Ashes to Ashes (39 page)

Also, college basketball games flowed with
adrenaline, like a drug to the vein. It was intoxicating.

A couple of games had passed before she got a
good look at Scott, but that first glimpse she recognized a kindred
spirit in him. He was more than a mere dumb athlete. Sports were a
way of escape for him, as it was for her. And he was escaping
something similar. She could see it in his eyes. At the time, she
didn’t know what he was fleeing from. She later found out that they
were escaping from the same thing…their father.

Bam had managed to eventually get near to
Scott so that she could spark up a conversation. The spark was
instant. The reaction was immediate. And the fire had been burning
brighter and faster and harder from one day to the next.

It was love. It was understanding. It was at
the core of them both. And when Scott had trusted her with the
story of his father, the role that his father had had in the death
of his mother, she knew exactly how tight their bond would be. Like
the fusion of bone.

She went on to tell Scott about her own
father, Lucky Barrett. She had been nervous at first, because the
name of her father was known in the area, most of the time for
despicable things. But it was rightly so. Lucky Barrett had earned
what people often said about him. He had once been just another
business man in a wealthy business family, but her father turned
crooked and chose a life of the negative type. That life didn’t
stay with him, though, but spread into other members of her
family.

Her uncle Franklin.

Others.

Bam had not wanted Scott to associate her
with her father and his lifestyle choices, because she was not like
him and fought day after day to be less and less like that man. She
cared how Scott viewed her.

While growing up under the care of Lucky
Barrett, Bam had seen things that many children were unable to
internalize in healthy ways. Violence. Greed. Death. She was always
surprised that she had never shown up on the police’s radar because
she was one of those people that knew where some of the bodies were
buried, so to say. But no one ever honestly asked her to dig and
she never volunteered.

The first chance she got, Bam left her father
and her family and blended into the population of Youngstown State
University, a small campus compared to places like OSU, but it
worked for what she desired. She could have gone to Ivy League
schools like Yale or Harvard, but she refused to let her father pay
for the expensive schools.

Year after year, her father had become
somewhat of a recluse, which made it even harder to be at home. He
rarely left the house, choosing to work through others. He was
often paranoid. It appeared that his sanity might have been
slipping. Bam believed that she understood the paranoia…the
reclusion. It made more sense since she had taken the pill herself,
the pill her father had cradled for years, always on him or within
arm’s reach. She couldn’t say for sure how long her father has had
his pill, but it had been a long time. She always thought it to be
a vitamin or some kind of narcotic, but the way he coveted it made
her curious.

How did she even get the pill? For a second
she almost couldn’t remember. It had been simple chance, she
recalled. She had taken a rare and unplanned trip to her former
home a few months after getting into YSU so that she could gather
up a few of her favorite books from the library. Bam wasn’t a
general reader, but there was a choice group of novels she had
cherished while growing up.
The Giver. A Wrinkle in Time. Fallen
Angels. Fade. Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.
And
The Hobbit.
There wasn’t any rhyme or reason why these novels had a place in
her heart, but they did. And her father would have never realized
that they were gone. To him, the library showed off prestige and
intellect, as only a large room full of read and unread books
could.

She had crept into the large and quiet
building, knowing that her father had most likely been
self-quarantined to his office. After hushing the butler, Mr.
Groves, with a finger to her lips, she had snuck into the library,
which had been as empty as always. It hadn’t taken long to locate
the books. On her way to leave, she had been stopped by a sight. On
one of the three reading tables had sat two black and gold
containers. She had become unable to move.

Her father’s pills. two of them. He never
misplaced them. But there they had sat. And why the black and gold
containers. She never understood it. Symbolic? She didn’t know.

Breaking into a motion, she had grabbed the
containers and bolted out the library door.

She wished that she would have never have
taken it. Or talked Scott into taking one.

The chair still sat in front of Lucky. Bam
reluctantly lowered down and became on equal ground as her father.
She shook with nervousness, which caused her fingers to tremble.
She wasn’t sure what to say. Instead, she moved in close to him and
helped him to drink the glass of water she had brought from the
kitchen sink.

Lucky drank ravenously.

“Thank you, Amber,” he told her once he had
drank down most of the glass. “That was nice.”

“Don’t take it as a sign of peace,” Bam told
him. She paused for a moment and listened for Scott’s snoring,
which had been nearly nonstop since he had fallen asleep. After
crawling into the bed to lie next to her, Scott had fallen swiftly
into slumber. “There will be no peace between us. There will never
be.” She tried to put pressure behind her words but knew that they
sounded nothing but weak. She never had much of a voice when it
came to her father.

Time to find one, she told herself.

“I know,” he replied. “Peace is an overrated
idea, anyway. Peace is for those people with limited
foresight.”

“I have no doubt that you would see it that
way,” she said. She couldn’t help but to laugh at his egotism. That
type of mindset seemed to run in her family blood. But not her. And
even though he sat restrained in a wooden chair, Lucky Barrett
would not be helpless, he would not allow himself to be held to any
fault. “You still won’t say it, will you? After all this time? What
the hell is wrong with you?” Her voice cracked beneath the
question.

“What are you talking about?” Lucky
asked.

“My mother,” she threw at his face, as if the
words were venomous saliva. “You still won’t tell me that you are
sorry. You still won’t allow yourself any blame. You still don’t
care. What kind of person are you, father?”

“A strong one,” he said.

“I don’t see a strong man,” she replied. “I
see a cold person, someone who is dead inside. You are the reason
that I am so fucked up. You are the reason that I am angry all the
time. You are the reason that I don’t have a mother to hold me.
Don’t you care?”

“I never said that I didn’t care,” Lucky
said.

“You never said you did, either,” Bam shot
back.

He nodded and said, “I’ve always loved a good
family reunion. It reminds me where I’ve come from and how far I
have to go.” His words were a sarcastic slap in Bam’s face. And Bam
reacted with a literal slap to his face, which drew some more blood
from the man’s cocked lip. It felt good. But it also made her feel
sad. She shouldn’t enjoy drawing blood from her father’s lip, even
if he deserved it.

She put down the cup of water, left her
father’s sight, and retrieved a dish towel from the kitchen sink.
Returning, she began to wipe at some of the blood on her father’s
face. She was gentle with the cloth, but the cloth was dry and only
managed to wipe away a small portion of the wet or dried blood. The
rest smeared and spread.

She then took a glance at the gunshot wound
on his lower leg. It had been recently wrapped with a small dish
towel and seemed to have stopped bleeding. But beneath the towel,
the wound was most likely infected or on its way to infection.

Bam thought about going upstairs to the
bathroom and getting the bottle of rubbing alcohol from the
cabinet. But she hesitated. Her mind felt twisted, which was the
reason that Scott had not wanted her to speak with her father
alone, because she should not be trusted with him. No matter how
much hurt Lucky Barrett had caused his daughter, deep down she
still wanted some type of approval from him. It was a viscous
circle, one that she fought to break by running away to YSU.

Bam dropped the rag next to her chair and sat
back down.

Be firm, she ordered herself.

“My mother died by a bullet that was meant
for you,” Bam continued, trying with all her might to properly
confront her father. “Did you know that it was coming? Did you see
yourself die and choose to replace yourself with my mother? Is that
what you did?”

“I don’t understand the question,
sweetheart,” Lucky responded. “How could I have known what was
going to happen? How could I have seen myself die? That…just isn’t
possible. It was out of my control. Fate. Destiny. Or a simple
unavoidable disaster. I could not have known. What drugs are you
on, sweetie?”

Bam slapped him again, much harder than
before. Instead of cleaning him up, she let her father bleed.

“You know damn well what I am talking about,”
she said, the words being ground between her clenched teeth. “You
know damn well what I am talking about. I took
your pill
and
I know what it does. And so does Scott. And I now know that you let
my mother die in your place. You knew that that motherfucker was
going to come for you and you made sure that mom was in that
driver’s seat. Didn’t you? Didn’t you? It was no accident. Was
it?”

Lucky stared back blank, emotionless, and
without reply.

It pissed Bam off.

“I don’t know what you want me to say,” he
finally replied. “A man on a motorcycle shot and killed your
mother. Not me. I don’t know what you think is going on here, but
you are far from right.”

“I took the pill, dad,” she replied. “
I
took it
. You can’t deny what it is and what it does. I know
from experience. And it’s the reason why all of this is happening
to Scott.
You
are the reason. All of this is your fault,
father.”

“What do you think you saw, Amber?” he
asked.

“Flashing lights. Life…draining from my
face,” Bam began. “I was dying…in a fog of shouting and confusion.
That is all I know. It wasn’t entirely clear.”

“Sounds like you had a bad trip,” Lucky said.
“Nothing more. There are some potent drugs on the market these
days. Just say no.”

“Where did you get the pill?” she pleaded.
“What is it? Where does it come from? Tell me. Tell Scott. Tell
us
. Please.”

Lucky popped his shoulders, shrugging in the
vain way he often did.

Bam was on her feet at once with her hands
wrapped around the man’s neck. She began to squeeze. “I want to
squeeze the life out of you. I want to you watch the shit come out
of your ears. Would that be funny? Would that be funny to you?”

“You are not going to kill me,” he managed to
mutter.

“How are you so sure?”

“I would know,” he choked out. “Or so you
choose to believe.”

Bam let go. Frustrated. “Maybe I won’t do it.
But Scott will. If you don’t give us some answers.”

“He won’t either,” Lucky chuckled. “I’m going
to be alive for a long time to come. Believe that, my dear
daughter.”

“The future is not set,” she stated. “Scott
has proven that, like I’m sure that you have quit a few times.”

“The future
has
been pretty reliable
for me,” he told her. “Too bad your mother didn’t have that
luxury.”

“You bastard,” Bam curses. Before storming
from the living room, Bam picked up the cup and tossed the rest of
the water in her father’s face. She hesitated at the bottom of the
stairs. Scott’s snores could still be heard. Taking a deep breath,
she climbed the stairs.

Chapter 47

After another hour at the crime scene, Ashe
and Oscar finally was able to get away, taking with them permission
from Detective Philips to speak to Norman Bones. Norman Bones was
stable and at the hospital. When the doctors felt that he could
survive being moved, he would be transferred to a jail cell.
Apparently Bones would not be able to dodge any charges that time,
as he had dodged many other charges in the past. He could try to
blame Scott and claim that he was acting in self-defense, but Ashe
doubted that would hold any water.

Perhaps it was the break that the Cleveland
Police needed against Norman Bones and they could once and for all
get the killer off the streets.

As he sat there next to Oscar, Ashe thought
about Norman Bones, a man who often killed for money, and
considered the thin line between a contract killer and a serial
killer. Serial killers tend to hold an above average intelligence
and are most often psychopaths or sociopaths who enjoy manipulating
and watching people die. But the same could be true about contract
killers. They too tend to be intelligent and void of a conscious or
the normal range of emotions. Contract killers do not always enjoy
the kill, but a majority seemed to desire it, either because of
training or compulsion. Ashe decided that the one honest line
between a serial killer and a contract killer was that a contract
killer kills for whoever pays them to do so.

It was a thin and blurry line.

“How much do you know about Lucky Barrett?”
Ashe asked his old friend, his mind a jumble of information, but
the information was beginning to find a solid hold in his brain,
instead of floating aimless.

“How much do
you
know?” Oscar returned
the question.

“Not a lot,” Ashe admitted. “I don’t remember
if we ever had a case that dealt with him.”

Oscar shook his head. “I never brought you in
on those ones, because I only wanted to pick your brain on the
serial cases, the ones where we didn’t already know who the suspect
was or could be. We didn’t need you for the organized crime
bullshit. We knew the usual suspects. No questions, only lack of
proof. Always lack of proof.” He groaned. “And…Lucky Barrett
operated all over this area of the world. Prostitution in
Cleveland. Racketeering in Warren. Dead men washing up in the big
lake. He wasn’t always a local problem. We didn’t always get the
crimes in our little city.”