Rebecca Coleman - Heaven Should Fall

“Shut up,” he said, but Dodge fixed the chain against a second hook and rose grinning. I stopped at the base of the stairs and looked at Drew, momentarily halting my effort to leave. If Drew already knew about Cade’s family, we were all in more trouble than I could have imagined. For all these months I had written off Dodge’s claims as paranoia, but if they were true, then I was already an accessory. I had known so much and said so little, and whatever agency knew Dodge’s name might also know about me and my silence. The fact that I had reasons for it wouldn’t matter. People always did.

“They got me on a watch list, huh?” he said, ignoring Cade’s scowl.

“Gag that asshole back up,” said Cade.

“Why? Let him talk. I’m interested.”

Cade gave a shake of his head and moved toward Drew, but the sharpness of my voice stopped him. “This matters, Cade. Let him say what he knows.”

The way Drew’s arms were fixed behind his back made it impossible to fully raise his head, but he looked up as best he could and trained his glance on me. “Call them, Jill. They’re coming anyway, and you’ve got a lot to lose.”

“She’s not on your side, little buddy,” said Dodge.

“Is that true, Jill?” asked Drew. His voice was plaintive. “You really on the side of this yuck-a-puck and your jackass baby daddy? I always thought you were better than that.”

“I’m on my son’s side. Tell me what watch list you’re talking about.”

“Will you help me if I do?”

“She can’t do a damn thing for you,” said Cade. He looked to Dodge and asked, “What do you want to do about the truck?”

“I’ll go clean it out once we’ve got him situated. You can hold down the fort.”

“We can get Scooter to do it. He should be over any minute now. I texted him from the road.”

Drew’s piercing eye contact kept drawing me back in. “C’mon, Jill, don’t be a bitch right now,” he said, and what sympathy I had built for him turned sour. “Who kept you company on Christmas? When this guy abandoned you for his real family. Who bought you dinner when he left you behind?”

That evening flashed into my mind. “I paid for my own dinner. And then you tried to get me to go to bed with you.”

Cade looked at him sharply. His face turned pink. Dodge made a noise that sounded like the yowl of a cat, all the while tightening the bungee cords that Cade had secured too loosely for his taste.

“Sorry,” said Drew. “My bad. I got mixed signals. I thought we had a bond. Sorta like the one you had with Stan when you were fucking him all that time you lived in his apartment.”

My heart went cold. “What?”

Dodge and Cade exchanged a glance. “Where’s the duct tape?” Cade asked Dodge, but his voice had a nervous waver.

“In the truck. I’ll grab it.”

“Yeah, you know what I’m talking about,” Drew said to me. Looking at Cade, he said, “Slept in his bed every damn night. I saw it myself.”

“Bullshit,” said Cade.

“No bullshit. Tell him, Jill. No surprise you didn’t tell this white-supremacist SOB you were taking it from the big black dude. How’d the baby turn out?”

Cade grabbed the broom beside the gun safe and whacked him across the face with the handle. His mouth started to bleed, and he rolled his lips to suck back some of the blood. Beyond that, he didn’t react. “Don’t hit me, asshole,” he said. “Hit your nigger-loving girlfriend. Not my fault the soul brother’s too beaucoup.”

Cade thrust his palm against Drew’s forehead, making his head whip back and then forward. Streaks of blood poured down either side of Drew’s chin, vampirelike. “Shut up,” Cade shouted in his face. From the second floor came the drowsy cry of the baby. “Shut up. Shut up. ”

Drew spit a mouthful of blood into Cade’s face, and Cade recoiled.

“You better let me out of here now, ” Drew shouted back. “You’re gonna go to jail for the rest of your goddamn life. Best you show some mercy so they don’t hang you. Guys are gonna be bending you over in the shower till you grow a vagina. You fucked up for real, Cade. If I were you I’d let me go and run like hell to Guatemala. They know who you are. You’ll be lucky if they’re not here by sunrise.”

By now Dodge was back, tearing a noisy strip from the roll of tape. He slapped it over Drew’s mouth and Drew ceased to even try to talk. He just glared at me, trickling blood from around the bottom of the tape and now from his nose, as well. The baby’s cry had risen to an insistent howl. I broke with Drew’s stare and hurried up the steps to TJ.

He was sitting upright on the bed, red-faced and squalling, the top of his little bare chest shiny with tears and drool. I lifted him and pulled him against me to nurse, the tension in my throat growing tighter by the second. His small fists pounded my chest with frustration when my anxiety slowed the milk letting down. Downstairs I heard the cellar door bang shut, and at that a sob burst from me, a choking, helpless sound that startled TJ and set his arms waving. I gasped back the second sob and tried to breathe normally.

Cade’s footsteps clunked against the stairs. I backed up into the corner beside the window. The door swung open and Cade stepped in, looking first at me and then to TJ. For the first time since his return I noticed his clothes were grimy and his eyes exhausted. His tattooed forearm was smeared with blood where he had wiped Drew’s spit from his face. He was overdue for a haircut, and with his baseball cap off the lank strands hung around his face in a dirty, formless mess.

“What have you done, Cade,” I cried. At the dread in my voice he threw me the uneasiest of glances, reaching into the hamper for a washcloth to wipe his forearm. “Tell me how you’re going to get out of this one. Tell me now, and then get me and TJ out of this house before they come to arrest you.”

He tossed the washcloth back into the basket. “Nobody’s coming. We’re all on our own here. And nobody’s leaving until we figure out what to do next.”

The weight of that notion was almost physical. The house, this drafty and rattling old place, seemed to snug around me as if shrunk tight by Cade’s determination. I clutched TJ tighter against my body to steady the shivers that rippled through my muscles, but it didn’t work. “How could you do this to us,” I stammered, my voice at a whisper, without any hope that he would offer an answer. “If you were going to do something this awful you never should have come home.”

“I didn’t intend to,” he snapped. “I’m not that stupid. The idea was to lure him into the truck and hold him while I went into the building with his ID. And then I walked over and the entire office building went on lockdown out of ‘an abundance of caution’ because of a bomb on the Metro. So I panicked. I didn’t know what to do. I just told Dodge to drive and we’d figure the rest of it out once we got here. He was acting like I was supposed to have all the answers, and hell if I know how to cover our tracks.”

I waved a hand wildly toward the door. “Well, what are you going to do with him now? ”

He squinted in a peevish way. “ I don’t know, Jill. Fucking bury him in the backyard. I’m driving back to D.C. tomorrow. I’ll think about it on the way down.”

I started to cry again.

“Jill, knock it the hell off. It has to be this way. The tree of liberty must be refreshed by the blood of patriots and tyrants, and if it has to be mine and his, then so be it. I’m not just going to let Elias die for nothing. Let them stick a toe tag on him and shove him into their freezer.”