An Unkind Winter (Alone Book 2) (31 page)

     Scott adored his boys. There was Jordan, his oldest, who was intelligent and talented and a bit of a goofball. And there was Zachary, who Scott was convinced would someday become a scientist or a highly successful engineer. Zach was always taking things apart and making other things with them. His curious mind never stopped working, and he loved exploring new things and new ideas. Zach was sweeter than a bucket of molasses. He was everybody’s best friend.

     Yes, Scott was lucky as a father. No problems with his boys at all.

     He was also lucky in that he lived in Texas at the time of the divorce. Texas wasn’t an alimony state. So he wasn’t saddled with monster alimony payments like his brother in Atlanta was. His brother Mike was divorced the same year as Scott, and was ordered by the court to pay forty percent of his before-tax income to a wife who had cheated on him multiple times.

     No, Scott had no such problem. He paid child support, of course, and was always on time with it. And he doted on his boys and bought them nice things.

     But since he didn’t have to pay alimony, he was able to take that money instead and use it to build his business.

     After the first storage facility was turning a healthy profit, he was able to buy a second. Then a third. And with each one he followed the same business model. He’d do some cosmetic improvements to attract a few more customers. Then he’d turn that additional income into air time on the local radio station, or ads in the local paper. Getting the word out drew more customers, which in turn would supply more money for special deals and discounts. Which would provide more money for another new facility.

     It was a business model that had served him well.

     And now, twenty three years later, Scott Harter owned a chain of thirty one storage facilities spread throughout San Antonio and nearby Houston.

     So even though he wasn’t as handsome as a movie star, and would never be a candidate to join Mensa, he was doing all right. And that was good enough for him.

     Linda had remarried within a year. The marriage only lasted two years and was full of problems. She waited a bit longer to marry her third husband, and the third time seemed to be the charm for her. The third husband, Tony, was a good man, who treated Linda and the boys well. At least it appeared that way to Tony. He didn’t know that since their divorce, Linda had gotten very good at putting on airs and keeping secrets. Keeping the ugly truth from Scott made it easier for Scott and Tony to be casual friends. Scott eventually found out that Tony was a con man and a user, who’d taken Linda for pretty much everything she had.

     It was Scott who helped her get back on her feet. She banished Tony from her life, and swore off marriage forever.

     From that point on, Linda chose a life less complicated. A life with an endless stream of boyfriends who didn’t provide a sense of stability. But they were a lot easier to get rid of when they didn’t work out.

     Their boys had been brought up in a stable environment, which meant they were well behaved and relatively problem free. Neither of them ever got into drugs, or ran away from home. Neither of them had gone to jail, or left a string of broken hearts. Both of them were good kids, who had bright futures ahead of them. Or so they thought. Actually, there were problems ahead, which none of them knew about, but which their father would soon discover.

     Yes, all in all, Scott was a lucky man, despite his being just an average guy. And he was living a pretty comfortable life.

     That was about to change.

**********

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THE CLEANSING

THE CLEANSING

is available now at Barnes and Noble.com and Amazon.com

     Ron Bennett was a scumbag. Not in his own eyes, of course. He thought quite highly of himself. As a former President of the United States, he was well known, and people paid him lip service and told him how great he was everywhere he went. But they did that to every former President, simply because, well, how often does the average person get a chance to meet one?

     Bennett was fawned over and made to feel special. But nearly everyone really despised him. He hadn’t been much of a President, after all. He barely squeaked into office after his predecessor finished a very successful second term and couldn’t run again. Bennett, on the other hand, tanked the economy and got the United States into a war with a former soviet bloc country for the worst of reasons. He didn’t like the dictator who ran it.

     So Bennett did what Presidents sometimes do. He misused his power and had his people develop falsified evidence, false testimony, that this nation was developing weapons capable of destroying Israel and the United States. It was all bullshit. But it’s ridiculously easy to deceive a public who doesn’t have access to the truth.

     It’s easy for a crooked politician, whose party controls both houses of congress, to mold the truth into whatever he wants it to be.

     So Bennett did that. He sent American troops into a country that had no plans to attack either Israel or the United States. And had they wanted to, they didn’t have the means to. What they did have, though, was a strong army which was fiercely loyal to its leader. Loyal enough to die for him. And they did, in vast numbers.

     The problem was, they took a lot of Americans along with them. Over 3,000 of them. America’s finest. Our sons and daughters. Dead on frozen battlefields half a world away. For nothing. Because Bennett didn’t like the man who ran that country.

     It wasn’t the first time, of course, an American President had started a war for his own ideological reasons. Or to meet his own personal agenda.

     It wasn’t until Bennett was defeated by a landslide after his first term that rumors started to circulate. And it wasn’t until the new President stopped the war and withdrew the American troops from the decimated country that inspectors discovered the extent of the fraud perpetrated on the American people.

     UN inspectors discovered no weapons of mass destruction. No nuclear capability. No chemical weapons. No biological weapons. Just millions of rifles, rocket launchers and land mines. Defensive weapons. The kinds of weapons that could be used to ward off a rich, powerful country like the United States for a certain period of time. But not to be a threat to anyone.

     And later, Bennett’s real motives became known.
American Times Magazine
did an extensive investigation that took two years to complete. They discovered that the whole slew of them- Bennett, his relatives, his friends, friends of friends, all had invested heavily in the defense industry in the months leading up his taking office. Each one of them made tens of millions. So did the friends and families of the Vice President, the Chief of Staff and the Secretary of Defense. But the investments were so well hidden, so well sheltered in blind trusts and overseas reinvestments, that a final accounting was never completed.

     And there was nothing illegal about it. That’s what outraged Americans most of all. The blood money this group took in exchange for 3,000 American lives broke no rules.

    So even though individually they fawned over him, Americans as a group grew to hate this man.

     Bennett didn’t let that stop him, of course. He did what disgraced politicians always do. He went to ground, stayed on the family ranch for a couple of years, and laid low. He waited for the dust to settle, for the smoke to clear. For people to forget.

     Then he very slowly, very carefully, began to reintroduce himself to the public. He became a client of the best public relations firm in the country. They were famous for making the despicable appear tolerable. And they knew their stuff.

     They started out by scheduling his appearances at the speaking engagements of other, more popular players. Long-term congressmen who enjoyed approval ratings of over seventy percent in their districts. Senators who were considered up and comers in their political party. Philanthropists who were famous for funding children’s hospitals, or shelters for the homeless.

     And at some point during each of these events, the cameras would record his presence in the group. Because, after all, he was a former President. And with his permanent detail of four secret service agents, he tended to stick out in a crowd.

     And when asked for a comment or interview from a local television station or print reporter, he’d be careful to take the high road.

     “Oh, this isn’t about me,” he’d say. “I’m just here to celebrate the opening of this wonderful new hospital for children’s cancer patients.”

     The goal, of course, was to ease him back into the public spotlight. To make him palatable again. To encourage Americans to forget his transgressions, and bury the past. To let bygones be bygones.

     If, a little at a time, he could be seen less and less as a heartless seller of American lives, and more as a misunderstood good guy, then he’d be able to reintegrate into society. Begin sitting on boards of big corporations again. Start rolling in even more and more millions to add to his already vast fortune.

     And so it was that he came to be sitting in the audience at Mike Allen’s anniversary dinner to celebrate his fortieth year in the United States Senate. He didn’t sit at the head table, of course, although they’d offered it to him. He had a table toward the back of the banquet hall, where he could enter without much fanfare and make an early exit if the crowd appeared to be openly hostile toward him.

     And it was while sitting at this table, while Allen was in the middle of expressing his gratitude for the people who put on the event, that Ron Bennett’s heart exploded. Without warning.

     He was dead instantly, of course. As his head fell into his bowl of soup, a secret service agent was on him immediately. Shielding him from further gunshots. A second agent helped him to the floor, where he’d be a harder target. A call went out on a hidden microphone, and the two remaining agents at the exits went on alert, scanning the rafters for threats. Then the crowd.

     The first agent had the former President on the floor now, assessing his condition. He quickly determined that the President was dead. He had no respiration or pulse. His face was covered with chicken bisque soup, his eyes wide open.

     The agent knew he was dead even before his head slumped. Otherwise his reflexes would have closed his eyes as his head fell forward.

     He also quickly realized that Bennett was not felled by a bullet. There was simply no visible wound. He keyed his collar mike and turned his head to the left.

     “It looks like natural causes and he’s signal 60. Get an ambulance here quickly. No lights, no siren.”

     The cleansing had begun.