Live Feed
The microphone was inches from Barry Gill’s face. He adjusted his backwards baseball cap more out of agitation than for comfort and leaned into the mic with all the serious intensity he could muster. Only five minutes into his show, he was already on a roll.
“Look around D.C. now, and you know what you won’t see? You won’t see any gangbangers roaming the streets looking for some poor soul to prey on. They’re all locked up, running scared, or holed up, waiting for the troops to leave. In D.C., you also won’t see immigrant killers looking for their next victims, waiting to see who they’ll rob next. What do you guys think? You all saw what just happened in California a few days ago, where that young woman was murdered by that thug? If we had troops in Oakland, I guarantee that wouldn’t have happened then.”
He mostly kept his eyes locked on the camera lens to maintain a connection with his viewers for dramatic effect, but occasionally glanced over to the screen that showed the feed of his YouTube Live viewers' comments.
Somebody gotta say it!
100% 100% 100% 100%
Just get rid of them!
Most of the names of the viewers were fake handles to hide behind when the users spewed their filth, but a few used their real names proudly to express their hate: FatNinja, BigBad John 69, Shittin Kitten, or Eric Kaufman. They chimed in faster than Gill could respond.
“The Death Troll says that liberal policies got us here, and I agree. Cary from Texas says that Biden let in twenty million illegals. You got that right, my friend. That swarm is responsible for much of the mess we’re in. I say that if we’re gonna get out of the hole that last guy got us into, we’re gonna have to wade through a lot of shit for a while. That’s what our new president is doing now to clean up our streets.”
Amen brother!!!!!
FK those guys
Gill had been hosting these “Lives” for over a year now, and he’d found his niche. What started as a channel to discuss film from a man’s perspective had morphed into something more pointed. He’d begun just wanting to talk about how men are represented negatively in current film and television culture, but he noticed that his most-watched episodes were the ones that contained elements of racial bias or what he viewed as forced diversity. The heat and wild comments he generated on those videos and discussions brought him more subscribers, viewers, and eventually, revenue, than those simply about media. Bolstered by seeing the numbers and direction of the channel, Gill added more social and political content to his repertoire, and his viewership began to climb exponentially. He had found his niche in angry white men.
The live broadcast ended after another thirty-five minutes of hate and bile directed at brown people, black people, poor people, and anyone else who happened to come up as easy targets for the night’s overall topic. The episode was titled Minority on White Crime Epidemic EXPOSED After Oakland Murder | Trump Calls for 'DEATH PENALTY' so there was plenty of filth to go around for everyone. Gill sat, chin in hand, for a few minutes in his expensive desk chair, elbows on the desktop, and clicked away to review the night’s analytics, checking to see not just the overall numbers but also interested in a state-by-state breakdown. He wanted to get his numbers up in the blue states, Canada, and Europe. The red states were easy pickings, he thought, but he wanted to make inroads with his viewership in those tougher markets. He knew there were more of his target audience there. That's how he was going to grow. In a moment of self-doubt, he wondered how he would be able to maintain the high volume of content to keep these people satisfied and to keep the money rolling in. He just had to think back to the amount of hate in his comment section to remind himself that the world was full of people waiting, yearning to let their grievances be aired.
Satisfied with the modest but growing numbers and happy with the $578 in the tip jar for the night and the three shirts he sold from his merch store, he used an app on his phone to adjust the lights in his Spokane “studio” and stayed in his expensive chair, bathed in the one purple light that he left on. Then, with his phone, he scrolled. And scrolled. And scrolled. He sat soaking up more dopamine and hate by scrolling and clicking through Reddit, 4chan, and other popular sites to find angry, disaffected young men and what they were mad about. He was beyond being gullible like the young men he was looking for, at least he thought he was. At 35, he felt he was beyond being manipulated or coerced, and he hoped to find younger, more receptive minds to mold or preach to. So far, his marketing plan seemed to be working: finding these hotspots on the internet where young men gather and complain, using a fake name to drop a couple of links to his videos, and waiting for new viewers to arrive. It’s just one of the things Gill had been doing to get new viewers, but it was effective.
The next night’s live show was on a new topic, but it was really more of the same. The episode was titled How Fatherlessness Created a Generation of Criminals | Spitting Hard Facts.
“I know a lot about this topic,” Gill said softly into the microphone and camera, striking a gentler tone than usual. “I grew up without a father around, and I may have gotten a little crazy. My mother must have had shit fits over me in my teen years. I ran with a few tough kids, and I had a mouth on me, but I never came close to doing what we see some of these animals in the streets are doing.” He paused for dramatic effect but continued in his softer tone. “But then, by the grace of God, I pulled myself out of that tailspin and pulled my head out of my backside. I joined the Marines right after high school and never looked back.” His tone started to rise with intensity. “Now, though, look at these other dregs that haven’t been graced by God or have the sense to pull themselves out. They’re gunning down store clerks and selling drugs whenever and wherever they want. They don’t have fathers at home to teach them right, and their welfare mothers are probably too strung out to do anything about it either.” His voice was sharp, and he looked straight at the camera, daring anyone to disagree with him. “The democrats have done everything possible to defund the police, so we can’t even fight back anymore, and the courts give the thugs so many rights that they can just waltz out of juvey or jail as soon as they walk in. What do you guys think about that? What have you guys seen?”
The comment feed, already active with a few comments from his regulars, lit up even more with viewers adding what they thought the problems or solutions might be.
NO FAULT DIVORCES KILLED THE FAMILY UNIT!!!!
they tells everyone that their victims
Tips were dribbling in at a dollar or five at a time, the usual pace. Then, from an account he’d never seen before came a tip for the amount he’d never received before on a live show: $500. He’d had several Lives where the total adds up to that much. That was rare but not unheard of. No one had ever dropped that much at one time before. If the amount wasn’t enough of a surprise, the username made him freeze: RickyRocket07.
No, he thought to himself, that must just be a coincidence. Despite his self-soothing, he did one of the worst things a live YouTuber could do: he froze for a spell and created dead air. After a long ten seconds of silence and with a shake of his head, he collected himself and began again in a voice less confident than before, but not before the image of a certain young, blonde teen was planted in his mind.
“Friends and patriots, I wanna thank RickyRocket07 for the generous donation to the show. You all know I use those funds to support the channel and causes that are in line with our shared beliefs, so this will go a long way in helping. Thank you, Ricky.”
RickyRocket07 had something to say about this in the chat.
My pleasure. I, too, had a rough time in my late teen years
Again, Gill froze, thinking about the similarities and odds of a coincidence, but gathered himself and spoke directly to Ricky. “I’m sorry to hear that, but it looks like you’ve recovered well and are doing OK for yourself.”
Yes. Much better now, but it was rough. Maybe I’ll tell your viewers about it sometime.
It was only through practice and repetition that Gill could hold his gaze into the camera. What he really wanted to do was to shut it all down, dim his lights, have a stiff drink, and sit in silence for a while to figure out what was going on. That had to wait; he still had more of the show to do. Now, though, he was without the steam and bile he had built up before the donation and the disturbing input from his guest. He shifted in his seat, took an extra moment to gather his thoughts back to the topic of kids without fathers at home, and started in again with a tangent about how social programs coddle society and that more young men should be compelled to join the military.
After another twenty-five minutes of screed, he ended his show with his usual reminders to his viewers to go check out his Patreon account, where patrons can get special behind-the-scenes access to him and can see content not found elsewhere. Within seconds of logging off, instead of his usual check of analytics and tip jar totals, he sat upright in his chair, turned his cap around, looked at the profile page of RickyRocket07, and found it to be mostly blank. Mostly. There were no profile or banner photos, and no information other than the user's hometown. It was listed as Rathdrum, Idaho. Gill knew the town well. He grew up in nearby Coeur d’Alene, and Rathdrum was where .... he didn’t want to finish the thought, but he couldn’t help himself. Images of Ricky Rocket came to mind.
Gill got up from his chair and grabbed a beer from his refrigerator, opened it, and drank half of it in one go. He had a twinge of regret for always drinking Michelob Ultra, always trying to keep calories down to stay fit and lean. Can’t be a fat slob like most of those liberals, he often told himself. Now, though, he wanted something heavier to drink, something stronger. He wanted to get a buzz on like–like he had that night, he recalled in a shock to himself. He had a bottle of bourbon in the cabinet that he kept for special occasions. Was this a special occasion? Would drinking make him forget or make him think about Ricky more?
He finished the rest of his beer in one more swig, grabbed another one, and then went back to his computer chair. Opening a search browser on his computer, he typed in a few keywords to aid his search: rathdrum, 2007, missing, richard lund, murder. Several articles popped up from the two local papers in North Idaho, as well as some older reports from CNN. They had a news crew up there for a short time until they finally found the dead body, and the furor calmed down a little. What all the articles had in common was a photo of Ricky, one that his mother gave to all the news sources. It showed a sweet young man with locks of bouncy blonde hair, smiling at the camera like it was his best friend who had just arrived at a party. His eyes were bright and wide, just like his smile, and his face radiated joy, reflecting his youth and enthusiasm. His face wasn't as joyful when he was finally discovered in the woods a few weeks after his disappearance.
Gill shook his head once and drained the second beer. It had to be a coincidence, he thought. No one knows. No one else was there. Ricky Rocket is dead and buried. He has been for a long fucking time.
Ricky Rocket was a dumb nickname, and Gill knew it even back in high school. Everyone did, but they used it anyway. The short, wiry kid earned it by being a sprinter on the track team and “moving fast” with the girls on the team. Someone said it out loud one day at a track meet in Post Falls when Ricky was just a freshman, and it just stuck. “Go, Ricky Rocket,” they yelled. The second meaning was earned later that season when Ricky was seen trying to make moves on some of the junior and senior girls on the team. By his senior year, his legend in the school established, The Rocket would be dead.
The thought made Gill stir from his torpor and got him moving again. He finally clicked through his analytics, scrolled through the comments on the video, checked his monetization settings to ensure everything was as it should be, and then checked the email account associated with his channel. Littered among the comments from viewers, requests for collaboration, and sponsorship offers was an email from a Gmail account: RickyRocket07. A tingling sensation began in the center of Gill’s chest and radiated outward like a star in all directions. When the tingling numbness reached his fingertips, he clicked the email to open it.
The email contained a photograph and three words. Nothing more. The photo was grainy and poorly lit, and if you didn’t know what you were looking at, it might have been hard to tell exactly what or who was in the photo. Gill knew. Gill knew exactly what and exactly who was in the photo. It showed a truck, a dark truck, sitting somewhere at night. His truck. The only illumination came from either streetlights or lights in a parking lot. The angle of the picture was from the left rear side, showing that the truck was a Ford F150, and there were two occupants. Most of the license plate was visible, and it showed to be an Idaho plate. You couldn’t see the face of the driver, only his outline, but you could clearly see the passenger's side profile. Just as importantly, you could see his bouncy, blonde locks of hair.
The three words were, “You were seen!”
The feeling in his chest intensified and pulsed and generated a heat he’d never felt before as his mind leapt to the many possibilities of how his life just might have turned to shit.
* * *
Half a state away, safely ensconced in a studio apartment above the garage at her parents’ house in Boise, Sara Lund refreshed her browser and saw that she no longer had access to Gill’s YouTube channel. Good, she thought. That meant that he had seen the email and had blocked her account. Donating that $500 hurt financially, but she felt it was a good way to get his attention. Sara wasn’t positive that Gill killed her brother until he blocked her accounts. Until then, she had only suspected it, felt it in her bones. She had gotten to him, and he thought he was safe. The real fun was to begin now.
Despite her years of self-denial and lying to her therapists, regardless of the built-up walls of self-defense she had constructed to keep herself safe from the memories of Ricky’s murder and her negligence, all it took was a mention in the news that a new Shake Meister was going to be opening near her home to release all those years of darkness. It was a breakthrough, a long time in the making, and the clarity for her responsibility in her brother’s end washed over her, wiping away her fears of consequences for her actions, leaving only the long-simmering hatred for the one she now knew in her heart was responsible. Lying dormant under all the years of pain from her brother's death, the failure of her parents to accept that she was still alive, her own long-standing addictions, and her feelings of unworthiness was a little kernel that had been the cause of much of her consternation. Her remembrance of a repressed fact brought about gut-wrenching sobs and a river of tears and snot of a volume she had never before produced. But that released memory, that hidden memory that had been tucked away so long under layers of shame and alcohol and drugs, meant so much to her. She remembered. She was the last person to see her brother before he was killed.
As soon as the clarity hit her, she went right to the basement in her parents’ home, where she’d moved back into after yet another relationship breakup and emotional breakdown. She opened one of her boxes of old things from her youth and found what she was looking for: an old blue Razr phone and charger. After charging it up for a few minutes, it came to life, and she checked the photos. And there it was. The picture she knew would be there. The photo she took on a whim as her brother drove off, leaving her at the Shake Meister in Post Falls to wait for her friends to give her a ride home.
“I'm gonna tell him,” Ricky said to her earlier that night.
“Whatever. I think you’re crazy. Barry’s not like that. He’s not gonna understand. What if mom and dad find out? They’ll freak out,” Sara said back to her older brother.
“Yes, he will. I know he will. Mom and Dad are gonna have to find out soon enough.”
Other than talking about the logistics of her getting home, that was the last conversation they ever had. Sara saw him as he drove off in Gill’s truck, and for no reason that she could ever verbalize, she snapped a quick picture with her phone. She never saw her brother again. His recovered body was so deteriorated that they had a closed-casket funeral. Her brother’s murder and disappearance were still unsolved even after all these years. With this new piece of information, this photo, this memory that she had willingly kept back then, suppressed for so many years, now refreshed, maybe she could get the case reopened.
A wave of guilt and shame washed over her as complicity in never sharing the image with the police at the time or telling them about Ricky’s last ride. She wanted to at the time, but was so worried about letting Ricky’s secret out that she never did. Having her parents know Ricky’s deepest identity, his deepest secret, would have shamed them to no end. They moved away from liberal California to avoid such “evil” impulses. She sat at her desk, head in hand, and replayed the time the deputy asked her if she knew anything at all that might help, and she just said, “No.” The self-loathing washed over her for a full minute before she shook it off. Enough of that, she thought. The blocking of the accounts, Sara felt, was something that only a guilty person would do — and she had a plan for that.
* * *
Gill went live a few minutes later than usual, 9:04 pm Spokane time. He’d gone back and forth about cancelling the whole show, but his need for ego gratification won out, and he started with his regular, confident self.
“What’s up, guys! Sorry for the delay. Had some tech difficulties, but I’m here now. Today, we’re gonna talk about the modern military, how it’s gotten too “woke” and what is being done by the new regime to instill a more killer mentality instead of all this soft shit we see now.”
The live feed comment section, already abuzz with activity, came alive even more.
GO WOKE GO BROKE!!!!
Its not like it was when i was in
“That’s right, DragonDawg. Times have changed. Even since I got out only a few years ago, things have gotten so soft. As you all know, I was a Marine for a bunch of years, and we knew how to kick some ass. Now, the rules of engagement they have to use make sure that they’re always fired upon first. A Marine has to die before we can fire back. That’s what the last administration gave us. That’s what the new guys are trying to fix.”
The comment section, still lively, started to come alive with unusual activity. RickyRocket07_2 posted a hyperlink time and time again. Nothing more. No message or text, just the link. It must have been posted forty or fifty times before Gill noticed it, interspersed between the comments of his viewers.
What the fk is this?
FKN SPAM!
Whos posting this
Gill saw the username and had a good idea what the link went to without even opening it. He right-clicked on the name and blocked them, hoping he had done so before anyone opened the link. Blocking a user removed all of their comments, and Gill noticed that all the links had disappeared. He hoped he was safe.
You guys see that pic? WTF was that about?
Hey, Barry! Who in that truck?
Hoping to cover his own concerns and distract his viewers from the distractions, Gill went back into his diatribe about the “woke” military. “When I was in Iraq, we knew what we had to do and we did it, but just a few years later, when that old man had us tuck tail and run out of Afghanistan, good Marines died because we had gotten too soft under his administration.” However, there was a segment of viewers who weren’t following his lead.
Wasn’t Ricky Rocket the guy that donated $500 yesterday?
Whered they go?
Y’all see what else that site said?
That chilled Gill. He had blocked the user, so he no longer had the link. While half-heartedly keeping up his banter, he wondered what else was on the end of that link. There was the picture he had been sent, he was sure, but what else? He hoped that if it stopped now, everything would just blow over and return to normal. One of his viewers had other ideas.
You gotta check this out!!!!! Gonna be a good show tomorrow. Lolz!!!!
A user named TigerBomb posted the link along with the comment for all viewers to see on the live feed. Gill, entirely forgetting about protocol and the fact that he was live on air, indulged his curiosity and clicked on the link. It went to a YouTube video that, when played, showed a still image that had been sent to him the night before, but in this one, the license plate on the truck was blurred out. The title of the video was WHO KILLED ME, and superimposed over the photo near the top was floating text that gave a date and time for a live broadcast!
"Fuck!” he said aloud for all his viewers to see. “Look, folks, I don’t know what’s going on, but I don’t like my show being hijacked. I’m gonna cut this one short tonight. I’ll see you next time.” He ended his show without his usual outro and end music. After cutting the video feed, he sat still in his chair, thinking of all the possibilities of how this could be hell on him, but he still suffered from the illusion that he could escape the weight of what was happening.
* * *
With the end of Gill’s live broadcast, Sara was just getting started. At her desk, she raised her hand to move aside a lock of curly blonde hair that had fallen in her face. When that only partially succeeded, she blew at it from the corner of her mouth, finishing the job. She had a message prepared and went through every video on Gill’s channel to paste it. It said, “Come find out who Barry Gill killed back in 2007!” and gave a link to a YouTube Live scheduled for 9 pm PST the next night. Not coincidentally, Sara scheduled it for the same time as Gill’s show. After ensuring that all his videos and Shorts conveyed the same message, she visited the SubReddit devoted to Barry Gill’s channel, r/BarryGillLive. She left the same message on several of the posts. Lastly, she did the same to about fifty of the posts on his show’s Facebook page, just to make sure the older crowd saw the message.
“Yeah. Fuck you,” she said out loud to no one when she was all done. Back straight, leaning forward, her elbows resting on the edge of the small folding table she used as her desk, Sara rested her chin in her hands and felt a swell of energy and self-empowerment she hadn’t experienced for years. Going to the police would have been too easy, she thought. She would do that also, but she wanted to make that fucker squirm for a while first. Now, there was nothing to do except wait.
She stood up quickly from her desk, knocking over her empty teacup, and headed over to her red velvet couch. The couch didn’t fit the decor of her current light green room at all. It was from a previous life, from a brief time a few years ago, when she had a modicum of happiness in her life, when she thought she had love. What she had, she realized too late, was the right combination of denial and alcoholism to make her feel like she had enough balance in her life to maintain the appearance of happiness in a co-dependent relationship. The relationship ended, but she salvaged the funky retro couch and an expensive mattress out of it all. That, and material for even more therapy.
Lying down on the soft, plush couch, her goal was to not move a muscle other than to breathe, to let her mind adjust to stillness, and then to work through the details of her presentation the next night. It was a fine goal, but like so many others of hers, it failed. She stayed still, but her mind whirred with thoughts of her many failures concerning her brother’s memory; her failings from that night. She knew there was no way she could have saved her brother, but maybe she could have said something earlier about him going away with Gill in his truck. Maybe that would have done something. Maybe this and maybe that. Her brother was dead, and now she was certain that Gill had something to do with it. She was taking action, and she felt better than she had in many, many years. Despite her desire to fulfill her nightly habit of getting white wine drunk, she didn’t have the urge to blot out the feelings. She wanted to feel things tonight.
* * *
As long as it took Sara to paste all the comments on his various posts and videos, it took Gill three times as long to find and delete them, but that was only after followers had seen them and either liked the comment or made a comment underneath it. There was no way to know how many of his followers had clicked on the link, but looking at the page where the Live was scheduled, he could see that the user, the original RickyRocket07, had grown a following of a few hundred subscribers. Checking back at the video/picture that was posted the previous night, he saw that it had over 5,000 views and more than 100 comments. Scrolling through them, most of them expressed confusion or bewilderment over the meaning of the image, but a few shocked him.
He’s exactly the kind of guy who would do something like this.
These fkn guys!!!! Always with these guys
Had anyone asked him, Gill would have said that it had been years since he’d thought of Ricky Lund, but the truth was that he thought of him in some way every single day. Sometimes it was just a passing thought about his feelings from that night, and other times he recalled each and every second of what had happened with crystal clarity. Tonight, waiting for 9 pm, was one of those times. He remembered their talk. He remembered what Ricky told him. He remembered his disgust and anger, and he remembered pushing Ricky away. He remembered the sound of Ricky’s head hitting the rock, and he remembered all that blood. He remembered all of it. An IMAX movie with full Dolby sound played in his head of his shameful actions afterwards. How he knew no one knew they were parked at an old, abandoned logging road near Rathdrum Mountain. How he buried the body under all those rocks, and how he went back to town like nothing happened.
As the 9 o’clock showtime approached, Gill wanted nothing more than to dive deeply into a bottle of something stronger than Michelob Ultra.
* * *
In the past week, since she discovered that Gill was a YouTuber and her plan became clear, Sara had learned a lot about technology. She taught herself all about the ins and outs of YouTube videos and livestreaming, but more importantly, she looked up all she could about creating deepfake videos using commercially available AI. Those two tech pieces combined to make what Sara hoped would be a powerful tool for her to impart some pain on Barry Gill, perhaps not as much as he deserved, but a little would suffice before the deputies did their duty. She had her prerecorded video ready for the Live session and waited.
At nine, exactly, she went live and hit the play button on her dashboard. Her screen, and those of the 2,377 viewers who were waiting for her, showed a young blonde man standing in a scrubby pine forest, looking serious and waiting to speak. His slightly curly hair was messy, but in an endearing way that highlighted his good looks. After a five-second pause, he began the speech that Sara had generated for him.
“Hi. I’m Ricky Lund, and I’ve been dead since 2007. I died somewhere in the woods outside of Rathdrum, Idaho, and only one person knows exactly how and where it happened. One night, in late 2007, this person and I drove in his truck away from the Shake Meister in Post Falls, and I was never seen alive by anyone else ever again.”
Ricky’s almost realistic self disappeared from the video and was replaced by the still image of the truck. This one didn’t have the license plate blurred out.
“That’s me in the passenger’s seat of that truck, and you’ve probably guessed by now whose truck that is and who that is in the driver’s seat. I’m not alive to tell you what happened after we drove away that night,” Ricky’s avatar held for a few seconds, where Sara wrote in for it to make a dramatic pause, “but that person is. They can tell you all about what happened afterwards. They can tell you what we talked about that night, the secret that I revealed, and all about why they never said anything to the police about our trip that night.”
* * *
Barry Gill watched the video while seated at his desk, keeping an eye on the comments as they rolled in.
Who tf is Ricky Lund?
I’ve found a link to a news article about this. I’ll post it.
Is Gill spposed to have done this? Is that what this is all about
Other viewers started posting old news links to the stories about Ricky’s disappearance and the eventual discovery of his body. Gill squirmed in his seat and felt a trickle of sweat roll down his back. That starburst in his chest was back again.
* * *
Sara watched as AI Ricky finished the speech she had programmed for him, an almost smile on her face.
“An hour ago, an email was sent to the sheriff’s department with a copy of the photo you’ve seen and a statement from the person who took it. In that statement, the person shares more about what I was going to tell the other person that night. That might be the reason this person killed me, but we won’t know until the deputies speak with him.
This is a person many of you know, who many of you follow on this platform. It’s someone who talks an empty talk of bravery and manhood, but was a coward when it counted. I suppose we’ll know more soon enough.”
The video ended and was again replaced by images, this time a series of them depicting the real Ricky Lund at various times in his too-brief life: Ricky as a baby, Ricky dressed as a pumpkin for Halloween, and another of Ricky just after a track race, smiling and waving to someone off-camera. Sara felt the tears welling up, but she fought them back. She didn’t feel that she deserved to cry; she’d done enough of that. She wanted a drink, but she thought she’d done enough of that, too. Instead, she stood up, walked away from her desk, and threw herself face down on the bed she had salvaged from the wreck of her last relationship. It was three days until her next therapy session, and she’d have a lot to talk about.
* * *
His followers, or at least the viewers of the Ricky Rocket video, kept the comment section of the video abuzz, and Gill read them with a sense of dread.
Gill’s a killer?
Oh, damn! Ya know the police are moving right now
Dude better have some answers
The starbursts in his chest didn’t stop now. They came so fast and so powerful that they all ran together in a solid series of pulses, keeping him both stunned and energized. He couldn’t stay motionless anymore. He jolted up from his chair and pushed it back, knocking over the lightstand behind him. This caused a quarter of the room to get darker, but it was the corner he wanted to get away from. He paced the faux-wood flooring and used his foot to shove the coffee table out of his way when he decided that he needed more room to move. A wider path seemed safer, he thought.
“Fuck it!” he said aloud and went into his modest white kitchen to fetch the bottle of bourbon he’d been avoiding the past few nights. The bottle was tucked away in the same cabinet as the Bloody Mary mix, vodka, and tequila. He felt better knowing he had all that to fall back on if the bourbon wasn’t enough. He had another fallback, too. Something more final.
His 9mm sat on the shelf in his closet in a secure case. He had other handguns, but this one, a Beretta, was special. It was the model that he carried back in the Corps. They hadn’t gone to the range together in more than a year, but every once in a while, Gill took it out of its case, stripped it down, used a lint-free cloth to rub it clean, and gave it a tiny bit of oil before putting it back together and working the action a few times. It was a calming, almost hypnotic act that took him back to happier times, to when he felt a purpose in his life, to when he wasn’t just floating around in space, making it all up as he went along. The Marines, even in the dangerous times, maybe especially during those times, gave him direction and a sense of purpose after all the lost feelings for what he did to Ricky. Now, all that was going to come out into the open. Now, questions would be asked. Now, he’d be ruined.
Gill pulled the case down from the shelf, opened it, and pulled out the handgun. He dropped the magazine and cleared it to ensure it wasn't loaded, then reloaded the magazine but didn’t rack a round into the chamber. Instead, he went back out to where his drink was waiting for him on the kitchen counter, grabbed it, then went to his overstuffed chair, his thinking spot, and held his pistol close to him in one hand, drink in the other.
He knew they’d be coming, and soon. The police, or maybe the sheriff’s department. Someone would come. They'd ask questions about that night. His secret would come out.
He heard a car pull up in front of his building and knew who it was. He listened to the car doors opening and then shutting again. Gill had a choice to make.
