He had a daughter.
And Derek remembered that fact because she was standing in the doorway six feet away.
5
She was maybe thirteen, just beginning the transformation from little girl to young woman, and it was already plain to see she was going to be stunning. Slim and tall, with raven hair that cascaded over her shoulders and halfway down her back. Her facial features were delicate but sharply defined.
Under virtually any circumstance the girl would be strikingly beautiful.
Except this circumstance.
Her face was screwed up in horrified confusion as she hung just outside the still-spreading ring of her parents’ blood. She stood unmoving, still as a stone, her gaze fixed on the two bodies.
Derek doubted she even realized he was in the room yet.
A pair of white buds sprouted from her ears and he guessed she’d been in her room listening to music during the brief confrontation. The struggle had gone unheard, but even the loudest of hip-hop or heavy metal music—or whatever teens listened to now—wouldn’t have been enough to mask the sound of two gunshots.
And here she was, and any moment now she would start screaming and Derek would probably panic like he’d done just seconds ago, and another bleeding body would hit the floor, this one a kid.
So Derek said, “I’m sorry, I didn’t know…I don’t…it…it was an accident.” The words came out high-pitched and quivery, the sound of someone else’s voice. Someone who was pretty close to stroking out.
The girl jumped in surprise and backed away a couple of steps before stopping and meeting Derek’s eyes. She must have seen the gun in his shaking hand but she paid it no attention. “You shot both my parents by accident?”
He lowered his eyes. He knew it was stupid, knew any second now the girl would run to a phone—assuming she didn’t have one in her pocket, which given her age was almost certainly a bad assumption—and call 911. He should be threatening her with execution to keep her quiet, should be tying her up and then figuring out a plan.
But at this moment, and under these circumstances, he couldn’t bring himself to do any of that. He couldn’t bring himself to hold her gaze. So he stared at the floor and said, “Um, yeah. Something like that.”
“I need to check for a pulse,” she said. “I need to make sure they’re alive and then call for ambulances. If you want to stop me you’re going to have to shoot me.” The girl’s eyes were watery and red, but she hadn’t screamed or panicked or started crying and her voice sounded steadier than Derek’s.
He couldn’t think of anything to say so he nodded.
Lowered his gun to the floor.
Watched as the little girl who was just starting to become a young woman dropped to her knees in front of the two motionless bodies. She landed closest to her mother so she started there. She lowered her head to the bloody chest and listened, then placed her fingers against her mother’s neck and closed her eyes in concentration.
After a moment she glanced across the room at Derek, her eyes giving away nothing. She pushed to her feet and stepped over her mother, dropping again to the floor in front of her father. Then she repeated the exercise.
Then she lowered her head to her father’s chest and began sobbing deeply. “They’re both dead,” she said, the words muffled by McHugh’s bloody shirt. “They’re both dead. You killed my parents.”
She hugged her father’s body and then sat back on her haunches and faced Derek. “YOU KILLED MY PARENTS,” she screamed, and then she popped to her feet and charged across the room.
He barely had time to raise the gun and didn’t have time to aim it, which was probably a good thing because he didn’t trust himself not to pull the trigger. The last thing he wanted was to commit his third murder in two minutes by killing a child. She slammed into him at full speed, screaming gibberish, and they tumbled into the dining room chairs.
Then she was slapping his face and punching him, kicking him for good measure, and he realized dimly that if he didn’t get his shit together he was going to get beaten to unconsciousness by a little girl. He had brought his arms up reflexively in front of his face to protect himself, and now he drew his right hand back, giving the girl a couple of free shots at his eye and cheekbone.
She rocked him twice with closed-fist punches and then he pistol-whipped her, slamming the butt of the gun against her raven-haired skull. She had drawn her fist back to hit him again but her lights went out immediately, as if someone had tripped a circuit breaker inside her brain. She fell off him sideways and hit the floor with a thud, her arms and legs spasming once and then falling still.
Derek realized he was panting and he worked to get his breathing under control. A shadow in his peripheral vision caused him to jerk his head to the side, fearful another McHugh was coming to beat his ass.
But the shadow was nothing more than the swelling beginning on the side of his face where the now-unconscious girl had slugged him multiple times. He placed the gun on the floor and lifted his fingers to his face, touching the skin gingerly.
It stung and he grimaced, and he realized he’d begun crying at some point. He knew Crowder viewed him as a fuckup; hell, the whole world viewed him as a fuckup, the most obvious reason being he was a fuckup. That much would be impossible to deny, not that Derek ever would have tried.
This situation, though, this was a fuckup on a scale that dwarfed even the worst shitstorms Derek had ever managed to involve himself in. This was a whole new level of fucking up. This was the Mount Everest of fuckups. The K2. The mother
