Taboo Unchained(102)
Blood sluices from the sudden gap in his flesh, but it's just a surface wound. As soon as I press down, his life will end and then … maybe I can start mine?
“Luke, don't!” I pause and sit up, but just a little. I'm still grinning like a crazy person, like a demon. “A life drenched in blood isn't any life at all.” I hear Audra trying to quiet Robbie down. “Killing that man won't bring Aliyah back.” I know she's right, but do I really care? I let my mind drift back to Clarice, to Mark, to the other men I've killed. All but Clarice's death satisfied the demons, but for how long? How much would've been enough? There never was going to be enough, and I knew that. My demons are melancholy and loss; they can't be cured. “Luke, look at me.”
“He raped you,” I say aloud, voicing my worst fear. My father raped me and sowed the seeds that Lloyd later watered, turning me into a monster. I don't want Robbie to become a monster.
“No, he didn't.” I hear footsteps on the dirt and then Robbie is there, collapsing to the ground beside me with Audra right behind her. She holds out her arms. “Just these cuts,” she promises, locking her robin egg blue eyes onto mine. In them, I see life and beauty and an innocence that isn't born, but made. “Some surface wounds and a bump to the head.”
“He killed Aliyah.” I look back at Lloyd and feel a warmness on my cheeks. I am fucking crying again. Me. Lucas Carter.
No. No. Wait. Luke. Luke is crying and it doesn't even fucking matter. I don't care. I still have to kill this man. I have to.
“He mutilated the love of my life and he shot her and he left her for dead in a shallow fucking grave!” I raise the knife above my head, my arm muscles tensing. I feel like a caricature of my former self, a villain in a movie or maybe just an anti-hero who has to make a choice. I thought, possibly, that my choice was Audra or Robbie, but I realize right then that that's not it at all. I have to decide what path I want to walk, if I want to try to start over or if I want to jog so deep down this path that I'll never find my way out.
“Luke, I like you,” Robbie says, repeating her words from before. “And I don't know about you,” she leans in and presses her soft lips to my cheek, “but I think we could work on that rose bush together, that we could find love.”
“She didn't just die. Aliyah suffered.” My words are quiet and hollow. Beneath me, Lloyd groans and struggles, but just barely. Whatever I decide now, the man isn't escaping this without a little suffering himself. “And I'm too dangerous, Robbie. I can't be fixed.”
“Who says I want to fix you?” she whispers. “I like you just the way you are, Luke, demons and all.” Robbie's words are young and ridiculously cheesy, but maybe that's okay? Maybe it's okay to be naïve. In fact, maybe it's better to be naïve than it is to be bitter and broken?
I start to lower the knife and as I do, it slips from my fingers and bounces off Lloyd's chest onto the dry packed dirt of the campsite. It's the last time I ever touch it.
“Come on, Luke. Come with me.” Robbie holds out her hand and I reach for it, my fingers curling around hers. The gentle softness of her spirit washes over me as I start to rise, to let go, to walk away.
“Son of a bitch,” Lloyd gurgles with his blood drenched lips. He rolls towards Robbie as I get to my feet and start to tug her up with me. A flash of silver catches my attention. Blood splatters the ground near my feet, and the sound of wicked laughter can be heard for miles.
I end up spending time in jail. Not, surprisingly, for murder or accessory to murder or anything murder related, but for prostitution. That's right. Prostitution.
My sentence is actually quite steep and based on testimony from Mr. Braxton and Audra Holiday mostly. I serve two months, but that's okay because I'm not a felon or worse … a sex offender. The first thing I might be, but the second is so anathema to who I am that I wonder, if I had given Robbie a chance, would I have been labeled as such? She might've been a decade younger than me, but in my two months in jail, she's all I could think about.
Dredging up the story of my career was the only way to keep me off the hook for having any part in Clarice's murder and the appearance of Lloyd Owens, and also to explain the existence of her DNA on some of my personal items. Audra Holiday, well, she was much luckier.
Not necessarily in getting away with Clarice's murder, but for Lloyd's.
As I sit in the passenger seat of her Mini Cooper on my way home from the prison, I can't stop thinking about that day, about the blood hitting my feet and staining the ground. I have this strangely vivid image of the red mixing with the dirt and creating these round globules. Ah, the wonders of adhesion. My redheaded friend didn't need to explain herself away, as she wasn't visited with a search warrant, but she is very lucky that the judge believed lethal force was necessary in her defense of Robbie at the rest stop.