Darkfall

And yet, odd as it seems, I still sometimes miss him so bad, you know, even after all these years-even a father I never really knew and can hardly remember. I miss him, anyway.”
    Jack thought of his own little Davey, not even quite six when his mother had died.
    He squeezed Rebecca’s hand gently.
    She said, “But my father dying when I was six-in a way, that’s not the worst of it. The worst of it is that I saw him die. I was there when it happened.”
    “God. How… how did it happen?”
    “Well… he and Mama owned a sandwich shop. A small place. Four little tables. Mostly take-out business. Sandwiches, potato salad, macaroni salad, a few desserts. It’s hard to make a go of it in that business unless you have two things, right at the start: enough start-up capital to see you through a couple of lean years at the beginning, and a good location with lots of foot traffic passing by or office workers in the neighborhood. But my folks were poor. They had very little capital. They couldn’t pay the high rent in a good location, so they started in a bad one and kept moving whenever they could afford to, three times in three years, each time to a slightly better spot. They worked hard, so hard… My father held down another job, too, janitorial work, late at night, after the shop closed, until just before dawn. Then he’d come home, sleep four or five hours, and go open the shop for the lunch trade. Mama cooked a lot of the food that was served, and she worked behind the counter, too, but she also did some house cleaning for other people, to bring in a few extra dollars. Finally, the shop began to pay off. My dad was able to drop his janitorial job, and Mama gave up the house cleaning. In fact, business started getting so good that they were looking for their first employee; they couldn’t handle the shop all by themselves any more. The future looked bright. And then… one afternoon… during the slack time between the lunch and dinner crowds, when Mama was out on an errand and I was alone in the shop with my father… this guy came in… with a gun…”
    “Oh, shit,” Jack said. He knew the rest of it. He’d seen it all before, many times. Dead storekeepers, sprawled in pools of their own blood, beside their emptied cash registers.
    “There was something strange about this creep,” Rebecca said. “Even though I was only six years old, I could tell there was something wrong with him the moment he came in, and I went to the kitchen and peeked out at him through the curtain. He was fidgety… pale… funny around the eyes…”
    “A junkie?”
    “That’s the way it turned out, yeah. If I close my eyes now, I can still see his pale face, the way his mouth twitched. The awful thing is… I can see it clearer than I can see my own father’s face. Those terrible eyes.”
    She shuddered.
    Jack said, “You don’t have to go on.”
    “Yes. I do. I have to tell you. So you’ll understand why… why I am like I am about certain things.”
    “Okay. If you’re sure-”
    “I’m sure.”
    “Then… did your father refuse to hand over the money to this son of a bitch-or what?”
    “No. Dad gave him the money. All of it.”
    “He offered no resistance at all?”
    “None.”
    “But cooperation didn’t save him.”
    “No. This junkie had a bad itch, a real bad need. The need was like something nasty crawling around in his head, I guess, and it made him irritable, mean, crazy-mad at the world. You know how they get. So I think maybe he wanted to kill somebody even more than he wanted the money. So… he just… pulled the trigger ”
    Jack put an arm around her, drew her against him.
    She said, “Two shots. Then the bastard ran. Only one of the slugs hit my father. But it… hit him… in the face.”
    “Jesus,” Jack said softly, thinking of six-year-old Rebecca in the sandwich shop’s kitchen, peering through the parted curtain, watching as her father’s face exploded.
    “It was a.45,” she said.
    Jack winced, thinking of the power of the gun.
    “Hollow-point bullets,” she said.
    “Oh, Christ.”
    “Dad didn’t have a chance at point-blank range.”
    “Don’t torture yourself with-”
    “Blew his head off,” she said.
    “Don’t think about it any more now,” Jack said.
    “Brain tissue…”
    “Put it out of your mind now.”
    “… pieces of his skull…”
    “It was a long time ago.”
    “… blood all over the wall.”
    “Hush now. Hush.”
    “There’s more to tell.”
    “You don’t have to