Truth or Dare

by Dwayne S. Joseph

  Jayson had been in his home before.

  He was supposed to have been coming to fuck Regina. He was supposed to have been coming to do all of the things he had promised in his dares. But he’d come with a gun instead.

  “When you sent the address, I knew Regina wasn’t real,” Jayson said calmly, as though Reggie weren’t pointing a gun at him. “Because this was Rita’s address, and I knew Rita was dead. Suicide in the bathtub, right?” Jayson watched him, his eyes dark, his smile twisted.

  Reggie swallowed what little saliva he had in his mouth and begged his finger to squeeze the trigger.

  He fucked her. My wife. In my bed. She’s dead because of him. Squeeze the trigger!

  Reggie stared as anger, fear, shock, grief, embarrassment, sadness, and disgust swirled around inside of him. He was emotionally paralyzed, unable to do what had consumed his every thought. He stared, and then opened his mouth.

  No! No words. Just do what you want to do; what you need to do! Don’t speak!

  “Y ... you killed my wife,” he said slowly. The words had escaped before he could reel them in.

  Jayson shook his head. “No, I didn’t.”

  Reggie nodded. It was another involuntary action. “Yes ... yes, you did. You killed her.”

  “No. I fucked her. Multiple times,” Jayson replied coldly. “But when I left her alone, naked in bed with her legs spread wide open, she was breathing.”

  Reggie’s head shook as images he had tried so hard to keep trapped behind a very thin wall began to force their way through. Images of Rita doing things that Candy had done for him. Images of the sex she had said she’d had. The sex that had happened on their bed.

  Reggie shook his head again as bile threatened to rise into his throat. “I ... I’m going to kill you,” he said, his throat so thick with grief that the words could only come out in a whisper.

  Jayson shook his head. “If you were going to kill me, you would have pulled that trigger already.”

  “Fuck you,” Reggie spat.

  Jayson raised an eyebrow. “If I were you, I’d squeeze the trigger before I squeeze mine.”

  Reggie’s chest tightened as Jayson watched him with eager eyes. He looked down to the gun Jayson held in his hand, held his gaze there for a moment, and then looked back up. Squeeze the trigger. That was all he had to do. Squeeze the trigger before Jayson squeezed his.

  “You want revenge for your slut of a wife, don’t you?” Jayson asked. “Isn’t that why you sent me those pictures and messages? Isn’t that why you lured me here, to make me pay for fucking her? Pull the trigger and teach me a lesson. I dare you.”

  Reggie could see Jayson’s lips moving, but the beating of his heart prevented him from hearing any of his words. Squeeze the trigger. That’s all he heard. That’s all he wanted to do. There was no need for words. His eyes went back down to the muzzle of Jayson’s gun, pointed directly at him.

  Before he squeezed his.

  Squeeze the trigger.

  Reggie thought about it. Willed his finger to react. Just a twitch. That was all it needed to do. A twitch was all the pressure that the trigger was going to need to send a bullet propelling into Jayson’s chest.

  Sweat trickled down his forehead and down the middle of his back. His heart beat faster, harder.

  “Do it,” Jayson instructed, his tone even.

  Reggie tried. With everything that he had. With all of the desire burning inside of him. With all of the hatred and despair. He tried. But as milliseconds passed, a very painful truth began to encompass him.

  He was no killer.

  He averted his line of sight down to the gun Jayson held again, then looked back up and stared into Jayson’s cold, unblinking eyes. Eyes that were easy to read. Eyes that said that while Reggie couldn’t kill, Jayson could.

  Reggie took a quick intake of breath; and then he heard a crack. Seconds later, his .22 fell from his hand as he slouched back into the chair while blood seeped out from a hole in his chest.

  Chapter 40

  He could have died. Right where he stood. A bullet could have hit him in his heart or head, and it could all have been over. Just like it was about to be for Rita’s husband.

  Jayson stood still and watched him take short, rapid breaths as blood seeped from the gunshot wound in his chest. He was trying to hold on. Trying to fight a battle he couldn’t win. The forever sleep was coming, and there was nothing that Rita’s husband could do to stop it.

  Jayson stared at him with a smirk. He had killed before. Twice. A husband and wife. Tim and Colleen. The Craytons. Their deaths hadn’t been planned, but they had been unavoidable.

  He had been fucking Colleen anally. It was something she said she wanted. Something that her husband, Tim, wouldn’t do to her. It was her dare to Jayson. She wanted to be fucked in her ass while she was choked nearly to the point of passing out. Colleen was a second-grade English teacher with a love for pseudomasochism. During their several chats she had revealed to Jayson how much she enjoyed pleasure and pain, how much it turned her on. She especially enjoyed being choked while she was being penetrated. There was something about the violence of the act, the submissiveness of it that gave her the chills. Before she was married, she had been wild, reckless. Her marriage to Tim had been more of an attempt to settle herself down than it had been for love, and for two years the attempt worked. Sex had become what she’d convinced herself it was supposed to be: clean, and most important, safe. But it was also boring. And, after two years, the freak in Colleen demanded to be released from the closet it had been forced into, and Colleen soon found herself stepping outside of her marriage when the desire to be nasty had been too strong to fight.

  Jayson had to kill her because the night he was fulfilling his dare, Tim had come home early from a trip and walked in on them. Tim was six foot four, about 250 pounds, with an attractive smile, who everyone called a gentle giant. Colleen used to complain during their chats about how passive her husband was. How he never got rough during their sex, no matter how much she asked him to. She used to call him a pussy and say that he was so weak that he would probably break down if he ever found out she was unfaithful to him.

  She’d been wrong.

  Upon seeing them, Tim flew into a rage, and before Jayson could fully pull himself out of Colleen’s rear end, the burly man tackled Jayson to the floor and proceeded to hit him with hard blows to his face and ribs. Jayson managed to fend off the brunt of most of the blows with his arms before he managed to turn the tide. Using wrestling techniques he had acquired in the military, he got behind Tim, wrapped his legs with his own, and cut off his airway by holding him in an unrelenting chokehold that eventually snapped Tim’s neck. Killing Tim hadn’t been his intent, but once he began to squeeze, he found himself unable to stop.

  Already hysterical, Colleen’s yelling intensified into an uncontrollable outpouring of tears and screaming. Jayson tried to get her to calm down, to listen to him as he explained how he’d had to defend himself, but no matter how hard he tried, Colleen wouldn’t shut her mouth. She kept screaming, moaning, sobbing, kept calling him a murderer. His adrenaline already on overdrive, the more Colleen wailed, the more frustrated Jayson became until, without a thought, he wrapped his fingers around her throat and squeezed until screaming would be something she would never, ever do again.

  The event should have rocked Jayson to his core. After all, he had just killed two people in cold blood—something he had never done before. But it hadn’t. In fact, instead of shaking him and putting him on edge, the violent act seemed to calm his nerves so much that for several minutes, he stood stoic and just stared down at the husband and wife that would forever be united.

  He stared just as he was doing now, watching Rita’s husband take his last breath.

  When he had killed Colleen and her husband, he had been unprepared, so he’d had to get rid of all evidence of his existence, which he had by dousing their bodies with gasoline he found in their garage, and setting them o
n fire. He flexed his fingers around his Ruger. His hands were covered by latex gloves. This time, he didn’t have to worry about leaving behind traces of himself.

  He looked at Rita’s husband for a few more seconds, and then walked over to him. “Your wife was a whore,” he said, making sure not to get too close as Rita’s husband was spitting up blood. “But, damn, she was a good fuck.”

  Rita’s husband looked at him through terrified eyes that were dimming with each passing second.

  “You should have pulled the trigger,” Jayson said. He took one final, long gaze at the dying man, and then turned and walked away. Colleen’s husband had intended to kill him. And so had Rita’s. Both times he had survived, and as he walked out of Rita’s home, he knew why.

  He got into his Escalade, closed the door, grabbed his cell phone, and pulled up a picture from his photo album; a picture of Jess, naked from the waist up, holding her breast for him.

  Jayson smiled as one word ran through his mind: Destiny. He and Jess, destined, meant to be. That’s why death had been unable to claim him, because there was no getting in the way of destiny.

  Jayson put the phone down inside of his cup holder and started his engine. The time for games had come to an end. It was time for destiny to be fulfilled.

  Chapter 41

  A crack. Coming from upstairs. The sound of it had been faint, but Candy had no doubt about what it had been: a gunshot.

  She stood still, breathing slowly as her heart rate increased. She had been leafing through half of her easy money, waiting for her benefactor to come and give her the rest, and then let her go when she’d heard the sound of the front door open and close. At first, she wondered if her benefactor had left, something he hadn’t done since he had brought her to his home, but then she heard footsteps moving around on the floor above her after the door had closed. In the eight weeks she had been living as a well-paid prisoner in the moderately furnished basement, she had gotten to know the steps of the stranger with the sad eyes. He walked slowly and heavily the way someone usually did first thing in the morning. In the seconds after the front door closed, she knew right away that someone had come into the house because the steps moving around on the hardwood floor had been light and easy, almost casual.

  The knowledge of someone else being present put her on edge. Who was the person? What had that person come for? Had he or she known she was there? Had someone come for her? Her heart beat heavily as she stood to the side of the wooden door leading to the upstairs that her benefactor always kept locked. She stood stoically with a table lamp clutched in her hand, ready to be used like a baseball bat or hammer if someone other than the benefactor came downstairs. Seconds turned into minutes as the footsteps moved around before they disappeared. She hadn’t heard the front door open and close again, so Candy had known that whoever had come inside hadn’t left, which meant that someone must have gone upstairs.

  Candy remained by the door and was going to stay there until whoever had come inside decided to leave. But then she heard the gunshot. A few minutes after that, she heard the light, easy footsteps again before the front door opened and closed once more.

  Candy breathed slowly and waited for ten minutes to pass after the footsteps disappeared; and then she waited for another ten minutes before she wrapped her right hand around the doorknob. Someone had come in, a gunshot had gone off, that someone walked away, and now there were no sounds; she had to get out of there. She tried the knob, but it didn’t turn. Her heart began to beat harder, faster. She needed to get out! She put the lamp down on the floor, and then put both hands around the knob and tried again, knowing the result would be the same.

  Working the streets for as long as she had, Candy had come across and survived many different types of situations, so rarely did anything cause her to panic. But this was a situation she had never been in, and as the doorknob refused to give, panic, along with regret, began to set in. “Dammit,” she whispered.

  She tried rattling the knob again for no good reason, and then stopped and placed her forehead against the door and sighed. “Dammit,” she whispered again.

  She shook her head, and then stepped back away from the door and looked up at the ceiling. No sound had come from above for over twenty minutes. Candy opened her mouth, hesitated for the briefest of moments, questioning what she was about to do, and then yelled out, “Hey!”

  She waited for a moment, and when no response came, she yelled out again. “Hey! Is someone up there?”

  Again silence.

  She went back to the door, closed her fist, and pounded on it. “Hey! Are you there? Let me the fuck out!”

  She beat on the door again, yelled out once more, then kicked at it. It was all futile she knew, but she was scared. She turned and looked toward the small room she’d been staying in, and stared at the black duffel bag sitting on the bed. Fifty thousand dollars, right there.

  She turned back to the door, and then looked back at the money; her money for the taking. She faced the door again. She had only one option.

  She took a few steps back, took a breath, and then, just like a football player did on the field, she charged forward and threw her shoulder into the door. The door didn’t swing open, but she had rammed into it hard enough for her to realize that another two or three charges, and it was going to give way.

  She took another breath, blew it out heavily, said to hell with the ache in her shoulder, and threw herself into the door again, and again. Then, one more time before she fell forward to the ground as the door swung open. She remained silent on her knees and listened to see if anyone had been coming. After a few short seconds of silence, she stood up, grabbed her duffel bag, and made her way cautiously upstairs into the kitchen. There she stood unmoving as her heartbeat hammered so hard beneath her chest, she could hear it above the silence.

  Silence. Nothing but.

  Candy took another breath, held it for a couple of seconds, and then exhaled slowly. She thought about the silence, and about the fact that the light and easy footsteps had come and gone, while the heavy and slow steps had been nonexistent now. Then she thought about the gunshot. She tilted her head upward and looked up.

  Leave, Candy. Take your fifty thousand and leave now before someone comes.

  Candy tightened her grasp around the duffel bag.

  Go! You don’t need to go upstairs. You don’t need to go and see what happened.

  Candy took a breath again. Held it as her heart pounded. Leave. That was what she needed to do. Leave. Don’t walk. Run.

  She exhaled, and then made her way through the kitchen, which was empty save for the stove, dishwasher, and refrigerator, and stepped into a large but empty living room. Candy looked around. No furniture, no pictures. Odd. To the right of the living room was the dining room, which held a long dining table with one chair at its head. Odd, Candy thought again. She moved through the living room and stepped into the foyer, which had white marble flooring and a staircase leading upstairs. The front door was off to the right. Her freedom.

  Candy looked at the door. Go straight to it, she thought. Go to it, open it, and get away with your money. Ignore the staircase.

  She took a step forward. She heard the instructions loud and clear as though they’d been given over a loudspeaker. Loud, clear, specific. Instructions not to be ignored. Yet, still, she took more steps forward, not toward the front door, but, rather, to the staircase where she put her hand on the banister and began to make her way upstairs.

  Turn around. Go! Someone could be there waiting for you. Take the money and go!

  Candy ignored the warning. She continued slowly, cautiously, to the top. Then she took tentative steps down the hallway, past two empty bedrooms, to the master bedroom, where what she saw caused her to take a quick breath of air through her mouth, which had dropped open.

  Slumped back in a small maroon love seat, his head tilted back, the front of his blue button-down shirt soaked bright red with blood. Her benefactor. Shock and fear para
lyzed Candy for several seconds. Her eyes fixated on the blood soaking his shirt. Blood released because of the gunshot she had heard.

  “Oh my God,” she whispered, then jumped when the bloody body began to cough. She inched into the room, her eyes focused not on the blood, but the very slow rise and fall of his chest. He was alive.

  “H ... h ... hel ... he ... lp.”

  Candy looked up. His eyes barely open, the benefactor was looking at her.

  “He ... hel ... p ... ple ... ple ... ase ...”

  Candy swallowed bitter saliva that had gathered in her mouth, and then gently put her duffel bag down.

  The benefactor lifted his arm slowly and pointed toward his bed. “Pl ... plea ... m ... my ce ... ll ... it ... it’s th ... ere ...”

  Candy looked at the bed. Sitting in the middle of the mattress was his BlackBerry, along with a set of keys, one of which was connected to a remote to lock and arm his car.

  “Pl ... lease c ... call ...”

  Candy looked back at the man. His chocolate-brown skin was paling, and she knew that if there was any chance at all to save his life, she had to make the call right away. She took a step, and then paused as something caught her eye. She looked down to the floor at the foot of the bed and saw a black handle similar to the one on her duffel bag.

  Her heart skipped a beat.

  She looked down at her bag, to its handle, then looked back to the one sticking out from beneath the bed. Same color, same texture, same size.

  She looked to her benefactor as he began to cough again. He had promised to pay her the other half of her money after whatever it was that he’d been doing was done. Then he was going to let her go.

  Candy looked back at the handle and moved forward, bent down, and wrapped her fingers around it. She pulled it from the bed, a duffel bag identical to the one he had already given her. Her heart racing now, she lifted the full bag onto the bed, unzipped it, and smiled as she stared at the other half of her payment.