AllFreeNovel
Share Us
I missed.
“Dad, watch out!” Damon yelled.
In a single motion, Sunday pushed away from the wall, pivoted, and hauled off and kicked me in the ribs just below my bad arm, blowing the air out of me and making me curl up like a whipped dog. He jumped over me, spun, and kicked me even harder in the kidney.
Sunday might as well have hit me with a Taser because it felt like a lightning bolt passed through me, and I puked. Then he looped his belt around my neck and cinched it tight.
“No!” Ali yelled. “Don’t!”
“You just don’t learn, do you, Cross?” Sunday snarled, and he wrenched me up off the ground by my neck, the belt right up under my jaw. “You’ll never learn, will you?”
“Never,” I choked, fighting not to pass out.
He dragged me against him and pulled even tighter on the belt, cutting off my air and the blood supply to my brain.
“Incorrigible, I can see that, and I admit defeat with you.” He grunted. “But let’s see if your family learns better. Let’s let them see what life’s all about.”
Sunday yanked again, and I strained against the strangler, whipping my head side to side.
“It’s meaningless!” he crowed. “It’s all so meaningless!”
I stopped struggling, and my eyes sought my family.
Bree watched me, blinking slowly, blood from the head wound streaking her cheeks. Damon and Jannie were almost free of their restraints but frozen on their bunks, watching me die. Ali hung off his bunk, screaming and reaching for me.
Spots were becoming blotches in front of my eyes, and all I could hear was my heart pounding like so many anvil strikes when I looked to my last hope on earth.
CHAPTER
97
“LET HIM GO, OR I’ll shoot you!”
Sunday wasn’t sure who’d shouted the order at first. He’d been staring at the top of Cross’s head, waiting for the big collapse, the pissing and shitting in the pants that always seemed to mark a death by strangulation.
But then he glanced up and saw Nana Mama.
The old woman was lying on her bunk with her knees drawn up under the sheets. Her bony hands held his .357.
She was aiming at him from ten, maybe fifteen feet away, and the nickel-plated barrel of the gun rested in a cradle of sheet fabric stretched between her knees.
“Do it!” Nana Mama shouted.
Sunday grinned lazily at her and eased up slightly on the belt. Cross started coughing and hacking.
“Watch yourself there,” he said to the detective’s grandmother. “Bullet gets to ricocheting around here, who knows who it will kill.”
“Shoot him, Nana!” Ali said. “In the head. Like he’s a zombie!”
Sunday considered himself a brilliant interpreter of body language, and he saw in the old lady’s face and trembling upper body that she did not want to kill him and that she was afraid of even trying.
“You won’t kill me, now,” he drawled. “Catholic, southern lady and all. Thou shalt not kill. Thou shalt not.”
Every inch of Nana Mama was shaking now.
“See there?” Sunday said, as soft and sincere as a funeral director. “You can’t even aim, you old bitch. You shoot, you’ll kill your grandson.”
“No,” she said. “I will shoot you!”
