Page 57 of Infamous
We’re all serial killers in our own quiet ways.
People like to put us in boxes. Mafia. Monster. Savior, depending on who’s telling the story and which side of the river they sleep on. The truth is uglier and simpler. We are all serial killers in the way we repeat ourselves - repeating sins, repeating loyalties, repeating the violence we claim to hate in everyone else.
Scar kills with his rage and reputation; Mason kills with inevitability and a look that makes men obey; Lucky kills with risk and a grin that dares the world to answer him. Me? I kill the part of me that remembers mercy. Bit by bit, I carve away softness until what’s left is efficient, useful, terrifying.
These three men now sit at the table in front of me. Scar. Mason. Lucky. Different sins, same ghosts.
I drop the folder on the table. It hits with a soft, final slap. It’s full of gala photos, hospital memos, patient logs, shipping manifests. Paper that already smells like rot before you read a single line.
“This,” I say, voice flat, “is what’s eating the city from the inside.”
Scar’s eyes are brass, all hard angles. “Start talking.”
I tap the top sheet. “Victor Kellerman. Head of trauma at St. Andrew’s. On paper he’s a saint in a suit - board-certified, donor-chair at every charity gala. Off the record he runs the hospital’s organ traffic hub.”
Silence presses us. Even the ventilation seems too loud as it hisses cold air into the room.
“How certain are you?” Lucky asks, like certainty is currency.
“Short of catching him with a scalpel in his hand, every road points to him. He’s selling body parts quietly, harvesting the expendable: terminal cases, overdoses, the unclaimed. He picked the wrong market with your man Ezio.” I watch their faces. Reactions are the same as ever - hairline fractures.
“Ezio had no blood kin,” Lucky says.
“What he didn’t count on was Ezio’s found family. He didn’t know that he answered to the Gattis.”
Mason’s voice is low, clinical. “How does he move them?”
“Signed cause-of-death reports, third-party clinics, freight runs. Organs hit brokers masked as research shipments, then vanish on manifests tied to export runs.” I slide a printout across. “Procurement receipts, employee rosters, shipping manifests. The kind of receipts that read like somebody built a meat market inside a hospital and left invoices on every slab.”
Scar goes still. Mason’s mouth thins. Lucky swears under his breath.
“I dug through hospital systems,” I say. “Kellerman signed off on at least half a dozen deaths where nothing obvious was wrong. Not mercy killings. Murder. And there’s a trail: clinic fronts, freight lines, shell companies laundering payments. Bank transfers dressed up as medical grants. Someone up top signs the checks; Kellerman is the hand in the theater.”
Scar slaps the tabletop hard enough to make the whiskeytremble. The glass tilts but doesn’t fall. “So he’s the butcher, not the puppetmaster.”
“Exactly.” I push a gala photo of Kellerman across the wood - clinical lights reflected in his gold watch, smile calibrated for donors. “He schedules ‘auto-donations,’ skips next-of-kin searches, routes tissue through clinics that don’t exist on any registry. I flagged account numbers, shell names, a call log tying a clinic to a warehouse in the port district.”
“How close are you to the top?” Mason asks, ash falling from his cigarette.
“Nowhere near,” I tell him. “He covers his tracks like a surgeon sutures a corpse. Squeaky clean.”
Scar studies the manifests, then looks up with the patient ferocity of an animal considering his next hunt. “How deep does this run?”
I bite my lip. There’s a part of this I don’t want to say out loud — because saying it is a promise I can’t always keep. “Deep. Kellerman has privileges at Mercy General. We can’t rule out a second market there. He thinks he’s invisible because arrogance smells like immunity. But we can surely change that.”
“I need names.” Scar’s voice is a flat stone.
“You’ve got routes,” I say. “Clinic fronts, manifests, timestamps. I traced transfers to a broker using legitimate-sounding companies. There’s a customs code tied to a warehouse in the port. Hit the logistics node and the chain peels back. It’ll be messy and loud, but it’ll make associates panic - and panicking people talk.”
Mason snuffs his cigarette with slow, calm hands. “We can’t have public blood. Not after the docks raid. That drew eyes we don’t want.”
“Quiet and surgical,” Scar says, watching me. “That’s our kind of clean.”
“There will be fallout,” I warn. “This runs into hospitals, shipping, money laundering. It won’t die quietly.”
“We’ve done quiet before,” Lucky says. “We can do it again. We hit the clinic, take the warehouse, then eliminate the couriers. Cripple the route. Make Kellerman the example that scares copycats. Then we watch who turns up to his funeral.”
Scar is practical: “He’s a high-profile surgeon. He’ll be missed.”
