He hoped.
It was almost time for the girls to get home. He was sitting on the sofa with the blinds open, watching TV and ready for his appointment, when a car pulled into their driveway. He watched a guy he didn’t recognize, large man, climb out and head for their front door.
Jeff had managed to peel himself up off the couch, slipping his phone into the pocket of his cargo shorts as he headed for the door to answer it before the guy knocked. A couple of times, they’d had people show up looking for the former residents. The couple who’d owned the house, prior to the people who’d lost it to the bank and trashed it before Brandon bought it, had been an elderly couple. Sometimes people who didn’t know they’d died showed up, and it fell on them to pass along the unfortunate news.
“Can I help you?”
The guy stared at him for a moment. “I’m looking for Stuart Powell.”
“I’m his husband, Jeff. Can I help you?”
The guy grinned, and Jeff rocked back, letting go of the door and staggering when the guy cold-cocked him. Pain exploded behind his eyes, combined with trying to reconcile that this guy had just hit him out of the fucking blue!
“So you’re the other fucker who ruined him, huh?”
“What the fuck?” The guy was already in the doorway and Jeff stepped back, confused and trying to catch his breath.
“Goddamned wife left me. Friends fucking mocking me. All Stuart’s goddamned fault.”
Now he realized who this was—Jake. Jeff stepped back. “Get the hell out of here, asshole!”
“Not until I get what I fucking want. Kick his fucking ass and drag him back to Iowa. Fucking parents won’t even talk to me. Siding with the little queer boy. I’ll show them and everyone else. Make a man out of that goddamned kid.”
Jeff realized this man was seriously unhinged, and he smelled like he’d already downed a six-pack. Jeff had never before in his life wished he owned a gun…until now.
Stumbling, still reeling from the punch, he knew he was in serious damn trouble. His cell phone was in his pocket but if he took the time to dig it out, the guy would be on him. If he could get outside and start screaming for help, maybe he could attract a neighbor’s attention.
Fuck! The girls would be home any minute!
Backing across the living room away from the guy as Jake drunkenly lurched his bulk at him, Jeff snagged one of the barstools at the kitchen counter and toppled it, briefly slowing the guy as he tripped over it.
Jeff ran for the sliders and yanked them open, but there was no way he could outrun the guy.
And he realized this was a tactical mistake. If the guy got him in the pool, he’d probably drown Jeff.
“Help!” he screamed. “Call 911!”
The guy lunged for him but Jeff ducked, dodging toward the other side of the lanai. He could dive through the screen and run around that side of the house, where the gate was closer to the street and easier to get opened in a hurry.
Except then he tripped and went sliding along the concrete pool deck, pain slamming the air out of his lungs as skin peeled off his palms, elbows, and knees.
He tried scrabbling around the far end of the pool, past the barbecue and patio furniture, maybe if he could put room between him and the psycho—
The man clamped a hand around his left ankle. Jeff reflexively kicked back with his right foot, hearing a satisfying crunch of bone as he got the guy in the nose. The man let out a roar of pain and released his ankle.
Jeff scrambled to his feet again and turned, horrified to see Emma and Grace racing through the house toward the patio. But he didn’t dare turn his attention toward them for fear of the guy getting to them first and hurting them.
“Yeah, come get me, asshole,” Jeff yelled, trying to keep the guy’s attention on him. “You want a piece of me? Tell everyone the faggot busted your nose. How will that play when you crawl back to Iowa with your nutsac tail between your legs, huh?”
The man still howled, but now with rage as he let go of his ruined nose. Blood poured down his face. “Gonna kill you now, you fucker. Was only gonna beat you up before. Fucking asshole perverts did shit to my brother. Wasn’t like that before he moved here. All your fucking fault!”
Jeff kept his eyes focused on the guy. Behind Jake, the girls exploded into a sudden flurry of movement. Emma grabbed the pool dip net from where he’d left it next to the sliders and swung for the bleachers. She whacked the guy behind the backs of both knees, taking him down with a fresh howl of pain erupting from him.
Grace had snatched the barbecue fork from its hook on the side of the grill. She dropped onto the guy’s back with both knees, the fork gripped tightly in her hands like a sword and now pressed against the base of his skull.
“Mister, I don’t know for sure if this would kill you or put you in a bed for the rest of your life,” Grace growled, “but if no one told you, Florida’s a castle doctrine, stand-your-ground state. Guns, sharp, pointy things, doesn’t matter. Oh, and FYI, I’m a fucking minor. I don’t mind doing jail time because I’ll be out in a few months, if I even do any time at all.”
Jake started to move and she jabbed the fork into Jake’s skin, making Jake screech and Jeff wince. “You that fucking stupid? Seriously? I have a goddamned genius IQ and was a preemie. I doubt any fucking jury in this state will convict me.”
She leaned in and even Jeff felt his balls shrivel at her cold tone. “We can kill you painfully and tell them you put up a fight. Crazy asshole breaks in and tries to hurt our dad, who’s got Lyme disease and is disabled? His daughters protected him? We’ll make a fortune on the TV interviews.”
She jabbed Jake again, yanking another piercing, high-pitched shriek from him.
“Nooo! Please!”
Meanwhile, Emma had dropped the dip net pole over the backs of his knees and stood on it. “Yeah, she also forgot to mention she’s a damn sadist. Borderline sociopath, except she has a conscience. She’s spent enough time in hospitals over the years to know how to make shit hurt. So unless you want your obit to say a half-blind little girl killed you with a barbecue fork, I’d hold very fucking still, if I were you. You’re lucky she didn’t pin your nuts to the concrete with it.”
“Good idea,” Grace growled. “Go get the other fork from the kitchen.”
“No!” the guy shrieked. “Please, no!”
Jeff would talk to Brandon about excusing the F-bombs later. He finally rolled onto his back and fumbled his phone out of his pocket, fingers shaking as he dialed 911. Now pain washed over him, and definitely not the good kind.
“911, what is your emergency?”
“Intruder attacked me and my daughters. We’ve got him pinned down, but he threatened to kill us…”
* * * *
Brandon paced in front of the couch. On it sat Jeff, Emma, and Grace.
All three wore identical grins.
The last deputies had finally left two minutes earlier, nearly two hours after their arrival following Jeff’s 911 call.
Until then, Grace and Emma had put on a really good act of crying, sobbing, acting terrified once Jake was handcuffed and they could let him go and let the deputies deal with him. They’d swarmed Jeff, clinging to him as the paramedics treated him. Jeff had managed solemn, stoic anger and pain in the face of his injuries.
Brandon had no sooner shut the front door than their grins had appeared.
That’s when he’d ordered them to sit.
The fuck.
Down.
They would be driving Jeff to the hospital shortly. Brandon had wanted to let the ambulance take him, but Jeff refused to get in because he’d had one ambulance ride in his life and didn’t want another. So the paramedics cleaned him up as best they could.
Brandon had already called Grace’s parents and assured them she was not only fine, but apparently ready to star in her own anti-hero comic.
“You can’t punish them, Bran.” Jeff’s grin widened. “They saved me.”
“A barbecue
fork? Really?” He stared at Grace. “You were going to kill him?”
She nodded. “Damned straight I was. He fucked with my family.”
Emma and Jeff both gave her fist bumps, although Grace was obviously more gentle with Jeff, due to his scraped hands and arms.
Jake had begged the deputies to get him out of there before Grace murdered him, insisting that she needed to be arrested for being violent.
That’d only made the cops laugh harder.
An initial blow into a Breathalyzer showed Jake was twice over the legal limit to drive. Brandon and Stuart had arrived home just as they were loading Jake’s car onto a wrecker to haul it away. Upon Brandon’s arrival, Jake had ranted and raved at him from where he’d been handcuffed in the backseat of a cruiser.
Brandon wondered if deputies frequently got to laugh that hard over arrests, but apparently the guy had also pissed himself in fear on the lanai. And Jake could barely walk, because Emma had bounced on the dip net pole as she stood on it, injuring Jake’s knees and bending the pole.
The barbecue fork, which had left several deep, bloody gouges in Jake’s fleshy neck, had been taken into evidence.
So had the dip net.
“By the way, we need a new dip net,” Stuart said from the chair. “Do you think they sell barbecue forks at the pool supply store?”
Brandon pointed at him. “That’s not helping.”
“Sir, they saved Jeff. How can you be mad at them?”
“That’s not the point! They put themselves at risk!”
“Would have been more risk if they hadn’t snuck up on him,” Jeff said. He sat with his raw and bandaged hands cradled in his lap, more bandages wrapped around his knees. “I mean, I didn’t want them there, but looks like they took care of themselves pretty well. Seriously. They saved me, Bran. I’m not too proud to admit I was in serious fucking trouble. Jake likely would have killed me if he’d gotten his hands on me.”
As it was, Jeff looked like he was getting off easy, despite the fact that he’d have two black eyes tomorrow from how Jake had sucker-punched him.
“Hey, don’t I get points for not killing him, Pop?” Grace asked in a remarkably calm voice, her head tipped to the side. “I could have easily punched that fork right through the base of his skull and taken him—”
Brandon held up one hand, the other now covering his mouth as his stomach threatened to upend over that mental image.
Stuart snorted. “She’s got a point, Bran.”
“That’s not the point!” he shrieked from behind his hand.
“Dad, she’s practically memorized Dexter,” Emma drawled, looking amused. “It’s her favorite show. Don’t even get me started on how she loves American Horror Story.”
“And you’re going to be a criminal profiler,” he mumbled around his hand.
“I think it works for us.” Emma grinned. “I can study her. Channel her powers into good instead of evil.”
Jeff snorted.
“My brother’s an asshole,” Stuart said. “Seriously dangerous. I’m not happy Jeff got hurt, but I’m also not upset that Grace nearly shish-kabobbed Jake.”
She leaned over and high-fived him.
Jake was going to be checked out at the hospital, then Baker Acted for evaluation.
Especially since he kept claiming the girls were “psychopaths” who’d threatened his life.
Stuart had received a frantic call from Emma and had raced home to find out what had happened, Brandon arriving only minutes later. Stuart had played Jake’s voice mail for the deputies, and then downloaded it as an audio file to send them for evidence.
As far as the deputies were concerned, it was cut-and-dry. Self-defense.
Brandon stared at them. Even Stuart was smiling now.
Finally realizing his stomach was going to behave, Brandon dropped his hand. “Okay. Step one, we need to get Jeff to the ER to get looked at. Step two…”
He stared at his house, which a short while ago had been filled with deputies and EMTs.
Other than Jeff’s injuries, everything was back to normal.
He slumped into a chair, shaking his head. “What. The. Fuck?”
Emma got up and walked over, leaning in to hug him. “Sorry, Dad. But you always taught me to stand up for myself and people who can’t take care of themselves. I wasn’t going to stand there on the phone while he was trying to kill Jeff. If you want to ground me, I get it, and I won’t be mad over it.”
Grace stood and walked over, joining their hug. “Me, too, Pop. If you tell my parents I’m grounded, I get it.”
A ragged breath escaped him. He was still trying to process this. “You guys could have been hurt or killed.”
“But we weren’t, Dad. We knew we could take him.”
“Yeah,” Grace said, grinning. “At least I didn’t resort to my first idea.”
“What was that?”
“Before Em took him down with the dip net, I was going to charge him with the barbecue fork, impale a kidney, and start twisting.” She mimed the action. “Big, meaty target. I figured that’d at least slow him down.”
Brandon barely got turned before he vomited on the floor.
Chapter Twenty-Three
“Good morning.”
Jeff opened his eyes and managed to turn his head to see Brandon sitting next to his hospital bed.
The doctors had wanted to keep him overnight for observation. Plus his primary doctor, when he heard about it, ordered in-hospital bloodwork for his Lyme, since he’d never made his appointment yesterday.
It was the next morning, and Jeff now sported a spiffy new PICC line.
They were already administering meds to him through it, and his stomach was revolting in protest.
But he wasn’t complaining too much, because they’d also started an IV on him, to push antibiotics for his abrasions, and to give him pain meds for them.
Damn good thing, because he could barely move. Even turning his head was almost too much for him.
“Shouldn’t you be at work, Master?”
Brandon scooted closer and pressed a kiss to the tip of his nose. “I had to see how my guy was first.”
“What time is it?”
“Nearly eight. I made Stuart go to work. He wanted to come by, too. It took me threatening to take away her car to make Emma and Grace go to swimming and school.”
Jeff managed a weak smile for him. “Meanie.”
Brandon brushed the hair from Jeff’s forehead. “How you feeling?”
“Like I died and forgot to stop breathing.” The pain had hit thick and hard late the night before, leaving him in tears that even Brandon’s hardest cane strokes usually couldn’t draw out of him.
“I talked to the nurse before I came in. The first round of blood work came back and you’re flaring again.”
“I know.” He barely lifted a bandaged hand and waved it vaguely in the direction of his PICC line. “I have new hardware. No hot tub for me for a while.”
“Sorry, buddy.”
“It’s okay.” He closed his eyes against a dizzying wave of nausea. “Talk to the cops?”
“Yeah, I called the detective in charge before I left home. The plan is no bond, since he’s a flight risk. Stuart called his parents last night. Shelly called Stu back soon after and apologized for not warning us. She said he was making crazy threats to her. He basically lost his flipping mind. They’re thinking, based on some other stuff, that it might be related to his alcoholism, and possibly even an undiagnosed mental disorder. They’ll have to evaluate him. Shelly admitted the drinking was the main reason she left him. He’s apparently been deteriorating for the past year and she was too scared of him to say anything. The boys have been wanting her to leave him.”
“Well.” Anything else he wanted to say got lost in a wave of pain flooding his system. “Sorry you yakked,” he finally managed.
“Thank god it’s tile.” He smiled. “So the girls were good, huh?”
“Yeah. Fantasti
c.” He forced a smile. “I think we should probably lift their restrictions, Bran. They’re almost seventeen. Don’t ask, don’t tell, huh? You know they’re going to make it for the long-haul. They almost committed murder together to save me. They’re like the Joker and Harley Quinn, only…cuter.”
“I think you mean Harley and Poison Ivy.”
“Maybe.”
Brandon stared at him for a long, quiet minute. “They did save your life,” he finally said, tears welling up in his eyes. “The deputies said he might have killed you, the way he was ranting.”
“Why didn’t you guys tell me about the calls and voice mail?”
“Because you were in pain and I didn’t want to put something else on you. And then I forgot.”
“Well, I guess I was stupid to open the damn door.”
“This is not your fault.” He leaned in, his forehead gently touching Jeff’s. “I cannot lose you. Either of you. I love you.”
“You’re not losing me, Master. Unless the doctors told you something they haven’t told me yet.”
Brandon managed a snort. “No. You’re stuck with us for life.”
“Good. I kind of like it here. Crazy, psychopathic teenagers or not, it’s a fun family.” He smiled.
“I think only Grace is psychopathic. Emma’s her handler. Your parents are coming in today to sit with you, by the way. They should be here soon. Let them help you, you fucking stubborn guy.”
“No arguments from me today. I promise. How long am I stuck here?” Actually, between the pain meds and the bed, he wasn’t very inclined to move.
“They’re going to evaluate you later this morning. You should be able to come home tonight.”
“Okay.” Jeff made fish lips at Brandon, finally getting a shnurfly smile out of him before he kissed Jeff. “You need to get to work, Master. Don’t get in trouble because of me.”
“I’m the boss. I got this.” He sat back. “Oh. The Sarasota TV station wants to talk to you and Grace and Emma. They want the story.”
“Oh, jeez.”
“I told them once you were home.”
“I guess we might as well. Maybe they can add it to their college applications or something.”
A Case of You Page 19
