Free The New Black by Richard Thomas

to go to Lexington and back probably. That’s when panic kicked in, and I ran back into the house, toward me and Penny’s bathroom, knowing the Browning was going to be gone, but hoping it wasn’t, and when I got there and didn’t find it where it should have been, I figured there wasn’t any way I was going to see Penny alive again, but I was wrong.
    2.
    It was Penny who found him. It took some time, but after a while the authorities pieced together what had happened. Around six in the evening, they said, must have been the time I fell asleep. When the house got quiet enough, Danny went out to the shed and brought in the long extension cord and ran it to the car battery. While it was charging he loaded up three assault rifles, including the Kalashnikov 3000, the one made to look like a AK-47, but with the guts of a MicroKal, laser gun and flamethrower and all. He took the Browning, too, and my Bowie knife, and his old play camo war paint, and a cache of armor-piercing bullets, although he never did use any of it except the 9mm. Then he sat down and ate the pancakes I had made, and washed the plate and knife and fork he had used to eat them off, and left them out to air dry.
    By time he got to Benny Gil’s house, he had worked himself up into something cold enough that Benny Gil didn’t argue, didn’t even need to be shown knife or gun to know it was in his best interest to give up Penny’s location and get Danny on his way. I don’t know what that means, exactly, except to say that Benny Gil is not a person I’ve ever known or heard of to be afraid of anyone or anything.
    What Benny Gil told Danny was that Penny was staying with her sister’s husband’s nephew Kelly, a bookish boy we never knew well because he never came around to family things, probably because he, or more likely his mother, thought he was better than us, from what they call a more refined stock.
    Kelly was, by then, well to do, UK law degree in hand, specialty in horse law. He even had a office at Keeneland and another at Churchill Downs, and if he thought as highly of himself as he seemed to every year on the television, sitting there next to some half-dead Derby owner who needed a oxygen tank just to breathe, sipping a mint julep, then I’m sure him and Penny made a fine pair.
    There’s no way to know it now, but my guess is that Danny, when he heard of it, came to the same idea I did when I first heard of it, which was that something not-right was happening between Penny and that boy, but I put it out of my head at the time because it was too horrible a thing to look at directly.
    At any rate, what happened next is the part of the story that got out into the world. Danny drove east on Interstate 64, stopped at the Sonicburger in Mt. Sterling and ordered and ate a egg sandwich, then headed toward the big expensive stone houses by the airport, where Penny and Kelly was shacked up.
    When he got there, he rang the doorbell three times—that’s what Kelly’s security company came up with later—and nobody was home, and I guess he didn’t want to wait, and I guess he knew well enough what ended up being true, which was that there was something worse for a mother than to be killed by her son.
    At the funeral, the preacher and everyone else said that wasn’t the case, that Danny was sick in the head and that these things happen in the brain, something trips or snaps or misfires, and then somebody is doing something they wouldn’t do if they were themself. But I think that’s the kind of thing people say when what they want to do is make themselves feel better instead of look straight ahead at the truth and all its ugly. Because what I think and pretty near to know happened goes like this:
    When he got there, he rang that doorbell three times, and nobody was home, and he got to thinking, and what he was thinking about was clear enough to him, and what he was thinking was