A New Start: Final Dawn: Book 9 (Volume 9)

by Darrell Maloney

  “I shouldn’t have made you that promise,” Bryan said. “I didn’t think it would be a problem for you to just move in with us.”

  “Don’t worry about it,” Rusty said. “It’s no big deal.”

  Except it was.

  Rusty and Aunt Amy weren’t close. Later on, when he became a troubled teen, he accused her of moving in so she could take the house.

  And use him to qualify for government assistance, and to lessen her tax burden.

  She countered by threatening to throw him out.

  Of his own house.

  When he was seventeen and a few months shy of being considered an adult, Aunt Amy died.

  Her death was expected, at least by her.

  She’d been diagnosed with cancer a year before. A fact she’d kept a closely guarded secret..

  She could have gone peacefully. Perhaps she could have mended some fences with Rusty, and perhaps he would have missed her.

  But she didn’t have it in her.

  Aunt Amy, despite her desire to hide it, was a mean-spirited and vindictive woman.

  And it was important to her that she have the last word, even if she wasn’t around to see Rusty’s face when he heard it.

  As he went through her desk to clear out her things, he found a note.

  It was in a sealed pink envelope with a large drawn heart and a few simple words:

  “For my dear Rusty, on the event of my death.”

  If it seemed out of character for Aunt Amy, it was.

  She was baiting him.

  He opened the envelope and read the letter.

  Dear Rusty,

  If you’re reading this, I have departed this earth. You’ll no doubt not miss me. I don’t care, for I won’t miss you either.

  From the beginning, you were an insolent snot.

  My brother and the whore he chose as his wife did a miserable job raising you. You had no manners and no respect for others. You fought my every attempt to teach you discipline and sassed me at every turn.

  I wanted to strangle you almost from the first day I met you.

  One thing you weren’t, I have to say, is stupid. For years you’ve told me that when you grew up you’d kick me out of your house. I told you that would never happen, and you accused me of scheming to steal the house from under you.

  I’d have done so if I could, just to spite you. But unfortunately I couldn’t. The courts wouldn’t let me.

  But I did the next best thing.

  To pay my doctor bills I took out a loan on the house. It was remarkably easy, as your legal guardian. The bank didn’t even question it.

  They didn’t question the second loan I took out a few months later either.

  At the end of January the doctor told me I had only three months to live.

  I figured, “Why keep paying the loan payments if I’m going to die anyway?”

  The doctor was a putz. The three months turned into seven.

  As I write this I’m in my last days. I disconnected the house phone because the bank won’t stop calling. I’ve been getting letters from them almost daily, and every one has gone unopened into the garbage can.

  All those times you told me you were going to throw me out of the house. And in the end, I get the last laugh. For it is you who is several thousand dollars in debt. It is you who will be thrown out of the house, not me.

  Don’t blame me, you little snot. If you hadn’t been a spoiled brat from the beginning we’d have gotten along better.

  Perhaps you’ll learn a lesson from your insolence.

  I know you’ll call me names and curse me, but I don’t care. You’ll say you hope I rot in hell. I don’t care about that either. I never understood your belief in your so called “God.” Religion is for the weak- minded. Those who are desperate to believe there’s something better for them after they die. I’ve never believed in heaven. And if there’s not a heaven, there can’t be a hell either.

  No, wait. Maybe there is a hell. Maybe there’s a hell on earth. Maybe hell is what you’ll go through in the years ahead. With no place to live and no one to watch over you. Perhaps it is YOU who is going to hell.

  As for me, I will, as they say, rest in peace.

  Goodbye, you little snot.

  I shall not miss you.

  -41-

  Coincidence can be a cruel and evil wench, and as Rusty finished reading his Aunt’s letter that fateful day the doorbell rang.

  It was a registered letter from the First National Bank.

  Everything she’d claimed was true.

  Many of the other things she predicted were true as well. He did curse her, and expressed his desire she roast in hell.

  And he did get evicted from his own house.

  Oh, Bryan and Mark’s parents retained an attorney for him, but it was a lost cause. Everything Aunt Amy had done was done legally. The bank had no sympathy, but did allow him to keep his possessions inside the house. That was their version of a settlement.

  Rusty moved in with Bryan after all, but for only five months.

  He moved out shortly after his eighteenth birthday, determined to make something of himself and prove his aunt wrong.

  But he failed miserably.

  Rusty felt he’d imposed on Bryan and his family for long enough. He had friends from high school who’d offered to take him in. All he had to do was help with a portion of their rent.

  The problem was, Rusty had anger issues.

  Bad ones.

  They may have been borne of his having been made an orphan at such an early age.

  Or perhaps it may have been the fact he’d spent most of his life trying to find the love he’d stopped getting on the day his parents perished.

  Or because he’d been constantly bullied in school.

  “Why don’t you go home and cry to your mommy, you big sissy? Oh, yeah! You don’t have one!”

  Or perhaps because he always wanted to lash out at his Aunt Amy. And he couldn’t. For even though she frequently slapped his face or shoved him around the room for his insolence, he couldn’t raise a finger in his own self-defense.

  Because she told him constantly that if he did, she’d have him carted off to juvenile hall.

  And she would have, too.

  The frustration and anger within him had been building for years. When he became a man it was always there, bubbling and churning just beneath the surface.

  It cost him job after job after job.

  He didn’t take criticism well. Not at all. And he didn’t like it when a supervisor chastised him, even slightly so.

  With each job he lost, it became a little harder to find the next one. Word got around he was a hothead and that he didn’t play well with others.

  His frustration grew.

  And one night one of his roommates offered him a meth pipe.

  “Here,” the friend said. “This will help you forget everything for a little while.”

  Before long he was dumping a gram a day into the oil burner and rolling it back and forth with his fingertips above the flame of a Bic lighter. He was selling all his possessions to pay for his habit.

  When his possessions were gone, he started selling his friends’ possessions.

  Without their knowledge or consent.

  Then he wasn’t only losing jobs, he was losing friends as well.

  Three months in, the burner just wasn’t doing it for him anymore.

  He tried several other methods because he didn’t want to become an IV drug user. He had at least that much pride.

  He tried eating the foul-tasting drug.

  He tried crushing it into a powder and then snorting it through a heated glass tube.

  They called it “hot-railing.”

  He took the shards and inserted them into his penis, shoving them down with a broken-off Q-Tip. Then he sat back and relaxed, tolerating the burn and waiting for the head rush.

  It didn’t matter whether he was alone, or with a room full of people he barely knew. The meth m
ade him amorous, and his being naked and willing made it ridiculously easy to get the affection he was starved for.

  He was the life of every party.

  Finally, all the other methods exhausted, he finally took that final step into hell.

  -42-

  It was just over a year after he’d taken his first drag of snow white smoke from the glass oil burner.

  Inhaling the stuff no longer did it for him. He was in full-blown “chasing the dragon” mode now, trying everything he could to experience that massive rush once again.

  He started crushing the crystals into powder, then mixing it with water and sucking it into a hypodermic needle through a pinch of cotton.

  He liked the rush he got when he injected the dope into his arm. It hit him all at once, with the power of a sledge hammer.

  But he started needing more and more.

  After six months he was using three grams a day and spending a hundred and eighty bucks for it.

  His veins were failing him. Partly because he was so dehydrated they were shrinking and becoming harder and harder to hit.

  And partly because the easy veins were covered with track marks now, the thickness of the scar tissue almost impossible to stick a needle through.

  When his dealer’s cook fell behind he wandered the streets, using user lingo to ask perfect strangers for the stuff.

  “Hey, man. You got any work?”

  He got popped twice for possession of paraphernalia. Once for a used stick he’d forgotten to discard, with just enough residue on it to earn him a trip to the county jail. The other time because of an oil burner he hadn’t used since his early days, still resting in the bottom of his backpack.

  Paraphernalia was a misdemeanor charge, though, and he was back on the streets both times within hours.

  Most of his friends had left him by now.

  But not Bryan.

  Bryan still felt bad for telling nine-year old Rusty he could move in so many years before. He couldn’t help but feel that he’d failed his best friend. That if Bryan’s family had been able to take him in he’d never have had to deal with Aunt Amy.

  And he’d never have become so desperate that he’d have to descend into the hell that was IV drug use.

  Bryan stuck by him until the end of his black days.

  It was Bryan he called the morning he woke up naked in the alley behind the shared house.

  Rusty’s feet hurt. That’s what woke him up.

  When he examined his feet he found someone else’s shoes. Sky blue Nikes.

  And they were a size too small.

  The only other thing to adorn his body was a yellow shoe string, tied tightly around the base of his penis.

  There was a used hypodermic in the grass next to him. But it wasn’t the brand or style he typically used.

  Rusty was used to seeing monkeys in the trees and hearing voices which weren’t there. But this time the morning sky was blackened with hundreds of bats, flying around his head but never quite touching him. And every one of them was taunting him with a hideous witch’s laugh.

  Rusty had been up for seven straight nights without sleep and with precious little water. And no food. Everything a meth addict eats tastes like cardboard. And since they never feel thirsty it’s almost impossible to swallow the cardboard. His throat was parched, his body was bordering on exhaustion and yet he had no desire to eat. He was wasting away to nothing.

  He ran from the bats, into the house, and encountered a couple of friends. He said, “What the hell happened last night? And whose shoes are these?”

  His friends were no help.

  Rusty hadn’t just lost a night. He’d lost four.

  “You were fully clothed when you ran out of here four days ago. You said the feds were crawling all over the alley and they were getting ready to do a raid. You said you’d be back when the heat was off. And nothing ever happened. We thought you got busted again or crashed somewhere else.”

  That was Rusty’s wake-up call. For two full days he scanned the local news, read the papers. He wanted to know if he’d murdered somebody, or raped somebody, or robbed somebody at gunpoint.

  He wanted to know what was in the needle. Whether it went into his arm.

  And who put it there.

  Mostly he wanted out.

  So he called Bryan. Bryan was the only one left who’d help him.

  Bryan got Rusty into a rehab program. Dropped him off and picked him up to make sure he went. Stayed up with him during his withdrawals. Acted as a punching bag when Rusty needed to lash out.

  And told him he was there for him until the bitter end. That he’d let him down once and he never would again.

  Sarah didn’t go to school with Rusty as Bryan had. She came into Bryan’s life while Rusty was still an addict, still breaking into homes and stealing things to sell for drug money. Still stealing from Bryan when he thought he could get away with it.

  “Why do you let him do that? Why don’t you tell him to go to hell?”

  “Because we go back too far for that. And because I’m the only one he has left.”

  Rusty celebrated his third year of sobriety just before Saris 7 struck the earth.

  It wasn’t an easy road. He relapsed twice and Bryan had been tempted to give up on him. Sarah threatened Bryan with leaving him and told him to choose between her and Rusty.

  She never left him. She loved him too much. But she came close.

  Frank Woodard came into the picture years later, after the world thawed out again. He knew nothing of Rusty’s drug use.

  Had he known he never would have trusted Rusty to dispose of the drugs.

  For an addict is never really completely cured. All it takes is one overwhelming urge to take him right back where he started.

  -43-

  Exactly forty miles from home, along a particularly steep stretch of Interstate 10 between San Antonio and Kerrville, the woman Frank Woodard called “Saint Eva” met her fate.

  If she was indeed a saint, or anything like it, she surely had a new home awaiting her at the pearly gates.

  A far better one.

  Frank had been struggling since that day to deal with many things. First of all, the loss of his best friend in the world had been one of the most traumatic events of his life. And as a homicide detective with almost thirty years’ experience, he’d seen a lot of traumatic events.

  Then there was the whole Nathan Martel thing. Three of his very best friends took Martel, bound and gagged, for a ride early one morning. They returned without him, and he was later found executed in the nearby woods.

  The men weren’t talking. But Frank didn’t have to be an experienced detective to label them his prime suspects.

  He was pissed at the whole situation. But mostly at them. They had no right to place him in such a difficult position. No right at all.

  Now Frank was losing sleep at night, struggling with one of the hardest decisions he’d ever had to make.

  Two of the shell casings he’d processed contained useable fingerprints. One only yielded eight distinct match points. It didn’t meet the legal standard. But it would damn sure tell him which of his friends was involved in Martel’s murder.

  The second print yielded better results. Ten match points. The standard in the State of Texas. It could be used at trial to convict the man who pulled the trigger.

  One of them, anyway.

  Frank was almost certain each of the men fired a bullet into Nathan Martel’s skull. Two of the casings recovered at the scene were nine millimeters. But they were from different weapons. Frank could tell from the strike marks. The third casing came from a .45 caliber weapon.

  Three men went out, all armed. Two were known to carry 9 mm handguns. The other was known to carry a .45.

  It was, in homicide detective lingo, a “no brainer.”

  The men were friends of his. They’d taken Frank and Eva in when the streets of San Antonio got too mean and Frank felt he couldn’t protect her there anymore.
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  They didn’t have to do that. In a sense, Frank owed them.

  On the other hand, Frank had been a law enforcement officer for too many years to just look the other way. He was a cop who still took his oath seriously.

  To Serve and Protect.

  The words still meant something to him.

  Even though the world had gone to hell.

  Even though the justice system pretty much no longer existed.

  Even though a man like Nathan Martel certainly deserved what he got.

  And even though Frank had been retired from law enforcement for more than twelve years.

  There’s typically no such thing as a retired cop. Not completely, anyway. The oath lasts forever, even when the uniform is hung in the back of a closet gathering dust.

  Frank had slept fitfully for days, losing an hour or two of sleep each night.

  Finally, his sleep deficit was overwhelming, and caused him to drift into a deep REM slumber.

  Frank only dreamed when he was in a very deep sleep.

  And he was finally going to get some relief. Not just for his state of exhaustion, but for his moral dilemma as well.

  Eva, though gone in body and certainly in a more peaceful place, was going to help him.

  She came to Frank descending slowly through a blinding light, as though floating down atop a feather. She was dressed in a flowing white gown, and her shattered body had mended and was whole again.

  Whole and unmolested. Unmarked, and as beautiful as he’d ever seen her.

  Even in his dream, Frank thought it looked like a cheesy scene from a stereotypical movie about angels.

  But this angel was his Eva, so he’d overlook the cheese. She was a sight to behold, and a sight for sore eyes.

  “Hello, Frank.”

  “Hello, Sweetheart. I’ve missed you so much.”

  “Frank, they’re all here. All our family. All our friends. Even the ones we weren’t sure would make it.”

  “My mom? My dad?”

  “They sent me with a message. They said not to worry. That there’s a place for you too. But not to hurry. That you only get one chance at life, and it’s a sin against God to try to rush it.”