“My wish is conditional. If the child dies, it will have been a painful and horrible life for an innocent. I hope my wife dies an equally horrible death, say chained to a bed in some foreign brothel. If the child lives, I’ll see to it we properly take care of the children, until the last is 18.”
The look in Jim’s eyes made me shiver. They were fixed, determined, and quite dead; devoid of any emotion. If I am any judge of character his wife would be better off in the brothel, than several more years with Jim.
My contact asked me for my shoe box. “How full is it? If I may ask.”
“Completely.”
“That is what we expected.”
“Wait a minute, I have wondered what is going on. It was meeting my needs, so I didn’t ask. ‘What we expected’ says there are some of you who are running this and that scares me.”
“Why? Might I ask?”
“Lots of things go on in my little part of the world, every single day. Way too much of it being things I don’t want to be aware of, let alone a part of. Now, I am not so prudish that because a – pardon me – sociopath like our speaker, has made a wish that is probably going to be carried out, I am not joined to him at the hip. But I am closer to him than I want to be.”
“You are afraid you are an accessory?”
I shook my head, “No, not really. I don’t know if Jim is a plant, actually has a wife, etc. I’ll never know what happens to her, if she really exists. You are a different story.”
“Why worry about me?”
He was starting to piss me off, this coy shit was wearing thin, “It is clear to me that I am at the end of the betrayed husbands route. Now, you need some or all of us to join the support group, or whatever you are called.”
“They were right about you. You have what it takes.”
I scowled at him and said as sarcastically as I could muster, “Just what does it take? That I have and you were all so right about my having?”
He threw his head back and laughed. “That.” He paused for a bit and then continued. “You are smart, quiet, aware, and thoughtful. Those are all necessary traits. You are right, of course, there are two halves to this organization. I’ll call them victims and victors.”
I looked at him, it didn’t sound right. “The opposite of a victim is not really a victor, is it?”
“Winners and losers.” He stopped to assess if I was with him. “Between husband and wife, one is a victim the other the victor. Our group doesn’t involve the betrayed, but we call them victors, anyway. That aside, this is getting to be a large group, there is much involved. We have a group who finds betrayed husbands, a group that arranges meetings, a group that plans, and a group that executes the mostly legal revenge.”
“You suggest more questions than you provide answers. I paid a lot of money, but it is a pittance toward the work you described. Are all these people volunteers?”
“I never thought about that. I can’t tell you much because I don’t know much. Everyone I know is a volunteer. I do know there are some who are not, but who and how many, I have no idea.”
++++++
Chuck’s pre-prison life left him with a personal fortune. He was happy to spend some of that fortune avenging the wrongs of cheating wives. His idea of a support group was great. There were plenty of husbands who wanted revenge but lacked the ability or the balls to carry it out. There was also an endless supply of felons, addicts, and other miscreants to execute the crimes. The tricky part was finding someone to create a plan to be executed — a hungry criminal will do anything for money, just not very well.