Page 208

No.

This is for me.

For John.

For the helpless fury of knowing I should have checked again.

For the knowledge that if I had, maybe Steven Mercer never would have had the chance.

For the crushing guilt that it took me far too fucking long to keep my promise.

I imagine John watching me from the sidelines as I take the man in front of me apart, because he sure as all hell would be doing the same if he could.

He nods solemnly at me, and I snap Steven’s neck.

I stand there for a while, steadying my breathing, then my phone vibrates from an incoming text.

Kammie: Daddy are you almost done?

The tension drains from my shoulders, the coiled violence in my hands going slack. I look down at my knuckles, raw and smeared with another man’s life, then at the body cooling in the chair. The air is thick with copper and voided bowels. My phone lights up with his message, and something in my sternum unclenches, warmth spreading through the cold certainty that had held me together for the last hour.

I type back.

Me: Yeah, baby. On my way soon.

The bubbles appear.

Disappear.

Appear again.

Kammie: okay

Kammie: be safe please

I stare at the words.

Nobody has said that to me and meant “come home to me.”

I look at Steven one last time, then back at my phone.

Me: Always.

That is a lie.

But I intend to make it true for him.

It takes me eight minutes to make the corpse unrecognizable, eleven to fit what’s left into a black contractor bag, and four to wedge the bag in the trunk beneath a tarp, along with Steven’s wallet and phone. The building itself isn’t attached to me, but I still bleach the blood spots and toss the chair out the window into a drainage canal behind the lot. By the time I’m back in my car, adrenaline is just beginning to fade, leaving a slick, chemical headache behind my eyes.

I check my reflection in the rearview—blood on my jaw, a red arc beneath my left eye. I scrub at it with a napkin from the glovebox, then head for the only place in Pittsburgh that has a working industrial incinerator and an owner who doesn’t ask questions about what’s in the bags.

I’m five miles from the incinerator, stopped at a light, when the phone buzzes again. It’s Kammie. The text is short.

Kammie: Daddy, men are here

The light changes, and I slam the accelerator, nearly ramming the car in front of me. Heart rate spikes, blood floods my ears.

I call him, hands shaking so badly I almost drop the phone. It goes to voicemail, then dead air.