Page 29 of Reaper
Bullshit.
Remorse might wrack his heart the way a hurricane batters a boat on the sea, but his words and actions aren’t those of a guilty man.
They’re of a man who misses the woman he loves.
A man so lost and ruined that he’s wandering the country looking for someone to help him. Someone to send him to my sister.
Because he still loves her.
And it’s a love that’s so strong that, if he actually had killed her, he wouldn’t be looking for someone else to kill him; he would’ve ended his own life before her body was cold.
“You made a promise, Adriana. You made a promise to me and to your sister. Pick that rock up, take your gun out — it doesn’t matter what you use, and I don’t give a damn how you do it — but you have to kill me.”
I kick him again, but not very hard. Just enough to get him to shut up. Then, arms crossed, I stand over him, motionless, silent, and look down at his grief-stricken face with a look that, I hope, sincerely conveys that I will not fall for his bullshit.
It might work on someone else, but it won’t work on me.
I know who he is. I know what he’s done. I know he loves my sister, that she loved him, and he sure as fuck didn’t kill her.
He shifts a little from side to side, then groans something.
I step to the side and then shake my head. “No. Get up yourself. I’m not doing a damn thing to help a liar like you. As long as it takes, I’m standing right here. I can wait here all day. Though I’ll probably get impatient and start kicking you in the balls in about five minutes. Do with that information as you will.”
“My choices are get up or get kicked in the balls?”
“Kicked, hit, stomped — there’s a lot of verbs that’ll come into play. And the torture device we found in the murder suite? It might as well be made by Fisher Price compared to what I’m going to do to you.”
He stands. Dusts himself off. Gives me a look that burns somewhere between icy hatred and righteous anger. “What changed your mind?”
“You did. You forget: I’m good at this shit. Figuring out liars and murderers is what I did for a living. I see it in your eyes and hear it in your voice, Reaper — you weren’t the one who murdered Vanessa.”
“Bullshit.”
“Bullshit? Fine, look me in the eye and tell me: did you put the drugs in Vanessa? Did you inject my sister?”
A moment’s hesitation. All I need. And he sees it — he sees that I know that the ‘yes’ he’s got waiting on the tip of his tongue is a goddamned lie.
Another moment.
“No.”
“The police report about her death says that you brought her in. You fucking carried her into the ER, screaming for help. You cried over her dead body. Why?”
“Why? I loved her. She loved me — for some fucking reason that I still don’t understand.”
Feeling kind, I give him a moment to breathe and quell the shaking in his voice before I continue. “You loved her, she loved you, you brought her into the ER for help… who put her funeral together?”
Another pause. But his eyes stay on me, steady, and his voice only shakes with pain, not with lies.
“I did. With help from some friends. I wasn’t able to do much at first. But once they made the first few calls, got some names, I was able to get my shit together enough to make sure that the funeral was something that honored her memory. I didn’t want it to just be some standard funeral that could’ve applied to anyone, because Vanessa wasn’t anyone. And she had some requests… there were times where we both were bottoming out and talked about what would happen if we died and what we wanted at our funerals. She wanted to make sure that when people talked about her, they mentioned her faults, too. She felt people were always too nice at funerals, and that it was dishonest and disrespectful, because it cut out so much of the stuff that made us real: our mistakes.”
I look deeper. Bore into his soulful, pain-stricken eyes. There’s truth there. And grief and love.
All for my sister.
Something stirs in my heart. Empathy, yes, but something deeper. Something that swirls with jealousy, and anger, and an urge to get closer to him. To share his pain authentically, to take it away from him in a way that doesn’t involve killing him, but holding him, so that we can both be closer to the person who we both loved and lost: Vanessa.
For that, and maybe other reasons. Reasons that turn my cheeks hot and make me shake with the strength it takes to repress them and the shame they bring up inside me.
