Shoot The Jerk

Chapter 18: Finally.

Finally.

CHAPTER  18

Jake

In hindsight, I don’t know what made me read the newspaper that morning. I usually don’t. But I did. Fortunately or unfortunately.

Small Town Drug Dealer Arrested. Rockstar Hunter Vander caught with supplies of meth and coke.

It was like a bucket of cold water poured over me. The rest of the article pretty much mentioned details, like where the stuff was found. I had a gut feeling that this had something to do with Kayla and her bitch of a sister. I was going to find out.

When I reached her house, her mother said she was upstairs, studying. I went upstairs.

The door to her room was wide open, and she was sitting on a chair with her legs propped up on her study table, staring out the window.

“Jackson.”

I could see her muscles tense all the way across the room.

“Kincaid.” She mimicked, not looking at me.

So that’s how it’s going to be.

“What do you know about this?” I demanded getting straight to the point.

She looked at the newspaper article, and didn’t even bother to hide her satisfaction when she read it. Instead, she looked straight into my eyes.

“So, the bastard finally got what he deserved.”

I felt such cold fury sweep up my body that I thought I was seriously going to strangle her. I wanted to strangle her.

“Your precious sister got him there, didn’t she? She set him up. Where is she? Hiding off someplace and leaving you to take the blame? What did she fucking do to him?”

That wiped the satisfied expression right off her face.

“Don’t you dare talk about my sister like that! She’s in some godforsaken rehab centre because of your sucker of an uncle! I don’t get to see her! So just stop acting like all this is about you!”

“Well, isn’t that just great! On top of everything else, your sister’s an addict!”

Kayla’s eyes threw sparks as she glared at me.

“You know what? I was going to take it easy on you and let you think what you think, but you’re such a jerk that I don’t even care if what I say hurts you.”

I didn’t even process her sentence before I spoke. “Just cut the crap and tell me the great big secret about my uncle.”

She sighed, all the fight going out of her.

“Come with me, before my mother gets curious.”

Then she went downstairs, with me following her. After letting her mother know that we were going out, she led me out the door. We walked for five minutes in complete silence until we reached the pier near the lake.

It was the most awkward walk of my life.

“Okay,” she said, letting her legs dangle over the water, “What do you know about your uncle and my sister?”

The fact that she could bring up the subject so casually started to make me angry again, but then I looked into her eyes. They were dead serious. So I asked the first question that came to my mind.

“Why did she leave him?”

“He was an addict himself. He abused her. At first she used to avoid seeing us until her wounds healed, but then it got frequent, so she always had bruises. She came to me one night, hardly coherent. I’d never seen her that battered before. In fact, she was in such a bad state, that I think she came to her senses. That was the first time she asked me for help. You can hardly blame me for wanting to help.”