AllFreeNovel
Share Us
"Dodge, I swear."
"You asked for it."
"Of course I asked for it," Dodge told the group. He would have grinned, but his split lip hurt when he did. His eye was the color of an eggplant and swollen nearly shut. "I'll show up at work tomorrow with Franklin's handiwork on my face, and Crystal will be full of remorse and apology. But underneath her big tits, her little heart is going to be pitter-patting at the thought of me standing up to big, bad Franklin on her behalf. I'll have won her heart and her loyalty."
"But he'll tell her what you said about screwing her."
"And I'll deny it. I'll pretend to be crushed and offended that she could even think I'd say such a thing. My feelings toward her are honorable and pure."
"I'm gonna puke," one of the group said drolly.
"What makes you think she'll believe you over Franklin?" the captain asked.
Despite his busted lip, Dodge spread his grin around the room. "Because she wants to."
And then Caroline King crossed his mind, and his grin dissolved. Almost to himself, he said, "Even when the bad is staring a woman in the face, she wants to believe her man is good."
CHAPTER
15
WHAT WERE THE CHANCES?
That was the question Oren had been asking himself for most of his life. Whenever Fate pulled a nasty practical joke on him, which was with unfair frequency, he had asked himself what were the odds of that happening, whatever that was in any given situation.
Obviously the odds of shit happening to Oren Starks were very good because the bad luck just kept coming.
Friday night had been a fiasco. The "lake house incident," as it was being referred to by the media, had been a disastrous personal failure, but to an outside observer, its absurd outcome must appear almost laughable. It had been like a bad farce, with the villain making his exit by falling down the stairs no less.
Given its comic elements, the shooting of Ben Lofland possibly could have been written off as a squabble among former co-workers. No one had died. Lofland's condition wasn't even all that serious. There would have been some unpleasant legal ramifications to plow through, but after all was said and done, the incident would soon have been forgotten.
But now, now, Oren Starks was wanted for the fatal shooting of a sixteen-year-old boy. Which was another kettle of fish altogether.
What were the chances?
Sneaking into a room in a disreputable motel had seemed like a good idea at the time. After all, there was a one-in-eight chance that room number eight would remain vacant. There had been seven others to choose from, for crying out loud!
But no, that particular room had been given to Davis Coldare and his female companion.
What were the chances that the Coldare kid would turn out to be an honor student, an all-star baseball player, a beloved son, friend, and student? If someone had to walk through that motel room door, why couldn't it have been a drug addict, a thief, a pedophile? Had that been the case, Oren Starks might have been hailed a hero for ridding the community of a menace.
Instead, the citizenry and every law enforcement officer in the state were on the lookout for the heartless killer of a golden boy.
What were the chances that the unnamed young woman who'd witnessed the shooting would remain levelheaded enough to later identify the shooter? It had been reported that she had picked out--unequivocally--Oren Starks's photo from a group. To add insult to injury, it had been that damn Delray Marketing employee photo that he'd always hated! The photograph on his driver's license was more flattering than that one. In it his forehead looked too high, his eyes too closely set, his chin undefined and weak.
What were the chances that he would be forced to deal with a disaster that had been totally unforeseen and for which he had no contingency plan?
The odds of all that happening were as slim as the odds for Mike Reader's neck to snap when Oren pushed him off the merry-go-round. The summer Oren turned nine years old had been a hot one in Beaumont, Texas. The wilting, record-breaking temperatures were keeping most kids indoors during midday. That's why Oren and Mike Reader were alone at the playground that fateful afternoon.
When Oren parked his bike, he approached the other boy with caution and awe. Mike was a bully who outweighed Oren by thirty pounds and was a head taller. But for all his wariness, Oren welcomed this chance encounter, seeing it as an opportunity to make a good impression on a popular classmate. If Mike and Oren forged a friendship during the summer break, then in the fall, when school reconvened, Oren would be accepted into Mike's wide group of friends.
But Mike was happy to see Oren there in the park only because he then had someone to torment. He invited Oren to join him on the merry-go-round. Oren cheerfully climbed on. But immediately Mike hopped off, gripped one of the metal bars, and, running full-out in the beaten-down track of the circumference, pushed the merry-go-round to go faster and faster until the landscape was a blur to Oren, who was holding on for dear life and whimpering in terror.
Mike jumped back on and began mocking him. He made fun of him for not having a daddy, and when Oren yelled to him that his daddy had died, the boy laughed and jeered and said he was a mama's boy. He called him a queer, a weirdo, a wimp, a sissy who probably peed like a girl, like his mother, sitting down. Oren blubbered denials, but Mike Reader persisted and began chanting the taunt. He made a little song of it.
The crude ditty was silenced when Oren mustered all his strength and, letting go of the bar he'd been clinging to, gave Mike Reader's chest a mighty push with both palms. Mike, caught off guard by Oren's courageous defiance, toppled backward off the spinning merry-go-round and landed in the hard-packed dirt. Oren heard the sound, like that of a stick being broken over someone's knee.
Catching intermittent glimpses of Mike Reader, Oren stayed on the merry-go-round as it spun round and round until it came to a full stop. Only then did he get off and walk over to the boy lying lifeless on the ground. His bladder and bowel had emptied the instant he died, which Oren saw as poetic justice, considering the nature of his recent jeers.
