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And then it all blew up after I had lit the fuse, thinking that was what I needed to do. I didn’t think I had any other choice. It was either temporarily hurting myself and Matt or permanently hurting my brother… at least that’s how I had seen it back then. Hindsight was one hell of a bitch, though. I could see now that the only ones permanently damaged by my choice were the two of us.
Matt raced down the wide streets, zipping past cars traveling at or below the speed limit. His focus was on the road ahead, his knuckles white-gripped around the steering wheel. I took a breath and tried not to let myself get too excited about what we were going to find.
The car whipped right, turned left, bounced over a yellow marked speed bump. I lifted off my seat as the car came back down on the ground with a loud bang.
“Sorry about that,” Matt said. But he was smiling, and so was I. Neither of us was sorry, not about anything. This was it. Just us two, running headfirst into the lion’s den.
“Your driving skills have gotten better over the years,” I teased, just as Matt cut a corner a little too close, the rim scratching against the pavement and spending up a handful of sparks.
“Fuck you.” He blew me a kiss. We drove up a steep hill and slowed down as we crested over it, the Blades unraveling ahead of us like a slow-motion scene in a horror film. The houses were mostly dilapidated piles of wood and brick and shingles that appeared to be one strong wind away from crumbling down. Most of the driveways resembled mini junkyards, and there were a couple of homes that had clearly illegal additions that likely housed some kind of drug operation.
Not a great place to raise a family, but a perfect place for a serial killer to hide out in.
“You’re good with this right?” Matt asked as he slowed down, approaching our destination. “Going in just us?”
I nodded and reached for his hand, giving it a squeeze. “We’ve done it before; we can do it again. Now’s our chance to end it all. Whatever it takes.”
Matt lifted my hand to his lips and kissed each of my knuckles, not once taking his eyes off the winding road. He brought us to a complete stop in front of a house with its windows boarded up and its yard overgrown with chest-high weeds. The door appeared to be rotted through, and the roof dipped toward the back of the home, no doubt where it had collapsed. Matt parked opposite the house, giving my hand one last kiss before he got out of the car.
I followed, having a hard time believing the hunt for the Pegasus was ending, right here.
“The red car isn’t here,” Matt noted in a whisper as we went straight for the front door.
“He’s probably not here.”
“Let’s collect whatever evidence we can, then. If he comes back, we don’t engage. We leave and wait for the cops to surround him.” Matt stood with a hand on the rusted door handle, his eyes laser focused on mine. I knew he was searching for any kind of doubt. He’d call it off, only if he thought I wasn’t comfortable with the plan.
“I’m ready,” I said. I made my choice: I was sticking with Matt, and we were ending this tonight.
Matt gave a nod and pushed at the door. It was locked but already giving way to Matt’s jiggling of the handle. He lined his shoulder up with the center of the door and threw himself against it. The door gave way, swinging open and letting us into a dark and dank-smelling living room. It was as if a refrigerator had lost power and some of the food inside was left to rot. Matt and I both unholstered our guns and fanned out, keeping deathly quiet as we cleared the room.
There weren’t sounds coming from anywhere else in the house, but that didn’t mean shit. Someone could be lying in wait, quiet behind a closet door, bursting out with a shotgun when one of us walked past.
“I’ve got you,” I said to Matt, walking backward down the hall as he took point.
We reached two shut doors on either side of the hall. We rotated like a well-oiled machine, and each of us entered a room, gun pointed, heart pounding hard in my throat.
It was empty. A bedroom of sorts, with a stained mattress sitting bare on the worn-out wooden floor. There were books stacked up next to the bed, mostly all business type of books with a couple of fiction pieces thrown in, and next to that was a dirty rag that looked to be colored the rusty red of dried blood. There were leftover Diet Coke cans sitting next to empty Pepsi cans.
