It's Only Death

by Lee Thompson

  The lead biker approached what he hoped to be my open tomb, his pistol held tightly in one hand, the other sliding beneath his vest, bringing the Bowie knife out, the steel gleaming. Shane was calling out for him. The girl knelt, her head dipped toward her knees. The Cadillac’s headlights shone on the water and I heard a gator splash from the bank into the murk.

  Lincoln’s fingers loosened then retightened around the butt of his pistol. He stopped five feet from the trunk and aimed. He drained the weapon’s magazine, then exhaled, his face slack and pale. Shane said from inside the car, “Is he dead?”

  “Shut up,” Lincoln ordered. He tucked the pistol back behind his waistband and transferred the Bowie from his left hand to his right. He approached the trunk like a man might approach a wounded lion.

  I’d been lucky that he’d failed to see me dive from the trunk and roll ten feet behind the Cadillac and lay unmoving against the dark soil. My sister, I knew had proved a distraction. Once I’d shot the two bikers who had meant to pull me from the vehicle, she had latched onto Lincoln and he’d had to turn away from me to backhand her, or to pistol-whip her, to get her to shut up and let go. She’d just cost him his life. I found satisfaction in that.

  He inched closer to the trunk. I shifted Don’s pistol slowly in case Harley looked up she might not catch the movement in the darkness. I sighted high up Lincoln’s back as he moved around the rear fender, raising his Bowie, intending to drive it down into my chest.

  I pulled the trigger.

  The pistol bucked.

  Lincoln crumpled as if God had balled him up in his fist like a piece of scrap paper. He let loose an agonized groan, lying on his side, the Bowie dangling loosely in his hand. I hoped I severed his spine, that’s what I was going for. It was hard to tell until you started to move someone. If they didn’t cry out in pain, the spinal column was shattered and no longer carried messages from their body to their brain.

  I pushed myself up.

  The woman stood now too. She wasn’t my sister. She was slim like Harley, her hair swept across her face and clinging to it, her eyes wide, her hands raised. She said, “I didn’t do nothing, mister.”

  I ignored her. In the Cadillac, Shane was shifting across the seat, trying to get behind the steering wheel so he could flee the scene and retain what some might call a semblance of living. I opened the passenger door when he hopped painfully behind the wheel. His crutches were in the backseat. His knuckles were bone white against his skin. I said, “Slide back over here, champ.”

  He shook his head, unable to speak. I shot him in the right knee. He screamed. The girl who I’d thought to be Harley broke through the brush behind me, seeking any avenue of escape.

  I walked around the car and opened the driver’s door, jerked Shane out onto the ground and he cursed me. I slapped the butt of the gun against the hinge of his jaw and he stopped complaining. He appeared dazed. He shook his head, blood trickling from the corner of his mouth. I pulled the car keys and put them in my pocket. I grabbed his crutches from the backseat and bent them in half and threw them into the water.

  Lincoln’s eyes were open when I rounded the car. He stared up at me with an expressionless face. He was sweating. I looked in the trunk but it was too dark to see, so I pulled Don’s phone from my pocket and hit the screen and Harley’s dead eyes, her bullet-riddled body, her soft and ivory skin, glowed garishly in the semi-dark.

  I heard myself sob but I couldn’t feel much of anything.

  I scooped her up and carried her around to the passenger side of the car and set her gently on the seat. Her blood clung to me, and it was cold.

  Bullfrogs croaked out there in the Everglades and things moved in the darkness now that the gunfire had passed. I kicked the Bowie knife away. I grabbed Lincoln’s right ankle and drug him to the edge of the water. He did not plead, he didn’t make a sound, yet he was alive, just shattered.

  I grabbed his vest and pulled him into the water and held his head beneath the surface and felt his body grow heavy in my arms, and I held him under for a full minute or two, and then pushed him out into deeper water, his corpse sliding like a canoe along the surface, rolling once so he was facedown.

  I splashed out, sopping wet up to mid-thigh. Shane was up, crying, leaning against the rear tire of the car, cradling his damaged knee. He said, “Don’t kill me, man.”

  “There’s no other option.”

  “I didn’t hurt your sister,” he said. “Lincoln did that, and now he’s gone.”

  I heard the woman I’d thought was my sister scream out in the woods, and I’m not sure if it was out of fear of being stranded, lost there in the dark, or if she’d stumbled across a beast that at its heart was no different than these men who had taken my sister, and many other girls like her, and bled them dry.

  Shane said, “Please, man.”

  I kicked his ankle and he screamed as his knee twisted.

  When he found his breath, he said, “I can give you money.”

  “Why did you assholes kill my sister?”

  “Lincoln did it,” he said.

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know,” he said. He groaned, added, “You have to get me to a hospital.”

  “You’re not going anywhere.”

  “The money,” he said.

  “What money?”

  “Harley’s money. I’ll get it for you, I swear, you can have it all.”

  “You took it?”

  “I had to,” he said.

  “No, you didn’t.”

  He nodded, his face going slack, his head lilting. I thought he might pass out, so I knelt in front of him and slapped him. He raised his head. He mumbled: “I owed Lou.”

  “You owed Lou what?”

  “Money,” he whispered, gritting his teeth.

  “So you paid him with what you robbed from my sister.”

  “No,” he said. “Lou told me to get his money back and my debt with him was over. I only owed him a few grand. It seemed simple, really simple.”

  I nodded. “He gets Harley’s money back but has Robert and her paying him every week for the next ten years.”

  “He’s smart like that,” Shane said. “She wasn’t supposed to get hurt, but Lincoln…”

  I slapped him again. His head stayed lowered. I didn’t think he had the strength to raise it. Behind me I heard something crack and I said, “Sounds like a gator just took a chunk out of your boss.”

  Shane raised his head slowly. His eyes were dim. He tried to spit on me but only managed to drool on his chin. There was a sickly light in his eyes. I stood and grabbed him by his hair and he kicked and screamed and fought me all the way to the water’s edge.

  I rolled him in and he splashed around, trying to get to his feet but couldn’t do it.

  I shot him in the shoulder and he hit the surface with a tremendous splash, a piercing scream. But there were other noises in the glades and his screams grew louder as I walked back to Harley and sat behind the wheel for a time, looking at her, at all the damage I had caused.

  I held her limp, lifeless hand and whispered something, I don’t know what…

  12

  Don’s phone had three voice mail messages but I couldn’t access them since I didn’t know his pin number. Looking through his missed calls I saw that one was from Robert, another from Angela, and the third I didn’t know. I called Robert. He didn’t answer. I left him a message, saying, “Your fat fuck of a boss had that shithead Shane steal Harley’s money and bring it to him. They killed my sister, Robert. I’m coming for him. Keep him there.”

  I called Angela’s phone. Her dad answered. He said, “This Elmore?”

  “Where’s Angela?” I said.

  “Where are you? I’ll bring her over.”

  I said, unsure why, “Lincoln killed my sister.”

  “That’s too bad,” Don said. “But she shouldn’t have been hanging out with those greaseballs. She knew better than that. Your dad wouldn’t have approved, would he? But
then, since when do his kids care what their old man would have thought. She wasn’t any better than you, Elmore, and I’m glad they killed her.”

  “Where are you?” I asked.

  “You want to swing by?”

  “I could have killed you but I didn’t.”

  “I know,” he said, “and I’m grateful, although not as grateful as Angie. She thinks the world of you. Imagine that. Her the daughter of a cop, loving some slimy, cowardly little cop killer, a common thief, a man without any future at all. It makes a father wonder what kind of daughter he has when she can be so protective of such scum, you know what I mean?”

  “Are you talking about yourself? Because she saved your life.”

  “I’m going to turn your skull to powder,” he said. “That’s a promise.”

  “Many have tried.”

  “Where the fuck are you?”

  “I’m on the highway,” I said. “I’ve got one more thing to do and then you’re never going to see me again.”

  “You’re not robbing me of my revenge,” he said. “I’ll find you, motherfucker.”

  “Best of luck,” I said, and hung up.

  It took Harley and I forty-five minutes to reach Lou DiMaggio’s gated community. The guard looked to be a sickly old man, his uniform too large for his pointy shoulders, and his breath smelled like cherry liquor. I rolled down the window and pretended I couldn’t hear him when he asked if I was all right. He leaned close to me. I put the pistol against his forehead. He grinned at me, the crazy old bastard. He said in a raspy voice, “Go ahead, you’ll be doing me a favor.”

  I pulled the gun away. I pointed at Harley. He looked in. His face paled when he saw her. I said, “Lou DiMaggio had that done to her. She’s my sister.”

  He gave me a curt nod and straightened up and disappeared back inside the booth. The gate opened. He came back out of the shack. He said, “Give it your best shot, son. I’m dead either way.”

  I climbed back into the Cadillac and drove up to Lou’s house. The gate was standing wide open. That was good, I thought, it had to mean that Robert got my message about Lou robbing Harley and him both, and that the poor bastard wanted some vengeance for her death.

  I turned the headlights off and crawled up the drive, idling the car. There were lights on all throughout the mansion. There were a couple of cars in front of the garage. One of them was Angela’s maroon Tahoe. I parked behind her dad’s unmarked cruiser and shut the Cadillac down. Why they were there didn’t make any sense to me.

  I didn’t know how many bullets I had left in Don’s pistol. I didn’t want to have to use any of them to kill him. I only wanted to kill Lou and leave Harley’s body in Robert’s care, to see that she had a proper burial, and disappear like I’d done before. It was about all I was good at.

  A shadow passed the living room window. I climbed out of my sister’s Cadillac and saw Angela inside the house, holding a green bottle of beer. I wondered if she and her father had known what Lou had done. It seemed unlikely, but I couldn’t think of any other reason for their being there. She watched me cross the driveway and climb the front steps.

  I was expecting Robert to open the door, to usher me in, maybe to tell me that he knew all along that Lou had fucked my sister over, and that he, Robert, hadn’t paid one red cent of her debt, it’d been his lie, a simple one, in hopes that she’d love him back. Hell, he might have known all along that Lou had used Shane. What kind of guy can work for a shitheel like Fat Lou DiMaggio and still be a decent person, keep that slime from getting all over him?

  The door opened wide. Don Gray grinned at me, cradling his bandaged wrist. But I had the pistol in my hand and I wasn’t in the mood for trading threats with him. I shot him in the shoulder and he spun back. I kicked him between the legs and he hunched quickly and I brought my knee up into his face as hard as I could.

  He had a new pistol in the holster on his side. I took it. I tripped him and he rolled over onto his back. I found a snubnose .38 in an ankle holster. I threw it out the open door and into the darkness, and in doing so, as I’d turned, I caught sight of Harley’s bloody head resting against the passenger-side window of her Cadillac. I felt so grim over that, that I kicked Don in the face. Blood from his lips and nose splattered the fine, beautiful wall behind him.

  I strode toward the living room and Angela came out before I could cross the threshold, but I heard Lou’s voice deeper in the house and he was calling for Robert. Angela placed her hands on my chest. She said, “James? Look at me!” She slapped me. I shoved her into the door casing and brushed by her.

  When a hand closed over my shoulder, so gently at first, I thought it was hers. But then the grip tightened, and pain flared through my whole body and Don spun me around and headbutted me.

  I barely had time to lower my chin toward my chest, and if I hadn’t, he would have broken my nose with the crown of his head, and it’s hard enough to fight a monster when you can see and I didn’t want any part of him anymore.

  But he wouldn’t let it go. He was bleeding from both nostrils and his blood dotted his dark tie. He had a firm grip on my right wrist and he tightened it until I released the pistol. He tried to raise his right arm but couldn’t, and pain swallowed his face for a split second.

  I poked him in the eyes and he roared, reeled back, blinking and breathing hard.

  Angela cried out for me to stop, for him to stop.

  I stooped to pick up the pistol and Don jumped forward again, knocked me back, away from the weapon. He couldn’t see well and one of his eyes was bleeding and seemed to be deflating and I could see part of the socket it nestled in.

  A bubble of blood burst from one nostril. He swung his arms out, trying to grab hold of me and I ducked underneath them, even as he stumbled forward, and my foot shot out and he tripped over it and landed hard on his stomach. And Angela was at my back, both of her hands tight on my shoulders, her fingernails digging in, and she was crying, “Stop, goddamnit! Stop! James!”

  But her father was already pushing himself up, and I saw Lou beyond Angela and in the hall with Robert right behind him. Lou’s face looked angry yet terrified. Robert had a hand on his shoulder, guiding him outside, and he smiled at me before they disappeared.

  And Don Gray was on all fours, shaking his massive wedge of a head, and trying to find his bearings. I straddled his hips, sat on him like he was a horse and reached underneath him, my fingers closing over his tie, and I pulled it around, held it with both hands and looked at Angela and told her, “If you can’t watch this, leave. I’m not letting him kill me.”

  She shook her head. She picked up her dad’s pistol and pointed it at me.

  Don struggled to get up as I strangled him with his own tie. I kicked him in the elbow and he collapsed and I pulled harder, and then all he could do was try futilely to get his fingers between the noose and his bull neck.

  Veins stuck out on his gleaming skull and he gagged, and I thought that any second now Angela was going to shoot me in the back as I killed her dad, like I had killed my dad, no joy in it either time, just like it was something I had to do, for the moment the only thing I had to do…

  And Don kicked twice, three times, and his broad back shivered beneath me and his thick skull was reddish purple. He sagged and I couldn’t hold him up all that well, but I kept pulling on his tie as hard as I could for another thirty seconds, another minute, until I heard Angela fire the pistol behind me like I knew she would eventually.

  A searing pain cut through my torso like a hot iron, and then, just when I wished it would turn to a numb faraway pain, it lodged into my neck, filled my face with heat, and I heard her footsteps, dully, over the ringing in my ears, the slam of my heart.

  I felt the blood running beneath my shirt and flinched and my hands slackened on her father’s tie. I waited for the life to drain from my body, remembering again what my dad said, that maybe it would be like a long sleep and one day you wake up and it feels like it just starts all over…


  And if that is so, then maybe in the next life, I thought, I’ll treat myself and everybody else a little better…

  13

  It’s a horrible thing to think you’re mortally wounded, believing up until that time that you didn’t care whether you lived or whether you died, and then discovering that you want to live.

  I groped for the wound and found it high in my trapezoid, close to my neck. The bullet had punctured a clean hole and as I stuck my finger into it, the pain caused the room to spin. Angela knelt next to me and her father. She didn’t look at me. I pushed back and stood, feeling sick. I heard another gunshot, this one outside.

  Angela touched the back of her father’s thick skull and said in the tone of a little girl: “Daddy?”

  She sounded the way I remembered sounding when I’d found my mother’s corpse in her rocking chair, a sense of helplessness and wanting to believe that if you had been a better child you could have saved them the fate they’d suffered. I placed a hand on her shoulder as she wept.

  A few minutes passed. I didn’t pass out, although I wanted to. I pulled Don’s cell phone from my pocket and dialed 911. When the operator came on, I handed the phone to Angela and stumbled outside.

  It took my eyes a second to adjust to the gloom, but once they had, I could see clearly that Fat Lou wasn’t going anywhere. He was crumpled in the open back door of his silver Aston Martin. Blood spatter and brain matter dotted the roof and had smeared on the passenger window. The garage was still open. I figured Robert had told him to wait out there—Lou a nervous wreck and watching the door to see who would walk out; me or Don Gray—as Robert walked by Harley’s corpse in her Cadillac, and having seen her, it’d snapped that last bit of goodness in him. He’d pulled Lou’s car out and made to help him inside and pressed a pistol to the back of his head and pulled the trigger…