Sunken Graves by Alan Lee (life books to read txt) 📗

“Um! Y’all, hey! Got a problem over here—”

“Oh! Fire!” Someone else. “FIRE!”

“FIRE!”

The congested little hallway turned as one, startled by the cry. A painting above the fireplace was ablaze, the effulgence reaching for the ceiling.

Panic caught more quickly than the stockings. Partiers began to scream. A flood for the doors. Calls to evacuate, calls for a fire extinguisher.

Gibbs and Jennings were forgotten.

“Did you do this?” Gibbs looked like a broken man.

“How? Hell or high water, I’ve been with you.”

“Peter wasn’t…he wasn’t going to kill her. He’s a big kid. He struggles with…” Gibbs trailed off.

“It’s bad in the basement, Chief. As bad as it gets. You’re his father. Deep down, you know.”

Screams in the great room intensified. Jennings could see the growing conflagration in the windows. Men and women fought each other for the front doors.

“Let me go,” said Jennings.

“No. You and I are going out the back.”

No one was looking. Jennings brought his shoulder up and over Gibbs’ forearm. Swung and smashed his elbow into Gibbs’ face under the eye. The chief rocked backward into the wall behind, releasing Jennings.

“Fucking…” One eye closed, Gibbs fumbled for his gun. “…dead sonofabitch.”

“Chief, there’s a fire. Where is Ann?”

Gibbs’ face paled, except for the vivid impact spot. “Annie.”

“Is she upstairs? She’s in danger.”

Gibbs turned away and ran for the rear staircase, ran for his granddaughter. “ANN!”

In the kitchen, caterers filled pitchers of water to splash futilely on the spreading fire. Out front, an assistant football coach located a garden house behind the boxwoods but the pipe was sealed for the winter.

In the raging great room, Lynch had Hathaway’s forearm in his mighty left fist. He dragged her against the crowd, pulling her deeper into the house. She screamed at him and hit him but Lynch had irrevocably lost his ability to reason. She’d rejected him. And seeing his house on fire, mirroring the halls in his mind, was the final tipping point.

Her resistance infuriated Lynch. He squeezed and Hathaway’s ulna bone, thinner near the wrist, cracked. Her screams mingled with the others unnoticed.

Fuck this. She rejected him publicly. She could pay the penalty the same way. With a hook in her, he could carry her easily like a big fish.

Lynch pivoted and raised the steel. Aiming for her throat.

Jennings hit him in the head from the side. A heavy bronze horse sculpture taken from a coffee table, swung for all he was worth. The impact knocked Lynch sideways. He fell slowly like a tree, jerking Hathaway down with him, swinging the hook without aim and catching nothing.

Jennings dropped the sculpture with a clang. Drew a ragged breath and stepped forward to kill him.

Jennings had the idea that morning as he packed. He’d paused to stare at the stunted shotgun next to the disassembled leg he’d been cleaning.

The shotgun, missing its stock, chopped off and finished with the suppressor, was about the same length as his prosthetic shin tub and foot.

He measured with the tape. From the tip of the suppressor to the ragged end of the shotgun’s grip, the weapon was seventeen inches long. The shin tub plus the prosthetic foot was sixteen inches long. A wild idea…could he disguise the shotgun? Use it as a prosthesis?

He’d gone to the maintenance workshop with a satchel and came back with extra drill bits and bottles of superglue.

Two hours later, the knee socket of his old prosthesis no longer fit the shin tube; instead the connector slid into a drilled hole inside the shotgun’s stock. He stabilized the assembly with two screws, fastening the ‘knee joint’ to the gun stock, and he set it aside for the glue to dry. He drilled four connecting holes into the hard foot, creating an opening big enough to fit the rectangular shape of the suppressor’s muzzle. He stayed up all night applying layers of glue. The final act was drilling a hole into his shoe directly below the barrel—if fired, the gun would shoot downward through the shoe.

The final product was, he had a shotgun instead of a shin.

It was weight-bearing to an extent; the shotgun barrel and suppressor were made of strong metals. In front of the mirror, wearing pants and the doctored shoe, he looked normal. Without the pants he looked like halloween and hardware.

He spent the morning limping around his apartment. The shotgun was heavy and provided no forward support. He couldn’t run, could barely walk, would be forced to take stairs one at a time. If he pressed too hard on the toes, his foot would break away from the suppressor. If he had to quickly step sideways, he would fall. And after a while the extra weight hurt.

The hurt was welcome, though.

The shotgun had no hammer and no safety. After it was loaded, the trigger had merely to be pulled. But how?

He tied two strings to the trigger and glued them fast. The strings were longer than necessary to avoid an accidental discharge. He ran the strings up his pant leg and through a rip in his pocket. Tied the strings each to a key, easy to grasp. Two strings and two keys for redundancy.

Standing in front of the mirror again. He walked in place. Walked backward and forward. Turned carefully in circles. Stopped. Reached into his pocket, grabbed the key, and gave it a sharp tug. Nothing happened. Tugged harder and he heard the gratifying click of the firing pin. Had it been loaded, the shotgun would’ve discharged its payload downward through the hole in his shoe.

Boom.

Sweating, eyes on his shaking left pant leg, he’d whispered, “Oh man.”

Coach Murray had taken all the shotgun shells from his drawer. But he found one final shell in the bag under his bed.

He’d built the device on a morbid whim. But sitting in his car outside Lynch’s house an hour ago, he’d decided to attach it. He’d decided maybe it hadn’t been a morbid whim, but rather a premonition.

Peter Lynch fell. He landed next