Aloysius Tempo by Jason Johnson Page B

between Maya and this fella Kris after he started hitting her, y’know? After he started doping her and forcing her and freaking her out. So, he didn’t like getting dumped, this fella, and he made a little plan to make a fool out of her, to stick some intimate personal pictures all over the Internet, you know? All this stuff I’ve got here on the phone, y’know? Some of them embarrassing, some a little more troubling than that.
    ‘So, Kris was pretty methodical, went to about twenty porn sites of all flavours, uploaded the lot, included Maya’s name, her home town, a link to her Facebook, asked anyone who was having a wank to this poor woman to share the dirty pictures, y’know?
    ‘Took no time at all and she was all over the place, and no time after that until everyone knew. Everyone in her home town and all. All very uncomfortable, as you would expect.’
    I nod. Sip. ‘Yep. And … ?’
    ‘So Maya’s very upset about the whole thing, Aloysius. She tries emailing and ringing the websites but it’s a hopeless task dealing with fuckers like that. Technically, she doesn’t even own the pictures to ask for them to be taken off the Internet, y’know, because she didn’t take them herself, you see. Ends up, she goes to her parents, Rick and Elena, a decent pair of people from Utrech, in the Netherlands. You’ve maybe been there.’
    I shrug.
    ‘So Rick and Elena aren’t the least bit happy with this situation either, again, as you can imagine,’ he says. ‘There’s not a lot they can do right away, but they start the long haul and get a lawyer and some IT lads on to it, and see if they can begin to sweep the pictures off the Web, y’know? In the meantime, Rick, her dad, takes a little notion, maybe a wee bit fuelled by anger, to look into this fella Kris, to get a good handle on him. He gets some of those IT lads to trace what they can, to see what he’s been up to, and it comes clear soon enough that Kris is no stranger to doing this sort of thing to his exes, to knocking them about and getting pictures. In fact, Kris has been at this revenge porn thing for a few years, drugging one-night stands and hookers, scaring the shit out of them, taking their pictures. Our Kris here has got himself a bit of status among these knob pilots, a bit of a reputation in the revenge-porn community, for want of better terminology.
    ‘Anyway, Maya’s dad Rick finds this all very upsetting, and can be told of no bigger cunt on earth than this fella, Kris. And Maya’s dad finds himself taking a wee look around online to see if he can get someone to, y’know, sort this Kris fella out. A decent father would be protective of his daughter like that, you see.
    ‘Now Rick is a bit of a headstrong businessman, knows his own mind sort of man, and is happy when he finds this ad deep down and tucked away there on the old deep, dark net, y’know, deep in the hard-to-track corners of the Web, y’know? He finds this ad and he has a wee anonymous email exchange with a bloke, you know? And he has a chat with this bloke. It was an ad for what they call ‘Military Services’, Aloysius. You know what I mean? It was an ad that said the person could ‘hard solve’ your problems. It’s not the sort of thing you would be looking for if you wanted to put someone in a bad mood, or wind them up or ruin their day, y’know? It’s more heavy duty than that, a bit more of a fuller job than that.’
    Martin sits back, takes another deep pull on his pint, sits forward.
    ‘So anyway,’ he says, smacking his lips unhappily, looking to his iPhone, ‘here’s a nice picture of Kris before he starting fucking around with Maya’s life.’
    Kris, shaggy-haired, trendy, good-looking, a white funnel neck sweater, a goatee beard, is on a Dutch street, is laughing.
    Martin points at the image, just so I’m totally sure who he’s talking about.
    ‘It’s Kris, okay?’
    And I nod.
    ‘And,’ he says, ‘this is what happened to Kris.’
    The side