Page 74 of One Last Chance

Chapter 27

When the flashinglights lit up the trees lining the road, David tossed himself dramatically onto the ground and started his howling again. If anything, it made me want to punch him even more. Maybe even stomp his head into the floor with the heel of my running shoes.

“Get him!” David howled. “Before he kills my daughter!”

I stood still. The two cars pinned my truck in as they parked, and the cops stepped out with their hands on their holsters.

“What’s goin’ on here?” The sheriff said.

“This crazy boy’s trying to kill my whole family!” David screamed. “He already killed one of my kids, now he’s after the rest of us!”

The sheriff looked at me. I met his eyes calmly.

“David killed Hunter,” I said flatly. “I’ve got the evidence right here.”

David’s eyes locked on my closed hand. He stood, weaving on his drunken feet, then lunged at me. I stepped out of the way and he crashed into the truck.

“I hit him because he did that to Daisy,” I said, nodding toward where she stood in the doorway, her face blooming petals of red and blue.

The sheriff raised his flashlight to her face, and she winced.

“These two can’t agree on who hit you,” the sheriff said to her. “Maybe you can clear it up for me, Ms. Daisy.”

She pointed, her fingers unmistakably in the direction of her father. “My dad did,” she said.

David lumbered to his feet and shook a finger in her direction. “You provoked me, you little slut! Screwing around with this felon behind my back and telling me to shove my head up my ass! Nobody talks to me that way, especially not my own damn kid!” He huffed and shook his head at her. “When’s it ever been a crime for a man to discipline his own damn daughter? Huh? Huh?”

“Is that why you killed Hunter?” I asked. “Did he talk back to you too?”

In the distance, I heard a moan rip right through Sandy and had just enough time to catch the shock in Daisy’s eyes before David swung at me. Unfortunately for him, he was off-balance and a little bit too far. The deputy caught his wrist and twisted it behind his back, snapping handcuffs in place without really getting down to the nitty gritty of what was happening here. But I guess even if he didn’t like me, even if I’d made a bad name for myself in this town, he was smart enough to know that in this situation, I wasn’t the damn enemy.

“You got the wrong guy!” David shouted. “I didn’t kill my kid for talking back!”

“Then why did you?” I held the evidence up, reminding him that I had it.

“David. No!” Sandy screamed. She was taking strides toward him now, pushing right past the cops. “That’s not true. That’s not true. You would never…”

“He wouldn’t hit Daisy either,” I reminded Sandy, “and yet…”

She glared at David, her gaze so powerful it was like she was attempting to exorcise the truth out of him. Seemingly, she saw just what she needed to in his eyes and in one quick motion thrust a slap so hard against his face it made the cop flinch. Sandy was screaming now, crying, fighting off the cops who were trying to stop her from hitting her husband. Eventually, they won over and calmed her down, but the tears still fell. “No. No. No,” she moaned and Daisy pulled closer to her side, hugging her mom with a tightness that was likely to snap the older woman in two.

David gave up looking at his wife and glared at me, his jaw jutting out so that beer-stained drool dripped out from the gaps in his teeth.

“Give that here,” the sheriff said. “Right in the bag, don’t touch it. You wanna tell me where you found this?”

“Close to the murder scene,” I told him. “Somewhere only Hunter and I were supposed to know about.” I turned to David. “What happened, David? Killing your kid got you off so hard you had to stop and take a smoke to celebrate, you sick fuck?”

“You shut the fuck up, Kash! You don’t know shit! You don’t know how much money that little punk was hiding from me. We were broke! Look at this place, it’s trash. He was just sitting on all of it, refusing to give me my rightful cut!”

“So you’re saying this is your zippo?” The cops asked.

David fell silent, but Daisy did not. “It’s his,” she agreed. “He used to have that thing with him all the time, like it was an extension of him. Hunter gave it to him for his birthday.” Her voice broke and she flashed a gaze to her father and shook her head.

I fell silent as the sheriff snapped cuffs on me.

“Wait,” Daisy said to the sheriff. “Do you really have to arrest him? Please, he was just protecting me. He knows he shouldn’t have done that—”

“The hell I shouldn’t,” I interrupted.

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