The Misters Series (Mister #1-7)

by J. A. Huss

  “A big problem,” Mysterious says as he cleans his gun on Perfect’s dining room table. “A very big fucking problem.”

  Ivy and Ellie are out shopping. We’re here on official Mister business, but the girls don’t know that. Ivy’s arm is healing nicely. She might need another surgery or two to remove bone shards if they become a problem, but she’s OK. She’s good. We’re both good.

  “Where the fuck is Corporate?” Match says. “He’s late. Why is he fucking late?”

  “I told you he wasn’t gonna show. He’s got some big deal going on. Said he’ll read the Cliff’s Notes when he gets back.”

  “Well, that’s fucked up,” Match says. “If you’re a target, then we’re all targets.”

  “Where the fuck is Claudette?” Mysterious asks, never taking his eyes off the gun.

  “I dunno,” I say, frustrated. “I’ve had people looking for her since she missed the funeral.”

  My father died. Just two days after all that shit went down at the Martha’s Vineyard house. We hadn’t been close for years and even though it would make a nice story to say we patched things up in the end, we didn’t. He was in a coma by the time I got to the hospital in San Diego. I’ve been to more hospitals in the last two weeks than I have in my whole life.

  But it didn’t matter that we didn’t get to talk. I know now. I know why my mother ended up divorcing him. I know why Claudette was never welcome at our house in Florida. I know why my father kept her with him.

  I don’t know why she was cut out of the will and I was put back in. That is still part of the mystery. But it makes sense that she attached herself to my hip these past six months. Why she offered up some of her own money to get that resort started. She was cut out of the will and wanted back in. She was playing the good big sister part to make that happen. But she was doing more than that. She was setting me up. How she came up with Ivy to make that happen though? That is also still a mystery. But I know—I feel it in my gut—I know she set me up with Ivy. I know it was her who forged Ivy’s résumé. Sent that invitation. How many people know about the silver envelopes we use? Not many. People connected with the old case. They know. And Claudette certainly qualifies as one of them. I fucking know it was Claudette who put all the events of the past few weeks into motion.

  But why?

  She’s a devious fucking cunt, that’s why. And I have no doubt that her mother was the same kind of woman. I know my father wasn’t perfect, but he was not a psychopath.

  Claudette is.

  I was waiting for her to show her face at the funeral, and when she didn’t come, I knew. She’s on some kind of revenge vendetta. She won’t get one penny of my father’s money. Not one penny. But hey, if she wants to fight that shit, I’m ready. I’m waiting. I’m gonna take her down from the inside out.

  She wasn’t at the MV house. In fact, there was not one shred of evidence that could link her back to Ivy’s ex-boring-boyfriend. But we all know it was her.

  There are very few people who have access to schedule the jet. Claudette is one of them. The only one connected to me.

  “I still don’t understand what Boring Richard had to do with this,” I say.

  “Did you ask Ivy?” Match says.

  “She had some kind of argument with him when she went home for dinner the Sunday before all this happened.”

  “About what?”

  “Me, I guess. He looked me up. Told Ivy I was a deviant or something. Told her to stay away from me.”

  “But why?” Match asks again.

  “How should I know, Oliver? I don’t see the connection.”

  “I do,” Perfect says. “Or at least I’m starting to. People are coming back. Allen came back into my life the same day Ellie popped into it. And somehow Allen and that Ellen Abraham woman were connected too. I don’t know how, but I know they were. Same thing with you, Romantic. You find a girl; your sister goes nuts. Now what we don’t know is what part Claudette played in those events ten years ago. Where does she fit in? Because I already know where Allen fits in. Too bad Boring Richard is dead. We could’ve put some pressure on him to give up the answers we still need. I should try and find Ellen Abraham. See if she might talk.”

  “Yeah,” Mysterious says, snapping his gun back together with satisfying clicks. “And Boring Richard left me a present on the bed up in Nolan’s house. So that’s another clue that he’s connected to all this somehow.” He looks up at me and I see it. I see just how dangerous Mysterious really is. He’s out for blood over that little gift. And I don’t know how he managed it, but Mysterious picked up every piece of damning evidence left out at the MV house. The cops never saw any evidence of what Ivy and I were doing that night. He got his own reminder of the past safely tucked out of sight too.

  Got to hand it to him. When Mysterious takes a job, he’s not fucking around.

  “Well,” Match says, “we’re just gonna have to take care of business. That’s what my old man always told me. He always said, ‘Oliver, my boy, when the shit hits the fan, you just turn that fucker around.’”

  “Your father’s a regular poet,” Mysterious says.

  “Maybe nothing’s happening?” I say. “Not the way we think it is. I mean, we don’t have anything to go on. We just have your old vendetta with Allen, Perfect. And my sister is a crazy cunt. Maybe that’s all there is to it?”

  “It’s not,” Mysterious says, stashing his gun in his pants. “You can’t overlook the fact that Mac had some weird woman fucking with Ellie at work at the same time Allen was fucking with him. And now we have two examples. Because Boring Richard was fucking with you at the same time as Claudette. Why was he looking you up?”

  “He told Ivy her roommate told him to. But she asked her roommate after, and she said that never happened.”

  “Yup,” Mysterious says as he looks inside a duffle bag. “What we have here is a classic tag-team operation happening, my friends. One operative distracts while the other takes care of business. And if anything else happens, I’m gonna do exactly what Old Man Match said. Turn that shit back on them. And they do not want to be my target. Whoever the fuck they are.”

  “Someone needs to get a hold of Corporate and make sure everything’s cool with him,” I say.

  “I’ll handle him,” Match says. “We have a business deal going, so he’s gonna show up for that in a few days for sure.”

  “All right,” Perfect says, peeking through the curtains of his front room. “The girls are back, so just…” He stops and looks at Mysterious. “Dude, get rid of the guns.” Mysterious has another one out, all ready to start cleaning it when Perfect says this.

  Mysterious grunts, but he stashes it back into the pack he brought with him, hikes it over his shoulder, and walks out the front door.

  “Jesus Christ,” Perfect says. “He’s gonna kill someone.”

  And then Match and Perfect both look at me. Because even though Mysterious has killer written all over him, I’m the one who pulled the trigger this time.

  “Maybe someone has it coming,” Match says, shrugging his shoulders and sliding his shades down his face. He turns and leaves it at that. Following Mysterious out the door.

  Perfect and I watch Ivy and Ellie talk to them for a few seconds before they both get into Match’s Hummer and drive off.

  Maybe someone does, I think as I watch them go.

  Maybe all that shit we’ve put up with for the past ten years is about to come back around. Only maybe this time, it’s not the Misters who have to stand in front of the fan while people throw shit.

  Maybe it’s someone else’s turn.

  Epilogue - Nolan

  “Just be nice,” Ivy says as she straightens my tie outside her parents’ house.

  “Hey,” I say, “they don’t call me Mr. Nice for nothing.”

  “They don’t call you Mr. Nice at all, Nolan. Now stop.” She shoots me a sideways grin as the word comes out. We haven’t had another rape fantasy. And I’m not saying we’ll never d
o it again, but I’m over it. It was fun, but it was a stressful fucking night. And every time I think about yellow rope, I see Ivy’s foot, tied to that bedpost as the guns went off and that sick fuck, Boring Richard, shot her.

  I don’t need to prove I’m innocent to Ivy. She knows.

  I don’t need to prove anything to anyone, I decide. Fuck them all.

  The front door opens and the Reverend William Rockwell stands there looking very much like a pastor’s daughter’s father.

  Well, except him, I guess.

  “Come in!” Sophia, Ivy’s mother, calls. Ivy slips past her father and leaves us there together. On the front stoop. He doesn’t invite me in, so I shift my feet a little, wondering why I’m letting this conservative dinosaur make me nervous.

  “You’re not good enough for her,” my father-in-law says.

  I nod, pressing my lips together. “Yes, sir,” I say. “I know that.”

  “And you eloped, so you’re never going to be good enough for her.”

  I nod again. “I know. I don’t deserve her. Not one bit. And I’m going to spend the rest of my life thanking God for letting such a smart and beautiful woman be my wife.” I have apologized profusely on the phone and email for weeks about the elopement. “We’re already planning a real wedding, Mr. Rockwell. So we can make it official in your eyes.”

  He’s never going to forgive me. Especially after I tell him she’s pregnant.

  “Hmmph,” Rockwell says, stepping aside. “If you keep kissing ass like this, Delaney, then we might even like each other in about twenty years. Come in.”

  I step into his house and immediately feel at home. Ivy is everything my life was missing these past ten years.

  And together we are building the best motherfucking resort the Southern California desert has ever seen. Ivy’s marketing plan was a whole lot more than free rooms to pique interest in the San Diego corporate community. It was cooking class weekends with our professional chef. It was golf lesson weekends with our new resident pro. It was dark-sky stargazing with guest astronomers. It’s a place for parties, and weddings, and anniversaries and corporate events.

  In fact, my new career looks almost nothing like my old one. I might not have ever gotten that art degree, but I got something much better instead.

  And it was just what I needed.

  A beautiful new life with my beautiful new wife, Mrs. Romantic.

  END OF BOOK SHIT

  Welcome to the End of Book Shit (fondly called the EOBS in my little pond), the place where I get to say anything I want and readers have to listen. ;) Just kidding. I bet most people don’t even bother reading these.

  OK, so like most of my stories this one started out based in fact. If you read the Rock EOBS you know that I got a lot of the original premise from real life and if you read the Social Media series, you might’ve suspected I based it off something that really happened as well.

  The Mister series is loosely based off another real event. All the characters are made up in my imagination. The settings are made up, the scenes---all fiction. But the basic premise—a group of guys get accused of something and suddenly their lives are turned upside down because the court of public opinion pronounces them guilty—is real.

  My premise takes place ten years after the “big event” that changed their lives. And my questions are valid ones I think. What happens to people who endure social outrage on a vast scale? People who might not just get national attention, but global attention? How do they go on when the dust settles?

  Well, this my version of how that scenario might play out. Mr. Perfect made pretty good use of his ten years between then and now, but Mr. Romantic? He’s not so sympathetic. And the way it affected him is definitely not sympathetic.

  But I feel for this guy. I always want to believe people are innocent. I root for people to be found not guilty. Not to get off. Not to avoid justice. But because I want them to be unequivocally innocent and I want that to be a final judgment in a court of law. I want to believe that people are good.

  I have a master’s degree in forensic toxicology. If you don’t know what that is, it’s basically drug testing. Biological analysis to determine what, if any, chemicals are inside the body of victims and perpetrators. And in my last semester we had to take an ethics class to prepare us for expert testimony in the courtroom. The one thing they hammered home in this class is pretty much the only thing that stuck with me. (I’m not a forensic toxicologist, right? I’m a writer. So I didn’t do much in this field to make it stick). But that one thing was this – “It is far more ethical to let the guilty go free than it is to persecute the innocent.”

  I still believe that. While it sucks when a criminal gets off, it literally makes me sick to my stomach to think of an innocent person sitting in prison for something they didn’t do.

  So I like to believe that everyone is innocent unless there’s a good reason not to.

  Sadly, I’m a bad judge of guilt and innocence. Remember Laci Peterson? That pregnant lady who went missing just before Christmas in 2002? I wanted her husband to be innocent so bad. Not because I have some weird fixation with would-be murders. But because I want to believe that no man is capable of killing their pregnant wife and dumping her body in the ocean.

  I was genuinely distraught when it became clear he was guilty. Lost my faith in humanity.

  So when another high-profile case came on the news not long afterward I decided I wasn’t going to invest my opinion again. I got burned with Laci Peterson’s animal of a husband. I’m out of the guilt or innocence business.

  But you know… you hear the news. You hear the evidence. You see the completely fucked up reaction of the media, hell almost the entire nation trying to lynch the people accused before they get to trial. And you form an opinion.

  I had an opinion, I just told myself I didn’t. I wasn’t going to invest in these things anymore. I always lose. They are always guilty. So when the details of this case came out and it was found they were innocent—well, I got some of my faith back.

  Not everyone is a monster. Sometimes people are set up. It absolutely happens. And for whatever reason, this case was one of them.

  So when I started plotting the backstory for Mr. Perfect in February 2016 I decided I wanted it to be about a case like that. Ten years earlier a group of friends are accused of a terrible crime and maybe they did it, maybe they didn’t, but they got off because the witness died.

  Now this is not exactly how the real-life case went. And believe me, that one is pretty interesting. But the book isn’t about that case. This isn’t their story. It’s just a story. One that could happen to anyone.

  But then I started looking up what happened to these people after the case was over and that’s where the backstory really came to life. That’s when I knew it was what happened after that mattered.

  No one gave a fuck about them after. No one cared that their lives were disrupted or that they had to find a way forward. No one cared about what they lost. No one even cared why they were accused in the first place.

  This was my story. What did the public outcry do to these people? How did that experience of unjustified persecution change them?

  This book is a look at five men, ten years later, and how one lie changed who they were forever. That’s it. It’s not a thinly veiled commentary on anything happening right now in the news and it’s not a statement about how people are treated by society and the media if they find themselves wrapped up in something bigger than themselves.

  It’s not about any of that. It’s just about these five fictional guys trying to come to terms with how one night turned into a nightmare.

  Mr. Perfect did pretty well. We’re all kind of proud of his reaction. He wanted to make the world a better place. Mr. Romantic? Well, not so much. He’s a cynical asshole with a rape fantasy fetish. Maybe he was this guy before the lie, maybe he wasn’t. Maybe that lie changed him for the better? He will never know because he can’t see his alternate reality wher
e that night never happened.

  I try to write unlikable antiheroes. I think I do a pretty good job. But I also try and give you a reason to root for them as they find redemption.

  Mr. Romantic isn’t as dark as some of my characters. James Fenici is dark. Merc is dark. Hell, I think Ford is probably darker than Mr. Romantic. So that’s why there’s no trigger warning in my blurb. This isn’t a dark book and if you think it is, you missed the point. All Mr. Romantic wants is an answer. Why? Why was he a target? Why did people lie about him? Why does he have to live with a stigma for the rest of his life over something he never did?

  And it turns out, that’s all each of the Misters want. Why?

  Well, if you read the whole series you’re gonna see why. Mr. Corporate will have his own demons to deal with. Mr. Mysterious will have you questioning everything. And Mr. Match will get that final answer, no matter what he has to do.

  Stick with me, I’ve got a story to tell. And I promise you, it’s something you’ve never read before.

  If you’d like to hang out with me on Facebook I have a private fan group called Shrike Bikes. Just ask to join and someone will approve you as soon as they see it. I am in that group chatting with the fans every single day and we have a lot of giveaways and fun stuff going all the time. Especially around release days. I usually do a takeover and give away all kinds of stuff related to the new release, so come on by and say hi.

  If you enjoyed this book please consider leaving me a review where you purchased it. I’m still indie. And the success of each and every book I put out depends on readers like you leaving their thoughts and opinions about the story in a review.

  Thank you for reading, thank you for reviewing, and I’ll see you in the next book.

  Julie

  JA Huss

  Mr Corporate

  MR CORPORATE

  BY JA HUSS

  Edited by RJ Locksley

  Copyright © 2016 by J. A. Huss