We're All Broken

by O. L. Gregory

  Roger didn’t know what grade level had their recess when, but at least these kids looked quite a bit bigger than the last group he’d seen out here.

  Eyes scanning from seesaw, to swings, to climbing apparatus, he was having no luck. Finding Sophie was turning out to be the equivalent of finding a speck of gold in a pile of iron pyrite.

  But then he noticed a girl up in the corner of the playground, a kickball game going on behind her, who was turned toward him, and staring.

  His eyes met hers, and he knew. He just knew he was staring into the eyes of his little Sophie-girl.

  Roger slowly put his car into drive and drifted it forward, steering around another parked car, and braking to a stop once he was even with Sophie. The whole time, he was praying the playground attendants didn’t notice him.

  Looking for the adults from this new vantage point, he realized that the active kickball game provided enough of a barrier that he might get away with talking to her. He waited to see what she would do next.

  Sophie looked around, decided the coast was clear enough, and moved over to the fence, threading her fingers through the chain-link.

  He pulled on a baseball cap and put on a pair of sunglasses, then shut off the engine and quietly got out of the car, walking up to her.

  “Hi, Daddy,” she whispered.

  “Hey.”

  “Are you all better now?”

  He squatted, trying to appear too short to be noticed. “Yeah. Took me long enough, huh?”

  She gave him a small smile.

  “I’m just here to make sure you’re alright, baby. That’s all I want to know.”

  She looked down at the ground. “Charlotte wasn’t.”

  “I know.”

  “Did you get her out of that house?”

  “I made sure the social worker knew she wasn’t alright. The social worker got her out.”

  “And the bad things stopped happening?”

  He stilled his motions and made eye-contact. “Yes. The bad things stopped happening. But that didn’t happen until Charlotte told somebody.”

  She chewed on her lip.

  Roger was careful not to break eye-contact. “If bad things are happening to you, baby, you need to tell me, so it can stop.”

  “Do you promise it’ll stop?”

  “I promise you, I will make sure it stops.”

  She glanced over her shoulder. “What if I don’t want to have to leave the house I’m in? My foster parents are really nice.”

  “Is that why you haven’t told anybody?”

  She nodded.

  “Is it one of the other kids hurting you?”

  She nodded.

  “We can have that kid removed.”

  She shook her head. “He’s their real kid.”

  Something in Roger’s gaze turned cold, hard. “He?”

  Sophie’s eyes grew big at seeing the change in her Daddy. She nodded.

  “What’s the son doing to you?”

  Sophie broke eye-contact and looked back down at the ground.

  Roger laid his hands over her fingers. “Sophie, honey, I don’t know how much time we have left to talk. You have to tell me what the son is doing to you. I can’t help you unless I know what he’s doing.”

  Her chin trembled when she looked up at him.

  “Is he touching you?”

  A tear fell from her face when she nodded her head.

  “Where is he touching you, sweetheart?”

  She chewed on her lip as she worked to clear her throat. “Down… down there,” she whispered.

  Roger drew in a breath and focused on the importance of gathering information from her, rather than to start in on some colorful cursing. “How old is he?”

  “Twenty.”

  Roger felt as though ice had begun running through his veins. “What’s your address, baby?”

  “455 Arbor Street.”

  “Do any of the other kids in the house drive?”

  “No.”

  “What kind of vehicle does he have?”

  “Blue.”

  “Two doors or four?”

  “Four.”

  “Is it a van, truck, car, or something else?”

  “It’s a car. And he’s got a bunch of bumper stickers on the back of it.”

  He nodded. “Good. That’s good. Does he work?”

  He nodded. “You know the shopping center with the Wal-Mart, and computer repair shop, and bagel shop, and video game place?”

  “I’ll find it,” he promised.

  “He works in the burger place that sits out by the road, next to another store in its own building. The whole thing’s on a highway.”

  “I’ll find it.”

  “So, what’re you gonna do to him?”

  Roger smiled. “I’m going to talk to him. I won’t tell him how I know, or who I am, I’m just going to make it clear that he must stop, okay?”

  “And I won’t have to leave the house?”

  “And you won’t have to leave the house. Okay?”

  She swallowed and nodded.

  “Okay, I need to go before any of the adults spot us. I’m not supposed to be talking to you or your sisters.”

  She nodded.

  He lifted his fingers to his mouth, kissed them, then pressed his fingers to hers. “I love you, baby girl.”

  “Love you, too, Daddy.”

  He quietly turned and rose from his squat, moved to the car, got in, and started it up. He gave her a wink as he pulled forward, heading for the state route that would take him to Penny’s high school.

  As much as he wanted to go and track this guy down, he couldn’t afford to be hasty. He needed time to plan. Plus, he couldn’t miss a week with Penny, not when she always made time for him.

  Roger spent Saturday looking at maps, searching for a not only Sophie’s address, but also for the shopping center that would match her description of where the little asshole worked.

  The more Roger thought about it, the more irate he became. The kid was twenty. Twenty. That was a man. A man who was touching a ten-year-old ‘down there’.

  Admittedly, he should have told Sophie to tell her social worker. But he understood her concern with wanting to stay with the foster parents. Even he had to admit that moving her to another house was a gamble as to how the foster parents would treat her. And how would they begin to treat her, if Sophie was the reason their son ended up in prison?

  But the thought that the guy could be touching her again, right at this very moment… The thought made him sick to his stomach.

  He got up and made his way down to the basement, to pound on the body bag. It was either that, or he was going to start pounding holes into his walls.

  And here’s the sick, twisted part of it all. His two unadopted daughters were being kept away from him because it was too dangerous for them to be with him. And yet, they were the two suffering the abuse.

  Because their placements were so supposed to be so much safer for them than he was.

  What he wouldn’t give to go pop the social worker in the mouth and knock a few of his teeth out.

  But… Roger had to grudgingly admit that the guy had gotten three of his kids into good homes and adopted into good families. And he did go get Charlotte out of her situation, as soon as he was told what was going on. Roger was also willing to bet that he’d go rescue Sophie, too, and press charges against the couple’s son, if Sophie would just say something.

  He let out a sigh, gritted his teeth, and kept punching.

  Roger had learned a lot from listening to other people’s stories, while locked up. Do you know how many of the people getting treatment in there had problems that started with sexual abuse? Too many.

  He’d also learned that it was highly embarrassing for the victims to talk about, which was only one reason why so many had said nothing, and suffered for years on their own. From this, he knew the level of trust his daughter was extending to him. He knew, too, that he had to come through for her.r />
  He’d made promises, mostly to keep her talking, but promises nonetheless.

  Her conditions were that she remain in her home, with the kind foster parents, and that the son stop touching her…

  There really only seemed to be one way to accomplish such a feat.

  He had to ensure that the son leave his parents’ house, never to return again.

  He had to wait until the following Friday, because he wanted to be outside Sophie’s house only while she was at school. He didn’t want to make a habit of seeing her, because he didn’t want to get caught, or put the burden of keeping that kind of repeated secret on her, at such a young age.

  Penny was one thing. She was older and more closely bonded to him. He knew he could trust her, because she valued his visits every bit as much as he did. Trusting Sophie seemed like so much more of a risk.

  Friday was the only weekday that he could slip out and it not be noticed. He drove by the house and spotted the bumper stickered, blue, four-door car. Continuing past, he drove around the block, coming back around and parking a few homes away.

  He assumed his usual stakeout posture.

  Four hours later, he was still waiting.

  In fact, he was there for so long that he could guarantee the couple across the street and three houses down were headed for divorce, given that the wife was cheating on her husband. Not unless she either had two husbands, or always greeted and parted every man in her life with mini-makeout session in the doorway.

  And, the woman’s house he was parked in front of was too busy to notice him, given that she was in labor. Watching her through her front living room window, he’d about broke down and called an ambulance for her. She kept doubling over every six minutes and panting for forty-five second intervals. But she eventually wised up and started making phone calls. If he had to guess, the husband had come home from work, the midwife had come in, and about-to-be-grandma was the one pacing and cringing in front of the window now.

  Roger might have been stuck in the car for most of the day, but bored he was not.

  Finally, a pimple-faced young man in a minimum-wage earning uniform came out of the house he was there to watch, and got into the blue car with a bumper sticker that begged people to ‘honk if you’re stupid, drunk, and horny’.

  Roger sighed as the car backed out from the driveway, and he started his own car to follow.

  He followed in pursuit for twenty-seven minutes, shaking his head as the kid drove to the very fast food place that he’d pinpointed on his map app, just the night before. A familiar looking shopping center, with a cellphone store right next to the fast food place.

  Roger parked with enough time to grab his phone and get a closeup picture of the asshole who was abusing his daughter before he went inside to hopefully clean out oily vats from dirty deep fryers, or maybe hosing off bird shit from the roof, or something equally fitting.

  His task for the day done, having gotten a good look and positive ID on the guy, he scanned the parking lot of the cellphone store, encouraged not to see Charlotte’s abuser’s car on the lot. Hopefully that guy was in prison, serving a sentence with a stupid, drunk, and horny cellmate.

  Chapter Twenty

  You Know What? Fire is a Necessary Evil

  “Thank you, Daddy,” Roger whispered, pulling out yet another gun from his remaining hidden collection. He loaded it, double-checked the safety, added a silencer, and slid it carefully into the waistband of his jeans.

  He went downstairs, ensured for the fifteenth time that anything traceable on his technology was wiped from his map searches, checked that the location tracking was enabled on his phone, then ordered a movie on pay-per-view.

  He laid the phone on the couch, turned the volume on the television up, then grabbed his keys and left the house.

  Pulling onto the far end of the parking lot, and parking along the shadowed far edge, half on the grass, he exited the car and kept to the shadows as he made his way toward the cellphone store.

  He kept himself to the fencing around the dumpsters in the back of the two stores. Roger knew figuring on the pimple-faced miscreant being scheduled to work on what was probably the busiest day of the week had paid off when he spotted the blue car in the parking lot.

  Now, all he could do was hope the kid was sent out to dump trash, or that he could pick him off going to his car at the end of the night, or… something.

  Roger found it awkward, waiting in shadows by dumpsters. He was used to his car. He felt exposed out here, and the cars in the drive-thru lane were making him paranoid, especially the nosey little kids who kept looking in his direction as they looked everywhere around them.

  Fortunately, it was late enough when he got here, that he didn’t have long to wait until the line died down and the employees inside began their shutting down rituals. When the back door opened, Roger’s heart fluttered in his chest as he prepared to fire. But disappointment set in as he realized some girl had been sent out.

  How messed up was that? There were at least three guys in there that he had seen, it was late, and they all decide to send a girl out to the dumpster? What if some dude was waiting out here with a gun?

  Oh, wait, look. There was!

  He could have easily grabbed her, knocked her out, and carried her off to his car.

  Instead, he crowded into a bush the landscaping team had put around the dumpster to draw customer’s gazes away from the obvious trash area.

  She dumped the trash and they both heard a whistle.

  Both their gazes shifted upward, and she let out a giggle. “Having fun up there?”

  Pimple-Faced Idiot smiled down at her. “Hey, changing out the banners up here is better than doing the floors.”

  “True enough,” she said, shaking her head and heading back into the store.

  He leaned over the edge of the half-wall up there and watched her go in, chuckling to himself.

  Roger took aim and, as soon as the back door closed, shot him in the head. He watched as the kid slumped, gravity pulling him down onto the roof surface and out of sight.

  Fan-freaking-tastic, Roger thought. He should have plenty of time to get to his car and head for home, before anyone thought to go up and check out what was keeping him so long.

  Roger came around the other side of the fencing, to slink around the cellphone store, when he saw Charlotte’s abuser standing there, frozen, with a trash bag in his hand.

  It didn’t take a genius to figure out the guy must have come out while he was distracted by the exchange between the girl and Crater-Face.

  Roger almost laughed at the expression on this guy’s face, but not a single thing about seeing this guy here was funny. “What’s the matter?” Roger taunted just loud enough for the guy to hear. “You hit little girls for fun, but can’t handle seeing someone with a gun?”

  The guy’s eyes rounded.

  “Yeah, I know you like to hit young girls. You want to know how I know?” Roger asked, taking a step forward.

  The guy swallowed as it dawned on him that he was in a bad way, right about now.

  “I’ll tell you. One of those little girls was my daughter.”

  The guy blanched.

  “Why the hell aren’t you in jail?”

  The guy started to stammer.

  “Never mind. I’ll make this simple. You hit my daughter, and I hit you. With a bullet.”

  Roger stared the man in the eye as he raised his gun and fired a bullet straight into the asshole’s heart.

  Taking a quick look around and seeing no one else in view, he jogged through the shadows and over to his car, taking off and heading straight for home.

  “Roger,” Kelly called out Monday morning.

  “Yeah,” Roger called from his private office.

  Kelly’s face appeared in the doorway. “There’re a couple officers here.”

  Roger’s eyes jerked away from his computer in surprise. “There’s what?”

  “There are two officers here, asking for
you.”

  Roger stood and followed Kelly into the living room. “Um, how can I help you?” he asked with a perfectly perplexed expression on his face.

  “Mr. Hayes,” the officer said, accepting Roger’s handshake.

  The other officer nodded and accepted Roger’s next handshake.

  “We were wondering if you could tell us where you were on Saturday night, around ten o’clock,” the first one finished.

  Roger looked from one to the other in shock. “I was here.”

  The officers shared a look.

  “I don’t suppose you have anything to prove that?” the second one asked.

  “Well—” Roger looked from one to the other, as though at a loss for words. “How can I prove I was home?”

  It didn’t escape Roger’s attention that both Kelly and Max were now watching and listening to what was going down.

  “Was there anyone here with you?” the second officer asked.

  “No, I live alone.”

  “What were you doing here at ten o’clock? Do you remember?”

  “Well…” He pretended to think about it. “Yeah.”

  “And what was it?”

  Roger ran a hand through his hair. “I rented a pay-per-view movie. I was here, on the couch.”

  The first officer head-nodded at the television. “Can you bring up your account, so I can verify the rental?”

  “Uh…” he gave a sheepish look over to Kelly. “Sure.”

  All of them stepped forward as he brought up the record.

  “Dude, you dirty dog!” Max said with a chuckle.

  “I’ve been widowed for a while now,” Roger said with an apologetic look in Kelly’s direction.

  She lifted both hands up in supplication. “Hey, if you want to watch a three-hour professional porno movie, that’s your right.”

  “Was it any good?” Max asked.

  Roger found a smile. “Yeah.” He turned to the officers, innocent questioning in his gaze, “Is that enough for you?”

  The first officer nodded. “We already checked on your phone’s location and saw that it was here, as well. Your added evidence is enough to satisfy us. Thank you for your time.”

  “Wait,” Roger said, before they could turn to leave. “I know I’m on probation, and that puts me on a suspect list for a lot of things, but can I ask what this was about?”