Blood Abandon (Donald Holley Book 1) Read online

  I tried to pace my breathing. I had to have a level head, and not let him realize that I knew what was happening. I pulled my SIG Sauer from my coat, inspected the silencer, checked the magazine, made sure a bullet was in the chamber, and was satisfied that all was in order. I put the gun back in my coat pocket and turned on my vehicle, and spun around and headed back home. I couldn’t trust my brother, but I could trust my gun.

  Chapter Eight

  I pulled in my garage, and hit the remote, closing door behind me. I sat in my vehicle for a few seconds, trying to clear my head. I took a deep breath, thinking about the despair I felt, like something was pulling me down toward the floor from inside of my chest. This was an uncommon feeling for me, and I realized in that moment that the fact that it was uncommon to feel it was depressing in its own right. I had figured long ago if I were to undergo some clinical analysis, a profiler might suggest I was a sociopath, though I would disagree due to the affection and love I felt toward my brother. He was all I had in the world, and now...I couldn’t think about that from an emotional standpoint now. I had to be smart.

  I entered the house through the garage, and made my way to the kitchen. As I rounded the corner into the kitchen, that’s when I saw Bit with his gun pointed at me. His face was devoid of any emotion. “Pull your gun out slowly from your coat and set it on the counter,” he said.

  I put my hands up slowly, and reached into my coat, feeling for the grip. Are you fuckin’ serious…? One step ahead, again. “Okay,” I said. I pulled the weapon out slowly, and sat it on the counter next to me. That’s when I heard steps behind me and a gloved hand reached out around me and picked it up. I felt the cool touch of a gun put to the back of my skull.

  “You fucked up, ese.”

  I kept my hands up. “How did you know that I knew?” I asked my brother.

  “When you decided to leave without me. Coincidentally, Oscar was nearby, so I called him in.”

  Bit smiled wanly, and motioned for Oscar to step around over next to him. The Hispanic man was in his late twenties, a little less than six feet tall, and had a wispy mustache, slick hair and hard eyes. He was lean and cagey looking; he was the type of guy who had a mean streak. I figured he was the one who had murdered the men from Bit’s crew.

  “What happens now, brother, is that you pull out all of the money in the safe, put it in a bag, and give us your vehicle.” He motioned toward me with the gun. “Let’s get to it.”

  They put me in front of them, hands interwoven behind my head, and walked me down the hall to my bedroom. The safe was in my closet, and was mounted into the wall. I put my hands down, opened the closet, and walked in. I cleared the section of suits and dress clothes hanging in front of it. I turned around to face them.

  “Open it,” Bit said.

  I looked at my brother; he looked like someone I did not know, and never had. All the compassion and love for me was gone from his eyes. I wondered what had happened.

  “I will, but you have to answer some things for me first,” I said.

  “I don’t have to do a damn thing for you,” he replied. “Now, open the fucking safe.”

  “You are going to answer me first.” I pointed at the safe. “This safe cost one-hundred thousand dollars. If you kill me, you don’t get in it without extreme trouble. You bring in more people to help you and you have to split the money more ways.” I watched their faces. “Your choice. Answer some questions, I’ll open it. If you don’t, shoot now, and do your best with it.”

  Oscar pursed his lips. “Fuck your brother, man. Pop this fool and let’s get that shit and roll out.”

  Bit just looked at me; it was more a look of irritation than anything. “Okay, ask your question.”

  “There’s more than one,” I said.

  “Well you can only start with one, so let’s get to this shit,” he rasped. Oscar held his gun on me; Bit put his by his side. I did not see my gun, so I figured it was still back in the kitchen.

  “Why didn’t you just ask me for money?” I asked. “I would have helped you.”

  Bit retorted with a light chuckle. “Oh, you would have given me a million dollars if I asked for it? I’m sure you are that charitable.” He snorted, looked over at Oscar. “Can you believe this guy?” He looked back at me. “The fucking nerve you have.

  “My whole life, it’s always been about you. You were older, you were smarter, you were this, and you were that. I was ‘two-bit’, the dummy of the two of us. That’s how you always treated me, and look how things are now. You never gave me my due; I was always a second class citizen to you. And that’s what has you in this predicament now,” he said.

  I couldn’t believe this. I had never noticed these feelings, but it made sense.

  “It was so easy to set you up, because of course you would believe I would fuck something up,” he continued. “Of course, I would need my big brother, who’s only two years older, mind you, to come and save me from myself.” He laughed. “That was easier than fishing with dynamite. You went right for it and even talked down to me the whole time as I had expected.”

  “Bit, I was trying to help you-

  “Shut the fuck up, Donnie. You asked; I’m answering.” He no longer resembled the bummy surfer type of guy I was used to seeing as my brother; he was changing, metamorphosing into something entirely different. “Not so dumb, am I now?” he asked rhetorically.

  “If you were trying to make your point, you’ve made it,” I said.

  “Too late for that, Donnie.” He lifted his gun back up.

  “I’m your brother,” I offered, trying to keep him off his guard. “I love you, Gerald. I’m sorry you’ve been hurt by my actions. I’ll try to do better.”

  “What did I just say? It’s too late for all that. You aren’t shit to me; I just want the money.”

  Oscar looked over at Bit when he said that, and that’s when I rushed Oscar.

  ***

  There was a deafening roar of gunshots as I tackled Oscar to the floor; Bit turned and jumped into the fray, trying to peel us apart. A wave of nausea hit me as Oscar and I fought for purchase with one another. I clawed at Oscar’s eyes as he screamed, and just as I was getting the upper hand, I felt hard blow to the side of my head and the world went black.

  ***

  I awoke from a hard slap to the face; I found Bit and Oscar standing over me, their body language extremely agitated. A terrible pain registered in my gut, and I looked down to see a large, dark oval spot on the right side of my lower abdomen. One of them had shot me.

  “Open the fucking safe, now!” Bit hissed. “We don’t have time for this shit.”

  I felt dizzy. “Why, you don’t want to do it on your own after I die?”

  Oscar kneeled down in front of me. I was slumped against the safe. Blood was out over the edge of my pants, slowly running down into my lap. He grabbed my chin, and looked right in my eyes. “Puto, I can make what's left of your life very, very painful. You’ll wish you had opened that safe long before you did,” he said. Looking in his eyes, I could tell he meant what he said. Somewhere in the back of my thoughts I had this idea that he probably would have been very good at my job with the same training I had received.

  As my brother stood above watching, I could see he was no longer my brother. He was just a bad man now, in a world full of them. He was the one person in the world I cared about deeply, and that had not been good enough. Looking at it, maybe we weren’t so different after all. I had strongly underestimated him.

  “I’m not going to open the safe, no matter what you do,” I said.

  My brother looked at me, clearly annoyed. Oscar withdrew a knife from his waistband. As he was getting ready to put it to my stomach, Bit fired two shots into the back of Oscar’s head, blowing brain matter out the front of his skull onto my clothes and the wall and floor around me. I gasped a deep breath, and wiped my face, the thunderous boom still ringing in my ears. I looked up at him, my vision blurry.

  “I never di
d care for silencers,” he said, calmly. “Besides, even as things are, I couldn’t let him torture you. You are my brother, after all.” He flashed a devilish grin.

  “Do what you are going to do, Gerald.” I said. “It’s only a matter of time before the cops are here.”

  “Ah, Gerald, now, is it?” he said. “No more ‘Bit’?”

  I exhaled, the blood loss wearing me down. I was in shock.

  “No more ‘Bit’,” I said. “You are you own man, now.”

  “Well then, this relationship has come full circle. It is time to be on my way.”

  And then my brother Gerald pointed his gun at me and fired.

  Chapter Nine

  I was released from the University of North Carolina Hospitals in Chapel Hill one month to the day from when Gerald had shot me. I shuffled slowly out the front exits, the pain still pretty intense, looking for a taxi in the midday sun. I was gaunt, having lost thirty pounds; by all accounts, I shouldn’t have survived the shooting. The surgeon who had operated on me in the emergency room that January night said that I had a bullet lodged in my stomach that had bounced around and caused some pretty intensive internal damage. The second bullet had entered my chest, missing my heart by a quarter of an inch. Even so, they had been able to surgically repair the damaged organs. The surgeon said that though he was hard pressed to believe in such things, what had happened could be a miracle. I thanked him for his efforts. My neighbors had called 911 after the first shots and even though I had lost a tremendous amount of blood, the ambulance and paramedics had arrived quickly enough to stabilize me.

  As I stood out in front of the hospital, waiting for a taxi to take me home, I thought of what my next move would be. As a contract employee, I had no health insurance. I could only imagine what a month’s stay in the hospital, on top of major surgery, was going to cost me. I needed work, and soon.

  And then there was the matter of my brother.

  On the cab ride home, I thought about something that had transpired while in the hospital.

  I had been visited by two detectives who tag-teamed me with questions. They wanted answers for the dead man in my house. I told them that I believed it was a home invasion gone bad. After all, my safe had been removed. They didn’t ask about my gun, so I figured that my brother had taken it on the way out. I kept no other guns in my house, so that was a stroke of luck.

  “Mr. Holley, we know you are a convicted felon. Do you own any guns?”

  “No sir,” I answered the first one.

  “So why was there one dead guy in there?” the other detective asked.

  “His partner killed him; kept the money for himself, I guess.”

  “Did you know these men?” the first one asked.

  “Never seen them before,” I replied. They didn’t buy it, but they had nothing at this point that made any sense other than a home invasion.

  “Okay Mr. Holley, take our cards. Call us if you think of anything.”

  “Sure thing, sirs,” I said.

  ***

  At home, I sat on the edge of my bed, looking into my closet. There was ripped-out drywall around the cutout where the safe had been. I wondered if Gerald had been able to get into it. Seeing as how I had underestimated him before, and knowing what type of money was within, he would find a way. My Tahoe had not been recovered yet, either. I tried to think about where he might have gone, but that was fruitless in my current condition. Worst of all, somewhere along the way, I had lost my work cellphone. I had had no communication with my employers in a month’s time, and how I left things prior was not a good thing. I wasn’t one to feel overwhelmed, but I put my head in my hands. No tears came, even if I wanted them. I wasn’t sure I was capable of crying anymore.

  I leaned back on my bed and passed out.

  ***

  I rode my bicycle along the edge of the creek, the path beaten down from the trips Bit and I had made many a time. I looked over my shoulder and saw him coming up behind me, his hair blowing in the wind, and wide smile worn across his face. He was laughing; I pedaled as hard as I could to stay in front. The warm summer air drew streams of sweat down my forehead into my eyes, and down my cheeks, but I hardly noticed. The sun cast streaks of yellow light in downward stabbing slants between the trees; it was the type of day I wished every day could be. I followed the stream edge for a shorter period of time than it seemed until I came to where three streams converged and a sizeable pond sat, muddy in color. I hopped off of my bicycle, and Bit was behind me, popping his kickstand in short order. We sprinted over to the pond’s edge, and picked up the fishing rods we had left there the afternoon before. I pulled the new Styrofoam container from my engorged shorts pocket and opened it, each of us drawing forth a purple, sizeable and dirt-covered night crawler.

  After baiting our hooks and casting our rods, we sat watching the red and white plastic bobbers floating gently on the surface, hoping to see the downward jerking motion, a true sign of the nibble from below. Several minutes went by as we sat in silence, then Bit spoke.

  “Donnie, why is daddy like he is?” he asked me.

  I looked over at him, considering his blackened right eye. I had no answer for him that would satisfy his young mind, as I didn’t have one that gave me that satisfaction either.

  “I don’t know, Gerald. He loves us, though, I know that. He just can’t always show it,” I said.

  Gerald nodded his eight-year old head, as though this made some sense, but not enough.

  “He really hurt me last time.” He looked down at his lap.

  “I know, G. I know.” I put my arm around him. “He hurts me, too.”

  Gerald said nothing, and I thought I saw a tear form at the corner of his eye, and roll down his red cheek. “I just don’t understand,” he said.

  “I don’t either, G, but I will promise you this: I will never hurt you.”

  “You promise, Donnie?” he asked, truly, deeply.

  I grabbed him by his chin, and made him meet my eyes. “As your big brother, I promise you.”

  He smiled, and wiped the wetness from his cheek.

  “I love you, Donnie. I always will. And I’m sorry for this…”

  I looked down at my chest, the blood pooling in my lap, pouring from my chest. I dropped my fishing rod, stood up and stumbled back, looking wide-eyed at my young brother, the knife in his hands-

  I bolted upright, sweating heavily, feeling my chest and stomach. The dream was heavy; it was something real from our past. A heart wrenching promise one little boy had made to his brother in an impossible situation. The only difference between the dream and reality was that my little brother had promised me he would never hurt me, either. But sometimes life has a way of making you break promises. Things would never been the same again, so wavering on the future was of no good purpose.

  It was time to go and find my little brother.

  Chapter Ten

  There wasn’t time to continue healing. I needed to begin my quest to find Gerald, and my first stop was a friend of mine from high school named Jim Haskins. Jim was the owner of a car dealership in Chapel Hill, and he had an interesting story. When he was still a salesman, he had been taken hostage by a serial killer while out on a test drive; the odds of something like that seemed small in a town as modest as Chapel Hill, but it had happened. The best part was he fought his way out of it, and had gained quite the macabre notoriety from it. He had written a book about the experience and used the proceeds to open his own dealership. He didn’t seem to mind talking about it as it helped him to sell cars. Since my Tahoe had not turned up, I was in need of another vehicle. I met him at his new lot which he had purchased about six months ago.

  He greeted me out front when my taxi dropped me off.

  “Donnie, nice to see you again.” He grimaced slightly. “It’s been a while. I’m sorry to hear of your recent troubles,” he said. He didn’t know what I really did for a living, of course, but he had heard about what had happened to me.

  “
Thanks,” I said. “I’m getting back on my feet. Now I just need a new vehicle,” I said, smiling.

  “I think we can take care of that,” he said.

  Two hours later, I was on the road in my new vehicle. It was a 2013 Toyota Tundra double-cab dealer demo that he had purchased at auction, and it only had forty-three hundred miles on it. It was a beautiful truck; black metallic exterior with black and gray leather inside. It was fully loaded, with the windows lightly tinted, and for me, it was perfect.

  I drove out to the climate-controlled storage unit near Raleigh-Durham airport that I rented. This was the spot I kept all of my equipment and supplies for any work I would need to accomplish in North Carolina. As I had mentioned earlier, being a convicted felon made it very important to keep my guns and other supplies out of the eyes of law enforcement officials. I didn’t want an automatic five years just for holding a gun at the wrong time.

  I drove down the long rows of units until I came to the one I rented. It was a pretty large unit, approximately forty-eight by forty-eight, and it held everything I needed. All of my local firearms, knives, information-extraction tool kits, several power tools, several large plastic fifty-five gallon drums, and a host of chemicals were held here. If the cops ever did get ahold of this, I was certainly toast. I did my best to keep it under the radar, renting it under a false identity and paying in cash, which the owner was happy to do and look the other way as I payed him more than the monthly rent he asked for. This had provided me the necessary level of autonomy that I had needed to go about my business for a number of years.

  I collected a number of handguns, some with silencers, a couple of knives, and large zip ties and a medium grade rope, and put them into a large black duffel bag. I shut the unit, locked it and loaded the bag into my passenger side floorboard. As I made my way back around the truck, I sensed someone there. I spun around quickly to find a man standing there in an unflashy, clean dress suit. I had never seen him before, but I instantly knew where he was from. He appeared to be in his mid-thirties, clean shaven and close cropped hair. He had his hands clasped behind him. I looked around, and saw he was the only other person immediately present. I didn’t bother asking who he was or he had found me. He worked for the same people I did.