by Jude Hardin
Before she said want to, Willy raised the pistol and drilled one into her forehead. Dead center. Her once-perfect skull now had a gaping hole the size of a nickel in it. She sat there for a second with a stunned expression on her face, and then toppled sideways toward Juliet.
Juliet screamed. She flung her arms around me and buried her head in my chest and started wailing. She felt real, and she sounded real, but I knew she wasn’t real. No more real than Terry Vine playing guitar in the garage. I wanted to push her aside, but I didn’t have the strength.
“Damn,” Willy said. “That was a pretty good shot, don’t you think? Now I’m wondering if I should shoot you next, Mr. Crossbow, or just sit here and enjoy my drink for a while and watch you bleed. What do you think?”
“Fuck you,” I said. “That’s what I think.”
“Oh, so you’re going to be a tough guy now. I can respect that. But since we’re all going to die today anyway, I think I’ll go ahead and finish this fine beverage. Tell you what: I won’t fire the gun again until the liquor gets down to here.” He pointed to a spot on the bottle, just below the bottom of the label. “I figure that’ll give us about ten more minutes to chat. How’s that sound?”
“Peachy,” I said.
“Now, if that bitch sitting beside you there will just shut the fuck up, we can continue our conversation in peace.”
“What?”
“Tell her to stop that bawling, man. That’s annoying.”
“Jules, look at me,” I said.
She slowly raised her head. Her eyes were bloodshot, her face shiny with tears. She was real. Now I knew she was, because Willy could see her too.
“I want to go home,” she said. “I just want to go home.”
“What are you doing here?” I said.
“Jet was my friend. My patient. We went out to lunch…”
She started crying again.
I turned to Willy. “Let her go,” I said. “She didn’t have anything to do with any of this. Let her walk away. You can kill me, and then you can kill yourself if you want to.”
Willy massaged his chin, considering that. “I want to hear you say it first,” he said. “I want to hear you admit that you’ve been fucking my old lady.”
Juliet looked up at me. She was sniffling. She looked confused.
“If I admit that Jet and I were having an affair, you’ll let Juliet go?” I said.
“Juliet. Is that her name? Sure, I’ll let her go. Why not? She’s aggravating the shit out of me with all that screaming and crying anyway. What a fucking baby. But you have to look me in the eyes and tell me first. And a simple yes won’t do it. I want details. If I think you’re making shit up, I’ll make you watch her die. Hard. So yeah, it’s a deal. You tell me all about it, and I’ll let her go. But first, I need to take a piss.”
Willy stood and turned his back to us and unzipped his pants. He urinated on the carpet and took a long pull from the bottle at the same time.
While he was doing that, I whispered in Juliet’s ear: “There’s a window broken out around back. If you climb in, you’ll see a backpack on the floor. There’s a gun in the backpack.”
Juliet nodded.
Willy zipped up, turned around, sat back down on the ottoman.
“All right,” he said. “Let’s hear the story.”
My bleeding had slowed to a trickle. Either I was running out of blood, or the wounds had partially clotted off. Maybe a combination of both.
There was no way I could have stood, or even crawled, but my head felt a little better than it had a few minutes ago. I thought maybe I was strong enough to placate Willy with some lies, hoping he would be true to his word then and let Juliet go.
“There’s not that much to tell,” I said. “I was at the grocery store down in Keystone Heights one day, and I met her there. In the produce section. We were both looking at the apples. I asked her what happened to her legs, and she said she’d been in a car accident. We got to talking about this and that, and one thing led to another. We met casually a couple of times, and then one night she invited me over here to her house.”
“Did she tell you she was married?” Willy said.
“No. I didn’t know she was married. Not until today.”
“When was the first time you had sex with her?”
“That first night she invited me over. It was a month ago last Wednesday. I remember, because last Wednesday she kept saying it was our one-month anniversary.”
“Did she like it?” Willy said.
“Pardon me?”
“The sex. Did she like it? Because that was one of our main problems. She was always too tired or had a headache or something. She had all kinds of excuses. She would cut me off for months sometimes. So did she like it?”
That was a tough one. If I said no, it would lead to another line of questioning. Why the hell was she fucking you if she didn’t like it? That’s bullshit. You’re a lying son of a bitch. And if he determined I was lying, he would kill Juliet. I needed to answer in a way that would be believable to him, but also in a way that wouldn’t destroy his ego.
“What can I say?” I said. “Yeah. She liked it. But she also warned me that sometimes she experienced periods of frigidity. Some kind of hormonal thing, she said.”
Willy bought it. He took a hit on the vodka, and with tears streaming down his cheeks, he said, “This is so fucked up, man. Do you know how fucked up this is? Do you even realize?”
I nodded. “Yeah. This is as fucked up as it gets.”
“I wasn’t aiming to come here and kill nobody today. I just wanted to see my baby. My sweet Jet. That’s all. Now look at her. Oh, God! What the hell have I done?”
Juliet had settled down. Willy was the one bawling now.
“There doesn’t have to be any more bloodshed,” I said. “Call the police and turn yourself in. They’ll send an ambulance and—”
“Oh, hell no,” Willy said. “I ain’t going back to jail, man. Not going to happen.” He held the vodka bottle up and looked at it. “Couple more swigs and that’ll be it. Adios, amigos.”
“You said you’d let Juliet go.”
He pointed the gun at her, closed one eye and took aim. His drunken finger trembled against the trigger. “Yeah, that’s what I said, wasn’t it? And I’m a man of my word. All right, bitch. Get the fuck out of here.”
“I can go?” Juliet said.
“I said you could, didn’t I? Now get the fuck out before I change my mind.”
Juliet rose. She wiped her eyes and face with her hands. She looked me in the eyes, gave me a slight nod, turned and walked toward the front door. She exited without looking back.
The .357 in my backpack was just like the one we had had at home. Juliet knew how to use it. I knew she did, because I’d taught her. Sometimes her scores at the firing range were better than mine. All she needed to do was climb in the window and get the gun and sneak back into the living room and blast Mr. Willy back to where he came from. Back to the darkest corner of hell. The shit was about to hit the fan. I just needed to keep Willy engaged for a few more minutes. I needed to give him a reason to hold off on shooting me. To somehow make him think we were in this together now.
“Mind if I have a drink of that?” I said, gesturing toward the vodka bottle.
He held it up and tilted it, assessing the volume. “There’s not much left,” he said. “I need to be good and drunk, and I’m not quite there yet.”
He was there. That’s the thing about alcohol. Sometimes it keeps you from realizing just how inebriated you really are. It’s why people party all night and then get behind the wheel of a car.
“You wouldn’t deny a condemned man one last drink,” I said. “Would you, Willy? Come on, man. It’s just me and you now. If you’re going to kill me, we might as well go out as friends.”
He sat there and stared at nothing. He was practically in a stupor.
“All right,” he said. “Forget about what I said before. We’ll drink t
ill it’s gone, and then I’ll put us both out of our misery.”
He straightened his arm and held the bottle toward me. I looked through it, at the distorted image of a sociopath, a demon whose sole purpose in life was to bring misery to others. I looked through the bottle, and in my peripheral vision I saw the beautiful young woman named Jet whose life had been wasted. She’d died for nothing. All because she’d been unlucky enough to hook up with this asshole. A furious rage boiled through me, and I did something completely spontaneous. Something I hadn’t planned on. In one swift motion, I grabbed the Stolichnaya bottle by the neck and broke it against the coffee table and lurched forward and jammed the sharp jagged end into Willy’s face and twisted it like a screwdriver. He screamed. He stood and dropped the gun and pressed his hands against the monstrous incisions I’d made and jumped up and down, wailing like a little kid who knows his whole day has just been ruined.
Blood gushed through Willy’s fingers, quickly saturating the front of his T-shirt. He took his hands away and gazed in astonishment at the bright red viscous goo covering them. There was a flap of glistening meat where his left cheek had been, and the tip of his nose was dangling by a single thread of cartilage. I could see his molars on the left side through the new window I’d created.
A massive dose of adrenaline pumped through me, fueling me like the afterburner on a jet fighter. I knew I had only one chance. I rolled off the couch onto the coffee table, and off the coffee table onto the floor, not feeling or even caring about the bits of broken glass digging into me, and went for the gun. I stretched, reaching for it with every ounce of my remaining energy, but it was just beyond my grasp. I tried to scoot, inching toward it, reaching, reaching, reaching. It was only a couple of inches away now. I touched the cold steel barrel with the tip of my middle finger. I grunted and strained and nearly had a grip on it with my thumb and forefinger when Willy casually bent down and picked it up off the floor.
He pointed the gun at my head and pulled the trigger.
Nothing happened. The gun didn’t fire. It must have jammed.
I rolled onto my back. I was spent. A fly landed on my forehead, and I didn’t even have the strength to shoo it away. The simple act of breathing had become a major effort.
Willy was a mess. He stood there fiddling with the magazine, trying to figure out why the gun had failed.
“Piece of shit,” he said. Or at least that’s what he tried to say. It came out sounding more like peesha schick. Apparently, the slashes and gashes on his jaw had resulted in something of a speech impediment.
“You shon of a bish,” he said, following the curse with something about a closed casket and how his mama wasn’t going to be very happy about it.
He aimed the gun and tried again.
CLICK.
Again.
CLICK.
Every time he pulled the trigger, I pissed my pants a little more.
He yanked the magazine out and emptied it on the coffee table and started reloading the cartridges carefully one by one. It was a simple task. A monkey could have done it. But Willy was very drunk, so he had to concentrate intensely on what he was doing. He moved in extreme slow motion, and with painstaking attention to detail, about what you would expect from someone who’d downed over half a bottle of vodka in a short amount of time. He’d finally managed to line up four of the remaining five shells, when a loud crunching sound came from the bedroom.
Juliet.
She must have climbed into the window and stepped on the pile of broken glass on the carpet.
Willy slammed the magazine back into the butt of the pistol.
“You stay here,” he said. “I’ll be right back.”
“Wait. I just want to tell you how sorry I am, Willy. I know a surgeon in South America who can fix your face. I have money. I could help you get out of the country. Tonight. We’ll wrap some bandages around your—”
“Shut the fuck up,” he said.
I lay there helpless as Willy stormed down the hall toward the bedroom. My only hope was that Juliet would quickly find the .357 and riddle him with six fat holes as soon as he opened the bedroom door.
“What are you doing, you stupid bitch!” Willy shouted.
A shot was fired. Then another.
I heard the sound of glass breaking, a lamp maybe, and then a sickening thud as someone hit the floor.
I expected my dear sweet Juliet to come running around the corner. I expected her to kneel at my side and embrace me and kiss my hot forehead and tell me everything was going to be all right. I expected her to call 911 and summon the medical attention I desperately needed.
But that’s not what happened. Juliet did not come running around the corner.
All my hopes for any kind of future faded as Willy emerged from the arched threshold to the hallway. Staggering, bleeding, sweating. He had the semiautomatic pistol in one hand and the .357 revolver in the other. He looked gruesome, like some kind of monster from an apocalyptic horror movie.
In the movies, the monster is always defeated in the end. Not so in real life.
“Bitch tried to kill me,” he said, the combination of the booze in his system and the lacerations on his face making his speech barely comprehensible now. “Why would she do that? I was nice to her. I let her go.”
“Where is she?” I said.
“Oh, she’s dead. I shot her. Had no choice. And now, since you wasted all my vodka, I’m going to have to shoot you too, Mr. Crossbow.” Mishta Crosh-bo. “And I’m not going to have to depend on this piece-of-shit nine millimeter I bought on the street this time.”
He tossed the semiautomatic aside, pointed the .357 at my head, and cocked the hammer back.
I’d always wondered if you hear the gunshot, the one that sends a bullet tearing through your brain. I wondered if you would feel it, if only for an instant. Would it hurt? Would it be the worst headache imaginable for the briefest of moments, or would all pain stop instantaneously? And then what? What would happen once the brain was completely destroyed? I believed there had to be something. Heaven, reincarnation, alternate dimensions where eternal spirits reside, something. I believed that the self continued on somewhere, that death didn’t result in a completely black and nonexistent oblivion. I believed it, and apparently my belief was going to be tested soon.
I’d always wondered if you would hear the gunshot, and I did. The thunderous boom sent an icy cold wave of silvery liquid current through me, as though my spine had been injected with water from the Arctic Sea.
I didn’t feel any pain. There was no bright light to follow. There was only darkness.
Only darkness, until I opened my eyes and saw Diana Dawkins standing there with a smoking gun in her hand.
Willy was on the floor, a few feet to my left. He had a nice fat bullet hole through his right eye socket, which balanced out the damage I’d done to the left side of his face with the broken vodka bottle.
“Nicholas, are you all right?”
“No,” I said. “I’m not all right. I’m dying. I need help, and I need it now.”
“Can you walk?”
“No. I can’t even lift my head.”
Di looked around the room, trying to figure out what had happened.
I knew that in time everything inside of me would come crashing down hard, but at the moment I was emotionally numb. Like when you sleep on your arm the wrong way and you wake up and it’s a dead thing that doesn’t even seem to be a part of you anymore.
I spoke to Di in a monotone, robotic voice, as if I were trying to explain an algebra problem.
“That woman there slumped over on the couch is the homeowner,” I said, struggling not to pass out. “Her name is Jet. The guy you shot is her estranged husband, Willy. He burned her legs with hot grease, and he was arrested for domestic violence. Recently made bail. He showed up right when I was about to leave.”
“Is there, or was there, anyone else in the house?” Di said.
“My wife is in the back be
droom. Willy shot her a few minutes ago.”
“Your wife?”
“Apparently Jet was one of her home-health patients,” I said.
“I’ll go check on her.”
Di walked back to the bedroom. She returned a couple of minutes later, furiously working a cell phone with her thumbs.
“Do I want to know?” I said.
“She’s alive, but only barely. Here’s how this is going to work: I’ll make an anonymous nine-one-one call for your wife. County rescue will pick her up and take her to the hospital. Homicide detectives will follow, of course, and Jet and Willy will be coroner’s cases. We need for this to look like a domestic violence issue, where Juliet just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.”
“What about me?”
“There’s no reason for anyone to know that you were here. I have some of our guys coming for you, in an unmarked ambulance. They’ll return you to Orange Park Medical Center. They’ll wheel you into the ER and then disappear.”
“But when Juliet wakes up, she’ll remember everything that happened, and—”
“That’s why I gave her a shot of Memorase,” Di said. “She won’t remember anything that happened in the past twenty-four hours.”
“How convenient.”
“Convenient, and essential. And I’m afraid I’m going to have to give you a dose as well.”
“Why? I’m not going to tell anyone what really happened.”
“There are too many contingencies at this point. It’s in everyone’s best interest, including yours, if you totally forget about the assassination attempt and everything that followed.”
She reached into her backpack and pulled out a syringe and a tiny glass vial. She uncapped the needle, pierced the vial’s port, and drew up the medication.
“I don’t want that,” I said.
“Believe me, it’s for your own good. You’ll fall asleep for a while, and when you wake up, the past twenty-four hours will be a blank.”
