Unhappily Ever After B. 01

AUTHOR'S NOTE:

Unhappily Ever After

is a long, novel-length story that relates the story of a veteran who returns to civilian life and pursues a career path begun before joining the Australian Defence Force. He is forced to resurrect his 'stay alive' skills when he is betrayed by his wife, whose lover puts a hit order out on him.

---oooBJSooo---

As with many of my stories, this one started out as an idea for a short story. Unfortunately, the characters took control, and it became my version of War and Peace. In an attempt to encourage those with an aversion to long stories to read it, I have broken it up into two books. This submission is Book One.

Book Two has been written and is currently in the editing stage. Each book tells its own story, but I'd recommend reading Book One first to get a handle on some of the characters.

Hopefully, those who didn't like the absence of gratuitous retribution in my previous submission,

Happenstance

, will find

Unhappily Ever After

more explicit. Doncha hate it when you've got to work things out for yourself?

Be warned, however. If you start this journey, be prepared for a long ride. Book One contains ten chapters, which will be submitted in seven parts. All seven parts have been submitted simultaneously, with a request to the moderator that they be published on consecutive days.

I trust you will enjoy my offering, but I will be happy to receive your comments either way. It should be noted, however, that I have blocked anonymous comments. I know that might inconvenience a few of you, but my philosophy is that 'better one commenter be inconvenienced than ten trolls be allowed to spew their vitriol'.

Please Note:

The right of Black Jack Steele to be identified as the author of this work - Unhappily Ever After - Book One - is asserted under worldwide copyright laws. All rights are reserved.

UNHAPPILY EVER AFTER

BOOK ONE

Copyright © Black Jack Steele 2022

CHAPTER EIGHT

Monday, December 25, 2017 - Tuesday, December 26, 2017

Every Day Is A Good Day To Die

I'm not a great lover of Christmas. Throughout my whole life, all I've ever seen at this time of year is people becoming stressed and violent and relationships being destroyed.

Sure, as a kid, I enjoyed the giving and receiving of presents. And I have to admit that love abounded in our home. But it seemed that the world around us was in turmoil.

Sam and I only ever attended one of her family's Christmas gatherings. That was enough for me.

She was the oldest of six children, with one sister and four brothers. Her mother was one of the most giving and beautifully-natured people anyone would hope to meet. And I saw her as the woman I hoped Sam would become when she reached her age. Like Sam, she was much smaller than the other family members. The others took after their father.

Reg was a very large construction manager and was as tough as they came. He was also a Vietnam-era veteran, so we got along well. I can't say the same for her brothers - or her sister, for that matter. They were just as big and tough as their father but lacked discipline. They were fighters rather than lovers. Any self-discipline their father might have instilled in them flew straight out the window as soon as they started drinking; which was part of their Irish heritage, I supposed.

That Christmas celebration turned into a huge family free-for-all. Of course, I was seen as a wimp because I refused to join in. Their father let them have at it but warned them not to pull me into their fights.

"You will regret it if you ever come up against him," he told them. "He might be smaller than any of you, but from what I know of his type - during our reminiscences, I'd let it slip that I'd served in a Commando unit - he could take all five of you on with one hand tied behind his back and still come out on top."

That didn't stop them from trying, though, and the oldest of Sam's brothers, Conor, kept baiting me. After asking his father's permission, I invited the would-be family champion around to the other side of the house to explain why I didn't want to get involved in their disputes.

We returned a couple of minutes later, with me helping Conor to walk. He seemed to be having trouble standing up straight. I'd let him have three swings at me before giving him a light jab to his solar plexus. That was the end of their attempts to draw me into their fights.

Sam's father died the following year, and I suggested that, without his guiding hand to control things, it would probably be best to invite her mother to spend Christmas with us. I knew if we went back to her hometown that year, I'd be forced to break a few bones.

Mavis didn't come the first year but came for the two Christmases afterwards. Sadly, she passed away before she could join us for a third time. That was probably a good thing because, by that time, any semblance of a loving marriage we'd had was fading fast.

Those were my thoughts as I woke on Christmas morning in 2017. It seems to me that, ever since I became involved with Sam, Christmas has been a time of year that centres around conflict. It appeared that this Christmas was not going to be any different.

Apart from a "Merry Christmas" greeting, Christmas morning in Tommy's home was just like any other day. He, Mother and I chatted over breakfast before he and I disappeared into his office to continue our strategic brainstorming.

The one thing we'd agreed about was that we would make them wait for their chance at me. They would have expected me to pick up my car and return home immediately after being released from the watchhouse, and they would have set up their ambush to meet that timetable.

That scenario had been confirmed by Red, who, with his crew, had undertaken a patrol of the forest. They had found that four men had been put into ambush positions, with two men on each side of the road. There would probably be another man back towards town to warn them of my approach.

My theory about Manyweather wanting to do the job himself was proved when the surveillance cameras at the property's front gate showed him and Charlie arriving in her Porsche. She parked exactly where she had done exactly a week earlier. I guessed she was attempting to throw me off balance by giving me a sense of

déjà vu

.

Sadly for them, I wasn't going to march to their drumbeat. Rather, I was going to let them stew for a couple of days before falling into their trap. Besides, we needed a couple of days to get the other elements of our plan in place. There wouldn't be much of a Christmas break for the home team this year.

Christmas Day is Christmas Day, however. And certain traditions must be observed. The people who worked for Tommy were his family. While he held a separate festive party for his off-site technical staff, those who lived and worked in his compound - those who were closest to him - were treated like blood relatives.

The lunch that Tommy served up would have done an Arab sheik proud; except for the roast leg of pork and the huge leg of ham, of course. In addition to the pork, a whole lamb was roasting on a spit, and a large roasted turkey sat in the middle of the table. There was also a mountain of rib-eye beef steaks and chicken breasts to be thrown onto the barbecue. And the array of salads sitting on the table was mind-boggling.

My parents had grown up with the traditional roast Christmas dinner, but we'd gradually moved away from the customary northern hemisphere fare as our national ties with the United Kingdom waned. It took a while, but we gradually realised that we lived in a country where Christmas fell in the middle of summer, where the temperatures on that auspicious day could exceed thirty-eight degrees Celcius (one-hundred degrees in old speak).

These days in Oz, Christmas was celebrated while wearing board shorts, tee-shirts and thongs (of the flip-flop kind, not the other ones), rather than being rugged up and sitting around a roaring fire eating roast turkey and baked potatoes and drinking brandy-laced eggnog.

"You know, you're the one who made all this possible," Mother said to me as we sat in the shade of a huge, one-hundred-and-fifty-year-old raintree letting our lunch settle. We were watching the children of Tommy's guests playing in the pool.

"No," I responded, "I had nothing to do with any of this. This is all Tommy's doing. He used his skills and his brains to build his multi-million-dollar empire."

"That part may be true," she said. "But none of it would have been possible if you hadn't saved his life. I would have been without a son, and the world would be without a brilliant mind.

"He came back to me an entirely different man than the one who left home to join the Army. Before that, he was headed for prison. When he returned, he had learned the difference between right and wrong and had developed an inner strength that I thought I'd never see. Not only that, but he had also learned the importance of having a close-knit group of friends around him. Most importantly, he had learned to value loyalty and self-sacrifice above all else.

"Please don't ever pressure him into sending you a bill for what he is doing for you. He sees it as part payment for what you gave him. He loves you, Stoney; not just for saving him but for being his friend. So please accept his gift.

"By all means, thank him. But be gracious in acceptance. It's his way of paying forward, just as you paid forward by dragging him to safety and doing everything in your power to keep him alive until help arrived."

I agreed to her request but promised myself I would find a way to pay him back; even if it was without him knowing about it.

"I didn't see what I was doing for him as paying forward, though, I said." I was trying to save the life of my wounded friend and comrade. There was no conscious thought guiding my actions. I was simply doing what any of his other brothers would have done in the same situation; what he would have done for me if our roles were reversed."

"Regardless of how you see it, Stoney," Mother said, "Thomas believes he owes you a huge debt. It has nothing to do with money; God knows, he has more than enough of that to last him ten lifetimes. But he knows it's your life that's now in danger, and he's doing everything in his power to do for you what you did for him.

"Don't fight him. Let him help you survive the same way you helped him."

"I'm happy to receive all the help I can get, Mother. It's just that I'm used to paying my way."

"That's fine, Aaron. If you feel you have to pay your way, find another way of doing it. Forget this 'paying forward' garbage, though. That whole concept was based on money. Use the principle mentioned in Lloyd Douglas' book,

Magnificent Obsession

. Live a good life, and do good things for others. But do them in a way that only you and your God know what you are doing."

After listening to her wise words, I made a mental note to read the book she had mentioned.

---oooBJSooo---

I spent the next hour helping to clean up, after which I went upstairs to my room for a traditional post-Christmas dinner nap, coming back downstairs an hour later to put in a half-an-hour in Tommy's four-lane lap pool.

During my holiday in the watchhouse, he'd managed to retrieve my emergency 'go' bag from my office, which meant I had fresh clothing and my toiletries. Most importantly, it meant I was wearing my own Speedos while swimming. While I don't have OCD, I really have a thing about wearing other people's underwear and swimming trunks.

As I climbed out of the pool, Tommy handed me an ice-cold beer and led me over to a pair of comfortable chairs in a shaded corner of the deck. The day's heat was waning, but the sun still had a bit of sting to it.

"Everything is in place," he said as we sat. "The spotter has been identified, and the ambushers have sights on them. We've also identified another spotter who's watching your business compound. It's obviously his job to let the others know when your car leaves. He'll be taken out of the game as soon as he has sent his message.

"The same goes for the one out near your place. He'll disappear after he's let the ambushers know you have passed his position. As soon as that message has been sent and acknowledged, the ambushers will be taken out; just in case we've misinterpreted their intentions. Our lads will use his men's AKs to make a lot of noise as you pass by, which should let Manyweather know you're approaching.

"He and Charlie have been sitting out at your gate since yesterday afternoon. And from what Breaker tells me, the ambushers are getting jittery. One assumes that Manyweather and Charlie are the same. By the time you turn up tomorrow afternoon, they'll be jumping at shadows."

Tommy then told me what else had been going on while we'd been filling in our day feasting and making merry.

"Believe it or not," he said, "many of the members of Manyweather's Neo-Nazi group are married with children. That means they have spent today at home with their families. Even the butch dykes, being good Christian white supremacists, spent the day with their friends and partners.

"With their bivouac deserted, our people have gone in and relocated the explosives that were recovered from your construction sites - along with those taken from your would-be Lebanese assassins - to their camp. The whole compound will become a pile of burning rubble upon receipt of a single phone call. The stupid pricks didn't even set a guard on the place; not that it would have made any difference.

"We've left Manyweather and Charlie for you to deal with as you see fit. You'll have backup, but they won't interfere unless your opponents get the upper hand.

"Hopefully, that will happen before they kill you," he said with a chuckle. "Maiming is okay, but killing my best friend would upset me greatly. They'd live long enough to regret that; a lot longer than they'd like to, I'm sure."

The weakness in Tommy's plan for my confrontation with Manyweather was that you

can't

plan for those situations. All you can hope for is that you are quicker on the draw than your opponent on the day. Apart from that, all you can do is ensure you have done everything possible to minimise the risk. After that, as my US Marine brothers used to say,

"Improvise, adapt and overcome"

.

With the short-term planning out of the way, our discussion turned to Sam and her master and lovers.

"That looks like becoming a long, drawn-out business," Tommy said. "Despite the police prosecutor pushing for custodial remand, none of the magistrates considered any of them a flight risk. They were all let out on bail while awaiting their committal hearings. In each case, the prosecutor - acting on the instructions of the Director of Public Prosecutions - had to formally request that the magistrates order the surrender of the 'alleged' perpetrators' passports.

"Being a good citizen, amongst the information I leaked to your friend, Alan McGregor, was the location of each of the safety deposit boxes belonging to the partners, associates and paralegals caught up in the net. I have no doubt they will find false passports in a number of those boxes. That should give the magistrates something to think about should the alleged perpetrators turn up for their next hearing.

"The fact that the boxes contain large amounts of cash should also strengthen the prosecutors' cases. The only way for the alleged perp to defend a drug distribution charge is to admit that the money comes from either prostitution or extortion. There are no other acceptable reasons that would explain how they have accumulated such large sums. I don't think

"I won it at the races"

or

"I inherited it from my grandmother"

will fly.

"If Mr McGregor is as smart as I think he is, he will put a watch on the safety deposit boxes and grab the offenders as they leave the bank with the passport and a bag full of cash. If the Feds haven't already been brought into the case, the false passports will get their attention.

"Did you know that, like the good ol' U-S-of-A, there is no provision for early release if convicted of a federal crime in Australia? No parole. No good behaviour. No presidential pardon. Nada! Whatever sentence a Federal Court judge hands you is what you serve.

"The downside to that is that you get to serve your time in a state prison - the Feds don't have their own - so you get to watch all the other prisoners doing short time while you serve out every minute of your sentence. Of course, if those prisoners ever knew that you might have grassed on them, your sentence would end up being a fairly short one. Your early release would be in a body bag."

That last comment made me think of Sam. I no longer love her - in fact, I had nothing but contempt for her - but I had once loved her. I hoped she hadn't been involved in the CI business. Not that it would make a great deal of difference. Once the news got out about the extent of the legal fraternity informing on their clients, every lawyer would be walking around with a target on their back. Any criminal lawyer sent to prison for such crimes would have the same life expectancy as a former police officer.

The only way Sam would survive in the environment would be to either spend the whole of her sentence in solitary confinement or allow herself to be brought under the protective wing of the biggest, toughest butch dyke in the system. If I had to put money on it, I'd go for the latter option. She enjoyed sex too much to want to spend her time in solitary. Besides, from what Tommy had told me about the content of the video recordings, it wouldn't be the first time she'd been with a woman; or women, for that matter. I just hoped she'd be able to avoid having that beautiful body disfigured by prison tattoos.

On the other hand, I hoped Kingston was thrown into the general population at the earliest opportunity and that he served as 'Bubba's Bitch' for a few years before one of his former clients stuck a sharpened toothbrush into one or both of his kidneys.

I didn't really care what happened to Sam's other lovers. Their lives - along with those of all the others who had become part of Kingston's world - would have been destroyed by that time.

I did feel a pang of conscience for those at the bottom of the food chain who would lose their jobs due to the collapse of Kingston's empire. But I had no doubt they all knew about what was going on and had had an opportunity to

"get out while the gettin' was good"

, as my father used to say.

He was a bit of a biblical scholar, was my Dad. And he would often use mashed up bible quotations in his father-son counselling sessions. One of his favourites was,

"Let tomorrow worry about itself. If you focus on addressing today's troubles, the things you fear might be lurking in the future might not happen"

.

Having served in Vietnam, where he had come across quite a few American Indians - what we in this politically correct world now refer to as Native Americans - he was introduced to their warrior philosophy. He'd finish his today-tomorrow homily by saying,

"...and if what you fear appears, face it like the warrior you are. Every day is a good day to die"

.

Those were the thoughts running through my head when, having noticed our silence, Mother appeared on the deck with a tray filled with a selection of leftover ham, chicken, lamb and salad. We noted three plates on the tray, so we assumed it was time for us to stop planning and get on with enjoying the remainder of the evening. Mother went back to the kitchen, returning with a couple of fresh beers and a glass of wine for herself.