Riven - Jerry B. Jenkins [152]
“You were playing me?”
“Brady, please. I thought we were both just playing. How would it have worked out? I marry you and then what? What do you do? Where do you work? What happens next?”
“So the whole thing was a big joke?”
“I didn’t mean to mislead you, I really didn’t.”
“You were conning me!”
“No, that’s not it. Now I’m sorry, but I’ve got to go.”
“Wait! So now that you know how I really feel about you, that’s it? It’s over?”
“I’m flattered, really I am, but I don’t feel the same, so I think it’s better that we just—”
“Wait!”
But she had opened her door and the interior light came on.
“Wait! I’ve got something for you.”
“Brady, listen, now, come on. Do you need me to be clear that we’re officially over?”
“Don’t say that! I love you!”
“Stop! Okay, I admit it. I used you to tick off my dad.”
“We had way more than that going, Katie.”
“No! We didn’t.”
She turned to leave. He grabbed her arm. “Please,” he said.
“I helped him write the letter, Brady, okay? I know that’s hard to hear, but you need to hear it.”
Brady reached into the backseat and grabbed the sawed-off, flicking off the safety as he brought it forward and stuck it within inches of her face.
He saw the panic in her eyes. She opened her mouth but couldn’t seem to make a sound.
He loved her so much. Wanted her so badly. Needed her so desperately.
When she turned to flee, he pulled the trigger.
The explosion deafened Brady, and the twelve-gauge pack of buckshot had barely escaped the muzzle and had no time to release and spread before it hit her. The concussion removed most of Katie’s head, drove her body into the half-open door, and blew it off its hinges onto the grass.
She lay next to it in a motionless heap.
Brady sat quivering as the acrid smoke cleared, sickened by the blood and tissue left inside the car. Lights came on all over the neighborhood, and he heard shouting.
He turned the weapon and pressed it to his heart.
Click!
He had emptied both barrels into the love of his life.
Anyone else might have thrown the car into gear and raced away. But Brady didn’t want to live. If only Tiny had given him one more shell . . .
Nothing had ever gone right for Brady Darby. And now he couldn’t even kill himself.
With the car still idling, he opened his door and rolled out, landing on the pavement on his hands and knees. He vomited and howled like an animal, heaving great sobs in the night. Soon he was surrounded by men in bathrobes, one on his cell phone to the police, two others leveling hunting rifles at him.
He was vaguely aware that a couple was making their way around to the other side of the car. The woman screamed.
53
Addison
Katie North was not really an heiress, except in the usual way rich kids would benefit from the passing of their parents. But the press dubbed her the Murdered Heiress, and thus, Brady Wayne Darby became the Heiress Murderer.
The newspapers and magazines and news shows dug up everyone anywhere who knew the victim or the perpetrator, alternating interviews between the upper crust and the other side of the tracks. It made for interesting television, if little else.
Friends of the Norths called Katie a troubled rebel who had recently reconciled with her family.
Acquaintances of Brady—some from as far back as Touhy Trailer Park, even his own mother—called him a dreamer, a career criminal, selfish, heartless, and cruel.
“He was always up to no good,” Erlene Darby said, her shy husband shifting nervously in the background. “Hasn’t spoke to me in years.”
Brady’s aunt Lois told the TV people that despite his troubled past, he had been doing well and that “this was a surprise and we wouldn’t be shocked to find out it was an accident.”
One of the first questions Brady was asked when he was processed into isolation at the Adamsville County Jail was whether he was suicidal. “You have no idea,” he whispered.
“Is that a yes?”
He closed his eyes and nodded.
Brady was put on suicide watch and issued prison garb that contained nothing