Prior Bad Acts

31

THE TRIAL WAS over. It hadn’t come out well for Kenny Scott, Esquire, but justice had been done. Swift and terrible.

Stan was shaking, sweating, exhilarated. There was still a small part of his brain that was horrified and terrified of the other emotions roaring through him. But that part was smaller and smaller, weaker and weaker. With justice came strength. Might with right.

Stan’s justice was pure and simple. There were no games, no loopholes, no getting off on a technicality. There was only right and wrong.

For the first time in his life, Stan Dempsey felt powerful.

To any casual observer going down the street, Kenny Scott simply wasn’t at home. Stan had turned off the television before he left. He had taken Kenny Scott’s car and parked it a block away, then walked back to his truck.

If his former colleagues discovered Kenny Scott too quickly, they would have a target area to look for him, and the intensity of the search would be fierce. Stan couldn’t have them find him before his job was done.

He calmly drove to another neighborhood and parked his uncle’s truck. In the back, under the camper shell, he ate a couple of bologna sandwiches with slices of midget gherkins in them and drank some coffee from his thermos.

He didn’t think about what he had just done. He didn’t try to recall the panic in the lawyer’s eyes, the screams the man had to swallow behind the duct tape that covered his mouth.

The rush the memory of meting out punishment gave was a thing unique to criminals, to serial killers, to men like Karl Dahl. That reaction belonged to the criminals who indulged in cruelty because it excited them. For those men, the memories were as important as the crime itself. They would relive their exploits over and over in their minds.

Stan didn’t think of himself as a criminal. He was just doing a necessary job no one else would do.

He finished his lunch and cleaned his hands off with a wet wipe. It was time for him to move on to the next name on his list.

Carey Moore.