Just Look What the Bitch Made You Do

by Jordan Harper

Maybe you should kill the bitch first, seeing as how she was the one who promised you true love forever and then went and sat on another man’s dick. That is the first thing you think when you stumble up to the apartment complex parking lot just in time to see her lead Danny Fucknuts in through her door. Your first thought is to take her and break her, jelly her face up with a rock, a tree root, something ancient and jagged. Smash her, crush her, make her slick and wet with blood.

You wander drunk through the streets near her place, where right then she is leaning back on her bed with Danny Fucknuts grunting over her. That portrait on the wall -- She made you pose for it at Sears, you in your uniform and her with her hair teased up to the sky, that one your friends called you pussywhipped for but you didn’t care because it was love and if love cost you that little smidge of dignity … That photo of you is watching her bang Officer Danny Fucknuts. In the drunk-haze you see yourself in that photo breaking out of the two-dimensions and strangling her right then and there.

You wake the next day floating in shit. You don’t know who you are except a giant ball of drifting meat, poisoned and alone. Then it all smacks back into you and again you want the bitch dead. But then you drink a little water. The iciness hits your stomach and spreads through your veins and you get cold and you get smart and you know, you fucking know: the first person the detectives would go to is you. They always suspected the boyfriend or the husband first – who else could hate a woman that much but someone who let her crawl inside? You aren’t some prick who is going to prison the rest of his life just because he fell in love with some dumb cooze, not like the dozen you’ve seen the detectives break at the precinct. No sir. But that doesn’t mean that you are going to let this one ride, let Danny Fucknuts keep going balls deep in your woman. Somebody has to die. And you aren’t a suicide. You might have sliced off your dignity for that high-test bitch, but you still have a stub left. And so here you are standing over Danny to kill the son of a whore.

But kill him smart.

Icewater cold, my man. You stand over Danny’s sleeping body in the middle of the night. You have done it all cold as hell.

You run through the checklist. Your head is shaved bald, not too radical a hairstyle change from your cop flattop – and you aren’t going to leave any hairs laying around. T-shirt, jeans, underwear, bought fresh out of JC Penney’s today. Fresh clothes paid for with cash money, straight out of plastic that evening, no chance to pick up secondary fiber evidence.

No fake alibi – just another lie to get caught in. You haven’t gone elaborate with the planning – plans are threads for Homicide boys to grab.

You parked your car on an empty side-street and walked here through the night, passing no commercial buildings with their security cameras. You’ve come at three in the morning after the last of the last-call drunks are asleep but before even the shittiest-job-holding sad bastards’ alarm clocks ring. You walked – you didn’t sneak or creep. Folks remember that shit and you aren’t no fucking ninja. So you walked up to Danny’s place and walked in the garage – Danny has that cop certainty that no one will rip him off. And Danny’s little plywood door in the garage, the only thing he saw fit to put between himself and God’s cruel universe, between him and the man who’s woman he is porking, that door you opened up with a goddamn credit card.

You moved cat quiet through the house even though Danny hadn’t gone to sleep without a load on in maybe a decade. And the woman he is fucking, you know for an absolute fact because you tucked her in with a liar’s kiss, is at home sleeping like she is innocent as a fucking turtle. You know Danny is alone, and that he won’t wake up unless a fucking gun goes off next to his head. Funny, that happens to be the plan. But you don’t think Danny will wake up with one hundred forty five grains of lead parting his hair and his frontal lobe.

The gun – that is the genius stroke right there in your hand. It belongs to Danny. Your backup piece is strapped to your ankle, but you don’t see no reason to chance it when here is Danny’s own pistol. Not his department-issue, but that World War II .45 he keeps in that box by the teevee. You can drop the gun right here next to him like a movie Mafioso. Let them run every ballistics test in the world. Won’t prove a thing. A perfect fucking murder to leave the boys in homicide scratching their heads till their scalps bleed. And leave the bitch wondering.

You raise that gun and think of the bitch, she promised, she said … You pull the trigger. The gun explodes in your hand, blowing off your trigger finger and the first joint of your thumb. The stumps sizzles and bleeds as you drop the mangled piece of metal. That bitch, that bitch, look what she made you do. Past the weird darklights of the flash you see Danny sit up wild-eyed, floating in silence and gunsmoke. With barely time to curse Fucknuts for taking shit care of his piece you jump on top of him, this guy who slipped it to the bitch, that bitch. With the first punch your half-gone hand screams out pain but you hit Danny again. Crunch crunch. Your bottom fingers grab the bedside lamp and bring it down, both hands to keep the grasp, and you think of his face leering up slimy slick from between her thighs, her running her hands through his hair the way she used to do with you and you bring that lamp down with a thud and a pop as the fuckwad’s skull breaks and then it is just you, everything quiet but your own stuttering breath, just you and the corpse.

Back comes the icewater and even in the dark you can see what you’ve done – your perfect crime devolves to shit – that bitch, you can’t believe what that bitch has you doing. Chock-full-of-DNA blood is everywhere. Mixed together, both of you, just like you’re both mixed up inside her.

The pain of your hand is one-removed, like some other guy is telling you about it. That is just adrenaline keeping you in the fight, but you can’t let it run the game. There is still time to make this smart – not perfect, but smart.

First off comes that pristine JCPennys t-shirt to wrap your hand up. Your belt cinches tight to slow the bleeding – at least keep it from dripping. You have two choices – you can dump the body, but that is a fool’s fucking errand right there. Stick the body into your trunk, shaking DNA all over, a potluck dinner for the lab boys – and then hide the body where? Bodies get found, and that is a truth that you know for sure. So that left option two.

Fire. You find a gascan in the garage. You turn on the gas jets in the kitchen to fill the house. The kitchen isn’t far from the bedroom and the gas fumes will hit the flames and foomp goes the house, every little scrap of DNA sizzled like bacon. Oh, when the bitch learns that her little fuck-buddy got roasted – you swear you’ll be there. And she’ll know, but she’ll never know. You’ll own her fucking soul once she hears that Danny Fucknuts went charcoal.

You hear the car before you see the lights.

The blue and red cherries light the room like an Arab disco, flash flash flash. The gunshot and screams led to someone calling the cops – didn’t they know you were there already? You peek out the window, thinking maybe you shouldn’t have turned the gas on so soon – tendrils of the invisible stink sting your nostrils. Frank Robinson has parked his squad car in the driveway. Frank is already walking up the drive. Frank rides his squad car solo except for Bruno the German Shepard locked safe in the back seat. So you only have one cop to kill. One more, that is.

Sorry Frank, but the bitch got you in pretty deep.

You pull your backup piece from your ankle holster left-handed and put it to the wall just to the right of the door where a good smart cop like Frank or you would stand when knocking on the door of a dark house. You wait one long second, the bitch’s face floating in the shapes of the dark. Then comes the knock and you pull the trigger. And the whole world catches fire.

The clouds of gas filling the house catches spark from the gun, and the air itself blazes alive with fire for less than a second. You come out the other side of the flamecloud smelling the stench of your own burning hair. But it worked – you can hear the steady rage of flames on Danny’s bed chewing up all that DNA. Too bad about Frank – he lays on the other side of the wall dying out loud. You look out the window past Frankie’s body to see the car door open and some rookie shitfuck climb out and take cover on the other side of the Vic, barking into the radio. You guess Frankie has gotten himself a new partner after all.

The house burns faster. You can go out the back and try to make it home and try to explain away the missing fingers and burns but you know it is way past that. You’ve been fucked from the start of this, trying to play it cool and rational when it was simple and savage. You should have cracked that slit’s skull the way you were built to do. It isn’t too late –too late to do it perfect, too late to do it smart, but not too late to do it right. You come out the front door with a caveman yell and pop a few shots to keep the rookie down as you run past.
You hear the rookie let slip the dog but you’re full of animal joy and keep right on running towards the bitch. Right then maybe the bitch is full of life and power, but when you bleed her out she won’t be anything more than a fucking porkchop. You run fast and free with a hard-on born of hate. It is your finest moment.

The dog takes you down in the street. Your front teeth shatter on the asphalt. Bruno tears out a tendon as you struggle to flop onto your back. You fire the gun into the air. You shoot down the moon. There are arms around you. You scream with a broken mouth.

That bith!

That bith!

That bith!