I was standing in Rome’s kitchen. The porch light showed me old yellow linoleum, slightly curled up at the edges. A cheap card table, a half-opened pizza box on top. The whole room smelled like stale cheese.
I eased the door closed, stood still as the air while listening for movement, letting my eyes adjust to the dark. I was planning on the fly—look for a knife. Maybe he keeps a spare gun on top of the fridge. I used to do that. Whatever part of me didn’t think this was a good idea kept quiet.
My eyes adjusted and focused past the porch light slicing through the blinds on the window over the sink to the archway into the rest of the house. And something was standing there.
Someone. Rome flicked the lights. I flinched, blinked, squinted to see him there, waiting, in sweatpants and a white T-shirt. Cell phone in one hand pulling away from the light switch, pistol in the other, lazily aimed at me.
Rome waited a long time before saying anything, neither of us moving. Must’ve been a few minutes. His expression never changed, a complete blank except for a tiny hint of dread. None of the fear I’d seen in the interrogation room. He must’ve been working hard to hold it in.
He said, “I was just doing my job.”
I nodded. “I get it.”
“The sheriff called me almost as soon as you left the parking lot.”
“I figured.”
“Hoped you wouldn’t come here.” Stopped himself, shook his head, and said, “No, I guess not. I’ve been looking forward to this.”
“You could’ve let me help find these fuckers. Could’ve trusted me. How in the hell did you decide I was one of theirs?”
He readjusted his grip on the pistol. “Don’t run your game on me. It’s too late. You going to pull an O.J. now? Tell me the real terrorists are out there still?”
“I know you’ve already got them in sight. I can’t wait until they’re questioned. You’re going to look like a total fool, man. Bring up my name, these guys will be all, ‘What? Who?’” I smiled, started laughing. “It’s going to be sweet.”
Rome stabbed the gun at me as he said, “You’re the fool here. You can’t come here looking to avenge your little girlfriend, thinking how right you are. I know damn well you’re part of that cell, and she was helping you. And if you want to deny that, then what in the hell was she doing waving a shotgun at us?”
I was getting angry, raised my voice. “An unloaded shotgun. She was harmless.”
He matched the volume. “I didn’t know that! How was I supposed to know?”
“I don’t care. It doesn’t matter any more.” That’s right. Son of a bitch could think he had me where he wanted me at gunpoint. But I didn’t care if I croaked. I was waiting for the right time to launch. Scanned the kitchen—drainboard by the sink, some forks. I could aim for that. “I’m taking you down.”
He sighed. “Man, you just did all my work for me. Here I was thinking I’d be throwing your new sheriff in jail tomorrow for obstruction, get some court orders and shit before I got cut off for good. It’s much easier now, you breaking into my kitchen like this. I’m going to call my agents and we’ll get you out of dodge, back to Minneapolis. Another nice cozy cell in solitary, that sound all right?”
When he dropped his gaze just enough to punch the call button on his phone, that was the cue. I stretched for the fork, couldn’t reach, bent over sideways until I had one in hand, and I charged.
Rome was stunned, dropped the phone and tried to get his other hand on the gun. “Get on the fucking floor! I will shoot you if you don’t—”
The charge only took a few seconds, but halfway into it, when the bullets didn’t tear into me like I expected, when I grabbed Rome’s wrist and the gun didn’t go off because he didn’t have his finger on the trigger, I got it: he couldn’t kill me. He needed me. Without me, the free rein license he had from his bosses at Homeland Security disappeared. He’d told them I was the key. He was so Goddamned sure. My death was the end of his power.
We collided and I sent him sprawling on his back in the living room, barely missing his coffee table. I banged his wrist against the table until the gun clattered across and fell onto the carpet. I stabbed the fork into his shoulder and he let out a grunt. He got a hand on my face and tried to gouge my eyes. I pulled back. He shoved me off, yanked out the fork, and got to his knees. He went after the gun.
I kicked him over before he got it, slamming his head into a CD rack on the wall. Jewel cases rained down on him. I stood, found the gun and gripped it. But then he was up and behind me, grabbed my collar and slammed my head into a small TV on a stand in the corner. Pain pulsed across my scalp. Jesus, it stung. He banged me again. The glass cracked. A smear of blood on the screen.
He reached for the gun. I tucked it between my legs, doubled over. He scrambled and grabbed. I stomped on his toes and sent him reeling.
I thought I’d end it for us both right there—one in the head for him, one for me. But I turned right into his fist. Popped me in the face, my cheek, almost got my nose. He kept coming, a football tackle into the far wall that knocked the wind out of me. His fingers circled my wrist, squeezing the circulation out of my hand. I was blacking out.
Breathe in. Come on. He gets that gun, you’re his bitch for life. Locked away without parole, without a trial, without anything.
He punched me again, pulled back for another. When he tried again, I opened my mouth, caught his knuckle and bit down hard. Caught a nice big vein over his index finger. My teeth went numb from the shock of the punch, probably loosened the ones up front.
He stumbled off me, holding up his closed fist while blood flowed heavy out of the wound, dripping on his T-shirt. He sat on the floor, his back against the couch, wrapping the shirt around his hand.
I pushed myself up, gulped down air, then got my bearings. I aimed the gun at his face. Thought maybe I’d torture him first, get a few laughs out of it. But after all that I just wanted it over. We both stared at each other, exhausted of hate, of smart-assed remarks, of anything besides heavy breathing and the smell of sweat.
I said, “Okay. That’s enough.”
Rome held up his good hand. “Wait, first. Look.”
“No more talk.”
He shook his head. “Not that. There’s something else. I was waiting before I gave it to you.”
I stepped right up to him, gun on his forehead. “Don’t fuck with me.”
He closed his eyes. “Drew wrote you a letter. We found it in the car. I was going to give it to you tomorrow.”
Half of me didn’t want to believe him, and the other half didn’t want the letter. But he’d put the bug in my head now, the nagging voice. I couldn’t let it go.
“Where is it?”
*
I helped him to his feet, got him to the bedroom. The letter was in his briefcase on the dresser, folded tight, in an evidence bag. It was sitting underneath my hunting knife, also in a bag, blood all over the inside.
“How’d you get this?” I asked.
“We caught one of those Malaysian bastards on his way back to Detroit. Had this in the trunk. That was the next thing I was going to use against you.”
“I told you it was stolen from me.”
He shrugged, eased down onto his bed. “I can’t believe a word you say, man.”
I put the knife aside and looked at the note. Nothing on the outside. Could be that Rome was full of shit. Maybe he’d written it himself.
I said, “You know what it says?”
“Of course I know what it says. It’s my job to know what it says. How about you? Want to read it?”
I stared at him a long moment. Flipped the note in my hands. Did I really want to know?
Finally opened the bag, pulled out the note.
THIRTY-ONE
Dear Billy,
I hope you get this, because if you do it means you’re safe and that you’ve made it back home. I’m hoping I will too, but I wanted to write this now while it’s on my mind. Layla has promised to help, and I hope she gives
this you. Know that I’m so grateful for everything you’ve done to help me, even though so many terrible things have happened because of it. I’m sorry I ever asked you to get involved. I hope I can leave this behind and sort this mess out in my head. I’ve never had to face so much death before, so many people I cared about.
And you. I want you to know that I do truly care about you. Maybe in another life, another time, I could’ve loved you. But I hope you’ll please understand that that’s impossible now. I could never trust you the way I need to, and I don’t want to be reminded of what happened for the rest of my life.
Please know that you have been so good to me. I’ll never forget your kindness, your sacrifice, or your love. All I ask is that we leave it behind, and that you do not try to contact me. I’m sorry if this hurts you, but understand how much I’m hurting inside, too. All I ask is that you leave me alone.
Always your friend in memory, with love,
Drew
*
I read the letter silently three times, hoping I’d missed a word or sentence or was imagining it. Tried in vain to believe it wasn’t her handwriting. Each time it was exactly the same, Drew’s words written in Drew’s hand, just like in her notebooks back when she was trying to think of a name for the band. I remember that list, six pages long. The favorite before Elvis Antichrist was “Gore Bunny”.
She had washed her hands of me before the FBI ever found her car. If she’d only dropped the goddamned shotgun.
Rome said, “Look, I know you wanted to protect her, but come on. I know it hurts.”
I stared at the paper, my hands trembling. “You really think she was looking for a showdown after reading this? Because that’s what you told me.”
“Shit, I just used what I had, a little exaggerated. Like I said, it’s my job.”
“Yeah.”
The whole time I’d been lost in Drew’s note, Rome had been scooting toward his nightstand, finally close enough to reach for the drawer. I caught his fingers twitch in my peripheral vision, and I was back to reality. Dropped the letter and brought up the gun.
Rome reached for the drawer but I kicked his hand away. Grabbed his briefcase and swung hard, papers and a cell phone and a couple of clips flying around as the corner smashed into his temple. I swung again for good measure, connected with his chin. He collapsed on the bed, hands covering his face, whole body writhing.
I lifted his gun. Almost forgot I’d been holding it. Or had I? No, I knew. The whole time, all it would’ve taken was a quick squeeze of the trigger. Revenge, my only reason for coming here in the first place.
But I couldn't do it. I had killed two men in my life, that gangbanger on the Coast and the terrorist lackey Umar. Guess I was done with it. Not someone I knew. Not another law man just doing his job, regardless of how wrong he was.
I wanted to tell him something, anything, to justify breaking into his house. I wanted him to feel the pain that was gripping my heart worse than having my head pounded into a TV screen. But when I opened my mouth to really let him have it, I had nothing.
On my way out of the bedroom, I heard him groaning, then my name. I waited, didn’t look back.
“You won’t get very far. I’ll be seeing you real soon, motherfucker.”
He might as well have said: Have a Nice Day.
I kept the gun, picked up Drew’s now crumpled letter, and left Rome seething on the bed. I took the front door out, walked back to the truck, and drove away.
THIRTY-TWO
Two hours north of Pale Falls I found a cheap hotel in a town called Alexandria. The walls were mint green. The bed had seen better days. They had cable, but the TV’s color was messed up, a big streak of yellow down the left side. Everything smelled like cigarettes and industrial glue. A small round table and two torn vinyl chairs shoved tight against the AC unit that ran along the front window, the rising sun spreading gray light across the floor. I sat in one of those chairs with a bottle of cheap Syrah I’d picked up at the off-sale liquor store a few blocks away. Drew’s letter was smoothed out on the table.
I didn’t know how much time I had left before the Feds found me. Really didn’t even know if they would bother looking. If it was up to Rome, probably. You don’t do what I had done to a man like that and expect him to let it slide. If Tordsen was right and Rome would be off the case as of this morning, then at least we’d eventually settle our beef on a personal level, no more weight of the law to keep either of us from bearing our fangs. Not that he’d been a fragile flower last night—far from it. I could only imagine how much nastier it would get from here until one of us was dead
If I even wanted it to go that way. I didn’t know. Maybe another game of Russian Roulette, but this time with Rome’s automatic, the odds definitely in my favor. Yeah, it was an idea.
On the other hand, maybe I could catch Ham before he left for school, catch Savannah before her busy day of playing with toy ponies began. Reconnect with my kids, see if Ginny and the in-laws might be open to me paying them a visit once they learned the truth about what happened to Graham. They needed to understand that he gave his life trying to save my ass. I would’ve died for him. For Drew. They took a stand for me. Maybe the only way to make it up to the universe was to take a stand for my own flesh and blood.
Those were my choices. On the nightstand beside the bed were the phone and Rome’s pistol. Halfway through that bottle of wine, I decided which one to pick up.
END
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Anthony Neil Smith is the author of Psychosomatic, The Drummer, Yellow Medicine, and Hogdoggin’. His fifth novel, Choke on Your Lies, was published as an e-original for Kindle and Nook earlier this year.
He is the publisher of the noir webzine Plots with Guns, and is the Director of Creative Writing at Southwest Minnesota State University.
Visit him at http://anthonyneilsmith.typepad.com and http://plotswithguns.com
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