I took off my jacket and set it on a bicycle with no seat. Slowly, I crept back to the old truck and pulled my gun from the waistband of my jeans. It was when I rounded the truck that I first saw a ball of black hoodie hunched over on his knees. Whoever it was had puked onto the pavement.
I aimed my gun at his head and cocked it. The hoodie froze.
"Who sent you, motherfucker?" I asked. Stepping forward, I pressed the barrel of my gun against his head.
No answer.
"So you want to play it that way, huh?" I asked angrily. I grabbed at the hoodie, yanking it back over the intruders face. I was glad that I was going to be able to hand down my own brand of perverse justice on this guy.
I was already planning his disposal when I was suddenly distracted by something soft in my hand. It was a clump of long, bright red hair.
What the fuck?
I looked from my hand to the small figure crumpled in front of me. I nudged him in the back of the head with the barrel of my gun. He finally turned and looked up.
SHE looked up.
Huge innocent blue eyes masked in pale skin stared up at me. Not a woman. A girl, no older than seventeen or eighteen.
A beautiful girl.
THE most beautiful girl.
My girl.
I was twenty-two. Not an old man by any means, but too old for a girl as young as her. It was wrong for me to be drawn to her the way I was. But my brain, my dick, and my thawing heart didn't seem to give a flying fuck about propriety.
It sounds so fucking cliché, but it was when our eyes first met when my life changed irrevocably.
I wouldn't say that I believe in any sort of destiny, but if something like that did exist, it was working that night. Abby crossing my path was when my life took another path the fork in the road of life offered, and I'd never looked back.
Although it wouldn't be an easy road traveled by any means, the scared girl on her knees before me would eventually welcome me into her life, into her body.
She would bear my child.
She would become my wife.
That skinny girl with the oversized sweat shirt had suffered so much in her life and little did either of us know then that she would suffer so much more.
Fucking OWEN.
The mere mention of his name was enough to send me into a rage right there in the visiting area.
It wasn't until Abby finally told me what Owen did to her, when she showed me the pictures, the evidence of a crime that makes my stomach roll every time I fucking think about it, when I'd learned that the true depths of my sickness and depravity had no limits when it came to protecting both Abby and Georgia.
Vengeance was a drug I main-lined the night I tracked down that bastard. Revenge was the high I rode when I removed him from this fucking earth.
Love is what made it all make sense. When it came to my girls and my love for them, any rules I had about how and why I do the things I do were thrown out the window.
Our love had no rules.
What I did to Owen made me realize that there was a reason I was put on the planet exactly how I was, how I am.
To protect my family.
SEVEN
The meeting with my lawyer went as well as could be expected for someone being charged with first-degree murder.
Henry Allbright, one of the only competent lawyers within ten miles of Coral Pines, had informed me that there was a witness to the crime.
Of sorts.
A gator.
A mother fucking alligator.
All these years doing god knows what to god knows fucking who and I was going down partially because a fucking lizard had to go and get caught before it had the chance to properly digest its midnight snack of Owen Fletcher parts.
The guy who'd caught it was quite surprised to find a hand minus a few fingers in the belly of the beast he was gutting.
Impressive feat for the gator.
Damning for me.
The surveillance footage from the marina cameras across the street from the boathouse where I'd caught up to Owen, showed him entering the building, then me following him in shortly after.
But that wasn't the damning part.
The damning part was me, emerging hours later.
Two black garbage blanks slung over my back.
The camera never picked up Owen leaving, but what it did pick up was the license plate on my bike.
After the FBI identified Owen from his dental records and learned he'd shot my daughter just a few days before his 'alleged' (their words, not mine) death, they had a clear motive along with enough evidence, albeit circumstantial, to end me.
They had half of Coral Pines lined up as witnesses ready to testify that Owen and I had our share of public scuffles in the past.
The case was wrapped up neat and tied in a mother fucking bow, they had me by the balls.
The judge denied bail.
The question was, if they had all this evidence for a year, why did it take them so long to arrest me? Why would they sit on this for so long before making their move?
This wasn't the Coral Pines Sheriff’s Department stumbling their way through an investigation. This was the motherfucking FBI. There was no reason for the delay in my arrest that made any sort of sense to me and that wasn’t the only thought keeping me up at night.
I couldn't sleep in jail. I hadn't slept a single night without Bee for over a year and was beginning to wonder if I was ever going to be able to sleep again.
Just a few nights earlier, I was fast asleep in the king sized bed I shared with my wife. My arms wrapped tightly around her, not an inch between us as I held her tightly to my chest. Her steady breathing was a constant reminder that she was there with me and wasn't going anywhere.
A shift on the mattress woke me, and I instantly sat up straight on full alert, only to find my daughter slowly crawling up from the foot of the bed.
"What's the matter, baby?" I'd asked, making space so Georgia could snuggle between me and Abby. Abby turned over onto her side, but didn't wake up.
"I dreamed bad dreams, Daddy," Georgia said, rubbing her eyes, her stuffed rabbit in the crook of her arm. I pulled the covers over us and she rested her head against my chest.
"They're only dreams, Gee. Daddy would never let anything or anyone ever hurt you," I said, brushing the curls from her eyes.
"Pinky promise?" she whispered, extending her pinky to me.
"Pinky promise," I repeated, hooking my pinky with hers. And I meant it. There was no way I was ever going to let anything happen to my little girl. My fighter. My survivor.
When Bee and I had sex for the very first time, I'd used a condom, but I was so wrapped up in Abby that I'd fallen asleep inside her, afraid to pull out like she would disappear if I did, rendering that little piece of rubber virtually useless.
It's the only time in my life I could look back on and be thankful for my stupidity.
Georgia was in the first moments of creation when Abby was brutalized by Owen, but somehow, through all that violence, our daughter had held on tight and didn't let go.
She grew big and strong inside my wife.
Abby says Georgia was born with a set of lungs that would scare the devil straight.
How appropriate.
Even though I didn't meet her until she was three years old, for the second time in my life, it was love at first sight.
I'd thought Georgia was Owen's daughter at first, the product of a relationship between him and Bee, but I still loved her, wanted her to be mine.
Wanted her to love me back.
I would walk to the ends of the earth for Abby.
I would burn the motherfucker down for Georgia.
In prison, if the mattress dipped in the dead of night, it definitely wasn't because your sweet baby girl was wanting some cuddles with you. But I wasn't afraid of the other inmates trying to come at me. The only stabbing I was afraid of receiving would come at the hands of the loose springs of the stained mattress I attempted to sleep on.
Every hour on the hour the guards made their rounds, shining their flashlights into the faces of the sleeping inmates, making sure each one was accounted for. The squeak of the guards’ boots against the concrete floor for the umpteenth time during the night wasn't a surprise.
My cell door being unlocked and opened was. I pretended to be asleep, preparing myself to defend my honor against whatever fucker had a fetish for blondes with tattoos.
"I know who you are," A voice said. A lighter ignited, from the corner of my half closed eye I saw the cherry end of a cigarette burning a few feet from my bed. Whoever it was sat on the floor with his back against the concrete wall.
"And who exactly do you think I am?" I asked, calculating how to take him out if he made a move.
"A mutual friend of ours calls you The Moordenaar."
The fucking Dutchman, the man who gave me my first job, and the first and only one of my employers to ever know my real identity. The Moordenaar, a Dutch word for 'murderer', is what he called me.
Subtle.
I should slit The Dutchman's throat for not being able to keep his fucking mouth shut. Fuck it. I'll add it to my list of shit to do when I got out. "Wrong guy," I said, turning to look at the guy invading my personal space.
Small yellow lights lining the walkway outside my cell and the light from the half-moon through a high window on the far side of the cell block was all the light I needed to make out that the guy in my cell was huge. A wall of muscle sat on the ground a few feet from my bed, a cigarette hung from his lip, black and white tattoos covered the backs of his hands and one side of his neck, his dark hair cropped close to his head.
His eyes were black and in the light of the half moon he looked like a man possessed.