Page 27 of Parting Shot

“No!” Benny screamed, and it was high-pitched and fractured before Modella pulled the trigger.

The blast splattered me and Andre before Joaquin moved behind us.

“Oh God.” Andre was trembling and looked over at me. “I’m so sorry. To you and Benny.”

Which was basically a confession.

I gazed up at Joaquin as he pulled the trigger, and I was splattered with more blood the second time since I was closer. Both men were dead beside me.

“And now what?” Joaquin asked Esau.

He tipped his head at me. “We don’t leave loose ends.”

“Sure,” my fake boss answered and lifted his gun and pointed it at me. “I am sorry.”

My eyes fluttered shut. I heard the gunshot, the sound followed by lancing pressure, heat. It felt like it tore open my left shoulder. Maybe all the blood was leaking out of my heart and that was what the draining felt like. Too much to know. Too much to care about.

One regret was not bad, and it was all I had. I wondered if Aaron would track down the truth or just ponder for the rest of his life what had happened to me. I really hoped I was worth looking for.

“Shoot him in the head!” The command came, dark and murderous.

“I’m so sorry,” Joaquin whispered under his breath.

I couldn’t speak anymore. He really needed to just aim. Wounded and bleeding to death was not a good time. Better to just be done.

The bomb going off couldn’t even get me to open my eyes and look.

SIX

I’d always had a strange way of processing trauma.

Like when I had been eight, my stepfather had come at me again. He used to beat the holy crap out of me all the time, but unfortunately, this time, my brother, Ian, was home from military school, where my stepfather had sent him—I wasn’t old enough to go yet—and got in the way. I thought—we both did—that Philip Calloway was letting it go, but he came back with a bat and bludgeoned my brother to death. He missed me by inches as I bolted out the front door.

My brother had been murdered at thirteen.

In court, I testified and cried, showed how my stepfather had held me down and punched me, and when the district attorney showed the huge eighteen-by-twenty-four blowups of Ian, dead in the living room, it was done. He was charged, found guilty of murdering Ian and attempting to do the same to me. The sentence handed down was death because Ian was a child, and therefore considered a protected victim. Honestly, the why never interested me, only the fact that he would die. It was all that mattered.

He never made it to the execution chamber at Utah State Correctional Facility; he had a heart attack and died in his sleep a year after his incarceration. The papers reported it was much too good for him. People who left letters and signs at the prison felt the same way. Everyone, across the board, wanted a child killer to die scared and in pain. I, of course, could not have agreed more.

My mother had covered for the man since I had been six and Ian eleven. She was charged with child abuse, neglect, endangerment, obstruction, the whole gamut, and sentenced to thirty years. The death of any child was horrendous. For a mother to allow the murder of her child and still support the killer was completely beyond the comprehension of the jury. I was informed when she killed herself three years into her sentence. She never apologized or, as far as I knew, expressed even a moment of regret. I did not mourn her passing.

My juvenile records were sealed, and afterward, I went to live with my father and his new family in Detroit, Michigan. My old man was a mechanic and had his own shop. My stepmother, Susan, was a secretary at one of the largest Baptist churches downtown. Both she and my father were extremely religious. When she caught me doing something wrong, I got a lecture, whereas, when my father caught me, he got out his belt.

Henry Stiel’s punishments were nothing like my stepfather’s had been, and so I simply took them, dealt with them, and moved on. He only beat me when I did something wrong, not for sport. By the time I was the same age as Ian had been when he died, my father put his belt up for good and simply roared at me and took things away. I had to sleep on the fire escape or go without dinner. The punishments seemed fair.

I learned to be sneaky and lie, and soon, once my two younger sisters hit fourteen and sixteen, everyone forgot about me. I was wild in private; Lydia and Karen were wild out in public. As soon as I could, I signed up for the Army and was off to boot camp a week after graduation.

With my father and stepmother being ultraconservative, having grown up with faggot jokes under Henry Stiel’s breath and Leviticus from Susan, I did not come out to them. They sent Christmas cards; I sent one of those Hickory Farms cheese and meat baskets every year. It was the extent of our interaction.

Mostly, during the holidays, when I was alone at night after dinners with friends, I thought about my brother and what our relationship would have been like. And while I knew I over-romanticized it a bit, we had been close as kids, even though separated by five years. It was why he had rushed to my defense the night he died. He wasn’t about to let me get hurt again.

So, because of Ian dying and all the events that had gone along with it, because of growing up and concealing that I was gay, then keeping that secret during my time in the Army, losing friends in Iraq and Afghanistan, being a homicide detective and continuing to keep the gay piece secret … I just went still when two men I knew were killed in front of me. It didn’t send me over the edge or spiraling down a rabbit hole.

An anonymous tip had led the Feds to the warehouse in Hoboken, New Jersey, where they found me alive and Benny Aruellio and Andre Franks both shot in the head. They arrested Joaquin Hierra, but Esau Modella got away. I didn’t care.

The fact of the matter was, through trauma, I was golden. Nothing else mattered.

The second night in the hospital, I nearly passed out from shock. A man I had not seen in three years came breezing into my room.