Trying to Understand the Monster

The others listened as Gavin relayed that Shawn had asked Grace if she had anything on Detective Joan McClane, or if she didn’t, to find something. Grace had answered in the affirmative, that she did have some dirt on the detective and would send him the information, though that was all Gavin knew. He wasn't aware of what that information was or how Shawn would use it against the detective, though he could easily imagine, just as the others could, that Shawn would use it to protect himself from the law. He had no idea though, and couldn’t possibly fathom, that Joan in fact had made her own deal with the devil.

“Shit,” Kurt growled, wishing he had something else to throw. “So, we can’t expect the police to do jack-shit about this then.”

“She’s only one police officer though, right?” Brandon noted, looking for some hope. “Even if he has something to use against her, he can’t **** the entire ARPD.”

“He doesn’t have to. If Detective McClane is the lead investigator, then she’ll have the means and influence to direct the men beneath her, and keeping them from looking too closely at anything that might draw unwanted attention to Shawn.” Kendra argued, leaning back against a nearby wall with her arms folded.

Victoria made a few gestures, which Kurt interpreted as “Maybe she’ll do the right thing?” Victoria nodded to confirm, which led Kurt to concede, “Yeah, I suppose we are at the mercy of the Detective’s integrity.”

Kendra made an incredulous face, but it was Gavin who replied, “How much integrity can she have if Grace has dirt on her? Or if she went to Grace for herself? We don’t what she did or what she’ll do to keep it secret.”

Nodding in agreement, Kurt said, “I guess we’ll know if there’s no news reports of the Detective getting fired or investigated.”

“Then why don’t we just do her job for her?” Trent insisted, getting a little tired of all the talking and no action. “If he hacked the newspaper, he was probably in the building, right? Someone must have seen him. If there’s a witness that can put him there, then it doesn’t matter what Shawn has on the detective. She can’t ignore evidence like that.”

“There are a lot of ways that can go wrong,” Kendra told him, frowning. “It wouldn’t be the first time that an inconvenient witness got removed from the picture. It doesn’t even have to be by lethal means. While Shawn has Grace in his pocket, he can find dirt on the witness and pressure them to recant their statement, which puts us right back at square one.”

“Grace also mentioned the fact that, in legal terms, she’s the bigger fish to fry. If he gets arrested, he’ll simply offer them her in exchange for his freedom, or at least a lesser sentence,” Gavin added, leaning back stiffly, his body still sore from being tased and dragged around. “We only just noticed her activities with Hannah and Shawn, but Grace has been at this for over a year. Think of all the criminals she’s helped, and the things she’s done. At best, he’ll get a slap on the wrist, while Grace’s goose will be cooked, and we’ll still have a problem.”

“Then maybe she deserves what she gets too,” Trent suggested with a shrug, still not having forgiven her for her mean words earlier.

“Grace isn’t a problem for us. Shawn is,” Kurt reminded him “Besides, if Grace is so useful to him, then maybe he won’t give her up straight away. If he’s got dirt on the detective too, he could always trade a dirty cop for a commuted sentence. Shit…” he swore again as he rubbed his head. “What are our options then? What’s left?”

“It’s obvious, isn’t it?” Brandon said, looking around at their oblivious faces. “We kill the bastard.”

“Kill…” Kurt swallowed as he ran a hand through his short blonde hair. The word just sounded so definitive and all-consuming. It was, by its very nature, designed to be final. If there was ever anyone who deserved to die, it was Shawn, but doing it like this, outside of the law, outside of governmental approval, wasn’t killing. It was ****. If they did that, the blood would be on their hands. There had to be another way yet, they just hadn’t found it. “That’s…uh…a bit too far.”

Brandon balked. “Too far? For a piece of shit like Shawn? He deserves the **** penalty but if the law isn’t going to work with us, then maybe we need to take it into our own hands. It’s not even a matter of means, just opportunity.”

“You’re talking about that stupid gun in the storage room,” Kurt turned away in disbelief, shaking his head. He turned back and said, “We don’t even know if it works and you want to go shooting up the place on some half-cocked whim in the name of justice.”

“I’m sorry,” Kendra interjected, asking the question that everyone else wanted to know. “There’s a gun.”

“Down in the storage, beneath the deck. We found it in a box, but it looks old, like civil war old. But with everything going on with Shawn, this is precisely why we didn’t mention it, in case anyone got any stupid ideas like this one,” Kurt explained, shooting glances at Brandon who was growing annoyed. He turned completely to the footballer player and asked, “Even if you have the gun, how exactly do you expect to find him?”

“She has to have some idea where to find him, or his usual haunts,” Brandon said, gesturing towards Kendra. “Or we wait for him to make another mistake. I mean, he kidnapped you instead of Gavin, and then Grace taking Gavin to him allowed Trent to follow. If we’d have been a bit faster, we’d have caught him, and if I had a gun, he’d be dead for sure. He’s sloppy, and…”

“No, he’s not,” Kendra corrected him quickly. She shook her head as she tried to think of the words to describe what Shawn ‘was’. “He’s calculated, but he’s not meticulous. He wants to be in control, but its not about lining everything up so that it falls in a particular, pre-determined path, he just enjoys being able to predict people’s actions and motives. People who get caught up in the details, who plan and need everything to go to plan, the moment something goes wrong, they fall apart. They break down and lash out. But that’s not Shawn. If something goes wrong, he’ll just roll with it and make it work for him. Just look at what happened with Gavin today.”

“He obviously didn’t plan for me being there today, but he certainly made it work to his advantage,” Gavin admitted, grimacing as his bruised face still ached. “But he did get mad initially. When he thought that Grace was trying to trick him.”

“It’s true he doesn’t like to be underestimated, and he doesn’t like to misplace his trust. He was livid when he found out that I didn’t get rid of Victoria’s yoga pants,” Kendra agreed, and added, “It’s not about the plan, it’s about people. People he can trust, people he can predict, people he can use.”

“Okay, so you know him so well then, what’s the plan?” Brandon demanded following a deep breath. “How do we get this guy without killing him?”

“I already told the girls my plan.” She lifted herself from the wall and pointed at the blonde, green-eyed girl opposite. “You’re gonna have to use Victoria as bait and you’re going to need Shawn to think that he’s already won.”

“No way,” Kurt said immediately. “I’m not even going to pretend to give that bastard anything. One wrong move, and we fail, and he gets Victoria, again.”

“I can’t.” Brandon agreed, clenching his fists. “I can’t be in the same room as him without smashing his face in. It’d never work.”

“Then he’ll get her eventually anyway. He’s expecting you to close ranks, expecting the men to protect the women, while he continues to get exactly what he wants. Think about who he’s used already. Victoria, Madison, Grace.” She looked around at Kurt, Brandon and Gavin as she said their names. “If you don’t do something, it’ll continue. He’ll wear them down until they make the choice for you, and give themselves to him, just to stop the torment.”

Victoria shook her head and took a step back, wondering if that was really her future, to sacrifice herself, her body to Shawn, to save everyone else. She didn’t want to do it. She didn’t like who she became when she was that close to the darkness, but if it was for her friends, the old and the new…would she do it? Could she lie with the devil to give them a slice of heaven? She shook her head again, not even wanting to think about doing such a thing.

Gavin knew what Kendra was saying was true from first-hand experience. Grace had knelt before Shawn and sucked his cock for his benefit. Not entirely, since she was also protecting her father’s name, but she had pleaded with Shawn to stop punching him and then sucked his cock. It wasn’t difficult to see the correlation. It was simply a matter of how far Grace would be willing to go to protect him. Would she really be willing to go all the way? To serve him, to fuck him, if it was in exchange for Gavin’s peace of mind? He couldn’t imagine the strong-willed Grace Smith being subservient to anyone, but then he never expected to see her deepthroat a cock in front of him either.

Unfortunately, these heavy thoughts were only making the teen feel even more tired, and giving him a headache on top of that. He pushed himself up from the couch, unsteady and wobbled slightly. Trent moved forward to keep him upright.

“Well, if that’s all, I’m going to go rest a little,” Gavin announced, and began slowly making his way to the bedroom, with Trent following close behind, like a loyal little puppy.

Kurt nodded, allowing him to go, since he didn’t have any more questions about what had happened at the warehouse or after. He now only had questions about what they could do to prevent Kendra’s vision from becoming a reality. But it certainly felt like they were running out of options. But it also made Kurt wary of making any more moves without thinking about the consequences. Every action they’d taken so far had resulted in Shawn coming out ahead. Their victories had always been minor compared to Shawn's psychological wins. Nothing they did seemed to faze him.

He felt something tug on his arm, and turned to see Victoria, pulling on him like a child to get his attention. She cocked her head down the hall, motioning for him to follow as she walked away, her hips and perfect ass swaying with every footstep. Even with everything else going on, he couldn’t help but appreciate the perfect body of the blonde as he dutifully followed her down the hall.

“Guess I’ll do something more useful than dash everyone’s hopes and get started on lunch,” Kendra joked depreciatively with herself.

“I’ll help,” Brandon offered, the only one left after everyone else had paired up and parted ways.

When he entered the kitchen, he saw Kendra leaning over the counter, reaching into the bread bin. She so often went under appreciated compared to a lot of the other girls in the cabin, but seeing her then with her slender legs, long and straight, pushing her perky ass out as she bent over, Brandon couldn’t deny that she was absolutely beautiful in her own right. And with that dark hair cascading over her face, and two big, brown eyes looking at him as she looked over her shoulder back at him, she almost reminded him of another brunette that he’d been trying not to think about.

“I don’t disagree with you, by the way,” She said, straightening up with the loaf in her arm.

“Disagree?” Brandon shook his head as he was pulled away from the fantasies of doing to the hot body in front of him all the things he’d done with his sister, like fucking in a sleeping bag in the backseat of the car, or in front of the smoldering embers of the campfire under the crisp morning sky. “Don’t disagree with what?”

“You were right about killing Shawn,” she reiterated. “The only way we’ll stop him for good, is if we stop him dead.”