The Apology Read online

Essa Alroc

  The Apology

  © 2012, Essa Alroc

  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. This book contains material protected under International and Federal Copyright Laws and Treaties. Any unauthorized reprint or use of this material is prohibited. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system without express written permission from the author / publisher.

  Chapter 1

  If Gabrielle could change anything in the world, anything at all, it would be her decision to come home early from her shopping trip on an ordinary December afternoon. She left her husband still sleeping that Saturday morning and headed out the door to get a head start on Christmas shopping. Nick had expected her to be gone all day.

  In the six months since marrying her husband, Gabrielle had become an expert at several things. One of those things was spending Nick’s money. Her husband was a wealthy businessman, who worked in a field that Gabrielle didn’t really understand. He’d vaguely explained it as an import business, bringing merchandise into the country for resale. He didn’t discuss his business and Gabby didn’t mind. He gave them security, which was all she ever really wanted.

  Because Gabby was such an expert shopper, she’d found everything she wanted to get for Nick in less time than she thought. She’d rushed home, relieved to find the driveway empty, and started looking for the perfect hiding place for his gifts. Their home was huge. Eight bedrooms and five baths; but at the same time, Gabby worried that Nick would find what she’d gotten him. She decided to hide her gifts in the one place she was sure Nick would never look; the attic.

  Though reasonable at the time, it was a decision she would live to regret.

  The attic was large, clean and deserted. The only things they kept up there were holiday decorations and old furniture. As Gabby remembered, there was also a closet in that attic. It was a closet that would be perfect for storing the gifts she’d gotten.

  She jumped out of the Lexus Nick had gotten her for a wedding present and started to load her arms up with bags. Lucia, her housekeeper, poked her head out the door and began to come out to help, but Gabby waved her away and dragged her packages in on her own. She took the steps two at a time, racing to get to the top floor of their home and into the attic before Nick came home from wherever he’d gone to. She tugged down the ladder to the crawl space and, with some very complicated maneuvering, managed to get all the boxes and bags up ahead of her. She quickly ascended the ladder and then pulled it up behind her to cover her tracks.

  Gabrielle crossed the room; the shadeless window gave enough light that she didn’t feel the need to hunt down a light switch. Instead, she pulled the closet doors open and was relieved to find it was mostly empty.

  Gabby was just stacking up the last box into an unstable tower of gifts when she heard the sliding ladder get yanked down. She let out a quick gasp, hoping she hadn’t been found out. Thinking fast, she crammed herself in next to her tower of presents and slid the closet door shut behind her. It was a flimsy door that didn’t lock; the kind that had wooden slats with cracks between them. She could see out into the room, but no one could see in. Gabby stifled a giggle as Nick’s head poked up into the attic. At first, she thought he was up in the attic hiding presents for her. Then she realized he had someone with him – two someone’s.

  The first was Grigor. Gabby had met him before. He was Nick’s chief of security at his business. Grigor was a large man, over 6’5” and muscular. He was at least ten years older than her husband. He rarely spoke and he almost never smiled. Grigor had always made her nervous.

  The second person, she didn’t recognize; mainly because he had a bag on his head. Gabby clamped a hand over her mouth to stifle her gasp. She watched through the slats as Grigor shoved him into a chair.

  “I wish we didn’t have to do this here.” Her husband’s voice was low and serious.

  Grigor gave the man in the chair a shove. “We wouldn’t if this idiot had kept his mouth shut.” He ripped the bag off his head. “Most of the warehouses are hot now, thanks to him.”

  Nick let out a humorous laugh. “That is disappointingly true.” He crossed his arms and leaned against the wall; his handsome face a mask. “It would be unfortunate if my wife were to find out.”

  Grigor snorted as he began tying the man to the chair using the zip ties he carried in his jacket. “She still doesn’t know?”

  Nick smiled as he studied his nails. “She’s not the brightest woman in the world.” He watched as Grigor leaned down to pick up a small case he’d brought with him. “But that’s not the reason I married her.”

  Gabby’s eyes narrowed at the insult. Sure, she wasn’t Einstein, but Nick sounded like he thought she was an idiot. Her time in the closet was proving to be quite educational. Her husband was a criminal and he thought she was a moron.

  “So why did you?” Grigor studied the man in the chair, making sure that his hands and feet were securely tied. He pulled the bag off the mans head and he was no one Gabby recognized. Just a terrified, red faced man with a gag in his mouth.

  Nick raised an eyebrow. “Have you seen her?” He turned towards the table and opened the small case they’d brought with them. “Our children will be beautiful; that’s a guarantee. Let’s hope they get my intelligence, though. One beautiful idiot is quite enough for me.”

  Gabby glared harder. She was so getting a divorce. In fact, she was a step away from jumping out of the closet and demanding one when she saw what Nick had in his hand.

  An electric carving knife.

  The man in the chair began to scream under his gag, his muffled wails carrying throughout the room. Nick handed the carving knife to Grigor and leaned down over the man. He tugged the gag out of his mouth.

  “Now, Luka,” Nick’s voice was ice cold. It was the same voice he used when Lucia used the wrong starch on his shirts. “Perhaps you can explain to me why all my warehouses are currently under surveillance?”

  The man called Luka gasped; his face was red and his eyes were teary. He never took them off the carving knife. “I swear, Mr. Yakiv, I told no one. I swear on my children’s lives.”

  “If you mean Ana and Adriy, there is no need.” Nick pulled the carving knife from Grigor’s hand. “It seems your children had an unfortunate accident this morning in your pool, along with their mother. So you see,” Nick studied the knife disinterestedly, “you swearing on their lives means very little to me, considering they are no longer alive.”

  Luka began to wail as the meaning of Nicks’ sentence sank in. Gabby shoved a hand in her mouth to stifle her own shocked sob. Her husband wasn’t just a killer; he was a ruthless murderer who apparently had no problem doing away with women and children as well. How could she not have known?

  “Now,” Nick leaned down closer as the wailing man gasped, trying to regain his breath. “I’m sure that you have nothing left to live for, and that is fine. You will never leave this house alive, anyway. However, the choice is yours.” He ran the carving knife down Luka’s face. “You can tell me exactly who you talked to and receive a quick death, followed by being dismembered and dumped into the bay. Or, we can dismember you while you’re still alive, or at least until you feel like talking.”

  Gabby watched Luka. His eyes were empty and sad now that he knew his family was gone, and that he would soon be joining them. His expression was stoic. He glared into her husband’s eyes and then, to Gabby’s surprise, he spat in Nick’s face.

  Gabby flinched, but Nick just looked amused. He pulled a handkerchief from his pocket and wiped the spit away, his eyes never leaving Luka. He handed the carving knife to Grigor. “Start with his fingers.”
>
  Gabby clamped her hands over her ears as the carving knife whirred to life. Even pressing them down as hard as she could, she still heard the scream of the knife as it cut into the meat of Luka’s hand, sawing through bone. He was screaming, but the sound of the knife drowned everything out.

  For the next two hours, Gabrielle sat in a closet surrounded by gifts, watching as her husband dismembered a man alive.

  ***

  Jesse Turnblatt pulled into a Park & Ride just outside of Tallahassee, Florida, as the air pressure in his right front tire dropped yet again. He sighed and shoved open the driver’s side door, getting ready to pull out the hand crank inflator he’d bought at a discount at a local Wal-Mart. It took forever and was hell on his shoulder, but he had no choice. There wasn’t a gas station around for miles and, if he tried to drive to one in his broken down jeep, he was guaranteed to have a blow-out.

  That’s just the way his life had gone, so far.

  Ever since high school, Jesse had been plagued with an ongoing string of bad luck. If something bad could happen, it would happen to Jesse Turnblatt. His promising football career had been cut short by a stupid freak accident. Then, he’d gone to community college, only to drop out after a minor marijuana conviction had nullified his financial aid. Unsure of what to do, Jesse had turned to the military, sure that an athletic guy like him would be a great career soldier.

  Just his luck, he was color blind – the one medical malady that couldn’t be waived to get him into service anyway. Even the most basic soldier had to be able to tell the difference between red and green. Jesse couldn’t even do that.

  Jesse wasn’t a particularly smart man, nor was he particularly charming. The few things he had going for him included being naturally handsome and naturally athletic. While those qualities alone were enough to make him the king of any high school he attended, he’d learned they’d grown exceedingly more useless the closer he got to thirty.

  Jesse flinched as he stubbed his toe on a rock on the way to his trunk, and kept moving. He ran a hand through skull-cut hair and pulled open the hatchback, yanking out the hand pump with a swear. He walked back around to the front of the jeep, and managed to stub his toe on the same damn rock. He bent down, the hot Florida sun scorching the back of his neck, and let out another muffled swear as he realized he was sweating buckets in his last clean shirt. He started pumping and pumping, grunting with exertion as he struggled to get his slowly leaking tire above 30 psi.

  “This your car?”

  Jesse sighed inwardly and turned around to be confronted with the navy blue, starched leg of a Florida State Trooper. No, he wanted to say, I’m siphoning air out of someone else’s tire. Instead, he stretched to his full 6’2 height and met the state troopers glare head on. “Yeah, it’s mine.”

  The trooper let out a “tsk” sound with his tongue and started to pull out a ticket book. “Your registration is expired.”

  Jesse nodded in agreement. “I’m planning on getting it registered when I settle.”

  The state trooper pulled off his mirrored sunglasses as he started to write the ticket. “And where you planning on settling?”

  Jesse was about to say ‘Mississippi’ when he noticed the trooper had grey eyes. Grey eyes had always had an effect on him, regardless of the owner. They always hit him with the same amount of guilt he’d felt that day in high school, nearly eleven years before. He always thought of Gabby MacMillan.

  And he couldn’t let the image of those sad, grey eyes, strangely beautiful in her homely face, go.

  Jesse had hoped she would go to her reunion. He had just gotten the news from his doctor that his boxing career, short-lived as it was, was over when he’d decided to go. The only reason he’d gone at all was to see her again. To tell her he was sorry and that, weirdly, he’d missed her. The nerdy, overweight girl with the awkward crush. The girl he had destroyed for no more reason then he found her crush embarrassing and he’d been angry with her.

  She hadn’t gone to the reunion. Her name tag, with her maiden name in parenthesis, sat unclaimed on the table all night. He’d been surprised to learn she’d gotten married. He doubted she had aged well. She was probably even heavier at 29 than she had been at 18. He pictured her husband as an overweight, balding man with a large hook nose.

  Her new last name was Ukrainian. It made sense, considering she’d fled their Massachusetts hometown shortly after graduation and settled down in South Florida. He wondered if she was happy, if she’d had children.

  He wondered if she still dwelled on high school the way he did. It wouldn’t surprise him if she did. She had, after all, been the victim.

  “You on something, son?”

  Jesse looked up, shaken out of his thoughts. “No, sir. Just overheated. Sure is hot here.” Jesse tugged at the collar of his t-shirt uncomfortably and stared up at the afternoon sun. His thoughts stayed with Gabby. The more he thought about it, the more his mind stuck to that day. It was shortly after the day he’d humiliated her in front of the entire school that his luck had started to go bad. “I’m going to Mississippi, sir.”

  “Right,” The trooper nodded and pointed to the curb. “Can you come over here for me?” Jesse nearly growled in frustration as the trooper started to guide him through a field sobriety test. As he said his alphabet backwards, he thought more and more about Gabby. Her sad, grey eyes and her broken heart. The way everything had gone perfectly for him before that day, and how it had all turned to shit afterwards. Perhaps it had been karma?

  “Follow my pen, son.”

  Jesse followed the pen, but his mind stayed elsewhere. He was down to his last $500, no job prospects in sight, driving a broken-down jeep and living on a wardrobe of five different shirts and the same two pairs of jeans. Maybe his jeep had broken down for a reason. Maybe karma was telling him that if he wanted to move forward, if he wanted anything good to happen again, he needed to go back. He needed to apologize to Gabrielle MacMillan, the girl he’d once liked so much and hurt so badly. What could it hurt? He had nowhere else to be. As he was hopping on one foot down a straight line, he turned his face to the trooper. “How far is Miami from here?”

  The trooper looked at him in confusion. “Miami?” He tilted his head in thought. “About eight hours.”

  Jesse dropped his foot to the ground. He was less then 8 hours from Gabby. What would it hurt to alter his course and see if an apology would actually work?

  “Why do you ask?”

  Jesse snapped his attention back to the trooper. “There’s a girl I know; from high school…”

  Suddenly, the stern trooper’s face slid into an easy smile. “First love, huh?”

  “Something like that.”

  “Well, that explains why you’ve been so distracted.” The trooper smiled and closed his ticket book, seeming to forget he was about to issue a ticket for an expired registration. “I married my high school sweetheart. Best choice I ever made was hunting her down and knocking on her door.”

  Jesse watched in amazement as the trooper walked around his jeep, forgetting about the sobriety test and instead, getting stuck in his own love story. “She’s in Miami. I figured it never hurts to try again.”

  The trooper nodded, “Yeah, but you’re not going to get there on this tire.” The trooper kicked the leaky front driver’s side tire on Jesse’s car. “But my brother-in-law just bought a new car and has been selling the parts off his old jeep. Pretty sure one of his tires would fit yours.”

  Jesse’s eyebrow shot up. Could karma work this fast? “Do you think he’d be willing to sell them for cheap, because I don’t have a lot of money?”

  The trooper shook his head. “Consider it on me.”

  A shocked Jesse got into his broken-down jeep and followed the trooper to a modest, family community in Jacksonville. The now genial state trooper introduced him to his brother-in-law and they soon had the front tire on Jesse’s jeep changed, free of charge. As Jesse pulled out of the dirt driveway and
onto the road, he smiled and waved to the brother-in-law and the closet romantic state trooper. He was going to find Gabrielle MacMillan and he was going to fix what he’d done wrong.

  For the first time in a little over eleven years, he felt like he was finally on the right path.

  ***

  Gabrielle sat across from her husband, nervously fiddling with her fork and avoiding eye contact. Everything felt surreal, like she was walking through a dream. After her husband and Grigor had finished with the body, they had left it, presumably expecting the ‘idiot’ Gabrielle to be home any minute. She’d waited for 30 terrifying minutes, alone with the mutilated body of Luka, until she had finally had the courage to brave her way out of the attic.

  She’d slipped out unnoticed and then had spent the afternoon driving around town, going nowhere, doing nothing. Just driving in a blank, panicked haze, unsure of what to do or if she could do anything at all.

  She wouldn’t go to the cops. She had witnessed first-hand what happened to people who talked about her husband.

  “The chicken is a little tough.”

  Please don’t kill Lucia. “I think it’s just the cut.” Oh, God…I said cut. Gabrielle’s heart started to thump again.

  Nick shoved his plate away. “Probably. Tell Lucia to start shopping at a different butcher. This is the third time this week.”

  Gabrielle offered a silent prayer that Nick wouldn’t kill the butcher for his subpar selection. She nodded wordlessly.

  “How was shopping?”

  It was going great until I came home and witnessed you mutilating someone. “It was fine.”

  Nick took a sip of his wine, still watching her carefully. “Have you decided what you want for Christmas, yet?”

  Yes, a divorce…and please don’t kill me. “No.” She shook her head, trying to get the sound of an electric carving knife cleaving through bone out of her thoughts. She started to clear her plate. “I’m not feeling very well. I think I might go lay down.”

  Nick gave her a gentle smile. “Too much shopping?”

  Too much watching my husband and his henchmen commit murder. “Something like that.” Gabrielle could feel her husband’s eyes burning into her back as she walked up the stairs.