Chapter 8

As we now approach the bedroom, the voices get louder.

“Hey, I hear someone.”

This voice is obviously Donnie’s and I’ll say the fucking thing you are not supposed to say and that’s that I can tell a white kid’s voice, especially an upper middle class white kid, from a black kid’s voice with just about 100% confidence.

“Dude, hey man, that sounds weird! Like not just what one person coming up the stairs and moving through the hallway would sound like.”

This voice is Cheeba’s although it’s definitely way harder to distinguish between Cheeba and Street’s voice than it is to tell either of them from Donnie.

“Yeah, dude, just hang back for a minute. Don’t go sticking your head out the door just yet. Let’s figure out just who’s stomping around your house like a Clydesdale before we let ‘em know we’re here. To be honest, all that racket sounds more like a burglar than your mom, don’t you think Chee?”

They’re doing just what I had asked them to do, Cheeba and Street, and I am starting to feel bad that I ever thought that they would fuck this plan up. Instead, they’re keeping Donnie in the room because, if he leaves before I get there then he’s a wild card. He could run from the house before we could stop him and if he were to call the cops then everything I’ve been planning will probably be over before it gets started. I’m determined to make sure that this doesn’t happen and, as good a job as my two guys are doing, there’s no guarantee that they’ll be able to hold him in there if he starts to freak out. This almost causes me to run and drag Beverly, still mostly hopping on one foot, along with me so that, by the time Donnie sees us and his mind is able to believe what he is seeing, it’s too late for him to flee. If he had tried, he would have run right into us because, now, I come charging through the door as I half drag Beverly along with me. We charge into the room and then I stop but not before sticking my leg out in front of Beverly’s one uninjured foot. It cuts her leg out from under her as I push her forward with all of my weight and she goes sprawling onto her own son’s bed, a place where I am hoping she will be spending many hours tonight.

“PWAH!” exclaims Beverly as her arms fly out in front of her but they are unable to keep her from face planting on her son’s rumpled sheets. Her exclamation is almost perfectly timed to Donnie’s and his loud cry of “Hey!” contains a plethora of emotions: fear, shock, concern and sadness all in one little word.

“Stop hurting my mom!”

I’ll give him credit, at least the kid found the gumption to overcome whatever fear he was feeling and charge towards me but, if I needed to catch Beverly by surprise to beat her up awhile ago, no such sneak attack is necessary with her son. Instead, I let him charge towards me as I fall back a little. Then, with this feint complete, I stop falling back and instead leap forward while hitting the ground at the same time. It works just like I planned and Donnie is still trying to process what I am doing when he trips over me as I hit the floor. His feet stay where they are but his body continues forward and, for the briefest of instants, he almost looks like he is flying like Superman before he then just looks like he is falling and heading for the corner made up of the bedframe and the nightstand. That’s a bit of a pun because “heading” is exactly what Donnie is doing. His hands fly out in front of him to catch him as he falls but they don’t stop him from flying forward and his head connects with a bone-jarring crash, slamming into both the frame of the bed and the corner of what looked like a pretty expensive nightstand. I wonder, as she heard her son’s head now crash into the heavy solid wood of both the nightstand and the bed frame, if Beverly was thinking she should have, for once in her life, been cheap as Donnie’s head would now be crashing into cheap particleboard instead of solid oak or another heavy wood.