The Marauder by Matt Rogers

Author:Matt Rogers [Rogers, Matt]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2023-05-06T16:00:00+00:00

40

Michelle and Joseph react about the way Dante expected.

Their arms shoot out straight like they’ve been electrocuted and they grip the mutual armrests of their seats, white-knuckled, rigid with terror. The left side of Michelle’s face and the right side of Joseph’s are coated in fine blood spray, one cheek each, flecked with the residue of their dead brother. His four-hundred pound corpse lies still on the recliner, his eyes wide and unseeing, his mouth still twisted in a snarl, the little revolver resting uselessly in his swollen lap.

By this point, Dante’s spent a full year mastering his mind, learning to enact supreme control over his emotions.

Now he loses all of that in a hot flash of rage.

He just tore the life out of Casey’s father.

It hits him like a gut punch.

He jerks the rifle to the left.

‘Why did he do that, Michelle?!’ he shouts, shaking the barrel in her face. ‘Why the fuck did he just do that?!’

She flaps her lips helplessly.

‘Start talking!’ he roars, his patience eviscerated. ‘Start talking right this second, or you’re spending decades in prison!’

Contrasted against the first ten minutes of conversation, all carried out at a respectable volume, the sudden explosion of noise is like a bomb in the windowless den. It punches straight through her cockiness to the primal part of her brain behind the frontal lobes, and she’s instantly both terrified and compliant.

She can process her brother’s death later; she’s scared at a baser level, focused purely on survival.

She holds up her puffy hands, chin trembling. ‘Okay! Okay! I’ll tell you! Please!’

Dante falls quiet and lowers the gun.

Stands there, simmering, thinking, This better be good.

She can tell it’s all different now, no longer a sarcastic back-and-forth.

This is as real as it gets.

She takes a deep, rattling breath.

‘He got angry,’ she says quietly. ‘That’s what just happened. You triggered something in him and he got angry. Because it’s not true, what you said.’

Dante stares. ‘I know it’s true.’

She shakes her head, blood spray hanging on her sweaty cheek, drops of crimson combining with perspiration. ‘It’s not. It’s just not. It’s...’ A sob swells from deep within her, and she releases it with a guttural sound, like a dry retch. ‘It’s why Lester had to go, you see. That’s why he had to die. Because he was going downhill with dementia, and he started recalling things that just outright didn’t happen. For weeks on end he was rambling about Daddy and Casey. About Casey as a young girl, and rape, and Daddy going away forever because of it. That’s what Lester was saying, that Daddy shot himself because he couldn’t live with what he’d done to his granddaughter. And that’s just not true.’

‘It is true, Michelle. Lester told Sarah the same thing in the back of the ambulance.’

‘Who’s Sarah?!’ she exclaims, her addled mind pulled in too many directions at once.

‘The paramedic.’

Silence.

Michelle composes herself, then reaches up with a pasty hand and wipes tears, sweat and blood off her face. She sighs. ‘That’s why you’re here, isn’t it? You know her, don’t you? Sarah.

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