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I grab a handful of the tight, curled weave of hair resting on the back of his skull. Clench. Raise. Swing. His face becomes a battering ram into the tunnel wall. The concrete gets a load of Derne’s facial bones and tissues.
All I can really see is Delilah, a year from now, holding her baby. Her smile fulfilled and beaming down, her fingers splayed open and her child’s miniature hand reaching up to palm its mother’s. The small, perfect affectations of innocent life towards their parents.
Delilah smiling, her face flashing back and forth between her youthful beauty and a ho
llow cavern of splattered brain matter and cartilage. At some point I see her dead body go limp like a marionette with its strings cut and the baby falls, and ash pours out of the empty blanket swaddling the child.
Every terrible thing in this world has a birthplace.
My shoulder is tired from swinging but I do it anyways. A chunk from the tunnel corner breaks loose and rolls off into the pooling shadows, leaving small blood-prints like a rubber stamp gone haywire as it tumbles and rolls.
I see Delilah, Darla and Belinda wearing their matching sweaters on Christmas. Three women trying to recover from an unfair position in life. I see Delilah losing her virginity to a boy who said he loved her as a way to get into her pants and I see her praying he means it because that is all she needs. I see a young girl looking at herself in the mirror every morning and asking herself why her daddy left her and why her new one won’t. I see her watching her own lips move as she mouths the question was it something I did? I see the tears fall in response.
I see the seeds of spiritual cancer planted and sown in the life of this woman. This soon-to-be-mother, now faceless and soaking wet, lying in the red snow of some foreign city surrounded by people who will treat her clinically as they scoop her up and take her somewhere where they can refrigerate her and dissect her before exclaiming to the world she died from being shot through her beauty.
I stop swinging when the bones in my fingers hit the corner.
Between my fingers, clenching and pulsing with unsatiated rage, remains small tufts of what used to be hair, now matted and tacky-wet. A fragment of the back of Derne’s skull the size of my palm.
It’s all over.
Nothing left to do now except wonder how I will answer for what I have done when asking for admittance at the Pearly Gates. That conversation with Saint Peter will be an uncomfortable one, for sure. At some point my fingers unclench enough for the handful of Derne’s facial remains to fall free. His body slumps. Decapitated. I turn around.
Gun in hip holster.
I leave. Done here.
69
Whiskey washes it all away that night.
The morning brings with it an end. Bathed in sadness, but an end.
EPILOGUE
Delilah’s body had cops crawling all over it before I handled Derne.
They might have heard the gunshots, but we were blocks away and underground. That had to play hell with the sound.
Most of the women in the group had scattered to the wind, besides the dead one and the one still trying to sustain that horrible note to keep her on this side of the curtain. She kept it up for three days before she lost her voice in the hospital.
The one thing about an anonymous group like the Incest Survivors is getting names. Witness lists, accounts of the violence, who did what, where did they go, how did it happen, blah blah blah. Entries on report forms left blank.
A few of the women stayed with the shooting victims or came forward later. As far as I can tell no one brought me up, maybe because I was there to help. In their eyes. I did fight the man murdering one of their own.
None could have known I’d been the one to draw the monster to their front door. Keep it that way.
They did describe Derne.
Forensics and crime labs vary greatly from department to department. Both Saint Ansgar and Three Mile High share a lab, centrally located in Saint Ansgar. It is in the Stone Age. My bullets were either not found or traced to me. I’ll keep holding my breath on that one.
Three Mile High police had traced Derne’s bank account transaction and the phone records to me.
Yes, he hired me to find her.
Yes, I found her.
Yes, I told him.
