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“They deserved it,” I say. We all deserve what we get, don’t we?
“If you say so.”
He is all stardust and rain, fading into the night sky, then fading back in.
I watch him. He’s beautiful. He was a beautiful man with dark eyes and high cheekbones, a wide, laughing mouth. I wish I’d had his DNA in me. I wish I had been more like him, even though he was a broken piece, too.
And then, just as dawn breaks the horizon, I see him arrive, driving fast, then skidding to a stop.
And for a moment I feel a tug back to that ugly world I left behind.
Henry.
“My sister,” I hear him say. “She’s here. She needs help.”
It’s not long after that that they roll me out, too. The coroner’s assistant, a tiny, bespectacled redhead, opens the bag for him. Henry stares a moment. Then he drops to his knees and starts to weep. It’s not pretty. Men shouldn’t cry.
The young woman puts a hand on his shoulder.
“That’s her,” he says.
“I’m sorry.”
I’m sorry, too. But he’ll be okay. He’s one of the good ones. Some of us, maybe most of us, we turned out okay in spite of our biology. And the bad ones? Well, I’ve rooted them out. I’ve done my part. A kind of justice has been served.
Boris the pedophile committed suicide.
Marta the enabler had a tragic fall from a roof.
Brad the tech mogul who laundered money for drug dealers ran afoul of clients who ended the relationship the only way they knew how. Decapitation.
Mickey who raped a young girl and then denied it. And there’s more.
Mickey’s game at Red World was being investigated with the help of his brother-in-law, as a haven for bad men looking to groom and lure young girls and boys into sending nude photos of themselves for sale on the dark web. Mickey who embezzled money; the transfer that he made from his computer tonight the one action the Feds needed to take him down. Mickey who was a workplace predator, with at least six women waiting to come forward.
All of whom confessed on tape to Trina, his assistant.
There are others. I could go on.
Each project has been a subtle long game that had the desired result. Cleaning up the mess my father made.
This final one, it didn’t go as planned. To say the least.
But so it goes.
Now that my watch is over, I relinquish control.
“Want to go for a ride, kid?” says my dad.
The Indian gleams and rumbles. He loved that thing. He loved me, too, the best he could. None of us is perfect. Or even close.
“Yeah, Dad. Let’s ride.”
47
Hannah
That moment again. When it’s all over. Or is it just the eye of the storm? Anyway—it’s quiet now, with all the violence behind and ahead.
