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While Dario had avoided the cameras and slurs like a pussy, he would confront. He was Robert Hawk. He—not Dario—owned this town. This arrest would be sorted out, he would be released and order would be restored. He saw the owner of the deep voice. It was paired with a dingy white T-shirt stretched over big shoulders and the lumber of a stride that easily shoved through the crowd. The man stood a head over the others, and when he came fully into view, Hawk was unsurprised to see his jeans and cowboy boots.
Who, the fuck, was this?
The man moved his right hand, and it was a blur of action, the motion too quick to respond to. He lifted the gun, and Hawk tensed, his legs bending, old muscles working overtime to launch him forward and out of harm’s way.
The gun went off.
Screams.
Movement. Shoving, running. Hawk fell forward without hands to catch himself with and met the unforgiving asphalt face first. The thin skin of his cheek shredded and his nose collided with the ground, a crunch of bone sounding.
Another gunshot.
Another. A volley of them, of screams and panic.
A hand gripped at his shoulder, and jerked him over, onto his back. He looked up and into the officer’s face.
“I—” He couldn’t get the words out. He wheezed, coughed. Stringy moisture blocked his airway. He felt pressure on his chest and glanced down, the officer’s hands on him, his forearms flexing as he bore his weight down on the wound.
The son of a bitch had shot him. Here, in front of all of these cameras. Robert Hawk, lying on the pavement like a weak old man. His wrists screamed in pain from the weight of the officer, the cuffs pinching them behind his back, and he tried to speak, to order the man off him, but couldn’t manage anything.
Is this what dying felt like? He looked up to the sky, and the pain in his chest grew deeper, blurring his vision and turning everything to red.
BELL
Everyone dies. Dad once woke me up in the middle of the night and pulled me into the living room. He made me sit on the floor, by his feet, and listen to his lengthy and disjointed opinion on death, the drunken gist of it summed up in those two simple words. Everyone dies.
Everyone. He’d leaned forward and punctuated the word with a stabbed finger toward my nose. It’s a part of life, Bell. We’re born. We live. We die. It was around then that I noticed the glass bowl sitting on the table, the bottom littered with cigarette butts, their ends damp against the slimy bottom and faux treasure chest. It was around then that I asked where Bubba was and realized that Everyone was, in this situation, my goldfish. Everyone dies. My goldfish had died because Dad needed a place to stick his cigarette butts and Bubba’s bowl had looked like the best bet. Gwen had died because I fell in love with the wrong man.
Now, in a hot and sweaty church service inside a clapboard barn, I watched as the pastor stepped away from the pulpit and stopped before the crowd. Of course, his sermon was about death. Just my luck. I tried to run away from something mentally and ended up tripping over it on my exit.
I shouldn’t have let Laurent drag me here. This pastor didn’t understand my plight. No one was trying to kill him. His most significant concern was probably paying the utility bill on this barn and worrying about that mustard stain on the sleeve of his jacket. I was willing to bet he’d never been in love with a married man, or surrounded by strangers two thousand miles from home, with a swamp man caretaker who was currently giving me the evil eye. I glared back at Laurent and he sighed, cutting his eyes to the front.
Granted, I did bring this on myself. I watched as the pastor carefully took the steps down and started to walk down the barn aisle, his voice rising as he moved. I closed my eyes and listened to the man speak about death. His opinion was a little different than my drunken father’s had been. His opinion spoke of the forgiveness that we could experience if we simply asked God for his mercy. Dad’s soliloquy had been more focused on Bubba’s short lifespan, and the fact that he would have been poisoned to death slowly and painfully, had Dad simply dropped the cigarettes in without flushing him down the toilet first.
I felt a sharp elbow in my side and almost yelped. Whipping my head to the right, I gave Septime a dirty look.
“Don’t fall asleep.” She mouthed the words in an exaggerated fashion that a lip reader three states away would see.
