69 INCHES AND RISING by Rebecca Steinbeck Page A

his publisher had already paid him a princely sum for. If he didn’t want to answer his phone, he didn’t have to. She turned and walked back to the lounge where she picked out a movie to watch. Thy Kingdom Come, based on the novel by Jonathon Steel. She slipped the disk into the DVD player and curled up on the couch. The movie began, and she smiled because she knew in her heart how much she loved him and she knew in her head just how big the jackpot she had hit was.
     
     
    CHAPTER THREE
     
    T he man in black went back inside the house and closed the door. He looked out the window at the woman across the road that he had shot in the chest. Her body was laying dead on the front porch of her house. He was holding the rifle he had used to shoot her and his hands were sweaty as they gripped it. He turned to his wife who was sitting in the corner of the lounge. She was wearing a piece of tape across her mouth and a length of rope was wrapped tight around her wrists. She looked at her husband through bloodshot eyes, her heart disintegrating more and more with each passing moment, each one taking her further away from the man she loved, the one who fathered both her children, and closer to the one who would put the end of a rifle in her mouth and blow her away.
    He came toward her, creeping and crawling, raising gooseflesh on her skin. He stopped in front of her and touched the end of the rifle to her chin. He lifted up her face and looked deep into her eyes. “All you had to do was love me. That’s all. But you couldn’t even do that. You didn’t even know how.” He sniffed a nostril full of snot into the back of his nose and he looked at her with a great deal more scorn than he had ever shown before. “And then I find me a woman who wants to love me and now I can’t even have that . To Hell with you.” His heart was angry and his soul was on fire. He pushed the end of the rifle into the flesh of her throat and wrapped his finger around the trigger. He was ready to kill. Again.
    There came a knock on the door. It was the police and they were responding to reports of a gunshot.
    “Hello,” one of them said. “Anyone home?”
    The man in black pushed the end of the rifle harder into his wife’s flesh. He was angry, ready to blow her away. Ready to be blown away. There came another knock. The sweat was dripping from his brow and running down his nose. It fell from the tip to the ground at his feet and a little puddle began to form. The police knocked again. The man with a rifle in his hand watched as every happy moment he had shared with each of the two women flashed before his eyes and for a moment he almost couldn’t do it. Moments don’t last forever though, and unless you are able to carry your thoughts from one moment to the next they are surely left behind, just as this one was. Goodbye my darling, and may God have mercy on your soul . He had killed a woman that loved him to scare a woman that didn’t and he pulled the trigger again. The bullet sped along the barrel and cut like a steaming hot knife into his wife’s throat and out the back of it. Her body slumped against the chair and the man stepped back. On the other side of the door the two officers looked at each other and drew their guns. One of them kicked his foot against the door and with a ferocious crack like that of the mightiest of whips the door broke down and the officers pointed their guns at a murderer. “Drop it!!” one of them said. The man who had just shot his wife and whose blood splattered the wall behind her dead body thought of all that had been and all that would surely come, and decided that he had got his revenge and that any more life to be lived would be better lived after death. He turned to face the officers and his finger stroked the trigger of his rifle like a hundred dollar hooker stroking a man’s cock. He aimed the rifle at one of the officers and pulled the trigger. The officer pulled his as well and the two bullets