Chapter Eighteen
Maria
“Are you alright?”
Ozzy’s voice is breathless and as hot as the blood streaming from the bullet wounds in his leg. His blood steams as it hits the cold Montana morning air.
He limps his way towards me, walking around the fallen bodies and pausing only when he gets in front of me, ripping a strip from his shirt and wrapping it tight around the wound in his leg.
I look over at him, hardly comprehending anything outside of the policeman’s pistol in my hand and the dead body — the person that I murdered — on the ground in front of me.
The gun is so light. The trigger so easy to pull. It’s a decision I made without thinking. It seems almost a crime that something so monumental could happen so easily. It’s a decision I’d make again a hundred times over — I love Ozzy, beyond all doubt — but it’s a decision that’ll haunt me.
Preacher’s not far behind Ozzy, and he reaches out with one cautious, gloved hand to take the pistol from me. “Easy there.”
“Are you alright, Maria?” Ozzy says again.
There’s so much concern in his voice. It stills my heart. It makes me start to feel human again after doing something so terrible.
“I’m fine,” I stammer, though I don’t feel fine.
He nods, pulls me close in a hug. “Good. You did good.”
I did good?
I feel hollow inside. Empty. Like my body is preparing itself to receive the enormity of the fucked-up emotions that I know are waiting on the horizon for me, ready to crash over me like a wave once the fullness of what I’ve just done hits me.
There’s a dead man in front of me.
I put him there.
I can see the hole I made in the back of his head. I can see the shards of his skull. I can see the brain beneath the bones.
I did good?
Red rivers flow from his broken body, tributaries of blood form a deep crimson pool beneath him that grows faster than the thirsty gravel can drink it.
How does he have that much blood inside him?
When will it stop?
This is what doing good is like?
“Nice shot,” Preacher says, looking at my handiwork. He’s so casual about it, like this is just another day on the job. How?
Sirens grow closer. They’ll be here, soon.
“Where are the papers, Maria?” Ozzy says. It’s jarringly brusque, while the rest of the world seems to be moving in slow motion. My name snaps me back to some level of consciousness. My name and the mention of the papers. “The cops will be here any minute.”
“What papers?” I say.
“You know what papers. I love you, but this isn’t time for games. Where are they? I can hear sirens on the highway — we don’t have much time. Give us those papers and then Preacher and I can get out of here.”
I shake my head. “How do you know about those papers?”
“You left them out on the table. I looked at them,” he says.
“You just went through my things? And you didn’t tell me? And how is it you even turned up here? You were planning to kill him, weren’t you?” I say. I can feel the floodwaters of anger rising inside me.
My world is in tatters around me and my life will never be the same. I’m a murderer, now. I shot someone to protect the man I love. All I want is a moment to breathe, to put things together. A moment to hold him and feel some sort of good.
But the approaching sirens and the urgency of everything means that’s impossible.
“He was going to talk. He had to die,” Ozzy says. “There was no other way. Now, we need to get those papers before the cops get here.”
It’s so callous. So matter-of-fact. So correct.
I can’t take it. For just one moment, I want to feel like there’s some sense of decency and justice in the world, that there’s right and wrong. Not that the ends justify the means or that murder is okay because the person being murdered deserves it. But I’m not going to get that. I’m not going to get anything close to that, not even for a moment. Not even after betraying everything I believe in for a man I love.
Instead, I have to lurch from one crime to another.
I break.
“The papers aren’t fucking here, Ozzy. They’re in my car, at the prison, in my bag. They’re out of your reach. Now get out. Get out. GET OUT,” I scream at him loud enough that my voice claws my throat ragged. Every bit of love, every bit of frustration, every bit of anger forces those words from me.
Those sirens, once faint, grow closer by the second. Ozzy and Preacher share a worried glance, and Ozzy gives me this hurt and worried look that cuts me to my soul before the two of them sprint back to their bikes and take off.
It’s only seconds before they’re out of sight.
I’m alone.
I stand there, despondent, gun at my feet and dead bodies and bullets all around me, while a trio of police cars — blaring sirens and flashing lights and all — pull up around the van. Officers jump out, guns drawn, voices screaming for me to get out of the van and put my hands on my head.
Numbly, I do what they ask.
I step forward, over the corpse that I made and the blood that I spilled, and I surrender.
They take hold of me. They’re not gentle as they lead me like a marionette to the back of a squad car. I’m cuffed, I’m yelled at, and I’m driven into town like the criminal I am.
* * * * *
I’m left alone in a room of unfriendly concrete, with mirror windows and a door made out of solid steel. Minutes tick by into hours. A man comes in at some point to process me: he takes my name, where I’ve been staying, what I’ve been doing in town, and then he leaves me alone again.
Another man comes in to fingerprint me. Another to check my hands for gunshot residue.
Nobody tells me anything, nobody stops to ask if I’m ok or if I need to call anyone.
I don’t blame them, really. Just as much as they’re trying to process information about what happened, I’m trying to process it, too.
I’m still trying to understand and accept that I just murdered someone.
I tell myself that I did it for good reasons, that I had to save Ozzy, that I had to stop David from escaping, that there was so much going on that it was only natural for me to react the way that I did.
And maybe it’s true.
But all I see is that I blew a hole in a man’s head and spilled every drop of his blood into the dusty gravel of the highway’s shoulder.
There’s a knock at the door, loud enough to make me start.
“What the fuck just happened?” Ryan says, barging into the room. “One moment I’m waiting at the attorneys office for our client to show up, the next everyone is scrambling because three officers are dead, along with our client and two of the shooters that set up the ambush.”
I look at him, feeling mute. Numb.
I shrug. “Are you my lawyer, now?”
“Maria, how the hell else do you think I got in here to see you? It’s a fucking madhouse out there.”
“Thank you.”
He sighs, pulls up a chair across from me and sits down. “Sorry. Look, it’s been one hell of a morning, and it has to have been so much worse for you. How are you holding up?”
“How do you think?”
“I think you’re feeling even more broken up than you look. I think you want to get the hell out of here and try and figure out a way to get back to normal,” he says. “Are you feeling well enough to tell me what happened? I mean, what were you even doing in the van?”
I take a moment, look down at the table in front of me, at my hands resting on that table. What happened is a question that I’ve been struggling with since everything went to shit. How much do I tell him?
“I went to see David. When I was going over his statement last night and putting it together, he’d said some things that seemed contradictory, some stuff that didn’t quite add up. I wanted to clear that up before we approached the US Attorney.”
“Fine. And why were you in the van?”
I look directly at Ryan. “You know our former client. He was being his usual self. Making me ride along was all part of some power play — he wanted to draw things out as long as possible. Or maybe he had this all planned, I don’t know.”
Ryan nods. Pausing. Thinking. “Maria, what really happened?”
I hesitate. All of my thoughts are a mess — scattered and broken pieces in my head. “I don’t know. One minute we’re driving down the highway, then there’s some talk about taking a detour because of an accident on the road ahead. They take this back road and then we’re being shot at. We crash. The officers get killed — some by whoever the hell is shooting at us, one by David — and then David gets free. That’s when the shooters try to kill David. They called him a rat. They left when the sirens started.”
“How did David die?” he says.
“I shot him.”
He pauses, looking upwards. “They said he took a bullet in the head. You did that?”
“He had a gun and he’d gotten out of his cuffs. You remember everything he’s said to me, Ryan. You know what he wanted to do. I didn’t have a choice.”
Ryan nods. “Fair enough. I’ll head out there and see if I can get you out of here. They’re about to start scouring the highway to see if they can find any sign of whoever was behind this. There’s so many roads, I doubt they’ll find anything. But is there anything you can tell me, anything you remember seeing, that could help in the search?”
I shut my eyes. I can see Ozzy walking around the dead bodies, walking towards me. I can hear his voice, at first so concerned, then so utterly focused. I can see the look on his face as I snap, as I vent every bit of my confused rage at him. It’s a look I’ll never forget.
“I didn’t get a good look at anyone,” I say, shaking my head. “I kept my head down when the shooting started. When I looked up, David was free. He had a gun. He was yelling at someone — who they were, I couldn’t see — and then he started towards me. That’s when I shot him. That’s all I remember.”
Ryan doesn’t question me. He doesn’t press me. It makes me sick lying to him. But I have to do it. I have to protect Ozzy. The man I love, even though the act of loving him him has thrown my life into such turmoil.
“I’m sorry this happened to you,” he says, getting up from his chair and putting a comforting hand on my shoulder. “Let’s get you home.”
Home.
That thought scares me. It stirs inside me the kind of white-knuckled existential dread that makes vomit and bile surge in my throat.
How do I go back to my life knowing what I’ve done?
How do I put these pieces back together when they feel so irrevocably broken?
How do I do this on my own?