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I slip through the narrow gap between my father’s house and the neighbor’s, toward the back door. For a criminal who’s amassed as many enemies as he has, his security system is a simple keypad lock on the door that, once entered, bypasses the alarm settings. Anyone watching him long enough could’ve easily learned the code by now, but I guess, when a man has been dubbed The Savage of Corona, based on his rather unconventional kills, people tend to keep their distance.
I punch the familiar code, my birthdate, into the keypad, wondering if he changed it after I took off. At the green light, I turn the knob, greeted by a cold blast of air and darkness, and enter the small mudroom. In high school, the room smelled like sweaty gym shoes and the ammonia my aunt used to scrub the floors when she came to help out my dad a few times a week. Now it smells stagnant and unused, like damp wood and mold.
The mudroom opens onto the kitchen, and I quietly pad through, taking note of only a few dishes in the sink and a lineup of pill bottles on the counter. The streetlamp outside offers just enough light through the window over the sink to make out both his name and those of the medications. Some kind of stool softener, oxycontin, a vitamin, and a few others I can’t begin to recognize. I could almost think he’s swiped them to sell, if his name weren’t printed on every bottle. A surprise, considering he always hated doctors.
The house is still on my quiet pass through the dining room, and toward the staircase, across from the front door. Avoiding the creaking first stair, I take slow and careful steps, skirting where I know the wood is old and weak, until I arrive at the top.
Somehow, the air feels thinner here, my heart pounding against my ribs as I stare down the hall toward my father’s closed bedroom door. Hand gripping the hilt of the blade I purchased my first night here, I glance down at the weapon I intend to use on my father. One of sturdy steel and jagged teeth.
My thoughts drift back to the night he came home late with blood on his hands. I was thirteen when I woke to the sound of him stumbling in drunk, washing his hands in the utility sink. I asked him what happened. Thought he’d gotten hurt, and was bleeding out from some wound. Instead, he smirked at me, before going back to washing, and said, “A man does what he has to, in order to protect his family. Even if it means killing his own.”
I had no idea what that meant. If he killed my mother and lied about how she died, or murdered the man who killed her. He didn’t say then, and as the years passed, he didn’t say much at all about his comings and goings. It was the only night in my entire childhood that he exposed me to the man he was outside of this home. The ruthless legacy he hoped to pass down to me.
I make my way toward his bedroom, pausing at the door to listen. An incessant whooshing sound bleeds through the door, like compressed air, a sound I recognize as a ventilator from my many visits to critical care units at the hospital. I turn the knob and open it to a dark and quiet room.
Scant rays of moonlight offer a luminous blanket over my father’s sleeping form, where tubes stick out of his mouth, connected to what I correctly identified as a breathing machine. Frowning, I edge toward him, fingers curled tight around the blade, and watch his chest rise and fall in time with eachwhooshof the vent.
His gaunt face and white hair betrays his age, adding decades on top of the ones I missed. Bags hang from a pole beside the bed, dripping fluids into a long clear tube that disappears on the other side of him. The stench of death hangs on the air, hitting the back of my throat with sterile scents of disinfectant over the musky odor of urine and infection.
I had no idea. The last time I saw him, he had far more weight on his bones, while he sat sipping his bourbon and smoking his favorite cigar.
Aside from his lungs expanding and contracting, he doesn’t so much as flinch beneath the blade I lift to examine, and I wonder if he’ll even know he’s dying when it slices across his throat. I twist the metal in my hand, and catch the tremble that has my muscles vibrating, my chest cold with the tickle of nausea. For every inhale and exhale of the machine, I take three breaths, feeling light with nervous anticipation.
Something about this doesn’t feel right to me. I clamp my eyes closed, desperate to remember Isabella’s smile, but all I see is my father’s, as he sat in the passenger seat of his Bonneville, his arm stretched across the back of it, while I awkwardly steered the car down the street, driving for the first time at age fourteen. “That’s it, Son! Drive it like you stole it!” he chuckled with pride.
Tears blur his form, and I swallow back the memory, grinding my teeth to stoke the wrath from before.
A click from behind has me spinning me around, knife outstretched.
From the corner of shadows across the room, he darkness comes to life. The business end of a gun breaches the light first, before a figure sits forward to reveal a face I know I’ve seen before, but can’t place.
“You brought a knife to a gunfight?” The distinct clip of a Brooklyn accent only adds to my confusion.
I study the man further. “Who are you?”
“Hand over the knife.”
“I don’t think so.”
“You’re here to kill him?”
The urge to glance back at my father is smothered by the need to keep my eyes on this guy. “What is he to you?”
He doesn’t answer, and the slight cant of his head tells me he’s studying me with the same curiosity that I’m studying him. “These are his final hours. He asked that I give him a peaceful death.”
“You wish to kill him?” I ask.
“No. I offered to kill anyone who tried to interrupt his last moments.”
“I’m his son.”
His eye twitches with a dubious sweep of his gaze, but he doesn’t bother to lower his gun. “His son is dead, last I checked.”
“My presence must come as a disappointment, then.” I finally glance back at my father, who looks even weaker than when I first saw him this way. “What’s killing him?”
“Cancer. Stubborn bastard waited too long. He’s been going downhill fast these last couple months.”
“And you’re his bodyguard, or the man who plans to clean out his accounts after?”
