“I’ll beat you to it after I watch him and the first little thing he does wrong, I’ll write his ass up.” I wove my fingers together and then popped knuckles. “Now, I need to go remove that word.” I strode from the house and back out to the garage.
I fought to pull the machine from its corner and all the stuff piled on top of it as Galena and Harley watched.
“Can I help?” Harley asked.
“Nah, there’s no room over here for both of us. I’d have to stop and let you back here just so you could work, seems sort of stupid. I’ve got it.”
“Call if you need anything, I’m off all weekend too, remember that,” Harley said, as she gave a quick one-arm hug to Galena and blew me an overly exaggerated kiss. “Love ya, girl. Call me, I mean it, I’ll be here immediately.” Harley locked eyes with me, waiting for me to acknowledge her.
“Will do.”
“Are you sure you’ve got this?” Galena asked.
“Yes, go back inside and chill. It’s only”—I glanced at my watch—“eleven and we’ve already surpassed our quota on stress for the month.”
I returned to trying to finagle the pressure washer out from under the pile of crap by jerking on the fucker so I could roll it out to the driveway. Finally succeeding, I grabbed a jerry can since the pressure washer was empty; it needed to be filled with gas.
It was hard to believe it was February, or that last week the temperatures dropped to the thirties, because it had to be close to eighty already. I wiped my brow then tugged the ripcord on the pressure washer and started the motor.
Jackson
“I have no clue what you’re talking about, but I’d like to go check on Kat to see if she wants any help.”
“That’s none of your business, if you had nothing to do with it, then stay out of it.” The deputy named Enzo was an asshole, but I knew that was part of his job.
“It said war-e-o,” Julien announced proudly from behind me.
“War-e-o,” I mouthed.
Enzo rolled his eyes and mouthed, “Whore.”
“That’s horrid.” I turned my focus to Julien. “You want to go see if we can help?” I asked him.
“Ummm, Jackson, you might not. I got the feeling that she didn’t like . . . kids,” Mindy explained. “I’m going to get out of here, okay?”
“Sure, thanks.” I waved Mindy off and then turned to Colton, the other deputy, who was laughing.
“Don’t take it personally, Kat just doesn’t like kids in general, any of them.”
How does someone not like kids? Fine, I wasn’t after a mom for Julien, I just wanted her body for one night . . . right?
“Okay, Mr. Boudreaux, thanks for answering all of our questions. Tell Mrs. Boudreaux we’re sorry for interrupting.” Enzo shot out his right hand.
“There is no Mrs. Boudreaux, that was Mindy, my babysitter. She stayed over because I stayed out with a friend.”
“We know,” Colton and Enzo replied in unison.
I shook their hands, and they were gone.
“Julien, let’s go outside, okay?”
“Yay.” Julien ran and wrapped his arms around what he intended to be my waist but was more my upper thighs.
I took hold of his hand, and we headed out. The first thing I saw was Kat. God, I wanted to kiss her and strangle her at the same time. How could she not like my kid? He was the coolest kid.
We were almost to the edge of Kat’s driveway when Julien spoke. “Look, Daddy.” Julien pointed to a dead squirrel lying on the side of the road that had a few vultures circling it. “’Member that time you run over that baby and left it to die in the street?”
I stared at my son, totally dumbfounded. “What? What are you talking about?”
He put one little hand on his hip and tilted his head as if he were speaking to a child, “’Member? We were in da car going to see Grandma and he was playing in da street wit his brudder. You hit him and killed him. I cried. But we were in a hurry, so you left him. Don’t you ‘member?”
His words slowly fit together. “Squirrel, Julien. It was a squirrel that I hit. Don’t call it a baby, call it a squirrel.”
“But it was a baby squirrel and brudder squirrel was watching. You didn’t kill him though.”
“You want me to arrest him?” the sexy voice asked from behind us.
“Noooo!” Julien screamed and wrapped his arms around me. Tears were welling up in his eyes.
She held her hands out in mercy. “Just kidding, kid, chill.” Kat stepped back.
“Not only do you not like C-H-I-L-D-R-E-N”—I spelled it so Julien wouldn’t understand, plus the word ‘kid’ was too short and he was likely to sound that one out—“but you have absolutely no way with them.”
“That’s why I don’t have any and don’t want any,” Kat explained.
“Well, yeah, this is my son Julien, and I think he’s kind of great even if sometimes precocious.”
“You call accusing you of killing a baby precocious? I call it downright evil.” Kat stepped back even farther. “Well, anyway, I’ve got the mess all cleaned up.”
“I came over because your buddies said something, and I wanted you to know that the girl you saw with Julien earlier—”
“Mindy, Mindy, bo-bindy-banana . . . how’s that go, Daddy?”
“We’ll sing it later, Julien. As I was saying, Mindy is his babysitter, and she’s Max’s sister. She stayed over last night so I could go out with Max and his friends.”
“That’s nice.” Kat was cold. I hated it.
“Fine, I just wanted you to know.” Julien and I headed back home. “What do you want to watch, kid?”
“Avengers.” Julien jumped up and down.
When we got back to the house, I got him settled with his movie. “I’m going to do some work in the garage, holler if you need anything.”
“Okay, Daddy.”
With my garage door open and the door from the garage to the house open so I could hear my son if he needed me, I decided to attack the giant pile of empty boxes. With a box cutter in hand, I began breaking them down.
After an hour, I was sweating and hadn’t heard a peep from my son, so I leaned through the doorway, yelling, “Julien, you okay, bud?”
“I’m okay!” he shouted back.
“You didn’t ask me if I was okay.” I froze at the sound of Tammy’s voice. “I’m not okay, I miss you.”
I slowly moved to block the doorway to my house to keep her from getting to Julien. “What are you doing here?”
“I live here.”
“You live where?”
“In Orlando, I moved here so we could be together. I know how long-distance relationships don’t work, so I gave up my life in New Orleans just for you.”
“Tammy, you are on house arrest.”
“I’m off.” She held out her ankle and showed that she was monitor free.
“We’ve been divorced for over two years. There is no long-distance relationship—in fact, there is no relationship that involves you and me.”
“Don’t say such things. We only had a misunderstanding,” Tammy sing-songed.
“I’m not sure what part of my not wanting to be with you is hard for you to understand, but things ended. You have a court-ordered judgment ruling you to remain away from Julien until he is eighteen.”
“I don’t see him.”
“He’s inside, which makes you closer than the minimum three-hundred feet.”
“Well, I can’t see him, so it means I didn’t know he was here.”
“Bullshit. Leave. Now or I’m calling the cops.” I was furious because she was here, but also because I wasn’t notified that she’d changed her address or had been released from house arrest.
“Calm down. I’m not going to hurt him, he’s my son too.” Tammy acted as if I were overreacting.
“No, he’s not. You were stripped of all your rights a long time ago. He is my son and mine alone. And you did try to hurt him. You almost killed him. What kind of wo
man does what you did? He had just turned one.” I was heaving, trying to keep my anger under control. I pulled out my phone and unlocked it. “I’m calling the cops.”
“Fine, I’m going. I don’t live too far away, and I already have a job; you can come by anytime. You know how I’ve always loved to cook for you.”
“Cook for me? Psycho-ass bitch, you would probably lace the food with some drug that causes amnesia or arsenic to kill me. I don’t trust you as far as I can throw you. First thing Monday morning, I’m calling Orleans Parish and finding out why in the hell I wasn’t notified.”
“Okay, Jackie, but we’ll talk soon.” Tammy moved as swiftly out of my garage as she had swept in. “But I’m not going anywhere, and when you finally come to your senses, I’ll be right here.” She turned and got into her older blue Acura.
I stood with my back still blocking the open door to Julien, my mind in a total clusterfuck. I’d left my home, the job that I loved, and my family to get away from this woman and to protect my son, and she had followed me.
What the fuck?
How in the hell did she find me?
My mind whirled with every conspiracy theory I’d seen on television before it landed on the most obvious thing I could think of. It pissed me off I hadn’t considered it before, but the crazy bitch must have my iCloud password and was tracking my phone’s location.
It was really the only explanation, since I knew my family wouldn’t tell her, and my work information with the bank was protected under the law.
I headed in and checked on Julien; he had grabbed a blanket and was curled up watching his movie. “Who was out dere?”
“I’m gonna make some lunch, okay?”
“Yeah,” he replied, not taking his eyes off the television. “Was someone outside?”
“Someone stopped by, they just had questions, but they’re gone now.” This reminded me that I needed to close the garage door then make lunch.
I grabbed a pan and set it on the stove before snagging the can of crescent rolls and package of hotdogs. I liked to call myself a talented man, but cooking wasn’t something I was good at. In the past three years, I’d learned a few kid-friendly-type meals, like pigs in a blanket, á la Mom teaching me.
I popped open the can of rolls and then wrapped one around half a hotdog; the tacky dough stuck to my fingers as I went through the entire can. After making sure they were all relatively straight on the pan, I placed them in the oven and let them bake while I headed for my laptop.
Logging into my Apple account, I updated my security information with new passwords and a new two-step verification. Almost as an afterthought, I checked to see if there was any way to access the information about when the last time someone used the Find My Phone feature for my account was, but that wasn’t something the company stored. It did, however, give me a list of authorized devices, and I made sure to delete everything that wasn’t my phone or iPad.
I checked on lunch, and a thought dug itself into my mind. It seemed like too much of a coincidence that my ex showed up hours after Kat had profanity painted across her driveway. I wouldn’t put it past Tammy to have been sitting outside my house waiting for me to get home and see me walk into Kat’s house.
I grabbed my phone.
Me: Are you super busy?
Mindy: No, why? Need something?
Me: Can I convince you to babysit for a while today? I need to run out for a bit.
Mindy: No problem at all. I can be there in thirty, does that work?
Me: Perfect. See you soon.
I set the phone down and just needed to think through what I wanted to say to Kat. I was still pondering how to approach the subject when the oven buzzer sounded. I snagged a dishtowel, since the oven mitts were still boxed away.
Pulling out the hot pan, I let out a groan. The dough on top was nice and flakey, perfectly golden. But as my eyes wandered down around toward the bottom of each roll, I could see them turning toasty and more of a coal color.
The pan was hot. Tossing it down on top of the stove, I pulled out a spatula and laid it next to the pan while deciding to give them a second to cool. I got everything out for lunch, made a pool of ketchup and mustard on each of our plates, grabbed the apple juice and poured Julien a cup while I snagged a Gold Peak sweet tea.
I returned to my messed-up creation and studied it. What the hell was I going to do? That’s when an idea came to mind. I fixed the pigs and popped two on a plate for Julien and a few more for me.
“Lunchtime, bubby, come in here.”
“Okay, gotta pause it.” A second later, he hopped up into his seat and gingerly lifted the bread on his pigs. “What happened, Daddy? These aren’t pigs in a bwanket.”
“Nope, they are pigs in the garage,” I said, surprised that I wasn’t referencing Tammy at that moment. “See?” I slid the dough-shaped garage, since I had cut off the bottoms. “It’s like Cars, you like that movie. The pigs are the cars. You can drive them through the mustard or ketchup.”
“Wow, can we have dese tonight?” Julien already had one garage devoured and was driving the pig around his plate.
“We’ll see. Hey, Mindy will be here in a few. I’m going two houses down; I need to talk with that lady who lives there.”
“Ohh, hold on.” Julien jumped from his seat and ran to the cupboard. He came back with a snack pack size of Oreos. “Give her dese for me, okay?” He handed me the cookies and got back in his seat, as if this were no big deal.
“Okay, but why?”
“She likes dem, but someone spelled it wong on her driveway.” God, I loved this kid.
Jackson
I found her in her garage fumbling around as she tried to organize it. “Hey, we need to talk.”
“Okay, what about?” Kat turned to me, and her brown eyes held warmth but her folded arms and stance gave off a don’t-come-any-closer vibe.
“It’s a long story, got somewhere we can sit? I might know who painted your driveway.”
“Sure, come in.”
I followed Kat through her house, which was eerily similar to mine. In New Orleans, we had old homes, rebuilt homes after Katrina, but we didn’t really have cookie-cutter homes. Her kitchen was much more girly, but that was to be expected, and her living room was comfortable and inviting.
“Want something to drink?” Kat asked.
“Sure, whatever is fine.”
“I have sweet tea, water, or Coke.”
“Sweet tea sounds great.” Kat smiled.
“You’re definitely Southern; most guys ask for a Coke, not sweet tea.”
“I think my mom put iced tea in my bottle.” Kat laughed as she fixed our glasses and then I followed her to the back deck.
“This is nice back here.” I pointed to the hedges of roses that made a wall between her yard and her neighbors’, rows of flowers that were a mixture of colors cascading down from the rose wall and falling into beds of lilies, daffodils, and peonies. But just seeing it caused a flashback to that time when I’d almost lost Julien.
“Petra has a green thumb.” She paused. “Hey, you just went pale. You feeling okay?”
“I’m fine, just had a flashback memory, which is sort of why I’m here.”
“Flashback as in latent memory and you need to go to the police?” Kat asked, her demeanor changing yet again. This time, she was still standoffish but it was in that, ‘I’m in charge, let’s get to the bottom of this’ kind of attitude.
“No, a memory of something that happened and for some reason I started putting two and two together. It has to do with your driveway.”
“Sit.” Kat pointed to two Adirondack chairs.
“Where to start?” I mumbled.
“How about telling me who you think might have painted my driveway?”
“My ex-wife.”
“Why do you think that?” Kat leaned back from me and flipped into her cop mode.
“She’s on house arrest—or rather, she was. I wasn’t notified when she was rel
eased.”
“She’s not now, is she?”
“She showed up at my house today.”
Kat tilted her head. “I’m confused, she lives here?”
“She says that she just moved here.”
Kat held up one hand. “Do you care if I take notes?”
“No, go ahead.”
Kat pulled out her phone and started typing. “Let’s go on. For you to be notified by the court, there must be some protective order in place. Is there?”
“Yes, just for Julien, she has no rights at all to him plus she must stay away from him until he is eighteen years of age or out of school, whichever comes last.”
“So, her showing up at your home is obviously a violation, why didn’t you report her?”
“She was in the garage, and when I said that I was calling the cops, she replied that she didn’t see Julien, so she had no way of knowing he was there.”
Kat shook her head. “That’s bullshit, and you know it. She had no reason to be at your home, your son is like two—”
“Four,” I corrected.
“Fine, four. She did not make an accident; it was intentional and needs to be reported.”
“I’m doing that, aren’t I?”
Shaking her head, Kat rolled her eyes. “How did she find you?”
“I think it is via my iCloud and Find My Phone. I never changed my Apple login info after she and I split, but I did today.”
“Weren’t you told to change everything?” Kat appeared dumbfounded.
“Yeah, but I was thinking computer, bank logins, not accessing iTunes. Hell, I don’t use iTunes. I use my phone as a phone, which is crazy, I know.”
“May I ask what happened that forced the protection order?”
I dragged one hand down my face in an attempt to mask my reaction. Then, slowly and repeatedly, I ran my fingers through my hair. “She tried to kill him.”
“What the fuck?” Kat shouted.
“She was tired of me giving Julien so much attention. She was never the maternal type. I always wanted kids and knew that she wasn’t the kind of woman I wanted to be with, but she showed up at my house telling me she was pregnant. I did the right thing and married her. But it wasn’t good. I was actually speaking to an attorney and figuring out how to leave and keep Julien since at his young age, they liked to keep the child with the mother. But he had just turned one.” I buried my face in my hands as I relived the scariest day of my life. “I had just gotten home, and Tammy was up on the roof. It was just a one-story and easy access from our attic, but she had Julien with her. It all happened so fast. She tossed him off the side.”
Kat, Knight Watch (Iron Orchids Book 11) Page 5