Lafferty's Ghost
By Dennis McFadden, first published in Fiction
A cheating husband who was dragged to marriage counseling sleeps with the flirty counselor. It backfires when it turns out she is not a marriage counselor at all, but a dangerous woman with a gun.
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Plot Summary
Lafferty is quite pleased with himself, having proven the marriage counselor his wife dragged him to, Katherine Flanagan, is a hack. The problem is that he proves this by sleeping with her. No good marriage counselor would sleep with one of her clients, so all he has to do now is prove her invalidity to his wife without admitting to his own guilt. In any case, Lafferty decides to celebrate this victory with a bath in Katherine's very nice bathroom in her very extravagant house. His celebration is cut short when he removes the luxuriously draped washcloth over his eyes and two men suddenly appear in the bathroom, one holding daffodils, the other holding a nine-millimeter pistol. He is dragged from the bathroom into the living room, and interrogated by the two men, both of them demanding to know where Katherine is. Lafferty is still naked, with only the daffodils to protect his modesty. He attempts to placate the men by telling them everything he knows about her, which is that she's a marriage counselor and he had just slept with her. After a while, he coaxes them to go back to the bedroom and check under the bed, this being the only idea he could offer them to stop them from putting a bullet in him. One of them goes to check, and is shot by Katherine, who appears in the living room pointing the nine-millimeter at the other man. An intense standoff ensues, both Katherine and the surviving man demanding the other drop their gun while Lafferty clutches the daffodils and whimpers. The two end up shooting each other. Lafferty steps over the dead bodies, wipes his fingerprints from every surface that he touched in the house, and walks away from the scene. He later goes home to his wife, who is in shock to find out that their marriage counselor is dead, and had apparently been caught up in some mysterious shady business.
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