Chapter 3
Gail watched as Riley picked up the phone after that damning statement and quickly dialed Derek, Timmy’s father.
Riley explained who he was and that he was here to look for the War Dog.
“Well, we’re heading down to the catacombs here anytime,” Derek shared. “I really don’t want to say, You’re welcome to join us, because I don’t know you from Adam.”
“Actually you do, but I wouldn’t expect anybody here to have anything good to say about me,” Riley corrected him. “Not that it was my fault, but—”
“What are you talking about?” Derek barked, instantly suspicious.
He looked over at Gail and replied, “I was Gail’s fiancé before her sister accused me of fathering her child.”
“Oh, good God,” he grumbled. “You’re that Riley?”
“Yeah, I’m that Riley,” he confirmed, with added emphasis.
A moment of silence came from the other end. “Look. I didn’t mean it that way.”
“Yeah, you absolutely did,” Riley stated, “but one would hope that the truth has finally come out around this place. I would like to think that at least some people have enough common sense to realize how those lies damaged my world more than they did anybody else’s.”
“Yeah, you’re not kidding. Shit,” he muttered.
An apology was in there somewhere.
“You lost everything, didn’t you?”
“You have no idea,” he remarked, “but I’ll be happy to tell you the truth about how I ended up after all that and what Gail’s father did to me.”
“Well, get your ass down here then, if you’re planning on taking part in this,” he declared in a booming tone. “We’ll be leaving from the pub entrance in about twenty minutes.”
“Can you make it thirty-five?” Riley asked. “I’ve got to get some boots.”
“Yeah, you sure as hell do,” he snapped.
“So, thirty-five minutes then, but we won’t wait one minute longer.
I don’t know that the dog had anything to do with this, but I sure as hell know that my son absolutely loved that dog.
So, no way in hell I won’t try to find Cain if I can, especially if it could help Timmy recover from the shit that just happened to him,” he added, his voice thickening.
“Yeah, I hear you. I’m on my way.”
With that, Riley disconnected, looked to Gail, and clarified, “If you think I will hold back on any of the lies your father told over all this or the lengths he went to try to kill me, make no mistake, I will not.”
She frowned. “Do you know that for sure, or is it just innuendo?”
“Oh, I know it for sure. I had a meeting with one of my superiors and was told very clearly that somebody who hated my guts had arranged to have me moved overseas into an ongoing conflict. So, whoever I’d pissed off had power, and I should probably make a point of not pissing them off anymore,” he told her.
She closed her eyes, her bottom lip trembling, as she whispered, “Dear God.”
“Exactly,” he replied. “God hasn’t been in my world for a very long time,” he shared. “So that ain’t gonna save your father when I finally get the revenge that I’m not looking for, which is starting to appeal in a really big way.”
She grasped his arm and whispered, “Please don’t go down the revenge route.”
“What’s gonna stop me now?” he asked as he stood up, his gaze hard on hers.
“You walked away. Debbie for sure walked away. Your mother and father both walked away. I’m the only one who didn’t.
You all ripped apart my life and didn’t give a shit, did you?
You tore me to shreds and sent me out into the Middle East battlefields, when I was happy as a K9 trainer.
Not a single one of you gave another thought to what happened to me.
It was all just Oh, he’s fine. It’s all right.
Don’t worry about him. That’s how your whole family, including you, hung me out to dry. ”
Tears welled up in her eyes, and she muttered, “I didn’t know.”
“And neither did you care to find out differently,” he replied softly.
He tossed money on the table for the coffee and added, “Now that I’ve said my piece, let me see if I can find the War Dog, which is the real reason I came here.” And, with that, he turned and walked out, leaving her shaking all alone.
As Riley walked to the truck, he realized for the first time that revenge really was on his mind.
He hadn’t expected it to come up at all.
It wasn’t something he’d really put any serious thought into because it wasn’t part of who he was.
Not that he was up for having Mr. Montoya killed, the way her father was so eager for Riley to die.
No, Riley wanted to take him down in another way—by tarnishing his reputation with the truth, by making sure Riley’s side finally got shared around town, and by ensuring both daughters knew the full ugly truth of it all.
But seeing Gail, reminding Riley of what else he’d lost, while also realizing that everybody else in her family had just casually moved on as if there were no reason not to, was another disappointment. Yet it just further confirmed that, for him, everything had been lost.
He shook his head as he hopped into the truck, then raced back home again, collected his gear, borrowing some from his brother, after sending a text to get permission.
Then he headed out to search the catacombs, but he had to get to the pub first. As soon as he got there, he found the whole place shut down.
He knocked on the door, and they must have been waiting for him because it opened up right away. A couple hard-looking men were here whom he didn’t recognize right off the bat.
One of them asked, “Jesus Christ, is that you, Riley?”
He looked the man over and recognized an old friend from high school. Jacob. “Yeah, it’s me.”
They hugged each other, and Jacob noted, “Man, after the shit that happened to you, I’m surprised to see you.”
“Yeah, well, I came for the War Dog and to find a way to make peace with the rest of it. You don’t even know half of the hell that happened to me, courtesy of Mr. Montoya,” he declared, with a headshake. “But right now, we’re heading down to the catacombs.”
“And you have some time to tell us,” Jacob added, admiration in his tone. “How the hell did you end up working for the war department and getting a job like this?”
“The middlemen handling that process for the war department,” he began, “are also the ones who gave me a place and a purpose when I got out of rehab. I was struggling with Do I come home, don’t I come home, and hating the idea of it.
You know, all that BS,” he added, with a laugh.
“After a while I realized I absolutely needed to do something.”
“Yeah, man, you can’t let shit like that keep you down.” Jacob studied him, his gaze warm, nodding.
“I think we all tend to do that at first,” Riley admitted, “but initially I needed to find some semblance of peace.”
“Have you seen her yet?” Jacob asked, his voice low.
“Yeah, just had coffee with her this morning.”
“Wow, I bet that went over well.”
“Not so much, but I did tell her about her father.”
“What about him?”
When he told Jacob what her father had done, a shocked silence came. All the men here seemed to share the same sentiment.
Jacob grimaced. “God damn it.”
“Yeah, nice to know that all that wealth goes to good causes,” another guy muttered, with a snort.
Derek added, “I can’t believe he even did that. I know old man Montoya hated you, but that sounds pretty extreme.”
Riley shook his head. “I do think he hated me. Yet I think it was all about control, maybe revenge for supposedly getting Debbie pregnant, hurting Gail. That is what he’s all about. It’s about control for him—over his own family too. That’s also why Debbie lied the way she did.”
“But, shit, she threw you under the bus.” Jacob frowned.
“Yeah, she did, didn’t she?” he quipped, giving his old friend a wry look. Then Riley turned and headed for the catacombs. He had happy memories of exploring these tunnels as they walked down the steps.
“Glad you’re wearing decent boots,” Jacob noted, “because it can get really slippery down here.”
“Yeah, I know, especially when the water rises.”
Jacob looked over at him and nodded. “We haven’t had a flood in this area for a long time, but, boy, when the earthquakes come? That’s when things down here get shaken up. It can get pretty wild and hairy.”
Riley nodded. “When did you guys last see the War Dog?” he asked.
“Let me see now.” Timothy’s father frowned. “The word we got this morning was that somebody was down here and had seen the dog last night.”
“Seen last night in these tunnels? Did he report the sighting?” Riley asked. When everyone remained silent, Riley turned on them. “I don’t give a shit about anything illegal you guys are doing unless it’s some really ugly shit, and then I’ll take you down too,” he vowed, his tone quiet and lethal.
“And when you say really ugly, what does that mean?” asked one of the men, with a hard look in his direction.
Riley replied without missing a beat, “Human trafficking.”
“Hell no,” he spat. “We ain’t got nothing to do with that at all.”
“You better not,” Riley declared, his tone hard, “because that’s the lowest of the low.”
“Yeah, it absolutely is the lowest of the low, and we are not those people.”
“Good,” Riley stated. “But, if you’re not raping women, not stealing kids, and not human trafficking, why the hell are you down here?”
He shrugged. “Private gambling.”
Riley laughed. “Of course,” he quipped. “Not nearly enough places to lose all your money upstairs.”
“There are, but it’s different down here. It’s a little more dangerous, deadly, exciting,” Timmy’s father shared.
“And was your son Timmy involved in any of that when he had his accident?”
Derek frowned at Riley, obviously considering this.
Riley supposed the old man looked older than he was or just had Timmy late in life.
“He wasn’t supposed to be involved in any shenanigans, but he hasn’t been conscious enough for us to ask him any questions.”