Hangman (Jason Trapp: Origin Story Book 1) Read online

  “But I guess I was just like you once, so how about we make a deal? My shift’s just about over. You follow me home, I’ll make sure you get a good meal inside you before sending you on your way. And then we can forget this malarkey ever happened. How’s that sound?”

  Trapp swallowed, knowing that it wasn’t a suggestion. “Just great.”

  6

  Trapp emerged from the guest bathroom in the Graysons’ beautiful prairie-style home with a towel wrapped around his waist, wondering how in the hell he had found himself here.

  His current surroundings, complete with floral wallpaper that was a little yellowed and faded by age and sun, but otherwise lovingly cared for, were so far removed from the seedy bars and rundown motels in which he’d festered for most of the past few months that it was hard to believe this could be anything other than a fever dream.

  Then pinch yourself, hoss.

  He just stood in the hallway for a couple of minutes, lost in thought as the droplets of water left on his torso by the shower air dried. He was so out of it that it wasn’t until she was standing right in front of him that he realized she was there at all.

  The girl looked up from her paperback a fraction of a second before colliding with his frame. She stood there, wide-eyed, with her fingers clutching the pages, staring at the apparition that had invaded her home.

  She’s pretty…

  Trapp hiked the towel up, just in case, before he spoke. “I’m sorry, ma’am –”

  “Cecelia!” a woman’s voice yelled out, cutting him off. “Get yourself down here. Your father brought home a stray again. I need your help setting up.”

  She was about his age, Trapp judged as they stared at each other silently in the gloomy hallway, the woman’s words dying away. Maybe a little younger, but not enough to count. She was wearing frayed, light-hued denim shorts and a white tank top that was marked by a dark smudge. Looked like oil.

  “Yeah,” he said lamely, feeling the need to fill the empty space. “The sheriff, your dad I guess, said it would be okay if I stayed the night.”

  She said nothing.

  Trapp started to stretch out his hand to greet her properly, then froze as he realized it was just about the only thing holding the towel up. He chanced a look down, just to check the whole edifice was holding up, and when he looked back up, she was smiling.

  Dammit, Trapp thought. There goes the first impression.

  “I guess that explains it,” Cecelia said.

  Trapp frowned, now feeling not just naked, but on a different wavelength. “Explains what?”

  “The bike out front. I hope you don’t mind, I was checking it out.”

  “Not at all. I’m Jason, by the way. I’m guessing you’re Cecelia.”

  “Not if you want to stay on my good side, I’m not,” she replied.

  Trapp thought he couldn’t be more lost if he tried. It had been a long time since he’d found himself in a family home, and he’d sure as hell never been in one like this. Women had never been his strong suit either. At least when it came to the conversational front. It was different when he met them in a bar, surrounded by other guys. Alcohol had a way of loosening the tongue. And women liked to say they’d hooked up with a soldier, so by that point the conversation was usually a moot point.

  That cry again. “Cecelia!”

  The girl – Trapp wasn’t willing to name her, even in the privacy of his own head – grimaced. She snapped the paperback closed and rested it against her head. She stuck out her hand, forcing Trapp to shuffle the scrunched towel from his right to his left before he met it with his own.

  “It’s Shea,” she said.

  “Jason,” Trapp said quickly. “But then I guess I already told you that.”

  He wished he could close his eyes and escape. Or at least haul the words back inside his mouth. Since neither appeared to be an option, he screwed his lips shut and hoped she would just put him out of his misery, the sooner the better.

  “I’ll see you downstairs.” Shea smiled.

  As she slipped past him, heading for the stairs, Trapp croaked, “Yeah.”

  “Hey, Jason?” Shea called out.

  He turned to face her. Not trusting his voice, he raised his eyebrows instead.

  “You’ll have to take me out for a ride sometime.” She grinned.

  And then she was gone.

  Did that really just happen?

  7

  His left leg didn’t work like it used to. But then again, Chino mused as he attempted the delicate three-way ballet of balancing his grocery bags against his chest as he simultaneously held himself upright with his cane and opened the latch of the gate that led into his front yard, these days it was the least of his problems.

  The metal device gave way with an anguished squeak that reminded him he’d been meaning to oil it for a couple of weeks now. Then again, it was hardly the most urgent task on a very long list that seemed to grow two heads every time he slashed off one.

  “How are you this morning, Alex?” an old woman’s voice called out. She was seated on the porch, raised up a few feet from the ground, and she was crocheting – not knitting. The distinction was important, he remembered, though he couldn’t for the life of him remember why.

  “It’s past lunch, Mrs. Carter,” Chino called back with a labored smile.

  He was dog tired just from the walk back from the grocery store. The last few steps to his front door presented the same challenge to him as the summit of Everest might to an exhausted mountaineer. Though it was not nearly so picturesque, with tufts of grass and yet more invasive weeds pushing aside the paving stones faster than he could pull them out.

  “It’s Ginny, boy, how many times do I got to tell you that?” she replied in a mock-serious voice, though her twinkling eyes belied the pretense. “And I suppose I do lose track of time out here.”

  “Yes, ma’am. Ginny, I mean,” he quickly corrected, kicking himself for the error. He needed to concentrate harder. It was always the same when he got tired, like he was now. Details slipped from the forefront of his mind. Names, faces, places he’d been and things he’d done. They all blended into one, or else faded away entirely.

  What’s that they say? Old soldiers never die. They just fade away.

  Chino’s face screwed up with unaccustomed anger. That was just the thing, wasn’t it? He wasn’t old, and at this rate he wouldn’t even get a chance to try it on for size. Hell, if things kept going the way they were, he wasn’t sure he wanted to keep on trying. What was the point when everything hurt?

  “Everything okay, Alex?” Ginny asked, her wrinkled forehead creasing ever deeper with concern.

  “Just peachy,” he replied through gritted teeth. “Tired is all.”

  He lifted his cane a few inches off the ground, wondering briefly if it would cause the whole damn edifice to collapse. He swayed a little, fingers clutching reflexively around the brown paper bag against his chest but remained standing. He rapped the point of his cane against his crippled left leg a couple of times, barely feeling the impact. They’d said that might happen, the doctors, when he woke up that first day. Nerve damage from when they dug the shrapnel out of his leg.

  It wouldn’t heal. Not now, not ever. But it wasn’t so bad. The other guys had it worse. He dropped the cane back down to the ground and stood easy once more.

  “It’s a long walk back from the store. Good for me to get out the house once in a while. But it’s a long walk.”

  He took a step forward, listening to the rhythmic clack-clack of Ginny’s needles. For a woman who was pushing eighty, she had remarkably dexterous fingers. They put his to shame.

  She laughed. “That’s why I let my little boy do it. These old bones haven’t got enough left in them. How about you let Mark help out next time? He won’t mind.”

  Her little boy, Chino knew, was Mark Carter. He was pushing fifty-seven years old, and he had a pretty bad case of emphysema from a lifetime spent sucking on those little white sticks. He w
asn’t a lot healthier than his old ma. Hell, Chino wouldn’t be entirely surprised if he passed before she did.

  He shook his head instantly, wincing as the action tugged against the scar tissue that ran down the right-hand side of his neck. “No ma’am. I’ve got to keep doing it. Part of my rehab. At least, that’s what they tell me when I can get an appointment.”

  “Okay, okay, have it your way,” Ginny replied, the bright look in her eyes indicating that she had a good idea of the real reason for his refusal. “But at least let me send him around to help out with the yard. You shouldn’t be putting herself through all that. Not with your leg.”

  It wasn’t his leg that was the real challenge, and both of them knew it, regardless of the fact that it went unspoken. But again he shook his head.

  “I’ve been holding off for the weekend. Supposed to be good weather, they say. Not too hot, not too cold.”

  “A Three Bears kind of day.” Ginny smiled, seemingly to herself. “That’s what Jack used to call it.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” Chino replied softly as an ache began to grow in the arm clutching his cane. Jack had been her husband, he knew. Dead five years now, but she spoke about him with an undimmed warmth. He wondered if he’d ever find a girl to love him the way Ginny had loved Jack.

  Don’t get your hopes up, kid.

  She dropped her wool to her waist and beckoned him inside. “Go on, forget about Ginny. Don’t let that milk turn now. You hear me?”

  Chino bowed his head dutifully, grateful for the reprieve. If Saturday was to be a Three Bears kind of day, then Thursday most certainly was not. It was 90°, but thickly humid, unusual for California this time of year, and it felt past a hundred. He was soaked with sweat. Even more so than usual.

  And so what if he sensed that Ginny Carter knew that he was as likely to tumble onto his face as make it to his front door?

  Ain’t pride a funny thing?

  He shuffled to the door, accompanied by the renewed clack of Ginny’s steel. His left leg dragged a little bit, but that wasn’t so unusual. Nothing a few hours on the couch couldn’t fix, at least for a time. He fumbled for his keys, put them in the lock, and turned.

  “Alex?”

  “Yes, Mrs. Carter?” he asked, turning his head a little and meeting her eyes. They were level now, so it wasn’t hard.

  “You heard anything from the VA?”

  He shook his head. Again, that wince of pain. “Nothing yet.”

  “Bastards,” she hissed with surprising intensity. “Forty isn’t enough. Not nearly enough. And you can tell them I said so.”

  Chino grinned wanly. “I’ll tell them, Mrs. Carter. But I don’t expect it’ll do a damn bit of good.”

  She shook her head, the anger fading away, replaced with a sadness that spoke mostly of exhaustion. “No, Alex. I don’t suppose it will.”

  With that, he stepped inside and closed the door behind him. He rested his forehead against it briefly, clutching the bag of groceries with his right arm, his polished wooden cane just an extension of the left. He didn’t have to look down to tell that his T-shirt was soaked with sweat. It wasn’t just a result of the heat, not with that acrid stink that only pain could conjure.

  Ginny Carter’s words kept running through his mind. “Forty isn’t enough. Not nearly enough.”

  She was right, too. Forty was the number the VA had given him to fund the rest of his life. Somehow a ruined left leg, cluster migraines, a disfigured face, and a partially removed frontal lobe only amounted to 40 percent disability in the eyes of some bean-counting fuck in the Pentagon.

  You could appeal, of course.

  But the bureaucracy was Byzantine, and most days he didn’t have the energy to fight it. His claim was working its way through the system, but with all the cripples making their way back from the Iraqi desert and the mountains of Afghanistan, they were backed up for years.

  So a little over five hundred bucks a month was what he was worth in the eyes of the government, and he didn’t have a whole lot of faith in that changing anytime soon.

  They said he could work to make up the difference. And he’d tried. But without the ability to drive a car more than a half hour without half a week to recover, or the gas money to fill it even if he could, all those plum office jobs were out. No bus service in this shitty neighborhood, and it was all he could afford. So retail it was. And no matter what the law insisted, they didn’t hire cripples, and those that did realized their mistake before too long.

  Stop feeling sorry for yourself, dammit.

  Chino turned away, wincing as the scar tissue pulled at his right temple. Tears prickled in the corners of his eyes, burning hot reminders of everything he’d lost. He shuffled toward the worktops of the cramped one-man kitchen in his cramped one-man house, his right shoulder crying out with pain at the effort of clutching onto the bag of groceries.

  He left it there, knowing he didn’t have the energy to put things away. Not just yet.

  He had a security setup, paid for by a local veteran’s group after his windows were busted in by wannabe gang-bangers one too many times. What the hell they were looking for he didn’t know; he didn’t have anything to steal. The cameras seemed to work, at least so far. There were two of them, one for the front and one for inside. There was an alley out back, too, but it was so filthy even the rats avoided it, and Chino figured you’d have to be one desperate junkie to try your luck back there.

  Besides, two cameras had come in the box, so that was what he was working with.

  The recording unit had its own screen. Acceptable enough quality. He ran the tape back for the hour or so he’d been out at thirty times speed, which left him waiting for a couple of minutes, serenaded by the tape player’s electric motor. He saw his own bald head walking backwards away from the front door, the raw pink patch so obvious against the rest of his tanned skin.

  He winced unconsciously and pressed play, holding his finger down on the fast-forward button as his past self speed-walked off screen.

  So far as he could tell, nothing had invaded his rickety sanctum while he was out. He checked the outside camera, the one pointing at the street, just to be sure. He saw the heads of a few kids bobbing over the top of his fence. Mexicans, probably, kicking a soccer ball around in the street. Just like he had when he was growing up.

  An SUV rolled past in triple time, except the kids in the street were still moving at that speed, only the truck wasn’t. It crept along, fast on tape, but slow back out in reality – as though it was casing the joint.

  And hadn’t he seen it before?

  The thought crossed his mind, a distant memory. He scrunched his eyes half-shut, trying to remember. Vehicles like that weren’t common in these parts. It wasn’t flashy, but even in the fuzzy camera image it looked quietly expensive. From what he’d seen, drug dealers preferred to flaunt their success with glittering chrome rims. But even they were too smart to bother working these streets.

  After all, why pan for copper coins when entire gold nuggets were available just a couple of towns over?

  Chino was struggling to remember where he’d seen that truck before when a sound caught his attention, surfacing over the background throb of a fast-onrushing headache. Something inside the house.

  He froze, stomach gripped by the cold hand of fear. It was never too far away. Not since that night in the desert. And it never took much to set him off.

  Chino looked up to see that it was only the top-heavy bag of groceries on the kitchen worktops, the gallon of milk shifting and settling in place before…

  “Oh, shit.”

  The milk fell before he had a chance to even think about doing something to stop it. The rest of the paper bag went with it, resulting in a series of thuds that echoed like a drum set tumbling down a hillside.

  That was when the migraine hit him, a lance of pain that started at his left temple and crossed his skull to the back of his right eye. The pain struck with an intensity that belied the earlier warnings
, which were mere twinges of discomfort by comparison.

  Chino lurched forward toward the counter, his conscious mind still locked on the puddle of white liquid that was even now forming on the floor. What was left of its processing capacity, now being eroded away by relentless waves of pain, did the math. He could still save a little of it. Maybe half the bottle. That would get him through the week, or at least most of it, and he could do without for the rest. He would have to, because as usual, the money had ended before the month.

  All this happened in a fraction of a second, but even as the thoughts crossed his mind, Chino knew it was too late. The pain was simply too great. He barely noticed as he stumbled and fell, his better arm – because neither were good – taking most of the impact as he collapsed to the floor.

  The agony was white hot now, and all-encompassing. He retreated, as he always did, to an empty, dark corner of his mind, where it didn’t hurt so much. The last thought that crossed his mind before the darkness claimed him was of the milk. The milk, and all the other groceries still sitting on the counter waiting to be put away. It was too hot, and he had no AC.

  Which meant when he woke twelve or eighteen or twenty-four hours from now, he would have no food either.

  The pain faded, and with it, his consciousness.

  8

  Trapp stood semi-stiffly, with his arms clasped behind his back, fingers interlocked. It wasn’t quite a parade rest, but it wasn’t far off.

  “You’ll be wanting me to tell you the secret, I’m sure.”

  The woman speaking was the sheriff’s wife, and under this roof, she was the boss. He knew that fact because she was wearing a bright pink apron emblazoned with the words “THE BOSS” in white stenciled lettering, complete with an arrow that pointed straight up. A Christmas gift, no doubt, or handed over as a joke by relatives just before sitting down for Thanksgiving dinner.

  She was a plump woman with kindly eyes, and permanently amused creases dimpled her cheeks. Upon his arrival less than an hour earlier, she hadn’t blinked an eye when her husband announced that he’d picked up an extra mouth to feed for dinner. Just sent him upstairs, made up a guest room for him to sleep in, and told him to clean up.