“What about when you were around?” a still-shocked Ricki asked.
“I told him to stop messing with her, but he wouldn’t listen to me.”
“You told him to stop?” Ricki couldn’t believe it. “That’sallyou did?”
“That’s all I could do,” Mamie said. “I wasn’t getting into it with that maniac.”
While they all were looking at Mamie with disbelief on their faces, Hershel had pulled out his gun. “Everybody hands up! Especially you,” he said to Milo. “Drop your weapon.”
Everybody put their hands in the air. Milo, who had his phone in his hand, pulled out his gun with his other hand and sat it on the floor. He knew they needed answers before the shooting started. Besides, he had another one up his sleeve.
“So you raped your own child and then put the blame on that doctor?” asked Vince.
“It worked the first time. Nobody said nothing. And he gave her that abortion without my consent because he knew he was fooling with that fast-tail child too. It could have been his baby too.”
“It was yours,” said Mamie. “She had just started messing with Dr. Proctor. It was your baby and you knew it. But how could you do it?” Mamie asked him with pain in her voice. “How could you still be having an affair with that floozie?”
Ricki and Vince were dumbstruck. Mamie seemed more concerned about her husband cheating on her than he was about her daughter being raped repeatedly by him.
But that was exactly what Mamie was concerned about. Hershel and that Assistant DA. “You told me it was over,” she was pleading with him. “You told me you’d never touch that woman again. But you lied to me? You lied?”
And before anybody realized anything, Mamie snatched that gun from the hand of her unsuspecting husband and shot him before he could say another word. She shot him repeatedly. Even after Hershel had dropped dead, she kept shooting. She nearly emptied the chamber on him.
And Ricki wasn’t trying to stop her either. Had she had that gun, she just might have emptied it too.
Only Mamie didn’t empty it. She had a few rounds left. And she pointed that gun at Ricki. That was when Vincesnatched Ricki and put her behind him, and that was when Milo pulled that small, semi-automatic Kel-Tec P32 out of his sleeve.
“Like I told you long ago,” Mamie said to her daughter, “I can’t live with him.” Then she shook her head. “And I can’t live without him,” she added. And then she turned that gun on herself, put it in her mouth, and fired.
She fell on top of her husband as if she was joining the trash heap.
Vince turned and looked at Ricki. He was terrified for her to have witnessed her mother and her father’s deaths. “Oh Rasheda,” he said with anguish in his voice.
But Ricki didn’t have anguish in her voice. “They never gave a damn about anybody but themselves,” she said. “She knew what he was doing to my little sister, but she stayed with him anyway? She told him to stop, she said. Like that was saying something. But she sat back and let it go on and on and on?”
“Now we’ve got to convince the cops of exactly what transpired in this house today,” said George. “Because she and he both said a mouthful.”
“I have it on audio,” said Ricki. “I turned on my phone before we walked through that door.”
George smiled. Vince wasn’t surprised.
“And I have it on audioandvideo,” said Milo as he waved his phone around. “I don’t trust law enforcement in this town either. I’ll send copies to all of you before I turn it over to them.”
George sighed relief. “That’s why you’re our security chief,” he said as he patted him on his back. “Good work, Milo.”
But Vince was still worried about Ricki. “Are you sure you’re okay?”
“Me?” Ricki was still staring at her parents. “I can’t mourn either one of them. I mourn my sister. I’m glad for my brother. But those two? Never.”
Then she exhaled. “They’re the reason why I will never, and I mean ever,” she reiterated, “bring a child into this crazy world. Never.”
As Milo called 911, she turned and walked out of what she’d always viewed as that Godforsaken house.
Vince, still stunned by her words that she would never bring a child into this world when he had recently decided that he wanted plenty of children with her as their mother, hurried out behind her.
But Ricki wasn’t backing down. She would never bring a child into this sick, rotten world.
EPILOGUE
