Whisper Me This(46)

You want me to find her, reach out to her. We actually fought about this—you, who have never really fought with me on anything. Oh God. You can’t know how this tears me apart. Do you know how much I want to see the girl? To try to explain to her what happened and how a mother could do such a heinous thing? But I can’t. I can’t even explain it adequately to myself, or to you.

Thank God Maisey and Elle are well away. I’m going to die anyway, so my safety is a small thing. But you, Walter. I won’t allow my past to hurt you, if I can stop it.

That’s why I went to town today and bought a gun. Who knew it could be so easy? The nice man at the pawn shop showed me how to use it. How to load and unload. How to aim. Tomorrow, while you’re at work, I’ll go to the shooting range and find somebody to teach me.





Chapter Fourteen

Tony stands in place at the shooting range, ear protectors on, his Sig held loosely in both hands. He doesn’t shoot. Not yet.

He’s waiting for the flashback to hit and clear before he starts his practice. It will come. It always comes. Sometimes it’s slow, and he thinks it’s gone and not going to happen. This is something he dreads more than the flashback itself.

The memory is his punishment, purgatory, and salvation. It keeps him on the straight and narrow. Reminds him of the price he’s sworn to pay and the path he is set on. If the memory doesn’t hit him hard enough to shred his guts and threaten to drop him, then he knows he is in danger.

Every Sunday afternoon he comes to the shooting range to go through this ritual. It’s been ten years now, once a week, fifty-two times a year. All the other regulars know his routine. They assume he’s meditating before he starts to shoot. They think he’s a badass for this, a sharpshooter. Some of them think he was a sniper in Iraq.

Nobody knows the real reason he comes here, regularly, every week. Nobody asks.

Once, there was a new employee, a little too nosy, who started in with questions.

“Hey, buddy. Whatcha doing? Praying your shots don’t miss?”

“Tallying my sins,” Tony says. “Making peace with my dead.”

And the guy had laughed, as if this was high humor and Tony was a joker. But the next week when Tony came in for his ritual, the owner walked over and told him the kid had been fired. “Not a place for asking questions,” he’d said. “My apologies.”

Today the free fall into memory is delayed. Instead, Tony remembers a different gun and a pair of wide eyes not quite blue or green, as if they can’t decide what color they ought to be. God have mercy. He has no space in his life for this, for the way a small thought about Maisey accelerates his heart and sends his blood rushing to places it has no business. And now his brain has followed, and he wrenches it back.

Here. Now. The gun in his hands.

As if it is aware of his betrayal of attention, the memory ambushes him from behind and very nearly drops him. One ragged breath gets away from him before he’s back in control, because that is part of this exercise.

To let the onslaught take him back to that day, that hour, that minute, that second when his finger pulled a trigger. It is his penalty to himself to relive it, fully and completely, once a week for the rest of his life.

His awareness fragments into two: the man standing here at the shooting range and the child he once was in another place far from here.

To his child-self, the gun is heavy, an unfamiliar weight. His hands are shaking, heart pounding, but he knows what he’s doing. Knows, when he pulls the trigger, what will follow.

And still. His finger tightens, curls back toward his thumb. There is a recoil. A sharp crack that hurts his ears. His eyes are clamped shut, so he knows only what his body feels and what his other senses tell him. Shrill voices screaming. A gasp. Moaning. The weight of something heavy hitting the floor.

Hands trying to pry the gun from his locked fingers. Fingernails tearing at his skin. Frenzied. Frantic. His mother’s voice.

“Give me the gun, Tony. Give it to me. Let go. It’s over.”

The gasping, whimpering, pitiful, blubbering breaths of a dying man. The stink of gunpowder not quite overpowering the tang of blood, the putrid gaseous stench of shit and piss.

I did this, he reminds himself. I pulled the trigger. The bullet hit him. He is dead.

Ritual completed, guilt and retribution program firmly reinstalled, Tony pulls himself out of the flashback. He knows the drill. Focus on what is. The feel of the floor beneath his feet. The gunpowder smell of the shooting range. The ongoing blitz of rapid-fire shots. He drags air in and out of his lungs in steadying breaths.

Only then does he open his eyes, fix on his target, and begin to shoot. As usual, his bullets hit the target in tightly clustered groups at head and heart. He’s a deadly shot. And this is why he does not, cannot, will not carry a gun or have one in the house. Why he couldn’t take the gun away for Maisey.

He is not to be trusted with women any more than he should be trusted with guns.

On the way out, he secures his weapon in the locker he rents for that purpose and then says, casually, to Brent behind the desk, “I hear Leah Addington passed. Know anything about the funeral?”

“Wondered where she was,” Brent says. “Damn. She was just getting good. Hope nothing bad went down?”

“Some kind of stroke or something,” Tony says. “May she rest in peace.”