Turning onto his street, he cringed when he saw Janet’s car in the driveway. “Damn,” he hissed, pulling in and shutting off the engine. “She would get off early today.” He dragged himself from the car, rounding up the right words to break the bad news. His feet felt like cinderblocks as he climbed the front steps and the right words were all wrong. Unlocking the door, he quietly slipped inside and leaned against it, putting off facing her for as long as humanely possible. He wasn’t ready for this but wanted to get it over with at the same time. She would know something was off with him but maybe postponing the bad news until tomorrow wasn’t such a bad idea in the short term. Give himself an extra day or two to lock something else down. But she would know something was wrong. Would smell it on his lies.
Brow folding, he held his breath when he heard an odd sound coming from upstairs. Billy quietly set his keys on the granite breakfast bar and crept up the carpeted staircase, the odd sound getting louder as something banged against a wall upstairs. Janet’s screams made him take the rest of the steps two at a time. Horrid thoughts of murder dashed through his mind. He could handle losing the shop and job but not her too. Not his Janet. Pulse racing, he grabbed a candlestick from a hallway sofa table and skidded to a stop in the doorway to the master bedroom, bracing for the massive amounts of blood spurting from her body that would tell him he was way too late. The air left the room. He blinked to clear his eyes. His legs turned to rubber and his heart fell out onto the floor as he watched the headboard slam against the wall. Janet’s bare legs dangled in the air and the naked black man lying between them wasn’t Billy. She screamed louder as the man pumped his ass between her thighs, giving her the business with such ferocity they didn’t even notice Billy standing in the doorway.
It wasn’t murder.
It was rape.
He stepped forward, mind spinning.
“Don’t stop, Charles! Oh God, don’t stop!”
Billy turned to stone.
Charles?
His head felt dizzy and this couldn’t be happening, not to him. He could accept everything else but not this. Not his beautiful wife. Charles tipped his head back and grunted, pulling one last moan from Janet, who curled her toes and dug her nails into the man’s back. Billy couldn’t breathe because this couldn’t be happening, not on the same day he lost his job. No one was that unlucky.
His wife’s feet slowly lowered back to the bed as she let out a long sigh.
Charles laughed into her neck. “Damn, we gotta take a half day more often,” he panted.
“Half day? Next time let’s make it a full day.”
He kissed her before rolling onto his back and exhaling a winded breath to the ceiling fan above. The candlestick slipped from Billy’s hand to the floor and Janet screamed. Pulling the bed sheet up over her breasts, she scrambled to sit up.
“Billy!” she gasped, brushing hair from her face. “What’re you doing here?”
He stared dully at her, numb from the eyes down and uncertain if he was asleep or awake. “I got fired.”
She traded a terrified look with the naked man lying next to her in Billy’s bed. “Fired? For what?”
“Does it matter?”
“Listen Billy, this isn’t what it looks like.”
The man started sliding out of the bed and Billy pulled the snub-nose revolver from the holster in the small of his back. When he got his CCW permit last year, he always envisioned stopping a deranged shooter at the mall or a mugger after a late night movie but not this. Even in his worst nightmares, this never crossed his mind.
“Stop,” he said flatly, gesturing with the gun.
Charles held up his hands and got back in bed. “Hey man, it’s cool, this doesn’t need to get any uglier than it already is. I’m sorry, Billy.”
Billy swung the gun to Janet, realizing he’d lost everything in the blink of an eye. Everything. A lone tear slid over his cheek. “Why?”
She held the sheet over her chest like a frightened child, like that purple bed sheet could protect her from the six bullets in Billy’s gun. “I’m so sorry, William,” she replied, using the name he hated and blinking some crocodile tears out for good measure. “But you know why.”
He gave her a shallow nod because he did. Over the past few months, the signs were there but he chose to ignore them because he could fix this. He could bounce back higher than ever before but that never happened. Another tear slid out and Billy shot Charles in the chest. Janet screamed and he put a bullet through her heart, killing her scream. Wide-eyed, Charles tried holding the blood inside his chest and slipped out of bed. Wet sounding gurgling noises bubbled in his throat as he stumbled to a chair with his slacks draped over the back. Digging a cell phone from a pocket, blood dripped onto his bare feet. Billy watched him with a strange fascination, unable to feel anything but the warm gun in his hand. The naked man tapped at the screen and put the phone to his ear, meeting Billy’s blank stare while holding his wounded chest.
“Yeah I’ve been shot,” Charles panted in a surprisingly calm voice. He nodded like the person on the other end could see him, a bloody bubble ballooning from one nostril. His eyes dropped to the blood pooling around his feet, mouth opening and closing. Looking up, he stared at Billy with the color draining from his face. “What-What’s your address?”
Billy stared back with the gun hanging limply in his hand, his world collapsing around him in slow motion.
“Billy!” Charles shouted, coughing up blood. “What’s your address?”
Billy snorted and shot him again. And again. And again until the gun clicked dry. He studied the dead man lying on his bedroom floor with his pulse pounding thickly in his ears and time stopping around him. Faintly, he could hear the 911 operator saying something through the cell phone on the carpet but it didn’t matter what she was saying because the emergency was over now. After a few seconds or minutes – he wasn’t sure which – he went to his wife’s side of the bed and stared at her lifeless body for a while.
“I’m sorry, baby,” he said, placing her hands over her chest to cover the blood painting her breasts in red. Operating on some weird automatic pilot, he pulled his cell phone out and snapped a picture of her he didn’t want. He examined the screen for several seconds and then looked back to his dead wife. She was beautiful. Even in death. Then her eyelids snapped back and she seized his wrist.
Billy awoke with a jolt and stared at the ceiling. For a moment, he couldn’t move, his body paralyzed from head to toe. It was suffocating being reduced to a pile of meat like this. After some time, and with great effort, he forced his head to one side to see Stephanie lying next to him a few feet away. His throat slowly unclenched, releasing a sip of air into his lungs. When he noticed Curtis and Paul gone from the room he pushed himself to his feet and followed a sliver of moonlight to the bags sitting by the front door. Slowly sliding a zipper back, Billy rifled inside a backpack he thought was Paul’s, using his hand for his eyes.
“You looking for this?”
Jumping, he turned from the bags sitting by the front door to see Paul holding up the cell phone he could barely see through the faint moonlight. “I thought you said you didn’t find it,” he whispered, slowly rising to his feet and staring at him from across the darkened room.
“What’s on here, Billy?”
His lips pulled down at the corners and Stephanie stirred on the floor. “Just some pictures. I had a bad dream and wanted to see my family. I miss them.”
Paul studied him through probing eyes, a quiet showdown stretching between them, and slipped the phone back into his jeans. “I’ll hang onto it for ya. It’s dead anyway.”
Billy swallowed thickly in the tension-filled silence bowing the walls. Slowly, he nodded back. “Okay.”
* * *
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Dead Series (Book 2): A Little More Dead: Gunfire & Sunshine Page 19
