No Good Deed

Prologue

The screaming child went ignored by the people in the parking lot as they unloaded their shopping carts and turned a blind eye to the boy’s cries. A horrible crime was taking place in front of them, and they chose to ignore it.

The twisted man had his routine down pat. Inside the store, he’d surreptitiously punched the child in the stomach and knocked the air out of him. Then he dragged his victim out the door by the arm, just the way a parent of a misbehaving toddler might do. When the child regained his voice and started to scream, the man scolded him in a calm voice.

“That’s enough out of you! Now be quiet, or you won’t get any dessert tonight.”

The child kept screaming and kicking the ground. The man came to his vehicle, a ’71 black-over-white Cadillac with a dented bumper, and dug out his keys. He popped the trunk and lifted the child off the ground by the back of his shirt.

“If you don’t shut up, I’ll throw you in,” the man threatened.

The trunk’s interior was lined with carpet. On it lay a collection of rusted tools, including a shovel and a machete. Seeing them, the child stopped crying.

“That’s a good boy,” the man said.

The child was fixated on the machete. He had seen landscape crews in his neighborhood use them to prune trees. They were dangerous, and they scared him. “Please don’t hurt me,” the child whispered.

The man laughed under his breath. He didn’t mean for the child to hear him, the sound born out of the sickest of impulses.

But the child did hear him, and screamed even louder.