Page 58 of So Bleak

“You wanna die?”

She chuckled and poured two black cups of coffee for them. It was Michael who had first gotten her to take the stuff black. She used to enjoy fairly sugary drinks, but after working with him for years, she had slowly come around to enjoying the taste of the pure beverage.

She handed him his cup, and he didn’t even wait for it to cool. She watched incredulously as he sipped greedily. “How do you not burn yourself?”

“The burn is part of the enjoyment,” he explained. “That, and I’ll nod off in front of my computer if I don’t wake up soon.”

“I know how you feel,” she said, taking her own seat. “If only we could all be Turk.”

They both glanced at the dog, who slept soundly on the floor in front of the couch, uncaring of the noise the two of them were making.

“If I die, I hope I come back as a well-loved dog,” Michael said. “I could spend my days getting belly rubs, eating and playing, scaring delivery drivers. It would be wonderful.”

She stopped with her own coffee cup halfway to her lips. “Delivery drivers.”

“Yeah, you know. How dogs always bark at delivery men. I used to have trouble growing up with drivers not wanting to leave things at our house because our dogs—”

“That’s it!”

Michael blinked. “What’s it? Dogs?”

“No! Delivery drivers! These four have different mailmen, but a delivery driver from a parcel service could have gone to all four of them.”

Michael’s eyes widened. “Holy shit. You’re right.”

They forgot all about their coffee as they both opened websites. “I’ll check Amazon,” Michael said. “You check Fedex and UPS. We’ll start with those three and work our way down to the smaller carriers.”

They worked in silence, both of them intensely focused now that they had renewed hope. The big three didn’t have any drivers that delivered to all four of them, but when Faith looked through food companies, she found a driver for Food2U, a local online food delivery service, who had visited all four victims.

And had delivered packages to them within a week of each victim’s death.

“Michael!” she cried. “I have someone!”

“Who?”

“Tyler Grant.”

CHAPTER TWENTY SIX

Tyler sifted a small handful of pellets into the tank. The fish quickly swam up to grab the meal, blissfully unaware of the fact that they were doomed to die at the same hand that fed them.

“You know, I can only feed them these pellets every now and then,” he commented. “I have to make sure they eat the snails. These are more like vitamin supplements than actual meals.”

He followed that up by dropping several snails into the tank. He had to source these snails carefully, ensuring that they were wild caught from areas rich in the plankton that consumed the bacteria that ultimately provided the tetrodotoxin used to poison his victims.

“It’s an involved process,” he explained. “And very expensive. I’ve had to set up an investment account to earn the money needed to purchase these fish and ensure they’re properly fed. See, the fish themselves don’t have the venom. It’s the bacteria. The bacteria in the water where they live produce it as a defense mechanism. Or they used to anyway. Nowadays, so many creatures have evolved with immunity to the venom that it’s basically useless to the bacteria. Then again, they’re bacteria, so they’re everywhere. It’s not like they’re going to go extinct.”

He picked up the fish net and looked through the fish, which were now busily eating the snails. “Anyway, plankton eat the bacteria, and snails eat the plankton. Then the puffer fish eat the snails, and the toxin accumulates in their bodies, specifically the liver. That’s the organ I extract the toxin from.”

He dipped his net and pulled out a fish. It quickly sucked in air, ballooning to several times its size, not realizing that it wasn’t a predator’s mouth it was caught in but a tool used by a creature unfathomably more intelligent than it was.

“I have to process it,” he continued to explain. “Tetrodotoxin is commonly known. Hell, anyone who watches Animal Planet knows what it is now. Not to mention that so many people get sick from it that it’ll show up on a tox screen as bright as meth will. So I tweak it a bit. It won’t last forever, of course. I’m not a fool. My freedom will come to an end eventually. But I’ll get you first. I’ll get a lot of you. I’ll slake my thirst for revenge in full before the Miracle Agent and her Wonder Dog get me.”

He turned to Gina Torres and smiled. The poor woman was shaking with terror. Her caked-on makeup ran in ugly rivulets down her cheeks, and her eyes were swollen and puffy with irritation from the makeup that had run into her sclera. God, it looked so ugly. It was a shame because she really was a pretty girl.

Oh well. She wouldn’t be pretty for much longer.

“You know why I’m doing this, right?” he asked.

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