Trophy 4

“It’s really you, isn’t it?” she asked, sounding both frightened and intrigued, like he’d taken her on a date to a scary movie and the monster had her liable to climb into his lap, letting him be her protector, letting him be all things masculine to her. “The Punisher… oh my God… you’re perfect! Did you bring the skull? Do you take it with you, even? Bet you wouldn’t want to explain it to the guy who runs the X-ray machine. Or do you make a new one in each city you visit? Can I help you make the next one? I’m really good with my hands! I got an A in all my art classes, I could’ve been an artist, honestly…”

“Did you bring the resupply?” Frank asked her, his voice callously cutting through her one-sided conversation.

The military term snapped Agnes into a straighter bearing. “Yeah. Yes. I’ve got it right here!”

She brought down the truck’s tailgate, hopped up, and scurried across the truck bed to where a number of cardboard boxes sat against the cab. She pushed them back to Frank and he opened them up. Inside were old clothes. Frank noticed that most of them didn’t seem to fit Agnes’ goth lifestyle, being colors other than black. He picked through them, quickly turning up some treasure. An HK69 40mm grenade launcher. An HK MP5 submachine gun. A G36 assault rifle. And finally, a Glock .40 pistol.

Frank looked them over. From a cursory examination, they seemed to be in pristine working order. He’d look them over more thoroughly back at base, where he’d service the weapons. But from what he saw initially, Agnes had come through. The Germans made hellacious weaponry and these were in fine condition.

“Where’d you get them?” he asked.

“You know where,” Agnes said. “I told you, I work in the evidence room.”

“And where’d they get it?” Frank stressed.

“Some doomsday prepper. Died of a hernia or something. All ready to fight once the world ended, but not to keep it from ending. No family, so it’s all waiting for the next dispo day. They used to auction stuff like this off—hell, a few cops just took it home.”

“No one’ll miss it?”

“Uh-uh. I replaced them with prop guns… you know, like for movies? They never check ‘em. They just chuck ‘em in the fire. It all burns the same.”

“Good.” Frank was already looking forward to buying ammunition. There would be no restrictions on that, though he’d have to spread his purchases out among several gun stores so as not to raise suspicion.

He wondered: should he get ammo for each gun at different shops, or ammo for all of them in small amounts at every shop?

Agnes was staring at him. Frank recognized her interest. People got intrigued by excesses. The people he’d killed, the way he’d gone about it, even his private tragedy. They were all… excessive. So some took to seeing him as a monster, others as a sex object.

He wasn’t even too surprised. He remembered how his wife had talked about him—tanned and powerful and as expertly fashioned as any statue. A copper Adonis, a giant from a Michelangelo fresco. For some, the scars and even the blood would detract from that. For others, it accentuated his handsomeness. The knowledge that he used those muscles to break, to damage—to punish—excited them.

It was rarely so pure a strain as Agnes regarded him with. Frank had indulged occasionally, for one reason or another. In his partners, he sensed reluctance, hatred, even disgust. Inevitably, those negative feelings fueled their pleasure. He found himself wondering what drug Agnes sought to cut the sex with. Or would she be the rare kind who only wanted the fuck itself?

“You’re going to use those, aren’t you?” Agnes asked. She sounded short of breath. “It’s good that you’re going to. I mean, not just because they deserve to die. Obviously they do. But those are good guns. Really, really well-made machines. It’s not right that they be made and then gather dust and then get destroyed without ever being useful… How are you going to do it, huh? I mean, which do you think you’re going to use first? God, I wish I could be there when you start shooting. I bet those fuckers don’t have anything better than Saturday Night Specials, maybe a few AR-15s just because they look cool when they’re all in black, but I doubt they do any maintenance on them. I didn’t do any on those, I thought you’d probably want to do it yourself, you’re probably really good at it by now, I wouldn’t want to mess them up by doing it some way you don’t like. What kind of bullet are you going to use? Armor-piercing? Do you think they’ll be wearing body armor? Or hollow-point? I hear blood gets everywhere when you’re using hollow-point.”

“I need to go,” Frank told her. ‘You should too. It might be a good idea for you to go visit a relative.”

“I don’t have any relatives. I grew up in an orphanage. Sorta like the guy who bought all these guns, only he had a lot of disposable income. They don’t pay us that much at the evidence lock-up. They don’t even let us take anything home, even when it’s, like, a mug…”

Frank started to speak, but Agnes cut him off; he couldn’t remember the last time he’d been interrupted.

“Anyway, I can’t leave, you can’t send me away, it would look suspicious. And just imagine knowing that you’re out there, in the same city I’m in, doing your thing! I can’t leave when that’s going on! It’s the most exciting thing that’s ever happened to me! What if I drove past some crack house you took down and saw all the guys you shot, shot with the guns I gave you, their heads blown off and their blood flying everywhere!? My heart’s pounding just thinking about it!”

She did seem to be developing rosy cheeks, a red flush making its way through the white make-up she’d coated herself with. Her eyes were lit up the same way, flashing with flecks of green he hadn’t noticed before. Her chest rose and fell, bringing her large breasts to even more prominence, as she sucked in breath to feed the demands of her racing need.

“I bet at least one of those guns gets you a pink mist. Like in a kung-fu movie, you know, when a guy gets cut and the blood just spritzes out of him like roach spray? Does that ever happen? Like if you plug a guy right in the artery? Does it hang in the air like a, like a misty morning? God, shit, please tell me, Frank--!”

He knew what she needed. What she couldn’t admit to. Even saying his name had her looking abashed, although whatever embarrassment she felt couldn’t hold a candle to her sick want. A desire that had to be expressed. This bitch was drawn to death and she saw him as the Grim Reaper.

He didn’t dare let her leave unsatisfied. Her lust for him could easily curdle into betrayal. But if he mollified her, it would firm his hold on her, keep her loyal, make her more tractable to him.

Frank’s erection was rock-hard, like an animal straining at the leash. He told himself that his body was that responsive, that it anticipated his commands. But he couldn’t ignore the possibility that as sick as this freak was, he too was sick enough to enjoy feeding her paraphilia.

Sex and death. There seemed to be no separating the two for people like them.

He drew up close to her, his six and a half feet of height dwarfing her petite body. She whimpered. Fearing what she craved. Frank reached down the front of her skirt and felt first her panties, then under them. Her pussy itself felt freshly shorn. Totally hairless. Nothing greeted his fingers but wet and flesh.

She gasped, loud and sharp.

“Frank… Frank… I’m sorry for being such a slut, Frank… I thought I’d be cool about it, but I saw you picking up those guns, God, like a part of you, and I knew you were going to use them when they’re mine, my guns, oh fuck—” Agnes’s eyes crossed. “I put the Glock in my pussy, Frank, but I would’ve come so much harder if I’d known you were gonna hold it like that…”

Frank did more with his fingers. Agnes gasped even louder. And she gasped again and again, her eyes rolling crazily, moving like a magician’s card trick between the whites of her eyes and her matte-black greasepaint. She was so exuberant that it was hard to tell when she was at her peak, but Frank got a pretty good idea when she tightened on his fingers, her hand flying down to grab him at the wrist and keep him doing what he was doing.