by Raen Smith
“Jack, you better not be back to haunt me. You know I don’t believe in ghosts,” Charla said as she pressed her back against the door. She waited, hoping like hell not to hear a response. “Don’t forget what I told you, once you’re gone, you’re gone. There’s no coming back.”
The Keurig machine whirred, making her heart jump.
“God damn it,” she swore quietly to herself as she walked back to the cabinets to grab a mug. She was edgier than she’d been in a long time. Now that Jack was gone, the cabin was becoming a distant memory of her safe haven. She couldn’t ignore the unrest she felt being here. She decided to spend the morning packing as much stuff as she could and making trips to Goodwill. She could be out in a few days. The problem was where to go next.
Most people her age could put their tails between their legs and drag their sorry asses back to their parent’s house. She didn’t have that option, unless she wanted to move back in with her alcoholic mother in a cramped place she was on the verge of being kicked out of. She wouldn’t go back there, even for a few days. She filled her mug and wrapped her hands around the warm ceramic before taking a sip of the hot liquid. She knew Jill and Aaron would take her in, but they were getting married in less than a month. Charla wouldn’t allow herself to disrupt their lives like that.
Her only option was to find a quick lease on an apartment and bank on getting a job while selling Jack’s house as soon as possible. She’d have enough to pay a security deposit and the first month or two of rent, but that was all. She’d spent almost all her money paying for nursing school. She cursed herself for not taking on more student loans. She had anticipated Jack living longer than he had.
She sighed and fished through a drawer to find a pen and pad of paper. She scribbled a checklist on the paper:
1. Pack rest of boxes.
2. Search for an apartment.
3. Call realtor.
4. Go to Dirty Leprechaun and tell Liam about Jack.
4. Stay out of Liam’s business with Jack.
5. Don’t fall in love with Liam Murphy.
***
Charla rolled her Corolla to a stop, idling at the Goodwill donation drop-off in Blackwell. Her car was packed to the gills, boxes stacked and bags crammed in every corner. She had driven the thirty minutes with a lamp on her lap. The load had only made a small dent in the cabin, but if she’d keep the pace up, she’d have it cleared in two days. She’d have to handle two more nights sleeping at the cabin.
She opened the trunk and handed the first box to the donation attendant. She was reaching for the second box when a familiar voice cut through her.
“Is that you?” asked the woman. Charla didn’t have to turn to know her mother was standing behind her. Blackwell was really too small. Her mother had moved here a little over a year ago for Larry or Tom or maybe it was Travis. Charla couldn’t quite remember the name of the rotating men her mother dated. Her mother had moved only two weeks after she’d found out Charla was attending nursing school in Blackwell. She closed her eyes and set the box back down. She took a deep breath before turning around to see the one-and-only Dotti Taylor.
“Mom,” she said through her teeth before she forced a smile to match her mom’s. Dotti was wearing a mini-skirt and low-cut tank top with what Charla classified as stripper heels. Classy, she thought. What else would she wear on a Wednesday morning at Goodwill?
“Honey,” Dotti gushed, moving toward her until they were only inches apart. Dotti wrapped her arms around Charla and gave a tight squeeze. Charla stood there for a moment before lifting one of her arms to give her a light pat on the back. This was how it always was. Dotti would shower her with snippets of affection before Charla would see flashes of the wicked witch she really was. Dotti released her and held her shoulders an arm’s length away. “How have you been, honey?”
“Good,” Charla replied short and sweet, praying Dotti wouldn’t notice the car packed with stuff.
“All of this needs to go?” The attendant asked behind her.
“Yeah.” Charla nodded her head at him and turned back to Dotti.
“What’s all that stuff?” Dotti asked, pointing a finely manicured nail at the trunk. She took a step forward and examined the car. She spun her head back toward Charla. “Did he die?”
Charla groaned inwardly, wishing like hell Dotti wasn’t standing here. “Yeah, he did.”
“Did he leave you with anything?” Dotti asked, leaning in toward her. Charla could smell the alcohol on her breath. She wasn’t sure if it was from last night or this morning. Either way, it didn’t matter. She was on the bottle again.
“No, he didn’t leave me anything. Just a cottage to clean out,” Charla replied, the anger rising in her throat.
“He leave you the place?” Dotti pressed. “You have an extra room? That asshole landlord of mine threatened to kick me out again…”
“How’s sobriety?”
She pursed her lips together and narrowed her eyes. The Dotti Flip had switched. “Don’t you even mutter a word to me about sobriety, you ungrateful little thing. You have no clue what I’ve been through. Ever since I lost Peter, I’ve never been the same. You lose your husband and then come talk to me about it. See how you handle it.”
“It’s been ten years and that man was never a real husband to you, unless you consider a husband to be an emotional and physical abuser who does nothing else but suck the life out of you,” Charla snapped. “You’re better off without him.”
“Don’t you say those things about your father,” Dotti hissed and pointed a nail into Charla’s chest.
“He wasn’t my father,” Charla muttered. Dotti opened her mouth about to spew more hatred but Charla cut her off. “Go back to rehab, Dotti.”
She clamped her mouth shut and furrowed her eyebrows down. “I don’t need some sniveling little girl who is too good for her mama to tell me what to do.”
“I can call for you,” Charla offered. “But I’m not paying for it again.”
Dotti clucked and raised her hand as if she were going to strike her. Charla took a step back and turned to her trunk just as the attendant reappeared next to her. Dotti cleared her throat and put down her hand.
“Well, I have a ton to do.” Charla grabbed a box. She wouldn’t stand here and waste her breath on the woman she was supposed to call her mother. “Hope you have a nice day.”
Dotti didn’t reply. Charla could still feel her standing behind her as she handed the box to the attendant. Then she heard the fast, hard clicks of Dotti’s stripper heels against the sidewalk disappear behind her.
Chapter 4
Liam parked on the opposite side of the street and killed the dull rumble of his decade-old white cargo van. It was his runner van, the one he used during his collections. The Audi wasn’t exactly the type of car to blend into the places and neighborhoods where he found his clientele. Plus, he didn’t want any of the clientele messing up his Audi. So he bought the old GMC for five grand, stripped the inside and built a custom steel barrier between the cargo area and front seats before he went on his first job. The other start-up costs were his collections of guns, although Jerry argued that he only really needed one. Liam owned six.
He double checked the address in the text from Jerry, his bondsman. N756 Hill Street. The faded yellow house with crooked shutters across the street had most of the same numbers. It was missing the seven, but he was sure this was it. He’d been to this house before. He’d brought in Rich Horton almost a year ago. Rich hadn’t gone down easily the first time around, so Liam expected this second-go-around to be worse. But the cool grand and the thrill of the hunt outweighed the risks. Some of the other bounty hunters Jerry contracted relied heavily on disguises or ridiculous measures to get close to their clientele. Liam relied on his presence and his ability to coerce.
These whacked-out nut jobs were a piece of cake compared to his tours in Afghanistan. Terrorists and road-side bombs had that effect on people. The Marine Corps called it desensitization to violenc
e. He had that whole psychology bullshit covered after participating in ground-level combat for two days straight. Nothing can quite wipe the memory of shooting a man.
Rich Horton was most likely getting high inside the house or maybe coming down from an all-night bender. Either way, he wasn’t going to be fit for a rational conversation, not that most of them were. Liam would have to go in around the back and take him down with force. This wasn’t something he minded doing. After leaving the Marine Corps, he struggled to find something that made him feel alive like the days back in the sweltering heat of the desert. The Dirty Leprechaun was great, but it didn’t satisfy his need to live on the edge. He needed a little more danger in his life. So when Jerry landed in the Dirty Leprechaun over eighteen months ago with woes about the latest hunter he stopped contracting with, it was a match made in heaven. Liam had found a new day job.
Bounty hunting in Clark County turned out to be more profitable than he would have imagined. He had no idea how many criminals were jumping bail in his hometown of Blackwell. The police department was overworked and short staffed to handle the city’s population of 30,000. City officials blamed it on the Chicago “creep.” The influence of criminal activity leaked into the surrounding communities, according to them. Either way, it gave Liam something to do during the day to keep his mind off his ex-wife and the jackass she was going to remarry. Turned out the love of her life was really some guy named Ken who owned a chain of laundromats. Liam had never seen Ken, and he sure as hell hoped he never would. He knew it was hard for Genevieve when he was deployed, but he never knew it was that hard. If only she’d told him.
Damn. It’d been two years since she left him and his wounds were still fresh, no matter how hard he tried to ignore them. Genevieve was his first love and his soul mate, or so he thought. They’d married under the stars in an open field the night before he left for the Marines when they were eighteen. He could still smell the sulfur of the fireworks and feel the bangs in his heart. He’d met his share of women over the last two years, but none of them compared to Genevieve. She was beautiful and smart, a combination he found to be like some goddamn mythical existence at the Dirty Leprechaun. That is, until Charla Taylor. She was gorgeous, smart, and one tough woman if she was willing to put up with a stubborn Irishman with Alzheimer’s. Charla Taylor was a triple threat. He could only imagine what Jack was like. Liam once tore out an IV when he was in the hospital coming out of surgery for a football injury in high school. He was later restrained to the bed by four nurses. It wasn’t one of his finer moments.
Liam slid his nine millimeter out of his holster and double checked the rounds. He’d never had to fire his gun during one of his collections, and he wanted to keep it that way. He was pretty lucky by the standards of the profession. He was good at negotiating with the presence of a deadly weapon, thanks to the military. Everyone he encountered knew he wouldn’t be afraid to use his gun.
He opened the van door and stepped into the cool darkness of the early morning. He guessed it would be a few hours before Charla even awoke. He tried to push the thoughts of her and her tight ass out of his mind. Damn it. He had a job to do.
He shut the door silently and crossed the street. He crept onto the lawn, moving along the chain-linked fence running between the two houses. He was just beginning to feel the dew soak into his sneakers when the sudden bark of a dog erupted next door.
“Damn,” he cursed, shooting a look of disdain at the backyard of the neighboring house. All he could see was two glowing eyes. They were stopped about ten feet from the house, which meant the dog was tied up. There wasn’t a dog the first time around so either they were new neighbors or they got a new dog. The bark was low and menacing, broken only by intermittent growls. Most of the drug dealers in the area had a penchant for keeping Rottweilers, which meant that Rich Horton had new neighbors AND a new dog.
Liam shoved his hand in his jacket pocket and retrieved a bag of leftover chicken wings from the bar last night. He wound up and heaved them over the fence. The growling deepened before it stopped. The early morning was silent again.
He leaned against the fence and sighed with relief. He never went on a run without a bag of chicken wings. He learned the hard way on his third job and still had the scar on his thigh to prove it. Jerry had laughed when Liam told him he'd gotten ten stitches because of that damn Rottweiller. Hazard of the job, Jerry had said.
Hazard was right, Liam thought as a light flicked on in the faded yellow house. He wasn’t in the mood to chase down Rich Horton. He wanted to get in and out so he could focus on what he needed to do the rest of the day. It was hard enough sleeping last night knowing he had two brothers out there somewhere. He grew up as an only child and was envious of his friends who had brothers. He wanted to beat up on a younger brother or look up to an older brother. He wanted something, besides his adoptive parents, not that he had any reason to complain. They loved and supported him, but they were older than all the other parents. They were as old as most of his friend’s grandparents, and they both died in his early twenties a year apart when he was on tours. He wondered what his pops would say about his day job. It looked nothing like the restaurant his folks had run for forty years.
Liam sprinted to the house and pressed his back against the siding. The light in the window five feet to his left flicked on. Seconds later, the window slid open and bare feet emerged, dangling out of the window. Liam reached for his handcuffs and pulled them slowly from the ring on his jeans, careful not to make a sound or sudden movement. Rich Horton wasn’t a complete idiot, maybe only ninety-five percent idiot. Rich knew someone was after him, but he definitely should have reconsidered where he chose to stay. Getting Rich was too easy.
He was about to lunge forward and grab the feet when legs appeared through the window. They were thin with knobby knees and way too feminine to belong to Rich. Then the rest of the body slid out the window, dressed in shorts and a sheer tank top. A woman landed on the ground with a thud. Her blonde hair whipped back and forth as she turned to the backyard and then to Liam. He lunged forward and covered her mouth just before she could let out a scream. She kicked him in the shin and flailed her arms as he worked to restrain her. He finally get a hold of her hands and yanked them behind her back.
“Shh,” he said in her ear. “I don’t want to hurt you. I’m here for someone else.”
She let out a muffled scream beneath his hand, and he reluctantly applied force to her wrists. She whined from the pain.
“Please. I don’t want to hurt you. I will let you go if you promise not to scream. Can you promise me that?” Liam asked, still bending her wrists up towards her shoulders. “Stop moving. You have to trust me. I’m not one of the bad guys. I’m here to get someone inside who has jumped bail. You understand?”
She nodded her head and stood still. He looked down and saw deep bruises and tracks on her bare arms. “You need help?”
She shook her head no, but he knew she was lying. Most of them did. “Look, there’s a clinic on Seventh Street. It’s free. They have a great program. Ask for Marian. She’ll help you out. You don’t want to end up like the guy I’m about to get inside. He’s going to prison for a long time. Trust me, you don’t belong there.”
Her body quivered beneath his and he thought for a second, there might be a chance Marian would call him later today about a woman who came to see her. But the thought was interrupted with a clamp of teeth against his fingers and a searing pain.
“Fuck,” he swore as he cranked her wrists tighter, making her body crumble. She released the clamp on his hand and submitted to him. “Get out of here.”
She sprinted toward the front yard, her blonde stringy hair streaming behind her. Liam dropped his hands to his knees and watched her run through the front yard and disappear down the sidewalk.
At least she went quietly, he thought as he turned his attention back to the house. In the beginning of his bounty hunting career, it was hard to come to grips with the amount of
drug use he experienced. There were junkies of all shapes, colors, and sizes, most of whom he handed cards to. He made friends with Marian at the clinic after a man he’d given a clinic card to had visited her. Liam had a low success rate though; only around ten percent heeded his advice. But he’d be damned if he would stop trying.
He crept toward the window and peeked inside to see Rich Horton passed out on the floor. On second thought, taking him in was going to be easier than he anticipated. He moved along the side of the house and turned the corner to see the back door. He opened the unlocked door, shaking his head. Rich Horton wasn’t helping his cause.
Liam walked into the kitchen and saw a half-empty bag of marijuana on the table. He dumped it in the kitchen sink and flushed it down with water. He moved forward with the handcuffs dangling in his hands through the silent house.
He reached the door at the end of the hallway, put his hand on the door knob and slowly turned it, holding his breath as he pushed it open a crack. He expected to see Rich lying on the floor, but the floor was empty. Liam’s eyes shot up to see Rich climbing out the window just like the blonde, feet first. Rich met Liam’s eyes for a brief second before he disappeared out the window.
“God damn it,” Liam yelled. He sprinted through the living room, jumping over a woman lying on the floor. He didn’t have time to throw her a card. He peeled out of the house and down the steps to see a naked Rich hobbling toward the sidewalk.
Liam flew across the yard and tackled him, bringing them both to the ground with a resounding thud.
“Oh, come on man,” Rich moaned into the grass. Liam shoved his face harder into the ground and yanked his arms behind his back. He cuffed them with a clank while he pinned his body to the ground. “Come on. I can’t go back. Goddamn it.”
“Should have thought about that before you jumped bail again,” Liam said, holding on to his arms. “Stand up.”
Rich staggered to his feet, standing in all his naked and wrinkly ass and ball glory.
