Death Before Facebook

good-bye to your asses, ladies.” He held the gun with both hands, raised it, arms outstretched. Skip heard the swishing of the door opening behind them.
    She let out her breath. Security. Finally.
    “Enough, Cole,” said Marguerite.
    His face darkened. “What the hell are you doing here?”
    “No more killing, Cole. Give me the gun.”
    “Goddammit, you crazy bitch.
Goddamn
you! All these fucking years I’ve protected you—”
    “You killed Leighton. I didn’t.”
    “What? After I’ve kept you out of fucking prison for twenty-seven years, you’ve got the nerve to say a fucking crazy thing like that—”
    “Cole, you’re getting upset.”
    “Marguerite, you better go lie down.”
    “Enough of this. Give me the gun. It’s over.”
    “You’ve got a fucking nerve deciding what’s over and what’s not. Where have you been through this whole thing? I’ll tell you where—asleep, that’s where. And now you think you can come in here and…”
    “You kept giving me those pills.”
    “What, me? Now I’m a pusher or something? You couldn’t wait to get your damn pills. I had to hide them from you.”
    “Cole, you’ve killed three people. Don’t you think that’s enough?”
    “Three! How can you say that! You up and kill your damn husband and I spend the next thirty years protecting you, trying to cover your tracks, and this is what you do to me? I’m going to kill you, Marguerite. You’re the next one—I’m just going to kill
you.
” He trained the gun on her.
    “You won’t kill
me.
” It was a high, strained voice. Neetsie’s. The door swished again. “I came with Mom. I was listening. I heard everything. I can’t believe you could talk to my mother like that.” She was crying.
    Crying and irrational
.
Her dad killed her brother and her good friend, and all she can do is complain about the way he’s talking
.
    The situation was getting more explosive by the moment.
    “Neetsie, I didn’t mean it. I was upset.”
    “I can’t believe you did what you did. I really can’t believe it. I thought you loved me.”
    “I do love you, baby.” His face was a mask of misery—this one definitely had emotions.
    “But where would you be if your dad was in jail? How would you get over that? Look, it should have worked;
something
should have worked. I just can’t seem to catch a break here.”
    Neetsie looked as amazed as anyone Skip had ever seen. “You’re not my dad. You’re not the same person who does Dr. John. You’re some creature who—”
    “Shut up.” He smacked her with the back of his gun hand.
    Skip moved.
    It would take two steps to get to him, but she had time for only one. She dived at his knees. She got a good grip, but he didn’t go down—there was simply too much distance to make much impact.
    He grabbed her by the hair and pulled. “Get up.”
    He put the gun to her temple. “Okay, we’re going.”
    He marched her out of the room and through the corridor, out of the closed wing and into the hospital proper. It was brighter here; the place Skip had found so depressing on her previous visit seemed cheerful by contrast. A nurse was striding toward them; another was talking to a man in a suit, probably a patient’s son or husband. All three saw the gun and began to run. Cole fired at the ceiling. “Let us through. Don’t try to stop us.”
    He kept walking.
    They turned a corner, nearly bumping into a nurse helping an old man on a walker. “Out of our way.” Cole swept them away with his gun hand, the other still holding tightly to Skip. The old man fell, which made Skip furious.
    She tried frantically to think what to do, but people were starting to litter the halls, some of them old, a great many of them sick. Instead of fleeing at the sound of the gunshot, the shouting, the clatter of the old man falling, they’d come out to rubberneck.
    Anything she did would endanger them.
    The good news was, she heard sirens. Cole heard too, and panicked. He shot once again at the ceiling. “Let us through.”
    People scattered, but it was no good. Others took their places.
    Still, he kept walking. The stairs were open, not in a closed stairwell, so that they were able to descend without the risk of surprise at the bottom; first one floor, then another, the gun tight against Skip’s scalp.
    She was not even slightly frightened; seeing the old, the sick, the innocent so vulnerable in those halls, knowing what this man was capable of, she was nearly blind with