Vengeance Before Virtue

by Tyler Porter

  “Andi,” he said, but she didn’t hear him. He took a few steps more toward her. “Andi!” Again, she heard nothing.

  He did hear something though. Something that sounded like footsteps. They were coming from behind him. He turned back toward the hallway to find Riley on her way down the hall heading for the kitchen. It wasn’t the sweet, little princess he remembered, though. This Riley was very grown up. She looked to be in her late teens, maybe a senior in high school. Her true beauty was almost completely destroyed by the amount of make-up she had on.

  Dark, heavy eyeliner was caked around her eyes and she wore dark red lipstick. Her fingernails were painted black. She wore a leather jacket over a faded, oversized black t-shirt that had been cut into a belly shirt. Beneath, she wore black jeans that had so many holes, she had more skin that was showing than was covered up. Her hair looked like she’d just been electrocuted. It was wild and straying off in all different directions. Matt’s heart hurt. He had often wondered about the young lady that Riley would grow up to be, but he had always imagined a gentle, caring, friendly young woman. He had never considered she might turn out anything like this.

  This version of Riley strode past Matt as if he wasn’t there, and then, right past Andi as well. To his surprise, Andi suddenly lifted her head off of the chair and turned it toward her daughter.

  “Where the fuck do you think you’re going?” she mumbled. It was clear she was heavily intoxicated.

  “Out, like I do every night. Why is it always such a shock to you that I have a life?”

  “Oh, you have a life? That’s what you think life is? Showing up to some party house and letting a bunch of drunk, drugged up jocks fuck you one by one?”

  “You’re one to talk about drunks, Mom. Why don’t you put the down the bottle for once and go for a walk or something? Exist outside of the glass for a change.”

  This was too much for Matt to take. He tried to step in.

  “Alright, everyone just calm down for a minute. Andi? Riley? ... Hey!” He tried to yell, but they didn’t hear him. They didn’t even know he was there. He moved to Andi and tried to touch her, but his hand went through her. He heard a car horn outside.

  “That’s my ride,” Riley said as she turned toward the door.

  “You know what, I am not dealing with this shit anymore. Go ahead, do what you want, but if you walk out that door, you aren’t welcome to come back,” Andi said.

  “Wasn’t planning on it,” Riley responded.

  With that, she turned and walked out the door, slamming it behind her. Matt ran to it and flung it open in time to see her getting into the back seat of a grey Dodge truck. The windows were rolled down, and he was able to see the driver. He felt vomit rising in his throat. His heart pounded as he stared and as the man in the driver seat stared back at him. It was Michael Vincent, the man who had been Mariah’s teacher and tutor. The man who his family had trusted and who had broken that trust when he brutally raped Mariah. He smiled from the truck, his head still bloody just as it was the night Matt had killed him, and peeled away from the curb as Riley closed her door.

  “This is your fault, you know.” Matt heard the words from behind him in the house. He turned to find Andi still at the table, but this time she wasn’t holding a wine bottle; she was holding Matt’s gun. “This is all because of you. Everything was fine until you showed up to that fucking coffee shop. You ruined everything.”

  “Andi, what are you doing?” he asked.

  “I am fixing this. I lost my daughter because of you! You spoiled her! You always gave her whatever she wanted—money, cars, trips, toys, anything! You never said no, and now she is lost! She’s lost!”

  “I’m sorry! Andi, I’m so sorry!”

  “No, not yet you’re not.” She cocked the pistol. “You took my life away from me. You took Will away from me. And now you took my daughter away!”

  Before Matt could respond, a loud crack bit through the air. He looked down and there was a hole through his chest, but not through his body. It looked like an object had passed through smoke. She fired the gun five more times, tears flowing down her cheeks. Crack! Crack! Crack! Crack! Crack! More holes in the smoke. He felt no physical pain, but he felt all of the emotional pain. His head was going to explode. He knew this would happen. He knew he would find a way to ruin another family.

  Andi wept and dropped the gun as the front door was kicked open. Matt turned and watched several officers bound through the opening, the last of which was Sheriff Demsey. He walked past Matt, and as he did, he uttered three simple words.

  “I warned you.”

  He moved to detain Andi. She struggled against the officers, but they wrestled her to the ground, forcing her arms behind her back.

  “Wait! Stop! It’s my fault! It’s my fault! Don’t hurt her!” He tried to run to her, but he couldn’t move.

  She continued fighting from the ground. Demsey looked at Matt, shrugged his shoulders, and pulled out his firearm, aiming it at Andi’s head.

  “No! Please don’t! No!!!!”

  “Matt! Maaattt!” Andi said as she shook him.

  He woke up with a jolt and gasped air. He breathed heavy as the morning sank in. He was drenched in sweat, and it felt like he was lying in a puddle. He looked up, and Andi was holding him in the bed in the hotel room.

  “Baby, you were having a bad dream. Are you alright?”

  He said no words. He just threw his arms around her and pulled her tight. He held her that way for over an hour, and she never questioned it. She just rubbed his head softly and listened to him breathe.

  Once he’d calmed down, he and Andi took a shower and got ready for the day. By the time they were done, they found Riley wide awake and playing with her stuffed animals on the couch. Matt went to her and scooped her up into the air, prompting a giggling fit. He hugged her tight and spun her around in a circle to her delight. They were playing this way when three knocks came at the door.

  He checked his watch: 9:30 a.m. It was not quite late enough in the morning to be the cleaning crew. He stood waiting for the person to announce themselves or for another knock to come, but neither did. He set Riley down and walked to the door, stopped, and looked through the peephole. Nothing but an empty hallway. He opened the door and looked to the left and then to the right. He was alone in the hall. There was only one piece of evidence that anyone had been there at all—a folded up piece of paper on the floor in front of their door. There was something hand written on the outside of the paper. Matthew.

  Chapter 8: The First of Many

  Matthew,

  I know that this is short notice, but please come home as soon as you can. It’s your father. I can’t say for certain, but I need your help. Something is wrong. Please come quickly.

  Love,

  Mom

  The first thing he thought was how odd this was. He’d given his mother his cell phone number when he’d left their house to find Mariah. Also, he had not told her where they would be staying. The other thought that entered his mind was: Why would she leave a note? Why not just tell him herself what was going on? Something wasn’t right. He could feel it, but he also couldn’t ignore it. He had always kept the old, home phone number programmed into any cell phone he’d ever gotten. He was certain that they still kept it. Old school. He gave the note to Andi to read as he tried calling. It rang seven times before going to the mailbox. He left a brief message, and then hung up.

  “What is that all about?” Andi asked.

  “I don’t know, but I need to find out. I’m going to go see her. Something is off.”

  “Well, we’ll go with you,” she insisted.

  “I don’t know, Andi. Something just feels wrong here. I think you two ought to hang out here until I know what is going on.”

  “Wow, stay here? Why? Because it’s safe? And here I was thinking that safest place we could possibly be was with you.”

  Andi was a master at getting her way. He knew that was exactly why she would
say such a thing. It was something that was just known. They were safe with him. He would never hurt them, and he would die before he would ever let anyone else hurt them. It wasn’t something that needed to be expressed out loud. Andi was smart though. She was a law school graduate after all. She knew exactly how to get what she wanted, and she knew exactly which of his strings to pull to get her there. His head was certain it was a bad idea, but his pride got the best of him.

  “Fine. But when we get there, you two stay in the car. Agreed?” He was stern.

  “Agreed,” she said with a devilish smile. She loved getting her way.

  They collected Riley and made their descent down to the lobby. They stopped at the front desk, and the clerk had the keys to the car, just as Sheriff Demsey had promised. They didn’t talk much on the drive to Council Grove. Instead, they put on Riley’s favorite music channel, Radio Disney, and chuckled to themselves as she belted out every word of every song, whether she knew them or not. The drive seemed shorter than usual, probably because they were enjoying it so much. The truth was, none of them had enjoyed very much of the time they’d spent in his hometown so far.

  They all had had great expectations about how this time might be, and they were all wrong—starting with the fact that none of them expected to have a shotgun pointed at them from the hands of Matt’s father, nor did any of them expect to find out what they had about Matt’s sister. Negativity aside, they were making the best of it. Before they knew it, they were parking on the street in front of Matt’s parents’ house. He put the Tahoe into park and studied the property. Everything seemed normal, but that gut feeling hadn’t left him since he’d received the note.

  “Alright, you guys stay here, okay? I’m gonna leave the car running, and if anything weird happens, anything at all, you guys go, and we will figure the rest out alright?”

  Andi’s agreement was given in the form of a quick kiss on Matt’s cheek. He got out and closed the car door softly so as not to alert anyone of their arrival. Quickly, he made his way up the driveway. He did not immediately go up the stairs of the front porch. Instead, he wandered around the side of the house toward the garage and the back of the property. As he moved, he scoped out the windows. So far, he’d seen no movement of any kind. The garage was shut, which told him that the house was probably empty. That car was his father’s pride and joy. He never had the garage door shut when he was home. He liked having it open so that the world could see his baby.

  That didn’t mean that his mother wasn’t home, though. As a matter of fact, it would likely be a better experience if he wasn’t home considering the last time he and his father had been in the same room, his father had rested the barrel of a shotgun on Matt’s temple. If his mother had made that trip all the way to the hotel with a note instead of calling, it was likely that his father did not know she was attempting to contact him. Matt walked around the side of the garage to the side door. He gave the knob a quick jiggle and, to his surprise, it was unlocked. He turned the handle fully and opened the door as slowly as he could. He remembered that the door used to creak terribly when he was younger.

  Matt and his childhood friends would always get caught trying to sneak in to steal beer from the garage refrigerator because of that door. If he wasn’t surprised before by the door being unlocked in the first place, he was definitely surprised to find that the door didn’t creak in the slightest. Not a sound. He looked around and the space was pristine. Almost too clean. A stranger would think the garage was never used, which he knew was not the case. His dad had always referred to himself as a “grease monkey.” He was in there tinkering on that car every day after work, whether it needed work or not.

  The garage looked so clean now, though, that Matt would have almost felt safe eating off of the floor: no tire marks, no grease stains, no shop rags strewn about, and not a single tool out of place. The next thing that caught his attention was a door he’d never seen before. It appeared to be to some sort of extension off the back of the building. He approached the door, but knelt down quickly when he heard a car door slam shut. He stayed bent down and tried hard to control his breathing. He was sure that the garage door was moments away from opening and that he would be exposed. He waited and looked around frantically for somewhere to take cover.

  Snooping around in his father’s garage when he wasn’t exactly welcome would be a tough thing to explain. He decided that he had to move, he had to get out of plain sight. He was closest to the door that was unfamiliar to him, so he turned the handle, opened it just enough so that he could squeeze through, and slipped inside closing the door behind him. For several minutes, he stood there in the dark with his ear to the door, waiting for some indication of what was to come next, but he got only silence.

  Once he finally felt safe to move, he began feeling up and down the wall on either side of the door, trying to locate a light switch. With no luck, he stood up and carefully moved his arms around above his head. He quickly found what he was looking for—a long string that hung down from the bulb and illuminated it when pulled. It took a few seconds for his eyes to adjust to the light, but when it did, his heart began beating faster than it had when he thought he’d been caught. It thundered inside his chest as he looked around the room. He thought he might be starting to understand... his sister running off, his mother’s fear, and his father’s dangerous behavior. It all began making sense as he stood looking at the contents of the small space.

  Chapter 9: Riddle Me This

  Guns. Guns lined three walls of the room. Not the typical firearms one might find in any home defense repertoire though, but advanced, sophisticated weaponry. Snub-nosed shotguns, high-caliber sniper rifles, automatic machine guns, and oversized pistols were carefully shelved. That wasn’t all. There were wider shelves bolted to the side walls. On one side, the shelf was overflowing with attachments: night sights, silencers, scopes, spare magazines, extended magazines, laser guards, and items he didn’t even recognize.

  The other wall was where he really become concerned. The ammunition. The first red flag was the sheer amount that was stacked along the shelf. It looked as though his father had been preparing for a small war in their hometown of Council Grove, where even the Sheriff seemed overly armed with his revolver hanging at his side. The second alarm bell went off inside his head, when he looked a little closer at the bullets themselves.

  He had spent a good amount of time around firearms and ammunition when he’d obtained his conceal carry permit. Before, during, and after the required course, he’d paid retired Navy Seals to teach him things about these weapons that ordinary civilians wouldn’t know. One thing he’d been taught was how to identify an armor-piercing bullet, otherwise known as “cop killers.” A major tell is that they have pointed tips, not rounded or flat. Another is that the casings are typically different from other bullets both in look and texture. The majority of the rounds he could see matched both of these descriptions.

  On the floor of the small armory were several pairs of combat boots, bulletproof vests, gloves, jackets and other pieces of apparel. All in all, he could not believe that this room or its contents belonged to his father. He caught himself close to imaging that someone had managed to build it and house all these firearms in the garage without his father knowing, but he quickly dismissed that idea. His father was extremely precise and noticed the smallest details. His garage may have been messy when Matt was young, but even so, he knew exactly where every rag, tool, and paint can were when he needed them.

  Then what? What was it? This was all wrong. His dad had always been a gentle soul—soft-spoken, wise, and loved by all. Even if he did ever manage to make an enemy, he would never go so far as to create a war room. He despised guns. Matt could remember wanting to learn how to shoot a gun, and to hunt—especially after military school—and his father had always shut down the idea right away. He had always talked about how dangerous they were, and when it came to hunting, what it meant to take a life, even that of an animal one planne
d on eating.

  As he looked around, he was certain of only one thing: Patrick O’Bannon was not at all the man he remembered. He had very much changed. He didn’t know if it was because of him, his sister, a mixture of the two, or something else entirely. What he did know was that his father had lost some piece of himself, and it had been replaced by something else entirely different. Something darker. He returned to the door, took one last look around, and pulled the light string, causing darkness to consume him. He nudged the door open into the garage, again only far enough that he could squeeze through.

  The garage door was still shut, and there was no sign that anyone else had been in the space. He made his way to the side door, slipped out, and closed it leaving it unlocked, just the way he’d found it. The driveway was still empty as well, so he figured it must have been a neighbor coming or going that he’d heard when he’d first entered the garage. He worked his way back around to the front of the house and climbed the stairs. As he went to knock, he saw it—another small note taped to the door.

  Matthew,

  The house was a bad place to meet. Please meet me behind Daryl’s in town. It is very important that I speak with you right away and it is very important that you come alone.

  Love,

  Mom

  Daryl’s was a small grocery store in the middle of Council Grove. Why would she need to meet him there, of all places? If she needed to speak to him alone, why didn’t she just talk to him at the hotel? The pieces weren’t fitting together at all, and it gave him an even worse feeling than before. Butterfly stomach or not, he had to meet her. There was something bad going on, and he meant to find out what it was, especially if it involved his mother. He bound down the steps and across the yard back to the car. He got in and turned down the radio which was still blaring Radio Disney.