by Jacob Stone
He pointed his gun at the face of the woman Antoine had been helping.
“Please, Antoine,” the woman pleaded, her color dropping to a sickly gray.
“I don’t have those watches,” Antoine said in a voice that was little more than a squeak. “Whoever told you I did misled you.”
“You’ve got forty seconds,” the robber said. “After I shoot her, your son gets a bullet in his eye.”
The woman started crying. Antoine’s skin color had turned as gray as hers.
“The watches are in the safe,” he said. “I need to go to the office to get them.”
“Smart man,” the robber said. “You two get out from behind the counter,” he ordered, referring to Jules and Carol. “All you nice folks lie flat on your face while me and Antoine conclude our business. Let’s see if we can end this with none of you getting killed.”
The robber closer to Stonehedge was focused intently on Morris and his dog, and the actor stepped forward and started to throw a right jab at him. The man must’ve seen this punch out of his peripheral vision, because he whipped his gun around slashing Stonehedge’s cheek open with the barrel. The actor stumbled back several steps, both hands going to his injured cheek.
Morris could see through the openings in the ski mask the robber’s eyes glazing into a look of violence. This was a stone-cold killer, and before Morris could do anything to stop him, the man shot Stonehedge in the leg, and the actor collapsed onto the floor moaning. Parker stayed on the floor, but his growling grew louder. The man pointed his gun at Parker’s skull, his eyes still glazed.
“Shut that dog up or I’ll blow his head off,” he snarled.
“I’ve got him under control. You don’t have to shoot him.” Morris glanced over at Stonehedge and saw that the actor was bleeding profusely from his bullet wound. “Let me tie a tourniquet around his leg. He could bleed out if I don’t.”
“Do you think I care? Because of this dumbass playing hero, this has turned into a twenty-five to life if I get caught. Let him die.”
“A felony murder would still be worse.”
“Not for me.” His attention turned to Carol. “Sweet cheeks, thanks to hero boy over there everything has changed. Me and you are going to the back room together for some privacy.” He yelled out to his partner. “You got a problem with that?”
The other robber’s voice was a tight growl as he said, “None. I’ll get my crack with her after you’re done.”
Carol shrank back. She looked like she wanted to scream, but was too terrified to do so.
“Missy, you get your ass out here now before I pull you out of there by your hair!”
Morris stepped forward, his hands pressed together into a pleading gesture. “You don’t want to make this worse than it is,” he implored.
The man swung his gun toward Morris, but before he could get a shot off, Morris took one more quick step forward while simultaneously flashing out with both his hands; his left grabbing the man’s gun hand by the wrist and twisting it around, while with his right he struck the man in the jaw with an open palm. As he did this, Parker lunged forward and locked his jaw on to the man’s knee and started shaking it as if he were trying to rip his leg off. All of this took less than two seconds, and before the other robber could react, Morris had the gun ripped out of the man’s hand and fired off a shot, hitting the other robber in the shoulder, which sent his gun flying out of his hand and him falling backward to the floor.
Morris punched the robber he was tangled with twice in the jaw. The first blow dazed him, the second knocked him out. Morris grimaced as he looked over at Stonehedge and saw how badly the actor was bleeding, but he needed to defuse what was happening across the room before he could attend to Stonehedge. The customer who had been threatened earlier had picked up the gun the other robber had dropped, and now stood over him with both hands holding the gun shaking as she pointed it at him, her body trembling as she tried to work up the nerve to shoot him.
“You don’t want to do that,” Morris said, as he took the gun away from her. He checked that there was a bullet in the chamber, then handed it to Antoine. “Cover him until the police come. If he tries to get up, shoot him in the chest.” As he ran back to Stonehedge, he ordered Jules to call the police and have an ambulance sent over. That they had a shooting victim in critical condition.
He used his tie as a tourniquet to staunch the actor’s bleeding. Stonehedge looked awful, but was still conscious.
“Am I going to die?” he asked Morris.
“Sometime in the future, but not today unless your ambulance gets hit by a bus.”
“That’s good to know.”
“The studio is not going to be too happy with me letting you get shot like this.”
Stonehedge laughed weakly. “They’re going to be thrilled with the publicity they get from this.”
“I suppose you’re right.”
“How bad’s my face look?”
“It’s a mess. You’re going to have quite a scar, but it will give you character.”
Carol had come out from behind the counter so she could sit by Stonehedge and rest his head in her lap. Morris made sure the robber he had knocked out was still knocked out, and he rubbed the bruised knuckles on his right hand as he retrieved his dog, who had moved over to the other robber so he could stand guard over him and growl.
Chapter Thirty-nine
On his way back to Simi Valley, Henry stopped at the same restaurant in North Hills that he had eaten at the night before. The same cute blonde waitress, Brenda, once again waited on him, and she showed him an adorable smile when she recognized him.
“I guess you just can’t get enough of us, huh?” she asked. “You must be a glutton for punishment.”
“I’m a glutton for your beautiful smile. It warms my heart just to see it.”
He ordered the same steak dinner he had the other night, and the same locally brewed pilsner, and added a shot of bourbon. When Brenda brought over the drinks, he told her a few more of his corny jokes, and did the same when she brought over the steak. His heart, though, just wasn’t in it. He was only killing time, avoiding going home any sooner than he had to. He was only half done with his steak when he waved Brenda over for the check.
“Time for me to go home and face the music,” he said.
She scrunched up her eyes, not understanding what he meant.
“The little woman is not going to be happy with me,” he explained.
“I find that hard to believe.”
“It’s true,” he said. “I disappointed her. And I’m going to hear about it when I get home.”
“She must be a hard woman to please.”
“One could make that case,” he agreed.
As with the other night, he left a hefty tip, this time a few cents over twenty dollars.
When he arrived home, he didn’t say a word to Sheila, nor her to him. He simply carried her to the bathroom, undressed her, scrubbed her clean in the bathtub, and put her in pajamas that were freshly laundered from the other night. It wasn’t until he had her in her wheelchair and in the kitchen that he spoke, asking her what she wanted for dinner.
“Are you going to make me beg?” she said in the painful way she had of speaking since the accident, where each word had to be pushed out as if it took every ounce of strength she had. “Show me the recording!”
“I didn’t kill anyone,” he said.
Her body became even more rigid, and her mouth twisted into the pinched, angry circle that he knew so well. She looked at him as if he had betrayed her in the worst possible way, and that made him lose his temper as well. He was trembling as he told her that he had tried to find someone, but it just wasn’t possible.
“Those police press conferences have put every blonde girl in the city on edge. Every single one that I approached looked at me as a potential serial killer. There was just no way of getting any of them alone.”
Of course, he was lying. There was that skinny blonde g
irl with the three-year-old boy and the eighteen-year-old babysitter. He could’ve killed all three of them if he was monstrous enough.
“You’re lying,” Sheila accused.
“I killed three people for you already! Three and a half if you count that man in Queens, since you left him half dead! Isn’t that enough?”
“You know it isn’t.”
“How am I supposed to know it isn’t? You make these insane requests of me. That’s it, I’m done! You just have to get over this craziness!”
Sheila clamped her mouth shut and looked away from him.
“Fine,” he said. “Be mad at me. I don’t care. We’re going to live like normal people for a change. I know you’re hungry. What do you want for dinner?”
After she didn’t answer him, he told her he was going to make things easy for himself and make her a fruit smoothie. He proceeded to add yogurt, almond milk, a banana, strawberries, a spoonful of honey, a pear, and vitamin powder to the blender. Once he had the concoction blended together, he took a sip, approved of the way it tasted, and placed the glass in front of his wife with a straw in it so she could drink it on her own. She didn’t waste any time using her somewhat good hand to knock the glass to the floor.
“Fine. You want to be that way, tomorrow I’ll pick up tubing and syringes for force-feeding, and we’ll do it that way.”
Henry took two beers from the fridge and brought them out to the living room, leaving his wife in the kitchen. He was brooding too much to pay attention to what was on TV. This changed for several minutes during the ten o’clock local news when they ran a story about Morris Brick’s heroics during a failed armed robbery of a jewelry store in Beverly Hills.
“You’re a busy man, Brick,” he muttered to himself.
After the story finished, he was soon back to his brooding. Later, after the local news ended, he went back to the kitchen and stared silently at his wife. She knew he was there, but she continued to act as if he didn’t exist.
“Do you want me to put you to bed, or would you like to watch some TV?” he asked.
No answer and no indication that she heard him.
He was past his brooding, and his nerves felt jangled. He couldn’t stand the silence from her. He couldn’t stand the thought that she’d rather die than acknowledge him.
“This is crazy,” he implored, his voice cracking. “You know I love you and would do anything for you as long as it wasn’t something completely nuts. Please, stop this!”
“If you really loved me, you would’ve done this for me,” she said in her painfully slow manner of speech.
“It’s not fair for you to want me to do this!”
“If there was something that was making you feel like you were suffocating, I’d do whatever you needed me to do so you could breathe again.”
Henry stared silently at his wife for several minutes, his mouth moving as if he were slowly chewing gum. Then he went back to the living room and stared blindly at the TV. At twelve thirty he got up from the sofa, and without saying another word to Sheila, he left the house.
Chapter Forty
Tallahassee, 1994
Sheila was carrying a hammer when she entered her sister’s bedroom. She couldn’t help smiling seeing Penelope’s alarmed expression. Her sister had every right to be worried about her walking into her room holding a hammer. She wasn’t the same skinny little girl that Penelope and her parents had once terrorized so thoroughly, but was now a more robust eighteen-year-old, and probably as strong as her sister. Stronger, actually, thanks to all the hate filling up her heart. She doubted it would be much of a contest if they ever got into a physical fight.
“What are you doing in here?” Penelope asked. She’d been sitting on her bed, smoking a joint, and reading one of her trashy gossip magazines when Sheila had interrupted her, and her expression was dopey enough that Sheila started laughing so hard that tears ran down her face.
“You’re really not very smart,” Sheila said between gasps of laughter. All at once her laughter dried up, and she wiped the tears away from her eyes. “It’s so ironic that you used to call me peanut brain since you’re the one with almost nothing inside your skull. The question you should be asking me is why did I bring a hammer with me.”
“I know why. You think you’re going to hit me with it.”
“No, that’s not it, dummy. Guess again.”
Penelope’s mouth tightened as anger flared in her dull eyes. “I’m getting off this bed and taking that hammer away from you,” she said in a soft, menacing voice. “Then I’m going to shove it so far up your ass that the doctors will never be able to get it out.”
“I wouldn’t try doing that. Not with you being so deathly allergic to bees.”
Penelope had started to get off the bed, but she sat back down. She took another hit from her joint and stubbed it out, all the while keeping her gaze focused on Sheila. Slowly she let the smoke leak out through the side of her mouth. “What does that have to do with it?” she asked.
“I’ll explain in a minute. But first let’s talk about what you just threatened to do to me with this hammer. You and mom and dad used to like to stick things into me, didn’t you?”
Penelope blinked several times. “You’re nuts,” she said, her voice now as dull as her eyes.
“My punishments? You’ve forgotten about them already?”
“Whatever mom and dad did to you was because you kept misbehaving.”
Sheila laughed again, but it was a sour, painful laugh that left a dull throbbing in her temples. “What mom and dad used to do? Are you that delusional that you’ve forgotten you used to join them? That you used to come up with ideas of what they should do to me? And this would be after you’d break things and blame it on me so you three could inflict your punishments on me!”
Penelope’s eyes narrowed, and her body tensed as if she were again considering jumping off the bed and attacking Sheila. In a way Sheila would’ve liked that to happen since it would’ve given her an excuse to drive the hammer through one of Penelope’s eyes. But she had a better use for it.
“Don’t forget about the bees,” she said.
Penelope blinked two more times as she remembered there was something about bees that she needed to worry about. She again settled back onto the bed.
“Whatever was done was for your own good,” she said. “And it was years ago. How long are you going to keep crying about it?”
Sheila almost threw the hammer at her sister’s head. It took an almost Herculean effort on her part not to do so. But, as she kept telling herself, she had a much better use for it.
“You three did those things to me from when I was a very little girl until I was fourteen. It was only after you kidnapped me that I was able to make all of you stop!”
“That was only a prank,” Penelope insisted.
“A prank? You and your two trash friends grabbed me from my bed, stripped me naked, tied me up, and threw me in the trunk of a car, and it’s a prank?”
“That’s all it was. A harmless prank,” Penelope stubbornly said.
“No, that’s not what it was. You three were going to take me into the woods and do worse things to me than stick this hammer up my ass. And then you were going to kill me. But you chickened out.”
Enough of a glimmer showed in her sister’s eyes to prove to Sheila that she had been right about what she had thought, but Penelope still persisted in claiming that Sheila had blown a prank into something much bigger than it was.
“A mountain out of a mole hill. That’s what you always do. Make a mountain out of a mole hill.”
“Enough,” Sheila said, holding up her left hand, palm facing her sister. “This is getting tiresome.”
“You bet it is!”
“Yeah, it is,” Sheila agreed. “Let me tell you about the bees, although if you weren’t such a dull-witted cretin I wouldn’t have to tell you about them.”
“You better watch your mouth. I’ve had it with your insults.”
Since entering the room, Sheila had slowly positioned herself by the wall where right outside her mother’s prized rose bushes grew.
“My insults are the least of your problems. Getting stung by dozens of bees is what you should be worrying about. Haven’t you been wondering why there’s been a buzzing noise coming from this wall for over three months?”
“You’re full of it,” Penelope said.
Sheila put a finger to her lips and shushed her sister. As the sounds of their talking faded, a silence grew in the room. Sheila kicked the wall and an angry buzzing could then be heard.
“There are bees in the wall?” Penelope asked, a slow panic forming in her eyes.
“Duh.”
“How?”
“I put them there. It wasn’t even that hard once I read a book on beekeeping. Not even that expensive either. I was able to buy a three-pound package of bees in Crawfordville for only forty-nine dollars. Getting them in the wall wasn’t that hard either. All I had to do was drill a hole from outside near the rose bushes, and then spray sugar water inside of it. Bees really like sugar water. After that I made a hole in the package that lined up with the one in the outside wall, shook it a little, and left it alone overnight. By morning, the bees settled nicely into their new hive.”
Penelope’s mouth dropped open into a dumbfounded expression as she processed what Sheila had told her. “If any of those bees had gotten into my room, I could’ve died,” she said.
“That’s right.”
“Why would you do something like this?”
Sheila had to bite her tongue to keep from laughing. How dumb could Penelope possibly be?
“To make you tell me the truth about why you kidnapped me that night. Because if you don’t tell me the truth right now, I’m going to punch a hole through the wall and hundreds of angry bees are going to swarm in here. And they are going to be pissed off angry. Bees don’t like having their hive disturbed.”
“I already told you the truth!”
