Читать книгу All of Us - A. F. Carter - Страница 17

The body is in full panic mode when I come aboard. Serena, Victoria, and Martha have fled and Kirk is nowhere to be found. That leaves me or Tina to face the emergency and it ain’t gonna be Tina. Still, they’ve picked the right sibling. Although terrible images continue to shred what little mind I possess, I force my brain to calm. I’ve been in tough situations before. That’s what I tell myself. I’ve been in tough situations and I’m still around and you can kiss my ass.

Besides, who’s to say it’s Hank Grand? Like Kirk, I’ve seen the mug shot taken when our father was arrested. He was forty at the time. Now he’s sixty-seven.

I study the man on the other side of the store. He’s standing before a display of refrigerated jars, probably salad dressing. I can see the resemblance, but I also find differences. In the mug shot, Hank Grand had a full head of hair, but this man’s nearly white hair is receding front to back. He’s sporting a gut, too, whereas the Hank Grand on those movies was trim. The nose is softer as well, and the jowls entirely new.

I watch him take a jar from the shelf, watch him spin it in his hand as he examines it. The gesture is so casual that I’m unprepared when he looks up, his head slowly turning until his dead eyes meet mine. I’m expecting to find pure malevolence but instead discover calculation, the look of a man weighing his options. I reach into Martha’s purse and wrap my fingers around a canister of mace given to me by a cop who didn’t say no. The canister reassures me to an extent, but it doesn’t tell me what to do.

From somewhere off in the distance, I hear Tina whisper, “Daddy’s come to get me. Daddy always comes to get me.”

I’ve never had all that much patience with Tina. Maybe she mopes for all of us, but she still mopes. Me, I want to live. I don’t want to be a mope or a prune, either. Indecision doesn’t become me.