Taming Cross

“Hold on,” I yell into her ear. “I’ve got to shoot again!”

I find him in the narrow, jolting frame of vision over my shoulder. I aim for his throat but I’m running and firing backwards, so the shot goes wild. He somehow manages to shoot—

SHIT! I wait for pain that doesn’t come, then look down and understand: It’s my left hand. The f**ker is spurting blood, but I can’t feel it. Whatever.

He gets in one more shot, a crazy shot he fires with crazy eyes, and as he does I notice the handle of vodka sticking out of his pants pocket. I spot a bush and throw Merri behind it, and as I do, the bullet lodges in the sole of my shoe. I can tell because the bottom of my foot feels hot and I can feel a bump. I take one step toward him, aim, and fire two quick shots at his leg. The first misses. The second hits the bottle, shattering it. The man screams and falls to the ground, and I put two more shots in his head.

They’re grizzly, disgusting shots, and the fallout is something I’ll be seeing in nightmares. Merri shrieks, then comes zipping toward me like a beautiful, girl bullet. She throws her arms around me and says, “Oh my God, oh my God, oh my God oh my God he’s dead! You killed David! That’s Jesus’s boyfriend. Oh my God.”

Jesus’s boyfriend?

“Evan, we need to move his body! Your gun is loud! Someone might have heard!”

“Yeah.”

“OH MY GOD, YOUR HAND!”

Merri grabs my left arm, and I flinch, not because it hurts but because it’s weird when people touch it. It makes me feel…uncomfortable. But she doesn’t let go. She gets a death grip on my wrist and holds the hand up to inspect.

It’s a bloody mess, but it looks like the bullet punched out that little flap of skin between my thumb and forefinger. I’ve studied the anatomy of the hand enough in the last six months to know it’s bleeding heavily because the radial artery is nearby. I’m feeling dizzy, but it doesn’t hurt. I use my right hand to steal my left one out of Merri’s grasp and whirl her around so I can see the back of her right shoulder.

“He got you, too.”

I want to rip her shirt away so I can really see the wound, but I can’t do that one-handed…not unless I use my mouth to hold her collar steady.

“It was just a graze,” she says, fingering the bloody spot. The circle of blood hasn’t grown much larger than a teacup saucer, but… “You’ve been shot before?”

“Of course,” she mutters. She turns to face me with her hands on her hips again. The look on her face is somehow a mix of gentle, frustrated, and sad. “Can you help me move the body? I don’t think there’s anywhere good to hide him out here, but I’ll open the back door and we can leave him in the laundry room.”

“The back door?” I frown at the dirt mound, and that’s when I realize… “That’s a house!”

“Yeah.” She winces as she moves her right arm. Then she shocks me by pulling off her shirt.

Holy Jesus H.

If I was dizzy before, I almost pass out when I see her creamy skin. My eyes jet to her huge tits, spilling out of a silky-looking sky blue bra, and travel down her soft, slim belly to the waist of her pants. Oh f**king hell, I want to kiss her there. She looks so soft.

She steps closer to me, sending my adrenaline boner into overdrive, and rips the shirt in half, using one half of it to wrap around my hand, right where the gunshot was.

“Will this hurt?” she asks, looking into my eyes before she ties it.

“I can’t feel the hand.”

“Well that’s a good thing.” She’s breathing heavily as she ties it. I brush her hair off her forehead to check her eyes.

“I’m not in shock,” she says. She touches my cheek. “Are you?”

“I don’t think so. I don’t need your help with David, either. I can drag him in if you open the door.” I might need her help, but I won’t take it. I can’t stand the thought of this beautiful woman touching a corpse.

“Are you sure? ’Cause I don’t mind.”

I nod. “I’m sure.”

“You need to keep that left hand elevated. When we get inside I’ll sterilize and do a proper bandage.”

I nod, because my head has started hurting and I’m feeling kind of off.

“The back door is right here.” She points to what looks like regular dirt, then lifts a tiny, dirt-colored plastic flap and punches in a code. Some dirt falls away, revealing a plastic-ish, dirt-orange door. She opens it somehow—I can’t see from where I’m standing—and I turn to get the body.

I try not to look at him as I grab one of his legs, using all my strength to drag him through the square doorway. I’m hoping Merri’s gone further inside, but she’s right there as soon as I stumble through the door. She presses something on the wall, the way you might with a garage door, and I can hear the door sliding shut as we maneuver the dead guy into the first room on the right.

It’s a surprisingly normal looking laundry room with a stacked washer/dryer combo, a little brown rug, a shelf of laundry supplies, and a framed photo of two men embracing, holding martini glasses.

Merri and I settle the dead guy face-down on the rug, and my gaze returns to the framed photo. The bald guy at our feet is smiling in the arms of a well-worked-out Hispanic man with shoulder-length hair and a Hollywood-worthy smile.

“That’s him,” I mutter. The infamous Jesus Cientos.

Merri nods.

I glance down at the floor, where blood is pooling. “This shit is weird.”

She nods and grabs a towel off a shelf.

“Let’s go out into the hall now.” She leads the way, lightly touching my back as I step by her. Then she stuffs the towel underneath the door.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

The inside of this place looks just how I remember, which is not really a surprise. Jesus and I picked out most of the décor online. From Pottery Barn, of all places. It was shipped to an empty building in Camargo, the next town over, and Jesus and David loaded it into a truck and brought it here and set the place up themselves, one weekend when Jesus pretended to be away with me. I stayed in the basement suite all weekend, cross-stitching some pillows Jesus wanted for the guest room and feeling buried alive. The basement of an underground bungalow feels really, really underground.

When I snap out of my memories and look at Evan, I find him holding out one of Jesus’s freshly laundered wife beaters. He’s holding onto it with a dryer sheet because his hands are painted red. I wonder when he picked it up.

I slip the shirt on while he casts his eyes back at the door, and then I lead him into the half-bath behind the next door down. We wash our hands with pear-scented soap from Bath and Body Works.