I heard the bat hit the kitchen table once, then twice.
I heard the bat hit the kitchen table once, then twice. “Where’s the money?” the bookie asked. My husband sobbed my name like I was suddenly worth saving. Minutes earlier, he had called our unborn child a mistake and shoved me into darkness. Now he needed me alive. I lifted the old emergency phone, smiled through the pain, and said, “Detective Reyes, they’re all here.”
The cellar swallowed me before I could scream. Above me, my husband was already auctioning off my life to save his kneecaps.
Tanner shoved me so hard my shoulder struck the dirt wall, and the world burst white. I landed on broken jars, clutching my stomach, dizzy from the pills he had forced into my mouth two hours earlier, pills bought from some online monster with no license and no conscience. Pain rolled through me in waves. Fear tried to climb my throat, but I bit it back. Fear made noise. Noise gave weak men instructions.
He dropped the old steel shovel through the hatch. It hit inches from my face.
“Bury the mistake yourself,” Tanner barked, panting like he had done hard labor instead of betrayal. “My bookie needs the hospital fund by midnight or he breaks my legs!”
The hospital fund. Our hospital fund. Twelve thousand dollars I had saved in envelopes, then a locked account, for prenatal care, rent, and the tiny white crib I had foolishly shown him in a catalog.
I looked up through the floorboards. His sneakers paced over my head, smearing mud across my kitchen. He thought I was finished. He thought the cellar was a grave with stairs.
Tanner had always mistaken quiet for surrender. At bars, he called me “my little mouse” and laughed when his friends asked if I ever talked back. When he lost rent money on cards, he said numbers made my head hurt. When I asked about bruises on his knuckles, he kissed my forehead and told me not to worry my pretty brain.
He had never asked why I could reconstruct a bank statement from torn receipts. He never cared that before marrying him, before hiding in a waitress uniform and trying to build a smaller, safer life, I had spent seven years in the state financial crimes unit.
My hand slid behind a stack of canned peaches. My fingers found the key box my late father had installed after the tornado season of 1998. The cellar door looked rusty from outside, but inside it was reinforced steel, with a deadbolt thick as a fist.
I turned it.
The lock punched home.
Above me, Tanner cursed. Then headlights splashed across the cracked kitchen window. Three engines. Heavy doors slammed.
Through the floorboards, I saw men in dark jackets kick in my front door, baseball bats in their hands.
May you like
And for the first time that night, I smiled.
--To be continued in C0mments
