The Aftermath

The guests had gone. Gone, back to whatever lavish homes they'd dragged themselves out of. Gone home to try and calm down, have a drink to steady their nerves and talk in astonished tones about what had happened. For the unfortunate few near to the incident, it was time to try and get the bits of blood and scraps of brains out of their clothing and hair. For the even less fortunate ones it meant a trip to hospital to be treated for shock.
The armed waiters had been good - fast and professional, but they'd fond nothing, not even a spent catridge casing. Whoever had taken the shot was either good or just plain careful. The only thing the waiters had turned up at all was a patch of flattened grass on a hillock overlooking the house and some van tracks on a nearby lane. They couldn't even be sure that the flattened grass wasn't caused by a resting animal - there were deer in the surrounding woods, but it did seem to correlate with the direction of the shot.
Henry couldn't believe it. Some fucker had made Pepper's head explode. He'd been showered with gore and hit the deck, but no second shot came. Had they been disturbed? Did they only have time for one shot? It didn't make sense. If they were careful enough to pick up the spent casing, you'd think they would have been able to shoot straight enough to hit him and not the dog. He was, after all, a much bigger target than a poor Pomeranian.
He considered the idea that the shooter meant to hit the dog, but that was just madness. Why kill his dog? What would that achieve? Unless...
Henry's mind whirled, thinking of all the possible reasons and scenarios. This was Henry's real talent - he could come up with fifty worst-case scenarios for any given situation by the time you'd finished explaining it to him. If he hadn't ended up doing what he was doing he'd have made either a great risk assesment manager or else he would have written some of the best disaster movies ever made.
It must have been intended to hurt him emotionally rather than physically, if the plan was to indeed hit the dog. It wasn't exactly a secret how much he and his wife cared for their dog - Pepper had won best of breed awards for fuck's sake, but really if that was the case why not aim for his wife or daughter?
Poor Pepper. He'd been such a good dog. A member of the family. He'd always yap if anyone came up the drive, before they'd even reached the door, like an early warning system.
Henry was going to have to make a lot of apologetic phone calls. Some of the people at the part were actually respectable and were not used to shots ringing out or exploding dogs. There were those at the party who he knew would be less traumatised by the experience and some of them would no doubt be ringing him over the coming days, probably with shot dog jokes at the ready. He'd laugh along, maybe even with one or two quips of his own but it would just be for appearences sake.
Then it clicked. Bentenman. Bentenman had said he'd wanted to talk to Henry at the party and Henry was walking over to Bentenman when it had happened. Bentenman had the biggest grudge out of anyone there, after losing two and a half million on a property deal that had only cost Henry half a million. That was enough reason for someone like Bentenman to want to hurt Henry.
Right, thought Henry. That public school fucker wants to kick off, then we'll kick off. He snatched the phone from its cradle and dialled Jeff. Jeff was Henry's second in command, his go to guy. Jeff got done whatever Henry needed doing and he was very good at it. Henry had known Jeff for almost fifteen years now and whilst he trusted him completely, if he was honest with himself, they weren't really friends. Jeff and his wife would come over for dinner once a week and Henry and his would go over to theirs. The talk around the table was always easy and light and there were no awkward pauses. They shared a similar sense of humour - dark and dry, perhaps unsurprisingly considering the things they'd seen and done in their lives .
Still despite all this and the fact that if ever Henry needed anything whatsoever, Jeff was there, Henry couldn't bring himself to think of Jeff as a true friend. He was the closest thing Henry had to one though, as everyone else Henry knew either worked for him or against him in some capacity.
Jeff answered within three rings and Henry explained his theory that Bentenman had engineered the shooting, that it was possible that Pepper was indeed the intended target
and why Henry thought this was the case.
Jeff simply listened, grunted in the right places and then asked what Henry wanted done. Henry paused - the moment was pregnant with possibilities, all of them spinning around inside Henry's head until one came to the fore, like a ball plucked from the swirling masses in a bingo machine.
Henry, with his talent for worst case scenarios, had imagined such a scenario for Bentenman and even Henry had to admit, it was a bad one. Jeff, ever the stoic, grunted again and told Henry he'd get it done.
With that done, Henry relaxed back into his leather sofa, the material creasing around his ample frame, picked up his glass and sipped the smokey flavour of the whiskey. He should probably go and talk to the wife. She'd been devastated by Pepper's death and had retreated up to the bedroom while Henry had been working out what had happened. Knowing her, she would have sobbed for a bit before retreating into two bottles - one of vodka, the other of Valium.
Henry rolled the glass between his fingers and let his head loll onto the back of the sofa. He sighed heavily and rubbed his temples. Slowly he rose from the sofa, knees creaking and shuffled the couple of steps to the table and set his drink down. He climbed the thickly carpeted stairs and made his way along the landing to the bedroom.
She was sat on the end of the bed, cheeks streaked with mascara, eyes red rimmed ans puffy, holding a sodden rag of a tissue limply in one hand. Henry walked over to the bedside cabinet and grabbed a handful of tissues. He sat next to her and handed her some of the tissues. She sniffled and wiped her eyes. He looked at her and she gazed back for a second before looking away, conscious of how she looked. Henry stroked her hair. He thought she was the most beautiful woman he'd ever seen, even at times like this or when she woke up in the morning with her hair all over the place.
It was a shame. She'd been so beautiful and funny and interesting and lively. Those days were gone now. After giving birth to Sarah, she'd suffered from post-natal depression that slid inexorably into a full blown breakdown with delusional episodes. She started seeing things and it got to the point where henry couldn't take her anywhere. She was so much the trophy wife that she may as well have had handles and an engraving but Henry had genuinely cared for her, as much as he was ever able to. Now she spent her days on Lithium and her evenings on what she called her double V's, which was vodka and Valium.
She told Henry that she hadn't taken her Lithium today. Today of all days. She was shaking, the reality of what had happened had been too much for her. She leant into Henry's shoulder and began slowly and quietly sobbing again. He put his arm around her and told her it would be ok, they'd find the fucker that did this and make them pay. She wailed and cried out what if it had been him? Or Her? Or Sarah for fuck's sake? What if they'd shot Sarah?
He consoled her for a couple of hours before she was calm enough to lie down. She was asleep within seconds, the exhaustion of the day, along with the Valium, sending her off. As soon as her breathing deepened, Henry got up gently and walked around the house. He often paced along the corridors late at night, thinking things through. He rarely needed more than four or five hours sleep a night. He remembered reading somewhere that the more intelligent a person was, the less sleep they were likely to need, but that had never made sense to Henry. Surely, he reasoned, if you were using your brain more, you'd need more sleep since the brain is the only part of the body that actually needs sleep? Besides, he was hardly intelligent - he hadn't even finished school. Sarah was always telling him off for saying things like that. She said academic achievement and intelligence were two seperate things and often unrelated. God only knew where Sarah got her brains from, her mother wasn't exactly due to appear on Mastermind any time soon either.
God, Sarah. What if it had been Sarah? As much as he'd loved Pepper, it was just a fucking dog. You could go out and buy a new one. Not something you could do with your only daughter. As he walked, tears pricked the corner of his eyes. He stopped and leaned against the wall outside her bedroom door. He choked back a sob and stood for a moment, staring at her closed door, thanking anything that was listening that she was ok.
His head filled with images of Sarah, limp and bloodied, or lying face down in the grass, which was growing redder by the second, or with half her face missing, or running up the garden with her in his arms, her head lolling unnaturally as he ran. As useful as his worst-case scenario talent could be, at times like this it was a definite drawback. The images he would envision could be as real as the world in front of his eyes sometimes and he could see his imaginings in crystal clarity.
As a child he'd been plagued by these thoughts, unwanted and intrusive, just as his father had told Henry he was once. Henry had been worried that he was some sort of psychic, that these thoughts and visions were prophetic in some form, but although many of the things he imagined as a child did in fact happen to him, he learned that they were just in his imagination whether they happened in the real world or not.
He was crying freely now, still tormented by ever worse images of Sarah - now bleeding to death from a ruptured femoral artery, hands on her thigh trying to stem the flow of life leaving her, her pleading face looking to him to make it stop and then eventually passing out from the loss of blood and dying before anyone could help.
He went into the kitchen to fix himself a snack. As he closed the fridge door, he thought he caught a glimpse of movement outside the french doors from the corner of his eye. Cautiously, he put the plate of chicken onto the counter and went through to the study, unlocked his desk drawer and took out his gun. It was a Sig Sauer thirteen shot pistol, the silencer already in place. He flipped the safety and headed back to the kitchen door.
He peered out carefully, exposing as little as possible for someone to target. He could see very little but there was no obvious threat. He stepped out and as he did, the security light went on outside the barn. His head snapped in that direction and then he was running toward the barn. He skirted around the main building, taking care to stay close to the wall and down the path to the barn as quickly as he could as there was very little in the way of cover.
As he got to the barn, he double checked the gun was cocked and the safety was off and then inched toward the barn door. He gingerly flicked the catch and eased the door open. Henry peered around the door into the darkness. He opened the door just enough to slip through if he breathed in and started to go inside.
Just as Henry had got fully inside the barn, a fox ran out from the shadows, between his legs and out into the fresh night. Henry almost had a coronary. He doubled over to catch his breath, laughing at himself as he did. He walked out of the barn and latched the door. As he walked back to the house he was unable to see the figure slipping around the back of the barn.