Bad Karma

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 taken 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.