Unhinged (Necessary Evils #1)(9)
August held up an electric saw, giving a smile even Adam found unsettling. “Found this,” he said, unnaturally cheery given their surroundings. He pulled the trigger and the blade roared to life until he let it go. “It’s cordless.” His mouth turned down in an imagine that expression that probably would have sent most people screaming.
But that was August. He had taken to killing as easily as he’d taken to quantum mechanics. He had a way of compartmentalizing that was almost supernatural. Adam had once watched his brother torture a man for five hours, then strip off his gloves, change his clothes and go give a three hour talk on particle acceleration in magnetic fields.
“What are we supposed to do with that?” Adam asked.
August looked at him like he was stupid. “We have no idea how much of Atticus ended up on our friend here. So we’re going to dismember him, bleach him, package him up in nice little pieces and chuck him into the river with some cement blocks. By the time he floats to the surface, any and all trace evidence should be gone. And then we won’t have to tell Dad that his pride and joy fucked up.”
Atticus plopped his gloved hands on his apron covered hips. “You know, it's not my fault I excelled at everything growing up. Maybe if you had all tried a little harder, Dad could have doted on one of you instead.”
Adam rolled his eyes, crouching beside the body to start undressing their recently deceased serial rapist. “Oh, yes. Please tell us again how being Dad’s favorite is so hard.” Adam got some perverse pleasure out of knowing that the man who’d forced himself on others without their consent was now being stripped and dismembered against his will. Too bad he was already dead.
“It was!” Atticus cried, indignant. “He always expected me to be perfect and to make sure you guys were perfect, too, and we all see how well that turned out.”
Atticus and August looked down at Adam with their patented older sibling superiority. “Oh, fuck you both. I’m sorry I’m not a doctor or an egghead professor. Has it ever occurred to you that I did you all a favor by never applying myself?”
Atticus snorted. “How so?”
Adam grinned. “I half-ass everything and still rise to the top. Imagine if I was using my full potential. I’d leave both of you in the dust. I’m the black sheep by choice.”
August snorted, but Atticus looked like a fish out of water, mouth opening and closing before he sputtered, “You’re a fucking supermodel. What exactly did you intend to ace, Tyra? Smizing 101?” August gave Atticus a smug look. “What? Kendra liked America’s Next Top Model. I know some things.”
Adam wrinkled his nose at the mention of Atticus’s ex-girlfriend. She was a fucking nightmare. A total gold digger who’d descended on the Mulvaney household like a plague, her army of skanks doing their best to land the Mulvaney brothers one at a time like they thought they could clear the board in one shot.
They were definitely barking up the wrong family tree. Half of his brothers liked dick, two of them didn’t care about gender at all, and August…well, Adam was pretty sure he was a fucking android. He couldn’t imagine his brother sticking his dick in anything that didn’t require batteries.
“Look, I’m not saying modeling required the same amount of skill as brain surgery or gene splicing or whatever the fuck you do when you’re in mad scientist mode, but at least I didn’t get a hatchet stuck in the head of a three hundred pound rapist.”
“It’s a meat cleaver,” Atticus and August said in unison.
“Whatever. Can we please get this done? It’s hot as fuck in here and it smells like rotting meat and shit.”
“You’re such a baby,” Atticus muttered.
“You’re such a baby,” Adam mimicked. “Fine. Next time, call Archer. Or Asa and Avi. The murder twins are always down for a little slice and dice,” Adam reminded him with a grunt, straining as he tried to get the man’s shirt off. “A little help here?”
Atticus sighed and August dropped his new toy. Together, the three of them wrestled the man’s clothes off and into a burn bag. August pulled the hose with the spray nozzle from its home on the wall. At least they still had the deserted factory to use in a pinch. As August hosed down the man’s mottled body, Atticus left and went to the van, returning with two bottles of industrial strength bleach, handing them masks and goggles before they uncorked the chemicals.
He was a stickler for the rules.
It was likely overkill, but they couldn’t take any chances. If they got caught, the whole family went down. Mutually assured destruction was the glue that held their fucked up little family together.
“Next time, can we just acid bath a bitch?” Adam asked, dumping the bleach over the corpse, nose and eyes burning despite the proper personal protection equipment.
“Those chemicals leave a paper trail. Besides, remember when Archer tried that and the barrel spilled?”
Adam shuddered. “Yeah, enough said.”
The rest of the job took about three hours to complete. By the time they were done, they were all covered in blood and bone shards. They loaded the now clean pieces into the cooler in August’s car before loading a layer of fish over top. They stripped out of their bloody clothes and took turns blasting each other with the icy hose water. Once they were changed into fresh clothes, they gave the place one more scrub with the bleach and the hose and August dumped the electric saw in a bucket of bleach before closing the place back up.