Please Give Mercy - Ending

He couldn't hear his wife's lover thrash around in the dark yelling his name. Chad was anxiously looking for Tom. He thought the wound was not that serious, at least if Tom got help immediately. The bullet may have nicked the top of the left lung. It would cause bleeding but might not fill the lung with blood quickly.

You might wonder about Chad. He wasn't really a bad guy, just someone who had been lied to. He now felt responsible for Tom and desperately wanted to find him and get him the help, both physically and mentally that he needed. It was a futile search. The darkness had won.

Within a couple of minutes an ambulance was parked down the street waiting for the cops to secure the scene. No one saw the darkness move and the shadowy figure stagger across the street four blocks away. A police cruiser, on the way to the scene, caught the figure in its headlight for a moment but the officers inside weren't on the lookout for a pedestrian. They were already thinking about the dangers of entering the house when they arrived.

Much later they would think about the shadowy figure but decide it was just a lone pedestrian on a late night walk.

The first two officers on scene entered the open door with guns drawn and quickly cleared the rest of the house as they approached the bedroom area. Finding nothing until they got to the master bedroom they were surprised to see a naked female covered in hickeys and bruises slumped over on the bed and crying. They immediately saw the ties used to secure Tom and surmised that there was a long story to sort out. The gun was on the floor and soon secured. One officer opened the cylinder and confirmed that a single bullet had been fired.

One officer found a robe and got Julie to put it on. The other officer started to ask questions. He started with the simple ones. Who had been shot, who else was there in the house at the time. He had already surmised that someone had been bound to the office chair. To him that meant that the woman had been having sex with her husband as an onlooker. It was to be determined if there was coercion or not.

Julie was too distraught to try and lie. She laid out the entire story and recounted how she had received a telephone call while Tom was away. The cops looked at each other as if to say, "Do you tell her or do I?"

Finally one of the cops stopped Julie's rambling. "Ma'am, we believe you were punked." Julie looked puzzled. He went on, "I suppose you still have a wired telephone and your husband's name is in the phone directory?"

Julie nodded. "Tom was very anal about wanting to make sure anyone could look up his number at any time so he kept a regular phone."

The officer nodded. "I think a group of girls, probably at a sleep over, looked up your husband's phone number and called and made out like one of the girls was seeing your husband. Usually the husband is home and the joke is over in a short time. This time it happened that your husband was gone on a trip and it fed on your insecurities. By the time he got home you wouldn't believe it if he had videoed every second of his trip for you to watch."

Julie suddenly was extremely pale. She remembered when the group of girls she ran around with in high school had done that very same thing when they were bored. Had they caused any marriage to fail?

Karma is a bitch and paybacks are hell. Now she fell for the same old trick and Tom was paying the price. Julie continued to tell what she had done. She even admitted she had hidden his medication so when she brought the two lovers to the house Tom would be falling into depression.

Now the ambulance crew was summoned in as the house was secured and deemed safe. One of the paramedics joined the search for Tom while the other checked Julie over. He found only the bruises and hickeys.

The cops wondered if she could be charged with a crime concerning the motivation and the knowledge she would be setting her husband up to become extremely depressed. They would have to file a report with the district attorney and let her decide.

Then came the sex part and how Julie had taunted Tom while the two men fucked her. She told them how she had faked her enthusiasm and had tolerated the marking of her skin in spite of the pain they had inflicted just to hurt Tom some more.

Finally she admitted that Tom had asked her to kill him before taking off the restraints. She was quick to state she would never intentionally harm Tom but she had pulled the pistol out of the drawer to make Chad and Jake leave and that Chad had grabbed the gun and it had gone off by accident and hit Tom in the upper left chest. She told them that Tom had started to cough up some blood and the blood spots might lead them to Tom.

Finally she told them of how Tom got away by slugging Chad and that Chad was now out looking for Tom. The question needed to be asked. "If Chad finds your husband is he likely to finish the job so Tom can't bring charges against you all?"

Julie looked horrified. "No, I don't think so but I really don't know Chad. Besides, Tom kept asking for us to give him mercy."

One officer immediately knew the implication. They quickly issued a BOLO (Be On the Look Out) for Chad and Tom.

The paramedic's disgust with her became evident as he overheard her story. It took all his professionalism to complete his exam and give his recommendation that she be seen by a physician. Julie shook her head and then signed his treatment refusal form. The medic couldn't leave fast enough to join the search outside.

The officer holding the pistol by the barrel with a cloth asked, "Will we find your fingerprints on this?"

She nodded. He continued, "Are your fingerprints on the shells themselves?" She didn't understand the reason for the question but she knew she had never loaded the pistol. That was Tom's job. She shook her head.

A female officer showed up and the men stepped out of the bedroom to allow Julie a chance to dress while being observed. The female officer forbade Julie of stepping on any bedding or moving any object as she found something simple to put on.

After dressing Julie was directed to the living room where another set of officers had her recount the story again. Before the sun came up she told the story many times to various representatives of the police department. The stories were then compared for differences. It was concluded that Julie had accidentally fired the shot.

After they rounded up Chad he confirmed the story and convinced them that he was a sufferer of PTSD, Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, from his time in the military. He explained how he started to sympathize with Tom and was just out trying to find him to get him medical care. The cops even hunted down Jake and got his version of the fiasco.

Chad had used a flashlight and had managed to trail Tom for a few blocks but then had lost the blood trail when it seemed Tom had managed to slip through the dragnet in the dark. The officers kept up looking though and concentrated their efforts toward the river as that had seemed to be Tom's goal.

After a few days the police came to the conclusion that Tom must have gotten to the river. The river was approximately a half mile wide at their city and they did not expect a wounded man to swim across so their search was then on the near side of the river both by multiple boats and also by men on foot.

Chad assisted by rounding up a bunch of military vets and organized them into various search parties. Some went among the homeless, some went out in borrowed boats, and some donned muck boots and used poles on the river's edge to see if a body had become lodged in the weeds and trees that lined the picturesque but deep river. Warnings went out to the various tugs that plied the river moving goods up and down.

Over the following weeks various leads were tracked down but Tom was not found. There was no record of any gunshot wound to the left upper chest being treated at any emergency room. Homeless shelters were searched multiple times. Other downstream states were notified but there was no person of interest found. The authorities decided that Tom must have drowned.

Chad, though, kept up his search even after his volunteers disbanded. He was driven to find the man he had helped become crazy.

And as for Julie she was a shell of the person she had been. She attempted to go back to work after a few days of recovery and worry about Tom but her supervisor came in and asked her how Tom was doing. Julie had burst into tears and had become almost hysterical trying to tell him what had happened.

Her supervisor had immediately called for the medical first responders and they took Julie to the first aid room and then had to call an ambulance as she continued to be too distraught. Of course a story like that couldn't stay within the confines of the small in-house medical community. By the time it got to the CEO it had been embellished and so changed that he had a hard time finding out exactly what had happened. When he finally sorted out the story Julie was placed on indefinite leave until she could function again. At the hospital Julie was placed on a suicide watch as the lack of news about Tom made her depressed. She finally admitted where she hid Tom's medications before she could be cleared to go home again so that she wouldn't be tempted to use them to harm herself.

Also, before she was released she had intense therapy sessions to help her to accept her responsibility in the whole fiasco. She admitted that she had not attempted to communicate with Tom about the suspected infidelity. She didn't try to minimize her mistake, instead continually broke down as the therapist pressured her to discuss her state of mind at every step following the phone call from the unknown female.

She also came to realize that her ultimate response was so over the top that she was solely responsible for Tom's state of mind. It didn't help her depression but she did acknowledge her ownership of how their relationship ended.

Before leaving the hospital she had to agree to weekly therapy sessions and some medications that were surprisingly similar to Tom's medications. The psychiatrist also wanted Julie to have someone live with her for a while to be the companion to help monitor Julie. Julie had talked to her mother but decided to not subject herself to that kind of sympathy as her mother immediately started to hammer on Tom and make the whole thing his fault.

No, Julie decided to go home and try to pick up her life again. When she walked in the door, though, she almost broke down again. Nothing was different. Everything was just as it was the night of the orgy. The bedding was soiled with sex fluids and blood. The chair was still next to the bed with the bindings still hanging. The tape she used to shut him up was lying on the floor.

Julie had to work through the tears to clean up the bedroom and move the office chair back to its original spot. Then she couldn't bear the thought of sleeping in the bed she had desecrated but instead moved to the guest bedroom where she imagined she could still detect the scent of Tom from when he had occupied the room. She also found a tee shirt that he had worn just before the night of hell and she could not sleep unless she had it in her hands. Many times she would wake and frantically search the bed for the shirt if she released it from her clutching fingers and could not sleep again until she was sniffing the shirt.

The days stretched into weeks. Julie returned to work amid the whispered comments of her coworkers. She held her head high and worked to come up with the next widget. If she succeeded it would be named after Tom instead of just getting a number on the patent. Each night she left the building after everyone else and then sat and cried for a while before driving home.

She also dove into the bottle a few times. Combined with her medications she flirted with serious injury but God wasn't ready for her yet. She felt she still had a penance to endure. After months of no word about Tom she gave up hope and reluctantly agreed with the authorities that Tom was deceased. She went to a bar a couple of times to find a companion and did drag a couple of men home at different times for sex. It was a complete fiasco each time. She would start out seducing the man but then would push him away and start bawling. The male usually gave up in disgust and left. One night she hooked up with Jake again. He already had carnal knowledge of Julie so he was prepared for a good hard sex session. He was surprised with she demanded soft and gentle lovemaking, not sex. He complied and started to slowly put his impressive weapon in her dry cunt but then had to stop when she started to call him Tom and began begging his forgiveness. No piece of ass was worth her craziness. He got up and quietly left her crying in the bed.

Julie kept the landline phone in case Tom was still alive and would attempt to contact her but was sorely tempted to cancel it as she started to get crank callers after the news people got wind of the story. She fielded many calls concerning Tom. Some gave her tips on where to find him. She would then give the tip to Chad and he would investigate. Others would demand to know why she was still alive. Then there were the ones that pretended to be Tom. The caller would ask a variation of, "Why did you do that to me? Why didn't you just kill me?" Those calls would send Julie back into a spin of despair again even though she knew that it wasn't Tom any time. She knew if it was actually Tom he would ask, "Why didn't you keep your promise and give me mercy?" No one outside the investigators and Chad knew about that request.

Julie had to cancel her social media presence as the same comments came all the time. These were worse. Most demanded that she kill herself.

She had gotten a lawyer to represent her in case of criminal charges but had released him after the prosecuting attorney had declined to press charges. Other than the accidental shooting and discharge of a weapon in the city limits it seemed pointless to try her for a misdemeanor. The prosecutor felt Julie was serving a greater sentence than if she was in jail. Most likely she would have never served any time but would have been granted probation.

Chad also finally went back to his poor paying job and just continued his search when he had the time. That meant he was on the streets at night and weekends looking for Tom. When he was asked by a coworker why he kept looking even when everyone else had given up he would just shrug his shoulders and make a comment about never leaving a comrade behind. Since Tom had never served most questioners would just scratch their heads and change the subject.

Chad, surprisingly, was getting a better handle on his own PTSD. He attributed it to the fact he didn't have time to dwell on his own traumas while searching for Tom. He missed taking his medications for days but didn't seem to be affected. His own darkness was kept at bay by the thought that Tom was still out there and suffering. Until someone found a body Tom was still alive to him and needed him.

It was almost a year later when Chad finally had a break. He was now looking in other parts of the city than down at the riverside. The city was large enough that its homeless population was scattered. Chad was searching the downtown area when he heard a whisper in the dark. "Please give me mercy." This was the only thing he heard. Chad immediately turned on his small flashlight to try and identify the person who spoke. What he saw was four men, all about the same size, each with long scraggly dark hair and full beards. All had dark eyes, what he could tell right then as they looked away from the light.

The four men were all dressed in tatters of clothing, multiple layers and also heavy coats with mufflers and stocking caps, even though it was summer. The stench of unwashed bodies, combined sweat, piss, shit, and other odd odors was prevalent.

Chad didn't shy away from the stench. He pointed the light, dim as it was, away from the men. His question was soft. "Tom Jones, is that you? Please, Tom, it is Chad. Remember me from your house? I did something very bad to you and I want to make it right. Please, Tom, if that is you, let me know so I can help you. I have been looking for you for months."

There was no response from any of the men. Chad tried a different tack. "Which of you is seeking mercy? Let me give it to the one who asks for it." Still no answer. One of the men took a drink from a paper bag wrapped bottle and then passed it around. All took a drink and no one actually made any more eye contact with Chad.

Chad was disappointed that he had not definitively found Tom but he was heartened. One of these four men could be the lost man he was searching for.

Chad kept talking in a low voice. "Julie needs to see you. She is lonely and is so distraught about what she did. She doesn't ever smile anymore. She goes to work and stays late to work on projects. She then goes home and crashes, just to get up and repeat. Her coworkers won't talk with her since they found out what she did to you. She was suicidal after that night for a long while. She is seeing a therapist and is on some medications. She wants to talk to you and tell you all about it. Can you come with me so you can talk to her?"

There was still no response. Chad asked the man on the far right his name. The man just looked at him for a long moment before answering. "They call me Jeb."

Chad looked to the next man. "What do they call you?"

The man looked even longer before dropping his gaze. "They calls me Street."

Chad nodded and acknowledged the first two. "Jeb and Street, good to meet you. My name is Chad."

Chad turned to the third man. "Sir, what is your name?"

The man wouldn't look up. He took another swig from the bottle and passed it on again. He rubbed his hands together and then looked up into the sky as if listening for guidance. He then looked down again. Street finally spoke. "We call him Dink. He doesn't speak much. Most of the time he just mumbles like he is talking to someone that we can't see."

Chad nodded. He could understand the mental challenges of living on the street. He had lived in a car for over a year and that was only a step above these guys. "Hey, Dink, good to meet you."

He then turned to the last guy. "Will you tell me your name? I would really like to get to know all of you."

This man mumbled something so low Chad couldn't hear it. He asked the man to repeat himself. Chad finally understood the man to say, "Ralph."

Chad smiled at the men. "Jeb, Street, Dink and Ralph, got it. Gentlemen, could I interest you in some food this fine evening?"

Two of the men, Jeb and Dink, nodded but Ralph and Street seemed to be more concerned that they were out of booze. Chad put out his hand and Street put the paper wrapped bottle into it. Chad wasn't surprised that the bottle was an empty muscatel bottle. He nodded and then left for a few minutes and bought a couple of bottles at a nearby package store for the guys. He gave them the bottles then headed down to a nearby sandwich shop and got four foot longs with ham, beef, and turkey with mayo. He figured they could use the protein.

When he got back Dink and Jeb immediately fell to and ate half their sandwich and put the remainder in a pocket of each man's respective jacket. Street and Ralph were too involved with the alcohol to stop and eat but each put the whole sandwich into a pocket for later.

Chad stood and talked with the four men for a time. Jeb and Street would answer most questions. Dink seemed to have multiple conversations going on in his head and Ralph just mumbled a lot. Chad did find out that the four considered this small piece of sidewalk their turf and could usually be found close to that location. Jeb told Chad that mostly they left to scrounge for aluminum to convert to cash for more muscatel since it was cheap but would return there to share their booty.