Free A Guardian of Innocents by Jeff Orton Page A

stop her to get a pen and notepad to jot everything down. She sounded exhausted, though she’d only been talking for about three minutes straight. But even then, Kimber still had to have her final say, “I don’t know exactly what happened there at the dinner table tonight, if it was some kinda shared vision or what, but you act like you’re used to these kinda things happening.”
    I sighed, “Let’s just call me gifted and leave it at that, okay?” 
    I was surprised to hear a slight chuckle, “Gifted doesn’t even begin to explain everything. . . There’s something I want to know.”
    “What?”
    “When we were there, in that place. . . Who was that guy that was with you?”
    A cold shiver raced down my spine, “What do you mean?”
    “There was a guy standing behind you—While Galen was on top of me,” she whispered, “He was dressed all in black. You were standing there looking horrified and he wasn’t more than a foot behind your shoulder.”
    “I don’t know,” I replied, feeling like I’d just been kicked in the gut, “I couldn’t say, but I think I’ve seen him before.”
     
     
    Chapter 7
     
    I knew I couldn’t rush into this. If I didn’t think everything out fully, if I didn’t account for every possible contingency, I would very likely end up dead or in prison.
    I wanted to see that son of a bitch dead. I wanted to watch him suffer. All so I could look into his eyes as he was dying and make him realize all the bad karma he had sown had finally found its way back to him in the form of a scrawny, teenage boy.
    Unfortunately, there just wasn’t a whole lot of time for plotting due to the spring semester at school had begun and I’d landed a part in an ensemble production of a play called “Waiting Room Germany,” a strange, highly artistic piece about how the fall of the Berlin Wall had affected the populace of Germany in different ways. Top that off with a weekend job manning a cash register at a large electronics store and my plate wasn’t just full, but overflowing.
    But it was when the rehearsal phase of the school play began that I made the first true friend I’d ever known. I’d had friends I sometimes hung out with every once in a while, but never a close friend, never a person that I talked to on an almost daily basis.
    It was also this friend that would give me the fortuitous break I needed to nail Galen.
    His real name was Stuart, but nicknamed Bo, a bearded, tattooed guy with arms like hairy slabs of meat. At first glance, he appeared to be the kind of guy who would bounce around from one construction job to another when he wasn’t riding with the Hell’s Angels. But he looked less like a biker and closer to a lumberjack. His light brown hair was always disheveled but never very long.
    Bo had shown up for the first day of rehearsal in clothes that were clean, but obviously old and well-worn. His leather sandals exposed the black nail polish on his toes.
    The sight of toenail polish on such a butch dude boggled my mind; he was a walking oxymoron. When he noticed my downward stare, he looked down as well and laughed, “I come from a conservative Southern Baptist family. I do shit like this just to piss ‘em off.”
    It was how we started talking. During the course of our many conversations, I learned he was a part-time musician who went to school during the day and worked security at a strip club at night.
    “Had to give up the bouncing for a few weeks while this play’s going on, though,” he explained.
    “You miss getting to stare at all those tits every night?” I asked with a smile.
    Bo shrugged, “Nah, they’re no big deal after you’ve worked there awhile. Just part of the scenery. I never even really notice them anymore—unless it’s some new girl I haven’t seen before. Mostly, I have to stay on the lookout for guys doing shit they ain’t supposed to be doing.”
    “Right,” I responded, trying to sound as if I actually knew what that might be, I