Page 51 of Black to Light

Tree leaves and branches whispered and rubbed back and forth. Gulls winged by and a few stopped to perch on tall, metal, streetlight poles. I heard the ocean in the distance, too, but mostly the sound was covered by the wind. A low set of headlights looped leisurely through the parking lot on the other side of the cement wall. Inside, two uniformed men could just be seen in the orange glow of the street lamps.

One carried a flashlight as they patrolled the parking lot in what looked like one of the golf carts, only theirs had a rotating blue light on top.

The door at the back of the building opened.

A figure appeared, backlit from the hallway behind him.

I saw Lucian Rucker there, and it surprised me that I recognized him.

He was less visible than I expected he would be, backlit from the hallway, but I clearly recognized his profile. His hair whipped visibly in the wind. A dim light flicked on over the staircase door as soon as the panel swung open enough to trip the sensor.

The result was an orange and gold glow over his face.

It made him look older, strangely more human, and less like the heavily made-up, celebrity billionaire I remembered from most of the media spots I’d seen. He pushed open the door with what might have been a faint smile on his face.

A ring sparkled on one finger. The wind continued to beat the hair around his face, but he didn’t seem to mind. A smug, satisfied look grew on his features as he gazed out over the dark parking lot, one foot outside the door––

Something visibly slammed into him.

It was shocking, brutal.

It threw him back hard.

His whole body slammed, skull-first, into the door jamb behind him. The shot blew out a large part of the side and back of his head. Morgan was right; the blood sprayed for yards down the inside of the hallway. It coated the door frame and most of the door itself.

The sheer violence of the death shocked me.

I wasn’t unfamiliar with gunshot wounds, but it still shocked me, maybe because of who it was, or maybe because of the calm normality I’d witnessed, just before it happened.

One bullet had done that.

The metal projectile slammed into him mercilessly; it threw his body into a backwards-tilted line, then pinned him there briefly. Once the force of the bullet and the shot ran all the way through him, his muscles, bones, and tendons lost all resistance.His knees crumpled, and his spine and abdomen didn’t fight back.

He fell like a sack of meat.

It was oddly anti-climatic.

It was oddly satisfying.

The recording ran maybe a minute and a half longer, but nothing really changed.

“Did you see that?” Black asked Nick.

Nick gave him a hard look and a brief nod.

Black glanced at Morgan. “Re-wind it.”

“How far?”

“Right before the shot.”

Morgan did as he was told.

Once again, Rucker stood there, satisfied, smug, smiling––definitely alive. The wind buffeted his hair, and I saw it rattle and vibrate the light over the door.

I couldn’t help noticing Rucker’s smile in more detail that time as he opened the door.

It looked more like a cold smirk to me now, and something in it struck me as cruel. Like he was remembering how it felt to stomp a puppy’s tail, or yank someone’s hair, or shove an old lady into traffic. His gaze turned inward, focused on something far away, but whatever he’d been thinking about, it had pleased him, and not in a very nice way.

---