Page 26 of Deadly Obsession

TWENTY

JAMES

The sun would be coming up soon.

Something was off.

The first thing that caught my attention was the fact that my tailgate was down.

Ask anyone who knew me, and they’d tell you I’d never leave my tailgate down.

It was one of the things I just couldn’t stand.

Like the sound of people chewing or odd numbers on a volume display.

My friends said it was a compulsion or that I was just plain crazy, but any three of those things really threw my mood.

To add to my frustratingly-growing suspicion that something terrible was going on was the pool of liquid on the tailgate that appeared to be dripping onto the ground. Thanks to the color of my truck and darkness outside at present, it was impossible to tell what it was, though.

Moving back inside, I pulled on a pair of black sweatpants from the floor and grabbed my oversize hoodie off the door hook and threw it on.

I was about to step out the door when the hairs on the back of my neck stood on end.

Or maybe it was my PTSD-fueled paranoia.

Either way, I turned, slid my hands under the mattress, and grabbed the shotgun I’d hidden there when I first arrived.

I then pressed a finger on the action release and pulled the slide back just enough to see into the chamber.

Empty. I knew it would be, but I always checked.

Drawing a buckshot from the extra four rounds on the side of the weapon, I dropped it into the empty chamber with the palm of my hand and slid the action forward.

Quietly but firmly enough to ensure I heard the click.

I took one last glance at Sera before stepping through the bedroom door, locking it from the inside. The moment that door shut behind me, it shut on James too.

I was Mustang again—the nickname my buddies gave me back in my unit.

We’d all been dumb kids when we first met, with fresh memories of cool callsigns strong in our minds.

It was during our first night in country, while we were all sitting around the smoke pit on the FOB, that we decided to pick callsigns for our personal usage on the squad.

It was nothing we’d ever use on the radios for fear of being hazed but a little brotherly morale booster for us .

PFC Johnson - Scarecrow

LCpl Sanders - Reaper

LCpl Hollister - Goliath

LCpl Smith - Mustang

Scarecrow and Goliath never returned home from that deployment. The former had been mowed down by enemy fire and the latter had stepped on an IED.

On the next tour, it was just Reaper and me, each of us Sergeants at the time in charge of our own separate squads. After that second deployment, we both took our honorable discharges, shared a beer, and boarded separate planes to never see each other again.

Until a year later, when I was standing in a state I’d never been to before, watching as the last of my best Marine Corps brothers was lowered into his grave.

The simple white coffin pinned with the Sergeant chevron I’d punched into it a few minutes before.

Beside me, a sea of other Marines from our old unit.

The asshole had to have a closed casket ?cause he’d suck-started a shotgun.

Just like the one in my hands right now. Apparently, his wife had left him not long after he’d returned home.

I’d had no idea.

I’d contemplated selling this gun many times, but my therapist told me I needed to conquer my fears and the things that triggered my PTSD.

Any shotgun in general had become one, not so much because he did it.

But because the same demons that convinced him to pull the trigger whispered to me many times as well.

Moving down the stairs slowly, I kept the butt of the shotgun in the pocket of my shoulder and the barrel aimed at the ground.

The last thing I wanted was to wake anyone up and have them find me creeping down the stairs with a shotgun.

That wouldn’t go over very well at all. So, as quietly as I could, I passed the living room and moved straight to the front door.

I glanced over to where my boots should have been but didn’t see them.

I also didn’t have time to run up and grab another pair. I’d have to go out barefoot .

I reached the front door, opening it enough for me to squeeze out before quickly shutting it behind me.

I paused to scan the area outside the cabin and saw nothing of interest, aside from a large shadow beneath my truck.

I raised the weapon in my arms, muzzle towards my back tire, as I made a wide sweep around to the rear of the vehicle.

That was when I saw it. A scene so gory it rivalled just about anything I’d witnessed in the Helmand Province.

A woman’s body had been mutilated. She lay there on her back with her stomach torn open.

The gruesome gash was deep and jagged, the skin uneven with irregular edges along the gaping hole in her abdomen.

From her ribs to her pelvis. Her organs sprawled out on the muddied ground, nature already taking its course on her decaying corpse.

Her intestines were pulled out of the chest cavity, looped around her neck and…

my mask! They were then twisted under her arms, where they were hooked onto my trailer hitch.

Blood was everywhere. On top of the lowered tailgate and all around her body, which was completely nude apart from my boots on her feet, alongside one of my brand’s hoodies.

Between that and the various tattoos I could make out on her skin, I knew easily who the poor soul was.

I also knew better than to disturb what was clearly a crime scene, but we were in the middle of nowhere, with no power and no cell service.

That meant no emergency services. So I did what I had to do.

Because if there were any clues that could identify the killer, I needed to find them.

I sat my shotgun against the back tire and raised the tailgate for a better look.

Unintentionally, this had me placing one of my hands in a splattering of what must have been the victim’s blood.

Damn it…

Once the tailgate was secured in the upright position, I rubbed the blood from my hand onto the sleeve of the dead woman’s hoodie.

That’s when I noticed something sitting on the rear bumper, just in front of the license plate.

I instantly recognized it as Lyndsey’s phone—it was hard to forget the hot-pink case covered in jewels.

My curiosity piqued, I picked up the phone and illuminated the screen, expecting it to be locked.

To my surprise, it wasn’t. With a swipe of my thumb, the screen opened up and I flinched at what I saw.

A still shot of an axe breaking through what could only be the leg of a very-nude, very-restrained Lyndsey tied to a very-familiar boat lift.

The blur of the photo led me to suspect that it was actually a screenshot of a video.

Opening the photos app confirmed it. The killer had recorded Lyndsey’s last moments.

“Fucking monster…” I grunted, tucking the phone into my hoodie pocket before placing my hands onto the sides of my mask, presently resting on the victim’s head. I lifted it slowly, her intestines making a wet, squishy noise as the helmet-like mask slid over her face. “Fuck… I’m sorry, Lola.”

Her face was frozen in a mix of shock and frustration.

Parting my fingers, I ran them down over her eyes, closing them for the last time.

That was when I noticed the blood on the side of her face, which likely meant she wasn’t wearing it when she died.

This in turn meant the killer had already been in my and Sera’s room, despite the cameras I had hidden throughout the cabin.

I’d originally assumed it was someone in the group playing a prank, like maybe painting my mask pink.

That was what I got for assuming anything.

As I brushed Lola’s hair back, my glare drifted to the wound on the side of her head and the small numerals carved into her skin: 3/6.

“Close with and destroy the enemy,” I cursed under my breath, reciting the start of 3rd Battalion 6th Marine Regiment’s mission. Time and space around me seemed to freeze, my mind racing over everything I knew .

Someone was out here. Someone who knew how to get in and out unseen. Someone who knew how to cover their tracks well, perhaps survive alone in the mountains and was familiar with ? —

That was as far as my thoughts got before something hard cracked me against my temple, and everything went black.