The gun roared. So loud and yet muffled by our two bodies pressed together on either side of it. I jerked. He jerked. I couldn’t imagine the look on my own face, the look that went with the despondency of being shot, being killed, until I saw the look on his face and realized it must be a reflection of mine. Except why did he look that way? He hadn’t been shot. He hadn’t—
I was still waiting for the pain to rush in when he keeled over, his shirt smoldering around the hole the bullet had made, gunpowder dirtying the material. And then blood rushing out, soaking into his shirt, and he could only look down at it as disbelievingly as I was.
He had to be in shock. Was I in shock? I must’ve been, because I couldn’t feel anything. It was like my mind wasn’t equipped for it, couldn’t figure out what emotions to send me. Sadness? Victory? Horror? It was too big for me to break down, too big for any of my thoughts to get around. I’d shot him. I’d shot him. He was dying. When he was dead, I’d be a murderer.
Maybe I should’ve tried to save him, but it seemed so irreversible. Like I couldn’t even try to counteract anything that had happened. It just was. And all over, he was going slack. His mouth agape. His eyes unseeing.
Until he slumped down on the bed and I knew there was no more for him to move. That was it. His resting place. And where better than a bed? He’d tucked himself in just like he was turning in for the night, only his night would last forever.
I let out a deep breath. Had I been holding it or had my lungs actually been pumping during that small eternity when I’d been looking at him, looking at him and trying to chisel all that had happened into thoughts small enough to think.
Lia walked past me. She looked as lifeless as he was. She bent over to feel his pulse and in doing so, her bare ass took up my vision. I could see a few of the dark hairs that clothed her womanhood and I felt a howl of laughter at how much was going on, how none of it had taken a break just because a man was dead.
Lucy was probably still in the diner, waiting for her coffee, maybe feeling a little shiver at the thought of me soaping up my body in the shower. It was hilarious. That somehow got through the traffic jam of my emotions and made it onto my face, into my voice.
I said “Jesus!” in a giggly voice like someone had told a joke.
“He’s not breathing,” Lia told me, like that exclamation had been me asking.
I sat down on the other bed before I fell down. I felt cold, clammy, and wondered if I was having some kind of medical episode before I remembered I’d just been in the shower. How long had it been? Three minutes? Three minutes since my biggest problem was choosing between mother and daughter as they both went behind each other’s backs…
Lia sat down beside me, putting an arm around my waist. “It’s okay. You didn’t do anything wrong. You saved me. God! He was gonna kill me!”
“Where’d he even come from?” I asked, not really asking, just venting questions the same way I let out carbon monoxide. “I came in here to take a shower and everything was fine, I come out again…”
“He’s mommy’s boyfriend,” Lia said.
“Her boyfriend?”
“Ex-boyfriend. She was seeing him for a while, but he started getting controlling, possessive. When he… when he finally said that I should be a part of things too, that was the last straw. We packed up and left. I guess he followed us.”
I shook my head, not understanding, not believing. “How’d he find you? How could he’ve found you?”
“He’s a rich man. I’m sure he could’ve afforded some way to track the car. Maybe he thought that we didn’t really want to leave, that we’d come back after a while once we realized… then when we didn’t, he came after us.”
I hung my head. Money. Relatives. Trouble. Lots of trouble and me not seeing any way to get clear of it. So that’s why they’d been so secretive. And now I was in the same boat.
“Okay. Okay. Get dressed. We’ll call the police. They’ll do a rape kit, we’ll explain what happened, it’ll be open and shut.” I said it already thinking that I could dip out. Make Lia claim self-defense—everyone would believe her—and leave me out of it altogether.
I’d be sorry to see Lucy and her go, but an ex-con has to do without a lot of rights, and one of them is the right not to get hassled by the cops, even when you’ve done nothing wrong.
Lia looked at me like I said something about the moon landing being fake, 9/11 being an inside job—that kinda break from reality. “We can’t call the cops.”
“He’s dead, Lia. We’re a long way past the point of calling housekeeping.”
Lia shook her head emphatically. “You don’t know him, Roy. He was sick, very sick, but… clever. Clever about it. He never let on how violent he was. Mommy and I were the only ones who knew.”
“They’ll be able to tell he was violent now!” I crowed, feeling far too hysterical for someone who was supposed to be calm, cool… not going to prison.
Lia popped to her feet, pacing as though set off by my raised voice. “He made it all look like he was the good guy. He’d bait Mommy… get her to hit him or yell at him, and then he’d call the police on her. They’ve got all the incident reports where it looks like she was the one attacking him. It’ll look like…”
“Like what?”
Lia pushed her hands through her hair. “Like Mommy found some guy and paid him… one way or the other… to kill her ex. He had a restraining order against her.”
“Then what’s he doing here? Lia, it was self-defense. Not even that! He was trying to shoot me and the gun went off, you can tell them that.”
“He made Mommy look like she was an addict. I mean, he made her take drugs and then he’d record her, all the cops on her…”
“Then what’s he doing here? If he wanted to keep away from you two so bad—”
“That’s how he set things up! He had Mommy living with him, but legally she was supposed to be somewhere else! If she didn’t do what he said, he would call the police and tell them she wasn’t staying away from him! He had it all set up! And he had me enrolled at this school, this fancy school that I wasn’t supposed to leave…”
I tried to say something, but the words weren’t there. Until they were. “Are you telling me your mother kidnapped you?”
“No! I wanted to go with her! But he has it rigged so no matter what we do, it looks like we’re bad!”
Her attitude was beginning to get to me. I felt like I’d come in halfway through a horror movie, sure the monster could be easily defeated, not at all knowing how indestructible it was. I tried to kill the beast anyway. “Okay, leave me out of it. Leave your mother out of it. We’ll say that she was getting breakfast and you were alone. He broke in, attacked you, you managed to get your hands on the gun—”
“It won’t work! No one will believe it! I’m not strong enough to get the gun away from him—look at me! They’ll say I let him into the room, then shot him in cold blood. That I made up being raped because my mother put me up to it. He has powerful friends, Roy. They’ll pull strings with the DA, they’ll hang us all for it!”
She was wide-eyed, panting, on the verge of a panic attack. I put my hands on her shoulders. “Calm down, calm down…”
“The moment the police get involved, we’re dead! We’re in the system then and these people own the system!”
“We’ll go to the news. Reporters. A man raping his girlfriend’s daughter, abusing her mother, getting himself shot. It’ll be national news. No DA will dare pull anything under that kind of microscope.”
Lia laughed like she was choking on something. “He owns four news stations. Even if it gets in the paper, so what? They’ll wait it out. People will move on to something else. And once the attention has dried up, they’ll ram us through the courts and fry us all. They have people who do it for a living, Roy. It’s all drawn up in a playbook already, they just have to turn to the right page.”
I looked at the body… made myself look at it… scrutinizing it for any sign of life. If the bastard would just come back to life, at least it wouldn’t be a murder charge hanging over me.
He stayed dead like he knew it was fucking me over.