I'm Not Dead

[ C H . 6 ]

This chapter is dedicated to @Busch_Kopf for all their helpful, insightful comments! 

Trigger Warning: Violence.

"For the last time Mr. Maneli, why did you attack Luna Mannford?"

Each time I heard her name, my ears rang as my mind cruelly showed me her mutilated face over and over.

She was a zoology major. She had a tattoo of a blue macaw parrot on her ankle. She loved green tea. She thought Randy should invest in a toupee before his bald head blinded someone. She listened to old music. She—

You know what, none of that matters anymore.

All my knowledge of her was useless because Luna was dead.

But I wasn't the one who killed her.

Sighing heavily, the detective rubbed her face before sitting back in her chair. The wood creaked from the shift of her body as she stared at me indecisively. "This will all be a lot easier if you just tell me the truth. It might even reduce your sentence." She leaned forward then. "There were witnesses Rocco. They saw you arrive at the bar with Luna and they saw you attacking her after that addict bit her. Lying isn't going to save you from this one."

They had washed her blood off my knuckles, but a tint of red remained, stubbornly clinging to the pigment of my skin.

"Mr. Maneli?"

Feeling my fingers curl into the palms of my hands then, I slammed my fists down on the table. "I told you, lady, Luna died, and she came back! That boy who got his arm ripped up, died and came back! They were attacking people, biting them, eating them! This isn't some new drug on the market, this is something else!" I took a second to swallow the dry lump in my throat, before lowering the volume of my voice. Shouting at her wasn't going to help. "You've got to believe me; I would never hurt Luna. I would never hurt anyone."

"Hmm. Okay," she then flipped open one of the folders from her pile of documents before turning it around to show me. "Your police record would say otherwise. Less than twenty-four hours ago you were arrested for drug possession after beating down some guy in a bar." 

She turned the folder around to look at it. 

"You've been arrested every other weekend for nearly a year. You've been drunk during all these arrests, even after you claimed to have gone to AA." She lowered the folder to look at me. "Your police record alone is enough reason for me to distrust you."

Sneering at her, I leaned back as well. "I'm not an alcoholic. I like to party, and occasionally I bump into the wrong crowd, doesn't make me a murderous psychopath. That argument is like telling a guy with tattoos he can't work in an office. It's judgemental as hell."

She licked her thumb before flipping through the pages in the folder. "You were drinking tonight, you were drinking all those other nights, it seems like alcohol negatively affects your moods. She looked up at me. "Says here about a year ago you filed a missing person's report for your wife Meredith. Doesn't look like they found her."

Feeling my features darken, I used every sober muscle, I had to keep myself from spitting at her. "We found out later that my wife left me. No one told me shit about it until days later. I'm not some asshole who likes hurting woman, I had to make a choice, I had to choose between Luna or my brother. I chose my brother and I would do it again in a heartbeat. If self-defense makes me a criminal, then the system is more broken then I thought."

Glaring at me, the detective rose from her seat. "Last chance Rocco, is that your final statement?" She asked.

"Yes."