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The Queen of Evidence

Part One

By Syd GhanPublished 6 years ago 5 min read
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There’s a moment before you kill someone where you feel light as a feather and free as a bird. There’s no less cheesy way of putting it. Lots of people don’t know what it feels like, but I do. In that moment, when impulse takes over, lives don’t matter. The world doesn’t matter. Nothing matters. Nothing. I’ll tell you what, man. You get a hell of a lot more sure of yourself after that moment—not just in taking life, but in living it. You’re not possessed by some demon. There’s no voice in your head. It’s just a moment.

My moment came behind Doug’s pharmacy. I come from a small town. We had one busy strip. It had two bars, a grocery store, a few apartment buildings, and down at the end of the block was Doug’s Drugs, just out of the way so he wasn’t too bothered by the drinkers n’ the stinkers. My daddy used to call them the revellers on the strip. “Son, you don’t mess with the drinkers n’ stinkers, cause you’ll wind up strapped, outta cash, and shit outta luck,” he’d say before going to take care of business I was too young and innocent to understand.

I used to steal from Doug’s when I was a kid, and he knew it. Nothing major, a bag of chips here and a bottle of cough syrup there. I was a stupid kid doing stupid things, and Doug never cared too much about it. I think I reminded him of when he was a kid. My daddy and Doug were alright with each other. They went way back, back to old gang stories my daddy would never tell me about. He’d never tell me about it, but people knew, so I knew.

And Doug’s pharmacy was on the strip, see, but just on the edge of the strip, and behind it there was a parking lot. My crew used to go back there and get liquored up, and nobody would bother us. It was Tourney’s job to bring the booze. He got it from his daddy’s basement. His daddy never seemed to notice a half a bottle of whiskey going missing every weekend, probably because he had so many of them.

Tourney and I were alone that night. Fig was at his parent’s country place because that’s where the rich folk went every summer, and Stanny was grounded for failing almost every subject. So there we were, Trick and Tourney, practically inseparable since the state had decided earlier that year that my daddy needed to be put down. I guess whatever made it easy for me, I come by it honestly.

I’d swiped a blade out of Daddy’s desk drawer a week before I got sent off to the foster home which, luckily for me, was down the street from where we used to live. It was one of those switchblades with the actual sharp part concealed by the hilt until you flipped it open. The handle was made of red marble. I’d never intended on hurting anybody with it. I just loved the way it looked and the way the patterns in the marble looked like veins. I'm not here to tell you I was the most well-adjusted kid, but I swear I never meant to be violent. Not then, anyway.

We’d already had a few swigs when he looked at me for a moment. And then he looked away. And then he looked back again and said, “You’re gonna end up like your pa, Trick. You’re gonna end up strapped on a slab of metal while some doctor puts a needle into a tube that’s gonna go into you through your arm and stop your heart from beating. I know you, Trick. You’re just like your pa. You don’t care about anyone. You don’t really care. I know you, Trick.”

Then we sat there on the pavement in the parking lot in silence, in the dark. It could’ve been minutes, could’ve been hours, but we sat there. I have no idea what possessed him with that, although I know now that he was probably right. I couldn’t tell if he was feeling smug or feeling guilty, but I knew that I was feeling something past angry, something beyond any normal emotion, really.

I stood up, light as a feather, free as a bird. I stood up then and I pulled the knife out of my pocket but I didn’t take the blade out of the hilt. Instead, on pure instinct, I brought the bottom of the handle down on Tourney’s head. He went down, blood trickled out of his mouth, and that was that. I stood there for two or three minutes, looking down at his now blank, open eyes. I felt as calm as the breeze. Then, after making sure nobody could see me, that the lights were indeed off in Doug’s pharmacy, I picked up the almost empty water bottle Tourney had used to store the liquor he’d stolen from his daddy’s basement, stored the bloody knife (still concealed in the hilt) in the back pocket of my jeans, and walked away.

They searched for him for months. They never found him, and I have no idea where he went. I know I killed him, but I’m not sure what happened to him after that. As far as I knew, they were going to find his body in the parking lot, at the end of the strip, behind Doug’s Drugs. And it wouldn’t have taken them long to come back to me, and I would’ve confessed because Tourney was right. I was just like my daddy.

But they didn’t find him. And things didn’t end so simply, because things are never as simple as that moment.

A year later, Tourney came back to school...

fiction
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About the Creator

Syd Ghan

I am a writer, songwriter, musician and music journalist. I write for Bucketlist Music Reviews and I run my own blog at www.thesydneychannel.net.

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