Blind Trust Read online

  I had gone to Kyle’s mother’s house and she’d thrown me off guard by being the nicest lady I’d ever met, besides my mother. I asked her about the neighborhood and she was so hospitable. She made me a snack and gave me a beverage as we talked about the community, politics, and children. Children came up in the conversation because this beautiful little girl, Chrissy, walked into the kitchen. She waved at me and I said hi. She smiled softly and I asked her how old she was. She didn’t respond, so I looked at the grandmother. She explained to me Chrissy was deaf and signed to her my question.

  Not only was his mom amazing, not only was Kyle just so damn irritatingly nice, and not freaking only did we share a damn friend… But he was the uncle of a beautiful seven-year-old girl who couldn’t hear, who he’d taught ASL. Apparently, he taught the entire family sign language so they could communicate with her. I didn’t learn much about the girl’s mother and father, partially because I didn’t ask. Though I was positive if I had, Kyle’s mom would have told me. She did however, happen to mention Kyle and the things he’s done for the little girl and her absent father. And if I’d thought that man couldn’t get any more perfect, I was totally wrong.

  The longer I sat there, comfortably, in their house, the madder I became. I left. Forced myself from their kitchen table, thanked Mrs. Shultz for her time and the snack, and avoided stomping to the door. I left without laying a finger on either of them, which brought forth plan B.

  My clock finally beeped for ten p.m. I was grateful because this book was making me want to stick a needle in my eye to pluck the confusion out of my brain from these psychopathic characters.

  I got dressed again and headed out to the bus stop that would take me to Hayden’s house.

  Bet he thought I’d forgotten about him.

  I wasn’t going to let Hayden live down murdering my parents even if it had been an accident. The rules strictly say DO NOT DRINK AND DRIVE. Why…? Because people die! It happens all the damn time.

  So… I constructed a plan. One that would give me a body to replace Kyle’s mother, and allow me to take out my parent’s murderer. I’d staked out the Reynolds’ house and put in an ass load of research on Hayden and his mother. My strategy was flawless; I intended to go to his house and use his mother to replace Kyle’s mom. I’d hang Hayden and make it all look like a suicide, so nothing would tie either death to a murder. He was mentally disturbed anyway. He was seeing a therapist for some major psychological issues, including bipolar illness. He’d also suffered a deep depression they couldn’t find a fix for. They medicated him heavily and he started selling the pills they prescribed. A year and three months ago, he got caught and almost, almost got sentenced, but the judge ruled in favor of the money. Had he gotten locked up then, my parents wouldn’t be dead now.

  There wasn’t much about the mother. I just figured his illness had to be genetic and since she’d been too afraid to say hello when I called their house blocked, maybe if she walked into a room and saw her son hanging from the ceiling fan, she just might put a pistol in her mouth.

  My Ts were crossed and Is were dotted.

  I walked down the quiet street of large mansion-like houses. It had been a very long bus ride over here and an even longer walk. I made sure to tuck my hair under my beanie, I wore full gloves so I didn’t risk the chance of fingerprints, and I covered all my skin, save my face, so I didn’t risk getting skin cells on anything. I was all set.

  Most places didn’t call for this much protection, but I was sure, when Daddy got home, he and his big bucks were going to have the Feds all over this.

  The house only had light by the front door and garage, everything else was pitch-black, darkened by the thick trees and bushes. Making my way around the back, I found my entrance; a window I saw they never closed when I scoped out their house. I climbed the thick metal gutter, and crept through the window into a dark bedroom. The mom was running her mouth on the phone from somewhere not too far from the room I stood in.

  She walked past this room, not even looking in its direction. I snuck out, creeping in the direction she had come from. Her room.

  It was an extremely large room, with an oversized circular bed sitting right in the middle of the floor. The room was painted gold and off it was a large vanity, larger bathroom, and gigantic closet.

  I quietly searched her drawers near her bed until I found what I was looking for. I knew it would be here. Her pistol.

  She was still far from the room, as I could tell from her talking loudly on the phone.

  I left her room and scurried down the hall until I heard a second voice. Male.

  This hall led to another. Near its ending was an open door that lit the area of the hall in front of it. A shadow paced back and forth past the door. It was just the shadow of a head moving along the floor; that told me the person in the room was not near the door’s entrance.

  I slowly crept down the hall, not even hearing myself move. I’d waited before I peeked in, going unnoticed.

  The back side of a man was disappearing through a door from within the room. I took the opportunity to pull the room’s door closed and locked it. I scanned the pictures in the room to make sure I had the right guy. All the pictures were of Hayden and his friends, I supposed. None of him and his family. The room was housekeeper clean, and not a pillow was out of place.

  The bed wasn’t far from the door he’d entered, so I sat on it and faced the door. I wanted to be the first thing he saw when that door opened.

  Minutes passed and I could only wonder what the hell he was doing that was taking him so damn long. …Jerking off, maybe?

  The door finally opened, but he wasn’t standing in front of it. A faucet turned on and in the next second, I was smacked in the face by the smell of shit. I almost gagged as I tried to hold my breath and not deviate from my own assignment.

  The smell was awful. I’ve never had to smell a skunk’s stench. But that smell was like a horse had eaten a skunk after downing rotten tomatoes, left some boiled eggs sitting in vinegar for three days before he ate them too… then his stomach got so messed up and bloated he took a large shit on top of a dead cow… that had been dead for six days already.

  The faucet cut off and I was grateful he sprayed some air freshener.

  He exited the bathroom and I lifted my index finger to my lips.

  I’ve taken out a few guys with the seductive summons, but I wasn’t dressed sexy—I was completely covered.

  He smiled, pulled closed the bathroom door, and leaned his back against it. “Do you want me to go first… or you?”

  I was tempted to ask, “To do what?” But I ignored him, rose from the bed, and walked over to his desk chair. He watched me as I pulled the desk chair to the spot of the room right under the fan.

  He grinned, eyeing me. “Cool… lap dance.”

  For the hell of it, I nodded. Hayden was a little cute. Blond hair, straight nose, nice lips. But he was short, and his clothes were tighter than mine. His shortness annoyed me because that meant I was going to need to do extra work to get the rope around the fan.

  He sat in the chair and I stood in front of him. I swayed my hips left then right and spread my legs to sway in another move.

  His hand reached up and took a full grip of me between my legs. He jumped up and I stepped back.

  “What the fuck?” he hissed in an angered whisper. “You’re a woman,” he accused as if it were a sin to be born without a penis.

  “Hence the boobs,” I told him, pointing to my chest.

  “I hoped they were fake. Why would they send me a chick?”

  I wasn’t expecting him to be pissed that I came accompanied with a va-jay-jay instead of a whacker. So my next move wasn’t so thought out. I pulled the gun and aimed it at him.

  “I need you to step up on that chair, wrap the rope that’s on your bed around your neck and the fan, and jump. Or I can just kick the chair out from under you. Your choice.”

  “Look, bitch. You don’t seem to recog
nize me.” He didn’t look or talk like he was queer; his voice was deep and hard. “But I won’t say anything if you just turn around and leave our house.”

  I shook my head. “As much as I’d like to do that, I can’t. See… you took something from me. And it’s only right I take something from you.” I motioned to him to stand up on the chair with a few slight tilts of my gun.

  With a cunning amusement, he shook his head. “No. I don’t want to kill myself.”

  “I hate to break it to you, sugar. But you already did.”

  “The second that gun goes off, you’re dead,” he threatened, as an eye squinted and the opposite eyebrow rose and fell, showing his seriousness.

  I pulled the silencer from my pocket and screwed it onto the barrel of his mother’s gun. “I think I’ll be okay.”

  He rolled his eyes and stamped his foot lightly. As he shook his head, he said, “Can you tell me what I did to you?”

  “I’ll talk as you climb.” Keeping the gun aimed, I stepped over to the bed to grab the rope. He climbed up on the chair and as he did, I said, “You murdered my parents.” I handed him the rope. He took it. “Both of them.”

  “I’ve never killed anyone in my life.”

  “You didn’t kill them directly, like I’m preparing to do to you. But you did murder them. Tie it around your neck.” It’s amazing what people will do when you threaten them with a pistol. Here I was holding this guy’s life in my hands as he looked down the barrel of his mother’s gun.

  The sense of power didn’t do to me what it should.

  Most people would feel triumphant. They’d take this power, this influence over a human and use it to their advantage. But it made me feel weak. It made me feel less than human. Watching him tie the rope around the ceiling fan, knot it, and then tie it around his neck, I felt like shit. But… I couldn’t let him off that easy. I wasn’t going to let my feelings stand in the way of him getting pay back.

  “Now jump,” I told him.

  He hesitated.

  My desire for revenge for my mother and father forced me to walk up and kick the chair from under his feet.

  He struggled, reaching out for me to save him. “I’m Valerie Harper. Because of your negligence for other peoples’ lives, you killed my parents, Kenneth and Diane Harper. And I am that dickless human who is killing you. I’m sorry… that’s probably not what you wanted to hear right now. I’m just really angry. Go toward the white light. It’s better after death… for most.” I watched him until he stilled. A deathly anger charged through my body like a raging bull, a vicious wrath consumed my blackened heart and it pumped an atrocity through my veins that caused a wicked heat to overcome me.

  I crept from his room, closing the door behind me. His mother was still rambling on the phone, but she was back in her room. I had to wait for her to get off the phone. A witness was not in the plan. I prepared the gun for her suicide as I stood in the hall waiting for her to wrap up her conversation.

  She rambled on the phone for another twenty minutes before she finally told the person she was talking to that she was about to get in the shower.

  I rushed into the room, needing to catch her before she made it to the bathroom. It was essential she didn’t cut on the light or the water. I needed her to be near the dresser in her room that I had taken her pistol from or the bed.

  She squealed when I entered her room with her gun clutched tight in my hand. She hurried to the dresser, making sure that, in fact, her gun was gone. Her hands raised in surrender. “I don’t know what you want. I don’t know what my husband did to you. But we can make up for it. Just tell me what you want.”

  I thought about it, tapping the index finger of my right hand against my chin. “There is something I want, besides you making your way over to the edge of your bed.”

  “What?” she whimpered, tiptoeing over.

  “Sit,” I said calmly. “You won’t have a chance to do this now. But in your next life, do a better job at raising your children. As parents, you all hold a lot of responsibility for the impact your children have on the world. Don’t fuck up the rest of the world because you suck at being a parent.” She started crying. “Don’t take all the blame,” I added. “Put some on your husband.”

  I approached her and stuffed the barrel of the gun into her mouth. “Grab the gun,” I instructed kindly. She did and I pushed her finger to pull the trigger. Blood splattered across her king sized bed before she fell against it.

  I was immediately flushed with guilt, wanting to sit on the floor of this woman’s bedroom and cry.

  The balloon expanding in my chest, I managed it as I glared at her. I felt the dark expression on my face; my brows relaxed, jaw tight, lips pinched barely but enough to tighten my cheeks, nostrils flared, and gaze a piercing knife. The anger I held had to be written all over it and the heat from my furious breaths and burn in my eyes proved I’d done nothing but make myself angrier.

  I snapped a shot of the splattered blood, the picture only capturing her forehead. Luckily, her hair was the same color as Kyle’s mom’s. Brown.

  I shuffled around the clothes in the drawer that had held the gun, to make it look like she rummaged through it looking for the firearm. I didn’t change anything else and I made sure both her door and her son’s door were open before I left.

  I exited out of the same dark room through which I had entered, dropping onto the darkened side of the house.

  On the bus ride home, the regular me kicked in. I pulled my knees to my chest and wept for my parents. Taking out who did it didn’t make me feel better. I was human again. Not an assassin, no longer a monster. I was completely human, crying to be set free from the heartbreak I brought on myself. Dying to find a different life than the one that caused me to know how to kill someone without even touching them. How to murder two people in one setting without a single scream or shot being heard. I didn’t know who I was. But I knew this wasn’t me. The me I knew wasn’t weak, or fragile, I didn’t feel, I didn’t care, I didn’t cry… I was supposed to be virtuous, I was supposed to be strong… And I no longer was. I was… broken.

  I couldn’t do this anymore.

  For there to be a hit out on me, and for one of those hitters to be living in my area, I had to doubt her skills. Grimmer told me more than a month ago my mom and any relatives were up. Supposedly, now my mom and my relatives had been recorded as executed and I was next, and it was of high priority.

  I didn’t know how they had them listed as terminated. My mom was alive. She wasn’t well, but she was alive. My sister had been crashing at my place and I didn’t want her to run away, but the process in getting her straight was a burdened struggle. I relied on Janet and Catherine to help me keep her clean and prevent her from being home alone. I couldn’t take seeing my baby sister suffer. Every time I walked in the house and saw her shaking and convulsing, the deep welts in her arms, the lack of color in her skin, the beg and hurt in her eyes… I would have preferred not to see her. When I was there, I took the battle of her rejecting me, fighting me to stay away from her, or I held her and tried to seem strong for her as she quivered and shook, and I prayed that all she was going through would be over soon. She still wouldn’t tell me what was up, and I tried my damnedest not to ask. I’d decided my petty need to seek revenge on the person that got her like that was less important than being the brother she needed right then.

  “That girl from our chem class.” Rick walked over, handing me a can of soda, jarring me from my thoughts. “She showed up at your house. She’s been out for a while.”

  I took in a deep breath thinking about Valerie Harper, my hit woman who was supposed to be taking me out. Yet, I was still alive. “Um hum. What about her?”

  “Did you know her? She was smoking.”

  “I think it was her birthday. She doesn’t look like that every day.”

  “She’s cute in those baggy clothes too. She just wasn’t ‘Hey, check out my girl, she’s hot’ cute. But that night she showed u
p at your house, she was No matter what I wear on the outside I’m bangin’ up under it. Rip my clothes off so I can show you hot.”

  I shrugged. “No, I haven’t seen her.”

  “Janet, isn’t she also friends with that girl?”

  “She is.”

  “I could tell by the way you looked at her you were diggin’ her. You don’t want to know why she’s been missing?”

  I threw a leg up on his ottoman in front of the couch we sat on. “If you’re interested in her, call Janet yourself and ask about her.”

  He threw out his hand.

  I tore my eyes away from the TV to glance at him. “What?”

  “Give me your phone,” he stated impatiently, like I was supposed to know that gesture of his hand being thrown out in front of me was a request for my phone.

  My brows knit. “Why?”

  “To call Janet,” he stated matter-of-factly, again.

  “Why?” I questioned belligerently, none of this making any sense to me.

  “To find out about the girl.”

  “What girl?”

  He slapped my chest with the back of his hand. “Call Janet, find out about that girl that showed up at your house. You’ve been all uptight lately since your mom got out of the hospital. Take a load off with a pretty girl.”

  I shrugged, slumping into the couch. “She’s not my type. Plus, she doesn’t like me.”

  “Look, Kyle,” he said in a serious tone, facing me. “We are very compatible together.” I rolled my eyes. “I know you don’t want to leave me, and honestly. Truly…” His left hand flew to his chest and the other grasped my right hand where it lay on the couch. “I don’t want to share you. But I want you to be happy. And if allowing some lucky lady a smidgen of your time will help you be happy, I’m willing to sacrifice my dignity and try a threesome.”

  I smacked him across his face. “The nerve!” I blurted. “This is just some trick so you can be with other people.” I stood from his couch and dramatically stormed for the door. “Don’t call me.” I exited, slamming the door for extra effect.