Rain on Your Parade

The Smoking Gun

Three seconds.

I look Matt in the eyes and envision them lifeless.

Two.

Harlie would witness me killing somebody.

One.

He could pull his trigger faster. And then he would win.

Too late to have regrets. My body makes it move before my brain can think it through.

Matt drops to the ground, a sanguine hole in his left temple.

He drops to the ground laughing.

"What's so funny? You're dying," I indicitavely ask him.

"T-this is on your...hands," he exasperatedly gasps out. "...I'm innocent as far as... the cops are concerned... you're holding the smoking gun, bastard... And Harlie's...gonna believe that...you did this... those drugs are supposed to..."

His head hits the floor. His eyes are open. He's smiling.

I find his pants on the floor and slip them on him. Close his eyes. Then I proceed to untie Harlie. She falls into my arms. She's seen some things. Her expression is that of trepidation. Mortified into one position of unnerring staring into the distance. And she's whispering something.

"...Dash... is that you?" she weakly asks.

I embrace her and stroke my traumatized girlfriend's hair. She starts crying.

"Why did you kill him? He was just bluffing. Now this is... this is..."

She breaks out into another fit of sobbing.

Then I finally put two and two together.

There would be no future. No more past as I came to terms with what I had done.

My best friend was dead.

My girlfriend would never be the same mentally.

I was dead. That reality finally hit me.

Not in the sense that I would no longer walk the earth, but in that I had no future.

A killer runs from destiny by knocking others out of the way.

Within five minutes I hear sirens outside the house.

"Come out with your hands up NOW or we're coming in!" The police shout.

Rifles cock. Men brace themselves at the door.

Two hands rise in the air through an open window. Two bloodstained hands bound in a frame.

All I had done was pulled the trigger in self-defence. And now I was paying the price of crimes I had never commited.

The police open the door and escort both me and Harlie outside. I'm in handcuffs while she's taken in an ambulance.

A white tarp lies on the ground with a figure underneath it. Roger. I later learned that it was Matt who shot him through the head with the same gun he had pointed at Harlie.

Four accounts of first-degree murder. Two accounts of animal cruelty. Illegal possession of a weapon. Two counts of child endangerment. Now behind the doors of a cop car, all the things that could have been fly through my head.

Harlie would never marry me.

I could never graduate from college.

We'd never have kids.

I would never grow old with her.

I would never grow old with my best friend.

My kids wouldn't have a father, even if I had kids.

My parents would disown me. Even my father. The man who trusted me enough to carry a gun at age 5 in my backpack on a hunting trip. And he would never talk to me again.

Looking at the ambulance as the doors close, Harlie looks back at me. As it drives away, a single tear falls off my face, and within minutes my head is in my lap as we make our way to a maximum security prison.

I was innocent. But I was paying for somebody else's crimes.