13 1/2 (37 page)
Authors: Nevada Barr
You dickless wonders, you sheep, let that instinct be beaten out of you. But you miss it. God, do you miss it. You glut yourselves on movies about killers, books about killers. You worship the killers because you want to kill. You need to. But you just watch.
I lived my life the way I was born to, not in the pen with my woolly, bleating brothers.
The plan was to kill Frank and Mom while they slept. I nearly freaked when Mom woke up and started gobbling like a turkey, then sprinted off, Frank’s blood dripping off her. Then, she’s running like a crazy woman down the upstairs hall, her nightgown flapping, and her hands flailing. That was worth the price of admission. I got to laughing so hard, it took me nearly five minutes to shut her up.
Lena was nothing.
The cat was just for fun.
I’m coming up from the cellar, there’s blood on me, and all of a sudden the light goes on at the Werner’s next door, and there’s Vondra gaping at me like a landed fish. At the time, I figured she knew what was going on, but now I doubt it. Anyway, I fucked her to shut her up. I could have killed her then, but it worked out better keeping her around.
The only major screwup was my leg. I thought I’d killed myself. That turned out in my favor, too. The buffoons on the police force were so blown away, they couldn’t bring themselves to look at anything too close. Dylan was there, he had the axe and the blood, and they fell all over themselves to hang him.
I’d planned on killing Dylan when I did the rest of the family. He was a huge pain in the ass. And there was the money issue. Mom and Frank’s estate would be divided. We were well enough off I could have made do with half, but it would have been a waste to give it to Dylan. What would he use it for? Braces for his kids?
I could have pinned the deaths on Dylan dead or alive—same story, only this time I hit my brother too hard, and brother dies in his jammies—but after I hit him, I thought I’d broken his neck without killing him. I figured he’d be a quadriplegic, or at the least a paraplegic. I would have enjoyed finding out how the kid everybody thought was God’s gift to the world would deal with peeing into a tube for the rest of his life.
I’m the one ended up pissing in a tube. You fucking sheep can bleat your little sheep laughs, but it doesn’t change anything. I owned Dylan for forty years. We were twins. We were closer than twins. Dylan was me.
That was the thing; I made him me.
Copyright © 2009 by Nevada Barr
Published by Vanguard Press
A Member of the Perseus Books Group
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Set in 11.25 point Dante by the Perseus Books Group
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Barr, Nevada. 13 1/2 / Nevada Barr. p. cm.
eISBN : 978-0-786-75150-1
1. Women college teachers—Fiction. 2. New Orleans (La.)—Fiction. I. Title. II. Title: Thirteen and one-half.
PS3552.A73184A’.54—dc22 2009018087
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