Page 25

The nails gleamed like dirty silver teeth underneath the garage’s light. These were the tools he needed tonight, and if he was being honest with himself, this was the one he was dreading the most.

And now a form of crucifixion on Tuesday.

When he turned from his tool bench, he caught his reflection in the mirror.

He used to pose in front of this mirror daily, back when this was his gym.

Those days were behind him; felt like they belonged to a different person entirely, someone with simpler anxieties, someone who hadn’t learned firsthand the specific heft of a human head or the peculiar resistance of an eyeball socket. Several lifetimes ago, easily.

Still, the glass threw back a familiar stranger.

Late-thirties, could probably pass for younger, lines around the eyes starting to make their claim.

Hair needed a trim. Nothing screamed ‘monster’.

Monsters, he knew from exhaustive research, rarely bothered with warning labels.

They looked like your neighbor trimming their lawns, your dentist asking you to open wide, the friendly guy at the hardware store explaining the different grades of sandpaper.

Blending in, he’d learned, was an important part of the process.

He’d thought, maybe arrogantly, that the doing wouldn’t change him. That he could compartmentalize and treat this whole thing like a complex project with grim deliverables. He was merely the architect, but looking at the guy in the mirror now, something had changed.

Not guilt. He wasn’t built for guilt. It felt more like weathering. Like sea air corroding metal. A subtle dulling of certain colors in the world, maybe. A sharper focus on others. Food didn’t taste quite the same. Sleep came in unpredictable bursts, or sometimes not at all.

The sheer logistics of it all – the planning, the acquisition, the execution, the anxiety in the aftermath – it ground you down in ways the initial adrenaline rush didn’t prepare you for.

It was exhausting work, maintaining two separate realities.

He flexed his fingers and studied the way tendons moved beneath skin. These hands had done impossible things. Surgical things. Violent things. Yet they still looked like the same hands that made coffee and waved to Mrs. Birch next door when she walked her Yorkshire terrier.

The duality fascinated him. Yes, he’d crossed lines that couldn’t be uncrossed and broken taboos that couldn’t be unbroken.

But the strangest part was that he felt more himself than ever.

He paused before gathering his tools. He was caught in that strange eddy of thought that seemed to surface between the planning and the execution.

The true crime cottage industry – the podcasts bleeding into TV specials bleeding into hastily written books – they loved to dissect the why .

They tossed around diagnoses like confetti.

Nature versus nurture. Childhood trauma whispering its poison down the years.

A bad tumble off a bike, a genetic hiccup, maybe just plain old bad wiring in the attic of the brain.

They reduced complex humans to simple equations, like solving for X would explain everything. A monster explained, packaged neatly for consumption. Ready for the next episode.

He almost pitied their simplicity. Their desperate need to categorize, to label, to put everything in tidy little boxes marked ‘Psychopath’ or ‘Sociopath’ or ‘Product of a Broken Home’.

It probably made them feel safe. If you could explain the monster, trace its origins back to a miserable childhood or a faulty gene, then it became predictable.

Not something that could be sharing your airspace, patiently waiting for the traffic light to change.

But they missed the point entirely. Sometimes the monster wasn’t made. Sometimes it was revealed, one murder at a time.

Enough philosophy. The clock didn’t care about existential insights.

He turned back to the workbench. Tonight’s ensemble cast of tools was already laid out.

The heavy box of four-inch galvanized nails.

. The twenty-ounce framing hammer with the checkered face for extra grip.

And for the subtle touch – a pair of compact bolt cutters, the kind designed for chains or thick padlock hasps.

About eighteen inches long, black handles, jaws capable of delivering immense pressure at a single point.

And the most important tool of all – a strong stomach. Certainly, nothing about tonight promised neatness, but he needed to adjust his M.O. again, and that brought a crippling wave of dread with it.

There would be no quiet entry through a picked lock or a failing bulkhead door. No element of surprise attack from the shadows. Tonight, the approach had to be direct. Face-to-face.

Tonight, there was no mask, metaphorical or otherwise. He had to show his true face to someone who no doubt recognized it.

Because here came the twist. Every good story needed that moment where the floor dropped out, where the reader – or the cops, assembling their neat little profiles – suddenly realized they weren’t reading the book they thought they were.

They wouldn’t see this one coming. Let them keep chasing White Whales. Tonight, he was hunting in different waters.