Page 62 of The Dearly Departed

I reached out with a gloved hand and tore the tape from his mouth, and in that instant, a slur of incoherent babble poured from his lips.

“Oh God, oh God, oh God, please, please, don’t … don’t kill me, man. Listen! L-listen to me, I-I didn’t even … I didn’t even know—oh fuck! Oh fuck, n-n-no, please! I ha-have kids, my wife, oh G—"

I grabbed his face with my hand, pinching his cheeks together. “Shut up.”

His head was barely able to jitter with a nod.

“What was it you used to poison him?”

His eyes widened as if he could read my mind. “O-oh, n-n-no, man. Please,” he sobbed. “Please, oh God, please, no.”

I tightened my grip on his face until he winced.

“What did you use?” I asked again, enunciating my words.

“Cy-cy-cyanide,” he whispered between sobs.

“Cyanide,” I repeated, the word nearly stealing my breath away, just thinking about Leonard’s final moments before that bullet—that sweet, merciful bullet—had penetrated his skull and put him out of his misery.

The panic. The burning. The sheer agony as his body shut down.

“I’m-I’m sorry,” he sputtered through his clenched face. “I didn’t … I didn’t—“

“He was a good man,” I interrupted, giving his head a shake. “Maybe the only good man I’ve ever known. And now he’s dead, because you made a choice to end his life—but hey! I guess that’s fine because you’re sorry.”

I dropped my gaze from his to the breast pocket on his white shirt, and there, I saw a little bulge. I had a hunch, and I used my other hand to reach inside to produce a small vial of clear liquid.

“Is this what you used?” I asked, bringing the vial to his eye level and shaking its contents.

I didn’t need him to confirm to know the truth. The fear in his eyes told me everything.

I imagined opening the cap, holding his mouth open, and dumping the liquid down his throat until the vial was empty. I imagined watching him suffer in the same way Leonard had before the Joker pulled out his gun. I imagined him collapsing at my feet and writhing on the ground until he ceased to move, his lips bubbling with foam until his last breath was taken.

My fingers itched for it. They twitched and begged, but, oh God, I couldn’t.

I didn’t want to.

As bad as this sniveling coward was, to take his life wouldn’t make me any better.

Somehow, it seemed worse.

“It’s okay, son,” Gerald said, coming up behind me. He placed a hand against my back. “Think of how Leonard suffered. The pain he must’ve felt.”

“Shut up,” I whispered, staring into that vial of clear, deadly liquid.

“He loved you … so, so much,” he continued, standing beside me. “He loved all of you, but you most of all. He said so. Many times. And he was here, and he died … because of you.”

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.