Ungoverned: A Thriller and Suspense Novel (Ungoverned Series Book 1)

by Shawn Raiford

  These siblings weren’t to be taken lightly. Norman would have to do something about them. Shaking his head, he was tired and couldn’t think straight. He would have come up with something later. After finding a suitable apartment, he would have to go shopping for clothes when he arrived in Bangkok, Thailand. He missed the city, the markets, and not the least, the food. Not that Norman didn’t appreciate the fine cuisine Houston offered, but it was expensive. All food in America was expensive. The street food in Bangkok was the best. Delicious and inexpensive.

  Setting up shop wouldn’t be difficult. He still had enough contacts in that part of the world to help him start a relatively profitable operation quickly. And with well over three million in US dollars, stashed in several overseas banks, he would start up soon.

  He went down to the hotel’s lobby, returned his key card, and sat quietly in a chair with a view of outside and waited for the hotel’s shuttle to the airport.

  Norman grabbed his photo album from the laptop bag, and opened it. He looked through the pages of him and friends with children who were longtime adults by now.

  Pausing on a page, he studied a Polaroid of him around thirty years ago. Norman thought it was amazing how young he looked. He didn’t have crow’s feet back then. No one could fight the aging process. He half remembered a quote he read once. “Youth is wasted on the young.” He agreed.

  Next couple of Polaroids were of him and some of his boys. He smiled at the lovely memories. The album had about a hundred pages. Some held up to six Polaroids per page, so there were a few hundred Polaroids in all. About ten percent were of Norman, and the rest were of his friends.

  A Polaroid of him dressed up as a clown with two boys suddenly appeared. Billy—Kyle—Norman, was written on the bottom thicker part of the border. Names were written on almost all of the Polaroids in the album.

  “Oh my God!” That was ages ago. He had worked as a clown for hire for kids parties back then.

  He closed the album, and stuck it inside the side laptop’s side pouch. Like the sun would come up in the East tomorrow morning, Chloe would come after him, and eventually kill him. If what she did to Carter was any indicator, he imagined what she would do to him. She sounded so angry on the phone yesterday, and no matter how brave he was, having a contract killer angry at him was quite nerve racking.

  He needed to be honest about his situation. Norman wasn’t a young man anymore, but he still had at least a decade left in him. All she needed was a distraction.

  An idea quickly germinated in his mind as he pulled the photo album in his lap again. His instinct was to keep it, but he knew it was his only way to stay alive.

  A slight change in plans.

  He went the front desk and asked them to call him a cab. There were some errands he had to run before leaving.

  The man called him a cab, and he went outside to wait. As he stood there, Norman petted the album like a loving pet, amused at his idea. It would save his life.

  Chloe would be busy for years to come.

  Chapter Sixty-Eight

  Reminded Of The Evil

  Up early, I was having breakfast at a diner with Henry.

  Bacon and eggs with buttered toast sat on my plate. A glass of orange juice next to it. Henry had a big bowl of oatmeal and coffee.

  A copy of the Houston Chronicle lay on the counter in between my plate and his bowl. I was reading the comics, I loved the comics, it was the only thing worth reading.

  Henry read the sports section. That’s the only part of the paper he read, stating that he didn’t need to be reminded of the evil that the city shit out every day.

  Our waitress, Bonnie, walked over with a pot of coffee. “You want me to top that off for you hun?”

  “No, ma’am, I’m leaving,” he said.

  Bonnie smiled, and tossed me a wink. “Well, manners and good looking, he’s a keeper honey.”

  Henry didn’t wear his wedding ring, because of his job. He thought the bad guys he took down didn’t need to know his marital status.

  “Yeah, my little brother Don Draper is handsome, but he’s taken already.”

  He glanced at me with a boyish grin. It was the same grin he used to give me when we were kids. I wanted to pinch his cheek, but he wouldn’t like it.

  I stuffed a fork full of eggs into my mouth. “You’re leaving?”

  “Yeah, going to take Julie and the kids to church.” He took out his wallet.

  I waved. “No, my treat, don’t worry.”

  He shrugged, and placed his hand on my shoulder. “Thanks, I’ll see you soon, right?”

  “Yes, tell the kids I will be by this week.” In my new role as a regular full-time aunt I needed to visit more often.

  “Will do.” He slipped out of the diner, and I then was alone in a -capacity diner.

  I grabbed the paper and looked through it. There was an article about the ex-city councilman. I didn’t read it.

  Henry came back inside with brown package under his arm. “Hey, sorry, I forgot to bring this in with me. It came through by mail to the station a day or two ago. It was addressed to me. It went through the X-ray, no poisons or toxins or explosives detected. I opened it and got this.” He handed me the package.

  “Who’s it from?”

  He shrugged. “I don’t know. Nothing was in the box except this smaller package,” he said, handing me the package.

  The only thing on the package was:

  A GIFT FOR CHLOE CREED

  Grimacing, I looked over at Henry.

  Held out his hands. “I don’t know, but I have to go.” He patted me on the shoulder and left.

  I waited a few minutes, staring at the package.

  Finally, I decided to open it.

  I used the diner’s knife to cut the plastic tape, tore away the brown paper, a box.

  Opened it.

  Peeked inside the box, I saw a cell phone and an old-fashioned photo album. The kind Mama had. I reached out and grabbed the phone. Nothing spectacular about the phone, it was just average. It had a little sticky note on the screen:

  “Turn on.”

  Surveying the diner, I noted no one was paying any particular attention to me. I hit the power button. It took a few seconds to turn on. No phone numbers in the contacts. I checked the messages and there was only one text message.

  “Call me.”

  Hmmm.

  I called it. It rang several times.

  A man answered.

  “Ah, good morning Chloe, how are you my dear?” It was a voice that I now recognized, Norman White.

  I hunched over, not wanting anyone to hear me. “I’ll be fine when I can feed your balls to rats. You remember what I did to your buddy, Kenneth?”

  “So, violent Chloe…” he said before I interrupted him.

  “Uncle, your pain… will be my pleasure.”

  He sighed. “I’m sure it would be, but you have to find me first, my dear.”

  Typical, another man who doubted me. I laughed. “I will find you one day, Norman White.”

  I could hear him breathing into the phone.

  “Yes, good Chloe. You know my name, my dear. But I have many names, and where I’m at now, a name isn’t that important, only money is.”

  “What do you want?”

  “I saw what you did to him, to Carter. I understand you want to hurt me, so I left the United States.”

  “So? You think just because you are on the other side of the planet, I’m not able to find you? My new purpose in life will to be find you and take my time killing you.”

  “My dear, I must admit, I am getting on in my years. I’m pushing sixty years old! I don’t have much time left…”

  “What the hell are you talking about? You could live another twenty years?”

  Norman said, “Yes, perhaps but I would like to know I am safe from you in my last few years.”

  “I’ll find you before you die, I promise you.”

  “And I believe you, my dear!”

&nb
sp; I didn’t say anything.

  “Chloe?”

  “Pedophile.”

  “Do you see the photo album?” he asked.

  “Yes, it’s here.”

  “Please, open it.”

  My eyes narrowed, and I surveyed the diner again. “No, I’m about to throw it in the trash with this phone.”

  “Please, I realize you despise me, and I understand your anger, your rage, you—”

  “You can’t possibly understand my rage, you coward.”

  “When I was waiting on the cab to take me to the airport the other day, I knew for a fact you would one day find me.”

  Where he was heading with this was a mystery, just letting him speak, hoping for a mistake.

  “I remember my good friend Kenneth Parnell, he was a bit crazy, I knew about how he taught you to kill animals you two hunted. He did have a strange inclination to harm animals. I found it disgusting. Anyway, he told me how he would torture them, how you would watch him. Then you started torturing the animals yourself, didn’t you?”

  Kenneth made me torture the animals. I despised him for making me do that. “What is your point you waste of a human life?”

  “You must want to see the men who hurt you back then, don’t you? There were a lot them.”

  Was he offering me monsters? “Go on.”

  “I have given you an olive branch, my dear. To spare my life.”

  “No, what I’m going to do is, throw this phone and this album away, I’m not playing your game. Bye dead man.”

  “Wait! Please Chloe, don’t hang up, I promise, you will want to look at the photo album. Please take a look. I marked the page that I want you to see first. There’s a red ribbon.”

  I opened the album to the page with the red ribbon, and saw old Polaroids. They were of me and men.

  A flood of bad memories bombarded my mind. This was amazing. I didn’t cry. “Why are you giving me this?”

  “It is a gift to you. Please, take care, Chloe,” he said, then the call ended.

  Chapter Sixty-Nine

  Baytown Is Home

  Baytown, Texas

  The scenery was nice as I drove down Highway 146. Exited, taking a small dirt road that led to a small wooden house.

  I loved coming to this house, my real home. It was the house Henry and I lived in until our mother was killed.

  The porch normally was filled with flowers, but it had been too cold to worry about. When I saw Sally, I smiled.

  Sally, a chunky woman with short, dark hair with grey strands, and one good eye, walked with a limp. The bad eye and the limp were thanks to our mutual friend inside. When she was a little girl, he had beaten her bad, causing her to be hospitalized throughout her life. I found her about eight years ago. I helped her with medical bills and Sally helped me by taking care of him.

  I walked up onto the porch. “Hi Sally, how are you?”

  She limped over to me, giving me a hug and kiss on the cheek. “I’m good, Chloe.”

  She reached over and grabbed a saucer with a cup and handed it to me. “Be careful, it’s hot. That’s chamomile with a teaspoon of honey.”

  “Thank you.”

  Sally reminded me of a grandmother, which was weird because I was actually older than Sally by several months. She lived here and spent her days working in the garden and taking care of him. She was happy living a quiet life.

  The warmth of the tea traveled down my throat into my belly. It felt good.

  We sat on the porch like folks did back in the day, drinking our hot tea, giggling, and smiling like young girls.

  Finished off my tea, I glanced at her. “So, how’s our boy?”

  “Ah, he’s still in there,” Sally said. “Want to see him?”

  I held up the photo album. “Yeah, I have something to show him.”

  “Is it something good?”

  I smiled like a prostitute at a ministers’ convention. “Yes!”

  “Good, let’s go inside.”

  I followed her into the house. The house was southern pretty. Colorful plastic flowers filled vases. Normally the flowers were real. In a couple of months, she could start putting real ones in the vases.

  A hug flat screen was mounted on the far wall. It was a gift I gave her last year. When Sally wasn’t in the garden or cleaning the house, she was binging shows on Netflix.

  I then followed her down a hallway to a door. Sally used a key to unlock the door. He couldn’t leave his room, but only to use the bathroom or to bathe. Sally told me she watches him take a bath while holding onto a cattle prod. He’s scared of her, but I tend to make his piss his pants.

  We entered his bedroom. It was sparse, a bed and an EZ chair and my favorite wooden chair. The room was clean and the bed was made.

  The only window in the room had iron bars to keep him in. He liked looking out of it, so I threaten every now and then to board it up.

  “Hi, it’s me.”

  He had a head full of white hair. He was rail thin. There were days I called Sally up and told her not to feed him, and she wouldn’t. I was sure she didn’t.

  “Thanks Sally, I’ll be out shortly.”

  “Okay.” She walked out of the room, and closed the door behind her.

  I sat on the foot of the bed.

  He was sitting, watching a cooking show. The volume was low.

  “Hi Kenneth.”

  He did not turn. “Hi.”

  “How you doing today?”

  “I’m okay,” he said in a voice raspy.

  “I came over today to show you something.”

  He turned to face me, and pulled back a little when he realized it was me. He nodded and said, “Okay.”

  The gift Norman sent me, out in front of me. “You see this?”

  Kenneth studied the photo album. “Yesh.” He was unable to pronounce some syllables and words correctly because a part of his tongue had been cut out years ago. By me.

  I showed him a few pages of memories of monsters like him. Several of the men he recognized.

  His eyes darted from side to side each time he saw me in a Polaroid. Because of him, I was in them.

  Most of them were labeled, the name of man and child, but some weren’t labeled. All photos were safe on my computer, and were saved on several external hard drives, and in the Cloud, after I scanned all these pictures this morning.

  I looked out of the window and it was a nice view.

  He looked up at me. “Where did you get these?”

  “Uncle gave them to me.”

  A look of confusion came across his face.

  “Don’t you remember your best buddy?”

  His head turned. “Yesh, but he left, didn’t he?”

  “Yes, he came back to Houston, but left again, because he knows I will find him and kill him.”

  He nodded.

  “He gave me this book so I wouldn’t go after him.”

  I pulled out a pen from my jacket. “Write their names down and I’ll tell Sally to cook you something good for dinner. Maybe some Hamburger Helper? The cheeseburger flavor, okay?”

  He agreed, and gave me the names of men and children to many of the Polaroids missing names.

  Strangely, I remembered some of the names of the men, not the children.

  “What will you do to them?”

  Smiling devilishly, I paused. “These men are monsters, they don’t deserve to live.”

  Kenneth nodded. “No, they don’t.”

  Chapter Seventy

  Just Wanted To Die

  Six Months Later - Huntsville, Texas

  Bradley worked at folding underwear.

  He looked around, saw scoundrels, thieves, and murderers. All these men here were filthy riffraff. He didn’t belong in prison, at all.

  A deal had been made with those cops and the DA. He pled guilty to embezzling. Bradley was stealing from the City of Houston for years. He ended up getting thirty months in prison. His lawyer told him he had to keep his head down, his nose clean, and
he would probably be released in twenty-four maybe as little as eighteen months with good behavior.

  He didn’t want to be here, who did? He could catch up on his reading. Hell, he might even take a class or two, at taxpayers’ expense. He smiled and thought, it may not be that bad.

  “You Brad?” someone asked from behind him.

  He turned around, a bit startled. A Hispanic man, about ten feet away. He stood five-foot seven inches tall, dark hair, dark eyes, and was thick shouldered.

  “Maybe, who are you?”

  His eye brows moved up. “I’m Martin.”

  “Well, Martin, I’m busy.” He turned around, showing his back to Martin.

  “Uh, I wanted to ask Brad something. If you ain’t him then you know where Brad is?”

  “Alright, but my name is Bradley not ‘Brad’. I’m not some white trash redneck. My name is Bradley!”

  Martin grinned boyishly. “All right, calm down little Hitler. Listen, I was told you like little girls.”

  Bradley looked behind him to make sure no one else was within earshot. He couldn’t help but think of her, that little angel in his house, Bernice.

  Swallowing down the memories, he shook his head, and glared at his feet. Then, he glanced up at the man, curious to know where this guy got his information. He took a few steps closer.

  His lawyer’s advice was to never talk about children with anyone while he was incarcerated. He had to be patient, and he would have girls again. “Where the hell did you hear that?”

  “A little birdie told me,” Martin said, grinning.

  Bradley shook his head. “I don’t know who you were talking to, I’ not into that.”

  “So why you in here, Brad?”

  He tossed the smaller man a half shrug. “Embezzlement,” he bragged. “I was a politician and I took tax payer money.”

  Nodding, Martin grinned like an evil clown.

  “What?”

  “That’s what she told me you’d say,” Martin said.

  He was confused. “She?”