Total pages in book: 20
Estimated words: 18070 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 90(@200wpm)___ 72(@250wpm)___ 60(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 18070 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 90(@200wpm)___ 72(@250wpm)___ 60(@300wpm)
“The kid caught one, let’s table this for now. Good job son, I’m coming.” I went down to help him reel in his first catch, a medium size brim, but the look on his face said that shit was a fifty pounder.
I have to say, as much as it hurts, finding out I have a son my first day out has gone a long way to bringing me back some of the joy I’d lost.
For the rest of the day I didn’t mention shit, but we left earlier than we usually would’ve because the boys wanted to get together and plan.
I picked Shelly up on the way back and took my family home, not sure that I wanted to leave them alone that night.
She freaked when I told her I was meeting the guys at the bar and I imagined she was reliving the last time I did that shit and what followed.
I couldn’t have them come here because she’d be all in my shit, but I couldn’t have that look of stark terror on her face either.
In the end we compromised. They brought their women and children over and the guys hung out in the kitchen while they did their thing in the living room. It was a party after all.
“I found out some more stuff.” Craig popped the cap off a bottle of beer and joined the rest of us at the table.
“Like what?”
“Well, since you heard it from Nate I had to figure he heard it from somewhere. Clyde and Sal were the best bets. You know a whiskey and a pack of smokes will get you anything from either one of those two.”
We all nodded in unison. The two old timers were known for hanging out at the bait shop when they weren’t holding up a corner at the local bar. If anyone knew what was going on around here it would be them.
“According to them, the kid, Justin, isn’t the one who had a beef with Roy, it was his mom.” He leaned in close after making sure the coast was clear.
“Apparently the doc got a little handsy with her
when she was under. She woke up and found him putting himself together and felt like something had went down.” Sick fuck!
“Anyway, she went home and told her son and he went and confronted Roy the next day. Shelly was already working for him by then, but I’m not sure she or anyone else knew about this.”
“Anyway, as far as they’ve heard, it was a homeless guy that did it. He’s long gone, but before he left he had one too many and let slip what happened.”
“But how did the DA come to focus on me? I wasn’t anywhere near that kid and I still don’t know how my shit got near him.”
It was a set of house keys that had sent me away in the end, and neither I nor anyone else could answer the question of how they got there.
“That’s easy, he must’ve taken them from Shelly’s purse at some point.”
“But Shelly didn’t have my keys, we weren’t living together yet.”
“But she’s had them in the past right?”
“Well yeah, if she was coming over and I was going to be working late…” It started to make sense and I wondered why I’d never thought of it before.
Maybe because I never looked at Roy for the setup until now. The shit was too surreal and too fucking out there. How long was he planning that shit?
“He could’ve stolen them and had a set made.” That was the general consensus around the table as I sat dumbfounded. Could this really be it?
“Something else that’s going to piss you off. The mother looks like Shelly.”
“What the fuck?”
“Same coloring, height, just older.”
“And after talking to those two it doesn’t look like the DA was in on it, just Roy and the homeless guy, who like I said, disappeared.”
“Where is he?”
“No one knows, he just disappeared into thin air. And you know how it is with the transient, no one knows his real name or where he came from.”
I needed to think, so I sat there listening to my son in the next room playing video games with his cousins and his mother in the other room with the women.
How can I prove this shit? How can I make him pay for what he’d done to me and mine? If Shelly hears this shit I know it’ll fuck with her head.
The fact that she’d moved in with the man who’d orchestrated this whole thing, and took my son along with her would fuck her shit up. I know my girl.
“She can’t ever know about this.” That was the only thing I was sure of for now. How I was going to get this motherfucker without losing my freedom again was a different story.