She tried to swing her purse at him. He belted her in the face. She could taste the blood pouring from her nose. “Don’t, Jimmy. What’ll the kids think?”
“They’ll think that you’ve been stupid again and I had to come home to stop that.”
She could smell the whiskey on his breath, which meant he’d been working on this mad all day. His control was already gone.
Did she have the guts to stick it out? She hurt so badly. She was so afraid.
“I’ve lived alone for three years, Jimmy,” she said, her voice nasal and high. “I’m not going back to the way it was. I’m not. I’ll take the kids and run if I have to.”
Five minutes later she was fighting for consciousness. He hadn’t just beaten her. He’d kicked her in the jaw. She wondered if it was broken. She curled into herself to try to protect her belly, her hand in her pants pocket.
“Bastard,” she moaned, struggling to get up onto her elbow, her other hand tucked against her stomach. “I’m not standing for this anymore. I am… not… teaching my kids that this is… okay.”
Jimmy bent all the way down and dragged her up. “You stupid bitch. Don’t you get it? I could kill you and nobody would care.”
Odd, she thought, blinking her one open eye. I could do the same thing.
So she did. Jimmy never heard the snick of the blade. He was focused on the hands he had around her neck. By the time he realized that this time she wasn’t so helpless, Peg had driven the razor-sharp eight-inch blade deep into his chest, right between the fourth and fifth ribs as if she was cutting out a rib eye. The blade went in so cleanly she didn’t even feel the scrape of a rib. She just felt a few pops, as if she’d broken through tough membranes. She hoped to hell she had.
She was holding herself up on him, and he was staring down at the knife in his chest as if he couldn’t comprehend it.
“That’s… mine.”
She didn’t answer. She just turned the knife and drove it in deeper. His eyes widened. His mouth opened. And then he simply collapsed in on himself.
He fell right on top of Peg. She couldn’t move; not while he gasped out his last breaths or while his heart faltered to a stop, never to start again. Her face was only inches from his staring, astonished eyes, and she waited, still not sure he wouldn’t wake and go after her again. She struggled to get air in past her broken nose and ribs.
She couldn’t stop shaking. She couldn’t believe it. She’d hoped. She’d prayed so hard that his time away would have made him a better man. Would have washed away his need to hit and hurt. She’d sure had her answer, hadn’t she?
She needed to do something. The kids were waiting back at the Peabodys’. No more than half a block away, New York was dancing. And she was lying here under a man whose blood was seeping out onto the asphalt, his body a dead weight.
She could feel the bruises swelling on her face. Her right eye was completely closed, and her lip was split. Blood stained her poplin shirt all the way to her waist, and she had to struggle to get enough air in.
“Help!” she screamed, finally pushing at Jimmy. “Oh, God, help! My husband!”
With a lurch, she pulled herself free of him, only to land on her knees. Her head spun. Her heart was thumping like a bass drum. She knew she was going to be sick. But she had to get to Officer Paretti. She had to…
“Hey, what’s going on?”
She caught a blurry glimpse of a couple of Marines shadowed at the Forty-fourth Street end of the alley.
“Please. We’ve been mugged. Help my husband.”
Officer Paretti came running. Bending down next to her, he cradled her poor face in his hands and sighed. “I told you it wasn’t safe.”
“Somebody came… came and tried to steal… I think they’ve hurt my husband… with his own… knife.”
“You sure?” one of the Marines asked. “We didn’t see nobody.”
Officer Paretti laughed. “You have any other ideas? You think what, that Mrs. O’Toole beat herself up and then stabbed her husband? Look at her.”
And Peg felt the gaze of the Marines, who took in her tiny frame and battered features and gasping breath.
“Yeah,” one of them muttered. “I guess so. Sorry, ma’am.”
Peg blinked up at them. “I tried so hard,” she whispered, tears streaming down her cheeks. “I really did.”
“We know you did, Mrs. O’Toole,” Officer Paretti said. “Now, boys, you go find me some help. And tell ’em to bring an ambulance. I’ll stay with the victims.”
He waited until the sound of the footsteps faded. Then he made it a point to give Peg a gentle frown. He looked over at Jimmy, who lay curled around the lethal knife that stuck from his chest. He looked at the blossoming damage on Peg’s face. He took one more look at the angle of the knife, the design of the cut, the way Peg was shaking.
“I’m sorry, Mrs. O’Toole,” he said, his voice even gentler than his hands. Peg could see every thought going through his head. She saw him reach over, pull his handkerchief from his pocket, and wipe off the handle of the knife. “Whoever attacked you killed your husband. Little thing like you. Lucky you’re alive.”
And Peg, who had survived, closed her eyes.
It was sixty years before she finally told the true story. She had just taken her granddaughter to the theater to celebrate her getting her master’s degree in nursing. Her granddaughter was named after her, although this one was called Mags, a girl with Peg’s red hair and Jimmy’s brown eyes, who had always told Peg she wanted to be a trauma nurse just like her.
Well, she was now, and a good one. Which was why when they returned to Peg’s retirement apartment in Brooklyn, Peg poured them both beers and asked Mags to listen to a story.
At first the confession was met by silence. Mags wouldn’t even look at her. Peg had never felt so tired in her life.
Finally Mags looked up at the black-and-white photo that hung over Peg’s head.
“You killed Granddad.”
Peg picked up her beer with shaking hands and took a sip. “I needed somebody to know.”
Somebody she trusted to understand. Somebody who saw the legacy of violence every day.
For a long moment, Mags looked out the front window. “Grams?”
“Mm-hmm.”
“Did you carry that knife knowing he was coming home?”
“I did.”
Her granddaughter’s eyes grew pensive. “And he’d beaten you before.”
“Yes.”
There was a nod, and Mags took a sip of her own beer. “Then I think it was a lucky stroke that you found that butchering job. Otherwise you might not have had the strength to gut the old bastard.”
Peg almost smiled. She had looked for that job for six months. “Honey,” she said, the confession finally complete. “Luck had nothing to do with it.”
The Devil to Pay by David Edgerley Gates
FROM Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine
TOMMY MEADOWS WAS COMING back down from Riverdale, where he’d gone to see his grandma, who was up there in an assisted living facility since May. Not the worst, either, the nursing staff cheerful, familiar with everybody by name, the meals okay, even if the food was mostly stuff you could gum, and the lawns sloped down to the Hudson, so if the weather was nice, you could take the old girl outside for a turn around the grounds in her wheelchair. But when it was rainy or too cold, all the alter kockers were lined up in the day room, watching Judge Judy, with blankets over their knees and oxygen feeds in their noses.
Better than state correctional, you might say.
Tommy had just done fourteen months in Dannemora, and he was out on probation but living with his mom, so although he had to make the weekly meet with his PO, at least he didn’t have to get an actual job. His old lady was letting him stay in the apartment over the garage, and as long as he forked over four hundred a month, it didn’t bother her where the money came from. She was long past caring how Tommy made the vig. He’d been in and out of Juvie since he was fourteen, and done hard time twice as an adult. For his part, he let her self-medicate with Old Mr. Boston, which was her idea of a hot date, and they got along just fine.