The life had been sucked clean out of me.
I was now sixteen and a murderer.
~
“Lucas. Lucas!” Mason called, pulling me from the darkness.
I’d fainted. Sitting propped up against the island bench, Mason kneeled in front, running a wet tea-towel over my face. “There you are,” he said, smiling through a mouthful of blood.
“What happened?”
He didn’t need to answer, and for my benefit, he wasn’t going to. I could see for myself. Anthony Borelli’s large body lay dead at the base of the stairs. The house looked like a scene from a massacre, the knife I’d used to end his life now lying abandoned on the floor like it was just some other object.
“Hey,” Mason gently shook my shoulders until I turned my gaze back to him. “Don’t go there, brother. You saved my life. You saved all of our lives. It had to be done. Do you understand?” He waited expectantly, and all I could do was blink. “Lucas! Do you understand? You did what you had to.”
“Yes,” I muttered robotically. Nothing could ever convince me that what I’d done was okay.
Soft wails filtered from the living room. My mom sat on the sofa rocking back and forth, staring at the rug as if somehow it was going to give her some answers.
“She woke up not long ago,” Mason muttered. “Crawled over to him, cried, and then moved over to the sofa to cry some more.”
My heart twisted hearing that. She was happy to cry over a monster. And yet, she didn’t care enough to check on her children. I was broken by this. This wasn’t the mother who had raised me.
“Ignore her,” Mason encouraged while heaving me to my feet. We turned to face Borelli, both overwhelmed with the amount of blood and gore.
“What are we gonna do?” I asked weakly.
“We’re gonna get rid of him.”
“What do you mean? We can’t just get rid of him. People will come looking.” I was becoming frantic. Frantic because I was the one who repeatedly drove the knife into his back. “They’ll trace him back to us.”
“No one is going to trace anything back to us. He took Mom’s car when he last left, and he returned in Mom’s car. There’s no bus ticket and no vehicle of his own to dispose of. The fucker barely left a trace.”
I was unconvinced. Just as I was about everything else to do with this.
“Stay here and watch Mom.”
I watched numbly as my brother ran out the back door and into the rain. He disappeared, and I began to shiver uncontrollably.
Mason barged back through the door holding a blue tarpaulin Dad had used to patch the roof once when a storm tore through. “We’ll wrap him in this,” he said, laying it out as best he could before gripping Borelli’s shoulder. “Grab his legs and roll him onto the edge.”
Doing as I was told, I waited for Mason to count to three before we rolled the dead weight onto the tarpaulin. Borelli’s hand flopped onto my foot, and I shuddered. It was a hand that had caused so much pain and injury. A hand that had connected on many occasions with my face. And now it was lifeless. Useless.
We moved robotically until Borelli was in place. All I wanted to do was curl up under my blanket and cry. Instead, my mother’s cries grew louder as she mourned for a man who cared nothing for her. She had turned a blind eye to her children being assaulted, and now she had the nerve to behave as if she had raised monsters for children who’d taken the love of her life away. I had blood on my hands, and she was still blinded by love.
“Lucas. Hey? Look at me…” Mason gripped my face until our eyes met. “He was going to kill me.” He glanced down at the rolled tarpaulin. “The fucker deserved to die.” A wide smile formed, and Mason laughed maniacally as if the whole thing entertained him. “You fucking did it like a pro, brother.”
“What?” I spat, angrily. How could he see humor in this? “This isn’t funny, Mason. I… I just fucking killed a man.”
“Yeah, I know,” he said, sobering up more so for my fragile state. “That could be me in there right now if it weren’t for you.”
I took an urgent step away, my stomach lurching. Lunging for the sink, I brought up the night’s devastation. Mason saw this as being something honorable, something that would define us as men. I saw this as a terrible mistake done in the heat of the moment to save the ones I loved. No matter which way I looked at it, killing Anthony Borelli was a life sentence.
Chapter 31
THEN
MASON
The rain fell heavy and fast, the droplets feeling more like razors slicing through our skin. Large puddles had formed over the backyard and driveway making shit even more difficult. I’d wrapped rope around the tarpaulin securing Borelli’s body as we dragged him toward the car. In the dark of night, we heaved and pulled in unison, our tired muscles struggling with the weight.
Lightning lit up the sky illuminating everything and exposing us to our neighborhood’s watchful eyes. I stopped and stared at my brother, breathless, watching the rain wash the blood from his face before we fell into darkness once more. He was struggling, mentally and physically.
“I’ll never get away with this,” he said, defeated. I watched and listened to my brother’s voice. “I’m still a juvenile. If I confess, I may not be tried as an adult.”
“It’s murder, Lucas. You’re of the age when it can go either way.”
My brother muttered something incomprehensible through sobs.
“I need you to stay together, Lucas.”
“If I hand myself in now, it’ll spare us being hunted down in the future,” he continued.
We lowered the body by the car, and I took the opportunity to talk sense. Grabbing Lucas’s shirt, I pulled him close. “That’s bullshit. If you hand yourself in now, we’ll all go down for this. Listen to me, Lucas. That fucker deserved everything he got, and I’m not about to have him continue to destroy our lives.”
Another flash of lightning and my brother recoiled from me. I was further scaring him in a situation where he was already terrified. But I couldn’t stop. Borelli had been right about one thing. Weak people are the first to go, and I wasn’t about to let this happen to him. Lucas had always been the faint-hearted one. I was the brother who carried a chip on his shoulder, harassed the teachers at school and terrified the neighborhood elderly with my impulsive outbursts. And now as the lightning spotlighted us, rain running down our battered faces, Lucas could see just how unfazed I was by a murder that took place in my own home, committed by my own brother, to save my own life.
I didn’t feel remorse like most would.
I didn’t feel the type of guilt that would plague someone for the rest of his life.
I wanted Borelli dead, and now I had my wish. If Lucas hadn’t done it, I would have.
A flash of lightning revealed my brother’s trembling lower lip. A deep rumble of thunder followed. At least the earth would be soft.
I knocked his shoulder, drawing his waning attention back to me. “Stop fucking wallowing and help me lift this asshole into the trunk.”
Conceding defeat, Lucas took the tail end of Borelli and together we struggled to lift him off the muddy drive.
“Higher,” I demanded, not quite able to reach the tray.
“I can’t. He’s too heavy.”
“I have the damn heavy end, so fucking lift this fucker.”
The tarpaulin slipped through Lucas’s fingers causing me to drop my end, Borelli’s wrapped head thumping on the tow bar on its way down.
“Fucking deserved that.” I smiled at Lucas who shook his head in shame.
“That’s not funny, Mason.”
“Sure as fuck is. Now go again. Lift.”
Once more, we heaved and grappled with the body using our knees for balance until we could roll it into the trunk.
We stood catching our breath, wiping the mud off our hands.
Someone was watching us.
I could feel it.
They’d watched our every move.