My periphery bled into a gray smudge, leaving only the needle-point focus of what was just ahead.
The creek.
The rush of the water against the rocks sent a spray of moisture across my face.
My lungs felt like they were trying to draw breath through a narrow glass straw—shallow, sharp, and never enough.
I tried to take a few steadying breaths, to calm myself down.
My doctor’s words were in my ear.
Stress can aggravate symptoms.
And I didn’t have my testing kit on me.
No.
I had to stop.
I was fine.
There was no reason to assume my sugar was off-kilter. It was just adrenaline. Just shock and fear and uncertainty.
I popped the magazine out of my gun and tucked it into my back pocket.
I might want to get rid of the gun, but I didn’t want to take any chances that some kid or dumb teen might find it. The water wasn’t much more than three or four feet deep. And while this was a more rural spot where people didn’t frequent, it was running water and it could possibly carry the gun down toward one of the popular swimming holes.
I carefully rubbed the muzzle of the gun with my shirt, then grabbed it with the material so I could use another swatch of my shirt to scrub any other fingerprints from the metal.
Finished, I reached down, grabbing a few leaves to hold the gun with, then flung it with everything I had into the water.
Finished with that, I walked back through the woods, got on my bike, and headed back out. At a slower pace. Trying not to look like someone who’d just committed a crime.
A murder.
It wasn’t the first body on my conscience.
But it was the first body I’d created when I didn’t have another choice, when I wasn’t in serious, immediate danger.
I didn’t have to kill him.
He wasn’t aiming at me.
But he was aiming at someone else.
Someone who didn’t even know some asshole had snuck up behind him while he was fighting with someone else.
It wasn’t that I regretted it.
I had many reasons to hate those men.
In fact, my plans involved all of those assholes being dead, buried, not missed, and utterly forgotten.
I planned to be careful and strategic about it, though. To have a plan for the body, for the gun, for everything involved with it, so there was no chance anything pointed back to me.
It wasn’t supposed to happen in the heat of the moment like this. With no plan.
I didn’t really even mean to follow them out here.
