Duane Swierczynski - Secret Dead Men

“It's not,” I said. “Just another detail."

“I don't remember."

“Okay. Go on."

“Well, this song was playing, and Alison was dancing around, and all of a sudden there was a knock at the door. This is the moment I've been playing over and over in my head these last couple of days. Why didn't I think anything of that knock? After all, I was a government witness, hiding out hundreds of miles from home so that I could stay alive long enough to testify at a federal trial. Why did I think that knock was ordinary, like mail being delivered or the phone ringing?"

I had no reply for Brad. I was about to mumble something stupid when he saved me the trouble.

“I'll tell you why. Because Alison and I weren't raised that way! We didn't have it beaten into our heads from age five that you couldn't trust people! That you wouldn't always have somebody around to protect you, even when they said they were going to! So, for the briefest of moments, I forgot where we were, and I thought nothing of letting Alison answer the door. I went back to a line in my text and started reading again. No, I'll tell what I had really thought: Thank God for the door. Now I can get back to work. Can you believe it? Do you know the selfishness and arrogance it requires to produce such a thought?"

I looked down into my glass.

“Let me tell you-it takes a lot. I was so self-absorbed that it took a full couple of seconds for reality to kick back in, for me to realize where we both were, and what we were doing here, and by then, it was too late. Alison had opened the door. And somebody stuck a shotgun in her face."

Brad was filled with a combination of self-loathing and anger I'd never seen before, even in the most self-pitying bastards I've encountered. It was as if he wanted to nuke the Earth, then save one last bomb for himself to detonate inside his own broken heart. I could allow Brad to finish his own story here, but it took a while for me to drag it out of him, and I'd hate for anybody to wade through all his psychodrama just to glean a few basic facts. (I know I did.) I wished I could have tapped his memory of the murders and played it back in private, so Brad wouldn't be forced to relive it. However, this was not part of the soul-collection deal.

According to Brad, here is what happened:

Alison opened the front door the very second Brad realized it was a mistake. The Killer pushed a shotgun into her face, and Brad remembers an awful second or two passing before anything happened. It seemed as if the Killer hadn't planned to open the door and start shooting. Perhaps he'd wanted to bargain with Brad, or at least make him plead for his life. Perhaps he was shocked somebody had answered the door.

Once the moment of confusion passed, however the Killer fired his gun, and Alison's throat exploded. Brad watched her step back, her knees buckle, her body give out. He was paralyzed. “None of the images held any meaning,” he said. Fortunately his paralysis broke, because the killer cocked the gun and swung it in Brad's direction. Through dumb luck, Brad slid from his desk chair to the ground just as a bullet sped over his head and blew out a large portion of the wall behind him. Brad charged the Killer.

The Killer tried to reload, but was unable to. So he went for a bunt-grabbing the gun with both hands to smash it into Brad's charging body. They collided. Brad spun back into his own desk, collapsing it, papers and textbooks flying willy-nilly around him. He landed on his back. But the Killer was thrown off his feet, too, which probably saved Brad's life-there was no time to reload the rifle.

Brad heaved forward again, as if he were doing a sit-up, and lunged for the Killer's legs as he stood up again. The Killer went down, but hoisted a punch in Brad's direction; the punch crushed nose cartilage. Brad returned the favor once (connecting with the Killer's mouth), twice (bony forehead), and a third time (left ear) before the Killer swung the base of the rifle up into Brad's mouth. Again, Brad staggered and fell on his back. He spat blood and jumped up instantaneously. Needless to say, Brad was angry. And when it comes down to it, the man whose blood is flooded with adrenaline is going to have the edge. The Killer was only in it for the money-otherwise, he wouldn't have allowed Brad any kind of reprisal. Either that, or he was a shitty assassin.

I made some preliminary Notes on the Killer: Inexperienced, yet solid. Trained in the basic areas. Young.

Brad hoisted the Killer up by his shirt and thrust his entire weight against the nearest wall; it was a spectacular collision, to hear Brad tell it. He put his entire shoulder into it. To follow it up, he pounded the Killer's body into walls throughout the living room, then the kitchen. Anytime the Killer tried to push back, Brad used his momentum against him, and flip him into, say, a glass-fronted cabinet, or a Formica countertop. (Which would account for all of the blood-streaked wood and glass found at the crime scene.)

That said, I'm not sure this was the lopsided battle Brad painted it to be. Consider the facts: Brad Larsen is a college professor, and our Killer is a piece of Las Vegas muscle. Even the weakest piece of Vegas meat is still pretty damn tough. True, Brad had the adrenaline rush of watching his wife die. Still, I can't believe Mr. College Boy turned into Muhammad Ali, wiping his kitchen up with the Killer. I have to believe the struggle was dead even, until it reached the back deck.

The back deck is where everything fell apart. As I understand it, the Killer wound up on the ground, and was reaching for a small pistol tucked in the back of his trousers. (Probably for emergencies… and hey, this qualified.) Brad saw him reaching for it, however, and kicked the gun out of his hand quicker than you could say, “Die, you scummy bastard."

Gun went airborne; clattered to the wooden slats. Brad nabbed it. Quoted some poetry at the Killer.

“It was the last thing I'd read before watching Alison die,” Brad told me. “All I could think of through each punch, jab and kick, were the words: Mark but this flea. It kept me alive."

Then, Brad shot the Killer in the kneecap.

“Right then, I knew what I was going to do,” Brad told me. “I was going to take this pistol, and shoot one bodypart at a time. I was going to make this man die slowly, and screaming, in inverse proportion to the time it took Alison to die. I wanted him to reflect on what he had done, and let the lesson burn into his soul before he left this world. First, the kneecap-I'd read somewhere that rupturing the knee hurts like hell itself, but is non-fatal. Then a wrist. Then, maybe an ankle. A shoulder. The other kneecap.

Brad never got to shooting the wrist, because behind him-out of nowhere-came a blinding pain in his back, as if God himself had decided to stick a cocktail toothpick through his entire body. Brad dropped the pistol.

He hurled his body around, only to receive a similar shock to his upper chest, right above his heart . Is this a heart attack from the stress of it all? he'd thought. Am I being struck down before I can completely devolve into an animal?

Not quite. Brad's eyes managed to focus, and he realized somebody was stabbing him.

He lifted his left arm to shield another blow, but the knife plunged right through his forearm. The blade lingered there, caught between the opposing forces of Brad attempts to dislodge it and the Wielder's attempts to draw it back. Brad saw his attacker: a young woman, with red lips. That's all he saw. Call her Killer Number Two.

The knife ripped free and slid back into Brad's left shoulder. Then out again and across his chest, bisecting his right nipple. Down, across three of his fingers.