Dead or Alive

by Trevion Burns

Violet sighed in relief. “How long is he scheduled to be gone?”

  “It’s an international trip, so he’ll be gone for at least three days.”

  “Thank you, Miles.”

  “Please tell me you’ve come to your senses and are going to call the police.”

  Violet nodded. “Now that I know he’ll be out of the country, yes, I’ll call them.”

  “Violet? Please be careful--”

  Her phone suddenly beeped wildly, and Violet pulled it away from her ear just in time to see a picture of a battery flashing before the screen went dark completely.

  Her phone was dead.

  She tossed it back into the passengers seat.

  She had all the time in the world to call the police.

  Right now she needed Remy, and without proof, she would never have him.

  “Hold on, Remy.” She prayed, before pressing the petal to the floor.

  ***

  Fear plucked with devastating fervor at Miles’ heart as he was sent to Violet’s voicemail for the millionth time in five minutes. He’d just spoken to her ten minutes ago, and now she wasn’t answering? Was her phone dead? Had she turned it off?

  Had someone else turned it off for her?

  As his blood ran cold, and he was sent to her voicemail once more, he realized it didn’t matter.

  “Violet!” He screamed into the receiver while racing to his car in the parking lot and climbing in. “Listen to me. I got an update from crew scheduling at Virgin and Jason just called in sick. He is not on the trip. Do not go to that house, Violet, he is not on the trip!”

  Miles hung up and immediately Google-ed the number for Santa Cruz police.

  “911 what’s your emergency?”

  Miles screamed an explanation into his phone as he tore out of the parking lot. Even as he yearned for it in the deepest, darkest part of him, Miles knew, to his terror, that Violet wouldn’t get his message.

  He prayed the Santa Cruz police would get to Jason before she did.

  12

  Thanks to the many obscure landmarks and street signs that had led the way to Jason’s house all that time ago with Remy, Violet was able to find it on her own with relative ease. As she pulled the Nissan up the long, tree-lined driveway, and to a stop in the empty lot in front of his house, she couldn’t help the hurt she felt as she thought about how happy Remy had been when they’d stopped here weeks ago. How much he loved Jason. How much he needed him. It hurt her heart to think about how terrible it would be for Remy when he learned that his best friend was responsible for putting this entire nightmare on his shoulders.

  The dirt dusting Jason’s porch crunched at her feet as she climbed the stairs, and she wasted no time producing two bobby pins from her pocket and going to work on the lock of Jason’s front door.

  As she jimmied the lock, she couldn’t help but smile to herself. Right about now Remy would be calling her a demon baby for having learned how to pick a lock at the ripe old age of ten, a charming trick she’d learned from Constance.

  In under a minute, the lock was disabled, and she was pushing open the door of the house.

  It squeaked as it opened, causing her to jolt, then she remembered that Jason was working that day. He wasn’t here, so there was no reason to be nervous, or tread lightly.

  The house was flushed with darkness, but the sunlight outside gave her enough illumination to see the porcelain pig even from across the room. It still sat in the exact spot she’d left it, gleaming at her.

  Violet hurried over to the table, and the front door squeaked shut on it’s own the moment she let it go, enveloping the room with darkness. Fury coursed through her veins as she plucked the pig up. The red splatters were still there and, with one swipe of her thumbnail, remnants of Meredith’s blood chipped away easily.

  When a deep voice rang out from behind her, the pig tumbled from Violet’s hands as she was chilled to the bone.

  She turned on her heel, and immediately pressed back against the table at the sight of Jason’s blue eyes boring into her from where he lingered in the dark shadows of his hallway.

  “He wasn’t supposed to be there.”

  Violet gripped the table with all her might, silently chiding herself for having shown up here, at all. Miles had been right, she should’ve waited.

  Simply calling the police hadn’t been enough for her. She hadn’t been able to wait for them. As she found herself face-to-face with Jason, alone in that house, she realized this was one of the biggest mistakes she would ever make.

  Her hunger to save Remy before he was destroyed by himself, or someone else, for good, had rendered her completely unable to think logically. When Jason stepped out of the shadows with a gun hanging at his side, Violet’s eyes instantly filled with tears of regret.

  “I called the police,” was all she could manage to sputter. Several deep, trembling breaths later, with Jason still taking slow steps toward her, she cried out. “Stop coming toward me.”

  To her complete shock, he did. He stopped, but the intensity in his eyes was so powerful that she felt like they were touching her all over, in the worst way, making a bile rise to her throat.

  She swallowed it back. “I called the police and they’ll be here any minute. Just…” She raised a hand in peace. “If you turn yourself in… I can help you, Jason. I’m already going to do a news segment to help clear Remy’s name… and I could help you, too.”

  “Are you doing a story, Violet?” Jason asked, almost adoringly. “Are you really?”

  The question held so many subtle implications that it chilled her bones. When she saw tears tumbling out of his beet red eyes, she silently thought how much he actually did look like Remy. How easy it would be to mistake one of them for the other when the brim of a pilot’s hat was shadowing their eyes.

  “I know you’re not a bad man,” she said. “We all make mistakes.” She hardly believed the bullshit words pouring out of her mouth, but something about the terror that charged through her gut at the sight of that gun in his hand was so poignantly different from the way she’d felt when she’d seen a gun in Remy’s. She’d always known, in the back of her mind, that she should’ve feared Remy, but she never had. Her gut hadn’t allowed it. But now? Her gut felt like it was tearing itself to shreds. The fear was capitalizing on her every bone, causing her knees to shake so ferociously it was a miracle she was able to remain standing. She shook so badly that she could hear the picture frames and trinkets on the table behind her trembling softly against the wood from where she was holding it tightly in her hands.

  “He wasn’t supposed to be there. How the fuck was I supposed to know Arch was covering a trip for the son of a bitch who was fucking my girl?” Jason wheezed. “He’s my best friend. I would never hurt him.” He brought his gun-clad hand up to his eyes, wiping the tears away. Then, he was banging the metal against his forehead with such force, Violet was sure he was cracking skull.

  She took one step back toward the door. “I’m sure Remy knows you would never hurt him. I know he loves you. And I know he would forgive you.” Violet took that moment to take another small step back, then another, but she froze when Jason stopped pounding the gun against his skull, and pointed it at her. She bit back a scream, and jammed her own eyes shut.

  “He wasn’t supposed to be there. The old bastard who was nailing Meredith, my Meredith--that fucking whore--he was the one that was supposed to be there. He was the one that was supposed to burn.”

  Violet’s eyes searched the apartment, looking for anything that she could use as a weapon, but nothing obvious was in sight. To her left, a cordless phone was an arms length away on the kitchen bar. She tried not to be obvious as she eyed it, all while listening desperately for the sound of sirens. She prayed to god the cops weren’t struggling to find Jason’s far-away, secluded house.

  “How could a woman take your heart, your fucking soul, how could a woman take every inch of you… and still treat you like her dirty fucking secret? She knew that
she wasn’t done swallowing every cock that threw her a passing glance! But she made me believe…” He sputtered, stumbled. “Meredith belonged to me. She told me that, she made it real. To find out that every pilot in the company had her, that one had her every night, in every hotel, on every layover… to find out the woman you’d slit your wrists for is making you look like a god damn fucking joke!”

  From behind her, Violet fingered the wall that separated the kitchen from the living room, letting her fingers move slowly up the plaster, towards the phone.

  “They had to go.” Jason pressed the gun against his forehead before pounding it softly. The pounds quickly grew in intensity once more.

  Violet took a few more steps back and grabbed the phone, hoping that this lunatic pounded away at his forehead so hard that he eventually knocked himself the fuck out. Sadly, he didn’t, and the gun was trained on her once more as his forehead and cheeks grew red with heat.

  “Arch wasn’t supposed to be there, but he was. I was going to have him go out with some dignity, but you fucked that up good, didn’t you? Huh?” The gun trembled under his uneven hold. “I rigged the truck, you wouldn’t take the truck. I had the cops on speed dial, but you took my fucking phone, you disabled my fucking landline. You’re a real clever one, aren’t you, Chambers? I loved Arch enough to send him away with some god damn dignity, but you had to throw a wrench in all that.” He threw a chair out of the way when she backed up sluggishly into the dining room, lunging at her just as she circled the table, putting it in between them. “Don’t walk away from me.”

  Violet stumbled over her feet as he continued to circle the table, moving toward her. She knew all it would take was one lunch of his huge body, one swipe of his arm across the table, and she would be defenseless.

  To her complete shock, all she could think was that she just wanted to see Remy one more time. That was what sent tears racing to her eyes, stinging them, hardly matching the pain she felt in her heart, but putting up a hell of a fight.

  “You can still do the right thing,” she wheezed, stumbling around the table until she was in the corner, where she pushed herself against the wall. From the window next to her, the dining room flooded with sunlight. “You can still do the right thing, Jason.”

  Jason bit his bottom lip as a smile spread on his mouth. “No, Chambers.”

  Violet fingered the phone in her hand, and tried to discreetly turn it on. When nothing happened, no touchtone, no lights, no nothing, the color drained from her face.

  “Yeah,” Jason’s smiled widened. “Some clever little nugget disabled my landline a few weeks ago.”

  Jamming her eyes shut, the phone tumbled from Violet’s hand and hit the floor with a thud.

  “You don’t have to be afraid, Violet.”

  Her eyes popped open. His face had gone suddenly calm, almost serene, the sun splashing through the window making him look almost angelic.

  “He was my brother. What he loves, I love.”

  Violet blinked heavy tears out of her eyes.

  “Tell him I’m sorry.”

  Her mouth fell open when Jason brought the gun to his head.

  A shot rang out, and Violet screamed at the top of her lungs when the window next to her made a piercing crack out of nowhere, eyes going wide when a bullet instantly seared Jason’s skull, right between the eyes. Her screams intensified when buckets of blood immediately began gushing out of his head. His eyes were lifeless, the picture of death but, chillingly, still wide open. His gun toting hand plopped lifelessly to his side, and his limp body bobbed back and forth before finally collapsing into a heap on his kitchen floor with the gun still clutched in his hand.

  He’d been a second from shooting himself in the head, but someone had beat him to it.

  Sobbing hysterically and tripping over her wobbly legs, Violet raced out of the kitchen and to the front door of the house.

  She came barreling out of the front door, expecting to see rows and rows of squad cars with dozens of officers hanging off their open doors, guns drawn.

  Instead, she caught sight of a man moving towards her from the far distance, showing himself from where he’d been hidden behind the expanse of trees that led into the dense forest outside of Jason’s home.

  Violet cried out in disbelief when she realized the man was limping towards her, gun at his side.

  “Remy!” she screamed, the horrified tears on her face flying from her eyes and off of her cheeks as she leapt down the porch steps and made a mad dash for him as quickly as her legs would allow. With every step she took running towards him, the agony on his face became more apparent, as well as the relief. The love. Did she really see love in his eyes, or was she delirious? Was she feeling the love so succinctly in her heart, that it was causing her mind to manifest it onto his face, as well?

  He was far off, and by the time she made it to him, she was gasping for breath. When he opened his arms, she leapt into them, sending him stumbling back, and nearly toppling over on his bad leg. But he didn’t dare drop her. She enveloped him with her arms and legs so tightly she could almost feel the moment she stole the air from his body completely, and when he wrapped his own strong arms around her in return, she was rocketed back to the day when she’d first felt those arms around her.

  It had been right, even then.

  “Remy, it was Jason,” she cried into his neck, tightening her hold around it as she felt his thundering heart, his deep breathing, and his quiet sobs meeting hers between their bodies.

  “I know, V.” He tightened his hold around her. “I saw him point the gun at you. I couldn’t get a good shot.”

  She knew it was the hardest thing he would probably ever do, shooting Jason to save her, and she tightened her arms around his neck. He’d hit Jason clean, right between the eyes, from a hundred feet away. With a heavy heart, Remy had confirmed Jason’s previous declaration in the most painful way possible.

  He never missed his mark.

  Not even from a hundred feet away.

  Not even when the mark was a man he called his best friend in the world.

  She yearned to pull back and look him in the eye, but was too unwilling to release her hold on him to actually do it.

  “I thought I lost you,” he whispered, his face collapsing with tears of white hot relief. “I was convinced you thought me guilty. I thought I lost you, V.”

  Violet finally pulled back and met his tear-stained eyes with her own. She tried to smile, but couldn’t, because she could seat the red hot pain flashing across his eyes. She sighed longingly when his hands went to her hair, shaking her head at him in disbelief. “My god, Remy. When are you going to get it?”

  It was the words she’d been uttering since the moment they’d met, but they’d never made more sense to him than they did right now. His eyes suddenly went to the house in the distance, where Jason lay dead, and he exploded into quiet sobs at the loss of his friend. The man he thought he knew.

  Violet threw her arms back around his neck, weeping softly into his shoulder. “I’m so sorry, Remy.”

  “Don’t be sorry, baby.” He tried to fight the sadness in his voice, but it broke through, stealing the sound, slicing his words. “You don’t have anything to be sorry for.”

  “You’d have never had to shoot him if I hadn’t shown up here like a fucking idiot.”

  “Stop, V.” He clawed at the back of her shirt. “It’s not your fault. None of this is your fault.”

  “We’ll get through this. I swear it.” She clawed at his own shirt as she whispered her next words. “I love you, Remy.”

  Remy jammed his eyes shut, blocking out the house in the distance, the numbing thought of Jason, anything and everything that didn’t involve the woman wrapped around him. It was finally over, and he no longer had to protect her from himself, shield her from his world.

  “I love you, V. I love you more than I’ll ever love anything again.” He’d die for her, he’d killed for her. He would kill again, a hundred times mor
e, for her. If he had to.

  He buried his face in her hair just as his body was overtaken with emotion, the weight of his words, and the unbearable truth that this nightmare was far from over.

  The sweet sound of sirens plowing away in the distance surrounded them as they held tight in their crying embrace, and tears left Remy’s eyes as he gazed at the house, once more.

  The loss of Jason, the weight of his betrayal, would strip away at Remy, bit by bit. He had no doubt.

  Without the woman in his arms, he would surely never survive such a loss. Such a terrible, unfathomable shock to his heart. Without her, he wasn’t sure knowing the truth would’ve been worth it. It would’ve cut too deeply if he’d had to face it alone. It would’ve killed him, dimmed his spirit, his soul, faster than twenty lifetimes in prison ever could.

  But holding Violet, right then, he knew nothing was insurmountable.

  No battle was undefeatable.

  As long as she was in his arms.

  ***

  “Jason Jacobson had an extensive history of un-diagnosed mental illness. Not unlike any other disease, avoiding treatment only gave that illness more room to breathe, more room to grow. In this case, it grew into a monster that took two lives—including his own.” The defense attorney came to an abrupt stop in front of the jury box in the courtroom, and soon his eyes were the only thing in motion as they jumped from one wide-eyed juror to the other. “Jason Jacobson’s illness went untreated for thirty years of his life, it grew, it evolved, it drove him to the edge of madness. An edge he tumbled over almost instantly, when he discovered his secret lover, Meredith Collins, was sleeping with another man. An employee, a peer, a Captain at his airline. Anyone else would have been hurt, sure. Angry? Absolutely. Hungry for revenge? Without question. But Jason Jacobson took it one step farther. Jason Jacobson plotted an elaborate plan to punish the people who hurt him. Jason Jacobson put on a Captain’s uniform and murdered Meredith with the sole intent of framing her lover, Captain Joe Piasta, with the crime.”