Page 20 of Heart Stopping
"So, what's your origin story?" I trailed my finger across the cracked linoleum. Clean, but the surface had seen better decades.
"What's the hurry, love?" Boner pulled two cups out of the cabinet and turned on the electric kettle. It started to gurgle loudly. I waited for his neighbor to bang on the wall, but if he was disturbed by the noise, he didn't let us know.
"Didn't you know curiosity killed the cat?" He spooned sugar into the cups.
"Lucky my name isn't Cat," I said, turning to look around the rest of the space. I hadn't been paying attention to it the last time I was here. It was cozy, with midcentury modern furniture, the couch and a narrow bookcase taking up most of the space.
"There's that sense of humor again." He pointed the spoon at me.
"Yeah, I'm a comedian." I walked over to the bookcase to peer at the titles. "Murder mysteries and Stephen King. Why am I not surprised? Is this your inspiration?"
He laughed. "Nah, that's what I read for fun. They keep me grounded."
I turned around and pressed my lips together as if I didn't quite buy it.
"Why do you do it?" I tried again. Most people didn't wake up in the morning and decide to sneak into someone else's place to kill them. The decision to do that was gradual. We weren't opportunists. We planned. Chose our targets. Justified what we were about to do, to ourselves.
Then we did it.
Boner closed his eyes and exhaled, his jovial mask dropping away.
"My father used to get rough with my mother. She always made excuses for him, but the only excuse was that he was a stone cold asshole." He opened his eyes and looked down at the floor. "She always had bruises. Then, one day he died."
"You killed him?" I guessed.
He looked up at me and laughed humorlessly. "No. Dickhead got into a fight at the pub. Copped a punch right to the face. Fell and hit his head on the footpath. Sidewalk, whatever. Died in a puddle of blood. But my mother? It was like she came to life when he fucked off. She mourned him."
He shook his head, clearly not understanding why. "She grieved, then she blossomed. Like she deserved to, you know? I decided then and there I wouldn't let anyone bully a woman if I could help it."
"How old were you?" I asked.
"Fifteen." He glanced over to the kettle which was almost ready to whistle. "When I was seventeen, I was walking home late one night. Saw a guy trying to rape a woman. Threw him off a bridge."
He shook his head just slightly. "There was remorse, yeah, but there was something else too. Relief. Asshole couldn't hurt anyone else. And the woman, she could go on with her life without being broken the way he would have broken her."
"The first one is always the most difficult," I said. I understood why he did what he did. Not only that, I would have done it too.
"See, I didn't find it difficult," he said. "I guess I was six ways of fucked up already. I hate to admit I might be just like my old man."
"Bullshit," I said. "There's a big difference between someone who hurts an innocent person to make themselves feel better, and someone who hurts guilty people to make the world better."
"Is there?" he asked. "I could have called the coppers. I could have punched the bloke instead of hurling him off a bridge. I could have fought him off her and taken her out of there."
"You also could have walked past and done nothing," I argued. "Plenty of people would have."
"Plenty of people suck," he grumbled.
I laughed bitterly. "Those are some facts you're speaking there. But there's also lots of good people in the world. People who need other people looking out for them."
"People like us," he said. When the kettle clicked off, he poured hot water into both cups and added milk before handing one to me.
"People like us," I agreed as if he'd offered that as a toast. "So you graduated from throwing assholes off bridges to hiding on fire escapes."
"Huh, I must have missed the part where I get a cap and gown. And my pretty degree from Vigilante University." He gestured toward an empty space on the wall with his cup.
"At least you don't have to pay back the tuition," I pointed out. "How long have you been here?"
"Here in the states, or here in this shit hole? Actually, the answer to that is two years. My mother remarried and I figured I could use a change of scenery."
