Chapter Five
Dax
Olivia and I talked until way past closing time that night and no one else ever came in. I let her have the room and I thought about going to my parent’s house but I didn’t want to leave her alone in the back of a bar. She said I could sleep in there too, but I had been in prison for two years. My body finally got some sweet release recently and now I could hardly think of anything else. In other words I didn’t trust myself to be good. I slept on the cot in my dad’s office instead and that’s where he found me when he came in the next morning.
“Hey,” he said in his raspy, “I smoke two packs a day,” voice. I was dead asleep and it scared the shit out of me. I literally jumped up off cot. My dad laughed. I apparently looked funny doing it.
“Hey,” I said back when my heart stopped pounding.
“What are you doing in here? What’s wrong with the bed down the hall?” I was twisting and stretching. The damn cot was more uncomfortable than my prison bunk.
“Nothing’s wrong with it. I let Olivia sleep in their last night.”
“Why does Olivia need a place to stay?”
“She broke up with Terrance,”
“Oh well then why ain’t you…?”
“Don’t say it, dad.”
He laughed again. “Alright boy, I’ll leave that one alone. Are you makin’ any progress on them security tapes?”
I cleared my throat, told myself to stop being a chicken shit and said, “Not on the robbery, but I found out a few more interesting things.”
“Like what?” he asked, leaning back in his chair and lighting up a smoke.
“I don’t know how to put any of this shit delicately, dad. I wasn’t trafficking drugs. You know as well as I do that I refused to have anything to do with that shit. I’m pretty sure I was set up. I think I was supposed to get caught and I was supposed to do time. The night of my welcome home party when I came in here, your email was open. I’m sorry that I invaded your privacy and I understand if you’re pissed. But, I saw one that Terrance wrote you, telling you that things were “all set-up and ready to go.” That was the day before I got busted. I’ve already confronted Terrance about it. He admitted getting an email from you giving him the orders. Then, I saw my mother confront you on the security tape. She thought you set me up too. I know those drugs weren’t mine and it all seems like an awfully big coincidence when you add it up.”
My dad was still staring at me, puffing on his cigarette with a thoughtful look on his face. I didn’t know if he was going to be angry about me going through his emails or not.
Finally, he said, “Let me ask you a question, boy. Why in the hell would I want to do that to my own kid? I mean you and I maybe haven’t been all that close over the years, but to send you to prison, on purpose? I ain’t a monster.”
“I’d like for you to tell me straight out that you didn’t do it and if you did, tell me that as well. In my mind, and I think in Mom’s too, the idea of it probably came from how pissed you were at me for going to college and refusing to follow in your footsteps and be a part of this club.”
“Well, let me tell you something. I watched and listened to your mama cry her eyes out every night while you were locked up. Her heart was breaking and there was nothing I could do to fix it. You might look at how I live my life here and think that I don’t care about your mama, but I would do anything for her. She’s my life. Her and my sons. Had I done this, I wouldn’t have only been doing it to you, I’d been doing it to her, and I would never do that, Dax…to either one of you.”
God help me, I wanted to believe him. “What about the emails?”
“I honestly have no fucking clue. I didn’t send Terrance an email with any orders. If he got one, it came from someone else. I also didn’t see any email he sent me about things being set up. You know first-hand since you’ve been in here snooping yourself. I forget to shut it down sometimes. That gives a dozen people access. If that email was opened already and didn’t show up as new, I wouldn’t have paid it no mind.”
Shit, I hated it when I had my mind made up that he was a dick and then he did this to me. There goes the damn conscience that the son of an M.C. Club President shouldn’t have. My dad was waiting for me to say something, but at that point I really didn’t know what to say.
After a long pause he said, “Go back to the security tapes, before you found the email and see who was in here on my computer the few days before. I didn’t send it, son.”
I didn’t commit to believing him. The little boy who worshipped his dad in me wanted to, but the grown-ass man who just got out of prison was saying, “bullshit.”
I just nodded and said, “Yeah, that’s a good idea. I’ll look at the tapes.”
He didn’t ask again if I believed him and I didn’t bring it up.