Orchard Grove (22 page)

“Once you’re comfortable,” he continued, the teacher to the student or, in this case, the actor to the camera, “you pick up the piece with your right hand, if you’re right handed, which in my case, I am.” He grabbed hold of the Colt, the barrel held at a sixty-five degree angle to the floor. “Then you cock a round into the chamber, like this.”

It hit me then that there was the possibility of his catching the round entering into the chamber either by sight or by sound or both. Sure he was plastered, but I decided to distract him anyway, just to be sure. As he pulled back on the slide, cocking the gun, I dropped a crutch so that it fell from the doorway into the room. His eyes automatically shifted to me and the fallen crutch as the noise from the mechanical metal-workings on the Colt. 45 filled the small room. It sounded almost pleasant. Solid, well-oiled craftsmanship in action even on a weapon that was more than one hundred years old. I had to wonder then, while I awkwardly bent over to pick up my crutch and return it to under my arm, if Lana had fulfilled her end of the bargain. I had to believe that the sound of a single .45 caliber round entering the chamber did not register with him since he was already convinced the barrel was empty. Call it a matter of mind over bullets.

I approached the desk, positioning myself only about a foot away from his profile. Then, making like a camera once more, I whispered, “Close up.”

“Now that we’re locked and loaded, in theory,” he said, “you turn the gun around so that the barrel is facing you, the grip flipped over.” He did that too, turning the Colt upside down, so that his thumb rested on the trigger, and the inverted grip was held steady between his fingers. “You then open your mouth wide, allow the barrel to assume the position up against the soft roof of your mouth, just like this.” He opened his mouth wide, pressed the barrel against the upper palate. “And finally,” he said, his voice distorted and choked by the gun barrel, “you do the deed.”

But that’s when he slowly pulled the barrel away from his mouth as he focused on something on the floor only inches away from the gun cabinets on the opposite side of the room. It was smear of blood. My blood. My blood from this morning. Neither of us noticed it until now.

“Is that blood on the floor?” he said. Then, looking up at me, the pistol barrel still only inches from his face. “You’ve been standing by the door this whole time. How did you get blood all the way over there while you were standing there? That is, unless you were here already. Maybe today, while I was at work.”

Pulse throbbed, my breathing coming in short breaths, brow soaked in sweat.

“You
have
been fucking my wife, Hollywood. This whole time, you’ve been fucking her.”

Releasing the crutches, I took hold of the inverted pistol grip with one hand, and grabbed a fist full of his hair with the other, and I rammed the metal barrel into his mouth. He reached up, grabbed hold of my neck as I shoved my index finger into the trigger guard and pressed down on his thumb.

T
he explosion took the back third of his head off, the meat, bone, and blood slapping up against the window glass directly behind him, while scarlet arterial blood gushed out both nostrils, pulsating with the final beats of his taken-entirely-by-surprise heart. His dark eyes went wide, as if he were thinking,
How stupid can any one man be?
His stocky body relaxed after only a few seconds while his cancerous soul exited his body, and no doubt, made a beeline straight for hell.

Coming from the opposite end of the house, a scream.

Lana.

“For the love of Christ!” she shrieked. “Was that a gunshot?!”

I released my hold on the pistol and his hair, gathered up my crutches, shoving them under my armpits, my entire body trembling but also feeling as though it were levitating. For a brief second I considered wiping my prints from the gun barrel but it was now covered in John’s blood. What good would my wiping anything away do?

“Lana!” I barked, pressing my fingers against the soreness in my neck. “Call 9-1-1. Your husband’s had a bad accident!”

I
wasn’t sure why Lana decided to play it like she didn’t know what was coming. Like she hadn’t played a pivotal role in making it all happen. Like she hadn’t asked me to do it!

Maybe she acted innocent of the whole bloody affair because she didn’t want to implicate Susan in any of this. It’s possible she wanted Susan, who possessed full knowledge of the plan, to somehow remain entirely free of guilt. As if simple denial had the potential to erase any shred of truth. As if it could be equated with plausible denial. Whatever the case, as I heard the two women making their way from the back end of the house to the gunroom, I decided that the best idea was to play along.

Entering into the room, Lana caught sight of John’s now smashed pumpkin of a head, and dropped to her knees on the carpeted floor.

“Oh dear God,” she cried, the tears bursting from her blue eyes. “My God, John, how could you do this to me? To us?”

My wife stood behind the grieving woman. Her face had turned pale at the gruesome sight of John, and she seemed to lose her balance so that she was forced to grab hold of the solid wood doorframe to hold herself up. Then, making an abrupt about-face, she took the corner into the adjoining bathroom where she began to vomit into the toilet.

I too began to feel sick to my stomach, like my guts had spilled out of me. Not at the sight of the blood and brain that covered the window behind John’s now blown away head, but at the reality of what I’d just done. I’d not only assisted in plotting a man’s death, I pulled the damn trigger. I knew full well that if, in the end, it turned out the police smelled foul play, I would face lethal injection. So would Lana. It was even possible that Susan would receive twenty or thirty years for having been privy to the plot and in turn, doing nothing about it. Sure, John put a gun to Susan’s head. Sure he was going to kill Lana, and perhaps even Carl and me. But he was also a cop. And cops took care of their own. There would be no mercy for a team of cop killers. Still, inviting the police to the scene of the suicide was the next item on the grisly to-do list.

I made a cursory inventory of my body.

Was I covered in any spatter? None that I could see, almost the entirety of his brains, blood, and bone, shooting away from me out the back of his head. Once more, I caught sight of the blood smear on the floor. My blood. It could be easily explained. The surgical wounds on my foot have been bleeding, and when John invited me into his gunroom, I couldn’t help but shed blood on the floor. Simple as that.

“Lana,” I said, the word scraping itself from off the back of my throat, “we have to call the Albany Police Department.”

She continued to sob while down on her knees, her body rocking back and forth like a penitent woman at the Wailing Wall.

“Lana,” I repeated, louder this time. “We must call the police.”

But she just kept right on crying like all this death and destruction had come as a tragic surprise. Susan came back in. I turned to her.

“I don’t know what’s come over her,” I whispered. “This is what she fucking
wanted
.”

My wife looked at me with hard eyes, and a coldness that cut right through me like razor sharp steel.

“Maybe it’s what
you
wanted,” she said.

H
obbling along the hallway I entered into the kitchen, opened the refrigerator door, grabbed a beer, popped the top and drank it down on the spot. Wiping away foam from my mouth with the back of my hand, I noticed Susan’s cell phone set out on the counter. Acting on instinct, I grabbed it, quickly punching in the security code, which was her birthday. When the main screen appeared I went to Texts. There was a text from Lana.

No, that’s wrong…

There were dozens of texts from Lana dating all the way back to early June when the Cattivo’s first moved in. My brain on fire, I scrolled through some of the messages, speed reading them as I went. “I’m falling for you,” Susan said in one. “Go with your feelings,” Lana responded. In another text, Lana said, “I’m going to kill my husband.” Susan responded with, “My husband can do it for you.”

I put the phone down, not because I thought I heard Susan coming my way, but because I didn’t want to see anymore. My head was spinning, my heart lodged in my throat. It was as if the earth had shifted on its rotation around the sun somehow, and gravity was no longer working for me.

What the hell was happening?

Susan had been lying to me after all, that’s what was happening. So had Lana. The two have known one another far longer than they’ve let on. It’s possible they weren’t just acquaintances who occasionally carpooled to the downtown P90X class or waved to one another across the front lawns. I couldn’t be sure, but judging from some of their texts, their relationship was physical. Had they set me up to kill John? Is that what this had been all about? I’d have to read all the texts to be sure.

Christ, if only I’d snuck a look at Susan’s emails four or five hours ago, John would still be alive and I would be packing my bags, getting the hell out of Orchard Grove for good…

Before I snuck a look at any more texts, I needed to do something else first. The police had to be notified now. With every minute that passed, John grew colder and colder. If we waited too long, the APD forensics team would become suspicious. Right now, it still looked like an accident and that’s the way I had to keep on playing it, especially now that the true nature of Lana’s and Susan’s relationship was slowly being revealed to me. If Lana wanted to continue to play things straight throughout the ordeal… if playing the innocent and shocked wife of a suicide was her modus operandi… then so be it. In truth, it could only help our cause.
My
cause, which was to be free of this mess.

The cordless phone was also sitting out on the counter, not far from Susan’s cell phone, near the sink. I went to it and, releasing my crutch so that it leaned against the counter, I picked it up. Inhaling a calming breath, I dialed 911, pressed the phone against my ear and waited for an operator to come on the line.