BALTIMORE, MARYLAND

The house’s spooky creaks woke the crooked cop up, but the footsteps is what made him get out of bed. They came from downstairs, heavy and slow. Like whomever they belonged to didn’t care that a man with a gun might be carefully descending the stairs, ready to transfer a bullet from his clip to the intruder without any hesitation. He closed his mouth and opened his nostrils as he reached the bottom of the staircase. Back against the wall, he crouched to squatting and peered around the corner into the living room.

Son of a, he thought.

The intruder was big. That much he could easily tell. He tried to make out features and shapes, but the darkness was too thick. What he gets for making his wife close the curtains every night before going to bed. He couldn’t help smiling at the irony of it. His privacy was impeding him.

Rising to his feet, still against the wall, he took one more glance around the corner. The realization that he didn’t feel the least bit apprehensive at the prospect of shooting a man in his own home, where his wife and two daughters slept, passed through his head as he clicked the safety off. He brushed it off, crediting his experience. He’d shot men before. No big deal. They were all scum, like the intruder, and they got what they deserved.

With that thought still at the front of his mind, he swung around the corner and squeezed the trigger several times. The shots were thunderously loud in the stillness, which didn’t surprise him at all. What did was what he saw in the split-second muzzle flashes. Even after the intruder escaped through the nearest window subsequent to briefly getting tangled in the curtains, he stood frozen in his living room with his gun raised, replaying the images in his mind. Was it the darkness playing tricks on his eyes? Was it the intensity of the muzzle flashes? Or did he actually see¾ and shoot at¾ a devil?

RATE THIS CHAPTER!