Dead Shot Read Online Free

in gray said eagerly.
    The embarrassed silence that followed was interrupted by a server with a tray of champagne. The group helped themselves, and the waitress, a young woman, sidled close to Gillian.
    “We’re not supposed to talk to the guests,” she said softly. “I hope you don’t mind.” Her brown hair was pulled into a tight ponytail, stretching the skin on her forehead like a botched Botox job. She looked like she was in her late twenties, maybe a little younger. Gillian’s age.
    “Of course not,” Gillian said, relieved to talk to someone real.
    “I’m a huge admirer of your work.”
    “Thank you. Fellow photographer?”
    She blushed. Shook her head. “An artist in my own small way.”
    “Good for you,” Gillian said. “And good luck.”
    “Thanks.” She hefted the tray. “Better get rid of these.” She moved off, and Gillian looked for a way to retreat.
    But she was trapped by the evening gowns. The hair-spray and the perfume. Lips mouthing the same questions she’d heard a thousand times. “How does such a small, feminine woman come up with such awful things?” “How do you manage all the details?” “Where do you get your ideas?”
    She pulled out her stock answers.
    “I don’t know how I think of these things.”
    “I hire people to manage the details.”
    “I don’t know where my ideas come from.”
    But of course, that was the public lie. She knew exactly how she could think of awful things. They’d been in her head since she was seven and found the bloodied, battered body of her mother. She glanced at the faces around her, but
his
face wasn’t there. In the crowd, she didn’t hear his voice. But in her head, it was always there.
    Tell, and I’ll do the same to you.
    He was a gorilla in her imagination. Big, dark, hovering. He growled low in his throat. “
Don’t tell.
” The words came out of his mouth like snakes and frogs in the fairy tale. They boomed in her memory, deep and ominous and distorted. “Don’t tell,” they snarled, “or I’ll come back and do the same to you.”
    His face was always obscured, a black shadow surrounded by mountains of shoulders. But his hands, those she could see. She was small, and his hands were close to her face. They were smeared with red. With blood.
    He’d cast a spell on her, a wicked, evil spell. Her throat had dried up tight. She couldn’t speak. Couldn’t move. Then, in all that silence and stillness, his massive arm had shifted like a turnstile and pushed her out of the way. She fell. Tumbled like Alice, down, down, down. And he lumbered away, a thick, giant beast.
    The memory took hold of her now, making the museum and the reception disappear into a mist. She let it come. Took the rest of the journey.
    Watched in her mind as the intruder left. Suddenly, she was free. Free to run toward her house. To scream for the one person who meant safety and shelter.
    Mommy!!! Mommy!!!
    The screen door slammed as she pounded inside.
    Mommy!
    The sound of her heart was huge in her ears, the hammering frightening.
    How funny for Mommy to be lying on the kitchen floor. Not funny ha-ha, but scary funny. She was on her back. The floor was wet all around her. Red and dark and wet. A knife lay in the muck. Her mother’s eyes were wide-open, but she didn’t see her little girl. She didn’t turn her head when Gillian shook her. Her pretty dress with the pink flowers and the green ribbon was pushed to her waist. She had no panties on. Gillian felt shaky and strange to see what her mommy looked like down there. She lowered the dress. Her hands were now red, too.
    Gillian never remembered screaming, although stories said she did. They found her wandering down Highway 100 in west Nashville, bloodstained and crying. She didn’t remember that, but at some point someone gave her a sedative, and time blurred. Memory blurred.
    And twenty years later she still believed that she, too, would die on a floor somewhere. Pointless, random. Too soon.
    Stay