Shattered Lives Read Free Page A

house, he paused at the garbage cans lined side by side in the alley pretending to tidy up a bit, but watching and listening for anything out of the ordinary.
    Nothing.
    He moved quickly to the backdoor, pulled the screen door back and used the key he had pulled from his pocket to unlock the deadbolt.  He entered quickly and shut and locked the door behind him and pulled his gun from the pocket of his navy-blue Indianapolis Colts hoodie as he did so.
    No sound. 
    Moving quickly, he went to the guest bedroom, knelt down and loosened the thread in the carpet just to the left of the closet and lifted it up revealing a ten by ten square piece of three-quarter inch plywood.  He used the point of his key to work around an edge of it and lifted it up revealing a drop box of sorts.
    He pulled out a fully loaded, unregistered Glock .9M and two magazines loaded with .9M hollow point bullets.  The serial numbers had been filed off, making the gun temporarily untraceable, courtesy of another one of his Weasels, this one a cocaine dealer who supposedly died in a drug deal gone bad.  Not coincidently, the bullets found in his skull came from a Glock .9M just like the one he shoved into his waistband.  Temporarily untraceable, because the firing pin, like any other firing pin, had a serial number few, if any gun owners, knew about.
    Underneath the gun were ten banded bundles of cash, all fifties. 
    A half-million.  Emergency money.
    Underneath the money were a passport and a wallet with a driver’s license and social security card of one of his identities, two credit cards in the same name and a set of keys.
    He took a careful look out of the corner of the living room window and satisfied that there wasn’t anything unusual, he pulled the hood over his head and left the house as easily and as quickly as he had arrived. He carried two duffle bags with the money split evenly between them and some clothes on top to help conceal it. 
    Four easy blocks away was a metro bus stop that would take him downtown to the station where he’d catch another bus to the north side suburb where his townhouse was located.  The trip would take him thirty-seven minutes. 
    He knew this because he had rehearsed.
    He was ready to disappear.  At least, for a while, but he would be back.  He had some unfinished business to attend to.

CHAPTER THREE
     
    Chicago, Illinois
     
                  Brett didn’t sleep very well, and it wasn’t from the pain in his shoulder from the gunshot even though it hurt like crazy.  It wasn’t the intercom chimes that preceded announcements for Doctor So and So to call this number or that number, and it wasn’t the fact that in his twenty-two months in captivity, he hadn’t slept much at night except in snatches. 
    This morning at some point, he was going to see his parents again, and he was nervous, if not scared, to see them.
                  He had been trying desperately to remember what they had looked like, how they might have changed, and mostly trying to remember the sound of their voices.  He had tried to picture his house and his room, but those memories seemed smoky and faded like an old photograph.  That, too, had scared him, but left him mostly sad.  During the time he was in captivity, he had often wondered if they would remember him or if they had given up on him.
                  Mostly, he had wondered if he had somehow disappointed them, especially after they found out what he had to do during the time he was in captivity.
                  Brett had watched Tim meet his parents for the first time in over two years.  While that reunion seemed to go well, he had learned from Tim that his parents didn’t really want him to talk about all that he had been through.  They explained to him that it might be best if he let the past stay in the past and that he should just move forward.  Neither Brett nor Tim had understood how that might be possible