Gun Shy(63)

The knife clatters to the floor and he lets go of my twisted wrist. I turn to run as he lifts the butt of the shotgun above my head. There’s a sharp crack at the back of my skull, and a syrupy warmth that begins to ooze into my hair. It’s almost a relief, the way the world blurs and fizzes. I sink down to my hands and knees, like I’m praying to this murderous God above me. My vision tunnels as I begin to crawl, black haze eating at the edges of my sight. Ray kicks me in the ribs, hard enough that I land on my back. He steps over me, the leather of his boots warm through my jeans as he holds me in place, and he’s all I can see in the pinpricks of my sight. Ray. He’s not smiling anymore. What will he do to me?

“So that’s where you’ve been,” Ray marvels, holding a matchbox car up and spinning the wheels with his fingertip. “On a field trip. Looks like you got yourself some souvenirs.” I stare at the little car, swallowed up in his big hand. The crude letters scratched into its underside are too far away for me to read, but I already know what they spell. DANIEL.



When I open my eyes, the pain in my head is so sharp I vomit a little. But I’m on my back, nowhere for the bile to go. I swallow it back down. It burns.

I’m cold. My arms are stretched above me, bound together and aching, and when I try to move them nothing happens. I tug again, harder. Fuck. I’m tied to the table, but worse than that, there’s a length of rope or something equally strong running underneath the table, reaching from my wrists to each of my ankles. When I pull my wrists, the rope around my ankles tightens. If I try to kick my feet away from the table legs, it only drags the rope tighter around my wrists.

I tug at the ropes, twisting this way and that, but it’s useless. Every tug makes the rope a little tighter. I am bound, trussed up like a roast turkey ready to be carved for Thanksgiving. Above the refrigerator, Damon’s collection of bobble-head toys and collectibles mock me with their unnaturally large eyes, their plastic grins, their ridiculous irony.

Ray appears at the edge of my vision. I turn my head just as he sits down on a dining chair and scoots toward me.

“You got me good,” he murmurs, staring down at his palm. “You’re a fucking bitch, you know that?” He laughs, but then his laughter turns to rage. He reaches his hand over and presses his bleeding palm to my mouth. Before I can clamp my lips together, warm blood breaches my mouth. It tastes like I just licked an ashtray full of pennies and dirt. I retch, trying to twist my head away as Ray digs his fingernails into my cheeks.

“You taste that?” he growls, standing as his chair falls away behind him with a crash. “You crazy bitch. That’s on you. That’s on you.”

He shifts his grip, pinching my nostrils together and covering my mouth at the same time. I gasp against his hand, vacuum-sealed to my face, searching for air where there is none.

“You want me to take my hand away?” he asks, his dark eyes crazed, the pupils stretched wide open. It’s as if I’m looking into hell when I look into those pupils, vast and empty and midnight-black.

I nod furiously, pleading with my eyes. Please let me breathe. He applies more pressure with his hand, digs his fingernails deeper. It’s like having a fucking bear trying to claw my face off. He waits patiently as I struggle against his grip, as my whole body starts to shake uncontrollably, desperate and hungry for just a sip of oxygen. The room starts to spin, the edges turn dark. If I black out again, I don’t know if I’ll wake up. Maybe I’ll just be dead. Maybe this is it.

I don’t want this to be it. Not here. Not now. Not with Ray.

My lungs start to pulsate in my chest. I must look like a fish out of water when they spread out their gills as they drown in air.

“If I take my hand away, you’re gonna behave. Okay?”

I nod some more. He takes his hand away and I turn my head from him, gasping in a breath. All I can taste is blood. All I can feel is the lactic acid screaming in my locked-up arms, the dead weight of my legs slung over the edge of the table, the burn in my lungs where air was gone for too long.

“I fucking told my brother you’d be a problem,” he says, grabbing a roll of paper towels and wrapping a thick makeshift bandage around his hand. “I fucking told him. You think he’d listen?” He’s muttering to himself, and to me, and if he doesn’t kill me I don’t know who’ll be more surprised out of the two of us.

“Where’s the fucking PBR?” he demands, disappearing from view again. I hear the refrigerator door open and slam shut. Seriously? I’m hog-tied to a table and he wants a fucking beer?

I hear him stomp out to the garage. The moment he leaves the kitchen a strangled sob floats out of me, unbidden and unexpected. I blink back tears, biting the insides of my cheeks. Crying is ammunition to people like Ray. Every tear shed is like handing him a nail for your coffin.

I wonder if I will get a coffin, or if I’ll be rolled into the dirt beside Jennifer.

I wonder if he’ll kill me first, or bury me alive.

So many details to ponder.

And he’s back. He slams a six-pack of Pabst bottles on the table beside my head, making me jump. He gazes down at me as he tears a bottle from the pack and opens it, a predator sizing up his prey as he takes a slug of beer. He sets the bottle down, the condensation from the glass soaking through his makeshift bandage and turning the kitchen paper red. “Fucking useless,” he mutters, unwinding the wet red paper towel from his palm and tossing it aside.