“You sound like me. Unfortunately, some of my behaviors are rubbing off on you, but regardless, if you—”
“It’s just a bunch of people clamoring for power and covering secrets with their dirt, or not caring enough to get the guy that shot and killed my son off the streets. Nobody gives a damn until it’s their kid in the ground, now do they? But because it was Chad, who was labeled a party boy, as if that has anything to do with this, he doesn’t matter. Chad was getting his life together. I had been riding him. He said I was too hard on him sometimes, and maybe I was, but I knew he could do better.”
“You loved him and wanted him to succeed. Sometimes that requires tough love.”
“Yes, that’s right. I told him to get off his ass and make something of himself. High school was over. It was time to take life seriously. He’d been lazy for far too long. But make no mistakes about it, he was a good kid, and I’m not biased because he was mine. I would be honest if he was an idiot and a loser, but he wasn’t. My boy was smart, baby. You would’ve loved him.”
“I believe you. I wish… I wish things were different and I could’ve met him.”
“Yeah… He was funny, caring, good looking and strong. No one hated Chad—that’s what made this even crazier. He didn’t have a mean bone in his body, and any known enemies, Kim.”
“It seems like sometimes, those are the very people who get targeted, Jack. The people who have so much to give and are a shining light to the world.”
“He was special. A good soul. You know, he could’ve had the world in his hands. He came to me a few weeks before he died, so excited about his new job at this marketing place. He’d finished training and was getting steady checks. He also was about to enroll in school for some online courses in computer science, had started the paperwork and everything for that. He was taking life seriously. He’d slowed down on the weed and hard partying. That’s why I knew it was bullshit when people said they’d seen him at a bar drunk the night he disappeared. He promised me he wasn’t going out and doing that, he was going to stay sober, and I believed him. I still do. Me and his mom were so proud of him.”
He paused, shut his eyes, and felt his heart throbbing with grief. His eyes moistened and he quickly wiped the tears away.
“Someone may have been jealous of him because he was getting his life together. You know misery loves company, Jack. This is heartbreaking. He had a good role model. You. I didn’t have to be there; I know you were a great father. Nobody is perfect, but from what I’ve seen and heard, you were A-1.”
Her words lifted him up, a balm for his pain.
“Whoever did this needs to be found, Kim. Who else have they possibly killed, huh? This may or may not have been their first rodeo. We could be dealing with a stone-cold murderer of not one, but several victims. Who knows?”
“I’ve thought about that. I’ve thought about that a lot, actually, and it’s chilling.”
“Nobody on God’s green Earth, gets to execute my kid, and then go on and eat good meals at great restaurants, bask in the sunshine, lie out on the beach, drink cold beer and bottles of wine, take boat rides, fish, sleep soundly, laugh at corny jokes, have sex, and be with their family on the holidays—all the good things in life that normal human beings look forward to—and not pay for it. I’m tired of getting the runaround, Kim. I am done trying to compromise and be patient. They thought I was a thorn in their side before? They ain’t seen nothin’ yet.”
“Oh, Jack… baby… it’s going to be okay.”
He knew she was trying to say the right thing, to be encouraging, but he couldn’t hear her. All he could hear were the screams in his head that he suppressed from coming out of his mouth, waking up day after day after Chad’s funeral, and not believing it was true. The realization that he wasn’t coming back, that his son was really gone. Losing a child caused a form of PTSD. It was irreversible damage. Long suffering with no end in sight.
“What does okay even mean, Kim? Is okay just a state of living, or is being okay merely being alive?”
She was quiet on the other end for a long while. He didn’t mean to put her in such a tough spot. His words were spilling out like lava from a volcano, and they burned his heart to a crisp on their way out.