Gun Shy(9)

Not does she. Did she.

As if she were already dead.

“What?” Damon choked, his bright blue eyes pooling with tears. “No, she always wears her belt.” I was too shocked to process the information properly. My mom was thirty-eight years old. She couldn’t be dying.

“Is she going to be okay? Is she dead?” I asked, hope overriding the reality written all over the doctor’s infuriatingly kind face.

“She’s alive. The machines are keeping her body functioning. Her brain sustained what we believe to be irreparable injury.” A pause. “I’m so sorry.”

Good news and bad news all wrapped up in one neat little sentence that took the air from my lungs. Your mother is alive. PUNCH. She might as well be dead. PUNCH.

“Are you sure?” Damon asked.

I reached for his hand again, his palm damp with sweat, his fingers crushing mine as he squeezed.

The doctor looked at me apprehensively. “The swelling makes it impossible to tell concisely right now…” he trailed off. He cleared his throat, adding in a half-whisper, “It doesn’t look good.”

My mind spun as I tried to process what was happening. Beside me, Damon was doing the same. He scrubbed his hand across his jaw, his stare vacant. How could this happen to us? “I am so very sorry,” the doctor repeated. I wanted to throw up. My hand burned where Damon was gripping it. I’d been burned by the flames, and now his touch was like agony.

I stopped hearing things at that point. I focused every ounce of my attention on the pain in my fingers, the burned skin that was being crushed by Damon’s stronghold. It was an odd comfort, the way the pain distracted me.

It can’t get worse, I kept thinking to myself. It can’t get worse than this.

I was wrong.



* * *



The next morning, I remember Chris, Gun Creek’s Deputy Sheriff, and Leo’s friend, leading Leo away in handcuffs. How could a hallway be so long? It seemed to stretch on forever. Damon pulled me tighter to him, his arm slung over my shoulder, and I sagged into his side. We both watched on, dazed and battle-weary, as Chris led Leo away. They walked and walked until they were pinpricks, and then they were gone.



It’s my fault, I would say to myself, over and over. As I held my mom’s hand in the ICU, her face already starting to hollow with death. She was still hanging on, and they’d said any brain swelling needed to go down before an accurate prognosis could be given, but she was already gone. I know it now, picking that memory out of my own brain, folding it over, tearing off the waxy film of denial and hope that marred my view at the time.

I don’t have that now, and I can tell you that my mother, God rest her soul, exited her body at the moment Leo’s car plowed into the creek and her untethered body smashed into the front dash.

I’d argued with Leo before I left for work that afternoon. Had yelled at him for something trivial before I stormed off and drove away, leaving him there in the parking lot with balled fists and that horrible longing, that thirst in his eyes that had never really gone away since Karen. I don’t even remember what we fought about now. It was something ridiculous, for sure, minor enough I can’t even recall.

So I made him angry, he got drunk, climbed into his car, and drove that car through a safety barrier, into a creek, with my mother riding shotgun.





CHAPTER THREE





LEO





NOW


Lovelock prison, ironically, doesn’t contain a lot of love.

At least, not the kind of loving I’m looking for. The kind of “loving” your cellmate tries to lay on you when you first arrive. Some of the men here have been in prison for decades - multiple. They’ve long since compromised on what they stick their dicks into.

Not me. I might not be the most built guy compared to some of the other prisoners here, but I am quick on my feet. My grandfather taught me how to rumble when I was a kid before he died, and I’ve never lost a fight yet.

Which is handy in a place like this. Because I like my asshole untouched very much.

“Bentley!” a guard barks from the cell door. I roll my eyes, sliding off the lower bunk in my cell and getting to my feet. I share this cell with three other guys on the sixth floor of Lovelock penitentiary, and it’s no accident that I have the best bed, the most cigarettes, and have never been touched by another male prisoner.

My fellow prisoners learned my name the day I arrived here, just shy of eight years ago. Some motherfucker tried to make me his bitch. I took his eye out with my toothbrush. One-eyed Al, we call him now. People at Lovelock know the name Leo Bentley, and they don’t fuck with me.

I saunter up to the guard, taking the cigarette from behind my ear as I do. We aren’t supposed to smoke here, but rules are made to be broken, right? The fucking guards here are just as bad as the inmates. Worse, in some cases.

Martinez, one of the less abrasive male guards here, waves an envelope through the small hole in the door. My heart leaps into my chest for a moment.

Is it from Cassie? Did she finally respond to one of the letters I’ve been writing her while I’ve been stuck in this hellhole?

But then I see the official typed font on the front of the envelope and my hope fades. Of course, it’s not from her. It’s probably from my parole board hearing. I’m not expecting miracles. When you drive off a bridge with the wife of a sheriff in your car and basically kill her, even though she’s not technically dead, people don’t take too kindly to your good behavior record. Mine’s flawless. Nobody ever snitched on me for Al’s missing eye, and he claimed it was self-inflicted. I don’t think he wanted to rat on me for it in case I took the other one while he wasn’t looking. Ha! Jesus. My sense of humor is terrible.