Past Imperfect

by Remington Kane

  “Ballou is difficult to track down because he’s had so few meaningful relationships. There’s no one who is close enough to him who would have an idea where he might have run off to.”

  “Have you heard back from his parents?”

  “Carly contacted them for me. They’re living in a senior community in South Carolina. They told her that they hadn’t seen or heard from their son since the first time he went to prison, and that they have no intention of discussing him with anyone.”

  “It doesn’t sound like they would be much help, does it?”

  “No.”

  White stared into the fire with a pensive expression. Jessica, seeing that his good mood was on the verge of evaporating, tried to cheer him up.

  “Let’s forget Ballou and enjoy ourselves. It’s not often that Maggie and Viola are home with us.”

  White nodded. “You’re right, and it was good to see Gabby again. Your sister is as happy as I’ve ever seen her.”

  “Daddy said the same thing, and he likes Lawrence.”

  “I’m still not sure your father likes me, and he’s known me a lot longer.”

  “Daddy likes you; he loves you. And after all, you are his son.”

  “I’m not his son. I’m his son-in-law.”

  “He married your mother, that makes him your father, and we’re brother and sister.”

  White smiled. “Don’t you ever get tired of teasing me about that?”

  “No, not really.”

  His good mood restored, Jessica took his wine glass from him and sat it on the coffee table next to hers. Moments later, they were kissing like teenagers on the sofa, as the crackling fire warmed the night.

  Chapter 14

  ALABAMA, TWO YEARS EARLIER

  Gabe Copeland had taken away Nicole’s drug business by killing three of her street dealers. The rest felt threatened and began moving drugs for Copeland. They feared him more than they did Nicole. She saw no point in menacing her own people further, and that emboldened Copeland to use the same technique on the hookers working for Nicole. One of the women had disappeared three days earlier. A day after that, Nicole’s perimeter guards stumbled across a box in the woods. The box had contained the hooker’s severed head. There was also a note.

  Get out of my way, Nicole, or your head will be next.

  Ballou was adamant about killing Copeland for Nicole. She agreed, knowing that she wouldn’t be able to stop him. Ballou assured her that he wasn’t planning a suicide mission and requested that someone get him several items he would need. He wrote down a list, and Nicole invited Marcus into the dining room and handed him the piece of paper that they were written on.

  Marcus looked over the items and raised his eyebrows in surprise as he took in the last one.

  “Crayons?”

  “Yeah, and they have to be gray or black, no bright colors, especially yellow.”

  “How the hell are you going to take on Copeland’s men with some crayons?”

  “They have their uses. Copeland’s men won’t be able to hit what they can’t see.”

  “What’s that mean?”

  Ballou waved off the question and pointed to the first item on the list. “About that shotgun, I need the barrel to be as short as you can get it.”

  “You’ll have it, and all this other shit too.” Marcus looked at Nicole. “Let me go with him and take a few other men along. If he goes after Copeland alone it will just be a waste of time.”

  “No,” Ballou said, before Nicole could answer. “I’m going alone. If you or one of the other men is spotted it will place Copeland on alert. By the way, what does the guy look like?”

  Nicole looked through the photos on her phone. When she found what she wanted, she handed it over to Ballou.

  “That’s my husband on the right. Copeland is on the left.”

  Ballou already knew what James Price had looked like from having viewed photos of him in Ann Campbell’s apartment. Copeland was as big as Marcus but not nearly as handsome. His face looked off-kilter somehow. His nose wasn’t centered, and one cheekbone sat high while the other looked sunken.

  “What’s with the guy’s face?”

  “Gabe was a boxer,” Marcus said. “Then he was in a bad car accident a few years back.”

  “Well, he’s easy to recognize,” Ballou said, as he handed Nicole her phone. “Now, where can I find him?”

  Copeland owned a nightclub and kept a large office in the rear. After closing at two a.m., he spent time in the office counting the night’s take. The staff finished their cleaning duties and left for home a short time later. The street where the club was located saw little traffic at night other than that related to the club, and the surrounding businesses had closed hours earlier.

  Since Copeland expected there might be trouble from Nicole, he kept his men around him. There were eight of them. Six were with him inside the office playing cards at a round table, while two stayed outside the club on watch.

  A bank of monitors displayed angles from the different cameras. One of Copeland’s men noticed movement on a monitor.

  “What the hell? There’s a guy walking around in the club.”

  Copeland studied the screen and saw a man wearing a hood stumbling around behind the bar. The man took a bottle from a shelf and poured himself a drink. His aim was horrible, and he spilled most of the liquor.

  “It’s a damn drunk. Goddamn it. I told those guys to check the bathrooms before they leave for the night. If we hadn’t spotted him, he would have been locked in here until we opened again.”

  On the monitor, the drunk decided to ignore the glass and began drinking straight from the bottle.

  Copeland pointed at one of his men. “Tony, throw that bastard out into the alley.”

  Tony grinned. “Can I kick his ass?”

  “Yeah, but don’t kill him or mark him up too bad.”

  Tony left the room to deal with the drunk. When Copeland looked up at the monitors, he was surprised to find that the drunk was nowhere to be seen.

  Ballou had entered the club around midnight through a back entrance while dressed as one of the kitchen staff and wearing a wig that had long hair. After entering a men’s room, he went into a stall where he removed the white jacket he wore along with the wig.

  The bathroom was active for another few minutes, but once he was alone, he climbed up onto the toilet and shoved one of the ceiling tiles aside. Ballou stuck his head through the opening and used a flashlight to look around. He was disheartened to find that there wasn’t enough room to hide in the space as he had planned to do.

  Instead, he shoved the white jacket and the wig up among the wires and pipes and returned the ceiling tile into its slot. Someone entered the bathroom, and again, he had to wait until he was alone. When it was safe to do so, he left the stall and walked over to open the door on the closet that held cleaning supplies, including a slop bucket and a mop.

  In the space behind the mop was a rolled-up banner that was used on occasion when the club was holding an event outdoors in the summer. Ballou squeezed himself behind the banner, then reached around it to shut the door.

  The closet stank. The odor was a combination of bleach and the scent of stale urine coming from the mop and bucket.

  Over the next three hours, the closet door was opened and closed twice. Ballou had held his breath and kept very still while whoever was grabbing the cleaning items was in the closet with him. Finally, convinced that he had waited long enough, Ballou had ventured out into the club. As he weaved about pretending to be drunk, he prepared himself for the battle that was to come.

  Copeland’s man, Tony, stepped out of the narrow corridor that led to the office and saw that the drunk was no longer behind the bar. The guy was leaned back in a corner on the small stage where the live bands played. Tony smiled as he walked toward his target. He would enjoy beating some sense into the man. He didn’t realize that the area where the drunk stood was a dead zone to the cameras. That was not by accident
.

  Ballou was mumbling to himself while pretending not to see Tony growing closer. When he wasn’t muttering nonsense, he was pretending to take long pulls off the bottle of vodka he held.

  Tony called out to him when he was just a few yards away. “Hey, asshole. The club is closed.”

  Ballou gestured wildly with the bottle while babbling nonsense. The bottle spilled its contents onto the floor. Tony’s eyes were captured by the scene, and he never noticed that Ballou’s other hand was hidden as it freed a knife from the long pocket on the front of the hoodie.

  “Look at the mess you’re making. I’m going to beat you so bad that you’ll never want to drink again.”

  As Tony reached out his right hand to grab Ballou, Ballou buried the blade into Tony’s abdomen. Tony made a sound somewhere between a grunt and a cough, then opened his mouth to scream as Ballou forced the knife sideways. Ballou used his other hand to smash the bottle over Tony’s head. That rendered him senseless and killed the scream that had been about to come forth. Tony fell to the floor with a serious concussion and his intestines exposed.

  Ballou claimed his weapon, a Beretta Px4, before grabbing Tony by the collar and dragging him into view of the cameras.

  This will get a reaction, Ballou thought.

  “Son of a bitch,” Copeland said. Beside him, two of his men uttered the same sentiment.

  On the monitor, the drunk he’d sent Tony to deal with was dragging Tony’s limp form to the end of the stage. It left behind a red smear that was blood.

  The drunk reared his head back and shouted. The cameras didn’t pick up the sound because they had no microphones. They weren’t needed. The cry was loud enough inside the quiet club that it echoed down the corridor and into the office. However, being able to hear it didn’t make it coherent. The drunk was shouting gibberish.

  “Bring that bastard to me and see what you can do for Tony,” Copeland said.

  “Can we kill him?” One of the men asked.

  “I want that pleasure for myself,” Copeland said. The men headed out of the office and into the corridor. Copeland looked back at the monitor and saw the drunk reach behind his back. When his hand reappeared, he was holding something that looked like a can of soda.

  Ballou had made several smoke grenades using old soda cans for the containers that would hold the necessary elements. As Copeland’s men rushed out of the office at the end of the corridor, he pulled the ring on a can, igniting the material inside it. As the black smoke flowed from the can, Ballou ignited a second one. Copeland’s guards shouted at him while breaking into a run and reaching for their weapons.

  Ballou lost sight of them as the smoke thickened and spread throughout the corridor. He dropped to the floor, reached back, and freed a shotgun that had an eight-inch barrel. The guards fired first, sending rounds zipping over his head. Ballou raised the shotgun on an upward angle and began firing back. The screams of the men were like music to him.

  “No! No! Shit!” Copeland shouted. From his vantage point in front of the monitors he could see what was happening, even with the smoke obscuring much of the scene. The “drunk” was lying on the floor. His legs were visible from the knees down. He must have a shotgun, Copeland couldn’t see it through the haze, but he had no problem hearing it. He could also see the damage it was doing to his men. They had all rushed out into the narrow hallway eager to avenge Tony. By doing so, they made themselves the equivalent of fish in a barrel. Shotgun pellets were doing serious damage. The few return rounds his men had managed to let loose had been aimed too high and had missed their attacker lying flat on the floor. If not for the smoke, which hid him, the man would have been killed before he could get off a shot.

  The barrage ceased as the shotgun ran dry. Three of his men were still able to walk, although they had all suffered wounds. They were rushing back toward the safety of the office when the shotgun, reloaded, began booming again. The three men took pellets to their backs and two of them went down. The third one fell near the threshold to the office and crawled inside.

  Copeland ran over to look at him and saw that his left side above the hip was ripped open. Judging by the amount of blood he was losing, he’d be dead in minutes.

  “Call… an… ambulance…,” the man gasped.

  Copeland ignored him and went to a corner of the room where there was a gun safe. He opened it and removed an AR-15 and three magazines. As he walked near the man lying in the doorway, Copeland saw that his open eyes no longer had any life in them.

  Taking out his phone, he dialed the number of one of the men who were guarding the outside of the building. While looking at the monitors, he couldn’t understand why they hadn’t entered the building yet. They must have heard the gunfire.

  Whatever the reason, they weren’t responding, or answering their phones. Copeland clutched the AR tighter. He was on his own.

  Ballou reloaded the shotgun again before moving in a crouch through the dissipating smoke. The corridor smelled of blood. The smoke grew wispy and he could see the men he’d shot. Three of them lay together, with a pair beyond them. They were all down and only one was still alive. That man lay on his back with a hand clamped to his throat. The hand was red from the blood he’d lost from the wound a pellet had inflicted. Ballou smashed the stock of the shotgun against the guy’s forehead and knocked him out so he couldn’t shoot him in the back once he passed him.

  There was a door open at the end of the corridor on the left. According to the information Nicole had given him, that would be Copeland’s office.

  As he moved along, Ballou kept looking over his shoulder. He had checked the place out before entering it and knew that there was at least one man outside on watch for trouble. The man guarding the door should have responded to all the noise and it was making Ballou nervous that he hadn’t.

  Could the guy have called the cops?

  That thought worried him. If the cops came, he would either have to leave before killing Copeland or kill the man and then face off against the cops. The thing about cops is that they just kept coming. Even if he killed a dozen of them, they would throw another twelve at him, and he would die.

  Ballou didn’t want to die. He wanted to see Nicole again and be her hero for taking care of Copeland for her. As crazy as the idea was, he wanted to be with her again. He wanted the life he should have had years ago.

  Ballou stepped over the bodies that lay near the entrance to the office. One of the men had fallen on the other, as if he had tackled the first man. Ballou spun around as he heard a sound come from behind him. He turned in time to see Copeland aiming a rifle his way and a red-hot fire erupted in his left thigh.

  “Aargh!”

  Ballou went down and Copeland kept shooting. There was a back way out of his office that Nicole had been unaware of. It allowed Copeland to enter the kitchen and come up behind Ballou. Fortunately for Ballou, he had the bodies of the two dead men to take shelter behind. Unfortunately, he had dropped his shotgun when he was hit. The weapon had fallen on the other side of the prone men he was hiding behind and he would never free the Beretta he’d taken off Tony before Copeland grew close enough to kill him.

  There was the booming of a different weapon, it was followed by a scream of pain. It was Copeland doing the screaming. Ballou peeked out over the mound of flesh he’d taken shelter behind and saw Marcus and Nicole walking toward him, along with a man he didn’t recognize but assumed was one of Nicole’s people.

  Marcus had a pistol while Nicole carried the rifle he’d heard. Between them was Copeland. He was looking down at what was left of his right arm. Nicole had hit him at the elbow and his lower arm was barely attached. She sent a second blast into his right foot and Copeland collapsed while howling in agony.

  “Kent, are you hurt?” Nicole asked.

  “He shot me in the leg. But listen, there’s at least one more man around here somewhere, the outside guards.”

  “They’ve been handled,” Marcus said. He was looking around at
the dead men. When his eyes fell on Ballou, Ballou thought that he glimpsed respect.

  The other man moved past Ballou and into the office. Ballou was wondering why the guy went into the office while Marcus helped him to stand. When he was on his feet, Marcus placed an arm around his waist so that he could hobble along on his bad leg.

  Nicole had leaned over to speak to Copeland as she picked up the weapon he had dropped.

  “My husband treated you like a brother and the moment he was dead you tried to take over. I hope you fry in hell.”

  Copeland didn’t respond verbally. Given his wounds, all he could manage was a moan. His eyes spoke though, they were pleading for mercy as he looked back at Nicole. She had no mercy to give him.

  The other man reappeared holding a piece of electronic equipment and a laptop. “We have the security files,” he said, and Ballou understood that the man had made sure there was no video of what had happened. Or there wouldn’t be once they were destroyed.

  “We need to get out of here,” Marcus said. Nicole nodded and led the way out of the corridor.

  More of her men were there. One of them was splashing gasoline throughout the club from a five-gallon can. When he was done, he tossed the can away.

  Everyone filed out of the building. Nicole was last. She set the club ablaze and paused in the doorway to watch the fire spread. It looked as if it took an effort of will for her to turn away from the flames that mesmerized her.

  As they were walking toward a pair of vehicles parked at the curb, they heard Copeland shout something. If he was begging for help, he picked the wrong crowd to ask.

  Ballou’s wound wasn’t serious. He was treated by a doctor who could keep a secret, and he was given a room in Nicole’s house to stay in while he healed. The two of them talked often, and the love they had felt for each other was still there.