Total pages in book: 56
Estimated words: 52476 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 262(@200wpm)___ 210(@250wpm)___ 175(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 52476 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 262(@200wpm)___ 210(@250wpm)___ 175(@300wpm)
“You okay?” I speak up without walking toward him, still leaning against the tree. After an initial shudder of shock, with his grip tight around the bouquet, Charlie’s gaze meets mine. It’s easy to tell I scared him at first. He’s been afraid ever since they killed her.
“Yeah, just … Yeah, I’m fine,” he says, then offers me a tight smile and finishes the thought. “Just leaving flowers.”
“For who?” I play up my youth. I know I look younger than I am. Poor nutrition will do that.
“My sister.”
All men are fueled by motives, by desires. Revenge is a deep-seated motive. We all have it buried inside of us. Including a high school boy, burdened by his mother’s poor choices and his sister’s death.
“What happened to her?” I chance a couple steps closer, eyeing the grave as if I haven’t seen it a dozen times before.
A gust of wind blows by, followed by silence. In the last few weeks, Charlie’s told four people what happened. He broke down at his workplace, the garage. He’s been slipping away and devolving. I nearly second-guess my decision to approach him today, the two-month anniversary of her death, and the two-week anniversary of the man who killed her getting off scot-free.
But then he answers, “She got involved with the wrong kind of people.”
“The wrong kind of people?” I know damn well who his sister was and the relationships he’s referring to. Knowledge is the only path that will save the damned.
“Yeah … they weren’t good guys.” He swallows thickly and his reddened cheeks burn brighter as he closes his eyes and allows the wind to batter him. “She said she was seeing … someone.” He shakes his head, huffing out a humorless breath and says, “Sorry, kid. I didn’t mean to—”
“My mother says it’s best to talk if you can,” I lie. I barely think of my mother anymore. Or my father. “So if you want to talk, I can listen,” I say, taking a seat on the stump of a tree closer to him but still at a distance. The stump isn’t a product of a saw. It wasn’t cut down; the bark is torn and the rings rough and jagged beneath my ass from where a storm long ago brought down the old tree.
“What are you, like … eleven?”
“Fifteen,” I tell him and smile. Charlie, the brother of Elizabeth Riggins, is almost twenty. He stayed in his hometown of Fallbrook to be close to his mother, and I imagine her hands dig deep in his pockets with that very hug he offers her each time she gives him a sob story. A broken home and a drug addiction aren’t uncommon around here. It’s a prime location for dogs to run free.
“So she fell in love with the wrong guy? It’s like Romeo and Juliet.” I speak nonsense, now seated lower than him so he’s forced to look down at me. Pulling an apple from my jacket pocket, I bite into it watching as he shakes his head yet again.
Charlie Riggins will think me a young fool, but I know him for what he is. A young man at the precipice of who he’ll become. He’s mourning and barely holding back a smoldering fire that burns within.
“Romeo he was not, kid.”
I smile every time they call me kid. They always do that. Children aren’t threatening and they don’t understand. That’s their first mistake.
“He was a bad man,” Charlie comments with his gaze settling on the cuts in the stone. His fingers trace over the quote. I’d planned on asking him what it meant, but silence holds back my swallow, the fresh apple tasting like the corrupt fruit it is instead.
Bad men always lose. A voice I only hear at night whispers that fact to me.
“So what are you going to do about it?” I ask Charlie, nearly choking as I swallow.
“Do about what?” he says with all sincerity.
“About the man who killed your sister?”
“I don’t know that he killed her.” The hair on the back of my neck stands on end; I didn’t expect him to lie to me. He knows he killed her. Even if he doesn’t have the proof I have, he knows.
“You blame him, though?”
“Yeah … he took her—it doesn’t matter.” He stops himself from saying more, not wanting to tell me she was last seen getting into the car with him. Plenty of witness saw them fighting, although they don’t know what they were fighting over. It’s the same thing it always is. Money.
Finley stole from his boss and she saw the money, took it and spent it. Addiction will make you do stupid things. Finley killed her to save his own ass with the boss.
He’s a dog and I have a plan for him. A plan that involves Charlie.
“There’s a guy I’ve heard of. His name is Marcus.” I tell him the story I’ve developed and worked out over the last few months. “I think he knows a lot of bad guys, and I think he wants them dead.”