Wreckage: An Addictive Psychological Thriller Packed with Twists, page 1
WRECKAGE
A PSYCHOLOGICAL THRILLER
J.D. PRATT
ANDREW WOLFENDON
© 2024 Phoenix Flying LLC
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to any actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
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CONTENTS
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Acknowledgments
About The Authors
Also By J.D. Pratt
Last Resort
SCOTT PRATT & J.D. Pratt
Acknowledgments
Kristy
Preface
The Summer Before
Part I
1. Tuesday, April 12
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
5. Five Days Later
1
Ever see that old beer commercial, “Life doesn’t get any better than this”?
That’s what I’m afraid of.
.....
August 23, 2017
If I wasn’t feeling bleak before entering Gauthier’s Shop ‘n Go, I am certainly getting the job done by the time I arrive at the Buddee’s Hot Dog Flavored Potato Chips display and double back toward the Build-It-Ur-Self Nacho Station. Gauthier’s is one of those discount food marts seemingly designed for one purpose only: to crush the human soul. It doesn’t sell a single product that a self-respecting, mentally healthy individual—not that I fit into either of those categories—would consume at gunpoint.
Cereal it is. I grab a box of store-brand Reese’s Puffs, pay the sullen cashier with the nose pimple big enough to be mapped by Hubble, and make for the exit, flushing like a shoplifter.
Cold cereal, dinner of champions.
After scoring some off-season lager to pair with my candy-flavored corn balls, I cruise past the tire and exhaust shops of south Wentworth and park in front of my tired and exhausted house. Well, my parents’ tired and exhausted house; the place I grew up in. Legally it is mine now—I inherited it when Mom died last year and have been living alone there since—but I’ve made zero effort to claim it as my own.
May I just say, nothing makes a thirty-eight-year-old feel more chipper about his life management skills than going to sleep every night in the same bedroom where he deflowered his first Victoria’s Secret catalog.
I am, in case you haven’t picked up on it, battling depression.
Well... battling is a strong word. The truth is, the fight went out of me ages ago. That’s what most people who’ve never been depressed don’t realize: the fight is the first thing to go.
I sit curbside in my vintage Hyundai, staring at the peach-colored, vinyl-sided bungalow and its twenty years of deferred maintenance—waiting, I guess, for it to transform into a sparkling seaside villa in France. When that doesn’t happen, I step out of the car and let my feet start their programmed death-march toward the sagging front steps.
“Hey, douche-weed,” says Clyde Gilchrist, my optimistically muscle-shirt-wearing neighbor, approaching me from his side of our scraggly dividing hedge. The man has a gift for crafting a conversation opener. “Can you do me a favor? Next time you decide to throw a bag of empties in my backyard, can you at least aim for the—?”
I cut him off with a flip of the hand. I’ve never, in fact, thrown anything into his yard—except disdain—but I’m not in the mood for Clyde Gilchrist this fine evening. I jam my key in the door and slip inside. The odor of last night’s Kung Pao Shrimp greets my nose as—
A hard object clubs my Adam’s apple. Feels like a flesh-covered pipe. My cereal box leaps from my hand, and my bottled beer and car keys crash to the floor. My feet try valiantly to continue their forward march as my neck is jerked backwards with a sickening crack of cartilage.
The hard object is a forearm. A muscled humanoid has me in a chokehold from behind. I can feel his biceps twitching and his hot breath in my hair.
My unseen assailant whips my body around in a smooth one-eighty and drags me backwards through the house, face up. I cannot breathe, and my eyes feel as if they’re about to pop their sockets. My feet flail, trying to gain purchase on the bare floor.
What the hell is happening here? Why?
I’m a second-rate computer game artist. I don’t own anything worth stealing—a casual glance around the house would tell you that—and I’ve masterfully engineered my life to be of no real consequence to anyone. Ergo, whoever this guy is, he has the wrong person. The wrong house. The wrong information.
Wrong, wrong, wrong. On every count.
I hope I can convince him of that. Whoever he is.
If only I could pull some air into my lungs.
As he jerks my body into the kitchen, I take absurd note of the black cobwebs dotting the ceiling. I haven’t looked up in years, I realize.
The man’s gym-forged arm forces me down into a kitchen chair, set in the middle of the floor, directly below the ceiling light, interrogation style. He releases the pressure on my neck just enough for me to gulp some air.
Standing in front of my parents’ 1970s Kenmore electric is a second man, smallish in stature, maybe five-seven or so. He’s wearing a Star Wars storm trooper mask. The jaw section has been cut away to expose his real mouth. Perhaps so he can speak and be heard more clearly? A well-trimmed reddish beard rims a set of small, even teeth.
The man wears latex surgical gloves and holds in his hands—almost comically, it seems at first—a branch-cutting tool, the type with two long handles and short, curved scissor-blades.
The pipe-hard arm maintains its lock grip as Storm Trooper addresses me in a soft, precise, and rather high-pitched voice that comes off as almost—but not quite—prissy. “This tool,” he says, holding up the instrument, “is called a lopper. Did you know that? This particular model is a long-handled, high-torque, bypass lopper. It can snip an inch-thick branch off a green tree as easily as slicing cake.”
Storm Trooper lays the lopper on the kitchen table and picks up an iPad. He holds the tablet device about a foot from my face, waits till my freaked-out eyes focus on it, and then taps it awake with a latex-covered finger.
On the viewing screen is a video, cued up and ready to roll. Its frozen image is that of a fifty-year-old man strapped into a metal garden chair, his arms and wrists duct-taped to the chair’s tubular arms. The man’s hands have been left free to move.
Storm Trooper taps the Play icon.
Trooper’s own recorded voice issues from the iPad’s speaker. He’s standing just off screen in the video. “I’ll ask this question once and once only,” Troop’s high voice says to the taped-up man on screen. “Who knows about this besides the woman?”
Video-guy in the chair replies, “I haven’t said a word to—”
Before he can finish his sentence, the open blades of the lopper lunge into view like a snapping turtle’s jaws. They hook the man’s left pinkie and ring finger into their curved bite and lop them off cleanly. A plastic bag is snapped around the man’s hand. He lets out a keening eeeee-eeeee-eeeee of raw agony, as blood streams into the bag and sweat pours from his face. He shouts in the voice of a man whose spinal cord is on fire, “Clarence Woodcock! Clarence Woodcock! Clarence Woodcock! Clarence Woodcock!”
My stomach twists like a wrung dishrag. Storm Trooper shuts off the video, puts down the iPad, and picks up the lopper once again.
“I hope that video was instructive,” he says in his almost-but-not-quite-prissy manner. “The way we work is this: I give orders, you follow them without a moment’s hesitation. Thus, you avoid the lopper. Are we abundantly clear on that?”
I nod. Yes. Abundantly.
“My partner is going to release your neck now. You are to remain seated while he straps you into the chair. Clear?”
Again, I no d. My list of alternatives does not stretch from sea to shining sea.
Chokehold-man wordlessly pats me down and pulls my phone from my pants pocket. He wraps a band of rubbery, self-sticking fabric around my chest and upper arms several times, fastening me to the chair-back. He does the same to bind my rear and thighs to the seat.
“Before we begin,” Trooper says—begin what?—“let me explain something that I hope will put this situation in perspective and enlist your cooperation.” Trooper Dan has my undiluted attention. “If you’ve seen many crime thrillers on TV, you may be thinking that because I am wearing this mask, I do not wish for you to see my face. Which, in turn, you might assume means you have a chance of sauntering away from this encounter.”
I do not want to hear whatever comes out of his mouth next.
“That is a faulty assumption. I wear the mask only out of an excess of caution. You are going to die today, Mr. Carroll. I get no joy out of telling you that, but I don’t define the job parameters.”
Adrenaline rips through every synapse of my nervous system. Not only does this guy know my name—my hopes of this being a case of mistaken identity have fizzled like spilt champagne—but also, he intends to kill me. My heart and lungs pump in triple-time.
“To employ a tired cliché,” says the masked man, “we can do this two ways...”
He pauses. I become aware of a detail I failed to take in before. The kitchen floor is covered with a sheet of clear plastic, Dexter-style. Not a hopeful sign for the protagonist, as a rule of thumb. “Option A—cooperation—is better for all concerned, believe me when I say that, but we will revert to option B without qualm. Option B, needless to say, brings the lopper into play. A testicle sliced in half is a memorable experience, I’m told.” His high, even voice has an almost hypnotic quality. “So... choose an option, Mr. Carroll.”
Does he actually expect me to choose aloud? Apparently, he does.
“Option A,” I say flatly.
“The only choice, really. Still, it’s surprising how often option B becomes necessary. Let’s begin.”
He lays the lopper down again and reaches into a paper bag on the table. His latex-gloved hands emerge holding three items: a plastic bottle of Svedka vodka—my brand, yippee—and two brown plastic prescription vials.
“This is a process I understand you’re familiar with from past experience,” he says. How could he possibly know I OD’d on vodka and pills half a year ago? “As you know, it’s a no muss/no fuss procedure. Pleasant, almost. Though last time you tried it, you didn’t get the job done, did you? Today we’re going to bypass the ‘cry for help’ stage and go straight for DOA.”
He hands me one of the vials. “Your instructions are to take all the pills in both containers, wash them down with the vodka, and then continue drinking the vodka until you are rendered... non-functional. Then, bim bam bom, it’s all over and we leave you to rest in peace.”
I stare at the vial in my hand, knowing I have no choice but to obey the man, but trying to prolong the moment before my fate is sealed. That’s when I register the soft clack-clack of my computer keyboard from the adjacent den—my “office.” Chokehold guy hasn’t left the kitchen, so that means there’s a third member of this rogue Jehovah’s Witness cell.
What have I, Finnian Carroll, low-level computer artist and general life failure, done to merit a three-man criminal operation?
And what do they think they’re going to find on my computer? The missing Snowden files? Yet, pathetically, a sense of violated privacy wells up.
“You’re not going to find anything useful there,” I shout toward the den.
“Oh, we know exactly what’s on your computer, Mr. Carroll,” says Troop. “Trust me. Come on, swallow the pills.”
I pour the contents of vial number one into my palm. Cute little rectangular prisms. Xanax. Close to a hundred twenty of them. My own prescription, as confirmed by the name “Finnian Carroll” on the label. I filled it just two days ago.
I review my options. One tactic might be to fling the pills, scatter them across two rooms. Buy myself some time. Would that result in lopper discipline? Probably not. If these guys are going to all this effort to stage my death as a suicide, the lopper is probably a bluff.
Wasn’t a bluff for the guy in the video, though.
“The pills, Mr. Carroll.” Trooper-man eyes me through the mask, waits precisely two seconds, then turns and reaches for the lopper.
“I’m doing it!”
My hand, filled with pills, flies to my mouth—Chokehold has left my forearms free to do the deed. A few pills miss their target; the majority score a hit. Trooper hands me the vodka. “Drink.”
I take an obedient swig, working the pills down my throat. I swig again. Storm Trooper takes the vodka from me and hands me the second vial of pills. These I recognize too. Diazepam—generic Valium. A script I filled but never used. Ninety blue pills, a three-month supply. Ten-milligrammers. I dump about half of them into my mouth. Troop hands me the vodka to wash them down. I glug away.
I eat the remainder of the pills and wash them down too.
Now it’s just a matter of waiting for the results to come in. So to speak.
Well, this is what I wanted, right?
God, what have I just done?
2
“Drink up, Mr. Carroll,” says Storm Trooper, strutting back into the room.
He has left me alone with Chokehold for a long while, to give the pills time to work their magic and so that he can confer around my computer with thug number three. Choke has been nudging my arm periodically, and I’ve been taking measured sips of vodka, but now Trooper Dan seems eager to step up the pace of my demise.
“Hurry, hurry, faster,” he says, rapping the Svedka bottle with his latexed knuckles. “We don’t have all day. Things to do, Mr. Carroll, things to do.”
Things to do.
For some reason, these three simple words snap me out of the fog of numbness I’ve slipped into. I will never, ever, ever have another thing to do. My thing-doing days are behind me. This stark reality blows through me like a polar wind.
No! I will never dab paint on another canvas. I will never smile at another pretty woman in a summer dress. I will never drink another pint of Arrogant Bastard Ale on the outdoor deck of Pete’s Lagoon on Musqasset Island with my best friend Miles.
I will never again set foot on Musqasset Island, the only place on Earth where I was ever genuinely happyish. I will never again sit on the rocks at Mussel Cove with Jeannie, watching the seals bob in the waves, laughing myself sick.
I will never again make love to Jeannie. (Full disclosure, that customer left the barber shop years ago.)
My thoughts cluster surprisingly around Jeannie, whom I haven’t seen in four years. Why did I let her go so easily? Why didn’t I fight for her? What trivial principle had I been trying to prove? My soul for a do-over! Until this moment, I didn’t even realize I wanted one.
A hot blade of longing stabs my heart. Longing for the life I once held in my hands and failed to embrace, longing for the life I will never have.
Suddenly all my “struggles” of the past year—the half-assed suicide attempt, the endless search for “the right therapist,” the maudlin boozing—unmask themselves as nothing but drama. Posturing. I realize I haven’t really been struggling with depression; I’ve seen what a monster real depression can be. No, I’ve been struggling with disillusionment. Clinical disappointment.
What a child, what an ungrateful tool.
Troop taps the vodka bottle again. I drink.
I mentally replay all the decisions and circumstances that brought me to this place and see the truth of my recent life with the crystalline insight of the soon-to-be-dead.
About four years ago, I left my beloved Musqasset Island to move back home to despicable Wentworth, Massachusetts, from whence I hail. Outwardly, I made the move to care for my mother who had Stage IV bladder cancer, but really, I was just escaping a situation on the island that was too taxing for my poor, pain-averse psyche to handle. The six months Mom was given to live turned into three years, which I “endured” with demonstrated valor, secretly grateful for the excuse it gave me not to make affirmative choices in my own life.
