“Wreck?”
“Yeah, some motherfucker ran her and her parents off the road. The car went off a mountain and down a cliff. Red was thrown out, escaped with a broken arm and a concussion. Her parents were trapped in the car. It caught on fire, she lost them both.”
“Fuck,” I said before I could stop it. Carrie came from money, and she never should have been friends with me or my little sister. Still, her parents were descent people. Hell, I don’t know if I’m a good judge, but they had been kind and they loved Carrie.
“Dance, Red’s been through the ringer. The last fucking thing she needs is your smart ass.”
“Why did you and the club get involved?”
Dragon puts his hand over a plain manila folder and pushes it towards me. I look down at it, shore up my courage and open it. Instinctively, I know I will not like what I find.
I sift through it, pictures of Carrie’s room with her clothes scattered everywhere and her underwear laid neatly on the bed cut in pieces, pictures of notes threatening to rape her and kill her afterwards. Each picture is worse, each note more damning. Then there are pictures of the accident. Only these aren’t police photos, these are pictures the sick pervert must have taken while Carrie lay unconscious. They are pictures of her parents burning alive.
I do my best to keep my hands from shaking, even with my anger and confusion I know that Carrie…is special to me. She always will be. The fact that she almost died while I was rotting away.
Christ.
“Your mom called when Carrie was released from the hospital and I put her under club protection,” Dragon said.
Mary isn’t my mom, not really. I grew up on the streets with Dragon. My life was shit, until I was placed in the care of Mary and her husband Walter. They were a nice, older couple who had always wanted a kid. For some reason, instead of adopting a baby or a young child, they took a chance on a wilder than hell teenage boy, who was mad at the world. I had been in their home for a year when Mary got pregnant with Jazz. Walter passed away shortly after Jazz’s birth with a heart attack and I stayed around and helped out any way I could. When I went into the service, I sent money and always came home on leave to visit with them. Jazz was special. She was all sunshine and completely untainted by the world. I cherished my time with her. Had I known she would die so young, I would have cherished it more. Carrie was my last connection with Jazz, something pure and innocent in my world. I tried to take care of it and protect it too, just like I did with Jazz. Apparently, failure was all I managed with both.
I shake my head, trying to ignore the emptiness of not having Jazz and the memory of her death. I have enough on my plate, no sense in bringing even more ghosts to life. I take a deep breath and look at Dragon.
“I still don’t understand why the club got involved.”
“Dance, they’re your family, whether you acknowledge it or not. That was why. Still, you haven’t finished looking at the last picture.”
I look back through the folder to find the photo in question. My body breaks out into a cold sweat and my breath stalls.
Fuck me. Why? What would be the point?
I pull it from the rest and look. It is a picture of me covered in the blood of the man I had killed. Carrie is crying and reaching for me as the police pull me away. I remember that night easily. It is engrained in my brain and frozen there in stark clarity.
I remember the feel of the knife in my hand, the breeze in the air, the stink of the dark alley, the way the moon shone down on Carrie’s auburn curls, the lust in the fucker’s eyes as he ripped the shirt off her shoulders and put his fat, dirty hands on her small, pale breasts. I remember everything. Every. Last. Thing.
Yet, there is one thing I had somehow forgotten. Maybe semi-forgotten, but just the same I didn’t remember it as strongly—until right now. The dim memory of how it felt to have Carrie in my arms when I promised I would protect her. For a moment everything in my life had been…right. It hadn’t lasted long, because minutes later men were tearing me away. I could do nothing but listen to her cry out my name.
I turn the picture over, read the writing on the back and my blood runs cold. My heart freezes.
Vengeance shall be mine. Phoenix.
“Who the fuck is Phoenix?”