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Hans and Mary Eileen were drinking whiskey after an evening out with friends before they got into a drunken argument. They had thrown off their clothes with the abandon of teenage lovers whose parents were away for the night and raced to the bed.
All went well, until Hans made a mistake.
“What did you say?” Mary Eileen said with just a hint of slurred words and way more Irish brogue than was normal. She’d had more than her share of Jameson’s out of a bottle Hans had brought home from the restaurant. Mixing it with wine had sharpened her wits, or so she thought.
Hans put his arms around her and squeezed as he picked her up off the bed.
“What did you call me,” she said.
Hans held her a little tighter, tensing — Mary Eileen could feel the muscles in his arms tighten up. He was behind her. She could feel him getting hard and then softening against her butt.
“I asked,” Hans said, “if you had a good time tonight with Cathy and Phil.”
“No, you didn’t, you fucking pig,” Mary Eileen said as she spun around to face him and push his arms down and his body away from her.
“You called me, ‘Cathy,’” Mary Eileen said. “You drifted off in your mind. You were pretending you were with her.”
Cathy was even younger that Mary Eileen. She was much cuter and even spoke German, as least enough to get Hans to laugh at a couple of jokes that neither Phil nor Mary Eileen could understand at dinner.
“I did not,” Hans said. He stood straight up. His six-foot-four-inch frame towered over Mary Eileen by nearly a foot. It was usually enough to scare her into submission. Some nights she liked that. In the beginning, she had loved it. He was so much like her father, Michael, as she remembered him in the Old Country.
But it wasn’t working for either of them, tonight.
“You fucking are hot for her,” Mary Eileen said, bouncing a fingertip off his chest.
Hans had opened his shirt at dinner, pretending it was too warm. God, how I hate that, Mary Eileen had thought at the time.
It wasn’t the wine or the Jameson's that had her simmering. She had simmered at dinner. Mary Eileen was close to a full boil, now.
“You always have been,” she continued. “Every fucking woman you fucking see, you have to think about fucking them.”
“I do not. You need to calm down, young lady.”
“Young lady? Who the fuck do you think you are talking to?”
“I’m talking to a fucking brat, that’s who I’m talking to,” Hans said. “See, I can drop the F-bomb too.”
Hans took a step toward her.
She took a step back.
He reached toward her and ran his fingers through her thick, auburn hair which had fallen to her shoulders after the red ribbon that had been holding it disappeared.
Mary Eileen took another step back and grabbed Hans’ hand to keep it away from her hair
“Sie sind mein schönes Mädchen,” Hans said, “ich werde dich immer lieben.”
Mary Eileen stopped. Now she held Hans by the wrist and moved a step closer to him.
My beautiful girl, I will love you always, Mary Eileen translated to herself. Hans had taught her a few phrases in German, phrases he wanted her to know. She might not have gotten every word correct, but she understood.
Even though Mary Eileen didn’t think she could trust Hans to keep his big thing out of any girl or woman who offered, she gave in. His blue eyes, cold silver hair, wide shoulders and that goddamn dimple on the left side of his face always does it, she thought.
She stepped closer to him.
Hans put both arms around her waist and drew Mary Eileen tight against his chest. She could feel his heat beating.
“Und ich bin dein, Daddy,” she said, “und ich bin dein. I am yours, Daddy.”
It was time for some intense role play. She could feel how excited Hans had become and that aroused Mary Eileen.
They went to bed and made love as a father and his little girl.
But this was not settled as far as Mary Eileen was concerned. Even while she was making love to Hans, she was thinking about how to get even with him and best-case scenario; be free of him
When she returned from the bathroom, Mary Eileen sat on her side of the bed, placed her hand on Hans’ chest, and told him that she still loved him and always would.
Hans rolled over on his side, facing away from her and went to sleep. To add insult to injury, he began snoring.
Hans was ignoring her. She might have been able to tolerate that, but he was also snoring. That was the final straw.
Mary Eileen was enraged.
The Beretta was under the mattress on her side of the bed.
While Hans rested peacefully, snoring perhaps as gently as a man could, Mary Eileen reached under the bed. Her hand came back with the pistol, the same gun she had used to kill David.
Hans was on his side, facing away from Mary Eileen. He was still snoring. If he hadn’t been snoring, Mary Eileen might have stopped. But he didn’t, so she didn’t. Holding her breath, she pressed the barrel the gun against the back his head and fired. The first one was the tough one. After that, Mary Eileen squeezed off four more shots into the back of her lover’s head.
Each .22 caliber bullet made a relatively clean entrance. Like with David, most of the bullets stayed inside his skull, ricocheting through Han’s brain, chewing up tissue and his life as they went. But those that exited Han’s head blew a decent-sized hole in his face.
The bed was a mess. It was worse than the brains, blood, skull fragments and God knows what else coated the dining room table after David’s execution. His remains had fallen on a wooden table and a tile floor.
Hans’ remains soaked deep into the mattress.
Mary Eileen was breathing fast and furiously. Her heart was racing. Once her breathing slowed, she crept to the bedroom window and sighed as quietly as possible, trying to sense if the neighbors had heard anything.
The night was still. Everything was quiet. Mary Eileen calmed herself, walked into the living room, laid down on the couch, and went to sleep. She knew from the last time; there was no need to rush.
~
THE NEXT MORNING SHE went back into the bedroom, where Hans’ body was still lying on the bed. Even more so than she had been with David’s corpse, Mary Eileen was racked with guilt.
Mary Eileen knelt beside the bed, touched his hand and asked Hans for his forgiveness before she began the process of disposing of his body.
It was early Sunday morning. The neighborhood was as quiet as it had been several hours ago when Mary Eileen first squeezed the trigger on the Beretta. Beyond the task that lay ahead of her, she had no worries.
Mary Eileen knew it was time to go to work. She dragged Hans’ body downstairs to the cellar where the chainsaw and cement were waiting.
“I guess Cheryl is going to hear the coffee grinder again,” Mary Eileen said to herself.