Michael

I let her be, hoping she’ll calm.

Once she fell unconscious I carried her to the backseat of my car and bandaged her wounds, then cleaned the shattered window and taped it up so it’d look more or less decent. After, I took off to the nearest motel on the way to Mexico border. Thankfully, no one noticed me carrying her to a motel door.

I succumb on a foot of a single bed and bury my heavy head in my palms. I haven’t slept for a while.

Ten or fifteen minutes pass as I rest. The last noise she made, of running water, I heard ten minutes ago. Now it’s dead quiet and I begin to think she might’ve hurt or killed herself in there.

I stand and rap on the door. “Get out.” No answer. “Get out!” I bang it with my fist.

“Where’re we going?” Her voice breaks through, a worn squeak.

“Get out, now.”

“Not until we get this straight!” She calls out. “Why didn’t you kill me?”

I roll my eyes. “Why didn’t you kill me?”

“Fuck you.”

“Fuck you too.” I hope to agitate her. It works as a few seconds later the door bangs open.

“You don’t get to fuck me!” She points a bloody and shaky finger at me. “It’s you who fucked my life, okay? It’s you who killed my goddamn sister! It’s you who—” she cuts off, uncertainty settling behind her eyes. She lowers her finger slowly, staring at me like a mouse at a cat, like she’s recalled who she’s talking to.

She swivels back to the bathroom, but I snatch her forearm before she closes the door and pull her back into the room.

“Get away!” She pushes me and stumbles onto the bed, blinking out the pain that no doubt stung her side. “Son of a bitch.” Unnatural green colors her face.

She’s turning delusional. If I don’t patch her proper she’ll die before we get to the border. If not from her wounds then from exhaustion and stress.

“You’ll bleed out,” I tell her. “Let me help.”

“What for?” Even exhausted she’s able to connect some dots and think of questions like this. “Just kill me, you pussy.” I twitch from her words and from her thorough observation. Only now do I notice her eyes are dark gray; a shade darker than mine. “Unless you can’t, for some reason you can’t. Or won’t.”

I won’t, because she’s not—

My phone vibrates in my pocket, cutting off my racing thoughts. The screen flashes Jared; the leader of my gang. Great. I let out an angry huff through my nose and answer, blurring words in quick succession before he starts his temper tantrum. “Yes. Listen, Jared, I’ll get rid of her like I promised and I’ll be back—”

“You’ve done fucked up, Mikey!” He yells and I move the phone from my ear. “Do you think I would’ve shot up your house if I wanted you back?”

I swallow. “I can make it back. I’m headed—”

“Where?”

I glance at the girl, watching me. She’ll figure it out eventually, if she hasn’t already. “To the border. To the Stewmaker. She’ll be gone.”

“It doesn’t change a thing! The cops are all over us, because of you!”

“You should’ve taken into account that I’m not a contract killer,” I grunt.

Jared, on the other end, clicks his tongue. “Don’t patronize me, Mike. You always did the job and I expected that from you. Every kill, you did, smooth and perfect like titties. Those murders were supposed to be a distraction for the cops, you know it.”

“I know.”

“So what happened, man? Did I do you wrong? Were you not happy with the girls, the pay, your brothers here?”

“Listen, it’s my own fault.”

“Damn right it is! Now we have that cunt you’re dragging with you and her brother’s trying to rat us out to the fucking feds, man.”

“Yes,” I say. The girl listens, her ear turned to the side, and I assume she didn’t make out Jared’s sentence about her brother. If I want to get back into my gang I’ll have to deal with him too, despite long ago briefly being friends.

“You’ll be gone too, you asshole! I don’t care what you do I’m sending people after you!” Jared shouts.

“Jared, listen—” The call ends and I squeeze the phone so hard the plastic cracks under my gloved fingers. I’ve known Jared for a long time. He practically raised me and he values me no matter what he says. Once I solve this I’ll still be able to get back.

“You’re dead whether I die or not,” she utters and throws her head back with a shrill laugh, then falters to her feet, leaving drops of blood on the bed.

I clench my jaw. This thing is spiraling out of control. I hate it. I hate being out of control.

She sways up to me and looks me dead in the eye. “Come on, Michael, kill me. Kill me…” she taunts, her eyes bloodshot and overwrought expression psychotic. “Kill me!”

My hand flinches faster than I know it. I backhand her across the face, sending her flat to the ground with a resounding thud.

“Ah, fuck.” She turns on her back and begins laughing as if she’s discovered my soft side.

She did. Not directly, but she did.

Her laughter rings through my head and I try to block it off by shutting my eyes and focusing on my breath instead. It doesn’t work, so I stare at the torn wallpaper on the motel wall because that’s all I can do. Her laugh dies off, replaced by panting and then silence. Yet even in a quiet room I still hear it, a haunting voice, pulling and tugging at the memories I fight to keep forgotten. They never are.

My mom laughed like this once.

I notice my fingers shake. I shouldn’t have hit her as it only proved her point. I can’t fight away the memory of my drunk father beating mom just the same. And she, an idealistic dreamer that she was, kept on taking it, kept reassuring him and me she’ll make it better with her stupid poetry. But all she did was write, without a single action taken to be with her family or to even get herself out there to fight for her dream. “It’ll happen when it’s mean to, Mike,” she used to tell me. She refused to see or believe anything else. First, it cost her job and my father his sanity, later, everything else.

She did wake from her reverie on that one night. When Father was beating her and when I, a nine-year-old kid, couldn’t take it anymore. I still recall the clarity behind her eyes when Father slumped to the ground. She and I watched him choke on the knife I had stuck into the side of his neck.

Finally, my mother was here. And she laughed. Back then I didn’t know what her laugh was about. Now I do. It was a laugh of revelation, a laugh people let out when they see something for the first time.

She could only take the reality for a mere week before I found her body swinging from a kitchen lamp.

Her dreams killed our family bond, my father, and finally her.

And I, over all my years on the streets, grew to pick victims who seek things, who dream. It’s easier when they don’t annoy you with their goals. Be it for girls, money, luxury. In this life they’re bound to a failure. If others don’t bring them down they get lost in their own fantasies, only to become a toll for someone else.

I look at an unconscious girl on the floor. She lives the reality to the point she wants to die, she wants nothing anymore.

What is the point of killing a suicidal person? They can do it themselves.

I lay her on the bed. Her chest rises and falls unevenly, and her body shivers even in her unconsciousness.

I pull off her sweatshirt and lift her t-shirt, exposing her midriff. One of the UZI bullets grazed her side and red stains my feeble bandage. I’ll have to sew her wound proper.

The problem is I’m as good a medic as Jared is a cover model. Back in my street gang, people would get shot, but we always had Carl; our doctor. I picked up some skills from him, but other than that I’m useless.

I clutch my fingers into a tight fist, observing her. Out of twelve people I killed she’s the first one like this. First one suicidal. Even if I get back into my gang I’m not sure I’ll be able to kill if… if I get more victims like her.

Stop, I tell myself. Instead of spending time on self-defeating thoughts I need to find someone with proper medical knowledge.

I think whether I should cover her, but if I do she might wake sooner than I need her to. Yet, for her this whole experience is nothing but pain, way greater than I’d like it to be. Agitated, I pull the covers from underneath her and cover her legs up to her crotch. Then leave.