Justice Unserved, Nadia Siddiqui [brene brown rising strong .TXT] 📗

had a nasty habit of killing those who crossed him. It was long before he was able to control his temper. Before he had ever gone to the police academy or anything of the sort.

Then he had started disappearing a few criminals. Those who were in the drunk tank one too many times and then whenever they were released they just wouldn’t make it home. Some low-level dealers or prostitutes on the streets, he didn’t care much what gender they were, but after a handful of them he realized that there was no fun in it. He didn’t like it when they fought back because it took too much of his energy and then he couldn’t enjoy the parts he liked the most. He likes to watch people break, it’s what makes him such a great asset to interrogations because he loves nothing more than playing mind games with people. He likes when they struggle but not when it’s a threat to him. A girl he kidnapped once even had the audacity to scratch his face, his whole face, and he hadn’t been able to prevent it. She died too quickly. He had left her to rot out on his farm until his pigs ate her.

Thomas Crane’s father and grandfather were both farmers and he had grown up a very poor man. He didn’t think much of material possessions and growing up he never knew that he didn’t have all of the same luxuries as the other students in his class did. It wasn’t until he hit high school that he started to see that his thrift store clothes weren’t as nice and that whenever his mother made his socks and shirts for him it wasn’t like what the other kids had and they often teased him for it. He only joined the police academy because he didn’t get good enough grades to get into college and Thomas wanted nothing more than the authority to make each and every one of those kids who had bullied him pay. He wanted to put bullets between their eyes and he had started learning how to properly fight in the academy. It was so much better for him than he ever could have imagined. Once he had his badge, he got it in his head that there was nothing that he couldn’t do with it. It was his all-access pass to anything he wanted. Suddenly, upon graduating, the whole world opened up to him.

He had moved to a bigger city just to get his years under his belt and didn’t come back home, not once, until his father died. He learned then that at some point in his years away his grandfather had left him and when he came home for the funeral of his father, his mother blamed Thomas for his father’s death, which was strange he thought, seeing as he hadn’t even been around.

Thomas’s mother was convinced that her husband had died of a broken heart. That while they had been so overly proud of him for making something of himself and moving away at first, they came to think that the reason why Thomas had never come home again was because he was ashamed of them. Which of course he was. Though the accusation of having done something that he hadn’t wasn’t something he could abide by. “You want me to be the reason somebody is dead, Ma?” he can remember asking her, and the look of horror on her face as he lifted her pie slicer off of the kitchen counter is a treasured memory he will keep with him always.

She became his first murder victim that night, and he found he liked it. He liked it a whole lot. He shoved her in the old well out back in the goat barn, where he sticks the ones he really likes. A whole farm with nobody to work it but himself, nobody to ask questions. It was more than he ever could have dreamt of. While Thomas had thought that the world was open to him before it was even more so now that he had a place to be as nefarious as his heart wanted.

For a time, that was enough.

For a time, he did as he pleased and reveled in the knowledge that he was untouchable, he might as well have been God. Though, much like anything else, it got boring. It wasn’t enough. The high that was given to him as he watched a life fade away into nothingness started to slip away.

Then he met Doris. Doris likes to bake cookies and look out her kitchen window. Doris also likes to stick her short, upturned nose into everybody’s business. Doris is a busybody. Doris likes to call the station and file report after report for any tiny little infraction that she finds wrong with any of her neighbors' behaviors. She likes to complain and she likes even more to talk off the ear of any poor cop who picks up the phone. She ties up his men and not in the fun way. Nobody likes Doris.

One day, Thomas felt he’d had enough when he had to go out on a call for yet another one of her little civic complaints that she is a fan of. He can remember her standing on her porch with her curlers in her hair and her arms folded across her chest with that smug look of satisfaction on her face as he parked his car and headed up to her neighbor’s house to ask if they had been able to give thought to destroying their garden simply because the smell of flowers aggravates Doris’ allergies. He was about halfway up the drive when the neighbor came stomping out of her house to combat whatever nonsense Doris had filed.

Thomas had been forced to stand there, listening to both parties complain and scream at each other until he finally had enough and smoothed