Chapter 28 #2
At the far edge of the parking lot, under a single floodlight mounted on a metal pole, two men stood facing each other. The light was harsh and white, and the two figures stood out in stark contrast.
Ethan had a gun.
It was a small handgun, dark metal, held in a grip that was steady enough to be terrifying. His arm was extended straight, the barrel pointed at Rob's chest from maybe eight feet away. Close enough that even a bad shot wouldn't miss.
Rob's hands were up. Not all the way up, not the dramatic surrender of a movie. Halfway. Palms out. The hands of a man who had never had a weapon pointed at him in his life and was discovering in real time that his opinions about everything didn't include a protocol for this.
Ben stopped abruptly, and the gravel crunched under his shoe. The sound seemed impossibly loud in the quiet lot. He didn’t want to spook either of the men, not wanting any spontaneous and ill-aimed gunfire. There were far too many people milling about, and this was a recipe for a fucking disaster.
His heart hammered against his ribs, blood slamming through his veins so hard he could feel it in his temples.
Think. Don't feel. Think.
He grabbed Kelly's arm and pulled her behind him in one motion. She stumbled, caught herself, and started to speak.
"Stay here," he said. Low. Firm. The voice he didn't recognize as his own was his father’s, the one Seth Reilly used when the situation was serious, and there was no time for discussion. He’d only heard it a few times, but it had been ingrained deeply in his psyche.
“That's my brother."
"I know. Stay here. We don’t want anyone shot here tonight. Your sister would be furious.”
He tried to diffuse the situation with a bit of light humor, but she wasn’t having any of it.
She grabbed his sleeve. He could feel her fingers digging into the fabric.
"Please," she whispered.
He looked at her. Her face was white. Her eyes were fixed on the two figures under the floodlight.
“Should I call 911?” she asked.
“You can, but we probably don’t have time for them to get here.”
Ethan was waving the gun around, his tone angry, but the words garbled as if the man was choking back sobs.
As emotional as Ethan was, Ben couldn’t predict what the man would do. He had to somehow disarm him without getting himself or anyone else killed.
Uh, Dad? If you have any ideas, I’m listening.
Except Seth Reilly wasn’t there. Ben was going to have to do this on his own. He’d sharpened his negotiating skills in some of the most shark-infested boardrooms on Wall Street. Hopefully, he’d learned a thing or two.
Quietly, he moved toward them, swinging out to the right so that he would come up behind Ethan, grabbing the gun away if he needed to. He still had hope, however, that the man could be reasoned with.
He could hear them now. Voices carrying in the night air, thin and strained. Ethan's words came first, broken and raw.
"You told her to get rid of it. You went to her. You promised me you wouldn't, and you went to her. All these years, I thought you’d listened to me, but tonight I realized that you don’t listen to anyone, do you? No one can tell you anything.”
Rob's reply was higher than normal. The confident, lecturing tone was gone. In its place was something squeezed and desperate.
"Ethan, listen to me. Put that down. Let's talk about this. You're not thinking clearly."
Wrong thing to say. Absolutely the wrong thing to say. Ben felt his stomach drop.
"Don't tell me what I'm thinking." Ethan's arm was pointed directly at Rob’s chest, so close he couldn’t miss. “You told her she was ruining my life, didn’t you? You made her think I didn't want her."
"That's not what happened." Rob's voice cracked on the last word. "I was trying to help. Both of you. You were about to throw everything away."
“Fuck you,” Ethan spat, his lips curled in derision. “You went to her when I told you not to. Did you kill her, too, you son of a bitch? You sure as hell weren’t sad when she died. If anything, you celebrated because it was all so easy for me now. You fucker. Did you kill the woman I love?”
The question hung in the air between the men, a blinking, dangerous, neon sign.
Ben had barely let himself think it, let alone articulate his thoughts, but Ethan had put them out into the universe.
But he couldn’t deny that it had crossed his mind.
Just for that single split second, before he’d pushed it away, not wanting Kelly to know he’d had a thought like that about her own brother.
Had Rob more than just talked to Lori? Had he…killed her, too? Ethan seemed to think so.
The heartbroken man’s hand trembled. The gun trembled and swayed with it.
Rob stood frozen, his hands still raised, his mouth open but for once producing no sound.
The parking lot was quiet except for the hum of the light and the distant, fading strains of music from a wedding where the bride and groom were probably dancing, completely unaware of the drama unfolding in the parking lot.
Ethan had a gun and over ten years of grief bottled up inside of him.
There was a good chance this wasn’t going to end well.