Pyro
Chapter One
1. THE PIANO MOVER FROM HELL
Life has been a rocky road since that morning nineteen years ago when my brother and I killed Alfred. For want of a better term, the police said Alfred was our mother’s boyfriend, but we never thought of him as anything but an interloper, not until the moment Neil and I found our sneakers stuck to the floor in his blood.
The morning of the murders my brother was eight days shy of his thirteenth birthday. I was ten.
The papers called it an execution-style slaying, and it was partially due to their distorted portrayal of the event that my brother was tried and sentenced and packed away to a long series of increasingly harsher juvenile detention facilities. We made some mistakes that morning. Not that, given the same circumstances, we wouldn’t kill Alfred again. Because we would.
In later years, our memories pasted over with hope and optimism, we decided that last drunken squabble between our mother and Alfred T. Osbourne started because Mother had been on the cusp of throwing him out. Maybe she’d found the gumption to do so. We certainly wanted to believe it. She’d never be able to tell us, since she died that mo ... read full excerpt from Pyro ebook
