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Barry opened his eyes and immediately regretted it.
He didn’t know where he was, only that it was completely encased in plastic. How wasteful, he thought. Sally had been on a recycling kick lately and she’d been training him to dutifully sort through the trash, separating landfill from biodegradables, paper from cardboard. They were even talking about starting a compost heap. He had been looking forward to finding out what exactly that was. He thought Sally would be pleased to know that she had taught him to consider environmental sustainability even in a situation like this.
Speaking of which - what the hell was this situation? The last thing Barry remembered was getting in his car to drive to acting class. He wondered what Sally, Gene, and the rest would think when he never showed up.
He was aware of a rustling noise coming from somewhere above his head. He tried to look up, only to find that he could hardly turn his head at all due to the strips of plastic holding it in place. He tried to remove the plastic, only to find that his hands were plasticked down quite securely, too.
Fantastic.
He cast his mind back to his military training to see if he could remember learning anything about how one should defend oneself when one can’t move a muscle. Nothing. Well, actually, Barry supposed there was one thing: psychological warfare tactics. Unfortunately, that had always been a weak spot of his. Deception, manipulation, and covert maneuvers simply weren’t in his nature. Obedience—now that was where he excelled.
The source of the rustling sound was revealed when a man wearing a leather butcher's apron leaned into his narrow field of vision. The last time Barry had encountered a stranger in a leather apron, it had been a Chechen man named Vascha who tortured Fuches in a garage by filing his teeth. Come to think of it, Barry had been tied up that time, too. What was it with leather aprons and forced captivity? Was that some kind of classic pairing he wasn’t aware of? If so, why were they even allowed to sell them?
At that time, Vascha had been quite accurately described as “self-consciously scary.” This man was different. If anything, he looked self-consciously ordinary. A young, fit, handsome dude with a tan, sun-bleached shaggy hair, and a couple days’ worth of scruff. Barry would have pegged this guy for a surf instructor sooner than a kidnapper/torturer. Only the intense, deranged gleam in his eyes gave him away as any kind of a threat.
The gleam and, of course, the apron.
The two men stared at each other for a few long moments. Barry reminded himself to try and memorize the face, just in case he were to be asked sometime in the future to identify this man out of a lineup or describe him to a sketch artist. But it seemed increasingly unlikely that he would ever see the inside of a police station again. Besides maybe in a body bag.
Barry cleared his throat. “Um, hi there.”
In response, the man took out a knife and sliced Barry’s cheek open.
“Ow! Fuck!” Barry shouted. He was no stranger to physical pain and injury, but this was so sudden, he hadn’t had time to brace himself. The cut was deep and stung like all hell. He felt a stream of blood drip down the side of his face. The unknown man pulled something out of his pocket—Barry was too distracted by his own agony to notice exactly what—and pressed it to the cut. Barry pulled with all his strength against the plastic wrap, trying to jerk his face away, but his struggles were completely in vain.
He gave up on fighting and focused on breathing deeply to regain control. His Marine training definitely came in handy here. In the service, he had gotten plenty of practice fighting through fear, pain, and discomfort in order to accomplish his mission. “Who are you?” he panted.
“Justice,” Dexter answered shortly. He held his slides up to the light in admiration. A drop of blood was framed neatly between them, trapped like a fly in amber. A shaft of light shined through, making it glow red like a tiny, gruesome, stained glass window. Dexter looked immensely satisfied as he carefully put away his trophy.
“Where’s your blindfold and scales?” Barry asked.
“What?” Dexter looked perplexed.
“If you’re Lady Justice, aren’t you missing your toga? At least you do have a sword, or something close enough,” Barry added, eyeing the knife that was still dripping with his own blood.
Dexter’s brow furrowed. He looked entirely unamused.
"Stupid joke. Never mind," mumbled Barry. So much for his attempt at psy-ops. Barry’s heart sunk further. Things were looking worse for him by the moment.
Dexter strolled around the table where Barry was laid out and gestured to the wall. For the first time Barry noticed the photos. At least two dozen of them: row after row of faces, some formal portraits of live subjects, others of corpses at crime scenes or morgues. Barry stared at the images. Some of them looked oddly familiar…
“Steven McLaughlin. Eduardo Vasquez. Alexei Sidorov. Michael Tate. William Thornton. Lisa Delgado. Hasan Aliyev. James Warner. John Burgess. Robert Santos. Charles Reese. Lindsey Strickland. Julio Ortega. Matthew Patton. Anthony Goodman. Donald Hodges. Marc and Camila Estrada. Paul Simon-Greer. Dana Clayton. George Marsh. Usman Dratchev. Timur Geshaev. Paco Corvera. Pablo Morales. Chris Lucado. Goran Pazar. Janice Moss.” Dexter read out, gesturing to each photo in turn. “And that’s just the start. Victims from all walks of life. Kills all over the country. I usually stick to my own city, but your body count is so high, I decided I had to make the trip out to L.A. just to track you down. You’ve been busy, haven’t you, Barry Berkman?”
Barry’s heart was pounding like a drum. He was in a state of utter shock. Names he never expected to hear again, faces he never expected to see again. Once he killed someone, he tended to expunge all the information from his brain as quickly as possible. He didn’t want to remember these people. But now, here they were, an array of his victims before him. His crimes and his guilt on display.
“How…?” was all he managed to croak.
“There’s no point in asking me how I know all this. There’s no point in you asking me anything at all, in fact. The only point of tonight is one killer removing another killer from this Earth.”
Dexter produced a huge knife, which had been lovingly polished to a brilliant shine. He slowly approached Barry. “I understand that you’re an actor, Barry. So think of it this way: in tonight’s performance, I’ll be playing the part of the killer who kills. And you’re playing the role of the killer who gets killed.” He raised the knife up high in steady hands, the tip of the blade pointing with laser precision straight at Barry’s hammering heart. “Break a leg,” he added.
“Whoa whoa whoa whoa! Can we maybe at least, like, talk about this a little? You know, killer-to-killer?” Barry’s voice was high-pitched and frantic.
“The time for talking is over.”
“Wait—but—uhh—why me?!” Barry squeaked.
“Because you’re an evil, dangerous, violent, indiscriminately murderous piece of shit. Goodbye, Barry.”
“I’m not indiscriminate! I only kill bad guys!”
Dexter had been a millisecond away from swinging down the knife and making the fatal stab. He paused. “Bad guys?”
“Yes! Only bad, violent criminals!”
Dexter pondered this for a few moments that felt like several eternities to Barry. He finally lowered the knife. “How do you know they’re guilty?”
“I’m a hitman and my, uh, my, well, this guy Fuches has all kinds of connections, he vets all the targets to make sure they’re bad. I would never kill an innocent person.” Barry explained all this in a desperate, terrified rush of words. He hesitated, then admitted, “Actually, I won’t lie: I have killed a few innocent people. And I swear to you, I regret every single one of them, and I’ll mourn them until the day I die.” Barry gulped. “Which is…hopefully not today?”
Shockingly, Dexter actually cracked a smile. “We’ll see.” He laid the knife down on the table. “So let me get this straight. You’re not a serial killer, you’re an assassin with a conscience? Do you have a lot of jobs?”
“Yeah, I get more assignments than I can handle.”
“And this Fuches person, is he picky about the actual killing, how it goes down? Does he tell you exactly how to do it?”
“No, he leaves all that stuff totally up to me. That’s my area of expertise. It's the only thing I’m good at, actually.”
“Not true. You’re also pretty good at saying the right thing at the right time.”
Barry was surprised to realize that he felt flattered by the compliment. “...Thanks.”
"This has been an illuminating discussion. I admire your code—I have a similar one. You're clearly skilled at what you do," Dexter said, looking pointedly at the dozens of victim photos as proof of Barry's effectiveness. "And the idea of having an endless stream of potential victims just waiting for me to find them..." Dexter shuddered, practically salivating at the thought of so many opportunities to satisfy his blood lust. Barry listened intently, feeling oddly stirred. He never had any real enthusiasm for killing; in fact, he tried to think about it as little as possible. In contrast, this man obviously savored it. As Barry watched him shiver with palpable desire at the prospect, it aroused something in himself, as well.
Dexter picked up the knife again and Barry flinched, but Dexter said, “Relax,” and began slicing the plastic that bound him. Soon, to his own surprise, Barry was free. Only once he sat up on the table was he struck by the fact that he was completely naked. Normally that would embarrass him, but he supposed this wasn’t the time to be worrying about modesty.
With his thoughts turned to clothing, he suddenly noticed something. He pointed to the shirt Dexter wore under his apron. “Hey, is that the American Apparel Baby Thermal Henley?”
Dexter looked shifty. “No, it’s not that, uh, it’s army fatigues.”
Barry grinned. “No way. It’s the Baby Thermal Henley in taupe. I'd recognize it anywhere. My friend Hank introduced me to them and now I buy them in bulk.”
Dexter bit his lip. He leaned in conspiratorially and whispered, “Me, too!”
“Well, it looks great on you.”
“I bet it looks great on you, too,” Dexter retorted, his eyes flickering down Barry’s body.
An awkward silence settled upon the two.
Barry finally broke it by clearing his throat. “Well, maybe we could, you know…team up sometime? Take on the bad guys together?” Barry suggested tentatively.
“I haven't had good experiences with accomplices in the past. But I’ll think about it,” Dexter replied, inscrutable and poker-faced as ever.
“You know what else you might think about? Using environmentally-friendly materials instead of all this plastic. It just piles up in landfills and takes years to decompose. Maybe try old newspapers or something? That way, you could murder people while at the same time reducing energy usage, cutting down air pollution, and lowering greenhouse gas emissions,” Barry said eagerly.
Dexter looked at Barry like he couldn’t believe his ears, like he’d never seen anybody quite like him in his life.
“I’ll think about it,” Dexter repeated. “My name is Dexter, by the way. Um…you want to borrow a shirt?”