REGRETS
by Eric Beetner

In the second it took to squeeze the trigger I knew I was making a mistake. Had she lied to me? Sure. Had she taken advantage of me? Of course. But killing her...an instant too late it seemed like such a bad idea.
   
Everyone always says your life flashes before your eyes right before you get killed, if you know you’re getting killed that is. She knew it. This isn’t a big room and even though the lights are off she knew damn well I had a gun. She asked me to bring it tonight. She also knew damn well it was pointed at her face.
   
In short, I’m assuming her life flashed. Could have been the muzzle fire but, either way. All I saw was our life together; all six months of it. Meeting at The Anchor, a bar usually reserved for grunts and deckhands like me, not yacht owners like her. The scent she gave off like a bitch dog in heat. She was looking for anyone, not just me, but I took the bait first.
   
A fast one up against the cold metal of the women’s room stall wasn’t the most romantic way to begin but it was exciting. It was always exciting. I should have been more pissed when I found out she was married but I had to admit to myself that it was no shock. A woman like that - dripping with stones, money to burn, five years past her prime but surgically altered to look ten years before it - married and bored and that equals dangerous.
   
The danger, I thought, was the possibility of getting caught. I didn’t know a damn thing about her husband except that he had money and he didn’t satisfy her. I didn’t and I did. That’s how our little trio worked. He bought the 1000 thread count sheets and I fucked her on them. He couldn’t get his boat out to sea without a crew of six and I could pilot it solo. That’s where we first hatched the plan, floating at sea one night.

   
In the instant it took for the bullet to leave the barrel of the gun I knew I had just checked in to a prison sentence, maybe even the chair. I couldn’t blame her either. Right up until the sound of the hammer hitting the firing cap blasted my ears I had blamed her and then it was as if the shock of the sound flipped a switch and I could finally see that this was my fault.
   
You just don’t bang another man’s wife. Guys on the docks had a lot of ways to say it. You don’t cut another man’s bait. You don’t bait another man’s hook. You don’t cast your pole in another man’s ocean. You get the drift.
   
It’s not like she was even that great looking. She really won’t be in another .008 seconds when the bullet reaches her forehead.
   
Her ass was tight from the daily workouts and her tits were huge from the doctors and the saline but her face was the kind that you could tell wasn’t going to age well and that process had started a few years back. It was the excitement. Any man will tell you that’s why they do it. Getting to have athletic sex on a six million dollar boat wasn’t too shabby either.
   
On that boat I was the captain. I could make her do whatever I wanted and she was eager to do it. I wore his silk robes and helped myself to the scotch and I haven’t been able to drink the standard bar-issue swill since.
   
When she first suggested killing him I thought of the boat, not her. The idea of being the permanent captain on that magnificent vessel was far more appealing than being with her while she fought the inevitable tide of aging with ever more radical surgeries and modifications.
   
She, the girl, wasn’t worth killing for but she, the boat, was.
   
So tonight when I showed up ready to get my first face-to face meeting with him just before I shot him dead, I was a little pissed off when she wanted to cancel the whole affair.
   
Cold feet. Cheating on her husband she could do with no regret and no remorse and I’m not so dumb to think that I was the first. Killing crossed some sort of line that she didn’t seem to know was there until she was right upon it.
   
But by then I had already made plans for my boat.
   
She begged and pleaded, even offered to keep on fucking me, but she wanted me to take the gun and leave right away. If there was no gun she’d still be alive. If I was going to strangle him or something I don’t think I would have turned that violence on her but with the gun it was so easy.
   
It wasn’t until it was a done deal that I even thought twice about it.

   
In the split second of time it took for her brains to exit her skull out the back and land on the wall behind her I stopped thinking on the past and saw the future. I was screwed.
   
I regretted ever falling for her obvious come on. I regretted letting her tell me she loved me and I regretted lying to her and saying it back.
   
Mostly in that moment I regretted that her husband was in the next room and that I knew for a fact I couldn’t pull that trigger a second time.
   
The room was dark again after the millisecond spark of the muzzle fire and silent again after the explosion of the bullet. A brief moment of peace and calm like being on the ocean at night.
   
Then, creeping in, was the sound of blood and brain slowly dripping down the wall and of the husband rattling the doorknob eagerly awaiting our first meeting.

Bio: Eric Beetner has had crime stories featured at A Twist of Noir and in the debut release of Crooked. He is currently shopping two novels, one co-written with noir writer JB Kohl. He lives and works in L.A. as a film and TV editor, writer and director. ericbeetner.blogspot.com and ericbeetner.com