Take One With You Read Free

hour.
    As he flailed at her awkwardly, she reached underneath his arm and lunged for the throttle. He slapped her hand away.
    “What the fuck are you doing?” he screamed, still not fully understanding. Is the bitch crazy?
    She got hold of it on the second try. He elbowed the top of her head this time, but she held fast, and it was then that he made his fatal mistake, at ninety-two miles an hour.
    Max hit her arm three times in succession, first striking her wrist, which caused the bike to throttle up, and then her forearm, fracturing her radius.
    Missy screamed in pain, nearly blacking out, but she held onto the grip.
    At that point, all Max had to do was to ease up on the throttle and onto the brake, guiding the bike to a stop. Missy had no strength at that point to either speed up the bike or yank the handlebar to the side, but Max had never been real smart about women, or anything else, for that matter, and he brought his fist down again.
    With every last ounce of strength she possessed, Missy tightened her grip and held on, bracing for the blow. As he struck her arm, Max realized his mistake, but by then it was too late.
    Bitch doesn’t want to kill me. She wants to kill us both.
    The front wheel yanked sharply to the right causing the bike to wobble violently and Big Max laid her down at one hundred and one miles an hour, the bike slamming them against the roadway and dragging them against the rough pavement, burning their flesh from the top and skinning it from below across seventy feet of asphalt.
    Even his last instinct was a major fuck-up; had Max just let go and not tried to save himself, he might have survived in slightly better shape.
    But Big Max was never very good at letting go of anything, one of the qualities, and there were many, that usually got him in trouble.
    The bike finally hit an uneven spot in the pavement and flipped, mercifully extricating the two of them from its hellish embrace, and Missy was thrown off the road and into a ditch. Her back was broken, half her face was torn away, but when she closed her eyes all she saw was the smiling face of her sister.
    Max opened his good eye and stared into the setting sun. For a moment he imagined he was lifting weights in the yard, listening to the chatter and enjoying the breeze, until he tried and failed to move his legs. He attempted to call out, but only swallowed blood. He managed to roll over, and saw his favorite tattoo lying on the road beside him.
    PUSSY
    He’d last seen that particular prison tat in the mirror, on the inside of his lower lip.
    Suddenly Max wanted to scream, needed to, but could only gurgle and spit out coppery chunks of his own tongue. He fought the urge to touch his face, which he now felt sure was mostly gone. It was debatable whether he could raise his arm, anyway.
    He remembered, but only for a moment, the blonde outside the prison gate, and after much effort, was able to look around for her. She’d disappeared like a whistle in the wind. Somehow he figured out that she must have been thrown clear of the road, and Big Max began to writhe his way to the edge of the road where he hoped he could watch her die. One of her boots stood up on its heel a few feet away, mocking his slow progression.
    Missy, for her part, had a couple of tattoos of her own. The one on her shoulder read Clairebear, and had remained intact despite the accident. A more recent one, a rather strange symbol on her wrist that would be noted and photographed as part of her autopsy, had been partially peeled away and thus would cause much consternation for the detective who reexamined her case much later after speaking, or at least trying to speak, to what remained of the man who’d raped her sister.
    Max made it to the top edge of the slope just as the slow-moving station wagon he’d passed near the prison pulled to a stop on the shoulder, its wide-eyed driver attempting to both shield the eyes of his elderly wife and call 9-1-1, all while pulling to a