The King

The King

By

Rick Soper

Copyright © 2013 by Rick Soper

Cover design by Rick Soper

Book design by Rick Soper

All songs contained within, Copyright © 2013 by Rick Soper

All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the author. The only exception is by a reviewer, who may quote short excerpts in a review.

This is a work of fiction.  Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.  And resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Produced in the United States of America

Rock Hard Press

First Edition: May 2013

Chapter 1

Jon Stevens was the agent other FBI agents went to when they’d run out of options. He was abrasive, and he could be aggressive; he just might punch you in the face if he was in a bad mood but no other agent in the FBI could match him at solving high profile crimes. Stevens had a way of seeing past the details that the agents around him got caught up in, and cutting through to the true nature of the emotions behind the crime. That insight – the map within the mystery – had led him time and time again to solutions.

Behind every greatness though, hid an equally immense flaw. The Chinese Yang for a Ying, or the Hindu relation between good and evil, balanced forever on the scales of Karma, a woman whose great beauty was offset by her madness, an actor of incredible talent, crippled by paralyzing self-doubt. In the case of Jon Stevens, his extraordinary ability to solve cases was offset by an unbridled hatred of paperwork.

FBI Director Emory Thomas knew this – it was why he’d assigned Emily Sarah, the resident computer expert, to him for the duration. She was as brilliant with technology as she was anal retentive about paperwork, and that included the stack of case files that Stevens had built up over months – years – of solving cases.  Thomas also knew that bringing in Sarah was a double-edged punishment: Stevens was highly uncomfortable being in close quarters with women.

What made matters worse was that Emily Sarah had a librarian-like beauty to her, a repressed sexuality that carried its own attraction. Her blond hair was pulled back tightly into a ponytail, and her bright, blue eyes sparkled through thick, black-rimmed glasses that rested on the bridge of her nose. Her soft, milk white skin was accentuated by the light red of her lipstick, and she was continually chewing on the tip of her pen in a way that could only be called...inviting. She was everything that Stevens found attractive in the opposite sex.

And she was interested in him, as well. Stevens could see it in the way she avoided his gaze, but when she thought he couldn’t see her, she looked at him like the other, younger agents looked at him: with a mixture of curiosity, respect, and awe. Stevens had an enigmatic reputation within the agency, based on his success rate as well as his avoidance of the other agents. The fact that he was a loner only added to the mystery.

Seeing the way she was staring at him, Stevens felt his stomach twist into a knot. He knew that look – he’d seen it, before. Curiosity. Interest. Other women had called him handsome. At 6’5” he looked down on most other men, and at 230 lbs. outweighed them, as well. He kept his brown hair short, something that in his mind was about convenience, but women seemed to like it. Emily Sarah was staring at the line of his jaw, and as he watched, her eyes locked with his, and he wondered if she could sense the darkness, there.

More than anything else, he wanted to be attracted to her, but something at his very core filled him with such revulsion at the thought of it that he wanted to flee. He didn’t know why he felt that way – it was just the way he’d always been. Something inside him was broken. It was why he threw himself into his work, so he didn’t have to face problems like this, so he didn’t have to see himself reflected in the eyes of women like Emily Sarah. 

He felt anger bubbling up from inside him – rage was a state that he understood, it was an emotion he could deal with, something he could wrap himself up in and turn outward like a shield. It didn’t make him happy. It didn’t make him easy to deal with. But it kept him sane.

“And when did you realize that the wine was poisoned?” Emily Sarah said, pecking away, at the laptop in front of her, as she filled in the case report.

Stevens rolled his eyes and growled. “When she fell off the chair and foam started coming out of her mouth, what do you think?”

Sarah cringed as she looked up at him. He’d been barking at her since she’d started asking questions, and as the interview had continued she’d become more and more tentative, as her interest in him had been slowly transformed into anxiety.

She was building up the courage to ask the next question when Emory Thomas burst through the office door and pointed at him.

“Let’s go!” he said, before pivoting and heading out.

Jon knew his boss well enough to know that he rarely got excited about cases, and that if he was in this big of a hurry he needed to move: he grabbed his jacket and waved at Sarah.

“Later,” he said, trying to suppress a grin as he left the paperwork – and Sarah – behind and caught up with Thomas, bursting through the door to the stairwell.

“We have a kidnapping,” Thomas called as the two of them vaulted down the stairs.

Emory Thomas was the head of the Behavioral Sciences Division of the FBI. For him to be involved in a kidnapping, it had to be high profile.

“Who is it?”

Thomas stopped at the bottom of the stairs as he opened the door to the parking garage.  “Billy Stone.”

“Shit.”

“Exactly.”

The two of them ran for Thomas’ car. Cases didn’t get any higher profile than the kidnapping of one of the richest men in the world.

Chapter 2

Billy Stone wasn’t born rich: he would have had to struggle up two or three notches on the wealth scale to have reached poor. His parents weren’t bad people, they were just unlucky. They were unlucky when his mother, Sheri, got pregnant at sixteen and Billy’s father, Sam, was only fifteen. They were unlucky when both sets of their conservative, Christian parents kicked them out. They were unlucky when Sam couldn’t find a job because no one would hire a fifteen-year-old who wasn’t in school and didn’t have a driver’s license. They were unlucky when they were forced onto welfare and the only apartment they could afford was in such a bad area that in the first two days, Sam was stabbed and lost most of his lower intestine.

But for all of their bad luck, Sam and Sheri Stone had somehow settled into an apartment and found some semblance of stability by the time Billy was ready to start school, and that one thing was what kept him on track. School was the fuel that fed Billy’s mind – a mind that had a voracious appetite. Not that the school Billy was in was top notch – or even middle notch – or really even fully functional. But it had a library, so Billy had access to books, which he couldn’t get enough of. And it had computers, which opened up his world.

Something about the way the computer worked clicked in Billy’s mind. It made sense to him. Where others saw a toy to be played with, Billy saw an instrument that could be tuned up and played, to a symphony of possibilities. While the other children in his class, played games, struggled with homework, and made their teachers’ lives hell, Billy began a lifetime love affair with computer technology. He drilled past the rough exteriors, past remedial programs, past games, and found underneath it all the programming language that made it all work, a language that made sense. It was as if his mind was tuned to the frequency of that language: not only could he understand it, but he knew how to talk back.

Unfortunately for Billy, he couldn’t spend every waking moment in front of the school’s computers. The overburdened teachers were blind to the genius sitting right in front of them and saw instead only one of many children that needed to be herded along through classes and the horrors of recess. Being a child of the welfare system, Billy was undernourished and small for his age, so for him, recess was a time to be relentlessly brutalized by larger, less intelligent children, who thought of Billy as a teacher’s pet because of his good grades.

The fact that Billy was able to survive grade school at all, let alone become the man he did, was nothing short of a miracle. 

Chapter 3

By the time Russell Scott met Amber Cross, he’d long since given up hope of finding a relationship that would work. He’d always believed that once you got past a certain point in your life: a career, a house, and a lifetime’s worth of habits, from favorite meals and television to music and books – it would be impossible to make room for someone else, not that he hadn’t tried. Russell had spent years dating, but his relationships always hit a brick wall. He didn’t know what he was looking for, and he couldn’t define it. He was at a point where he’d come to accept that he’d be alone, and he was okay with that.

Then Amber walked into his favorite Vietnamese restaurant, just as he’d settled into a steaming bowl of Kasoy. She sat down alone, ordered the same thing and their eyes met playfully from across the room. From that moment on, Russell was hooked: there was just something in her eyes that made him feel like home.

Amber was very different from the women that he had gone out with, before. In almost every way she was his opposite. Where Russell was a conservative Republican CPA, Amber was an ultra-liberal hippie, who only worked when she was forced to. Where Russell was a homeowner, a Rotarian, and a businessman with deep roots in the community, Amber blew from home to home and town to town, whenever the desire hit her.

But opposites can, will, and do very frequently attract; Amber and Russell fell into each other’s arms the moment they walked out of the restaurant. Amber was a free spirit, who lived by the philosophy that if she wanted someone, she reached out and took him, and Russell, well, he was a man, and like most men, lived by the rule that when a woman says she’s going to take you, well... you let her, especially if she’s much younger, and incredibly beautiful.

For Amber, Russell was a stable center, and in turn she taught him that life was an adventure to be enjoyed. Together, they remodeled his house to give it more character, they traveled the world, they took dancing classes, they went to the gym, they cooked. They did everything and anything with each other. They were madly in love.

When they first met, Russell was thirty-three and Amber was twenty-four, but that nine years never meant anything to them: it was just a number on their driver’s licenses. They connected on so many levels that for a long time they never even thought about their age difference, until Russell thought about death.

He wasn’t trying – it just showed up one night as he answered the phone. A football game was on and Amber was curled up under his arm. It was John, a friend of his from high school.

“Ron’s dead.”

“What?” Russell sat up, the phone loose in his hand as John told him how their old friend Ron had dropped dead: no heart attack, no aneurism, no warning, and no reason. He was just suddenly dead. One moment he was the Ronny that Russell had grown up with, the Ronny that had pushed Russell into a locker on the first day of junior high and called him a teacher’s pet. The Ronny who’d gotten his driver’s license first and buried his truck, in the mud next to the river, that very night. The Ronny, who’d found ways to buy beer when they were still in high school. The Ronny, Russell had lived with in college. The Ronny, Russell had argued sides with all the way to and from NFL football games. The Ronny, Russell had been the best man for at his wedding. And suddenly, Ronny was dead.

Over time, Ronny had turned into a father named Ron, and drifted into a different set of friends while Russell moved to a new city and built a life, there. They’d been best friends who’d drifted apart, but Russell had always assumed that they’d have the time to reconnect.

Ronny’s death hit Russell hard. At the funeral, he found himself staring at Ron’s kids. In the time since he’d seen them, they’d grown into miniature versions of their dad. Even though Ron was gone, a part of him was still there, shining in the faces of his kids.

When they got home from the funeral, Amber coaxed him into the shower she’d had remodeled to fit the two of them, but a thought was stuck in his head and as they moved past the steamed mirror he grabbed her, wiped off the mirror, and told her to look at their faces: at his blue and her green eyes staring back.

“We make a great couple,” he said.

She smiled and hugged him. “We do.”

“We’d make a great-looking baby…”

She looked up into his face. “Is that what you want?”

“Yes.” He’d never thought about having his own kids, but the reason for that had been not having the right woman to have them with. After what had happened to Ron, all he could think about was dying without having children to carry on his memory.

Amber must have seen the need in his face. “Then it’s decided,” she said. “We’ll have a baby.”

It was a decision that couples make every day, all over the world – part of the way humans are made: with the built-in desire to see their essence live on in the eyes of the children that they create. In every way, the decision to have a child seemed right to them in that moment. They loved each other deeply, and they wanted to share that love with a child. They were happy with their decision... until it went terribly wrong.