The lie settled between me and Mama like a third person in our tiny kitchen, breathing our air, eating our food.
She fussed over the lump on my head, her fingers surprisingly gentle as she dabbed at it with a warm washcloth soaked in witch hazel. The sharp, clean smell cut through the usual apartment stench of fried onions and Pine-Sol.
"Damn animals," she muttered, her voice thick with a tired rage. "Stealin' food from an old woman's mouth. They got no soul, no decency. You sure you're alright, baby? You ain't hurt nowhere else?"
Her eyes, wide and searching, scanned my face. Looking for cracks in the story. Looking for the truth I'd buried six feet deep in that garage.
"I'm good, Ma," I said, my voice a little too steady. I made myself flinch as the cloth touched the tender spot. A performance. "Just… shook me up, is all. They came outta nowhere."
It was the right thing to say. It painted me as the victim. The scared kid. The sheep. Her face softened, and she pulled me into another one of those bone-crushing hugs. "My smart boy. You didn't fight 'em, did you? You just gave 'em the food. That's right. That's all you can do. Nothing in that container was worth your life."
I let her hold me, my arms hanging limp at my sides. You have no idea what it was worth, I thought. The gun. The body. The click. The code. The words echoed in my head, a mantra from a ghost in a mechanic's coveralls.
Sheep. Wolves. Artists.
Which one was I?
For the next week, I tried to be a sheep. I really did. I went to school. I answered when called on. I got a B+ on my algebra quiz. I came straight home. I did my chores without being told twice. I was the perfect, traumatized little angel.
And I was crawling out of my fucking skin.
It was like an itch deep inside my skull, right behind my eyes, that I couldn't scratch. The world had gone from full-color to a dull, washed-out gray. Everything was so… boring. Pointless. The petty drama in the hallways, who was messing with whose girl, which crew was claiming which corner—it was all just noise. Bleating.
My focus was shot. I'd be trying to read about the fucking Civil War, and I'd see the blood-soaked fields of Gettysburg not as a historical tragedy, but as a canvas. A messy, inefficient one. I'd look at the kids laughing by the lockers and wonder how that laughter would sound if it were choked off into a wet gurgle.
The image of Crown—Marcus Jones—wouldn't leave me. It was my new screensaver. His glassy eyes. The peaceful slackness of his jaw. The perfect, violent holes in his chest. I'd close my eyes and I could still smell the iron-rich blood, the garbage, the gasoline from the garage.
I started paying attention in a new way. I'd always been observant—survival in the Cypress demanded it—but this was different. This was… clinical.
I watched the wolves.
I saw Tevin from the 4th floor, who ran with the Eight-Note Brims, lean on Mr. Grady, the old Korean war vet who ran the bodega, for his "protection" money. I saw the barely concealed tremor in Tevin's hand, the way his eyes darted around, not from guilt, but from a constant, low-level paranoia. He was a predator, but a stupid one. A wolf who pissed on his own territory, marking himself for anyone with a bigger bite.
I saw Shanice, a girl in my grade, selling herself behind the rec center to a john in a beat-up Honda. Her eyes were empty, miles away. A different kind of predation. A different kind of rot.
The Cypress wasn't just a place. It was an ecosystem. And it was sick. Overrun with parasites.
The mechanic's words came back to me, every single fucking day. "Someone must be the gardener."
Was that me? Could that be me?
The fantasy wasn't random anymore. It had a shape. A purpose. I'd see Tevin shaking down Mr. Grady, and my mind would, without permission, draft a blueprint. A dark alley. A quick, efficient strike from behind. Something heavy and solid. The body would be found in rival territory. A message. A pruning of the worst kind of weed.
Then the fear would hit. Cold and slick. What the fuck was wrong with me? I was thirteen. I should be thinking about video games and trying to see the new Fast & Furious movie, not plotting fucking murders.
But the itch was always there. Stronger.
The breaking point came ten days after the alley.
I was coming back from the bodega, a loaf of bread and a carton of eggs for Mama in a plastic bag swinging from my hand. I took the long way, avoiding the alley where it happened. My alley. I hadn't been back.
I heard the shouting before I saw them. Tevin and two of his boys had Mr. Grady backed against the graffiti-covered side of his own store. Tevin had the old man by the front of his stained white apron.
"—every week, old man! Every goddamn week it's a fuckin' conversation!" Tevin was spitting, his face inches from Mr. Grady's. "You think this is a charity? You think we provide protection for free?"
"I… business is slow, Tevin," Mr. Grady stammered, his hands up in a gesture of surrender. "The police, they been hassling my customers. I barely made rent this week."
"I don't give a fuck about your rent!" Tevin screamed, shaking him. One of his boys, a lanky kid named Mouse, laughed, a high, reedy sound. "My rent is due! You understand? You got till tomorrow. Two hundred. Not a penny less. Or me and the boys gonna have to come inside and… inventory your shit. And we ain't gentle."
He shoved Mr. Grady hard. The old man stumbled, his shoulder hitting the brick wall with a sickening thud. He cried out, a short, pained sound that was swallowed by the indifferent hum of the projects.
Something in me snapped.
It wasn't anger. It was colder than that. It was certainty.
This was wrong. This was a flaw in the system. Tevin was a blight. A weed. And nobody was doing a goddamn thing about it.
The sheep—the people walking by, glancing over and then quickly looking away—they just accepted it. This was the way things were. This was the Cypress.
The wolves… they were the problem.
But the artist… the gardener… he could fix it.
I didn't move. I stood in the shadow of a stairwell, watching as Tevin and his boys finally walked away, laughing, leaving Mr. Grady to slide down the wall and put his face in his hands.
My heart wasn't hammering. My breath was even.
The itch was gone. Replaced by a cold, solid resolution.
I knew what I had to do.
The problem was, I had no idea how to do it. I wasn't a killer. I was a kid with a head full of dark dreams and a newfound philosophy from a psychopath in a garage. I had no tools. No plan. No skills.
I needed to learn.
The library was my first stop. The Cypress branch was a sad, underfunded place that smelled of old paper and despair. The computers were from the last century, and the non-fiction section was mostly self-help books and outdated legal guides.
But it had what I needed.
I started with forensics. I read books about blood spatter patterns, about time of death, about decomposition. It was dry, clinical, and utterly fascinating. I learned about lividity, about how a body tells a story to anyone who knows how to read it. I learned that most murderers are caught because they're stupid. They're driven by passion, by fear, by ego. They make mistakes. They leave evidence.
An artist wouldn't.
I moved on to anatomy. I needed to understand the machine I wanted to stop. Pressure points. Major arteries. The structure of the skull. The quickest, most efficient ways to shut the system down. I didn't take notes. I memorized. I burned the images into my brain.
Then came the practical stuff. This was harder. I couldn't exactly practice on a real person.
So I practiced on everything else.
I started paying attention to the security cameras in the neighborhood. Which ones worked. Which ones were just empty shells. I mapped blind spots in my head, routes through the projects that would keep me invisible. I noted the schedules of the patrol cars. They had a pattern. A lazy, predictable loop.
I began to take walks at night. Just short ones at first, around my block. Then deeper into the jungle. I moved silently, staying in the shadows, my hood up, my hands in my pockets. I became a ghost. I watched. I listened. I learned the rhythm of the night. When the real wolves came out to play.
I was in the middle of one of these walks, cutting through a narrow passageway between Buildings F and G, when I saw it.
A flicker of movement ahead. A door to a basement boiler room—usually chained shut—was slightly ajar.
I froze, melting into the darkness against a dumpster.
A figure slipped out. He was tall, wearing a hoodie, but I caught a glimpse of his face in the sliver of light from the streetlamp. It was the big guy. The mechanic's muscle.
My breath hitched. He looked left, then right, his movements efficient, professional. Then he pulled the door shut. I heard the distinct click of a heavy padlock being secured.
He turned and walked away, his footsteps silent on the pavement, heading toward the industrial edge of the Cypress where the garage was.
I waited until he was long gone, until the night was silent again except for the drip of a leaking pipe overhead.
What was in the boiler room?
The itch returned, a fierce, burning curiosity.
This was it. A test. A sign.
I counted to one hundred. Then I moved.
I crept to the door. The padlock was new, heavy-duty. But the hasp it was attached to was old, rusted. I pulled on it gently. It wiggled. With enough force, it might pull right out of the rotten doorframe.
I looked around. The coast was clear.
Taking a deep breath, I wrapped both hands around the hasp, braced my foot against the door, and pulled. Muscles I didn't know I had strained in my back and arms. The old wood groaned in protest. Rust flaked off onto my hands.
Come on, you motherfucker…
With a final, splintering crack, the screws tore free from the rotten wood.
The door swung inward a few inches.
A wave of damp, cold air washed over me. It smelled of mildew, dust, and something else. Something chemical. Like bleach.
My heart was going now, a steady drumbeat of anticipation. This was it. This was his place. The mechanic's. It had to be.
I slipped inside, pulling the door shut behind me as best I could.
The room was pitch black. I fumbled in my pocket for my phone, pulling it out and turning on the flashlight.
The beam cut through the darkness, illuminating a small, concrete-walled room. It wasn't a boiler room anymore.
It was a workshop.
A long, heavy table stood in the center. It was spotless, made of stainless steel. The kind you'd see in a morgue. Or a butcher shop.
Shelves lined the walls, filled not with tools, but with supplies. Rolls of thick, clear plastic sheeting. Duct tape. Heavy-duty garbage bags. Bottles of industrial-strength bleach, hydrogen peroxide, and chemicals I didn't recognize. A stack of neatly folded tarps.
On a smaller table against the far wall was a toolkit. But it wasn't for fixing cars. I shone my light over it. A bone saw. A set of scalpels, their blades gleaming. Pliers. Wire cutters. All of it meticulously clean, arranged by size and purpose.
This wasn't a garage. This was a clean-up room. A dissection room.
This was where the artist worked after the painting was done.
The sheer, horrifying scale of it hit me. This wasn't a theory. This wasn't a code in a book. This was real. The mechanic wasn't just a philosopher. He was a practitioner. A master.
And he'd left the door open. Just a crack.
He'd known I was watching. He'd known I'd come.
This was my first lesson.
A wave of nausea washed over me, followed immediately by a surge of exhilaration so powerful it made me lightheaded. The itch was gone, replaced by a terrifying, wonderful sense of belonging.
I heard a noise outside. A car engine, getting closer.
Fuck.
I killed the flashlight, plunging the room into absolute darkness. I stood there, frozen, listening. The car slowed. Stopped right outside.
A door opened. Closed.
Footsteps approached the door.
I was trapped.