choice, and I already had one run-through. What was an encore performance? A piece of cake, right?
Right.
As Thackery followed Hector at a run down the hall, I gripped Meleah’s arms as she staggered back against the stained plasterboard and helped her slide down to a sitting position. Peeling back her hand, blood under her immaculately short polished nails and in every crease of her knuckles, I faced the slash that ran across the front of her throat. It was bleeding, but it wasn’t the waterfall spill I’d unconsciously expected. It wasn’t deep enough for arteries to have been cut. It wasn’t precisely superficial, but she wouldn’t bleed to death.
I didn’t think.
She wouldn’t die.
I hoped.
I ripped the pristine white sleeve of her lab coat-professional always, even on field trips to hell. She was a good match for Hector. Would that they both lived long enough to find that out. I wrapped the sleeve around her throat and tied it snugly enough to help with the bleeding but not enough to cut off her air. “Put your hand back up.” I pulled it up for her and pressed it to the quickly staining cloth. “It’ll help.”
Her eyes met mine as her hand automatically stayed where I’d placed it. “He drowned my baby,” she whispered. “Jack.” My mom had been the only one to call me Jack, like the girls had been the only ones to call me Jackie. “He killed our Tess.”
“I know… Mom.” I swallowed. A recording, only a recording with more depth and scope than any duplication should have. “I know. Stay here. I’ll get Boyd. I promise.”
I ran a soothing hand along her hair and then stood from my crouch to run down the hall after Thackery and Hector. Thackery had kept hold of the knife, something Boyd hadn’t done, since he’d left it buried in my mother’s throat. He had something else that my stepfather had lacked. Boyd had just been a fat, lazy bastard who had no hope of outrunning a fourteen-year-old. Thackery was a whippet of a man. Lithe and fast.
But Hector was no skinny teenager, either. His body was honed and hardened by military service. He could outrun the runt that I’d been. Thackery was quicker than Boyd. Hector was quicker than me.
He’d already fired the shotgun. I’d already been throwing myself onto Thackery, knocking him and the knife down, where they could do no more damage. Unfortunately, in Hector’s eyes- my eyes from sixteen years ago-the damage had already been done. His hands had already found the shotgun in the closet, and his finger had already pulled the trigger. I wished I’d been slower. Thackery didn’t need saving. I was another matter. The buckshot mainly hit my chest and was stopped by the Kevlar. Some of it hit a few inches under my left arm, an area unprotected by the vest. Only part of the load but enough to blow me off Thackery and land me on my back. People say it feels as if you were kicked by a mule. People, they always goddamn lie.
The pain spiked sharp and hot, and blood coated my gloved hand when I touched the multiple punctures through cloth and flesh. I looked up from my hand to Hector. He didn’t see me. One shot. It had taken two to put Boyd down. As Thackery growled and propelled himself up from the floor, blade in hand arcing straight for Hector’s chest, Hector fired the second shot, right into Thackery’s face-Boyd’s face-the same as I had done.
And if there was balance in the world, any at all, that’s where it would’ve stopped, the killing. Hector would go to Meleah’s side and tell his mom that everything was fine. Everything would be all right.
The world laughed at that one.
Whoever had left the shotgun hadn’t only loaded it, they’d also left extra ammunition. Thackery was gone, a faceless corpse lying across my legs in a hallway I used to slide down in socked feet. But I was still alive-in serious, nerve-shredding pain but alive. That made me another Boyd to take care of. Hector disappeared into the back bedroom and returned to load the shotgun with two more shells by the time I managed to use a handful of Thackery’s lab coat to pull myself up into a sitting position. I ignored the gray haze that blurred my vision. “Hector,” I said hoarsely, but he wasn’t Hector now. “ Jackson, it’s over. You killed him. You killed Boyd. He’s dead.”
The shotgun stayed trained on me, and Hector’s pale eyes didn’t blink. They were empty. That didn’t mean he hadn’t heard me. If I could’ve seen into my own eyes when I’d put Boyd down, I wouldn’t have seen much of anyone home then, either.
“Jackson,” I emphasized again. The guy at the mill had heard me, or at least I’d pushed the recording into a minor detour. “Jackson, your mom is hurt. She needs you.”
This time, Hector did blink, and his lips peeled back from his teeth. “You stabbed her. You murdering bastard. She’s dying. You’ve killed her. You killed Tess. No more killing. Not by you.”
I saw them simultaneously: his finger tightening on the trigger…
And the shoe.
It was at his feet, halfway between him and Thackery’s shattered skull. It gleamed bright and pink as the day Mom had bought it and as the day I’d found it in the grass. One small pink shoe. Tess’s shoe… although she’d been buried in them both. Her pride and joy, her favorite possessions. How could she be buried in anything else?
This was dying, I guessed. Not your whole life running like an overly long James Cameron movie. No, just small moments. Small shots of the things that had derailed your life altogether. It made sense. It made you glad to go. You could finally see the whole screwed-up mess put to rest, because there’d never been any real hope of turning it around with one selfless act. That was movie shit, and movie shit was just that. Pure, unadulterated, get-your-hopes-up and pull-the-rug-out-from-under-you-every-time shit.
“Go on then, Jackson,” I said quietly, my eyes still on the impossible shoe. “Boyd has to go, and you know it. Pull the trigger. Hector, if you remember this, it’s not your fault. Some things have to play out. You can’t stop a recording in the middle. It has to play out until the end. Things just work that way.”
I didn’t look up to watch him pull the trigger. If he did remember this, I didn’t want that to be one of his memories. Nightmares cut at you a shade less in the dark of the night if you don’t have to see them looking back at you.
But instead of the shotgun blast that I couldn’t possibly hear until after it tore off my head, I heard something else. Something as impossible as the shoe.
“Boys are so stupid.”
I lifted my gaze-not by too much, I didn’t have to-and saw her standing behind Hector. She had small fingers hooked into his pocket as she peeked around his hip. The strawberry blond hair was in a bow. Green, to clash completely with the shoe. Tess had always had her own unique style.
“Jack Sprat, I’m awfully busy now.” There was the same overly dramatic sigh I remembered. Her face brightened. “You found my shoe!”
“I did.” My lips were completely numb. I didn’t feel them move. “I wish I could’ve kept it before, but I thought you’d want it more.” Hector hadn’t pulled the trigger, or he had and here was the afterlife I’d always denied. I didn’t like being wrong. I hated worse to admit it. But now, if this was what happened when you died, I didn’t mind being a blind idiot. “Where were you all those years? Why didn’t you come see me?”
She cocked her head and smiled, happy as she’d ever been… always been. Every minute of every day. “I came all the time. Except not so much since, um, December? Other than that, I visited you tons and tons. But you couldn’t see me or hear me. You never pay attention.” She stomped her socked foot playfully, and suddenly, the pink shoe was back on her foot as she stepped out to stand beside a frozen Hector. He was breathing, I could see that, and maybe that meant I wasn’t dead after all. Why would I stick around to watch the man breathe?
“I knew you’d need help. And if you wouldn’t listen, then I’d have to smack you one and make you listen.” I felt good and solidly smacked, that was true. She reached up and pinched Hector’s side. “Wake up, Hector. Put the bad gun down and wake up.”
Hector jumped, as if he’d received a small electric shock. “What
…?” He looked at the shotgun in his hand and hurriedly eased back on the trigger before placing the weapon on the floor. “Jackson.” He was pale under his darker skin. “I shot you. God, I shot you.” Thackery he paid no attention to. After all, in his mind, Thackery had been a done deal, anyway.
Tess shook her head, hair swinging and fierce with exasperation. “Boys. Boys can’t do anything right.”
Hector’s head jerked around and then angled down. I was certain my file had pictures. He knew who he was seeing, what he was seeing, even if I was having trouble wrapping a mind suddenly made of mush around it all. “Tess?”
“You hurt Jackie, but I guess it’s not your fault. I thought doctors were supposed to be smart and have suckers. Grape suckers are the best.” She turned an expectant gaze on him, only to sigh again, this time in disappointment, when his mouth opened without sound and no suckers came out of his pocket. “I think you need to
