We’re in the middle of a dim room encased in stone bricks, the only powerful light hanging over the Hobo, who was strapped into a metal chair by leather straps, only really able to move his neck. Off to one side, against a wall was a table that had an assortment of ‘tools’ on it, including a mallet, a saw, a screwdriver, and a small wire rack decoupled from its stand. Wait, why is there a rack on that table? Lenny has been questioning him for about half an hour at this point.

“So, how long is it going to take before you start talking about what you’ve been doing?”

“I don’t know, man, when are you gonna stop fucking around?” Between the vocal tone and the way he tilted his head as he spoke, it’s obvious he’s being annoying for the sake of being annoying. Somewhat bold for a man strapped to a chair, but I’m sure he just wanted to show some bravado before he died.

“You know what? It’s been a little while, so yeah, I guess I’ll stop fucking around.” Lenny rolls a shoulder, before slugging right into his guts. The man grunts, and then exhales.

“Must be real easy for you when you got me strapped down like this. You too scared to face me man to man?” he lets out a chuckle, raising an eyebrow in a wordless taunting gesture.

Lenny sighed. “I don’t have anything to prove to a rat like you.” He proceeds to slug the hobo in his gut a second time. He doubles over a little bit, coughing.

In a matter of seconds he pulls his head back up, laughing it off. “Well, that tickles. You gonna try any harder, pretty boy?” The man looks over with a hint of indifference-but more than that, sheer mockery.

“Perhaps. June, a moment, if you will...” We walk out of the interrogation room and into a side room. “Okay, so here’s the plan: I need you to get to work on him with a carpenter’s hammer.”

My heart sinks just a little as I realize he’s asking me to torture a helpless man. “Why do I have to be the one to do this? And are you absolutely sure that I need to?”

“Well, I need to run a good cop, bad cop routine to sweat him, and I need to make sure you’re able to do what’s needed should the time arise. I know it’s not pretty, but we have to do it.” Do we really, though?

“You mean I have to do it.”

Lenny frowns, and then chuckles. “It’s not like I’m a glutton for torturing people myself, but I’m not letting this fucker and his friends defile the recruits like this.” He about-faces to the door. “I want you to snatch the hammer off the table while I’m in between you and his eyes. I want to catch him by surprise- swing the hooked end into his forearm first, but above all, don’t kill him or knock him out.”

“Right, then. On your mark.” We walk back into the main interrogation room, as I strategically trail behind Lenny, grabbing the hammer when the hobo wouldn’t be able to see it. I hide it in my sleeve as I pace around Lenny to his other side.

“Hey, pretty boy… you done fucking around or what?” While I’m walking over, I’m mustering up the will to take the shot, despite my own internal objections to such a thing-and then I had a realization. It seems cruel, but if I rattle him enough to snap on the first strike, I won’t have to hit him again. I let the hammer drop from my sleeve, gripping the handle and keeping it out of his sight for the moment.

“I admit, I try to be as professional about this kind of thing as possible, and quite frankly you should count yourself lucky that I’m patient as I am, but I think she’s beginning to lose patience.” Lenny tilts his head in my direction, most likely the signal that I’m supposed to take. Despite myself, I bring the hammer down onto the hobo’s forearm, leaving him screaming as I spur myself into yanking it around, the edges of the hooks digging into his flesh. It makes my stomach churn, but I make a savage yank as if I was trying to pull his forearm bones apart, before pulling the hammer out, the gouged areas filling with blood like waterlogged trenches.

The hobo’s left visibly shaking and trying to keep his composure, as Lenny remains completely straight-faced. “I’d still prefer to treat you as professionally as possible, but her? I’ve seen how she gets worked up, and I assure you I have no way to stop her once she really goes overboard.” Lenny leans forward, his face inching closer to the hobo’s. “In fact, she told me about how she would alternate which side of the hammer she hits you with until you speak up or pass out.” I watched the color drain from the hobo’s face as Lenny continues, completely undeterred. “Now, I wanted to show you a little mercy, so I got her to agree to give the boys over there some time to place bets on how many bones get broken before we’re done with you.” He looks to the recruits standing guard at the edge of the room. “I’ll give you guys 30 seconds or so to place your bets.” Lenny looks back to the hobo.

I shivered as my imagination played out the results in my head. I could see his arms shattered to the point of having the structural integrity of wet noodles, and that wasn’t an ending I wanted to see. I pull Lenny a few feet away, gripping his sleeve tightly as I did before speaking, consciously forcing myself to keep quiet. “Are you quite sure we need to do all this to him?”

Lenny sighs. “Remember when you were mad at me because you had to kill that one guy? This guy probably had something to do with creating that particular situation.” He puts a hand on my shoulder, taking the time to look into my eyes. Despite his occasionally hair-trigger temperament, and the savagery he was capable of planning, I saw a steadiness in his eyes that was faintly familiar to me-and ultimately comforting. “Don’t feel too bad for him. He had it coming.” I inhale and exhale with a nod as he turns back to the hobo. He checks his watch. “20 seconds.” The time ticks down in my head, but the tension makes it feel more like two minutes, each second punctuated with me silently pleading with the man to just give it up now. “Time’s up. Let’s begin.”

I feel my heart sink an inch as I force myself into action, cocking back the hammer and bringing it down on his forearm.

“STOP! I’ll tell you what you need to know!” The hammer stops just before it hits his arm a second time. I can feel my arm relax slightly in turn.

“Do you really? You better start explaining yourself quick, or she might get the idea you’re just stalling.”

The hobo lets out an inhale and an exhale. “Here’s how the plot goes: Abduct one guy, stuff him full of this new variety of Teneb, and get him to abduct more people and stick them with the Teneb, while using the treatment as blackmail leverage. Then, you can pretty much destroy your target’s organization from within.”

It all made sense now; the boy’s writings, his frantic pleading with the Hobo to get what he needed-which was apparently medicine all along- and the claim that the Haracrein wouldn’t save him at all, everything clicked perfectly. Shit, why didn’t I think of that?

“That’s ridiculously sophisticated and complex, but it holds up with what we’ve found… unfortunately.” Lenny sighed, and frowned. I can tell the mere possibility weighed on him heavily.

“It does… So, Lenny, are you going to let him go?” I spoke up, hoping I wouldn’t have to do this any longer. Slicing up enemies that try to kill me in whatever way presented itself was one thing, but this felt like something else entirely.

“Not yet. I’ve got some other things to talk about before we progress to that.”

The hobo threw his head back. “Oh, god damn it...” The hobo sighed.

“Tell me more about this ‘new variety’ of Teneb.” Lenny leans forward slightly. “What the fuck’s up with that?”

“I don’t know much about it myself, just that it’s a variant that’s simply not meant for actual customers. Doesn’t give you much of an actual high, but slowly lays the withdrawal on ya. Not easily curable, either. As far as I know its designers are the only one that have a permanent cure, or even a temporary antidote for that matter. Must’ve had some pretty serious talent designing it, ‘cause that boy bent the knee to me real quick.”

“So you’re telling me, then, is that your client hand-engineered a variant of Teneb just for this task?”

“It would seem so, but I wouldn’t be able to know for sure. It’s possible that they just bought the formula from someone else.” The hobo performed a motion loosely resembling a shrug, as much as he could in his restraints.

Lenny turns away briefly, running a hand through his hair. It was the first time I’d seen him show even a hint of genuine distress. “God damn, that’s kind of scary. The Teneb industry is getting more powerful than I thought.” Though it took me a while to fully digest what we had just learned, I felt a soft case of bone-chills come over me once I did realize that there was probably someone bigger behind this.

Lenny turns back to the hobo. “Who hired you?”

“Who hired me? Some other group of clowns kind of like you, another mafia, though they were particularly insistent on not telling me who they were as an organization. I only got spoon-fed information via a middleman, kinda made me feel like I was a real spy.” A short cackle, and then a pause, as if he was waiting for a follow-up question. “Can I go now?” The Hobo seemed slightly annoyed, presenting resistance even now.

“Interesting, but surely there’s something more you can tell us. What were their plans?”

“Well, they definitely wanted to take a swing at you in particular, but I heard the guy mention something about disrupting a drug operation over the phone. My deadline was a week from now, so maybe that’s when they’ll be making a move.”

Lenny seemed to mull it over, then brought his head back up, looking over. “Still, I can’t simply let you up and walk away if you’re just going to try pulling this shit on my boys again.”

This gave the man some pause-I could only assume he wasn’t big on outright double-crossing his employers, but it seemed like he wasn’t scared enough to refuse. “Damn, guess I’ll have to skip town altogether. But, yes, if that’s what it takes, I’ll discontinue my current… contract.” The man grumbles, like a child only begrudgingly following an order to clean their room. “Can I go now?”

“Don’t try dragging the cops into this, or it’ll just get even more unpleasant next time around.” Lenny turns around, sighing. “He’s free to go, boys. Make sure he can’t trace us back to this place.”

Two of the others get to work untying the man from his chair, and then throwing a bag over the Hobo’s head and seeing him out, presumably to drop him off somewhere far away via a car ride.

With that set aside, Lenny finally turns back to me.

“Wait. This talk about ‘Teneb’, I…” I search for words, searching for a better description than ‘literal monsters’. “I’ve encountered some extremely violent thugs, and they all had blackened blood like that one guy did. Is this Teneb stuff connected to that somehow?”

“Oh, most certainly. Makes monsters out of men, more than any other recreational drug on the market. Very few are actually able to produce it, but those that do make absurd amounts of money off of it. It’s like an entire goddamn industry.” I blink, staring at him in shock as I try to piece together what he just said. Those monsters I had to face were the result of an entire criminal industry? If true, that meant that I couldn’t count on what I had faced so far as mere unlucky, isolated one-offs, but as constituents of a much larger epidemic.

I must’ve been dead in the water trying to parse this information for a while, because I hear Lenny continue. “Anyway, I think it’s safe to assume that we’re due to be in the line of fire a week from now. I’ll be sure to let the right people know ahead of time.”

Completely knocked out of my stupor for the moment, I pause and digest the statement. “Wait, we have a drug operation?”

“Well, yeah, counter-protection money doesn’t pay too great.” Lenny slipped a hand in his pocket, the carpenter’s hammer still in his other hand. “We don’t deal in the bad shit, especially this black goop that’s been plaguing the town lately. So long as we’re not dealing Teneb ourselves, I’d say we’re justified. The other stuff’s way too common already, so it doesn’t make that much of a difference whether or not we sell it ourselves.” Lenny shrugged, clearly not seeing much of a problem in this.

Which is odd, since I’d have figured the old man wasn’t the kind to get into drug dealing. “Does the old man know about this?” The thought crept into my mind almost too suddenly to be realistic, but it made sense to me.

“I don’t think he does, and we try to keep things that way. Besides, without that part of the operation we really wouldn’t have funding for much of anything else, really… including my wages.”

“I see.” I frowned slightly, looking across to one of the brick walls of the interrogation room. As much as I hated to admit it, there’s almost no way counter-protection alone pays enough to keep the Haracrein’s finances afloat.

Lenny walks over and sets the hammer onto the table gently, then turning to face me again. “Anyway, we’re going to have to prepare for that potential assault. I’ll be sure to get the boys nice and ready for it.”

I nod in turn as he walks out of the room. I linger, caught in thought over having to torture an unarmed man. It didn’t feel right. I feel myself mentally shiver as I hold up the now-bloodied hammer against the dim light of the room, walking over and setting it on the table before heading out myself.