Free Blind Fall by Christopher Rice Page A

fingers grazed empty leather.
    When John opened the front door of his trailer a crack, Alex Martin stepped forward into the security light’s near-blinding halo. No strange car parked nearby. Obviously he’d been trying to sneak up on him. But he wasn’t dressed to do harm. He wore a dark green polo shirt with an alligator label, jeans that showed off his time at the gym, and a heavy black waffle-print coat with a faux fur collar. A branch had clawed him during their race through the rain, leaving a long scratch on his left cheek that was starting to scab over. John didn’t remember him being so tall, probably because he wasn’t hunched over sobbing or running like hell to get away from him. The muscles he had were vanity muscles, the kind he’d lose in a few weeks if you got him away from whatever protein powder he was devouring every morning.
    With a wave of his right hand, John invited him inside. Alex followed, reaching into the flaps of his coat. As soon as John took a seat, Alex gently set his Sig on the tiny table in front of him, then backed away from it as if it were radioactive. “I found it a few yards from the house,” Alex said.
    “Thank you.”
    Alex nodded, gave his full attention to the floor. He stood with his back to the fridge, his arms crossed, and if John hadn’t known how much time it had taken him to get there, he probably would have assumed he didn’t intend to stay for more than a few minutes.
    “Tell me what you saw,” Alex finally said.
    The tone of his voice was gentle, not the lisping parody of homosexuals John had acted out and laughed at all his life, but something strangely close. His lips were parted slightly; John thought it looked almost like he was anticipating a kiss. I’m not a homophobe, John thought, wondering why this word had entered his vocabulary so easily. But he better make it clear he’s not expecting anything out of me that requires me to drop my drawers. Telling Alex what he had seen the night before would be equivalent to signing some sort of pact that wasn’t quite clear to him. Nevertheless, he needed to be believed.
    So John told him, starting with his decision to deliver the gift in person and his long drive through the rain. He described how he had been forced to ask for directions from a gas station attendant who had treated him as if he were dirt—now he could see that this woman had known Mike’s secret and had been afraid of what a reunion with John might bring. He told Alex about how he saw the Force Recon decal through the rain and debated going back to town for a room before he headed up the driveway, entered the house, and found Mike lassoed to the bed’s headboard, his chest hacked open, and his blood the color of ink in the dark.
    Then he remembered the detail about the V-shaped bloodstain on the doorknob. When he mentioned this, Alex blinked and straightened against the counter he had been leaning against.
    “You saw it, too?” John asked, hating the desperate note in his voice.
    Alex nodded. “On the front door, when I started running.”
    In the silence that followed, John expected the guy to break down in front of him, to sob like he had done in the woods. Instead, Alex appeared to be in a daze, as if he were straining to visualize the scene John had just described.
    “He never told me that you had a way with words,” Alex said.
    John almost asked Alex if he were being sarcastic, but he could tell he was sincere from the way he was standing, still dazed, staring away from John now, as if his image were too bright to look directly into. “Right,” John said. “He was too busy telling you about how I wasn’t a real man because I…how did he put it? Because I live in my sister’s shadow?”
    Alex seemed surprised to hear his own cruel words repeated back to him. It looked as if he had forgotten about making the comment just hours earlier, and John realized that given the events of the past forty-eight hours, that was probably the