LOVING HER SOUL MATE (30 page)

She didn’t realize a third person was in the room
until she had already walked over to her side of the bed.
 
She saw to her amazement, on the opposite
side, Blair Malone knelt down at John’s side.
 
She also saw how Blair had John’s penis in her mouth, licking it like a
lollipop.
 
When she looked up and saw
that Shay was looking at her, she didn’t even have the pride to stop.
 
She, instead, took his rod all the way down
to the back of her throat.

“John!” Shay blared, astounded by what she was
seeing.

“Yes, what,” John said as he jumped awake, causing
Blair to fall back on her butt.
 
When he
realized she was there, he was as astounded as Shay was.
 
“What the fuck are you doing in here?” he
demanded to know, jumping out of his bed.
 

Blair quickly backed up and stood up.
 
Only her eyes were on Shay.
 
“You can’t have him,” she said, moving toward
the foot of the bed, her eyes trained on Shay.
 
“Nope.
 
Made up my mind.
 
You
can’t have him.”

“Get out of here, Blair, what the fuck’s wrong with
you!” John yelled as he reached for a pair of pants thrown over a chair on his
side of the bed.
 
“And get out now!”

But Blair only had eyes for Shay.
 
“You can’t be with him,” she was saying.
 
“He’s my husband.”

Shay’s heart was hammering.
 
She’d already seen how foolish this woman
could be.
 
“He’s your
ex
-husband,”
she said, “and you need to get out of here.”

“Me?
 
Get out
of my own home?
 
Bitch, who do you think
you are?”

“Bitch, who do you think you are?” Shay asked.
 
“Your ass the one running up in
here starting
something.”
 
Shay was getting angrier by the second.
 
This was the same chick
who
had spit in her
face.
 
Now this?
 
But she was ready for her this time.

But as quickly as she thought she was ready, she
realized she wasn’t ready for this crazy woman at all.
 
Because it changed on a
dime.
  
John was still demanding
that Blair get the hell out of his home.
 
He was even beginning to move toward her to forcibly remove her.
  
Shay was still arguing with her, word for
word, making it clear that she wasn’t going to stand for her foolishness this
time around.
 
And then Blair pulled out
the gun.

Everything stopped when she pulled out that gun.

“See bitch,” Blair said, “I got your foolishness
right here!”
 
And she pointed it at Shay,
and fired.

“
Nooo
!”
John
screamed as soon as she pointed the gun.
 
Before she fired he was leaping across the bed.
 
As she fired he was throwing his body into
Shay’s small body and knocking her to the ground.
 
The bullet whizzed past his ear and lodged
into the back wall.
 
And Blair fired
again.
 
And again.

The second and third shots missed too, as John had
completely covered Shay.
 
But he knew he
had to do it.
 
He slung around, grabbed
his sidearm off of the nightstand,
then
flipped onto
his back, pointing his gun at Blair.

“Don’t make me do this, Blair!
 
Don’t
fucking make
me do this!”

But Blair wasn’t listening.
 
John’s movement left Shay exposed, and she
aimed to kill her.
 
She saw red.
 
She saw Shay, and she saw red.
 
But before she could fire her final shot, as
she was just about to do, John fired his first and only shot.
 

One shot was all it took.

Blair buckled, looked at her husband as if amazed
that he would have even thought about harming her, and then fell over.

“Shay!”
John yelled, his gun
still pointed at his ex-wife, his heart in his shoe.
 
“Tell me you’re okay!”

“I’m all right,” Shay yelled back, sitting up from
the fetal position John had thrown her into, looking up with what he recognized
as pure terror in her eyes.
 

John went over to Blair, and checked her
pulse.
 

He then sat back, on his haunches, and dropped his
still smoking gun.
 

“Is she going to be all right?” Shay asked,
standing to her feet.
 
“Is she all
right?”

John looked at Shay with what she knew to be pure
terror too, and then he went to her.
 
He
pulled her into his arms.
 
“No, baby,” he
said, his brows knitted.
 
“No.”

And although he held Shay, although she felt his
protective arms around her, she felt as barren, as alone, as unprotected as a
fruitless tree in the middle of a desert.

Police now swarmed the chief’s home and John and
Shay now sat quietly on the edge of the living room sofa.
 
Shay had put on a pair of shorts and a
t-shirt and John was in his trousers and a sweat shirt.
 
Neither had on shoes.
 
Both looked as if they’d seen the gates of
hell and were still horrified by the view.

“Sit back, babe,” John urged Shay as he put his arm
around her and they both sat back on the sofa.
 
There was no way there were going to find lemonade in these lemons.
 
It was just that bad.

It only got worse when Ted Fletchette, the town’s
mayor and John’s boss, arrived at what was now considered the crime scene.
 
He stepped in slowly, looking from right to
left as if he had to make sure the coast was clear.
 
When he saw John and Shay, he walked in their
direction.
 

Ted didn’t speak.
 
That wasn’t his style.
 
He just
took a seat in the chair flanking the sofa and looked at his chief of
police.
 
It seemed to him that the scene
itself, of cops everywhere, of a dead ex-wife in the ambulance outside, of
neighbors who also happened to be voters standing out on their lawns wondering
what in the world was happening here, spoke for itself.

Then he exhaled.
 
“You put me in shitsville, John,” the mayor eventually said.
 
Shay looked at him.
 
“There’s no cute way to put this,” the mayor
continued.
 
“I’m screwed.
 
I mean, think about the irony here.
 
My first chief of police was as crooked as a
curve and now my second chief of police just killed his wife!
 
They’re gonna run me out of this town on a
rail!”

Shay couldn’t believe how the mayor was turning
this awful tragedy into an indictment against his political future.
 
She almost said something, but John squeezed
her.
 
So she held her peace.

“All we can do now,” the mayor went on, “is
mitigate
the damage.
 
I’m suspending you immediately, pending the outcome of an
investigation.
 
Craig Yannick will be in
charge for now.”

Shay could not believe it.
 
“You’re suspending him?” she asked.
 
“What did he do?”

“What do you think he did, Miss Turner?
 
He killed his wife!”

“He killed his
ex
-wife because she was
trying to kill me!
 
He didn’t just kill her.
 
He was saving my life!”

“Yeah, well, I don’t know that, now do I?
 
And I wasn’t talking to your ass, anyway.”

“That’s enough, Ted!” John said.
 
“I’ll accept your suspension, but I won’t
accept you speaking to Shay that way.”

The mayor threw his hands in the air.
 
“Sorry,” he said.
 
And then his voice began to rise.
 
“I guess I don’t know how to be politically
correct when my entire career has just been fucked!”
 
Some of the police officers in the room
looked his way.
 
Then the mayor stood up
angrily.
 
And walked
back out.

The days that followed were a blur to Shay.
 
Everywhere she went the townspeople gave her
funny looks and made annoying comments as if she and she alone were solely
responsible for what happened that night.
 
John was indeed suspended pending an official investigation and was
ordered, by the mayor himself, to stay away from Shay until they could get to
the bottom of what really happened.
 
Shay, too, wasn’t allowed back to work at the Tribune pending the
investigation’s outcome, and was strongly advised, by the newspaper’s attorney,
to have no contact with John Malone.

But they didn’t know what they were asking of
them.
 
John and Shay had become the
other’s best friend, soul mate,
partner
.
 
They broke the no-contact orders almost
immediately.
 
First by
phone.
 
Every day and night they
spoke by phone.
 
But as the investigation
dragged on, from one week into two, John couldn’t bear it anymore.
 
He had to see for himself just how Shay was
holding up.

He phoned her by week two and told her to get in
her Beetle and drive, two towns over, to the backside of the Big Wal-Mart
parking lot.
 

Shay arrived first, sitting quietly in her VW, and
then he arrived, in his Silverado, and she got out and got into the truck with
him.

At first they just sat there, staring at the few
cars traveling in and out of the grocery store, and then John looked at
Shay.
 
She was still, like him, badly
shaken.

“You okay?” he asked her, concerned.

She looked at him, to make certain he wasn’t
kidding.
 
“No,” she said as if it was
obvious.

“It’s not your fault, Shay.
 
You did nothing wrong.”

“That’s what you’re saying.
 
That’s not what everybody else is saying.”

“Then everybody else
are
damn fools!
 
I caused this.
 
Me.
 
Not you.
 
Not. . .”

Shay looked at him.
 
“Not Blair?
 
Is that what you were
going to say?
 
That it wasn’t Blair’s
fault
, either?”

John frowned.
 
She could see how torn he was.
 
“It was her
fault,
of course it was her
fault.
 
But---”

“But what, John?”

John ran his hand through his already rumpled
hair.
 
“What do you want me to say?
 
That I bear no blame here?
 
My bad decisions caused the life of my son,
and now I had to take the life of his mother.
 
They both died at my own hands, Shay.
 
And when you have to face a truth like that, a truth that stark, you
don’t give a damn about the circumstances or the context.
 
You just don’t.
 
If it wasn’t for my actions they would both
be alive today!
 
And then to drag you
into this.”
 
John could barely contain
his grief.
 
“That’s the worse part of it
all.
 
You had to get tainted with my
craziness.
 
Now they’re calling you a
slut and a whore and a home wrecker.
 
You
!
 
All because of my
decisions.
 
We can dress this up
however we want, but it’s all because of me.”

Shay understood his anguish.
 
She was anguished too.
 
Every time she thought about that bloody
scene in that bedroom it made her so disoriented that she didn’t know if she
was going or coming.
 
It was bad.
 
And they both knew it.

A few days after they met in the Wal-Mart parking
lot John was exonerated of all wrongdoing, and he was fully reinstated on his
job.
 
Although he was ready to get back
into action, it wasn’t the same.
 
Because Shay was still traumatized.
 
Because it kind of felt
like too little too late.
 
And on
the day he showed up at Shay’s home, to tell her the so-called good news about
his reinstatement, she had already made up her mind.