CHAPTER 1 #2
I got to my feet, blocking out the agony that pleaded with me to just remain laying flat on the ground and not move for many hours yet.
I grabbed my cell as I passed the table, then slammed the front door closed.
My cell shook in my weaker left hand, but I managed to hit my voicemail and started to listen to the several Colt had left for me, starting with the most recent.
“Bam, I get that you’re busy but I really need you to call me back. I have something I needed to talk to you about and it can’t wait.”
That was the most recent, and the others were similar.
Had he been trying to call me about this threat?
Had be needed my help and I’d just ignored him?
The text messages were the same, pleading with me to call him back as soon as I could.
Telling me he needed to speak to me urgently.
The last one had been over a week ago and the fact I’d heard nothing since terrified me.
How had I not even realized he hadn’t called for a whole week?
He always called me every few days, even if he just left me a random voice mail.
He checked on me constantly, and when he actually needed me I’d been too busy wallowing to even answer a damned phone call!
I moved over to my bed and laid out flat across the middle of it, praying the spasms in the bottom of my back and down both thighs would ease, as I called my brother. It was the middle of the night, but I didn’t care. I had to know he was safe and what was going on.
The fear really set in when he didn’t answer the three calls I made, and I knew something was wrong. My brother always picked up my calls without fail, but he most definitely would not miss me calling in the middle of the night.
“Colt, call me right away. I’m not fucking around.
I need to speak with you urgently,” I growled into his voicemail, then I ended the call and forced myself to sit up.
I refused just to wait there, hoping he’d call.
I had to go to him and find out what the fuck he was mixed up in.
There wasn’t much I could do alone, but I could damned well make sure whatever fuck up he was messed up in, got handled.
I pushed through the pain and spasms to get to my feet, crossing the room to the gun that still sat on the carpet.
The guy I fought hadn’t been wearing gloves, so I knew I would be able to get prints from it if I needed to.
I picked up a discarded envelope I had thrown to the floor earlier that day, some huge brochure about life after CPD – a whole lot of bullshit I’d set light to in the kitchen sink – but the large envelope would serve as an evidence bag for the time being.
One way or another I was going to find out who that fucker was, and what the hell he wanted from my brother. My hiding was over. It was time to go home and face the music.
***
I cursed myself as the bright, low sun shone in, right through the uncovered windows and woke me well before I was ready. Why didn’t I close the curtains before I crashed?
Knowing I wouldn’t go back to sleep now that I was awake, I sat up and looked around me, feeling disoriented.
I’d made the ten hour drive to New York through the night and through half of the next day, but by the time I arrived in the city, I had been too exhausted to start trying to hunt Colt down.
One of the infuriating symptoms of what happened to me was that I was always exhausted, and the night before It had gotten to the point I’d barely been upright by the time I pulled my rust bucket of a car into the under ground lot of the hotel, just around the block from Temple .
The club would have been closed when I arrived anyway, so I knew no one would be there.
I could have gone to our apartment across the city, but I just wasn’t ready to face that place again.
Colt had taken me there after he found me that night, ten years ago.
I wasn’t sure I could ever bring myself to walk into there ever again now.
Instead I dragged my exhausted and failing body to the lobby of the hotel and actually used the credit card Colt gave to me, and constantly nagged me to use, to rent a room where I could crash and hopefully recoup some energy for a few hours.
Maybe a part of me was hoping he’d see the charge and come looking for me.
It would save me having to hobble into Temple for all to see my shame.
I tried not to allow my mind to even think about Jack and Mason.
It was unlikely they’d be there. Jack would surely have moved onto new pastures by now, and Mason hardly ever went there mid-week, too snowed under with work.
But what if they were? What would they think when they saw the person I was now?
“Stop it!” I told myself angrily. If they were there, then screw them and what they thought.
I’d been injured in the line of duty, doing my job and saving the life of an innocent.
I’d done a good thing, so fuck them if they wanted to judge me for the state that injury had left my body in.
I didn’t need or want them anyway. I never did.
I reached out for the bag I had all of my medications packed into and started taking a concoction of pain meds, muscle relaxants and whatever else I thought would help me get going again. I had to find Colt. That was all that mattered.
It was around ten minutes before I felt the pain down my back ease enough for me to sit up and stumble to my feet.
My left side, which had some weakness after the shooting, was even weaker because I was exhausted.
I’d barely slept, tossing and turning for most of the night without the aid of booze to make me sleep.
This was who I was now though. There was no cure. No fixes, quick or slow. I worked out hard to strengthen what remained of my functioning muscles, nerves, and joints, but still every movement caused pain, and every day was filled with exhaustion, medication, and a deep, irreparable sense of loss.
Refusing to focus on anything but getting to Colt and smacking him upside the head for whatever he was up to, I moved to the luxurious bathroom and set the shower running. It had an enormous rainfall shower head and it looked heavenly.
When I was a kid, living with my mom we didn’t have luxury.
Hell, we barely had food and electricity.
My mom suffered with depression and horrendous mood swings, so keeping a job was hard for her, as was functioning day to day.
We lived in some shitty places, but I always made do with what I had, and I tried hard to take care of my fragile mom too.
Then she was gone and I went to live with Colt, and with him I was given every single luxury life had to offer.
The apartment was always warm and welcoming.
There was always food in the kitchen, and hot, luxurious showers were a given.
If I ever needed anything, Colt would somehow know, and then I would have it, usually without any fanfare.
The item would just appear in my room. Clothes, electronics, books, toiletries, and beauty products.
It didn’t matter what it was it was all available to me.
My life in Chicago had been somewhere in between. I never went hungry or worried about paying bills, but I didn’t take money from my brother any longer either. I lived comfortably on the wages I earned and I was happy.
But everything had changed when I was shot two years before, and now I found myself living a life so much more like the one I lived with my mom – except now I was the depressed one.
I was the one who felt lost and unable to cope with life.
Living on the meagre pension I was paid was tough and my home was a dive.
I had missed luxury. I had missed hot showers and comfortable beds with bright white, soft sheets.
“Stop it!” I told myself again, this time staring at my reflection in the mirror over the vanity.
I missed so much though. I missed my life, and my brother, I missed feeling fulfilled and settled.
I missed peaceful sleep, and days filled with no pain or bone deep exhaustion.
Most of all I missed myself. I wasn’t me anymore.
I hadn’t been for ten years, since the night so much was taken from me in a matter of hours.
Since then I’d tried hard to plaster over the holes that monster made in me.
I’d found armor that kept everyone at arm’s length and I had found a way to live with what happened to me.
My job got me through mainly, and I had thrown everything I had left into being the detective I was desperate to be.
Then one night, two years earlier that had been ripped from me too, along with my strength, my independence, my self-respect, and my will to keep fighting.
Now the reflection looking back at me wasn’t the Ava I had been in college – light and free and filled with hope.
Nor was she ‘Scott’ as everyone called me at CPD.
That tenacious, determined kid who worked her way up to detective in just a few short years, was gone too.
Now I was an empty shell filled with nothing but regret, pain, and memories I would happily discard if I knew how.
I was too thin and so pale my skin looked almost translucent in the areas in and around the bruising from that fucker hitting me the night before.
My red eyes were circled with dark rings that were heavy and prominent.
My hair was lifeless and greasy looking, the once vibrant strawberry blonde now darkened because I never went out into the sun more than I had to any longer.
My body was thin too, since I spent all of my time working out, drinking, and wallowing.
Under my clothes things were even worse, my body a map of all of the regrets in my life, there for me to relive every time I removed my clothing.