CHAPTER NINE #3
There were so many questions to ask. So many things I wanted to know—needed to know—but with Leonard dead, would I ever know the truth? I’d never get his side of the story, and his side would’ve undoubtedly been closer to the truth than anything Gerald Crowley could offer.
The turmoil in my brain was tumultuous, and it warred with the goodness injected into my heart. It was the separate foundations laid by the trauma of childhood and the luck I had stumbled upon when we broke into The Llewellyn Family Funeral Home.
One cracked and unstable, the other sturdy and reliable.
But they shook now. Both rattled by the earthquake in my soul. They collided and joined, becoming something new and unsettling, and what the hell was I supposed to do with this now, when the angel on my shoulder was gone and all that remained was the devil on the other side?
“Let me help you,” Gerald whispered, his voice soothing, coaxing. “Let me show you how good it can feel to remove another bad man from the world.”
“I need to get out of here,” I murmured through gritted teeth, ready to take a step back, but Gerald held me in place, applying pressure to my back.
“You already had the plan. That was all you, and it was good,” he whispered, laying his hand over mine. “Now let’s execute it, together.”
“Stop,” I said, pulling my hand from his grasp.
I was bigger and stronger than him, but I’d somehow forgotten about the two enormous, muscular men on either side.
Or maybe it was that I hadn’t expected them to stop me when I pulled my hand from Gerald’s grasp.
But one of them reached out and held my wrist in place as Gerald removed the cap on the vial of poison.
“Hold his mouth open,” Gerald commanded in that same gentle voice.
“No,” I replied.
Then I heard a click from behind me.
“Dean is pointing a gun at your head right now,” he said, his tone never changing. “You will do this, or he will shoot you. That’s your choice.”
I inhaled sharply. “You would actually kill me?”
“I don’t want to,” Gerald said, and, fuck, I actually believed him. “But I do have to clean up my messes—you can understand that, can’t you? Now, you either become one of us or you become a part of the mess. That’s the choice. Make the right one.”
“And if my choice is to die right here?”
“Then I go after your brother and that friend of yours. You make Dean put a bullet in your brain, and I put a bullet in theirs. You will be solely responsible for the deaths of everyone you care about.”
Finally, I turned from the terrified man before me to stare at the one who’d gotten me into this situation in the first place.
“You tricked me.”
“I invited you,” Gerald corrected, holding up a finger. “And you accepted.”
“Fuck you.”
“Now, now, my boy,” he said, patting my back.
“You’ll feel differently when you fully understand what’s going on here—I can promise you that.
But we’ll get there eventually. Now”—he waved a hand toward the guy in front of me—“hold his mouth open and be done with this nonsense. It’s gettin’ late, and I’m gettin’ bored. ”
He’ll kill me if I don’t.
He’ll kill Shawn and Ike if I don’t.
They don’t deserve to die.
Two lives saved if I take the life of the one who had killed Leonard.
With a tremulous breath, I grasped the guy’s cheeks, my lungs working overtime.
Every push and pull of air encouraging my hand to hold tighter, stretching his jaw open wider, even as he tried and tried desperately to press his lips together.
He screamed. He cried, the tears pouring from his eyes, looking up toward my masked face and begging.
How many times had I begged as a child at the hands of countless men and women?
How many times had those pleas gone unheard?
“I’m sorry,” I said, giving him the apology never offered to me. “Remember, I tried to stop this.”
Without giving myself the chance to reconsider, I tipped the vial of cyanide into his open mouth, emptying every drop onto his quivering tongue.
“That’s it. There you go,” Gerald said, offering words of praise as his hand rubbed my back in gentle circles. “Now, hold his mouth shut. Don’t want him to spit it out.”
Nobody could tell that a tear slipped from my eye as I snapped his jaw shut, holding it closed as the poison poured down his throat and seeped into the soft, wet tissue of his mouth.
I knew it didn’t take much cyanide to kill someone within minutes. I knew it acted quickly.
But those moments …
After his arms were released and my hands fell from his face …
When his eyes widened and his hands clawed at his throat, his chest, his mussed-up hair …
As he opened his mouth to scream, only to stop abruptly and fall to his knees, vomiting at my feet …
As he fell and convulsed on the floor until, finally, his body ceased all movement altogether …
Those moments lasted forever, and by the time they were through and the room grew silent and still, my face was sodden with every bit of guilt and regret, knowing I’d carry it with me forever until the day I, too, took my last breath.
“Jesus Christ, finally,” Gerald said with a groan. “Next time, kiddo … bullet through the brain, all right? Trust me. It’s quicker.”
Then he patted my back before walking away toward the back of the room and said, “Dean, call Jesse and get this mess taken care of. I can’t deal with the smell anymore.”
“Yes, sir,” Dean replied, clicking the safety on his gun and slipping it into the waistband of his pants.
“And make sure my boy here gets the body of his friend downstairs,” Gerald continued. “I’m sure he’ll want to handle that funeral himself.”
Then he snorted with amusement, and I tore my gaze away from the corpse at my feet in time to watch him throw his head back, his whole body shaking with laughter as he said, “Good thing you brought the hearse!”