All of the "if only" thoughts, they would kill me.
I felt the heavy burden of guilt. Guilt for my failures as a father. And above all else, guilt for April's murder. All of it was my fault. April had been too good for someone like me. She never deserved my brand of shit.
April had stood by me when I went to the federal pen for embezzlement, because I got stupid and cocky enough to steal from my employer. Well, stupid enough to get caught anyway. I was young and foolish. I was a helluva lot better at what I did now. And now, I was doing the same shit on the right side of the law. I was trying to make up for lost time, trying to redeem myself for all the wrongs I'd done, the things that resulted in April's death.
I knew all of these things, felt deeply guilty for them. And yet...when I'd visited the club, there was a part of me that missed it. Part of me wanted to tell the club I was back and out of retirement, ready to do what was needed. There was a dark part of me that wanted the excuse to act on the rage I felt all the time, to be able to do it under the guise of club business. Working in a white collar job, securing networks from hacks like myself...it wasn't exactly an outlet for anger.
I couldn't explain why I was sitting in my bedroom, cleaning my weapon. It didn’t need cleaned, but I felt drawn to it, without any sense. I knew I shouldn’t be, but I felt like I was on auto-pilot. It started this morning, the impulse to clean it, then the vague thoughts about what if I used it.
It would be better for MacKenzie if I weren’t around.
Better for her to be with her grandmother.
She’d be happier, surrounded by family.
You weren’t meant to raise a kid, not by yourself.
April was the only parent worth her salt. You don’t have your shit together to take care of yourself. You can’t take care of a kid.
MacKenzie would be better without you.
It would be better if you were dead.
I told myself I was just cleaning it, that’s all. I hadn’t used it in a long time. I wanted to make sure everything was still in working order.
Even I knew when I was bullshitting myself.
I held it, felt the weight of it in my hand, the cool sensation of the metal against my palm. I wondered how it would feel to put it to my temple and pull the trigger. I thought it through carefully as I turned the weapon over in my hands.
I thought about the people I’d killed, and how they felt when I did it. I didn’t feel badly about the men I’d killed, about beating one to death with a sledgehammer, smashing him into a bloody pulp until he was completely and entirely obliterated. I didn’t feel remotely guilty about wrapping a chain around the other one and dragging his body behind a vehicle, while his cries of agony rang out through the desert night. And when I watched Axe peel a man’s scalp from his head before slitting his throat, I felt satisfied. Thrusting my knife into Mad Dog’s belly was like the icing on the cake.
I didn’t feel badly about any of it. Those shitbags had killed April. They had ripped my wife from me, taken away MacKenzie’s mother. They deserved to die. They deserved far worse than the horrors Axe and I had inflicted on them.
What kept gnawing at me, clawing away at my insides, was that I’d felt good when I had done it. Killing them wasn’t some sober act of retribution for April’s death. It was like some kind of switch got flipped when I picked up the sledgehammer. Something turned off in my soul. Killing them felt fucking amazing.
It shouldn’t have felt that way. I wasn’t that person.
I didn’t want to be that person. If I was, what would happen the next time someone crossed me?
And what the hell kind of father could I possibly be with that kind of darkness in my soul? It was my fault MacKenzie had lost her mother. I had brought that on her, with my involvement in the club. Sure, Mad Dog’s men had killed April, but her death was all my doing. Her blood was on my hands.
Since April’s death, I felt adrift. She was my anchor, always had been. We joked about her being a ball and chain, but it was a good thing, in my case. She kept me tethered, tied to family and the things that were important to me, when I could have kept running out of control with the club, like back in the early years with them. When she died, I lost my moorings.
I looked back down at the piece in my lap. It would be so easy to just end everything. I sat silently, the weight of the options heavy on my mind.
Then I set the weapon on the nightstand, beside the slip of paper with the phone number on it. I don’t know why I had kept it.
Or why the fuck I picked up the phone then. I should have done something else, called a friend. Shit, called a hotline or something.
But I didn’t. I called a woman I didn’t know.
When she answered, I almost hung up.
“Hello?” She asked it three times before I swallowed the lump in my throat and spoke.
“It’s Joe. Hammer. The computer guy,” I said. Why the hell was I calling her?
“Hammer,” she said, her voice soft. “I wondered if I would hear from you.”
“I don’t know why I’m calling,” I said.
She was silent, and for a minute, I thought she’d hung up on me. “It’s okay not to know,” she said.