Gun Shy(75)

“Come back here!” Damon yells, barreling up the stairs. There he is. The little boy I glimpsed in the kitchen is gone, and the man full of darkness and rage is back.

I bring up the video search on my computer again and hit play, turning the volume to max. I set the laptop on the closed pine box that housed Jennifer; Damon’s mother’s voice fills the room; his real mother, the one who birthed him and nursed him and sent him off to school. The one who tended an empty grave that bore his name, the one who waited for thirty years for him to come home, and then died of a broken heart when he never, ever did.

Damon rounds the corner, coming through the doorway, charging at me until he sees the milk cartons, the face on the video. Daniel was such a loving boy, his mother says, her devastation ringing clear in the same attic where Damon’s own child lived and died for the briefest of moments. I fix my gaze at the bloodstain on the floor, the one beside the now-empty box where Jennifer bled out because I can’t bear to look at Adelie Collins as she talks about her missing son.

“What is this?” He’s horrified, tears pooling in his eyes.

“It’s your mother,” I say. “Don’t you remember her, Damon? Daniel?”

“Stop it.”

I turn the volume higher.

Daniel was such a beautiful boy. His eyes, they were so blue.

Damon grabs the laptop and throws it at the ground as hard as he can. It shatters into a million tiny pieces, and the sound of his mother’s anguished voice is gone, replaced by an ugly silence that promises terrible things.

I think about Leo. About how, by doing this, I’m protecting him from every evil thing Damon has planned for him. For both of us.

“I’m going to beat the shit out of you,” Damon says, his eyes blazing.

I nod. “Yeah,” I say, my voice resigned. “I thought you might say that.”

A weird look passes over Damon’s face. He steps to the side, holding onto the pine box for balance. He stumbles.

“What’s wrong?” I ask him. “Cat got your tongue?”

He rights himself. “Nothing. I’m fine.”

A fine sheen of sweat has broken out on his forehead. “You don’t look fine,” I say. “You look like you’re about to pass out.”

He stumbles again, his eyes sparking with recognition. “You…. Cunt,” he manages, before falling to his knees. “What the fuck did you give me?” He swipes madly behind his back, probably looking for the gun in his waistband, but it’s not there anymore. It’s in my hand.

I start to laugh as he sways on his hands and knees in front of me. “Just a little bit of the medicine you’ve been giving me all these years, Daddy-O.”

He lunges for me drunkenly, but I step back, away from his foolish grip.

“You,” Damon hisses. I’m so fucking proud. He grabs my ankle and tugs. I don’t think so.

“Watch it,” I say, kicking him in the face with my Doc Marten boot. Blood explodes from his nose as he goes down, hard. “Don’t make me fall and hurt myself. What if I die? You don’t want another Jennifer to bury, do you, fucker?”

“Cassie….”

“Shhhh,” I whisper. I imagine my words circling around in his addled mind as the last bit of light fades from his vision, but Damon’s a big boy, and he’s not going down with just a handful of ground-up Percocet. He gets up on one arm and drags himself closer to me again, within grabbing territory. He’s fast with his hands, but I’m faster. I raise the gun in my hand and smash the butt into Damon’s face, sending him to the floor in a limp pile. Before he can move, I take his own police-issued cuffs and cuff his hands behind his back, as tight as the metal links will go around his wrists.

I roll him over and he’s still conscious, but barely. His blood-spattered face is clammy and warm, his eyes struggling to focus on me as they roll around in his head. I sit on his chest, the gun in one hand, his half-empty cup of coffee in the other. I press the gun into his cheek, forcing his mouth open, and tip the rest of the drugged coffee into his open mouth. He starts to thrash his head to each side, but I’m quicker, and I’m not drugged to the eyeballs. I slap my hand over his mouth and lean in real close, so our noses are almost touching.

“Swallow, bitch,” I whisper.

He chokes and splutters, but he swallows the rest of my coffee cocktail. I wonder if I gave him enough to sedate him. Maybe it will kill him. I have five morphine-filled syringes hidden in my mother’s room if I need to take him down again.

“Cass,” he slurs, and I’m equal parts disturbed and fucking impressed that drugs and a pistol whip haven’t knocked him out yet.

“I always wondered how you got there so fast,” I say. “I was fifty feet away from the creek when they crashed, and you were there within seconds of me getting to that car.”

His eyes roll and flutter; it won’t be long now. “Cassie, what did you give me.” More urgent. More desperate. I wish I could freeze time so that I could press my lips to his and taste his despair the way he has tasted mine all these years. I bet it tastes like orange lifesavers and cotton candy. I bet it tastes like a bright red candy apple that sick old men use to lure ten-year-old boys into vans and whisk them away from their mothers.

“I hope you enjoyed ruining my life, motherfucker,” I say to him. “Because I’m about to end yours.”