9.
Jarvis: Regret
Lieutenant Reginald Jarvis had informed his secretary that he was to receive no calls or interruptions. Ordinarily, this would have meant that he was working feverishly on some aspect of the Project, but today he found himself simply staring at nothing. Occasionally his eyes would move to the files on his desk. Two dossiers and a coroner's report lay in an untidy pile.
The Kowalczyk girl was dead. Her body had been discovered two days ago in the bowels of Seti Station, after she'd been missing for almost a week. Her erstwhile protector had caught up with with her and tortured her to death.
He didn't need to open the file at this point. The images and the coroner's descriptions were burned into his brain.
My fault, he thought with anguish. All my fault. Never should have put the tracer in her.
Somehow Riddick must have detected the chip. It had been cut out of the girl's arm and put in her mouth, in the age-old traditional warning against people who turned State's Evidence. And that was probably the gentlest thing that had been done to her.
The body had been barely recognizable as human when it was found, but the dental and tissue type records had matched almost instantaneously. The authorities on Seti Station had been on the lookout for Audrey "Jack" Kowalczyk already. The whole time, that damned chip had been signaling that she was somewhere on the station, but it took a drunken janitor to find her.
It wasn't supposed to go down like this, he thought again futilely. Riddick should never have been able to detect the tracer, for one thing. The fucking device was supposed to be invisible to all available scanners! But there it was in a little baggie on his desk, still smeared with the girl's blood.
She'd been raped repeatedly, according to the report. Semen samples had shown a positive match with Riddick's DNA. Worst of all, the free histamine tests had shown that every single wound had been inflicted while she was still alive.
He wasn't supposed to be this unstable, Jarvis protested mentally, his eyes moving to the thick dossier that covered the life of RIDDICK, RICHARD B. They said his psychosis had passed!
There was no denying, however, the animal savagery of Riddick's latest and cruelest transgression. The poor kid had been devoted to him and he'd gutted her like a fish. It was a crime that surpassed even his earliest atrocities as a teenager.
Had the psychosis returned? If it had, the whole Project was in jeopardy. There were eleven operatives who might be similarly ticking time-bombs.
He wished he could just order the kill, but the Board was still adamant, even in the face of this latest debacle. The Kowalczyk girl was nothing to them, just a disposable tool that might have led them to their quarry, but hadn't.
He was the one who had to live with the guilt. He was the one who had to cope with the knowledge that he'd sentenced her to live out her final months in a flea-bitten dive before her life was snuffed out in an ordeal of terror and pain.
She'd been an amazing person, really. He'd desperately wanted to recruit her, to give her the training such sharp intelligence deserved. In time, he would have brought her into the Project, revealing the hidden truths about her old friend and the Tribunal's plans for him. Jarvis was sure that, once she'd been given full disclosure, she would have wholeheartedly assisted him in bringing Riddick back in...
It would never happen, now. She was dead and the "truth" about Riddick was in question. But the board wouldn't let him hit the purge button, not yet.
He cursed himself for authorizing Saunders to forward Mason's job offer to the girl. It had seemed ideal at the time -- they'd let her hook up with a shady character, then catch her in the act of committing a smuggling offense. She'd be trapped in their web, finally, faced with either hard time in a real prison or the deal they kept trying to hand her.
But she'd never made it as far as Mason. Riddick had found her first.
Did she run to him? Was she happy to see him at first? When had her joy at their reunion been dashed aside by his animal cruelty? Had she even understood why he'd turned on her?
Jarvis was amazed to realize that his face was wet.
He picked up the small, woefully-thin file on Audrey Jacqueline Kowalczyk and leafed through it, perusing the photos. There was one that had always stuck in his mind... where was it?
Here. It was a candid shot, taken a month before her release, while she was on a field trip with some of the other well-behaved girls in the shelter. Even though it was only a picture of her face, he knew the whole story behind it.
She'd been at the zoo, walking from exhibit to exhibit. Finally she had found the Jaguar paddock. There had been trouble a few hours earlier -- one of the keepers had been injured. The male jaguar was now confined in a tiny cage, chained and muzzled.
She'd watched him for three hours. When their hidden observer had snapped her picture, he'd caught her mood perfectly. Such compassion and empathy in her face, unlike the careful deadpan she usually wore. Such feeling for the suffering of a caged, restrained, supremely dangerous beast.
Had she seen Riddick in the jaguar?
Had she found the jaguar in Riddick when they were reunited? Had it found her?
He pulled the photo out of the file and spent several minutes gazing at it. Then he turned and opened a little-used drawer in his desk. He'd put his ex-wife's photo, frame and all, into the drawer when she'd left him six years ago and hadn't bothered to look at it since. Now he removed the photo from the frame and slid Jack's picture in. He set it on his desk.
From now on, her mournful eyes would watch over him.
Tossing his ex-wife's picture into his wastebasket, he made himself a solemn promise. Approval from the Board or not, he would never let another opportunity to kill Richard B. Riddick go by unused.
Even if it destroyed his career, he was going to avenge the death of Audrey "Jack" Kowalczyk.
10.
Riddick: On The Job
He had been crouched in the alley for three hours already, patiently awaiting his quarry. The man would come eventually.
He'd taken advantage of the "downtime" to think about his current situation and the last week of his life. He was going to have to make some changes, he realized. His usually-meticulous plans were in severe danger of coming unraveled if he wasn't careful.
Not that he blamed Jack in any way. It wasn't her fault she'd grown up; it certainly wasn't her fault that she'd turned into someone he wanted to fuck. She seemed completely oblivious to his growing distress, which was both a good and a bad thing.
That stupid tickle session had been his first real warning of how profoundly things had changed. She'd shrieked in mock-fear and run from him, as she had years ago, letting him corner her and tickle her until she was breathless. It had been an old game of theirs, a completely innocent one. He hadn't been at all prepared for the sudden surge of lust he'd felt when he'd really looked at her gasping, prone body below his. It had taken every ounce of his self-control to prevent things from getting completely out of hand, and to keep her from knowing how close to the edge they'd gone.
They'd finished their breakfast without further incident and he was recovered by the time they were done.
Thing was, he was pretty sure she didn't feel it. She seemed blithely unaware of any sexual subtexts that appeared; all the more reason for him to keep himself under control. He was a lot of things but he was no rapist, and Jack was far too precious to him anyway. He had no intention of hurting her.
He really should have seen this coming. He'd always known she was going to be a beauty, hadn't he? He'd figured that eventually he'd be stuck beating back the wolves from her door, but he'd never realized that he'd be one of them.
The bathroom had been their next problem. He hadn't lived with anyone for four years and his habits were a bit lax. Jack, meanwhile, was accustomed to sharing facilities, but only with other girls. They'd embarrassed each other several times before they got the rules straight. Bathrobes on at all times on the way to and from; door closed when the room was in use, always. Riddick had never been particularly body-conscious, and Jack didn't seem to be either, but it had to be done this way or he was going to end up doing something he was sure both of them would regret.
The newest rule had been imposed just this morning. Jack had had a violent nightmare the night before and her screams had wakened him. He'd rushed into her room and gathered her into his arms so quickly that he didn't realize at first that she was every bit as topless as he was. The only thing separating their upper bodies had been the thin, sweat-soaked sheet from her bed.
They'd had a heavy argument about it in the morning. Riddick still couldn't bring himself to tell her the real reason he didn't want her wandering around half-naked, so he'd retreated into a plausible, convenient excuse.
"You need to be ready to pick up and leave at a moment's notice, kid," he'd told her. "We won't necessarily get much warning before we have to vacate. You remember that from before. So you'd better be ready to head out in whatever you have on. And naked ain't inconspicuous."
It had backfired on him a little; now he had to wear an undershirt to bed, too. He really hated doing that.
He snapped back into alertness as a silhouette appeared at the end of the alley. Was this his man? Nah... just some kid lighting up... Guy wasn't due yet, anyway.
Tomorrow he would be checking Jack into the Regen clinic, which would give him a few days to get a little perspective. They'd still do their breakfasts; he'd promised her that. He'd be at the clinic every morning at 6 a.m. and they'd spend their traditional hour together over eggs and toast or whatever godawful food the clinic provided. She'd be bedridden for a week after the process began. It would be an excellent time for them to continue their re-acquaintance without any dangerous subtexts.
And his nights would belong to him, again. He had some serious plans for them, too.
First, though, this little piece of business. If he wasn't mistaken, his mark was approaching.
Yes, the man entering the alley was Benicio Godot, the drug dealer he'd been hired to kill. No bodyguards with him, either. This was way too easy. He'd hoped for more of a challenge, he realized. Bodyguards, body armor, weaponry, something.
Instead, all he had to do was rise to his feet as Godot passed and slide his shiv into the man's Sweet Spot. He stepped away as blood fountained out from the man's back. He'd hit the artery spot-on. The man crumpled soundlessly to the pavement.
Sighing, he cleaned his shiv off on the man's pants leg. Too damned easy. Jobs like this were the equivalent of found money to him.
He waited a few minutes until the body began to cool, then removed the man's thumbs as requested and put them into a plastic bag. Time to go collect his pay, and then get back to Jack. She'd be horrified if she knew what he had done, but he didn't plan on telling her.
"Never tell me," she'd said once, years ago. "I don't want to have to think about that stuff. I know you do it, but I want to be able to pretend you don't."
He still honored her request. He was actually fairly particular about the jobs he took; he only X-ed out crime kingpins. He wouldn't touch their families. He never took contracts on women or children. His first preference was to take contracts on people who were as dangerous as he was, but those were hard to come by. He'd been offered his own contract once or twice, something that never failed to amuse him.
But Jack would never know anything about these jobs. In his current guise, she wouldn't recognize him anyway.
He was wearing his Stan Kaplan disguise today. There really had been a Stan Kaplan once, who hadn't been a bad slice artist, until the day he'd gone after Riddick and met his untimely end. Riddick had held onto the man's papers and had slowly arranged to assume his identity. Now he performed his periodic hatchet jobs under that name. Just enough to keep Stan alive in everyone's minds and keep his coffers full.
"Stan Kaplan" entered the lobby of the Richelieu building and headed over to the bank of antique-style elevators. He rode up to the eighth floor and entered a small, unmarked door at the end of the hall.
The secretary inside smiled at him, seeing a green-eyed, sandy-haired man with a very deep tan and an expensive suit. Some millionaire playboy who spent all of his time on resort beaches, that's what Stan Kaplan looked like, when he wasn't out slumming. Layers and layers of truth, each more dangerous than the last. Below the millionaire playboy lurked a seedy hatchet man. And below the hatchet man lurked the most feared man in the galaxy.
Sometimes he thought it was the layers of deception that entertained him most, and were the reason he continued with the disguises at all. He smiled back at the secretary, enjoying how completely she was taken in by his appearance.
She motioned him to go through the inner door and he did so. Now he was in Vincenti's office.
"Got your package," he announced without preamble.
Vincenti was a man of few or no words, just like him most of the time. The man just held out his hand for the bag. Riddick turned it over. He waited in silence while Vincenti ran the thumbprints through a scanner. When the confirmation came up, the crime lord nodded in satisfaction.
"Very good, Mr. Kaplan. Most impressive. Would you have time for another assignment?"
"Sorry, I'm afraid not. I have some family business to attend to."
Vincenti merely raised an eyebrow. It was a statement that could be taken a myriad of ways. After a moment, however, he simply shrugged and let it go. He reached down and drew a briefcase out from under his desk. Opening it, he withdrew an encoded credit chip. "Your fee."
Riddick nodded, giving a tight smile. "Thank you. It was a pleasure doing business with you."
Vincenti nodded back to indicate that their meeting was over. Riddick turned and left.
He went immediately to the nearest cred machine and plugged in the card, starting his fee on its long, round-about journey to its ultimate destination -- his carefully-hidden accounts. Once the card had been emptied of value he broke it in half and pocketed it.
An hour and two disguises later, he disposed of his Kaplan costume, including the broken card, in the bowels of a foundry. Now he could head home to Jack. And now her operation was paid for in full.
Blood money, sure. But she'd spilled enough of her own for him already. He owed her. If she asked, though, he was going to tell her he'd been watching a play at a local theater.
He even knew which one he'd claim he'd seen.