Ghosts by Matt Rogers (ap literature book list txt) 📕

three hundred pounds, and she felt the reverberation under her feet when he toppled forward and slapped the ground beside her. She looked down at the motionless body.

A sorry sight.

When the shock wore off, she felt nothing.

Just a hollow emptiness.

The man she now knew as Slater put the gun away as the report faded into nothingness, swallowed up by the desert. The one called King got out of her back seat and came to join them. No one spoke. She didn’t want to be the first. They’d been in contact several times over the last fortnight, but conversation had been brief. Instructions dished out, requests made, all of which she’d followed. She didn’t have a choice, but if she did she’d still comply.

Life had changed since she’d met them.

In too many ways to describe.

She couldn’t bear to look at them, but they stayed quiet until she did. She stared at Icke’s corpse until it blended into the sand around him, meaning nothing at all. Then she raised her eyes to them.

Their faces were blank. Slater thought nothing of killing a man. She thought she’d been the same, but she realised she’d only been suppressing it all along. Sooner or later it catches up to you. Truthfully, she’d never taken anyone’s life herself. She’d always had people for that.

She didn’t think she had the tenacity to pull a trigger.

These men did.

She relented, and spoke first. ‘What now?’

‘We’re going to let you live,’ King said.

She knew the next question immediately. ‘Why?’

If she were in their shoes, she’d rid the world of Gloria Kerr. It’d be better off without her.

Slater said, ‘Your daughter.’

It didn’t compute.

Kerr shook her head.

She said, ‘You know what I did to her.’

‘We know other things, too,’ King said. ‘We heard Melanie’s account. Icke brought her to Wan’s. Icke indoctrinated her. Icke turned her to the life.’

‘I let it happen.’

‘We know,’ Slater said. ‘Which for me is good enough to put a bullet in you.’

King said, ‘Good enough for me, too.’

She said, ‘So then what is this?’

‘This is a compromise,’ Slater said. ‘We’re not berserkers. It might seem that way, but you need a level head to do what we do. And a level head gave us answers we’d rather not have come to.’

King said, ‘Melanie’s a recovering heroin addict. She’s fragile, she’s riddled with trauma. We kill you — that’s the icing on the cake. That’s a downward spiral waiting to happen. Her life is almost ruined now, but she’s not all the way gone. She will be if she’s isolated even further. She’ll turn back to drugs, because they’ll shut the voices up. She’s been rebelling for months, maybe a full year. That doesn’t go away like that.’

He snapped his fingers.

Slater said, ‘You let it happen. There’s so much you could have done, and you didn’t. You were supposed to care for her, protect her, and instead you ran a business she was involved in with all the cruelty of a sociopath.’

‘I am a sociopath,’ Kerr said.

‘You’re not,’ King said. ‘You’re a messed-up woman trying her very hardest to be one.’

Kerr didn’t answer.

She couldn’t.

Emotion was gripping her — a rare, foreign sensation she’d experienced an awful lot of over the last fortnight.

Slater said, ‘Today everything changes.’

King said, ‘You changed midway through the carnage. You flipped on everyone the moment your daughter’s life hung in the balance. Deep down, under all the corruption and madness, you care about her.’

Kerr said, ‘I do.’

Slater said, ‘Raise her right. Guide her to the right path. Don’t force it. But be there for her. Try not to speak about the past. The past is the past.’

Kerr said, ‘She doesn’t deserve a bitch like me.’

King said, ‘No, she doesn’t. But she deserves a future, and you’re still her mother, and you’re the only one who’s going to be able to stop her relapsing. It’s coded into her brain now — that life, the drugs, the parties, the prostitution, the thrills, the money. She knows what it did to her but that doesn’t mean she’s out of the woods. Otherwise there’d be no one at addiction meetings. They’d realise they were destroying themselves, and they’d stop cold turkey, just like that. That’s not how people are.’

Kerr saw Slater twitch.

She thought nothing of it.

She said, ‘I’ll do everything I possibly can for her, but I know you don’t believe me.’

Slater said, ‘We believe you.’

‘How could you? After what you’ve seen?’

‘Because if you even entertain the idea of dipping a pinky finger back in murky waters,’ Slater said, ‘we’ll know.’

She masked a shiver.

He continued. ‘You never asked how we found you in the first place. How we knew so much. We’re everywhere, Gloria. We’re your guardian angels. We’re the ones who lurk in the shadows, making sure you don’t slip up. If you even slip up once…’

She said, ‘I won’t.’

King said, ‘Of course you won’t. Or we’ll be there. If we catch a whiff that Melanie’s not in a good place, if she’s reverted back to old habits…’

Kerr waited for him to finish.

He didn’t.

Then Slater pointed the Glock at Icke’s corpse between them and fired three shots into it. Blood sprayed, flecking her face, and she recoiled. Before she’d even realised what she was doing, she screamed. She never let her fear out, no matter how much it affected her. Showing fear was the ultimate weakness, and now she’d committed the cardinal sin. The noise, the blood, the implication. It all got to her at a primal level.

She was broken.

She lifted her gaze back to them, eyes wet with tears, not blood.

Slater said, ‘One slip up.’

King said, ‘One mistake.’

Slater said, ‘You’ll wish you were never born.’

All she could do was nod.

And then they were gone. She thought she caught a mirage of them getting into Icke’s BMW and driving away, but it could have been an illusion. One moment she blinked, and the next they weren’t there. Maybe her mind was playing tricks on her.

Maybe it wasn’t.

It was just her and the corpse of Alastair Icke, and