Pressure (25 page)

Completely serene.

Maybe I’d died. Maybe he’d killed me during our scuffle. Maybe I was floating toward that white light at this very moment, and just couldn’t see it.

No. I hurt too much to be dead.

Instead, I laughed.

“Let me talk to you about control,” I told him, amazed at my calm, steady voice. “Control is when you decide not to kill a worthless piece of shit like yourself, because you don’t need to. It won’t bring Melanie back. It won’t bring Tracy back. It will just mean that I caved in to the feelings you tried to give me all this time. And I can’t think of one good reason why I should let you win.

“I don’t need to kill you. I don’t need to complicate things when the police finally burst in here. Do you know what control is? Control is realizing that shooting somebody in cold blood, even you, will cause enough nightmares to far outweigh that brief moment of euphoria.”

“Coward…” Darren whispered. I couldn’t hear him but I could read his lips.

I shook my head. “No. I have options, Darren. You didn’t take away my life; you took away my family. But with you gone, I can move forward. I can find a new job and I can root for Peter’s dog to win prizes and I can learn new juggling tricks and I can encourage Jeremy to perform some more crappy stand-up comedy and…all kinds of stuff. I can be happy again.”

Darren turned his head and spat out a huge amount of blood. “You’re just scared to do it.”

“I’ve never been less scared in my life. You always talked about power, Darren. Well, how about this? I wish you nothing but the worst. And if I’m really concerned about revenge, why on earth would I let you off so easily as to kill you? Your ass is going to prison. You don’t like people telling you what to do? You’re gonna be dealing with that twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, buddy. You might even get to be somebody’s bitch. Whether it’s prison or an insane asylum, every bit of your freedom is gone, Darren. It’s over. What do you think about that?”

“Don’t do that to me…” Darren begged. He looked small and sad and frightened.

“Oh, I can’t
wait
to do that to you.”

“Shoot me, Alex. I deserve it.”

“No. You don’t deserve it. That’s the whole point.”

“
Kill me.
” He tried to scream the words, but was too weak.

“No. It’s my choice. And I choose that your sadistic, pathetic, murdering ass gets dragged off to prison.”

Darren began to weep.

I picked up the vest of explosives and tossed it onto one of the top bunks. “Anyway, I’m going to send a kid out to tell the police to come on in. Hopefully I won’t accidentally get shot. That would sure screw up this start of a whole new life, huh?”

I knelt by the twin graves, feeling a little self-conscious and uncomfortable. There was so much I wanted to say, but I was having trouble finding the words.

“Melanie? Can you hear me?” I asked.

I waited for a long moment, as if expecting a response. It was hard for me to find the words, but I didn’t need to say them out loud. Melanie and Tracy would know.

So much to tell about these past two months. I had, in fact, been shot by one of the cops while trying to surrender, which put a bit of a damper on my victory party. However, the superficial leg wound gave me a lot of bargaining power, and it was pretty easy to convince authorities that I was not the bad guy. Mr. Sevin was not so easy to convince, and would no doubt go to his grave believing that I was quite the hooligan.

On the basis of his superb performance in the video, Jeremy was quickly offered a small role in a major motion picture. He got an agent who managed to screw him over in record time. But he’d loved his two days on the movie set, was dating an aspiring actress (who, he confided, would always remain aspiring), and was currently waiting tables and going to auditions. He’d considered cutting himself at each audition as a gimmick, but I talked him out of it.

Darren remained under twenty-four-hour suicide watch. As the prosecuting attorney said, he couldn’t so much as “scratch his balls without asking permission.” I never spoke to him. There was no need. He wasn’t going anywhere.

I didn’t have permanent hearing loss, which was nice.

Some nights I woke up crying, and some nights I woke up screaming, but most nights I slept through until morning. I had plenty of nightmares about what I’d done with the scissors, and I thought about it a lot while I was awake. Ultimately, though, it was something I could live with. Darren was responsible for the twin graves in front of me. I could have done much worse than chop off his finger.

I met somebody. Christine. The timing was bad and I wasn’t even close to being ready to fall in love again, but I liked being with her and she liked being with me.

“All I can offer you is friendship,” I’d told her.

“I’ll take it,” she’d said.

I missed Melanie and Tracy terribly, and I’d always miss them, but my life would continue. I stared at their graves and said the only words I could manage.

“I’m happy,” I said. “I hope you are, too.”

I set down the flowers, wiped the tears out of my eyes, and walked toward the cemetery gates. Killer Fang II, a gift from Peter and his family, would be anxiously waiting for me at home, and that puppy and I had a lot of playtime to get in before the day was through.

A LEISURE BOOK
^®

June 2009

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Copyright © 2005 by Jeff Strand

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