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  “You didn’t think I’d catch on to you did you? You thought that you could run along happy as can be and fuck another man’s wife without consequences! Is that what you really thought?”

  Oh shit. Everything clicked in Bill’s mind in a heartbeat. The madman with the gun to his head was Nancy’s husband Jake. He had found out about them. How? They had been so careful? He had apparently misjudged this asshole’s paranoia and psychopathy after all. Shit. Now he was going to pay for it. For a second his mind leapt at the idea that Nancy might have been hurt, but he had just left her and she was just fine. This psycho was hiding in his car waiting for him to come out of the house.

  “That’s right pig. I know what you have been doing with my wife. I have eyes and ears everywhere and if that little bitch thinks she can get away with this sort of shit then she is sorely mistaken. I’ll take care of her next.”

  Jake chuckled at his last remark.

  “Don’t you dare lay a hand-“Bill began before being hit on the top of the head by the butt of the gun. Blinding pain soared through his head, turning his vision blurry for a few seconds as the pain subsided to a roaring ache branching out from the top of his head to the sides.

  “DON’T SAY A DAMN WORD!” Jake growled.

  “What do you want?” Bill replied. He expected to be hit again, but he was tired of playing games. He was coming close to his own house, but he was not going to drive that way just in case this prick did not know where he lived and did not yet know his name. There was no reason to help him out any more than he had to.

  “Just drive. I will tell you where to go and all will be revealed soon enough,” Jake said in a conversational tone that was eerie as hell. When a psycho went from yelling at the top of their lungs to speaking very relaxed and almost sleepy in a matter of seconds then it was a bit unsettling to deal with for any rational person who had normal emotions.

  Bill was aware that he had never been this frightened before in his life. He tried to keep his breathing as slow and deep as he could to just allow the oxygen to do its work and relax him. That was all he wanted. He just needed to chill out a bit and to not think of all the possible ways that this right here could go very badly.

  There had to be a way out of this. Crazy people did crazy things. They never did rational things. He was sure that this crazy person would drop his guard or make a mistake and when he did Bill would assume the role of decision maker and he would find a way out of it all. He just had to keep his eyes open and wait for the perfect moment to pounce on it all.

  Jake did not say anything for a while. It seemed that his rant was about over and now he was just staring at the back of Bill’s head. This was actually more unsettling and creepy. Bill could still feel the cool breath on the back of his neck adding weight to the nozzle of the gun that was still there pressing firmer still into his soft flesh.

  Bill was no stranger to guns and he was certain that if he got ahold of the gun away from Jake he could do whatever he had to do with it. He had never killed anyone before but he was sure that if he had no choice then he would pull that trigger and never think twice about it. That was the law of the world whether anyone else wanted to believe it or not.

  Bill knew that to survive this he had to play along. He had to continue to pretend to be prey when he was really going to be the predator soon. He was going to wait for the chance to turn the tables and he was certain that it was going to come along. There was no way that he was not going to make it out of this alive. He kept repeating those words in his mind. He had to stay positive and he had to continue to be relaxed. If Jake sensed that he was not relaxed then it would only trigger his predatory instincts. This would make him want to hurt Bill even more than he already did. Jake wanted to think that he was being rational and was in control. He wanted revenge on the guy who was banging his wife; this was understandable. Any man would want revenge on the person who was sticking it to his woman, but of course Jake was not just any man; he was a complete paranoid psycho. Therefore the rules were magnified by what he was actually capable of doing.

  “Turn left here,” Jake grunted.

  Bill did as he was instructed. He had passed his own house about two miles past and he was relieved that Jake did not seem to notice this fact. If the man knew as much about Bill as he knew about Jake then that would have made this whole experience even scarier. Somehow the fact that they were both strangers made it a little more passable.

  Bill could tell where they were going. They were heading off on Lake Road that ended up lapping around Veto Lake. It was a local swimming hole and fisherman’s paradise where Bill had spent lots of time as a boy. It was a good place to get away from things and to really think. If you went in the middle of the day when most people were at work then it was pretty peaceful. Bill often skipped school and as a kid and rode his bike back around to hang out there. Sometimes he would even go home and hang out when his mom was at work. She worked part time and was only gone three days a week. Bill had gotten pretty good at faking the phone call from his parents to call him off school for the day. And then it was simply a matter of making sure his parents did not see the number of days he was absent on his report card.

  Bill had no intention of letting Jake force him out there in the cover of darkness to shoot him and toss his body in the lake. It was easy to come to that conclusion that this was Jake’s master plan. It was pretty basic and pretty sure to land Jake in prison, which made Bill mildly happy but he did not think it was worth him dying to make this happen. He had to make a move and he had to do so soon. In just a couple of miles they would be past all of the houses on this road until you got to the other side of the lake. It was all wilderness surrounding the area with the lake thrown in the middle.

  “Whatever you are planning to do, I’m sure we can talk about this,” Bill said. He was still trying to sound like a whiny victim. He had to let Jake know that he was scared and that Jake was in control. He had no idea if Jake had enough humanity in him to respond to that. The man reeked of alcohol and that was not helping matters at all. Bill was shocked he had not smelled the alcohol when he first got in the car, but his head had been too wrapped up in the clouds of love with Nancy.

  “There is nothing to talk about. You soiled the sanctity of my marriage. I know it isn’t all of your fault; my wife is a total whore. I know that. I’ve tried to fix her and show her the error of her ways, but no matter how much punishment I inflict she responds with impunity. I will just have to send her to Jesus. That is all that can be done with that whore now.”

  “You would kill your wife? Really?” Bill asked.

  “Damn right. She isn’t my wife anymore; as far as I can tell as soon as she made the decision to accept you inside of her than she became a free agent. She is no good. She is a whore as I’ve always known. Now it’s time for me to make everything right.”

  “This is wrong. You will never get away with this!” Bill said. His voice was getting loud. He couldn’t help it. This man had to see how crazy he was and how this was not going to accomplish anything for him in the long run. If he killed Bill and Nancy then he was just going to rot in a prison cell. There was no way he was ever getting away with it. Couldn’t he see that? Couldn’t he see how messed up his own logic and thinking was?

  The answer was no. Bill could tell that the rage had taken him far too far. He was gone now. Maybe he would sober up eventually and come to some common sense and reasoning, but it was unlikely to happen anytime soon.

  “I will get away with it. You better believe it. I have it all worked out. I’m going to make it look like you killed the bitch and then you couldn’t live with yourself after what you did and you drove yourself into the lake here.”

  “That doesn’t make any sense!”

  “Shut up and drive.”

  Up ahead a deer in the road. Bill barely glimpsed it for a second as it ran across the road only a few feet in front of him. He had no time to stop and no time to think as instinct
took over and before he realized what was happening his hands jerked the wheel hard to the right to miss the large deer and the car swerved off the embankment.

  Jake’s body flew forward and to the right as the car hit the steep ditch of the side of the road and the unthinkable happened. The car flipped repeatedly rolling over and over down the hill. Bill held on to the wheel as tightly as he could, his fingers growing numb as the blood froze inside his hands from the pressure.

  In a glimpse from the corner of his eye he saw Jake’s body fly through the passenger side window and hit the ground a split second before the car rolled on top of him. Bill winced as the crunching sound of bone and the last breaths of agony echoed throughout the car.

  When would the rolling car stop he wondered? Would it roll all the way to the bottom of the hill only to be stopped by the grove of trees that lined the edge of the woods? That had to be over two hundred feet. Could he survive that far?

  Bill closed his eyes and prayed for it all to be done and over with. He just wanted to go home. He just wanted to be safe and forget this had ever happened to him. But he realized with an overwhelming sense of blind panic that this was not to be as he cursed himself for not wearing his seatbelt. He had never worn them because he hated the idea of being totally strapped in and he hated the feeling of being trapped when he was driving. He was a large man and a seat belt had always been uncomfortable for him. But he was now seeing the error of his ways as his body crashed to and fro inside the rolling cabin.

  He was getting bloodied and bruised and he was sure that he had some broken bones. There was no doubt about any of that. He was hurt. He could feel the air being sucked out of him as he tried to cram it back in only to be denied due to extreme pain inside of his chest.

  There was a blinding pain in the back of his head and the crunch of glass before he blacked out.

  All Bill knew now was darkness.

  Chapter 2

  “RISE AND SHINE”

  3 Months Later

  Bill awoke from the coma at almost three months to the day of the accident. He had almost no memory of how he had come to be in the hospital. But over the next several days he was able to piece it together in his mind slowly and methodically with the help of a counselor on staff at the hospital. The coma had been like the deepest sleep he could have ever remembered having and he felt as if he was not fully awake for almost a week afterwards. Things that happened seemed to be half dream and half real and everything felt muddled and confused.

  His body had almost forgotten how to work and he found that he was only able to walk after three days of trying and then only if he had a walker and an orderly on each side to make sure he made it alright. It was by far the hardest thing that he had ever imagined having to go through and he would not have wished it on his worst enemy.

  It was a good week before he had begun to get his head on straight. His friends and family visited him almost every day and he was actually starting to remember some of the things that they spoke about. The first few days that they had come to see him after he woke up was very foggy and hazy indeed. He found that he could hear the voices around him and that they were speaking directly to him, but the words were all jumbled together and just were not making much sense. He knew that he was asking them things on the days that followed that he had already asked them and they had already told him.

  His best friend Buzz and his wife Joan came to see Bill several times. He had known Buzz since they’d played football together in high school. Buzz had actually gotten out of the town for a bit and went to college. But his family and everyone he knew were still in Crestwood Falls so he came back. It seemed that anyone who ever left the area eventually came back to it. The place was like some wicked catch 22 where everyone who grew up there swore they would leave and most never did because by the time they were adults they were all too stuck in their small town ways and most were in love with their high school sweethearts ready to settle down and get married at the ridiculously tender age of eighteen.

  Bill’s mother came to visit him every day and spent most of the day with him. He and his mother had always been exceptionally close, but he hated to see her spend all of her day with him. His stepfather Frank even came and stayed the whole day as well. Frank was a good man. It had taken Bill several years to fully trust him, but after the experiences with his own father that was to be understood. But his mother had lucked out and found a good man to spend the remainder of her life with. He and Bill had become pretty good friends. Frank was a veteran police officer who had been elected Chief of police in Crestwood Falls three years ago. He loved his community and he loved his work of keeping riff raff off the streets.

  Everything was going well, until the third day that Bill found out what had happened to Nancy. Jake had been killed in the accident and Nancy thought that Bill would never wake up again. She somehow felt she was being punished by God’s wrath and that she had brought the pain and heartache on everyone involved and she took her own life.

  Frank had told Bill this with a stern, but comforting voice. He had put it off as long as he could and Bill thanked him for sparing his feelings. It was perhaps the most devastating blow he had ever received and he did not know quite how to deal with it initially. He had never loved anyone as deeply as he had loved Nancy.

  The blow that Nancy was gone felt like a shotgun blast ripping right through the center of him and he felt physically nauseous, as if he was about to spew all of the contents of his stomach all over the floor. Somehow he held it together but he could not stifle back the sobs. He knew that his family had probably pieced together the reason why Jake had tried to kill him and that he was deeply in love with Nancy. She was the perfect Angel he had always dreamed of being a part of his world and now she was gone. He had closed his eyes it seemed and his whole world disappeared when he opened them back up. What in the hell was happening to the world around him? How was he supposed to get by now?

  Bill spent the next two days in a stupor where he did not want to see anyone and he damned sure didn’t want to talk to anybody. He barely wanted to do any of the physical therapy that had been laid out for him by his doctor. Even the sweet and attractive rehab nurse, Teri had not been able to shake him out of the funk he was in.

  Teri was actually Buzz’s sister who had just returned home from college where she had studied nursing and had landed a job in the rehab center at the hospital. She was put in charge of his primary rehabilitation needs. He had not seen Teri since she was eighteen, except a few times in passing when she was home for summer vacation working at her dad’s Pharmacy. He always kind of got the feeling that she had a little crush on him, but she had always seemed so much younger than he and Buzz (four years) but now she suddenly didn’t seem so young. She was all grown up and giving him orders. The girl was a tough cookie who knew when he was throwing in the towel and letting the pain and fatigue get the better of him. She found a way to tap into the last bit of anger and fight he had in him and forced him to keep going.

  And she looked damn sexy in that nurse’s outfit. This only proved the point that no matter what crazy trauma or pain a man is in the sensual allure of a woman is always enough to bring him out of it.

  Teri had matured into a voluptuous and sexy girl with a sassy personality. She still retained enough of the tomboy in her that he remembered from when she was a kid, but she had blossomed considerably. She was average height with curvy hips, large breasts, fiery red long hair that hung down past her shoulders, and a smile that could make the most evil dictator on Earth cry “uncle”.

  So yea, rehab wasn’t all bad. But Bill was starting to chomp at the bits to get the hell out of the hospital.

  It was about the eighth day since Bill had awoken from the coma when his doctor came in to check on him. Bill was in fine fettle and was starting to wonder when he would be able to get out of the hospital and go home. He knew he had a long way to go with some of the rehab, but he was comfortable that he could go home
and then come in for his daily sessions. He really just wanted to get his life back.

  The doctor was a man who was only about eight years older than himself, which did not make him feel any better. He understood that one started to feel old when his doctor eventually became younger than he was. That was probably the best way to look at the aging process, or at least that was what he had read in a book once. He could not for the life of him think of who it was that had written that book, but he would love to shake the man's hand right then and maybe have a few beers with him because that man could teach him about life.

  “Hey, there Bill. How are we today?” The doctor asked.

  “Fine doc. I wish I could walk a bit better, but I guess we can’t all be Olympians, right?” Bill joked. He was surprising himself with the jovial attitude that he was displaying at the moment. It was possible that he just wanted to get out of the hospital so badly that he was just deluding himself into thinking it was going to happen and this sent tingles of excitement and happiness moving up and down his spine.

  “Right you are, but Teri tells me you’ve been making great strides,” the doctor said as he closed the door behind him. He sat his clipboard down on the table and pulled up his stool so that he could take a better look at Bill.

  “Well, she is an amazing nurse,” Bill said.

  “That she is,” Doctor Bates said. He stood up and grabbed the otoscope from the side rack and turned on the light. Then he placed a plastic tip on it and proceeded to look in Bill’s eyes, his ears, and up each nostril.

  “Ok, the basics look pretty good. Any pain or headaches to complain of? I know you had some of that earlier, which is to be expected.”

  “No, actually the past week and a half I’d say has been pretty good. The pain in my body is getting less and less each day and the pain in my head is gone.”

  “Fantastic. I’m just going to run a few cranial and cerebral tests on you here. You might be feeling a little silly with some of these, but don’t worry I won’t tell anyone,” The doctor joked.