Free Witness to Death by Dave White

someone is going to try and kill me,” she said. “They’re coming after me for the mistake I made. When I saw you on the news—twice—the second time they said you’d been arrested, I got really scared. If they went after you, they were definitely going to come after me. And you were a sitting duck in jail. So I came to get you out. It was all I could think of. I went to Home Depot and got the turnpentine.”
“I don’t understand.”
The muscles around his stomach tightened. Bile rose in his throat and he gagged.
“You don’t get it?” Her voice was rising and cracking. “I didn’t want you to follow Peter. I wanted to protect you. And myself. And then you went and did it anyway.”
“I was just—”
“Now I’m trying to save us both,” she said. “We’re wasting time. We have to get out of here.”
John stood up. If he could just forget who he was talking to, and ask the right questions, maybe he could learn a thing or two.
“Are you caught up with the mob? Are you gambling?”
Ashley stood up too. She stepped around the table and put her arms around John’s shoulders. Her eyes were soft and watery.
“No. It’s none of that. We have to go.”
She stepped away from him.
“Is Frank a terrorist?”
“I can’t tell you, John. I can’t.”
John sat back down, his legs giving out beneath him.
He was about to say something else. He wasn’t sure what, but his mouth was open and sound was coming out, but Ashley held up a hand. John closed his mouth.
“We’re leaving now.”
She walked across the room, to the lamp near the window. She reached out and clicked it off. As she did, there was a loud bang and the cracking of glass.
She turned slowly, and he noticed the sadness in her eyes was gone. Now they were scared.
She dropped to her knees and pressed her hands to her stomach.
“Ashley? ASHLEY?”
As John got out of his seat, his entire body went numb. His hearing was replaced by a ringing sound. He tried to ignore it all as he rushed toward her.

 
Ashley fell into John’s arms. He took a step back, catching her at her elbows. Air escaped from her lips in a hiss. He looked into her eyes as they glazed over. A warm liquid oozed from her stomach on to his shirt, and he felt it soak through to his chest. Near the wound something sounded like a straw sucking up the last bits of a drink.
“John, I—” she managed but the rest was cut off as she struggled for more air.
On the fire escape a woman, tall, thin, wearing black clothes and a gray ski mask held a gun and a knife. She used the butt of the gun to punch through the already cracked lower window pane, shattering it. Little pieces crinkled to the carpet. Once most of the glass was cleared, she stepped into the apartment.
“You,” the woman said, her green eyes glaring at John through the mask. “You were the one on the news.”
She glided through the door, flipping the knife in her hand without looking at it. Her movements struck John as the exact opposite of her tone of voice.
John reeled backwards, dragging Ashley’s limp body with him. She was dead weight and he couldn’t carry her far. He felt her slipping away, out of his hands and he couldn’t stop it. The best he could do was let her hit the floor as softly as possible. It didn’t matter. She still hit the ground with a dull thud.
The woman with the knife was only ten feet away from him now. He turned, got to his feet, and ran toward the kitchen. He made it to the doorway, when he felt her hand on him. As he started to turn into the kitchen, he felt his legs go out from under him. He fell forward sliding along the tiles into the counter. The flesh in his upper left arm, near his shoulder was on fire.
John reached back toward the pain, only to feel the knife embedded in his flesh. The throbbing burn radiated through his left shoulder as he flexed his muscles to make sure they worked. They did, but the pain was excruciating.
Flat on his stomach, John tried to pull his injured arm around