I Am Retribution

By Ramsey Austin-Spencer

Left in a garbage can after birth, Brown Smith doesn’t mind being overlooked and alone, but when the young boy living in an alley meets an innocent young girl named Lila, he understands he needs to be her protector. As the two grow, he uses the skills he honed on the streets and later in the military to keep her safe. However, that becomes more difficult when he finds himself in love with the girl, who is now a woman married to a drug kingpin. When he and Lila die trying to escape, he realizes that not even death will stop him from getting retribution on those who hurt Lila.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Ramsey Austin-Spencer
• Release date: Jul 2, 2023
• ISBN: 9798215743270

Ramsey Austin-Spencer

Ramsey was born in Salt Lake City, UT, raised in Salt Lake City, UT, married and had a family in Salt Lake City, UT and will more than likely die there as well. Don't feel too bad; Ramsey also enjoys traveling to places other than Salt Lake City, UT. In a motor home with a Jeep towing behind it she tours the United States just for fun. An accounting technician by profession (odd, I know), she does payroll for one of the municipal entities in (you guessed it), the Salt Lake City, UT area. Writing is the passion that has driven her since she could pick up a pencil. Receiving her Associate's Degree from Salt Lake Community College, and her Bachelor's Degree from WGU, she continues to work on perfecting her trade by continuing to take classes. Always looking for new educational experiences, she is a certified diver, studied sign language and French, has been in local plays and even went through a Citizen's Police Academy. Two sons and a wonderful husband are the reason you have a chance to read the work Ramsey has written. They encourage, irritate and force her to do better. Hope you enjoy.

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I AM RETRIBUTION

BY: RAMSEY AUSTIN-SPENCER

2023 Copyright by Ramsey Austin-Spencer

Smashwords Edition

CHAPTER ONE

What do you want to know?

Have I ever killed anyone?

I ain’t going to lie about it. Yeah, I’ve killed, but don’t ask me for a number because that ain’t the point. You see, I don’t make no apologies about it, and I don’t feel like I need to make any excuses for what I’ve done. I did it and that’s just the simple truth.

Some people try and put it off like they didn’t have a choice in the matter, but that’s bullshit; I had a choice, everyone does. Don’t let nobody tell you different. I had my choices, I made them, and I’d make those same choices again because that’s who I am, and I ain’t going to pretend to be anyone else. You’re only lying to yourself at that point, and I won’t do that.

Don’t get me wrong; it’s not that I believe I was always right or that I couldn’t of done things differently. It’s that I wanted every son-of-a-bitch I killed dead, and I still do. Like I said, I made my choice and I’d do it again. It’s simple really; I’m a bad man. Never claimed to be anything else; never really wanted to be.

I won’t bore you with the gritty little details of my birth, my childhood, or my education. Let’s leave it to say that from the moment I drew breath my path in this world was pretty much set. I was garbage - literally. I was found in a dumpster when I was probably only hours old. I was expendable and unwanted. I’m not crying about it because it doesn’t really matter, and honestly, I really don’t give a shit. You get what life hands you, and you take that and do what you can with it. Life ain’t fair, and I can live with that. You’ll never hear me bitching that bad things happen and it just ain’t right. I took my share of shit, but I gave my share back. In a lot of ways, I got what was coming to me. In the end, we all do.

Some people like to try and make you believe you can create a decent life from very little, but that’s crap. Look closer and you’ll see it ain’t decent; it’s barely a life. Those who got everything they need in life try to make themselves feel better by acting like it wasn’t just dumb luck where and when they was born. You show me someone who claims they made it out of the gutter, and I’ll show you someone who stepped on those below them to lift themselves up a little higher or made their life sound worse than it was so it seems like they dug themselves out of poverty when all they really did was upgrade their living room wallpaper. Trust me, when you’re born in hell, that’s where you stay because even if you think you got out, you didn’t. It follows you. The streets mold you, they infect you and they make you what you are, and you can’t escape that.

I do what I need to in order to survive, although I have to admit that there were parts of this life I enjoyed, and I wouldn’t change that. I have nothing holding me back and no moral code to live by, so I have total freedom. How many people can say that?

The reason I’m telling you any of this isn’t for sympathy or even for understanding. What you think about me doesn’t mean shit to me. I think maybe what I really want is to get things straight in my own head. I want to make sure I didn’t let them turn me into something I’m not and that I stayed true to who I was. It’s important to me. I want it made clear that I didn’t sell out. Right up to the end I did what I did because that’s the way I wanted it. Me; no one else. That’s the way it had to be; the way I needed it to be. I did things by my rules, and no matter how it ended up, I can say I was able to hold my head up and take full responsibility for every damned thing I did. Anyone who tries to blame others is weak, and I ain’t weak.

My story really starts the day they disappeared me. I didn’t mind that so much, but Lila, she didn’t deserve that. I mean when you go after someone who’s innocent you deserve whatever retribution comes your way. I have a problem with people that use others like that, and Lila was innocent, no matter what anyone might say. I think I feel that way mainly because she was never meant to be here with people like me. Someone like her should have never known what it was like to live in the filth and poverty of the streets.

From the beginning she was supposed to be given a different life, and I think that’s when you start asking yourself about what’s fair and why shit happens to people who don’t deserve it. She had it all, and then it was taken away from her, and I believe that makes it worse than being born destitute. I know I wasn’t the man to get it back for her, but when it all came down I was all she had, and I did what I could. Of course, in the end, all I could do was make them pay for what they did to her. It didn’t feel like it was enough, but I think she’d have understood. That was Lila; she always saw the good in people. She always seemed to trust what I did for her, and she accepted what I was. Someone like that is special. Someone like that you have to protect and take care of, and God knows I tried. Not at first, but you have to understand when I met her, the idea of caring about someone was completely foreign to me. She changed that.

I think I’m going to have to go back a little further to make it all clear - to make you understand that even though I might not have been worth saving, Lila was a pure soul and those bastards should have never gone there. They should have never hurt her because that’s where it all went south. That’s what cost them their lives, and I made sure they knew exactly why they were dying before they went.

Lila had a beginning that was a fairy tale. First off, she had a mother and a father. Right there you know she was one up on a lot of us. They lived in a little town just over the border of Kansas somewhere. Nice folk; hard-working people. I didn’t know them, but I know their type, and I know they would have shuddered at the thought of someone like me being around their daughter. I understand that, and it was one of the reasons I tried to stay distant from her, but in the end, I was all she really had, so I don’t think they can complain too much. Someone needed to try and protect her and when there’s no one willing to take that on, you accept whatever you can get. What she got was me.

She was seven when I first met her. She came to live with her aunt in Chicago after her parents died in a car crash or something like that. That’s where I was living; in the alley between the Modine Furniture warehouse and a thirty-two unit apartment building. That was my alley, and everyone knew it.

I know what you’re thinking, but I wasn’t no bum. I didn’t pick through the trash for food and junk like that. I wasn’t about to stoop to taking scraps like some of the others who came and went through my life. I didn’t beg; I took what I wanted. If you’re cold and want a coat, you take it. If you’re hungry and want to eat, by damn, you get some food. If people are trying to push in on you and you want to protect yourself, well, sometimes you have to stand up for yourself, and it can get a little bloody. People try to figure out how far they can push you, and it’s up to you to set those limits. It was always on my terms, and I like to think I never went after anyone who didn’t deserve it.

The streets have their own code. People get to know you and understand what kind of person you are pretty quick out here. People will give you as much shit as you’re willing to take, so you have to make it clear what will happen to them if they try to fuck with you. I had my place, and I protected it; and myself. I wasn’t trying for some sort of tough guy rep like some of the other punks on the street, but I think it was understood how I’d responded to any shit coming my way. Lila didn’t have any idea about staking your claim and protecting your turf. If she had, she wouldn’t have come walking through my alley.

Lila lived on the second floor of the apartment building two streets over. I started seeing her as she walked to school every day because she walked right through the alley. Normally people didn’t come through here because they knew this was my alley, but I didn’t really mind. She didn’t mess with me, and so I let it go other than to realize what a stupid move it was and if she didn’t wise up they’d find her body in a dumpster somewhere. I mean, I lived here, it was my turf and no one pissed with me because they knew I didn’t take that shit, but you never put yourself where you could be jumped and no one would see it. Not that that alone would save you, but you could tell these things were foreign to her, and that was when I first noticed her innocence. She went about her life in her own way, and I admired that, even if it was going to get her killed one day.

I was near twelve at the time, and Lila, even though she was only seven, was a cute kid. I don’t normally notice those things, but she had bright blue eyes that caught your attention first thing, and then her smile made a bit of an impact. She always smiled at me as she tipped her head and looked over while I stood there watching the world do its thing. I’d give her a nod to let her know it was all right. People standing out on these streets are waiting for trouble and I wanted her to know she was safe as far as I was concerned. I wasn’t going to look out for her, but I wasn’t going to cause her any harm either. That’s just the way the streets work, and I’m not out to change that. She made her own decision to walk through the alley, and she’d live with the consequences, but this was my alley, and it was all right by me if she walked through it.

For nearly three months I watched Lila walk by going to school and then again on the way home until one day, as she was on her usual route home from school, she comes right over to me and gives me a book. I don’t want it, but she hands it over to me anyway. I mean, what the hell am I going to do with a book, but like I said, she was a cute kid, and for some reason I couldn’t stop myself. I should have known right then she was trouble. If I’d had any sense I would have moved alleys just to get away from her or threatened her a bit to get her to go a different way. Even though I didn’t have a whole lot of experience, I already knew something like this could control you and you should avoid it. People are dangerous and innocent little girls and the worst.

I’m Lila, she offers.

Brown, I respond.

Brown?

I don’t want to go into the whole story about how they found me just born with the umbilical cord still attached in a dumpster on Brown Street, giving some moronic social worker the idea to just tag me Brown Smith, so I don’t respond.

Do you read? she asks.

If I have to.

I won this book at the book fair at school, but it’s too old for me and I thought maybe you’d like it.

I looked down at the shiny paperback cover. It was The Hobbit. Why in the hell would I want to read something like that?

Have you read it before?

I shook my head. I could read, I was actually pretty good at it, but I didn’t normally read books. I thought it was important to learn how to read, and the nuns seemed to like to beat that knowledge into you back when I was at the orphanage, so I’d learned. I didn’t mind; I knew I needed the basics. Reading and math were always something you’d be using to make sure others didn’t take advantage of you, so I paid real close attention. I took to it real good, but again it was a survival skill, not entertainment. I didn’t have time in my life for make-believe, and a book called The Hobbit seemed like it would be full of a lot of silly useless stuff to me. I think the cover proved it with some odd-looking little hut and a big-footed mouse-looking thing on it.

My fingers were already turning the slick white cover dark, but Lila didn’t seem to notice. I smeared my thumb across it once more just out of spite. I felt a quick stab of guilt, but I pushed it away. The last thing I wanted was to get all emotional over some kid’s book. She handed it over, and my hands were dirty; that’s the way it is. If she didn’t like it, she could take her book and get the hell out of my alley; but she didn’t.

My teacher said I should have my mom or dad read it to me. Lila’s eyes closed for a moment, and I knew there was pain there. I had to admit, for the first time since I could remember, I felt something. It was a hiccup or a stutter in my chest, like I could sort of feel whatever pain she was feeling, and I didn’t like it. Feelings were as useless as fantasy books, and I knew they only got you into trouble, and if they were someone else’s feelings, I was sure that would only make it worse. I don’t have a mom or dad anymore, but if you read it, I’d listen.

I handed the book back. Get someone else.

She looked down at her shiny white shoes. She clicked them together like she was Dorothy from the Wizard of Oz or something. Don’t get me wrong, I didn’t read that book either, but the movie theater is a great place to slip into when it’s snowing and cold outside. Winters in Chicago can be a bitch, and sometimes you have to spend as much time as you can in places like that to keep from freezing to death. I mostly slept, but after six or seven times of sitting through the same movie, it wears on you. The image of those freaky monkeys and that dumb broad clicking her shoes together to go back to a broken-down farmhouse in Kansas seem to be a part of my childhood memories, and that just pisses me off.

Maybe Lila did want to go home. Maybe she just wanted to go back to a time when she had a mother and father who would read bedtime stories to her. Whatever she was thinking or feeling I don’t know, but what I do know is that I was starting to feel guilty again, and I didn’t like it. It wasn’t my job to read gibberish to little school girls, but I took the book back anyway. I tell myself it was a choice, just like everything else in my life. It was a choice, and I made it, and I have to live with the consequences. I can’t go back now, and I’m not sure I would if I had it to do over again anyway. This was when I let Lila into my life and to take that back would leave my life less colorful – empty. I hate to say it, but I needed her, and I’m sure she knew it even if I didn’t at the time.

It’s a long book, I told her. It’ll take us weeks to get through this.

She smiled up at me. Damn her. I’ll come this way tomorrow and you’ll read a little bit for me?

I didn’t answer, but I know I nodded a little bit which was the same as telling her I’d do it.

I watched her go, full of life and enthusiasm. I knew she’d eventually lose that. This neighborhood didn’t really allow that kind of energy. It took it from you and distorted it into something sick and wrong, but for right now, it felt like a warm light shining on me. I didn’t want to let myself think about what she’d look like when that light was gone, but for right now I liked it. I’d never been around anyone who was so open and honest. She wasn’t like anyone else who lived in this shit hole, and that was something worth looking out for. The code of the street may say you look out only for yourself, but I told you before; I live life my own way and to hell with others. If I wanted to, I’d watch Lila’s back, and right now I wanted to.

Lila stopped by the next day and I read. It wasn’t like I had a choice. With everything else in my life I always made sure I had an option, but with Lila I never seemed to. Oddly it didn’t bother me. She sat completely wrapped up by a story I’m sure she couldn’t understand. I had to admit I didn’t understand a lot of it either. I mean, the guy wrote nonsense, and I just said the words without caring what they meant. She’d sit down and lean against the building, her head tipped to the side while she stared at the wall in front of her as though she was there in the land of Middle Earth or wherever the hell the story was. She’d gasp when something bad happened, and she sighed at the ending. I wouldn’t say I enjoyed it, but I will say no other book has affected me the way this one did. It wasn’t the story; it was Lila. Seeing her take so much pleasure from me reading to her made me feel… well, special. I’d never felt that way, and again, I didn’t like it, basically because I did kind of like it. It was bad to get used to things like that. It only led to trouble.

We finished it in two weeks and I expected that would be it. I figured I would see Lila walking to and from school, and I’d nod to her like I had in the past, and that would be it. We had nothing in common, and we had no reason to even talk to each other, but Lila didn’t see things that way, and it seemed clear to me now that what Lila wanted, Lila usually got; especially from me.

After we finished the book she came through the alley again and she stopped to talk this time. That became the norm. She’d bring a small sandwich bag full of potato chips or cookies and offer to share them. I never ate one thing she offered to me, but that didn’t stop her. I don’t want to owe anybody anything. You may not think a bag of chips is a big deal, but if you allow yourself to be sucked in by someone’s scraps, the next thing you know you’re someone’s pet, or worse, bitch, and that is something I would never tolerate; not even with Lila.

She’d tell me about what they did at school and who she’d talked to during recess. I didn’t really care, but I sat and listened because she was like a force of nature. Everything seemed special and exciting when Lila told it. She asked me about my school and my parents, but I wasn’t about to get dragged down that road. Girls are like that; they try to get you talking about yourself, and suddenly you find yourself telling them everything. I’d seen it happen to Benny from apartment 4G just above me. He told this hooker everything and the next thing you know the cops are busting down his door and dragging him off along with an apartment full of stolen stereos. Saddest damned thing I’ve seen when a grown man is crying and begging for some hooker to forgive him and give him a second chance while she’s standing there with her hand out to the cops waiting for the payment they’re giving her. Like I said, most people deserve what they get, and I wasn’t about to go asking for that kind of trouble.

I would never admit I liked the time I spent with Lila, but she was a funny little kid, laughing about the stupidest things. When she talked, her face glowed, and her blond curly hair bounced around her like a circus act. Those blue eyes would pin you and want to know what you thought. I just smiled and nodded and that seemed to satisfy everything she wanted. She’d squeal with delight and continue on.

I knew I was in trouble when I’d finish up whatever I was doing for the day to make sure I was back in my alley by the time she’d be coming home from school. I’d always been quick to get a job done, but now I moved a little faster. When I ran drugs for Scott, I literally ran. Once I dropped the money off to Harold, I scaled the fire escape to get back because it was faster. I admit I made up reasons to justify myself. Running and working my arms like that kept me in shape. It also helped me out when I took short-term jobs over at the docks. If you could move payload before anyone had time to notice, you were an asset. Assets get paid.

So I’d be there when she came by and we’d sit and talk. She’d bring her homework with her, and we’d sit and do it together. I didn’t mind; like I said, information never hurt. The funny thing was when she’d bring the stuff back and tell me what I got on that assignment, like it was all mine. She’d smile and laugh, and it was almost contagious. She had a way about her that made me want to be around her.

During the summer she came by at odd times, and I wasn’t always there, but she’d leave me a smiley face or something in chalk on the cement or a hand full of dandelions she picked in the park. I knew Lila loved the park, and sometimes I’d walk that way to see if she was there. If she saw me, she’d run over with her usual excitement and beg me to watch her swing or go down the slide. If I had nothing to do, I’d lean against the fence for a few minutes and watch just to make her happy. That was it, really. Seeing Lila happy provided an odd kind of enjoyment for me. It kind of reminds you that there was still joy in the world somewhere, and even though none of it may be for you, it’s enough to keep you going, keep you alive, just knowing it’s there somewhere for someone.

Things started changing and I know it started with the day Dillon Chester found me. That’s when Lila saw what it was really like on the streets, but it was also when I knew she would always be in my life.

CHAPTER TWO

Dillon Chester was about three years older than me. I’d known him for a while, though mostly by reputation. He moved here from Detroit five years ago and thought he was big shit. Hell, I was only fourteen and knew that in this town it didn’t matter where you came from; it didn’t impress no one. What you once did and who you thought you were meant even less, and the more you tried to build a rep, the harder they put you down. Still, Dillon seemed to want to make a name for himself, so he threw his weight around a lot. I was pretty sure one day he’d piss off the wrong person and end up dead, but I didn’t really care. All I ask is that I get left alone, but I should have known Dillon wouldn’t let that happen.

Getting himself some boys he could boss around, he ran the streets stealing shit and pushing people around. I try to stay low; not because of the likes of Dillon, but I found that if you don’t make a lot of noise, no one knows you’re there, and then no one has reason to come after you. It’s easier that way. Up until now, I never really had a problem with Dillon. Not really. I mean, he tried to come at me once, but I burned him. Literally, I had a lighter and when he grabbed me, I singed all the hair off his arm. He didn’t come back, but guys like that aren’t real smart, and they tend to think they need to regain the respect they lost. They can’t.

I just