Hunter’s Baby Read online

  Hunter’s Baby

  Alexis Abbott

  © 2018 Pathforgers Publishing.

  All Rights Reserved. This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are the product of the author’s imaginations. Any resemblances to actual persons, living or dead, are entirely coincidental.

  This book is intended for sale to Adult Audiences only. All sexually active characters in this work are over 18. All sexual activity is between non-blood related, consenting adults. This is a work of fiction, and as such, does not encourage illegal or immoral activities that happen within.

  Cover Design by Wicked Good Covers. All cover art makes use of stock photography and all persons depicted are models.

  More information is available at Pathforgers Publishing.

  Content warnings: serial killer, kidnapping, conversations about abusive pasts and child abuse

  Wordcount: 56,000 Words

  Contents

  Introduction

  1. Hunter

  2. Blossom

  3. Blossom

  4. Hunter

  5. Blossom

  6. Hunter

  7. Blossom

  8. Hunter

  9. Blossom

  10. Hunter

  11. Blossom

  12. Blossom

  13. Hunter

  14. Blossom

  15. Hunter

  16. Blossom

  17. Hunter

  18. Blossom

  19. Hunter

  20. Blossom

  21. Blossom

  Also by Alexis Abbott

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  Hunter

  His muffled, panicked voice tries to cry out through the gag in his mouth as I tighten the robes binding him to the old maple tree. Once the knot is tight and secure, I stalk around the tree, peering at my victim through the eye holes in my ski mask. The last light of day fades behind me as I look into those terrified eyes, and I’m the last thing he sees in daylight before the night swallows us.

  He is afraid, but he isn’t in pain. He deserves pain, but that isn’t how I operate. I’m not a sadist, or some maniac who gets off on torture. I do this because the way I see it, this is the right thing to do. What I’m doing is making the world a better place.

  I look into his wide, bulging eyes as the fading light makes my reflection vanish from his pupils. My victim is a tall man with a clean-shaven face and angular features. He’s skinny, but I know firsthand that he’s stronger than he looks. He’s an accountant. He looks nothing like the kind of monster I know he really is. The real monsters are rarely burly, terrifying men covered in scars and tattoos. The most deadly ones are the ones you’d never suspect.

  “We’re a long way out in the woods,” I say calmly, listening to the sound of his quick, loud breathing. “Hear that waterfall? It’s closer than you think.” I reach for the sheath on my belt and pull out a long hunting knife. The metal makes a soft noise against the leather, and my victim tries to shout and struggle in his bindings. It’s useless, of course. The knots I tied in that rope could hold down a grizzly bear. I twirl the knife in my hand and reach to his face to take hold of the cloth wrapped around his face, holding the gag in.

  “Let’s have a chat,” I say, just as calm as ever, even though the man in front of me is thrashing wildly against the rope. All he’s doing is giving himself rope burns. “You can scream all you want, but nobody’s going to hear you out here. And if they knew what you’ve done, they wouldn’t want to do anything about it anyway.”

  That gets his attention.

  As I hook my fingers under the cloth and bring the razor-sharp knife to his face, I cut it loose, then pull the gag out of his mouth with my gloved hand. I’m dressed in a ski mask, a black sweater, dark jeans, and black hiking boots. I drop the nasty gag, and to my surprise, my victim doesn’t start howling like a wounded animal as soon as he can. He watches me carefully, pale face sweaty and fearful.

  I pull my mask off my face so we can look at each other like human beings, even though I’m not keen on calling him that. Immediately, his eyes start trying to memorize my features. I can almost read his mind, thinking about describing me to the police: a man with somewhat dark skin in his late twenties, brown hair and eyes, muscular, with a very short and trimmed beard, strong jaw and prominent brow, hair shaved on the sides and short on top. He might add broad shoulders and a deep voice that sounds like it’s from somewhere around here upstate.

  “What do you want?” he asks in a tired, scared voice. “Money? I’ve got a lot of money.”

  I don’t answer. I stare into his eyes, searching him, wondering how far he’ll go. After a few moments of silence, he keeps talking.

  “Enough money to set up a guy like you real good. You like girls? I can hook you up with someone nice. Someone who won’t put up a fight. I got a lot of friends who have a lot of handy skills, you know? I-I can make things happen. A lot of things. Is there some girl you’ve always wanted? I can make her yours. Let’s...let’s just talk about this, okay? Hell, I know some people who could put you to work. Make some real money. More than whoever’s paying you for this. Someone’s paying you, right? I’ll double it. You get how this works, don’t you? I pay you more, set you up with someone nice, and we get back at whoever’s pulling the strings here. Make it so nobody ever knows what happened. That sounds good, right?”

  He’s amusing, I’ll give him that.

  His voice gets more desperate with every sentence. He’s grasping at straws, but I don’t think he realizes that. He thinks I’m a hitman, hired by some rival of his to take him out professionally. I’m flattered that he thinks I’m doing professional-grade work, frankly, and if I were, his string of absurd offers might have given me pause.

  Men like him who only care about money will go to any lengths to climb higher on their mountains of vice.

  “Do you...do you get what I’m offering?” he croaks, his voice almost pleading. He’s trying to save some face, and it’s laughable. “You hear me, right?” He pauses, eyes searching mine. “...how much do you know?”

  I crack a smile at that.

  “More than enough,” I say, looking down at the blade of my knife and inspecting the edge. This tool of mine cuts through human skin like butter. I slowly pace over to the small bag I left a few feet away from us when I dragged my victim out into these woods southwest of Ithaca. Stooping down, I pull out a simple folder and open it, approaching him and thumbing through it.

  “You’ve been a busy man, James,” I say. Reviewing the folder in front of him is just for show. I’ve memorized every detail. “You don’t fit the usual profile for your type. Most of you are happy to turn to white collar crime. But no, the second that you realized one of your clients had a hand in moving hard drugs, you wanted in. That’s the kind of blackmail you usually see in hardened mafiosos.”

  His jaw sets as he watches me, and I can tell he’s itching to try to say something to defend himself. But face to face with your own crimes with no justice system to hide under, it’s hard to muster up a defense.

  “You’re not lying about being able to offer me women, though,” I say, raising my glare to him. “You didn’t spend much time helping drug traffickers cover their tracks. You figured out that there’s just as much money in sex trafficking, with the bonus of being able to dip into your merchandise. You liked that. It went well for you, until one of the girls turned up dead.”

  He opens his mouth to say something, but he thinks better of it when he remembers the long knife in my hand. He was pro
bably just about to try to call me a hypocrite for judging him, considering our circumstances. I always find that such a funny thing for these monsters to fall back on.

  “Your mafia connections dropped you like a hot potato after that,” I say, pacing slowly as I read over his crimes. “Let’s be honest, if I hadn’t gotten to you, they probably would have sent one of theirs after you eventually. But you didn’t need the mafia. You’d already learned how to trap women. So you kept playing accountant for desperate people in poor neighborhoods. You found young women who were already desperate, and you took payment any way you wanted. And if they weren’t to your liking, some of them had young daughters that you liked. Very young daughters,” I add, shutting the folder and tossing it back down, approaching him, unable to keep the furious grimace off my face. “Even your own daughter, James? Your own flesh and blood? What’s wrong with you?”

  “Who are you?” he croaks, unwilling to acknowledge the crimes I have on him. “You don’t look Russian. Italian? Who do you work for?”

  I stare at him a long time before my full lips smile faintly.

  “Don’t know whether to be flattered or insulted,” I say as I come to a stop right in front of him. “I’m neither. Just a concerned citizen.” I put one gloved hand on his forehead, pushing it back against the tree and glaring at him in the eyes. “Standing up for the people who can’t stand up for themselves.”

  “So you’re a psychopath,” he growls, straining his eyes to watch me.

  “Not the word I’d use,” I say, “but if you want that to be your last thought, you can have it.”

  Before he can reply, my right hand flashes up faster than the blink of an eye.

  The next second, his eyes go wide, then slowly glass over as he makes a soft choking noise. I’ve plunged my knife straight through his neck to the wood behind him.

  I always strike with surgical precision. It’s quick, clean, quiet, and if all goes well, I sever the spinal cord with a single thrust, ending him quickly and painlessly. Normally, I don’t even let them know what hit them. But I felt like this guy deserved to have his crimes put in front of him before he faces the devil in hell.

  I hold the knife in place as I watch ruby-red blood start to pour from his wound. The groaning of the ropes around him tells me his body has gone limp. He’s dead.

  I leave the knife planted in his neck for a moment. I’ll come back to it soon. I make my way over to my bag and take out the final piece of the scene I’m going to leave for the investigators that show up in a day or so.

  It’s a perfect white lilac, stored in a mason jar.

  I take it out and move back to the victim’s body, and I hold the lilac under the wound before I yank the knife out. Blood runs out from the wound and stains the white petals, tainting them with death. I carefully use the knife to open the victim’s mouth, and I slide the flower stem into it, letting his teeth hold the bloodied flower in place, hanging out of his mouth.

  I take a few steps back and survey my work.

  One of the most evil men in Ithaca hangs limply from his bindings to an old tree up here on a rocky cliff in the woods. It’s all brown and gray and a little leftover green out here, so the white lilac stained with drops of red blood stands out like the centerpiece of a painting on the scene. I have to admit, there’s something beautiful about it.

  I am a killer. That much is true. But I don’t do it for the love of killing. I do it so that people like this man, who trap people, rape women, and destroy lives can’t just walk freely like the rest of us. Men like him sniff out innocence and ruin it.

  That’s why the pure white lilac dipped in blood is my calling card.

  The white lilac is a symbol of youthful innocence and memories, which is all I have left. A victim’s blood stains it. It feels strange to leave a calling card, but it also feels right somehow, in a way I can’t explain.

  I leave the murder scene and gather up my things after carefully combing over the site to make sure there isn’t a scrap of my DNA left to tie me to the crime. I gather up my bag and hike a ways away to an old cave that’s too hard to get to for most vacationing hikers from the college. There, I set down the folder containing my victim’s crimes, the gag I used to bind him, and every other incriminating piece of evidence I have. I strip down naked and add it to the pile before emptying a container of lighter fluid onto the pile. I put on the change of clothes from the sealed bag I brought with me, then strike a match and toss it onto the pile.

  I step back and watch it all burn. I’m now wearing a hiker’s outfit, and if anyone sees me coming out of the woods, I’ll look like just another hiker who spent too much time in nature this evening. Not that anyone will see me up close. My route is carefully planned and shadowy.

  As I watch the fires burn down to nothing but charred ashes and prepare to burn them again until there’s nothing left, I can’t stop thinking about her.

  She’s always on my mind when I make a kill.

  There’s one reason I do this. One reason I strike out into the world to hunt down the sociopathic, evil people who make it a dark place. I don’t relish the act of killing, but I do relish the act of making the world a safer place...all for her.

  My innocence was stolen away, too. Like the snow-white petals of the lilac flower forever stained in red blood before being doomed to wilt away, innocence can’t be taken back. Once it’s gone, that box can’t be closed again. It’s a tragedy that almost all of us must go through, whether we like it or not. For many people, it’s a violent process that leaves you shaken and traumatized for the rest of your life.

  It certainly did for me. My mind races with worries over whether I spent too much time talking to my latest victim, but when it comes to parents abusing their children, it strikes far too close to home for me to resist forcing them to confront their crimes before I end it. I still wake up in a cold sweat sometimes, the sounds of my parents’ angry voices ringing in my ears, moments before one of their hands came down hard on me. That’s something I’m going to live with forever, just like James’s daughter will live with it forever, no matter how just his death is. Abuse is a wound that keeps on bleeding.

  I wonder what that means for me, standing here in a fresh set of clothes and getting covered in the smell of smoke as I watch the last traces of my crime burn before my eyes. Does the question of right and wrong even matter? I don’t pretend I’m a good man. I’m an evil man trying to do good.

  All for her.

  The yellow fire reminds me of her blonde hair. It’s so soft that I can almost feel it against my fingertips again. If I lose myself in the hypnotic sight of the flames, I can almost take myself back to that place I haven’t been with her for so, so long. Her naked body against mine, our warmth together, our lips pressed tight together, her scent in my nose...she is like no other.

  She’s still out there, too. I wonder what she’s doing tonight. I don’t even know where she is. All I can hope is that she’s happy, and the only way I can make that come true is if I make the world a better place...removing one sorry sack of shit at a time.

  All for her.

  All for Blossom.

  Blossom

  “Hi! Welcome to the Lazy Bean. How are you doing today?” I chirp brightly as the next customer in line moves up to the cash register. My cheeks are aching from hours and hours of holding this same plastered, probably unconvincing smile on my face, but I know I have to keep it up for a little while longer. After all, my strict manager is the one on duty today. All day long I’ve felt his prickly presence behind me, hovering while I try to do my job. You would think we’re some high security clearance team working at the Pentagon or something, Marty is so uptight. It’s just an upscale coffee shop, but he runs the place like every latte or pastry order is of life-or-death importance. I guess that’s why he’s the manager and I’m just a lowly barista; he gives way more of a damn than I do. But to be honest, I would be a lot more enthusiastic about my job if I was making much more per hour.

&nb
sp; The customer, a middle-aged woman wearing designer sunglasses indoors (presumably to show off the word GUCCI emblazoned in tiny silver lettering on the frame), scoots up, leans her elbow on the counter, and replies in a conversational tone, “I’m okay, hon. Could be better. It’s awfully windy out there, huh?”

  Ah, great. A chatty Cathy. Just what I need when the line is nearly out the door.

  But I can positively feel Marty’s eyes boring into the back of my head from across the kitchen area behind the counter, so I just hoist the edges of my smile a little bit higher and lean in. It’s just after four o’clock in the afternoon. I just have three more hours left to survive and then I get to go home and spend the rest of the night decompressing from work. And frowning as much as I want to, of course.

  “Oh, is it windy?” I ask. “I haven’t been out there since six-thirty this morning, and it was pretty calm outside then.”

  “Six-thirty?” the woman replies, letting out a low whistle. “Boy, that’s awfully early. You must be one of those natural early-risers. Ha. Not me! I don’t get out of bed before at least eleven, not unless my bed is on fire!”

  She starts cackling at her own joke and I hurriedly force myself to chuckle along with her as she slaps the counter with her palm, apparently just totally tickled by her own sense of humor. She’s a little obnoxious, but I remind myself it could be much worse. She could be a mean customer or a rude customer or an impatient customer. All of which I see every single day here. You’d think handing people delicious beverages would precipitate a more pleasant work environment. I mean, this isn’t the DMV or anything. And if you’re a customer here, especially a regular, then your life must be pretty sweet. Anyone who can afford a six-dollar cup of coffee on a daily basis is clearly operating in a much higher echelon of society than I am. And yet, so many people roll through this cafe in such sour moods every day. I don’t get it. If I had that kind of financial stability and freedom...well, let’s just say I wouldn’t take it for granted.