"Every man has gotta have a purpose, Billy," My old man told me one chilly February pre-dawn morning while he burned down his second Winston of the day. "It's what your grandpa taught me and what his daddy taught him. And it's what I've tried to teach you and your brothers."
Of course, the old man wasn't much for ranching, either. The fact was, my dad was a bit of an adrenaline junky, and ranch life doesn't exactly provide that kind of rush. So along with running the ranch, he was a Phoenix police officer, and when traffic stops and domestic disturbances weren't enough to keep his blood up, he ran for Sheriff of the town the ranch is parked in, Apache Junction, and won by a landslide thanks to the family's reputation. Not that being the sheriff of a town that was mostly made up of retirement castles and trailer parks was much more of a gas, but the old man just so happened to become sheriff when the Hell's Angels and other various forms of white trash decided to set up Meth labs by the dozen in our quiet little Arizona town. That gave him plenty of action, so much so that it eventually got him killed and sent me down the same road.
But back in high school, I was a spoiled little shit. I didn't give two shits about hard work. The fact was, all the ranch was was giant weight around my shoulders. It was some place I went to sleep and eat, and all the other things I had to do there prevented me from partying, getting laid, and playing football.
Back then, that was my main focus in life: football. I lived and breathed it. It was the one thing I wanted more than anything else in the world and I was convinced that one day my skill and drive would take me all the way to the NFL. Sure, I think back on how I was back then and have a good laugh at myself, because basically every high school football player has the same pipe dream. And, inevitably, that dream is crushed beneath the massive heel of reality. That big old foot squashes you like a bug when you get injured so bad that there ain't a chance in hell you'll ever play again; or when you realize that virtually every high school player in the country has the exact same dream as you, and every single one of them is better than you'll ever be and then your ego gets crushed along with your dreams and you become a beer drunk who wistfully laments the "good old days" any time he has one too many Natural Lights on a Friday night.
Me, I consider myself one of the lucky ones. I had plenty of talent, plenty of drive and ambition, enough to get picked up by Arizona State University as a second string QB after graduation. But in the long run, my body wasn't built for the game, and in my first ever start, I got hit so hard that it cracked two vertebrae and busted a rib that then plunged into one of my lungs like a dagger. My one college appearance and it sent me to intensive care for a week-and-a-half. I would make a full recovery and even be offered a place on the team after, but I walked away instead. The one thing my six month long recovery taught me was that I wasn't meant for the gridiron and if I kept at it, all that would happen to me was more pain and suffering. Besides, by that point, the old man had been shot killed breaking down some tweaker's door and I wanted my own brand of revenge.
But back in high school, all of that was a thousand miles away and I was a God. My team and classmates worshipped the very ground I walked on and I knew it. And I took full advantage of it, I ditched classes knowing that not a single one of my teachers would bust me or fail me. I treated my classmates like utter shit and made more than a few of them absolutely miserable with my bullying. I didn't care, though. Me acting like an asshole 24/7 made my teammates bray like donkeys and bolstered my teenage ego. But despite being the king of my own little desert fiefdom, the one thing I wanted avoided me like the plague.
Jenna McClean.
Actually, that's not a very accurate statement. Jenna didn't avoid me, not by any means. What she did do was play with me. She toyed with my emotions, twisting and turning my emotions around her little finger like she was playing with a piece of silly putty. Basically, whatever that girl wanted, I would do it without a second thought, and if you saw her back then, you'd completely understand why. Jenna was a teenage boy's wet dream. She was a homegrown Playboy centerfold: Sweeping blonde hair, crystal blue eyes, a full, curvy body that radiated sex and desire from every pour. When she walked down the hall, every male head--teachers included--would turn and watch her walk by.
We'd known one another since kindergarten and our families have the Gold Canyon of Arizona running through its veins. The Collins--my family-- and McClean families came to Arizona in 1870. Both families bought up hundreds of acres of desert, one family thrived, the other became dirt farmers and tent pole preachers. You can probably guess which family prospered? Not that McClean's did all that bad for themselves. Jenna's great grand daddy had a silver tongue and the will of God pumping through his veins. His ministry traveled through out the west coast and, of course, down south. He was big with the snake handlers and the folks who spoke in tongues. His travels were enough to keep the homestead running, more or less, but they got out of prospecting and moved into cattle ranching.
The rivalry between the two families kicked into high gear when my grand dad emptied the last of his mines and decided to go into the cattle business himself, which is how the Collins ranch came into being. Because of its creation, and because my Grand dad used his influence to swipe more than his fair share of the McClean's business away from them, tensions between the McClean's and Collins's got ugly, real ugly. My old man used to tell us stories of his uncle Frank and the McClean twins, Jasper and Derek. Frank was a bit of an asshole, the type of guy who bragged himself up as much as he could. But the fact was he mostly rode his daddy's coat tails but made it out that every smart business move the ranch ever made was his idea.
Anyway,, back in the day, Apache Junction and Gold Canyon were quite literally one horse towns. One country store, one feed store, one Woolworth's (Which pissed off the country store owner to no end when it came to town), one saloon. It was pretty much impossible to not know your neighbors and an even greater impossibility to avoid your enemies and even the people you didn't quite care for. Now, Uncle Frank, he didn't hate the McClean twins. True enough, he wasn't exactly fond of them, but from the way the old man told it, Frank didn't have it in him to hate anyone. But he did like rubbing people's noses in shit (I most likely inherited this unholy trait from him), especially the McClean twins.
One cold November night in 1948, the three of them were drinking pretty heavy all night long. Frank was talking up the family ranch up pretty big all night, he was especially bragging up the fact that they'd grabbed a couple of heavy hitters from Texas and Kansas City. Between the two of them, they were bring in 10,000 steers. Losing those two clients took a significant chunk out of the McClean's asses, which meant McClean's grand daddy was going have to hit the open road again preaching hellfire and brimstone. At around 2 am, the McClean twins drank up enough courage to not eat anymore of Uncle Frank's shit. They pulled him outside, beat the piss out of him, and then chained him to the bumper of their Ford and went for a ride. You can probably guess what happened after that?
Needless to say, the McClean twins were arrested, tried, and then put in front of a firing squad. After that, the Collins's avoided the McCleans, and the McCleans avoided the Collins's and each did the best they could to stay on their tracks of land, and if by some chance members of the family crossed paths, they made sure to walk the other way. Personally, I think this was the reason I wanted Jenna so much. Forget her face, her body, the way she moved; she was forbidden fruit and it made me want her all the more because I knew being with her would piss off my old man to no end.
Chapter 2
And maybe that was the reason why Jenna loved to toy with me, because she knew that no matter how much I wanted her, my family would never approve of her, and her family would never approve of me. Not that it mattered to her one way or another. Jenna was a daddy's girl who did what ever her father told her to do, but her teenage rebellious streak drew her to me even though she knew she would never become serious with me out of fear she'd disappoint her old man and possibly disgrace t
he family by bedding down with a Collins (which she did on more than a few occasions). But without a doubt she knew how to play me.
After the first time we made love, she knew she could do whatever she wanted with me. It was like she was a voodoo priestess and I was her zombie slave. If someone at school offended her some way, she'd set me on them like a rabid dog. I remember this one kid named Chris Carter during our senior year. He was kind of an odd guy, liked to draw and read, kept to himself for the most part. I never paid much attention to him, at least until he pissed off Jenna for some reason. One afternoon after practice we'd driven up to Tortilla Flats. We were making out hot and heavy and I thought she was going to give it up to me again (It had been three months since we'd made loved for the first time, and believe it or not, despite my utter devotion to her, we only had sex in the entire six years of our "relationship". Yeah, I was a complete fool for her).
But instead of stripping down And letting me have my way with her, she pushed me off and started talking shit about Chris. She started talking about how weird she thought he was. About how she thought he'd be the type of kid who would come to school and start shooting it up for no reason other than he was a complete psycho. She went on and on, and as she kept talking, I kept nodding and agreeing with her, hoping that she'd finally shut up and start taking off her clothes. But, nope, she just kept talking and I kept agreeing. Soon enough, I was so worked up by Jenna that I was almost ready to drive straight over to Chris's house, march straight into his house, and then beat the living hell out of him. I didn't do that, of course, but the next day at school, I started making that poor kid's life a living hell.
For six months, I visited some cruelty or other on Chris Carter. Thinking back on it now, some of the things that I did to that poor guy make me shutter. I mean, he didn't do nothing to nobody, and I still can't understand the reason why Jenna had a bone to pick with him? I guess it just made her feel better about herself to see me torture the poor kid. But all the things I did to him, I didn't deserve a single damn one of them and I wish I could take it all back. I'm one of the lucky few bullies who eventually gets to make amends for his past misdeeds.
Back when I had given up on college and was just starting in with the Phoenix police department, I ended up pulling over Chris doing ninety miles an hours in a Porsche 211. He was quick to make his mark after high school and he created a piece of software that would eventually be bought by one of the big software companies for millions. When I pulled him over and asked for his license and proof of insurance, he handed it over to me shaking like a leaf. When I read the name, I completely understood why he was so scared. I'm sure he was having flashbacks of the beatings--nothing mental and physical--I'd dished out. Instead of ticketing Chris for excessive speed, I asked him to have a cup of coffee with me and apologized for all the things I'd done. Of course, by that time, Jenna's spell over me was completely broken and I realized what a shitheel I'd been to the guy, to everyone I knew back then, really.
The thing that drove the final wedge between me and Jenna was just after I had almost fully recovered from my football injuries and my old man had been shot and killed on the job. I was so full of rage and anger at the time, I hardly knew what to do with myself. I felt weak, powerless, and absolutely rudderless. This was, of course, when Jenna started nosing around again. It had been a few years since I'd last seen her. Despite the time and distance, she was never far from my mind. I heard things about her from high school friends; stories about her partying hard, going to community college off and on, and a long series of lovers. In my blindness, I kept thinking that all the guys she was sleeping with were nothing but pale replacements of me and she was just bidding her time until I came back into her life.
But then I got hurt, and day-after-day in the hospital, I hoped that she would come and see me. It was the same when I was recovering back on the ranch. But I never saw no hide or hair of her. Then the old man bought it, and I was suddenly in more pain than I thought humanly possible. Three days after his funeral was when she popped up on my door step, her eyes shining, her entire being seeming to eradicate this strange glow. She was almost exactly as I remembered her. Sure, she was a little older, a little rougher around the edges, but she was still the same Jenna in my eyes. She practically fell into my arms when I answered the door, smothering me with kisses without saying a single word as she pushed me inside and began pulling my clothes off, not caring if anyone was in the house (Thank God there wasn't. My brother Henry was somewhere drinking his pain away out in the desert, and my oldest brother Sam was back down in Tucson strong arming Mexicans with the Border Patrol) just needing me more than anything else in the world.
We made love for hours, her body was like a ceaseless wind-up toy wanting more and more of me. In those short few hours, all the years between us seemed to fade to nothing, as if we hadn't spent a single moment apart. After I was finally spent and passed out from exhaustion, I woke up a couple of hours later and discovered Jenna rifling through my wallet. She'd also stuffed her purse full of my mother's jewelry; keepsakes that my father had held onto to remember her by. Catching her doing these things, taking these treasures simultaneously broke my heart and hardened me beyond repair. I finally saw this woman, this broken girl, for what she was: She was a user. She had always been one and always would be one, and she was only capable of loving one person and one person only: Herself.
I exploded in a rage, shouting at her and dragging her out of my house and tossing her into the dust and grime of the driveway, telling her I never wanted to see her again. It was at that very moment as I slammed the door behind me that I decided that not only was I done with Jenna, but done with love or any semblance of a normal life. I became oddly peaceful and content, filled with purpose. Because at that moment, I decided my only true path in life was vengeance and justice, and I knew in order to follow this path, I couldn't have any attachments, I needed to be alone so that no one could ever hurt me again.
Chapter 3
My new sense of justice led me to joining the Phoenix police force. The men who had killed my father had already been brought to justice by the old man's deputies, but the world was full of bad men and I decided I would do anything in my power to bring them down.
I joined up with PHXPD during a period in the departments history where they couldn't find the men to put into patrol cars and would take on anyone who would put in an application. Because of this, there was a whole lot of dirt going down within the department who would turn a blind eye to a lot off things that were happening within the city limits, And the good cops in the department just did the best they could to stay alive and stay out of the way of the dirty black and whites.
I was lucky enough to be partnered up with a veteran named Officer Patrick Duncan. Pat was a Mormon with eight kids and a perpetually pregnant wife. He basically cared about two things in life: His family and the job, and I was thankful for his devotion to both. Because of his honesty and integrity, we were given the toughest beat in the city: Roser road. Roser was, actually a pretty nice neighborhood. It was a lot of decent working class people barely making ends meet and having to live in section 8 housing. Of course, the danger of section 8 is that it attracts an element that takes advantage and bring drugs and violence. Mine and Pat's jobs basically broke down to us making sure nobody hurt the good people and didn't spread further out into the surrounding neighborhoods.
More than a few of our fellow police liked to refer to us as zoo keepers. It used to get under my skin, so much so that I got into a few of their faces about the slur. Pat would back me off and drag me out to the patrol cars.
"You can't let them suck you into their hate, kid," He'd say as we laid in our gear for the night. "Because that's exactly what they want you to do. Before you know it, you''all be getting into shoving matches and then within a few months you'll be agreeing with everything that's coming out of their mouths.. Trust me, I've seen it happen a thousand times. It's better to just keep your head down, do th
e best job that you can, and make it home at the end of the night."
So that's exactly what I did. Sure, I gritted my teeth in the two years I patrolled Roser Road; there were even a few times when I was dealing with some serious asshole roughnecks where I started thinking of myself as nothing more than a zoo keeper. But at the end of the night when I would go home still breathing, I'd wipe those thoughts out of my mind and start the next day with fresh eyes the best I could.
But after two years of working patrol, I knew I was barely making a dent. The bad men just seemed to be getting badder and growing in numbers, and because of this, I decided I needed to up my game and put in a transfer to the narcotics division.
Being a narc isn't like it is in movies and television. There's no undercover work, there's no shaking down dealers and turning them into CI's. What being a Narc is is busting down doors dressed like a storm trooper from Star Wars. Being a Narc was putting your body on the line day-in-day-out never knowing if you were going to come home on your own two feet or rolled out in a body bag. For three years, I watched it happen more than a few times. Men and women with families who believed that what they were doing was for the greater good, that they were making a difference busting into the homes of young black and Mexican kids and taking a couple of pounds of dope off the street and losing their lives our use of limbs because of it. I believed it like a religion, at least until I took a bullet from a sixteen-year-old kid with a fourth grade education.
Arranged Marriage To The Rogue (Victorian Romance) Page 60