Retribution

By David LaGraff

Los Angeles becomes a battleground when John McDougal sets out to get retribution for the murder of his best friend's son. He is up against the Ukrainian mob and they are willing to spare no expense to take him out. To make matters worse, the mother of the boy is a beautiful woman who is out for revenge and McDougal cannot say no to her chilling demands.

• Language: English
• Publisher: David LaGraff
• Release date: Nov 20, 2010
• ISBN: 9781458122322

David LaGraff

I've been telling stories since I was old enough to talk. My readers find themselves in a world which centers on romance but with a twist, as the love grows in the midst of extreme crisis. I write for those who have been knocked down a few times by life and may or may not have recovered yet. This stress opens them up to people they would not ordinarily include in their inner circles and changes forever the tapestry of love and the way they think and feel about life. My tales take place in a near-psychotic state, or perhaps profoundly neurotic, a condition which allows for a spiritual dimension to enter, wherein invisible forces which normally run smoothly in the background begin to bubble through the cracks in their psyches. My people perceive these forces as perhaps a divine intervention of sorts, something to be added to their arsenal to deal with the conflicts. Under the twin pressure of immediate external stress and the infusion of newfound spirituality from within my heroes and heroines must change and become someone newly capable of creating a new life going forward.

Book preview

Retribution

by

David LaGraff

Copyright © 2013 David LaGraff. This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either products of the author's imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental. All rights reserved. No part of this publication can be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, without permission in writing from the author.

Smashwords Edition, License Notes. This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with. If you're reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

Chapter 1

When I got home to the 10th floor roach-infested firetrap I lived in across the street from the downtown Los Angeles Greyhound station, Billy Ahiga was waiting for me. Which was unusual, since he’d been in the VA, the one out on Wilshire, for the past couple of weeks, waiting to die from the same rare blood disease that’d killed his father. He didn’t call first because being as how I have a certain incurable technophobia, I don’t have a phone. So he didn’t call, he simply left the VA and came.

Billy is full-blooded Navajo, and the disease had something to do with that. Billy said it was a virus that entered the Navajo population because of the bats in New Mexico, but there was no scientific proof of that. Myself, I speculated it was something Billy picked up tunnel crawling in the Ashau Valley a lifetime ago. Wherever it came from, the damn thing incubated for years before it blew up. Years ago, when we met in Nam, he’d told me about it, how it had taken his father and how it would take him too, when it was ready. The disease attacks the connective tissues in the final stages before ultimately turning the body into a stinking bag of bloody pus. Since the disease only killed native Americans, and mostly the ones who also drank too much, as Billy had, there wasn’t any big national program. Nobody was working on a cure or anything. After Billy died, there wouldn’t be any men coming over wearing biohazard space suits to see about a cleanup.

He wasn’t a bag of pus yet, but from the smell of him, it wouldn’t be much longer. He’d taken up a reclining position on my big red leather couch. In spite of the smell, Homicide, the stray alley cat who was sometimes fed by me, had come in from the fire escape and was asleep on Billy’s stomach, an affection the tattered, vicious beast had never shown me.

Outside, it was one of those bright, clean February days in L.A. where some hot winds had gusted in from someplace farther south, blowing all the chemical stink out to sea, and the temperature had shot up into the 80’s. Inside, the air was overly heated from the sun beating down on the roof. There was a sense of claustrophobia, amplified by the smell of his disease. I put the window cooler on and in a few seconds the air began to cool the sweat on our bodies, blow the stink out the window and make the place bearable. As bearable as a rat trap like my place ever gets.

You smell like shit, I said.

They killed my son, he said.

Who did?

Some gang bangers, I think. They shot him when they went in to rob that Trader Joe’s store near the VA. David was in there buying me a Hostess cherry pie and a Coke and they shot him in the head.

He fished out a slip of paper from his shirt pocket. There was a Beverly Hills address, and a woman’s name. My son’s mother, he said. Her name is Angela Caldwell. She’ll be expecting you to call her. She has some information for you. Billy had never been married. He hadn’t watched his son grow up, but two years ago, his son had found him and they’d had a reconcilement of sorts. Leastways enough of one for the son’s death to arouse Billy to the maximum level of anger. Which was why I figured he’d come to see me.

I’ll talk with the boy’s mother, I said. And then I’ll find the men who did this and kill them.

No. That would only be revenge. And revenge isn’t enough. It’s got to be more than that. I want-- he was interrupted by a convulsion which sent Homicide scurrying under the couch. There was an explosion of blood with the coughing fit, most of which sprayed me right in the face, and when it was over, he lay still. His lips were moving but no sound came out. I put my ear to his mouth. --retribution, he said, then died.

I thought about it. Retribution. The word had an uncommon meaning to Billy and me. When we were partnered up in Southeast Asia doing our thing together, retribution meant killing everybody, down to the last man, woman and child, and generally burning everything to the ground before, during, and afterwards, and so forth. Because stuff happened over there. Lots of stuff. Evil things. Me and Billy had been a component of the war machine, and it had left indelible marks on our souls. Our divergent life paths had crossed in the Navy, where we’d been sorted and graded and packaged into an experimental training program now known as the SEALS.

You may disagree with what we did over there. And perhaps you would have done things differently. Perhaps you would have shown mercy when one of your best friends handed a stick of gum to a cute little toddler and the child exploded in his face, shredding what used to be your drinking buddy all over a pig wallow. Maybe you’d have smiled and shown infinite patience to the old woman who tried to slash you with a machete while you were in the latrine. Maybe you’re one of those bastards who thinks violence isn’t mandatory to maintain the peace, that war is merely one of many options and that peaceful negotiations, if given enough time and effort, are the nobler, higher path. If so, you’re a better man than Billy and I. More power to you. Just let me know where it is you’ll be buried so I can come often and piss on your saintly remains.

I looked down at Billy, or what used to be Billy. He no longer looked like a man bent on retribution, just a tired old man whose years had been few and bitter. An old man who frowned in death, a frown he would carry into the afterlife where he would doubtless make the bitter complaint to God that he had suffered the hideous misfortune of outliving his only son.

Billy still had his long braids, and the big sixteen-inch Bowie strapped to his side, which he’d carried since he was thirteen years old, the one passed down to him by his father, who’d been given it by his grandfather, who, it was said,