Post by cgoddess on Feb 26, 2006 19:53:55 GMT -5
Chapter 13: A Father’s Vengeance
Disclaimer: I do not own Red Eye or The Transporter.
AN: Kudos to all who figured out who ‘Frank’ was. Yes, he is the Transporter, Frank Martin. I think he and Jackson totally live in the same universe. The fact that Frank lives in Miami in Transporter 2 and both that movie and Red Eye came out around the same time caused a plotbunny to form…what if their paths crossed? I adore Frank. If this keeps up, he’ll have a fic of his own one day.
.-.-.-.-.
The driver’s name was Frank Martin; he spoke little but when he did, it was politely to Lisa and with professional humor to Jackson, who was still distraught about his car. A mild rivalry between the two had developed over time; though they both loved their German cars, Frank went with Audi while Jackson preferred his BMWs. It obviously grated at Jackson to have to rely on Frank’s car when his own was being held hostage.
Two or three hours passed almost pleasantly for Lisa, listening to them banter while she watched the scenery out her window. Frank struck her as Jackson’s opposite. Though they shared a love of some things like their cars, their suits, their reputations, they had differing viewpoints on how they worked. Frank revealed that he was more hands-on, not unwilling to physically fight his way out of a situation. Indeed, his job seemed to require it much of the time. Jackson’s point of view was far more hands-off in contrast, where he hired others to do the dirty work. Frank pointed out that his approach was more honest and straightforward. Jackson replied that his method meant he’d likely stay alive longer. Lisa found herself laughing quietly at both of them, until Frank brought up a past job they’d done together.
“There was that one time you did get your hands dirty,” Frank was saying, “I remember, since I was driving for you.”
He didn’t seem to notice the glare that Jackson sent him. Lisa was surprised at the change in Jackson’s posture, one moment relaxed, the next, stiff and angry.
Frank went on, unaware. “Your client was a good guy. He didn’t even flinch when you got back.”
“Enough,” snapped Jackson, startling both Lisa and Frank with the vehemence in his voice. “I don’t want to talk about that.”
Frank shrugged and went back to his driving. The light mood had dissipated; Jackson stared morosely out his window as the miles ticked by. Lisa simply watched him, studied his face and wondered about his curious change of mood.
She didn’t think he noticed, but then he swung his head around to look her in the eye. “You really want to know, Leese?” he asked fiercely. “Want to hear about how I actually killed someone on purpose? How I got my hands dirty for money?”
“I don’t know,” she shot back. “I’m not the one sulking here.”
Frank snorted; suddenly, his eyes were fixed firmly upon the road when Jackson sent a glare at the back of his head. Jackson turned to Lisa, angry. “Sulking? You have no idea. I would have been very happy never to see or hear or even think about you again, but I had no choice.” He paused, then, with sadistic relish, he informed her, “Your dad hired me.”
Lisa felt the blood drain from her face; her hand went subconsciously to her scar. She couldn’t tear her eyes away from Jackson’s. At length, she asked in a shaky voice, “H…he hired you?” Then, more firmly, “After what you did to us?”
“Funny how life works, isn’t it? Though Joe…” he trailed off. “Joe wasn’t what I thought he was, any more than you turned out to be what I thought you were. He wanted me to help him find the man who hurt his little girl. The one before me,” he added spitefully. “That was part of our agreement.” He swore under his breath and ran his fingers through his hair. She read his face the reluctance to tell her anything at all, the recollection that he’d promised to tell her everything.
She also saw that he regretted that promise already. “You’re not getting out of this,” she warned, and he shot her an unreadable look.
“Do you want to hear or not?”
She waited. Frank drove without a word, without even a look back.
Jackson sighed. “I told you Joe visited me in the hospital. He wanted me to know that if I ever hurt you again, he would be ready. That the only reason I overpowered him the last time had nothing to do with skill and everything to do with surprise. I should have realized it the moment he picked up the gun; he knew exactly how to handle it. At that point, though I had become careless and wasn’t thinking or else I’d have figured it out.”
“He was in the war,” she murmured. “Dad was a veteran. He fought in Vietnam, right at the end.”
“Yeah.” He gave a thoughtful sigh. “Just another tidbit I didn’t have about him.”
“For someone who manages such high-profile crimes, your information network is sadly lacking,” she said flatly. “Go on.”
If her jab stung him, he didn’t show it. “So I got out of the hospital. I had already determined not to run across your paths again; I needed to build my name back up after I was fired,” he went on, sounding disgusted. “What I didn’t know was that Joe had some connections of his own, some old Army buddies who owed him favors. He had them find me and pull me back out in the sun to dry.” He stopped, glancing down at his hands. “Your dad could be pretty persuasive. He had something to hold over me, and I didn’t have a choice. I couldn’t turn him down.”
“What did he have?” Lisa almost didn’t ask the question; she was unwilling to stop this confession.
He gave her another of his rueful, wry smiles, his eyes hooded. “My failure. The mere fact that he lived. I couldn’t touch him. Or you, honestly—if I had, I would have been taken out in a heartbeat. Vengeful managers are dead managers. Why do you think I was fired?” He laughed with no humor. “Because I failed my mission? Of course not. Missions go badly all the time. I was fired because I let the job become personal.
“But back to Joe. He approached me like a client looking for a freelancer, so I went to meet him at a cozy little bar and too late, I realized who he was. I would have walked out, but he was waiting for me, called me over to him across the room by name. ‘Jackson Rippner, the man who tried to kill my daughter’, he called me, like an old friend, laughing with the bouncer and the barkeep and every f*cking person in the place. They all knew who I was.”
His hands clenched at the memory of the humiliation. “I had to stay there and take it,” he hissed. “Two hours of your dad telling the story about how you took me down with your trusty field hockey stick, your shoes, your goddamn luck. It was like being at a class reunion with every person you ever hated in school, only worse. I’m not a fighter, I’m a manager. I arrange things, set up schedules, hire subcontractors like hit men and drivers. There was no way I could leave without going through a half dozen people who could break me in two. So I sat there, drank Guinness, smiled whenever your dad thumped me on the shoulder and told some detail like it was a joke at my expense.”
Lisa felt a momentary sense of achievement. Her father had outwitted Jackson on his own terms, taken him down in such a way that left Jackson at Joe’s mercy in front of too many witnesses for Jackson to retaliate. She cheered her father’s method, wished she could have been there to see it herself.
Jackson read this on her face and poorly hid a sneer. “I’m glad you find this entertaining.”
“Naturally, I do.” She lifted her chin. “It was the best you deserved.”
He looked away. “I thought that meeting would never end. Someone took our picture at one point—that’s the one you keep trying to look at. ‘Smile for the camera’, Joe was saying, while everyone around us laughed at me and egged him on.” He stared out the window as he spoke. “Finally, at the end of the night, when I hoped I could escape, Joe suddenly became serious and got down to business.
“Apparently, he really did want my services. He had the money, and now he had backup, and at that point, I couldn’t turn him down. I needed the work. I needed to rebuild my reputation; there is nothing like working off a debt to a former enemy to do that. So he told me: ‘I want you to find the man who hurt my little girl, and I want you make sure he never hurts another living being.’ I thought he was crazy, or at least joking, but he meant it.”
Lisa shuddered, wrapped her arms around herself. Her father had solicited one of her tormentors to…what, kill the other?
As if she’d spoken the thought aloud, Jackson shook his head. “He wasn’t asking me to kill the guy—just persuade him. Using whatever means necessary.” He smirked. “I never would have pegged your dad as the vengeful type, but I guess I snapped something inside him. When all was said and done, I had to admire him. ‘Never again’ seems to be your family motto.”
She bit her lip, closed her eyes. There had been a period when her father had seemed distracted, the year after she’d moved north. It was clear now just what had been bothering him.
Jackson gave an introspective little laugh that made her look up at him again. “It was easier than I expected to find the guy. He had stayed in Miami, had been taken in on a separate—but very similar—rape charge shortly after yours and after eighteen months, he was back out on the street. He lived alone.” Jackson’s tone changed to one of disgust. “When I broke into his place, he hardly even fought back, he was so drunk. I thought I’d pass out from the smell.”
“You don’t have to tell me this anymore,” she whispered. Jackson’s tale brought too many memories, too many nightmares to life. Though on some level she wanted to know what he’d done, another part of her resisted the temptation and begged to leave the past alone.
He, however, wouldn’t let her. “Oh, but Leese,” he murmured, leaning close, enjoying her discomfort, “I’m just getting to the best part.” He grinned again, having fun once more now that he saw her back away from the story. “You wanted me to tell you, remember? Where was I—oh, yes. So I had gone in after tracking that worthless waste of carbon for weeks. I’d called Frank here to drive us, since I didn’t want anything to go wrong. Your dad insisted on coming, too, though I made him wait down in the car. I went up alone, planning on smacking the guy around a little, threatening him. You know what I mean.”
“Stop it.” She couldn’t look away; the old fear, the old helplessness rose in her chest but she couldn’t look away from Jackson’s fierce blue gaze. He held her transfixed with his hypnotic voice and her own morbid desire to know the fate of her first attacker.
He went on, ruthless, savoring the telling. “But I didn’t expect that, when I got there, something else would take over. I saw him on the floor where I’d thrown him, frightened and whimpering, moaning, begging for his life. I kicked him in the gut, ready to make my last threats and leave, when something caught my eye.”
Neither of them looked away now. In the mirror, Frank’s eyes flickered to them once or twice, but he stayed out of it and drove.
“In my research, I had learned what the psychiatrists and the prison counselors decided about him—that this piece of sh*t was just misguided, struggling with power issues and his way of coping was to attack defenseless women. They let him go on a suspended sentence because he had ‘changed’,” Jackson spat. “But I found out the truth. He was a hunter, Leese. A hunter who took trophies and put them in a little framed shadow box on the wall as a reminder of what he had done.”
He was angry now, but not at her. He was angry at the man, angry at himself for being angry at all. She felt like she would suffocate in the heavy air. She had to gasp in order to speak. “Trophies…?”
His eyes went cold, the mask dropping back into place with difficulty. “Every girl he raped—” She flinched at the word, spoken with such venom, “—every single one, he took something. I saw which one was yours even from across the room. I got a close enough look at a field hockey stick to recognize it at a glance. You had a keychain of one, didn’t you? A little one, painted with your school colors.”
Lisa thought she would break. She had forgotten, believed it had just fallen off sometime, never gave much thought to its fate. It was such a small thing, so minor and silly.
“And you know what, Leese?” His voice dropped, the words low, the rasp turning his tone to gravel. “Suddenly, I understood what drove Joe to do this. Why he hired me to find this arsehole and teach him a lesson. And I decided that the lesson was going to be the last one he ever learned.”
“You killed him.” She almost mouthed the words, knowing they were true. “Why…what—why did it matter?”
“Because when I followed you, when I did things to you, I had a reason. Disagree with the reason all you like, but it was there. You were chosen deliberately for your job, and until you stabbed me, I had no plans to hurt you or Joe if at all possible.” He took a deep, shuddering breath. “Then there was this guy who had no reason. He just wanted to hurt someone, and you were his target. He followed you and didn’t know who or what you were, just that you were female and pretty and vulnerable. And then he marked you, like a hunter wounding a deer and leaving it caught in a trap. And you weren’t the only one. And I saw, in that moment, the difference between him and me, and how much smaller that difference almost became when I went after you.”
Her heart ached for all the other victims, the other girls who shared her experience. She wondered how many of them would ever notice something missing, some shred of their dignity always enshrined on their attacker’s wall. She shuddered violently, and only then could she look away.
The action broke the tension between them; Jackson shifted, too, and was quiet for a while as he collected his thoughts. When he spoke again, his voice had regained some normality. “I put my gun to his forehead, shot him twice and took the box down from the wall. It was easy enough to light it on fire, to drop it on the table covered with papers and food boxes and all the other crap the guy had collected. Then I left, came downstairs, pulled the fire alarm, and then we took off. Your dad just looked at me in the car. He never asked me what I did, but I think he knew. He paid me, and we never brought it up again.”
.-.-.-.-.
Miles of highway passed before anyone spoke, mile after mile of dark road hissing white noise under the Audi’s tires. When they pulled off the road to fill up at a gas station, everyone got out to stretch their legs.
“I’m going to get something to drink,” announced Jackson. To Lisa, he said, “Don’t wander far.”
She didn’t answer him beyond a nod. He watched her for a moment, then went into the convenience store. Frank was busy pumping gas. Lisa needed a moment of quiet, so she walked to the guard rail at the edge of the road.
Nothing much was around; there was the garishly-lit station, a McDonald’s, a few dark buildings, one of which had a ‘For Rent’ sign in the window. The other side of the street was largely uninhabited save for the ubiquitous kudzu and some highway trees. She wrapped her arms around herself again, looked up at the night sky.
In all her nightmares, the ones she had about that horrifying day, she had never thought to wonder if anyone else had been attacked by her rapist. She hadn’t even known his name to press charges, could hardly remember what he’d looked like even though the rest she recalled in too-vivid detail. When Jackson had told her about finding him, she had wondered how he could have done so. She felt a sense of isolation; what if she had gone looking for other women who had endured her horror? Did they feel the same way she did, that there couldn’t possibly be anyone out there who understood?
She shivered. The man was dead, and had been for a couple of years, and she hadn’t known. There had never been a sense of relief for no reason, never a stray thought that she was safe. Funny; she’d always thought that her scar would tingle or she would get some sign that it was over. Of course, she hadn’t gotten a sign about her father, either, and had to be told by police officers she didn’t know.
The crunch of gravel behind her announced Jackson’s presence. She wondered if he was making the noise on purpose. “Frank’s all set,” he said. “Water?”
Lisa took the bottle and cracked it open, suddenly thirsty. When she had taken a long drink, she saw him already walking away. “Jackson—”
He paused, half looked over his shoulder, said nothing.
“Thank you.” They were two of the hardest, truest words she’d ever spoken in her life.
Even from behind, she could see the set of his shoulders change, could almost feel the quiet sigh. She imagined he must have closed his eyes, contemplating. Then he was walking away again, back to the car, leaving her to collect herself before she followed.
.-.-.-.-.
AN2: As much as I dislike ‘explaining’ things about my writing, I decided that the issue that inspired Joe’s actions really needed to be brought up. Since this isn’t really the place to do so, I would like to ask you all to check out my LiveJournal for the whole story. You can find it friends-locked at divinebird.livejournal.com under the subject line “Parents, Soldiers, Criminals”. Please do look, comment, whatever.
And now you have a little look into how I approach my writing, and what influences my characters’ emotions. Thank you all for reading so far, and I hope you continue to read through the end.
Disclaimer: I do not own Red Eye or The Transporter.
AN: Kudos to all who figured out who ‘Frank’ was. Yes, he is the Transporter, Frank Martin. I think he and Jackson totally live in the same universe. The fact that Frank lives in Miami in Transporter 2 and both that movie and Red Eye came out around the same time caused a plotbunny to form…what if their paths crossed? I adore Frank. If this keeps up, he’ll have a fic of his own one day.
.-.-.-.-.
The driver’s name was Frank Martin; he spoke little but when he did, it was politely to Lisa and with professional humor to Jackson, who was still distraught about his car. A mild rivalry between the two had developed over time; though they both loved their German cars, Frank went with Audi while Jackson preferred his BMWs. It obviously grated at Jackson to have to rely on Frank’s car when his own was being held hostage.
Two or three hours passed almost pleasantly for Lisa, listening to them banter while she watched the scenery out her window. Frank struck her as Jackson’s opposite. Though they shared a love of some things like their cars, their suits, their reputations, they had differing viewpoints on how they worked. Frank revealed that he was more hands-on, not unwilling to physically fight his way out of a situation. Indeed, his job seemed to require it much of the time. Jackson’s point of view was far more hands-off in contrast, where he hired others to do the dirty work. Frank pointed out that his approach was more honest and straightforward. Jackson replied that his method meant he’d likely stay alive longer. Lisa found herself laughing quietly at both of them, until Frank brought up a past job they’d done together.
“There was that one time you did get your hands dirty,” Frank was saying, “I remember, since I was driving for you.”
He didn’t seem to notice the glare that Jackson sent him. Lisa was surprised at the change in Jackson’s posture, one moment relaxed, the next, stiff and angry.
Frank went on, unaware. “Your client was a good guy. He didn’t even flinch when you got back.”
“Enough,” snapped Jackson, startling both Lisa and Frank with the vehemence in his voice. “I don’t want to talk about that.”
Frank shrugged and went back to his driving. The light mood had dissipated; Jackson stared morosely out his window as the miles ticked by. Lisa simply watched him, studied his face and wondered about his curious change of mood.
She didn’t think he noticed, but then he swung his head around to look her in the eye. “You really want to know, Leese?” he asked fiercely. “Want to hear about how I actually killed someone on purpose? How I got my hands dirty for money?”
“I don’t know,” she shot back. “I’m not the one sulking here.”
Frank snorted; suddenly, his eyes were fixed firmly upon the road when Jackson sent a glare at the back of his head. Jackson turned to Lisa, angry. “Sulking? You have no idea. I would have been very happy never to see or hear or even think about you again, but I had no choice.” He paused, then, with sadistic relish, he informed her, “Your dad hired me.”
Lisa felt the blood drain from her face; her hand went subconsciously to her scar. She couldn’t tear her eyes away from Jackson’s. At length, she asked in a shaky voice, “H…he hired you?” Then, more firmly, “After what you did to us?”
“Funny how life works, isn’t it? Though Joe…” he trailed off. “Joe wasn’t what I thought he was, any more than you turned out to be what I thought you were. He wanted me to help him find the man who hurt his little girl. The one before me,” he added spitefully. “That was part of our agreement.” He swore under his breath and ran his fingers through his hair. She read his face the reluctance to tell her anything at all, the recollection that he’d promised to tell her everything.
She also saw that he regretted that promise already. “You’re not getting out of this,” she warned, and he shot her an unreadable look.
“Do you want to hear or not?”
She waited. Frank drove without a word, without even a look back.
Jackson sighed. “I told you Joe visited me in the hospital. He wanted me to know that if I ever hurt you again, he would be ready. That the only reason I overpowered him the last time had nothing to do with skill and everything to do with surprise. I should have realized it the moment he picked up the gun; he knew exactly how to handle it. At that point, though I had become careless and wasn’t thinking or else I’d have figured it out.”
“He was in the war,” she murmured. “Dad was a veteran. He fought in Vietnam, right at the end.”
“Yeah.” He gave a thoughtful sigh. “Just another tidbit I didn’t have about him.”
“For someone who manages such high-profile crimes, your information network is sadly lacking,” she said flatly. “Go on.”
If her jab stung him, he didn’t show it. “So I got out of the hospital. I had already determined not to run across your paths again; I needed to build my name back up after I was fired,” he went on, sounding disgusted. “What I didn’t know was that Joe had some connections of his own, some old Army buddies who owed him favors. He had them find me and pull me back out in the sun to dry.” He stopped, glancing down at his hands. “Your dad could be pretty persuasive. He had something to hold over me, and I didn’t have a choice. I couldn’t turn him down.”
“What did he have?” Lisa almost didn’t ask the question; she was unwilling to stop this confession.
He gave her another of his rueful, wry smiles, his eyes hooded. “My failure. The mere fact that he lived. I couldn’t touch him. Or you, honestly—if I had, I would have been taken out in a heartbeat. Vengeful managers are dead managers. Why do you think I was fired?” He laughed with no humor. “Because I failed my mission? Of course not. Missions go badly all the time. I was fired because I let the job become personal.
“But back to Joe. He approached me like a client looking for a freelancer, so I went to meet him at a cozy little bar and too late, I realized who he was. I would have walked out, but he was waiting for me, called me over to him across the room by name. ‘Jackson Rippner, the man who tried to kill my daughter’, he called me, like an old friend, laughing with the bouncer and the barkeep and every f*cking person in the place. They all knew who I was.”
His hands clenched at the memory of the humiliation. “I had to stay there and take it,” he hissed. “Two hours of your dad telling the story about how you took me down with your trusty field hockey stick, your shoes, your goddamn luck. It was like being at a class reunion with every person you ever hated in school, only worse. I’m not a fighter, I’m a manager. I arrange things, set up schedules, hire subcontractors like hit men and drivers. There was no way I could leave without going through a half dozen people who could break me in two. So I sat there, drank Guinness, smiled whenever your dad thumped me on the shoulder and told some detail like it was a joke at my expense.”
Lisa felt a momentary sense of achievement. Her father had outwitted Jackson on his own terms, taken him down in such a way that left Jackson at Joe’s mercy in front of too many witnesses for Jackson to retaliate. She cheered her father’s method, wished she could have been there to see it herself.
Jackson read this on her face and poorly hid a sneer. “I’m glad you find this entertaining.”
“Naturally, I do.” She lifted her chin. “It was the best you deserved.”
He looked away. “I thought that meeting would never end. Someone took our picture at one point—that’s the one you keep trying to look at. ‘Smile for the camera’, Joe was saying, while everyone around us laughed at me and egged him on.” He stared out the window as he spoke. “Finally, at the end of the night, when I hoped I could escape, Joe suddenly became serious and got down to business.
“Apparently, he really did want my services. He had the money, and now he had backup, and at that point, I couldn’t turn him down. I needed the work. I needed to rebuild my reputation; there is nothing like working off a debt to a former enemy to do that. So he told me: ‘I want you to find the man who hurt my little girl, and I want you make sure he never hurts another living being.’ I thought he was crazy, or at least joking, but he meant it.”
Lisa shuddered, wrapped her arms around herself. Her father had solicited one of her tormentors to…what, kill the other?
As if she’d spoken the thought aloud, Jackson shook his head. “He wasn’t asking me to kill the guy—just persuade him. Using whatever means necessary.” He smirked. “I never would have pegged your dad as the vengeful type, but I guess I snapped something inside him. When all was said and done, I had to admire him. ‘Never again’ seems to be your family motto.”
She bit her lip, closed her eyes. There had been a period when her father had seemed distracted, the year after she’d moved north. It was clear now just what had been bothering him.
Jackson gave an introspective little laugh that made her look up at him again. “It was easier than I expected to find the guy. He had stayed in Miami, had been taken in on a separate—but very similar—rape charge shortly after yours and after eighteen months, he was back out on the street. He lived alone.” Jackson’s tone changed to one of disgust. “When I broke into his place, he hardly even fought back, he was so drunk. I thought I’d pass out from the smell.”
“You don’t have to tell me this anymore,” she whispered. Jackson’s tale brought too many memories, too many nightmares to life. Though on some level she wanted to know what he’d done, another part of her resisted the temptation and begged to leave the past alone.
He, however, wouldn’t let her. “Oh, but Leese,” he murmured, leaning close, enjoying her discomfort, “I’m just getting to the best part.” He grinned again, having fun once more now that he saw her back away from the story. “You wanted me to tell you, remember? Where was I—oh, yes. So I had gone in after tracking that worthless waste of carbon for weeks. I’d called Frank here to drive us, since I didn’t want anything to go wrong. Your dad insisted on coming, too, though I made him wait down in the car. I went up alone, planning on smacking the guy around a little, threatening him. You know what I mean.”
“Stop it.” She couldn’t look away; the old fear, the old helplessness rose in her chest but she couldn’t look away from Jackson’s fierce blue gaze. He held her transfixed with his hypnotic voice and her own morbid desire to know the fate of her first attacker.
He went on, ruthless, savoring the telling. “But I didn’t expect that, when I got there, something else would take over. I saw him on the floor where I’d thrown him, frightened and whimpering, moaning, begging for his life. I kicked him in the gut, ready to make my last threats and leave, when something caught my eye.”
Neither of them looked away now. In the mirror, Frank’s eyes flickered to them once or twice, but he stayed out of it and drove.
“In my research, I had learned what the psychiatrists and the prison counselors decided about him—that this piece of sh*t was just misguided, struggling with power issues and his way of coping was to attack defenseless women. They let him go on a suspended sentence because he had ‘changed’,” Jackson spat. “But I found out the truth. He was a hunter, Leese. A hunter who took trophies and put them in a little framed shadow box on the wall as a reminder of what he had done.”
He was angry now, but not at her. He was angry at the man, angry at himself for being angry at all. She felt like she would suffocate in the heavy air. She had to gasp in order to speak. “Trophies…?”
His eyes went cold, the mask dropping back into place with difficulty. “Every girl he raped—” She flinched at the word, spoken with such venom, “—every single one, he took something. I saw which one was yours even from across the room. I got a close enough look at a field hockey stick to recognize it at a glance. You had a keychain of one, didn’t you? A little one, painted with your school colors.”
Lisa thought she would break. She had forgotten, believed it had just fallen off sometime, never gave much thought to its fate. It was such a small thing, so minor and silly.
“And you know what, Leese?” His voice dropped, the words low, the rasp turning his tone to gravel. “Suddenly, I understood what drove Joe to do this. Why he hired me to find this arsehole and teach him a lesson. And I decided that the lesson was going to be the last one he ever learned.”
“You killed him.” She almost mouthed the words, knowing they were true. “Why…what—why did it matter?”
“Because when I followed you, when I did things to you, I had a reason. Disagree with the reason all you like, but it was there. You were chosen deliberately for your job, and until you stabbed me, I had no plans to hurt you or Joe if at all possible.” He took a deep, shuddering breath. “Then there was this guy who had no reason. He just wanted to hurt someone, and you were his target. He followed you and didn’t know who or what you were, just that you were female and pretty and vulnerable. And then he marked you, like a hunter wounding a deer and leaving it caught in a trap. And you weren’t the only one. And I saw, in that moment, the difference between him and me, and how much smaller that difference almost became when I went after you.”
Her heart ached for all the other victims, the other girls who shared her experience. She wondered how many of them would ever notice something missing, some shred of their dignity always enshrined on their attacker’s wall. She shuddered violently, and only then could she look away.
The action broke the tension between them; Jackson shifted, too, and was quiet for a while as he collected his thoughts. When he spoke again, his voice had regained some normality. “I put my gun to his forehead, shot him twice and took the box down from the wall. It was easy enough to light it on fire, to drop it on the table covered with papers and food boxes and all the other crap the guy had collected. Then I left, came downstairs, pulled the fire alarm, and then we took off. Your dad just looked at me in the car. He never asked me what I did, but I think he knew. He paid me, and we never brought it up again.”
.-.-.-.-.
Miles of highway passed before anyone spoke, mile after mile of dark road hissing white noise under the Audi’s tires. When they pulled off the road to fill up at a gas station, everyone got out to stretch their legs.
“I’m going to get something to drink,” announced Jackson. To Lisa, he said, “Don’t wander far.”
She didn’t answer him beyond a nod. He watched her for a moment, then went into the convenience store. Frank was busy pumping gas. Lisa needed a moment of quiet, so she walked to the guard rail at the edge of the road.
Nothing much was around; there was the garishly-lit station, a McDonald’s, a few dark buildings, one of which had a ‘For Rent’ sign in the window. The other side of the street was largely uninhabited save for the ubiquitous kudzu and some highway trees. She wrapped her arms around herself again, looked up at the night sky.
In all her nightmares, the ones she had about that horrifying day, she had never thought to wonder if anyone else had been attacked by her rapist. She hadn’t even known his name to press charges, could hardly remember what he’d looked like even though the rest she recalled in too-vivid detail. When Jackson had told her about finding him, she had wondered how he could have done so. She felt a sense of isolation; what if she had gone looking for other women who had endured her horror? Did they feel the same way she did, that there couldn’t possibly be anyone out there who understood?
She shivered. The man was dead, and had been for a couple of years, and she hadn’t known. There had never been a sense of relief for no reason, never a stray thought that she was safe. Funny; she’d always thought that her scar would tingle or she would get some sign that it was over. Of course, she hadn’t gotten a sign about her father, either, and had to be told by police officers she didn’t know.
The crunch of gravel behind her announced Jackson’s presence. She wondered if he was making the noise on purpose. “Frank’s all set,” he said. “Water?”
Lisa took the bottle and cracked it open, suddenly thirsty. When she had taken a long drink, she saw him already walking away. “Jackson—”
He paused, half looked over his shoulder, said nothing.
“Thank you.” They were two of the hardest, truest words she’d ever spoken in her life.
Even from behind, she could see the set of his shoulders change, could almost feel the quiet sigh. She imagined he must have closed his eyes, contemplating. Then he was walking away again, back to the car, leaving her to collect herself before she followed.
.-.-.-.-.
AN2: As much as I dislike ‘explaining’ things about my writing, I decided that the issue that inspired Joe’s actions really needed to be brought up. Since this isn’t really the place to do so, I would like to ask you all to check out my LiveJournal for the whole story. You can find it friends-locked at divinebird.livejournal.com under the subject line “Parents, Soldiers, Criminals”. Please do look, comment, whatever.
And now you have a little look into how I approach my writing, and what influences my characters’ emotions. Thank you all for reading so far, and I hope you continue to read through the end.
That's crazy! Woah. 
