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“You’re pressuring me.” I lean on my crutch and reach back for my phone. Taking it out and unlocking the screen with trembling fingers, I type “9-1-1” and hit dial. “You shouldn’t try to pressure me like that.”
“I’m trying to save your life!” He slams his fist against the door, so the thud echoes all the way through my home. “Bad people are coming for you. So open the fucking door and let us in.”
“911,” the dispatch lady answers. “What’s your emergency?”
“My name is Aurora Swanson,” I rush out. “I live at 8496 Cardale Street, Copeland City. I have a cop knocking on my door. His name is Archer Malone. He says he’s a detective and needs to speak with me.”
“Ms. Swanson!” he booms from outside. “Open the door!”
“Please help me!” I cry. “I have reason to believe he’s lying. I’m scared,” I tremble. “I don’t know what I’m supposed to do.”
“Detective Archer Malone?” the woman on the other end of the line mumbles. “Yes. We have it here in our system that Detective Malone, as well as Detective Fletcher and Detective Banks, are reporting to 8496 Cardale Street this evening.”
“Th-they are?” I exhale a gulped breath and shakily set my knife down on the back of the couch. “Are you— are you sure?” I fix my crutch beneath my arm and swipe my cheek clean of tears, using my shoulder. “Are you definitely sure?”
“Ms. Swanson!” Malone knocks once more, so hard that the door rattles on its hinges. “It’s important you open up.”
“I’m coming.” Sniffling, I start forward slowly and internalize every creak of my crutch. Everygrrrrras it holds my weight. “I’m co—”
I startle back with a shriek, dropping my phone, when the door busts open and bounces off the wall, revealing two men on the other side wearing almost all black. Shirts, pants, boots. Their hair is black, and their eyes, too, because of the shadows.
The one in front, Archer Malone, smiles the smile of a venomous snake and darts closer as I spin on my heels and sprint. Except, he grabs my hair in his fist and yanks me back until my legs and crutch go one way, but my head and shoulders go another.
I scream in terror and slam to the tile floor with a thud that steals the breath from my lungs. My back aches, and my throat is bone dry as I look up at the man who crouches over me and grins. His incisor glitters gold, while the rest are too white, too perfect, too… dentist-made.
“You shouldn’t open the door without checking the peephole first, sweetheart.” He takes a gun from somewhere on his body and rests the end on my forehead. It’s cold and hard. Chilling in how icy it is, terrifying in how final this moment seems. Tears blind me from anything else happening in my home, and my whooshing breath makes it difficult to hear the shouts from the other men. The orders barked. The words spoken. “You’ve become a loose end, Aurora. And the people I work for don’t keep loose ends around.”
“I didn’t call the cops about what I saw.” I squeeze my eyes shut, but that only pushes more tears onto my cheeks and into my ears. “I didn’t tell anybody.”
“Mr. Vallejo’s name is on TV, kid.” He pulls his gun away and cocks it, the lack of pressure against my forehead and the sound of metal clicking against metal bringing my eyes open with a snap. “For the first time in five years, his name is being blasted on the news.” He slides his pinky finger along my cheek and shakes his head. “We don’t like that kind of noise.”
“I didn’t tell anyone!” I’m seconds from dying. I won’t move from this spot on my living room floor. I’ll never be able to call my mom again, and I’ll never be able to feel her arms wrapped around me. I didn’t know the last time she held me would be thelast time. I didn’t appreciate it enough. I didn’t stay in the moment and absorb every last scrap of love she was gifting me. “Please don’t kill me,” I plead. “Please! I didn’t tell anyone.”
Pop!I jump at the unforgiving boom of a bullet going off. I squeeze my eyes shut and wait for death to take me, but when I remain conscious anyway, when nothing hurts, and nothing happens, I open them again and look into my killer’s eyes.
Noise crashes all around me. Shouts. Fists. Voices. My tiny home is filled to the brim with men I don’t know. But then I catch one I do.
A memory from a million years ago, and yet, it was only months ago. A familiar face I’m not sure I ever conversed with, unless our conversations took place while I was sedated and loopy.
He stands over my captor’s right shoulder, hidden from my gunman’s sight. His eyes, green and gold, but shadowed in equal parts rage and empathy, he looks down on me like I’m a dying dog, awaiting the final blow to put me out of my misery. He looks ten-feet-tall from my vantage point on the floor. Massive in the shoulders and chest, purely because of his placement behind an equally large man.
It’s all about perspective, I suppose. And maybe later, when I’m floating in the afterlife and have time to reflect, I might wonder why I was thinking about the man at all when I was about to die. Why did I notice the gold speckles in his eyes? Or the pity in them? Why did I focus on the veins in his forearm, before I spied the gun in his hand?
Why do I accept my fate now, while he stands over me, and not before, when it was just me and Golden-Tooth?
These are all things to discuss with the therapist I can’t afford. But the good news is, death is free. I mean, aside from the funeral, and the plot of land I don’t own. There’s no money in the Swanson coffers, so maybe they’ll toss me in the trash and consider it a done deal.
That’s the way Judy Jinx would want it, right?
And soon, my mom will join me too. She deserves better than to be tossed away, but the cold hard truth is, we’d both rather decompose in a shallow grave somewhere in the forest—together—than to be placed somewhere else where we run the risk of never finding each other again.
Judy owes me that much, surely.
Men fight around me. Guns go off, and Miranda London’s face is shattered when a stray bullet pierces the television screen and sends smoke pluming from behind. Time seems to work in slow motion. Like, super, duper, ridiculously slow, because while I get a chance to categorize the man with the teeth, and the other man with the arms, and then Miranda London’s destroyed face, nothing else seems to happen.
And yet, so much chaos surrounds me.
Noises blur and run together. Shadows fall across my body. My living room. My legs ache, but now, so does the back of my head. My scalp stings where Golden-Tooth yanked my hair, and my skull thuds with a headache after it’s collision with the tiled floor.
