“Okay, honey. You’re right, it doesn’t make sense that you would have been behind Keith’s going down.”
“Except that I was, when you boil it down, right? It was my fault. Brian would never have targeted Keith if Keith hadn’t gotten in his face that night at the bar, defending me, putting Brian in his place. Humiliated him. Keith would never have been on Brian’s radar. Keith would still be alive…”
“Ellie, you can’t go re-writing history. From what Jack told me, that night that Keith gave McAfee what he had coming to him was the same night you and he…” Grath wiggled his brows at me with a funny sly smile, trying to lighten the mood. “So if Keith had never been involved, had never been on McAfee’s radar, then you might not even be alive—no telling what McAfee might have done to you—Aaand also, you wouldn’t have Peter. You wanna change that?”
The thought of not having Peter, who had so completely taken over my heart, was devastating. It was either Keith or Peter, but it was no choice at all. It had all played out the way it did, and now I had my beautiful son, and there was nothing any of us could do to rewind the clock for Keith’s sake. So I took a deep breath and smiled shyly back at Grath.
“You’re right. I could never choose not to have Peter. Never. But it doesn’t make me feel less guilty about Keith…It’s my fault, my fault, that Peter will never know his father. That Jack—and all of you—have to live without a great man whom you all loved—”
He cut me off. “Don’t go there, Ellie. You gotta let it drop. It makes sense, now, that we have a bead on Keith’s killer. Before now, we had nothing. So this is progress. We’ll find him, we’ll take him down. On that, you can be damn sure. One hundred percent.”
Steph, Mister Logic, got back in the ring. “You said the other day that the gun you saw in McAfee’s hands, that it looked like…?”
I repeated what I had seen. “Like a gun a cop would carry. At least, a cop on TV. I guess they look like real cop guns? I don’t know the make and model, but it was black, kind of square-ish looking, all business, no frills. Handgun. Not small, but not outrageously big, either. Does that help?”
“Yeah, it helps a lot, actually. Fits with the bullets that were found in Keith’s back.”
I flinched. Poor Keith! I hated to think of what he must have gone through, those last hours and minutes of his life, and what he might have thought about. I sent a prayer up for him, a message of love and gratitude and of sorrow at the untimely end to his sojourn here. I would regret and grieve his passing forever; it was something that I would carry in my heart for eternity.
But now, knowing—or thinking I knew the culprit behind his takedown, and the evil and madness that drove Brian to do it, I was getting angry. Red-hot angry. Because: how dare Brian play God with Keith’s life, with my life, with Peter’s life, and Jack’s life? Brian had to be all-out crazy—no, psychopathic—to have gone through with any of this. And I was done. I was pissed. I wanted to bring him down personally.
Apparently, in my raging thoughts, I had at some point gotten to my feet and started treading the carpets with vengeance, because I suddenly had two very strong arms around me, holding me from behind, and Grath’s voice began whispering in my ear, “Shhh, shhh, it’s okay, girl. We’re gonna get him. Breathe, Ellie. You have the cops, you have Steph and his team, you have me, and Jack, and the whole MC with you now. We’re all on this together. And we will hunt that bastard down. Do not worry. You just take care of that precious baby of yours, yeah? That is your number one. We will take care of the psycho. Okay? Are you breathing? In and out, honey. In and out.” And then we were basically doing Lamaze together, on our feet. It wasn’t even weird; it helped.
After a few minutes, he let me go, and we were all a bit calmer. The room was full of the tension of too much knowledge and too little action, but there was a new element, too: we were part of a team. I felt like a part of the team, even though they had relegated me to playing a bystander role in the hunt for the psycho killer. I had trouble with that image, a little bit. It was discomfiting—hi, understatement!—to think that all this time, Brian was actually capable and guilty of murder, and that he did it effectively for me. Gross. Repugnant. Sickening. Sick.