Chapter Twenty-Seven
Roy – Tuesday
This time as I woke up at the crack of dawn, I slid quietly out from under June without waking her. She needed her rest, and I had a whole lot to do, stuff that needed my attention right now. I couldn’t sleep with all of it swimming around in my mind, anyway, so I needed to just get on with it.
I got dressed silently and put in a call to the driver that I’d turned away at the airport, the one I always used when I needed taking anywhere, and I asked him to take me to the office in the next town over. I needed to get Tank from Lewis, who had offered to pick him up as soon as I told him I wasn’t going home – and we needed to have a chat, too.
I closed the door almost silently behind me and raced out to the sidewalk to wait to be picked up. The entire time, my mind was spinning. I wasn’t sure what it was that made me suspicious of Lewis, but I needed to be sure. I needed to just talk to him, to find out the truth. Even if this turned out just to be a trip to confirm that he didn’t do it, it would be worth it.
“Hey there,” Gary, the driver, grinned at me as he pulled the car up. “How are things going?”
“Haven’t you heard?” I asked wryly, not actually sure how much the news of what’d happened had spread just yet. “I’m being accused of murder.”
“You what?” he gasped in shock, turning to face me. “What the hell happened?”
“Take me to the office; I’ll tell you along the way.” I knew I could trust Gary, at least enough to tell him some of the story, and to be honest, it would feel good to get it off my chest.
As the car parked outside the office, my heart really started to kick up a notch. This was it – the moment that I was about to have my suspicions either confirmed or denied – and I honestly wasn’t sure if I was ready for any of it. Why hadn't I just stayed in St. Louis a little while longer? Why didn’t I remain at June’s a little while longer? Why did the dead body have to end up on my damn property? It didn’t feel fair.
“Thanks, Gary,” I said quietly. “I’ll call you later; okay?” One of the best things about this driver was that he didn’t mind having Tank in the back of his car. It was one of the reasons why I always used him.
Then I took in a few deep breaths of air and I smoothed down my tee shirt, forgetting that I normally decided to arrive here in a suit, and I stepped inside. As I walked through the building a few people called out hello to me, but all I did was send them a cursory wave back. I didn’t have time for niceties, not with all of this on my mind.
“Lewis,” I called to him, as I spotted him chatting up one of the receptionists. “I need to talk to you – now.”
His face went pale and his entire body stiff, but he followed regardless, knowing that was what he had to do. As soon as we were inside his office, I clicked the lock on the door and shut his blinds, too. This was about to be a private conversation, and I didn’t want anyone to hear or see us.
“Boss, I really don’t think that you should be here,” he told me cautiously, moving backwards behind his desk. “With all the heat on you at the moment, it doesn’t exactly look good for the company, and now that I—”
I could tell that he was about to say “I own the business,” but he managed to stop himself just in time, thankfully…I might have had to hit him for that one. Everything was still mine at the moment, and that was possibly the way that it was going to stay.
“Who was that guy?” I asked Lewis simply. I saw him as family, as the younger brother that I never had, so I wanted to treat him as such and be straightforward with him. But he didn’t answer; he just gave me a look as if he didn’t quite understand what I was saying. “The guy, the one on my property. Who was he?”
“I… I don’t… I don’t know…” He blinked far too rapidly and started physically shaking under the pressure of it all.
“Don’t lie to me,” I told him seriously, needing him to understand that I already got it, so there was no point in holding anything back anymore. “Just tell me who he was. I know that you know, and I also know that you’re aware of what happened to him, so why don’t you cut the crap and just tell me.”
Guilt was written all over Lewis’ face, and it had conflicting emotions racing right through me. On the one hand, I was pissed as hell, mad that he could throw everything that I’d done for him back in my face, but on the other…I couldn’t stop that innate desire to continue helping him, despite everything. Lewis had potential, but deep-seated problems too. I wanted more than anything to continue what I’d started and to really sort him out.
“I… I…”
“Just tell me already,” I pumped my fists in temper. “I can’t stand this. Fuck!”
His face crumbled, and I could see the façade finally slipping away. I was right, and that was shining through, and I’d never felt worse for following my intuitions and them being right. “I… I started gambling again.”
As those words left his mouth, I felt my heart sink. I felt sick to my stomach as the truth hit me like a smack in the face. I thought that I’d been changing Lewis, crafting him into a better person, bringing him to the best of his potential, but all along, nothing had changed. His addiction still had a grip on him.
“I didn’t mean to; I didn’t even really realize that it was happening until it was too late.”
He fell to his chair as if shock was consuming him, but I wasn’t about to let it slide. “Then what happened?” I asked with a coldness to my tone. “Carry on.”
“Well, I started off small, but things just escalated. In the same way that they did last time. By the time I realized what was happening, I had no control over it.”
“Why didn’t you just come to me?” I asked, exasperated. “You know I would have helped you again.”
He looked up at me, tears shining in his eyes. “I didn’t want you to be ashamed of me. You did so much for me, and I couldn’t let you down. I just couldn’t, not again… I turned to loan sharks.”
I was so frustrated that I wanted to scream. He knew I would have paid things off for him, making things better before they got out of hand. “I had to dip into company funds to pay them off, and I thought that you would never find out because you were signing things over to me.”
“So, you were just going to run my company into the ground?” I snapped back angrily. “As soon as you got hold of it, that would be the end of it?”
“No, no, I thought I’d be able to bring things back. I thought I would be able to sort it out. I thought that I still had things under control. That was until the investigator started poking around.”
“Investigator… I’m going to assume that’s the man who ended up dead on my property.” Lewis didn’t answer, which told me all that I needed to know. “So, how the fuck did that happen?”
“He kept poking around here, trying to find out more about me and what I could afford, and I guess that led him to you… I don’t know,” he shook his head, losing himself in the terrible memory, the one that he would have to live with forever.
“I saw his car coming up this way, and I followed him. Well, I followed him all the way from the office, actually, and I thought that if he came up here, we would be able to hash it out properly. To just talk about things with no one else around, so we could say what needed to be said. I was going to tell him that soon the company would be mine, so they would get their money soon enough, all they had to do was be patient…”
“But it didn’t quite work out like that, did it?” I asked him sternly.
“No, he… Well, it got a little crazy and he ended up pulling a knife on me. I tried to grab it, to take it from him so that he couldn’t hurt me, but… You know the rest.”
He held out his hands to me, as if that explained everything, which caused everything inside of me to boil over. My mind raced like crazy as I tried my best to decide what the hell to do, and before I knew it, my body was reacting for me. I didn’t even consider the implications of my actions. I just swung my arm backwards and connected my fist with his jaw. In that moment, I could have continued, I could have beat him to a pulp for being so stupid and so selfish. How could he think that it was okay to wreck everything that I’d worked my whole life for? And why the fuck could he not just keep away from gambling.
I glanced down where his body had hit the ground; he was cowering, shaking like a little child. “Please… I’m sorry… I didn’t mean for you to get involved with this. It was an accident, honest… Don’t tell anyone…”
But his damn excuses didn’t mean anything to me. I needed to get the fuck away from him before I did something really stupid. “Where’s Tank?” I hissed at him instead.
“He’s tied up out back. Roy, please…” But I couldn’t wait around to hear any more of his excuses, so I turned on my heels and left, needing to get my dog.
“Gary,” I said into my phone as I walked. “Sorry, can you come back to get me? I need to get away from here.”
“I’ll be right there.”
As I sat outside the office, waiting to be picked up and petting my beloved dog, I tried my best to decide what to do. On the one hand, I really wanted to head right to the police station, to tell them the truth and to put an end to this completely, but on the other, I didn’t feel like I could.
I didn’t want to see Lewis rot away in jail for the rest of his life; no matter that he’d done, it didn’t seem right. It wasn’t entirely his fault – the addiction was to blame mostly, and it felt like such a waste to see his life fall away, and all for nothing. He had so much potential, so much to offer the world, and he was throwing it all away. Maybe jail would be the best thing for him, the shock that he needed. But would he survive getting locked away for so long?
What did I follow? My head or my heart? This was going to be the most difficult choice that I would have to face in my whole damn life, and I wasn’t sure where to even begin with it. All I knew for sure was that I couldn’t do it here, not with Lewis so close.