Free Assume Nothing by Gar Anthony Haywood

thirst for blood out of the box, he would never get it back in. He either learned to keep himself in check, or all was surely lost.
    ‘Please,’ he said, his voice a dry, barbed whisper. ‘You have to trust me on this, Dana. I’ve got to handle this situation alone. There’s no other way to be sure.’
    ‘Sure of what?’
    He took a long time to answer. Tears and images of the wife and two children he’d once thought were his forever began to cloud his vision like a veil. ‘That I won’t have to bury you or my son. Been there, done that.’ He shook his head and swallowed hard. ‘I’m never going there again.’
    Dana remained far from convinced. Not going to the police for help ran counter to everything her instincts were telling her to do. But there was truth in her husband’s words to her, truth she couldn’t deny even to herself. Seeking police protection was no guarantee of her safety or that of their son, and nothing short of a guarantee would suffice. She hadn’t suffered what Reddick had suffered, could only imagine the depths of his pain and heartbreak, but she had seen enough over the years to know that he would never survive it if anything were to happen to her or Jake. Asking him to entrust their lives to others while people who had threatened them with death were still breathing was asking the impossible.
    Even so, Dana might have held her ground and insisted they call the police over Reddick’s objections were it not for the simple fact that Jake was her son, too. She loved Reddick, but Jake was her life, the center of her universe. If Reddick needed to know with absolute certainty that Baumhower and his friend would never again touch a hair on the boy’s head, no less so did Dana. And, it shamed her to realize now, she didn’t much care what such certainty would ultimately cost.
    ‘All right,’ she said, reaching out to take Reddick’s hand.
    He held on to her tight, drawing all the strength from her that he could. He knew he would need it. He’d been an emotional cripple for a long time, a borderline psychopath walking a razor wire between normalcy and madness, and now he’d been pushed over the edge. His head throbbed and his body ached, and he felt like the only thing holding him together was his skin, that if he turned too quickly in one direction or another, he’d crumble into a pile of ashes that would then scatter to the far winds. But he couldn’t let that happen. Not yet. He had work to do first, dirty work, and to do it he would have to retain some level of functionality. One day or two, that was all he needed.
    After that, he’d gladly surrender in full to the darkness that had been calling him for the past nine years.

TEN
    I t didn’t take Clarke long to begin having second thoughts. He should have just killed Reddick and been done with it.
    Cross, of course, were he aware of what Clarke had done, would say just the opposite: Clarke should have never approached Reddick in the first place. So what if he heard about Gillis Rainey’s body turning up in the river? Was that any reason to assume he’d put the dead man and Andy Baumhower together, ever? Why make a pre-emptive move to guard against something they had no reason to believe would ever happen, and one so fraught with risk, at that? Instead of improving the odds that Reddick would never go to the police with word of the car accident he’d had with Andy last Sunday morning, Clarke had all but ensured it.
    Unless the scare he’d put into Reddick proved to be big enough.
    That was the one thing Clarke was becoming less and less sure of as time wore on. By early Saturday morning, one long restless night after he’d fled Reddick’s home, Clarke was as convinced as ever that trying to silence Reddick before he could become a problem had been the right thing to do. Sitting back and doing nothing, playing the percentages that Reddick would never connect Gillis Rainey to Andy Baumhower, would have been a punk move, the