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by Christopher P. Mooney

An accident, they said. Just one of those things. Sure, your daughter got knocked down but the driver of the car that killed her, technically he wasn’t doing anything wrong. Apologies all round but there’s nothing we can do. You understand, right?

Fucking wrong. Fucking no way. I’d been called many things over the years, in prison and out, but an idiot was never one of them. The whole thing reeked of bullshit. My little girl was dead and I wasn’t about to stand still for a white-wash. No way, no how. So I did a bit of digging and found out the bastard behind the wheel was the son of some rich arsehole in a corner office with a brass plaque and a view of the river whose phone had some useful contacts on speed-dial.

The grief could wait. First I had to feed the hate.

Anyone who drives that badly must like wetting his whistle before keying the ignition, I thought, and I was right. I found him in the Anchor Inn and, huddled in a corner booth, watched as he drowned himself in drink for four nights. Three nights in a row I let him drive away clean.

The fourth went like clockwork.

Drunk or sober, a driver needs brake fluid. A little nudge from me just before the junction and his car rolled over several times before coming to a stop in a flaming heap. No chance of survivors, the bulletin correctly said.

You understand, right?

Christopher P. Mooney was born and raised in Glasgow and currently survives in a small house near London. At various times in his life he has been a paperboy, a supermarket cashier, a shelf stacker, a barman, a cinema usher, a carpet-fitter’s labourer and a foreign-language assistant. He is now a professional high-school teacher of French and English and an amateur writer of crime fiction, horror fiction, adult fiction and eclectic poetry. His stories and poems have been published in print, online and on Kindle by Crooked Holster, Spelk Fiction, Dead Guns Press, Devolution Z, Revolution John, Out of the Gutter, Yellow Mama, Horror-Sleaze-Trash, Romance Magazine, Open Pen and The Molotov Cocktail.