“Don’t walk out the door,” Amy said.
But he did, of course. That was exactly what he did. Walked out the door.
Or started to, anyway.
He had two more steps left to cross the threshold when Amy said, “Stop right there, Richie. I mean it.”
And that was when he turned around and crouched down and fired.
Amy returned fire immediately.
She saw a bright blooming red flower on her brother’s chest. His arms being flung wide. His weapon fly clattering against the wall. And him fall over backward, half in, half out of the cottage door.
He was crying. Sobbing.
She ran to him, knelt down next to him.
She could see that at least two of her bullets had done enormous damage. One to his chest. One to his stomach.
“I wanted you to kill me, Amy,” he said, his voice husky but faint. “I didn’t have nerve enough to do it myself.”
He squeezed her hand with the last of his strength. “I love you, Amy. I’m sorry I made my life so miserable for you.”
He was looking up at her with eyes so forlorn she could barely stand to see them.
He looked so young. He looked so scared.
She leaned down and kissed him tenderly on the cheek and then took his bloody hand and held it.
“I’m sorry, sis,” he said.
And then he died.
She took his hand and pressed it tenderly to her cheek. Her eyes shone with tears. She looked up at Sam. “I didn’t have any choice, did I, Sam?”
He came over and put his hand gently on her shoulder. “No,” he said. “You didn’t have any choice at all.”
Epilogue
The minister did a damned good job.
She never got sappy. She talked about the good things Richie had done, yet she also talked about the bad things as well.
And she talked about how difficult it is to know somebody else, to truly know him, because we are all prisoners of our own needs and desires and demons.
Richie had his demons, she said, and not one of us here, not even his beloved sister, ever had any real insight into those demons. They were locked inside Richie. He took them with him to his grave.
She ended by saying that the town would always remember what had happened here this week. And rightly so.
But she hoped that, in time, the life of Richie McGuire could be put into some kind of perspective. That the town could forgive and love him again... as they had loved him one time long ago, on the autumn afternoons when college football was played... for that had been part of Richie, too... his great skills as a player... and the thrills he had inspired as a hero.
Driving out to the cemetery, Sam next to her in the backseat of the funeral-home limousine, Amy looked out the window at the warm fall day and said, “I keep trying to think I did him a favor, Sam. I keep trying to think that he really wanted to die.”
“I think he did,” Sam said.
“Yes,” she said, beginning to cry, looking out at the countryside where Richie Douglas McGuire had played as a boy. “Yes, I guess he did.”
Then Sam took her in his arms and held her as the limousine climbed the steep road to the cemetery.