Step On A Crack

Chapter 82

EUGENA HUMPHREY, unfortunately, had seen dead bodies before.

Her grandmother’s was the first, and she remembered how angry the withered, sadly questioning change in the face of her beloved Gram had made her. More recently, with her philanthropy work, she’d been shown pictures of atrocities throughout the world that needed somebody’s attention, and she had tried her best to help.

But even the garish images of the hacked-up villagers in equatorial Africa couldn’t prepare her for what she had just witnessed with her own eyes.

Just shot him, Eugena thought. Stepped up to the pew and just shot him through the head.

Why? How could one human being do that to another?

Now she watched the gunmen drag the body along the marble. What a horrible sound it made, like blood being squeegeed off glass. A hijacker at each side pulled at the body’s rag-doll arms as though it were some nonsensical schoolyard game.

A shiny black loafer came off one foot. Terrible detail. The open eyes of the lolling head seemed to make eye contact with Eugena as the corpse was pulled into the shadowed gallery beside the altar.

Why me? the lifeless eyes seemed to accuse her as he was pulled out of sight. Why me and not you?

They just killed my dear friend, Eugena thought, and then she began to sob uncontrollably, and she knew she would be changed forever by this.