Last Kiss Goodbye Read Free Page B

fact, going home meant facing the very people who’d condemned him. The neighbors and family who’d gossiped about his family, testified against his character, thrown him away and forgotten about him.
    The ones who believed he was a murderer.
    But he would face them, anyway. Because someone in Kudzu Hollow knew the truth about the Stanton slayings and had allowed him to take the fall.
    One last glance at the columns of the courthouse and its stately presence, and he remembered all he’d learned in prison. Laws varied, depending on a person’s financial status. For the poor, the old adage “innocent until proven guilty” didn’t matter one iota. In fact, it was the opposite—you were guilty from the beginning, and nothing you said made a damn bit of difference. From the moment the sheriff had slapped handcuffs on him, Matt had been labeled a killer. Not one person in Kudzu Hollow had spoken up to defend him.
    Then in prison…hell, everyone screamed they were innocent. He’d had a hard time telling the difference himself. He’d met men bad to the bone, some meaner and more depraved than he’d ever imagined. But other innocents like him, convicted by bad cops, seedy lawyers, piss-poor judges and shoddy crime scene techs, filled the cells, too. Trouble was, once the prisoners were all thrown in there together, fighting for survival took priority.
    And they all became animals.
    Sweat beaded his forehead at the memory of the acts he’d committed in the name of survival.
    His life would never be the same. He’d lost his youth, and for a while his chance for an education, although the last few years he’d pulled himself together and had been studying the law. One day soon, he’d obtain his license and take the bar exam. Become a respectable citizen and prove to the world that it had been wrong about him. Maybe he’d even work with Willis to help free other innocents.
    Matt’s chest squeezed, though, as he climbed into the lawyer’s black Cadillac. Now only one thing drove him—bittersweet revenge on the man responsible.
    If only he knew his identity.
    That fateful night raced back as Willis drove through Nashville, Matt’s mind wandering back in time as the sea of cars and traffic noises swirled around him.
    Fifteen years ago, he’d been up to no good, stealing tires from the junkyard, when he’d spotted that little Stanton girl running for her life. Hell, he’d felt sorry for the kid. They’d both grown up in the trailer park that backed up to the junkyard. He knew the kind of life she had. Had heard folks in town gossiping that her mother liked the men, that if she wasn’t married she’d be shacked up in one of Talulah’s Red Row trailers making money on her back. And some said that she did spend her days there with her legs spread wide, entertaining customer after customer while her old man sold car parts and pedaled junk for a living. And Matt had finally learned that was true, although he wasn’t proud of the way he’d found out.
    Old man Stanton had beat his wife. They were white trash just like his family. Ivy had been such a puny little thing, with bundles of curly blond hair and those big green eyes that he hated to think of her big-bellied father taking his fists to her. The poor kid didn’t have enough meat or muscle on her to fend off a spider, much less a drunk, two-hundred-pound, pissed old fart who wreaked of whiskey and a bad temper.
    When Matt had seen all that blood on her hands and shirt, the devil had climbed inside him. He’d wanted to kill her bastard daddy. Teach him to pound on somebody his own size. And he had gone to the trailer, the one with the torn, yellowed curtains, the broken-down swing set and the beer cans smashed against the porch.
    But he hadn’t killed anyone.
    No, her mother had been dead when he arrived. A vicious slaying, as if animals had been at it. Matt had damn near lost his dinner seeing all the blood on the floor, like a fucking river. And her daddy had