Bad Karma

  BAD KARMA

  J.D. Faver

  AMAZON EDITION

  *****

  Bad Karma

  Copyright © 2012 by J.D. Faver

  Amazon Editions, License Notes

  This e-book is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This book 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 recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Amazon.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  *****

  CHAPTER ONE

  Retribution

  He sat in his car, his stomach tense from worry. His fingers ached from gripping the steering wheel so tight. Where is she? What’s taking her so long?

  The bell sounded, grating his nerves like a dentist drill. Students poured from the building and for a moment he was afraid he would lose her in the crowd. There! He swallowed hard when he spotted her as she emerged from the building, his heart pumped harder against his ribs. He could hardly breathe.

  She made her way to the crosswalk, her uneven gait setting the tempo in his head. She paused and turned toward him, looked beyond and then glanced in the other direction before holding on to the street lamp to step down off the sidewalk.

  Careful now sweetheart. Don’t want anyone to run over you. He chuckled, a single dry huff of air exploding in the stillness of the car. Flexing his fingers around the steering wheel, his heart beat faster.

  So, I’m not dead after all.

  He’d been slogging along, numb to everything but his one single-minded purpose. It was as though he had been in a coma since the horrific night when everything in his life had come to a shrieking end.

  He watched as she limped through the intersection and crossed into the parking lot reserved for staff. He hadn’t noticed that he had been holding his breath and deliberately sucked in a lungful of air before blowing it out forcefully.

  Skyler Danforth didn’t look like a ruthless killer, but she had destroyed him as sure as if she’d held a gun to his head and pulled the trigger. His life was over. All that was left for him was the clean up. This woman had taken the only ones he’d ever loved. Without them, his life would always be viewed in black and white.

  She unlocked the door to her new vehicle, a silver Audi. Perhaps her rich daddy had rushed out to replace the one she’d wrecked. The one that had taken Kira and Ben away from him. The one that had crushed their lives and his and left him alone in an aching void.

  He shook his head, chasing away the picture of Kira’s bruised and battered face as she lay on the table at the morgue. His tiny son nearby, crushed and broken, only a small protuberance under the cloth covering him.

  His gaze focused on Skyler again. How can she go unpunished? How can her life just go on as though nothing happened? It must have been her fresh, all-American girl good looks that kept her out of jail. Who would think her pretty face hid the soul of a shallow, self-serving monster, willing to do anything except take responsibility for her own actions?

  She adjusted her mirror and fastened her seat belt before pulling out into traffic. He turned the ignition and started the motor. Smooth as silk, he slipped the Malibu into gear and slid into the stream of cars behind her.

  Skyler left the Junior High School campus behind and maintained a steady speed, well within the posted limit.

  The Audi made a right onto a residential street. She zigged and zagged, finally turning into a driveway and eased into an open garage before using a remote to seal herself and her vehicle inside.

  He cruised by slowly, noting the address of her new place; a duplex on a quiet street. It looked comfortable. Way too comfortable for the woman who had ended his life. He circled the block before parking across the street two houses down to wait and watch.

  She’ll have to come out sometime.

  ~*~

  Sky opened the door and looked both ways before stepping outside. She’d donned her shorts and blue windbreaker and pulled her dark honey hair into a pony tail.

  Wolfgang was eager for a run. Sinking her fingers into his thick fur, she scratched his neck before she fastened his leash and started off for the park, two blocks away.

  Her leg hurt. The pain was constant, but she was determined to strengthen it. Sitting behind a desk for most of the day at the Junior High School campus made her stiff, but she’d taken the job because it would allow her to heal and complete her rehabilitation. Most other nursing jobs required long hours of standing on one’s feet and she wasn’t up to that yet.

  Her muscles had atrophied inside the cast and the leg was still weak, the right calf being noticeably smaller than the left. Walking briskly, she concentrated on her steps instead of the pain and covered the two blocks in good time.

  Her cell vibrated. She frowned when she recognized the number.

  “Mom, let me call you back. I just got to the park and I need to start my run now.”

  “Skyler, are you sure you should be straining your leg. Didn’t the Physical Therapist tell you to take it easy?”

  She cringed at the strident tone of her mother’s voice. “No, Mom. The P.T. said to push myself until I was pleasantly fatigued. I’m not there yet.”

  Her mom snorted out a now familiar sound of disgust. “If you had been willing to move back home after your hospital stay, you could have Daddy and me to take care of you. Instead you chose to take yourself off to live in the middle of nowhere, where you don’t know anyone. In Springhill, you have no friends and no family to rely on. You’re all by yourself. Alone in a strange place with a new job.” Her mother made another exasperated sound. “You’ve always had this desperate need for independence, but this is ridiculous. I don’t understand what you were thinking.”

  “There’s nothing desperate about my need to be independent. Goodbye, Mom. I gotta run...Really.” Sky flicked the phone closed and tucked it in her pocket. She leaned against the chain link fence and stretched out her hamstrings.

  Pain stabbed through her calf. Her ankle felt weak. She adjusted the elastic wrap around her knee and bounced on the balls of her feet a few times before starting off at a slow pace.

  Wolfgang padded along at her side, staying in stride, though she knew he longed to be running full out off the leash.

  He was German shepherd and red wolf mix, with an expressive face and the heart of his wild ancestors.

  A burning in Sky’s lungs reminded her of how out of shape she was. Her heart thudded against her ribs, steadily drumming as she concentrated on placing one foot in front of the other. She struggled to control her breathing, counting her paces per breath. In four...out four. She stumbled. Foot drop. She was rapidly becoming fatigued. Better stop. Maybe I should take a break. No. Gotta push myself.

  She stumbled again, fell forward, caught herself with her hands before she did a face plant. The aggregate bruised her palms. Better than falling on my knee.

  Sky limped off the track, heading for the playground equipment, Wolfgang glued to her side.

  ~*~

  He lit a cigarette and watched her stumble. When she fell a moment later, he cringed. It was just reflex, he told himself. He didn’t care if she fell. He wanted her to fall, to feel pain.

  She struggled to her feet, then examined her palms and brushed them off on her shorts.

  Her limp was more pronounced now. The dog walked beside her although she’d dropped the leash. She shuffled to the swing set and slid into one.

  He picked up the binoculars and focused on her face. She looked tired and wilted like a flower from yesterday’s bouquet.

  Soon, it would be time for payback. Time to exact payment for what she’d take
n from him. What was the value of two lives? One wife? One small son? How much in damages was he due?

  She was alone now and completely isolated...vulnerable. But he wanted Skyler to be fully rehabilitated before he confronted her. He wanted her whole before he took her apart.

  ~*~

  Zach Bailey always enjoyed his early morning jog on the beach, especially at the first of May. The weather was perfect to his way of thinking and the hoards of vacationing families hadn’t yet hit the beaches, despoiling them with tossed baby diapers and other discards inconsiderately left behind.

  He jogged barefoot, each step rebounding off the damp cushiony sand. A lone consumer, he relished a panorama of sensory delights. Inhaling deeply, the salt air invigorated him as the beauty of the scenery entertained his vision.

  The rising sun sent long fingers of salmon reaching across the cloudless sky to reflect in the calm, glassy surface of the Laguna Madre. The soft white sand warmed to a buttery gold while the dunes remained shadowed in purple.

  Zach considered it a privilege to put the first footprints in the sand. To see what the tide had brought in. Sometimes it was shells and sand dollars. At other times, the tide brought in debris jettisoned from the oil tankers offshore.

  A few months back, dismembered bodies had washed up onto the pristine beaches, but the sheriff had solved the case and those responsible were either incarcerated or dead.

  Port Isabel was safe again. Today, no corpses lay underfoot. The lower Texas coast curled affectionately around the Gulf of Mexico, warming as the first rays of the sun caressed its shores.

  Zach loped along, filling his lungs with the tangy salt air. He’d grown up in Port Isabel, the small community nestled in the curve of Texas just above the Mexican border. It was separated from South Padre Island by the Intracoastal Waterway and connected to the island by the two and a half mile stretch of the sinuous Queen Isabella Causeway.

  His parents still lived in the house he’d grown up in. They’d raised him along with his six brothers and one sister in a rowdy, loving atmosphere. The red-headed Bailey kids were infamous around the lower Gulf Coast.

  Zach had built his home on Padre Island, across the causeway from his parents. His house was right on the beach, the last structure before the protected beach front began. He’d built his modern bachelor abode high on concrete pilings to resist the possibility of a storm surge carrying it away during the hurricane season from June first through the end of November.

  Zachary, the middle of the seven Bailey brothers, was the first in his family to graduate from college and had gone on to earn a Doctoral degree from A&M in Marine Biology. Now he was back on his home turf, having been awarded funding for his research project involving the Atlantic Bottlenose Dolphins and working on writing articles to be published is scholarly journals. He’d thrown himself into the project after being soundly rejected by the first woman he’d ever lost his heart to.

  Chloe Palmer had returned home, an unwed mother with a young daughter. She’d fallen back into the arms of Rafael Solis, her high-school love and the man whom she’d married shortly after the series of murders had been solved. Now Chloe Solis was pregnant with her second child and Rafael was bursting with pride.

  The happy couple often invited him to their home for dinner. Chloe’s three-year-old daughter called him, ‘Unka Zach’.

  Chloe kept hinting that she planned to find a suitable female companion for him when the next crop of summer visitors hit the beach.

  He was less than enthusiastic. The summer girls came looking for a fling. He wanted what Rafael had. That forever thing.

  He stumbled, but didn’t fall when the top of his foot caught on a piece of driftwood. He picked it up and flung it into the dunes. Pay attention idiot, or you’re going to break your neck.

  It was the thought of having someone to love that had tripped him up, not the driftwood. Someone who would love him and make babies with him and be as tight as his parents. The Bailey marriages lasted forever. Forever was all he wanted.

  Today, Zach was going to help Mack out on the shrimp boat and visit the pod of dolphins he was studying. He’d tagged them all and was deep into the process of recording their movements and social interactions. That was his plan, at least.

  When he jogged back to his home, he saw a truck backed up to the steps of the house next door. It was a rental truck used for self-moves.

  Perhaps the renters were planning to stay through the summer. He saw a young woman skip down the stairs. She looked as though she could be in her late teens or early twenties, a fresh young face topped by a bouncy, honey blonde pony tail.

  Zach paused half way up his own steps to stare at the young woman. Too young, but a visual treat by any standards.

  The girl disappeared into the back of the truck.

  He shook his head. Better not to get involved with summer people.

  ~*~

  Skyler tried to rest her injured leg. Her new job would start in three days. Not much time to relax after the strenuous move.

  Cassidy was trying her best to unload everything by herself, but the furniture was too heavy for one woman to carry alone. Even one as strong and healthy as her younger sister.

  Cassie had rented a dolly along with the truck, but she hadn’t realized that the house she leased over the internet had the beach for a front yard. Even if the dolly could be persuaded to bump up the steep flight of wooden steps that led to their new front door, it would be useless, sinking into the soft sand.

  “I’m coming, Cass. Just hold on.” Sky clung to the railing and tried to hurry as she took the stairs one at a time, stepping down with her injured leg and then transferring her weight to the good leg. Slow and steady.

  Sky glanced around, blushing when she realized that a tall man was watching her labored descent from his vantage point atop the deck of the neighboring house.

  Another quick glance confirmed her first impression. He was great looking, tanned with auburn hair and wide shoulders. He raised his hand and grinned.

  Oh, great! Hot guy next door and I’m gimping down the stairs.

  “Can I give you a hand?” the hot guy called out.

  Cassie poked her head out of the truck. “A hand? We don’t need your applause. We need your muscles.” She flashed the man her wide, infectious grin.

  “I’ll be right over.” The tall man loped downstairs with an athletic ease.

  Sky reached the bottom step by the time the hottie neighbor arrived. He stood grinning down at her. Dark auburn lashes tipped in gold shaded his green eyes.

  “I’m Zachary Bailey. Call me Zach. I own the house next door.” He held out his hand.

  Sky offered her hand and it was wrapped in a warm, freckled grasp. A sensation she had not recently experienced swirled through her chest and seized her stomach. She felt flustered under his scrutiny and pulled her hand from his. “I’m Skyler Danforth and this is my sister, Cassidy.”

  Cass waved from the open back of the truck.

  “Looks like you’re going to need more than one Bailey to get this furniture off the truck.” Zach flicked his cell phone open and pushed a button. He spoke to someone on the other end and snapped the phone closed. “We should have some help in a few minutes.”

  Sky raised her brows. “Just like that? You can call forth your minions?”

  He laughed. “My minions? I’m a Bailey. We Baileys can call on each other for help, anytime.”

  “Must be nice.” Cassie swung down from the truck with a lamp in her hands. “There are just two Danforth daughters and you’re looking at both of them.”

  “Where are you moving from?”

  Cassie shot a somber look at Sky.

  Sky met her gaze. “Ah, originally we’re from Austin.”

  “And what brings you to the island?”

  The girls glanced at each other again. Sky took a deep breath and blew it out. She smiled at Cassie, hating to share their business with anyone, but this man was probably harmless. “My brill
iant sister just graduated from the university with a Master of Science degree in microbiology and a teaching certificate. In the fall, she’ll be teaching Biology at the high school and hopes to start work on her doctorate soon.”

  Cassie rolled her eyes. “Feel free to talk about me while I’m gone.” She stomped up the stairs carrying the lamp.

  Zach gave Sky an appraising look. “And you? Why did you come to the island?” His green eyes seemed to be dissecting her.

  She shrugged. “I’m a nurse. I can find a job anywhere.”

  “So, you came to keep your little sister company?”

  Her stomach clenched when she was faced with so many seemingly innocent questions. She nodded. “In a way, yes.”