HUNTER (8 page)

CHAPTER TWELVE

I was surprised when Liam came home early. I wasn’t as surprised that he was in a rage, as that was becoming more and more common. Though this time, he was furious. He nearly took the door off of its hinges when he barged in.

My heart skipped a beat. There was no way that he could have found out that Hunter came over—not unless…

My heart sank into my stomach. Hunter had gone to the warehouse. I should have figured he would’ve gone and done something dumb and reckless after he left.

Liam’s eyes locked on me and his expression dropped. “I can’t fucking believe you,” he said. His eyes were red, as if he’d been crying. “I asked one thing. That’s it. Just one fucking thing.”

“I’m sorry, Liam. He just showed up here. I was going to tell you,” I said.

He shook his head and laughed, the rage still burning in his eyes. “Just admit it. You’re fucking him. Just tell me, Kyla. Just fucking tell me.”

“I’m not.”

He slapped me. My ears were left ringing and my jaw tender. Tears began to well up in my eyes.

“Don’t lie to me. I’ve been nothing but good to you. Three years, I’ve supported you. This is your way of repaying me?”

“I’m not sleeping with him, Liam. I’m not lying to you.”

He prepared to slap me again, but hesitated. His body was tense and his jaw was clenched tight. It was taking everything he had in him not to knock me out cold. Maybe it was the tears running down my face, or maybe he actually believed me; something held him back.

“Please don’t hit me again,” I said.

“Just tell me why you did it?” He wiped his eyes, which were also glazed with tears.

“Did what? He just showed up. I don’t even know how he got our address.”

“Bullshit,” he shouted.

I backed away from him. His mind was made up and there was nothing I could say to change it. All I could do was hope that he didn’t hit me too hard.

Liam turned away from me and began pacing the room with his hands on his head. He took long, deep, controlled breaths. It crushed me to see him like this. Liam wasn’t a bad guy. He didn’t have a short fuse. He never screamed, or yelled, or hit me until Hunter came home from the Congo. I don’t know what’d gotten into him, but if yelling at me and hitting me would make him feel better, I was happy to be his punching bag. I just wanted the old Liam back.

“I bet he told you, then?”

“Told me what?”

“C’mon, Kyla. Don’t start this.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” I pushed away my tears.

He laughed. “Yeah, right. I lost my job. Last week.”

“What?”

“I was fired. And you know what? It’s your fault. If you weren’t such a fucking slut, I would still have my job.”

He scowled at me. His eyes were full of hate, full of disgust. There were no signs of love anywhere behind those dark lenses.

I tried to speak but couldn’t. I didn’t know what to say. I had too many questions but I was too afraid to ask any of them. I was too afraid of what he might do. What did he mean he lost his job because I was a slut? I’d never even met his bosses or been to the warehouse. I didn’t even go to his staff Christmas party. Liam had told me it was for employees only. Though now, I was beginning to think he was just ashamed of me.

“Oh, don’t try to look all sad. Don’t expect me to feel bad for you,” he said. I tried, but I couldn’t help it. I was devastated. Our three-year-long relationship had fallen into pieces in the span of a few days. “Two weeks ago, they brought in a new floor manager. He liked me for a while. I actually thought I was going to get a raise. Then, he found out about you.”

“What are you talking about, Liam? What do I have to do with anything?”

“The new manager’s name is Roger Patrick. Turns out, he knows you pretty well.”

Roger Patrick was Sammy’s older brother. Roger hated me, even before rumour got out that I cheated on Sammy. Roger used to be friends with Hunter until one day when they had a falling out. I’m not sure what happened, but after that, Roger hated anything to do with Hunter, and that included me. Roger always told Sammy to stay far away from me, told Sammy that I would cheat on him. Unfortunately, he wasn’t wrong.

It wasn’t a surprise that Roger fired Liam.

“Liam,” I said, “I’m so sorry—there must be something we can do—”

“—There’s nothing. I need to find a new job and no one’s hiring. We’re fucked.” His hand remained clenched in a fist, but he didn’t strike. Still, something was holding him back—something that hadn’t held him back before. “I applied for unemployment but I haven’t heard back.” Still pacing, he was slowly calming himself down. The redness slowly drained from his face. “I don’t know what you ever saw in that cocky piece of shit.”

“That was a long time ago.”

He laughed. “I’m trying really hard to think of a reason to stay with you,” he said.

I felt the same way. I scoured my brain for a reminder. I could still remember the day he asked me out on a date. It was so cute, the way his face got all red while he shuffled his feet. It would have been impossible not to say yes. He reserved a table at Antonio’s Steak House, and he got all dressed up in a suit and a tie. Sadly, we didn’t even make it to the table. The waiter told him his credit card had been declined with his fifty dollar reservation deposit.

Oh God, I felt so bad for him as we walked out of the restaurant. His face was beet-red and he couldn’t look me in the eye.

We ended up across the street, ordering cheap pizza from a place called Nero’s. It wasn’t the greatest spot for a date, seeing as it had no tables, so we took the pizza to the nearby golf course, climbed the fence, and lay down on the green, watching the stars as they overtook the sky.

We kissed. He told me that, as long as we had each other, things would be okay.

The man I kissed under the stars that night was not the same man that was pacing around the kitchen, calling me a slut, and slapping me across the face.

“I’m going out,” he said without looking at me. He slammed the door on his way out. I didn’t know where he was going. I didn’t know where he’d been going at all for the past week.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

I woke up the next morning with Anders standing over my bed. The son of a bitch damn near gave me a heart attack—could have gotten himself killed, had the gun I usually kept under my pillow been there. Fortunately for Anders, I wasn’t allowed having any weapons in my house until I “completed a full psychiatric evaluation.”

“Good morning,” he said with a casual smile. In his hand was a cup of coffee, fresh judging by the steam rising up from it. It was one of my mugs, meaning he made it with that damned pod machine.

“What are you doing here?” I asked.

“I came to check on you.” He took a long, casual sip and then exhaled as if it was the best damn cup of coffee he’d ever tasted.

“You’ve got a fucked up way of checking on people, Anders.”

“I wanted to beat the media. I tried calling, but your phone’s disconnected. Why is your phone disconnected, Hunter?”

By about 3AM, I had to disconnect the thing. It kept ringing—Greg kept calling, telling me the Kongies were outside his house. I would tell him he was dreaming, he’d calm down, and then he’d call back fifteen minutes later. He kept telling me he couldn’t find his rifle. I guess that’s why they didn’t let us have guns. God forbid Greg mistook some poor kid walking his dog for a Kongy.

“Telemarketers. They’ve really upped their game since I left,” I said.

“From now on, just keep the phone connected.”

“Roger that.” I sat up. “I don’t suppose you made one of those for me?” I asked, looking at the cup of coffee in his hand.

“I didn’t. You’re out of pods. Tell me, Hunter. Why are you breaking orders, going to see Kyla Rose?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

He laughed and held up a document. “I’ll refresh your memory. You left your house a few minutes after 1300, arriving at the Kyla Rose’s house at 1330. At 1415, you left Ms Rose’s house, arriving at the library at 1430—”

“—You’re spying on me?” I knew they were keeping a close eye on me, but I didn’t realize they had someone following me.

“I’m not personally.” He took another sip from his coffee—my coffee.

“Okay, so I went to see a friend. You going to have me arrested?”

“No. And we actually appreciate that your trip to Ms Rose’s house was fairly discreet. I’m more concerned about what happened after.” He referred back to the document. “At 1515, you showed up at Flannigan’s Irish Pub and assaulted an ex-Marine in public. Not just any ex-Marine, but the ex-Marine that happens to be dating the Kyla Rose, whose name we are trying to keep out of the media.”

“He had it coming.”

“I don’t care if he had it coming, now we have a problem. Now we have consequences. There just happened to be a journalist having dinner at Flannigan’s Irish Pub when you decided to take Mr Silverstone by the neck and pin him to the table.”

“For an ex-Marine, he didn’t have a lot of fight in him.”

Anders didn’t look amused or impressed. His lips pressed thin and his eyes narrowed. “See, I want to say it was bad luck that the reporter was there, but it wasn’t. There are still reporters all over town, reporters that will do a story on you taking a shit if they happen to see it. Now you’ve brought Ms Rose into this. Now we have the tabloid’s attention. Soon, coverage will be national.”

“Why do they care?”

“Because you are one of two surviving members of one of the most controversial missions in our military’s recent history.”

“There are less than a thousand people in this town, Anders. You don’t seriously expect me to avoid Kyla for the rest of my life.”

A knock at the door grabbed both of our attentions.

“Not for the rest of your life, no. But for a few months, yes,” Anders said, walking towards the door. “Get dressed, you’re going on TV in five minutes.”

“What?”

Anders didn’t respond. Instead, he answered the door. Waiting on the other side was Matthew Bremkin. Behind Bremkin was an army of impatient news reporters.

Bremkin and Anders wanted me to make a public apology to Liam Silverstone, for publically humiliating him at the pub—or as they put it, “unnecessarily inciting an engagement.” I didn’t want to. Liam didn’t deserve an apology. He was the one that should have been making a public thank you to me, for not breaking both of his scummy, woman-beating hands.

They told me I didn’t have a choice, and they made it very clear that I not mention Kyla or the reason why I unnecessarily incited an engagement. In other words, I couldn’t tell the world that he was a steaming piece of shit.

I ended up doing the apology after it occurred to me that it was the last thing Liam would want—everyone in the country hearing about how he, an ex-Marine, had been forced to say “uncle” in a bar fight.

Anders and Bremkin weren’t impressed, though I didn’t break any of their stupid rules. “Don’t you have any respect for your fellow soldiers?” Anders asked with a scowl after we went back inside, away from the reporters.

“Hm.” I thought. Not much. How could I? Sure, there was a time, long ago, when men selflessly gave their lives for freedom and democracy and all that shit. But those days had been long gone since Nixon stepped foot in the White House. Now, men and women who loved their country were working to end poverty, crime, and all that altruistic shit.

We didn’t give a shit about the country.

We just wanted an easy out that didn’t involve years of schooling and hard work and dedication and ambition. We just wanted to shoot guns and sleep with girls and we were told we could make a bunch of money doing it—a bunch of half-brained pawns trying to take the king in a game of Checkers. We believed what they told us. They said jump, we jumped. They said shoot, we shot. If we asked why, they’d just fed us a load of bullshit.

“Hunter?” Anders prodded.

I smiled and shrugged. He wouldn’t have been able to handle my answer. It was too politically-incorrect for his fragile generation.

Anders turned to Bremkin. “What do you make of all this? How much shit are we in?” he asked.

Bremkin thought for a moment, peered out the window, and returned, still scratching his chin. “It’s not good,” he finally said. “And I have more bad news.”

“Jesus Christ… Okay. What?” Anders said.

“Someone vandalized the Veterans Monument last night. The media found it before we could. It’ll be on every news outlet by the evening.”

“You’re kidding me, right?”

“No. I haven’t even told you the worst part. Whoever did it spray-painted over Sergeant Samuel Patrick’s name. I’ll spare you what they wrote.”

Anders looked at me slowly with narrowed eyes, as if it was me. I scowled right back. How dare he accuse me of spraying Sammy’s name; Sammy was my best friend.

“It wasn’t Sykes,” Bremkin said. Anders’s eyes became wide and his face became red. He looked away from me, probably realizing how big of a dick-head he was. “We have intel on Hunter through the whole night. As a matter of fact, he was on his house phone with Corporal Greg Cherovitz precisely when he’s been accused of having done it.”

“Accused of having done it?” Anders asked before I had the chance to.

“Oh, I’m sorry. I forgot to mention, Sergeant Patrick’s brother, a Roger Patrick, made a statement this morning, claiming he saw Hunter on the street last night with an empty can of spray-paint.”

“Damn it. This is bad,” Anders said, as if it needed confirmation.

“Yeah.”

Roger Patrick. There was a name I hadn’t heard in a long time. He was a real stupid motherfucker. He was a few grades above Sammy and I, and he always had the hots on Kyla but was always too much of a pussy to do anything about it. He was a creepy kid, too. I remember going into the bathroom during class to have a cigarette and seeing him hunched over a urinal, hunched jerking it like a wild man. He told me he’d kill me if I ever told anyone, and I believed him, too. He had those freaky, dark eyes that never blinked—the same kind you see in old pictures of Charles Manson. Of course I told everyone, and he often reminded me that he was going to kill me. Again, he was too much of a pussy to actually do anything.

“Where does Roger live?” I asked.

Anders and Bremkin snapped their heads towards me and they both scowled in near-unison. “Don’t even think about it,” Anders said.

I didn’t understand what all the fuss was about. If they would’ve released the proof that I was at home when it happened, people would have cheered me on while I whipped the shit out of Roger Patrick. Instead, Anders and Bremkin seemed completely fine with me being booed every time I left the house.

“So what can we do?” Anders asked.

“Hunter leaves town. Until all of this dies down, he disappears. We can say he went for treatment.”

“Good idea.”

“Treatment? What the hell are you talking about?” I asked.

“PTSD.” Bremkin said.

“What about Greg? We can’t keep him alone, not after last night. With Hunter gone, the media will turn to Greg. Then we’ll have a real problem.”

“What? He phones my house a few times, you can’t leave him alone anymore?” I said.

Bremkin looked at me, laughed, and shook his head. “At 0400, Greg broke into my house, Hunter. I caught him digging through my filing cabinet. When the police asked him what he was doing, he said he was looking for proof I was a Congolese Rebel. He said he found it, too—and he showed the police my dog’s vaccine records.”

I didn’t have a response. They were right, Greg was not only a media nightmare, but he was potentially dangerous. He needed treatment.

“We can send Greg away, too,” Bremkin added. The plan was too perfect for them. They got rid of Greg and me, didn’t pay a dime, and looked like the most caring, compassionate people on the planet. In reality, they were too damn cheap to really pay for the PTSD treatment that Greg really needed. Bunch of white-collared cunts.

“Okay. That’s what we do. Hunter, pack up your things.”

I didn’t even get a say in the matter. I was their pet dog—their unwanted, pain in the ass pet dog. Fuck ‘em. If they wanted me gone, so be it. I was just happy to get out of Nintipi.

They wanted to send me out into the bush to Greg’s uncle’s old cabin. How they even knew about the thing was beyond me. Greg’s uncle had been dead for a decade, and the place had been empty since we were teenagers. It was an hour drive from town. Their plan was to drop me and Greg off, leave us there without a car, and drop off food once every two weeks. At first, they said it would only be a month. When the topic came up a second time, Anders said, “It won’t be more than two months.” The third time it came up, “Four months and you’ll be back in Nintipi.”

Bremkin and Anders were a couple of bastards, but the plan wasn’t a bad one—it was actually a pretty good one. I was looking forward to spending the winter in that old cabin. Let things settle down, maybe bag a few bucks.