Chasing China White by Allan Leverone (best time to read books TXT) 📗

now he was a little pissed off, too. Righteously so, he thought. Who the hell was this guy to ridicule him when he was the one holding the gun?

“I told you, I don’t have cash in the house. I certainly don’t have twenty-five grand. A guy would have to be nuts to keep that kind of money lying around.”

“Crowder says your wife likes expensive jewelry. He says he knows for a fact she’s got way more than enough necklaces and rings and other shit to cover your debt. We’re gonna go up to your room, or wherever she keeps the stuff, and I’m going to fill a garbage bag. Then I’ll go, and I’ll take that hundred bucks in your wallet as a bonus.”

“Listen,” McHugh said. “I’ve got a line on the games this weekend, and by Sunday night I’ll be able to wipe the slate clean, or at least make a significant down payment. Just give me another couple of days.”

“Not gonna happen. Now get moving.”

Anger flickered in McHugh’s eyes and he made a move toward Derek, who had lowered his gun slightly. It wasn’t exactly pointed at the floor, but halfway, and now he raised it again in a hurry and said, “Not one more fucking step.”

McHugh stopped in his tracks and jerked his head left, at a doorway that opened into a dining room or something, and Derek sensed sudden movement from that direction, and McHugh started to say something but what it was Derek did not know because as he turned to face the movement a shrill scream sounded, and Derek jumped, he literally left his feet and bounced into the air in surprise, and he was so fucking surprised he staggered backward when he came down and as he staggered backward he pulled the trigger.

It was a reflexive action, absolutely no thought involved, and the gun roared and McHugh shouted something and on the other side of the doorway a body dropped to the floor.

4

It was a woman.

The woman was about McHugh’s age and it had to be his wife, and Derek had just enough time to register the fact that she was lying in a rapidly spreading pool of blood before the heavy sound of footfalls returned his attention to Jeff McHugh.

The man was bellowing incoherently and charging at Derek, coming at him like a freight train, and Derek had just enough time to swing the gun in the man’s direction and squeeze off another round before McHugh hit him and both men fell to the floor in a tangle of arms and legs, the gun skittering away across the room.

They had fallen next to McHugh’s wife, who was lying unmoving but still leaking impressive amounts of blood onto the hardwood floors, and Derek slipped and slid in it as he scrabbled to reach his gun.

If McHugh got to it first, Derek knew he would not survive beyond the next few seconds, and once again he felt that odd sensation of longing. He didn’t want to die, was fighting to live, but somewhere deep down inside his subconscious the thought of leaving this shit show behind for good held real appeal.

He crawled across the room on his hands and knees—holy shit, there’s already so much fucking blood—and against all odds managed to reach the gun before McHugh. It had slid almost all the way under a pine dining table the approximate size of a football field, and Derek picked up the gun and turned onto his back like some hero cop in an action movie, but this was no movie and he was sure as hell no hero, and he lifted the gun and prepared to fire at McHugh or at least scream at him to stay the fuck away.

But he didn’t do either thing.

He didn’t do anything.

Jeff McHugh lay next to his wife on the floor, every bit as unmoving as she, bleeding from a bullet wound in his chest that was almost a perfect match for the one in the middle of his wife’s body. She’d had a slight head start in the bleeding contest, but he was working hard to catch up, and the blood continued to soak their clothing and spread onto the floor.

He was supposed to be alone. He was supposed to be alone. He was supposed to be alone. The words raced through Derek’s head on a continuous loop, like an old vinyl record album with faulty grooves that was repeating the same lyric over and over.

Derek wiped the sweat from his eyes and tried to think. How the hell was he going to get out of this mess? McHugh was dead or dying and so was his wife, and Derek had pulled the trigger on both of them.

He had fucked up royally, and he wasn’t any closer to wiping his drug debt clean—or getting that heroin he needed so badly—than he’d been before he stepped foot in this house. Crowder was still going to want his money, dead couple or no dead couple, and Derek had no idea what to do.

McHugh was supposed to be alone.

It was all he could think, and Derek was so afraid and confused, and he knew there was something he should be considering, but for the life of him he couldn’t figure out what it was, because it was just so fucking hard to concentrate.

He raised his eyes from the bodies of the two people he’d killed—you’re not just a drug-addicted fuckup now, you’re a murdering drug-addicted fuckup, you’re a killer, a goddamned murderer—and just like that it all clicked into place and he realized exactly what he should have been considering before. It should have been the very next thought in his head the moment the bodies of McHugh and his wife hit the floor, and if he hadn’t been so fucking stressed out and panicked, Derek wanted to believe it would have been, even though he couldn’t quite convince himself.

McHugh didn’t just have a wife who should