23. Drake #3
Though recently perturbed by the interaction with a close friend, the whiskey in my veins and the anticipation of seeing Helen soon lifted me out of a sour mood.
The drudgery of the quarterly work event was inconsequential to me when I barely held a proper title in the business anyway.
Everything I did for William Graham was field work.
Bloody, dirty, brutal. Life threatening.
I wanted out.
Once we found the mastermind behind the masked attackers targeting the crime families, attempting to destabilize them, I would tell Dad I had no intention of being elbows deep in carnage without necessity. But what did I want if not the thing I’d been trained for?
A home with Helen. A safe place. Perhaps a position in an office down the hall from hers. I’d join her on whatever savage crusade tasked to her because I wanted to, not because I’d been ordered to.
And maybe that home would eventually be filled with children—a family.
Our family. Children that didn’t bear the burden of the darker aspects of our lineages.
We could avoid the ruthlessness and cruelty that I faced.
I wanted that—a family with her that I could provide a better life for.
No need to avoid dwelling on darkness if they skipped it entirely.
And I could do that for them, those imaginary potential children.
With that train of thought, I spent half the car ride through the darkened Friday night dreaming about the delightful process of making children.
The city lights flashed over the tinted windows, a multi-colored background in the dark car interior, and I lost myself in daydreams of all the salacious things I could do to my wife the moment I walked through the door.
Anticipation thrummed through me as the car pulled up to the gate—and found it already open.
The gate shouldn’t have been opened that late at night with no expected visitors.
With the current security concerns, Monty would have told me if she invited anyone over in my absence.
An arrow of alarm shot through my heart as the escalade pulled into the driveway.
In times of pressure or danger, my honed instincts draped over my panic responses like a dark, fortifying shroud.
Not that time. Not when my eyes flicked over the security team members splayed out in a scattered massacre over the driveway and front lawn.
Pools of fresh blood glistened under the early moonlight and beams of light from the front windows.
I shot out of the backseat before the car rolled to a stop. My shoes beat down on the grass as I rushed to the front patio. Not stopping to register the two beaten and bloodied figures by the front door, I jumped over them and burst through the door, clinging to its hinges.
Bedlam and chaos greeted me. Muddied boot prints on the hardwood floor.
A vase of flowers knocked over, red and yellow petals, broken glass, and a shallow puddle of water.
Bloody handprints on the stairs, and along the wall where someone injured had been dragged downstairs by force.
Books knocked over as evidence of a struggle. Torn pages littering the halls.
“Monty!” I shouted, taking the stairs two, three, at a time. Silence greeted me where it should have been riotous brown curls and lively blue eyes. “Helen!” My voice croaked, breaking as I cried out for her.
I burst through the door of every room upstairs and down, tearing the already destroyed house apart in my manic search for her.
“Helen! Please, Helen!” Slipping on the puddle and cutting my hand on the broken glass in the front hall, I pulled myself up with a crazed groan and raced back to the front door. “Helen!”
A garbled noise from the bodies on the front patio drew my focus.
My attention snapped down, finally forcing through the haze of panic to take stock of the survivor.
Banjo laid out, half hanging over the front steps with unseeing eyes turned up to the night sky.
His pale skin was completely blanched of color, and crimson flecks dotted his short salt and pepper hair.
A garish river of blood spilled from his lips and the bullet hole in the side of his head, staining the wooden slates of the patio.
Gizmo’s dark skin was equally splattered with blood and blossoming bruises. His large, calloused hands reached for his partner as he’d crawled across the distance to cradle Banjo’s head. Heavy, wet tears spilled from his eyes as he silently wept.
It was a moving scene amongst the carnage—or it would have been if my one-track mind wasn’t entirely consumed by the blood on the walls and the world-destroying fact that my wife was missing.
Each breath punched from my lungs and my heart rattled against my ribs as I dropped to my knees and clawed at the guard’s jacket.
I wanted to kill him, to hate him, to slam his head into the ground until his brains painted the surroundings. My blood pounded in my ears, but it was his strangled sob that knocked the sense back into me. At least enough of it for me to inhale a full breath and think realistically.
An anguished cry tore from my throat as I hauled the bleeding guard upright. “Where is my wife?!”