Forgive Me(105)

“You would figure it out one way or another. I have no doubts about that. None whatsoever. But no matter what happens, no matter what I tell you,” Gabriel said, “please know I love you very much, and I’m so incredibly proud of the woman you’ve become.”

“Daddy, what is it?” Angie’s chest tightened. Dread overwhelmed her.

“I’m so sorry,” Gabriel said, sputtering his words as tears welled in his reddened eyes.

To Angie, it looked as though he had aged a dozen years in a matter of seconds. “Tell me, please.”

Instead of her father’s voice, the next sound Angie heard was a whip cracking noise, followed by the sound of breaking glass. The noise startled her. It was loud and unexpected and it sounded very close by.

Gabriel lurched forward, knocked off balance. He fell hard into Angie and his momentum carried them both to the floor where they landed in a tangled heap.

Did he have a heart attack? Angie’s thoughts were reeling and her father’s weight felt crushing. Using her arms and legs for leverage, she rolled her father off her body. He spilled onto his back, breathing erratically, eyes glued to the ceiling, head not moving.

“Dad, are you all right?”

Angie felt a stab of fear when her father didn’t respond. On her hands and knees, she leaned over her father’s face and tried to get a look into his eyes. She felt something warm and wet spread against her fingertips.

She looked behind her and saw that the floor around her father’s lower back was coated in red where blood was seeping out. Her fingers were sticking into the blood.

Angie screamed and rolled Gabriel onto his stomach, seeing for the first time the hole in his denim shirt, singed around the edges as though the fabric had been burnt. Blood gushed out the hole and spread across Gabriel’s denim shirt.

Angie pressed her hand against the wound, but blood pulsed through the cracks of her fingers. “Dad! Dad! Oh my God! Oh God!”

Her eyes were wide, breath shaky, body frozen from terror. She thought first about calling an ambulance, not what had caused her father to fall down bleeding. It took a moment for her fragmented thinking to gel into a sensible narrative—her father had been shot.

Movement in Angie’s periphery drew her attention to a male figure lurking in the doorway. He was tall and thin with a clean-shaven face and unsettling pale blue eyes. He must have entered through the patio door. He held in his hands a high-powered rifle with an attached scope and what appeared to be a suppressor screwed into the barrel. He had more guns holstered to a battle belt secured around his black tactical pants. A black long-sleeved combat shirt and black leather boots completed his ensemble. The man’s expression was a blank.

He stood five feet away, give or take, essentially point blank range. Without uttering a word, the intruder lifted his gun and took aim, not at Gabriel, but at Angie. A bullet was coming her way, and she gritted her teeth to brace for impact and the blackness to follow. Would it hurt? It was human nature to fear pain, same as it was to freeze in the face of one’s imminent death. The intruder’s aim was high, and Angie imagined the bullet would enter through the center of her skull.

Instead of a gunshot, Angie heard her father grunt loudly.

The man’s attention pivoted to Gabriel. What could have been a threat was nothing more than a bleeding man’s slow roll toward the office doorway. The man trained the barrel of the rifle away from Angie and onto Gabriel, who continued his deliberate roll toward his assailant, smearing in his wake a jagged trail of blood.

Angie knew what was coming. She understood somehow what her father had intended, and she had a choice to make. She could scream, cry out for her dad, and try to plead with this killer for mercy. Or she could use the precious few seconds he had given her to strike.

Bullets spit out the barrel of the rifle with the same whip crack sound—not silent, but not at all deafening. Three shots were fired, each chambered using the rifle’s bolt action. The bullets exploded Gabriel’s stomach, neck, and head in that order.

The killer quickly refocused his weapon away from the bloody remains of Gabriel DeRose and back onto Angie. But Angie was no longer in the same line of sight as before. She had gone onto her stomach and crawled toward the assailant while he was busy murdering her father.

Barely able to contain shock and horror, she’d managed to slither on her belly, traveling three feet at most. She had covered just enough distance. With her arms extended out front like giant antennae, she got to within reach of the killer’s ankles. She grabbed hold, her fingers digging hard into the pliable leather of his black boots, and pulled with all her strength. The attacker got off a shot as he fell, but the bullet struck the wall behind the office desk, sending bits of plaster and drywall shooting out in various directions.

The killer fell to the floor with a hard crash. Angie heard air explode from his lungs. She was on top of him in a flash, striking him in the throat with a well-timed and well-placed punch. He gurgled and wheezed after impact. She dared not strike again and scrambled to her feet, mouth open and twisted in a silent scream. Gaining traction and balance, she raced to the front door, the closest way out.

The knob wouldn’t turn, and no matter how hard she pushed and pulled, the door wouldn’t budge. What was wrong? The killer was groaning, getting back to his feet. No way to back track now.

Somehow the killer must have barricaded them inside. Angie figured he had done the same to the side entrance in the kitchen. She gave only a moment’s consideration to going out the kitchen window. She would have to break the glass, climb over the sink, push her way past the jagged shards to freedom. Too hard. Too much time. She imagined it would be the last act she would ever do. Angie made a different choice and rushed to the basement door in the middle of the kitchen.