a family, but in Mr. J’s instance, it seemed to bring the exact opposite. His mother, a trivial drug user since her mid-teens, who at first truly believed that a baby would bring her salvation, was struck by a debilitating case of postnatal depression. Her answer to it, completely disregarding the wellbeing of her newborn, was to upgrade her drug use from mild to junkie. In one quick step, salvation became damnation.
His father, who had never really wanted a child, preferred the bottle to the needle and the fist to dialogue. As a result of such a volatile mix, John Louis Goodwin grew up the neglected child — the proverbial ‘invisible boy’ — of a complicated, love — hate relationship.
All of that lack of love and affection didn’t go unnoticed by young John and from a very early age he realized that he just didn’t fit into his parents’ plans. The beatings he got became more and more frequent as he grew older, but to his mother’s surprise and to his father’s anger, instead of crying and running for cover, he would always stand his ground and take the beatings fearlessly and in silence.
But all of that came to an end one rainy summer night, just days before John’s fifteenth birthday. That night, after another drunken beating from his father, John returned to his bedroom, packed the very few items of clothing he had into a small rucksack and sat on his bed, arms hugging his knees, eyes focused on the dirty wall in front of him. For hours he listened and waited, until total silence took over his house and he was certain that both of his parents had passed out drunk in their bedroom. Without an ounce of regret, John opened his bedroom door and tiptoed into the kitchen. He knew exactly where his mother kept her drug money. After collecting the whole stash, he forever left the ‘living hell’ he was never able to call home.
For John’s plan to work, he needed to get out of that backwards town he lived in, pronto. At the city bus station, the only bus going anywhere that rainy night was heading to the city where angels were supposed to live — but instead of angels, all he found as he got there were demons.
At first, John roamed the streets in a fog, sleeping rough and eating out of garbage cans and back alley dumpsters, but the funny thing was that, in those dumpsters, he would usually find a better meal than any he ever had when he lived with his parents.
Life on the streets of LA was never easy, and though John had seen first-hand the destructive effects that drugs and alcohol could have on a person, at fifteen and homeless, he was literally powerless to escape the pull of those two vices. Soon, John also discovered gangs, girls, money, parties and a life that was exciting, frightening and dangerous in more ways than one. It was then that John came face to face with his first internal demon — his addictive personality.
It was that demon that made him grab on to that life of vice like a parasite, and he fell into it like an anchor into the deep sea. For three years that life was all he had and he lived and breathed it with every atom in his body, but the madness of it all was destroying him inside, eating away his brain, obliterating his emotions. He needed to escape it before it was too late. At the age of eighteen, John Louis Goodwin joined the US Army.