Turnabout Is Fair Play Read online

  Turnabout Is Fair Play

  by Bill Willoughby

  Copyright © 2016 by Bill N. Willoughby

  All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof

  may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever

  without the express written permission of the author

  except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

  Dedication

  I dedicate his book to my wife, Trena Willoughby who has supported me, given me ideas when I was unsure of which turn to take and allowed me time to write.

  She is, without a doubt, the strongest woman I have ever known.

  Even with her disabilities she has always put me first.

  I love you, Trena.

  

  Also, my eternal thanks to my friend, Leigh Ann.

  Table of Contents

  Introduction

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Introduction

  She was the love of my life and had been for over twenty years. It was just she and I. Now it’s just me. We buried her today.

  Now I’m going to find the men who killed her.

  And I’m going to kill them.

  I work security at a government facility. Ironic, huh? Here I am protecting government personnel and property and I couldn’t protect her. My boss said not to think that way but fuck him. He’s going home to his wife tonight. I’m going home to an empty house where my beautiful bride was raped and killed.

  When I walk in the door I see her lying on the floor; legs splayed, panties in a bunch on the floor, blouse pulled up and bra ripped apart. And the blood. Always the blood. They said they cleaned it but I still see it. I’ll always see it. And her. Always her. She never leaves my mind. Our lives together runs through my mind all day every day. It will never stop. And I will always love her.

  And I’m going to kill them. Both of them. The police don’t think I know what they know but I do. It doesn’t take much to hack into their computers from a government facility. I have their names, I have their addresses, I have their pictures.

  I didn’t write any of it down. It’s seared into my mind. I’ll always see them too. But never the three of them together. That would be too much. That would drive me over the edge. Hell, I may already be there. Maybe the hatred will stop after I kill them. Maybe not. I don’t know yet.

  What I do know is they are going to be terrified when I find them. They’re going to feel fear like they’ve never felt before. A real fear to go along with the real pain. And they’re going to die. Slow. Painful. Excruciatingly slow and painful. And I won’t care.

  It won’t bring her back but it will satisfy me. I promised I would always take care of her and I let her down. I deserve pain too. I deserve to die. But I won’t kill myself. We always said we would be together in eternity. And we will. It might take me a while to catch up to her but one day we’ll be together. Again. Forever.

  I hope she forgives me.

  Chapter 1

  Daryl Resnick and Marcus Garvey. That’s their names. One white and one black. Lowlifes. Drug dealers. They’ve been in jail before. More than once actually.

  The addresses on file aren’t current so I’m not sure where they are. I’ll find them though for what they did to my Miranda.

  My anger grows each day. It already consumes me. It’s a mission. It’s a calling. It’s based on love. It’s based on hate. There are emotions running through me that I don’t even know how to describe. But they drive me.

  Daryl Resnick. White male. 28. 5’11”. 145 pounds. Rheumy blue eyes. Slump shouldered. Long, greasy hair that covers his eyes. Bulbous nose that was broken in the past. Dirty face. Spotty beard. Brown teeth of a meth addict. Originally from New Bern, North Carolina. Walking dead man.

  Marcus Garvey. Black male. 32. Jamaican by birth. Chubby. Clean shaven with a porn star mustache. Short afro. Eyes with a distant vision like he’s not even really there. Rings on all of his fingers. Former pimp and dealer. Another walking dead man.

  I have guns. All legally obtained. For the most part. Plenty of ammunition. Tie wraps for handcuffs. Sharp knives. A black Chevy Tahoe with tinted windows. Just like the government has. I’m ready. Ready to do this.

  They’re probably not together. Unless they’re fools. Well, they are fools but if they have any sense they’ll have split up. I’ll start with their families. Put some pressure on them. Maybe some pain too. We’ll see how it goes.

  Resnick first. I head for New Bern early Saturday morning. One month to the day since I buried my bride. Three hours to get there. Straight down Route 17 past Elizabeth City and a dozen or so small towns. But I’m not sightseeing. I’m hell bent for leather to see Mama Resnick. But I’m careful too. All of these redneck North Carolina small town cops love writing tickets. Speed limit sure. But there’s no wasted time. No coffee breaks. No pee breaks. There’s plenty of time for that later.

  Mama Resnick is a widow. She’s 76. Lives alone in a trailer at the end of a dirt road off in the woods. They say in space no one can hear you scream. Probably not back in the woods either. Works for me.

  I’m dressed nice. New jeans, plain white polo shirt, white New Balance 608 cross trainers with the blue logo. Beard trimmed, Hair freshly cut. My badge from the job in a detective’s wallet. She won’t get to look at it long enough to know it’s not real. I made a fake ID to go with it. I made several in fact. Today I am Michael Force.

  I hit the town limits. New Bern, North Carolina; birthplace of Pepsi-Cola, home of historical districts and sissy writer Nicholas Sparks, Victorian mansions, Civil War battlefields and an epicenter of slavery back in the day. Something to be proud of I guess since they mention it on the town’s web site. But I don’t care. I want Mama Resnick and according to the GPS I’m eight minutes away.

  Sure enough there is the unnamed dirt lane just past Cedar Grove cemetery. I look around as I drive down the lane. No one is around except the woman hanging up clothes beside an old, rundown mobile home. No skirting, chickens running free, an older model piece of crap Ford with fading and peeling paint and a modest garden off to the side.

  I guess she doesn’t hear me drive up because she doesn’t turn or look up. I park and take another look around. I stick my .38 Special into my back pocket and open the door. I step out and close it a little harder than I need to to get her attention.

  It works. She looks up and shades her eyes with a withered and bent hand. Arthritis. I remember the look from my grandmother, knurled knuckles and veiny hands. I almost felt sorry for her. Until I remembered she pushed one of the bastards that killed Miranda from her dried up birth canal.

  She gave a little wave and began a slow walk towards me. I advanced on her and met her hallway across the dusty yard.

  “Mrs. Resnick?” I asked.

  “Yes. Who are you?”

  “My name is Michael Force and I am with the Virginia police.” I held up my wallet with the fake ID and badge. S
he squinted her eyes and I flipped it shut.

  “Well, what are you doing down here in North Carolina?”

  I gave her a small smile. “I’m looking for your son, Daryl. Do you know where he is?”

  “Damn!” she spat. “What’s that fool done now?”

  “To be honest, ma’am, he robbed a bank.”

  She shook her head and sighed. “That boy was nothing but trouble since the day he was born. Worthless just like his father. I was so happy when Mike, that’s his father, died and when Daryl left home for good.”

  “I hope you get him and throw him in jail for good. He doesn’t deserve to be among nice people. Robbing, drugs and who knows what all?”

  I thought to myself, “Add in rape and murder.”

  “So do you have any idea where he is, ma’am?”

  “Last I heard he was with his cousin in Raleigh.”

  “How long ago was that?”

  “Couple of weeks I guess.” She looked me straight in the eye a moment and then said, “Do you want the address?”

  So two hours to Raleigh on US-70. More small towns. Not a cop in sight. Lucky me.

  I’d been to Raleigh when I was a teenager but don’t remember a thing about it. Their web site calls it a “blossoming metropolis.” Whatever that means. As far as I was concerned it was too much traffic. Too damn many people in my way. I had put in Daryl’s cousin’s address in the GPS. Seems it was in the middle of downtown. Lucky it was a Saturday so traffic wasn’t too bad. Yeah, right. Worse than home that’s for sure.

  I found the street finally. And there were the apartments. On the corner of West Martin and South West Street. An eight story rundown apartment building. Old. Probably early 1900’s. Dirty red brick. Iron grated windows. No fire escapes. A death trap. Maybe literally depending on who was home.

  I parked a couple of blocks down on South West and hoofed it back to the apartment. Old fashioned buzzers by name plates to be let in. I looked the labels over. Resnick, 7G. I tried the door and it swung open.

  Of course it’d be too much to ask to have an elevator. So I climbed the stairs slowly and quietly. One floor at a time, pausing to look around at each landing. Finally I reached the seventh floor. I looked each way to see where G was. It was at the end of the hall on the right on the backside of the building. It was deathly quiet in the hall except for some music coming from the end of the hall where I was headed.

  I stopped outside of G. That’s where the music was coming from. I listened but didn’t hear anyone moving around. I stood there biting my lower lip trying to decide how to do this. Did I want to go in slow and pull my Virginia cop routine or go in loud and fast? Maybe a combination of the two.

  I pulled a 9mm semi-automatic from my belt, knocked on the door and covered the peep hole with my thumb.

  “Who is it?” Came a voice on the other side. “Hey, what’s the joke? Lemme see who’s there!”

  I garbled some words with a, “Let me in, man” thrown in.

  The locks clicked and I threw my shoulder into the door. Whoever was on the other side fell back and I moved my pistol around the room. Sitting there on the couch was my boy. And he wet his pants.

  The other guy tried to get up but I pointed the 9 right at him and shook my head. He slumped back down on the floor.

  “Good to see you, Daryl,” I said.

  “Who the hell are you, man?”

  I reached into my pocket and pulled the wallet out. “Virginia cop. You’re going back home with me.”

  “The hell I am!” he shouted and tried to run past me and out the door. I brought the butt of the pistol down on his shoulder and he crumbled at my feet. Crying.

  “Hands behind your back,” I said.

  “Hey, dude! You ain’t got no warrant. You can’t just come busting in here like this. I know my rights.” Said the cousin.

  I stared at him. “It’s not your rights I’m worried about. Now, you want me to call the local cops and have them toss this place for drugs or are you going to shut the hell up and let me do my job?”

  Resnick held his hands out to me palms facing. “I don’t want no trouble.”

  Cuz looked at Resnick and said, “Sorry, cuz, you’re on your own.”

  I reached down and jerked Resnick to his feet. I spun him around and put the plastic cuffs on him, pulling them tighter than I needed to.”

  “Ow, man, that hurts!” He yelled.

  “Shut up,” I said. I smacked him on the back of the head and said, “Walk. Slowly.”

  I turned and looked at the other man. “You his cousin?”

  He nodded.

  “Well, tell him goodbye. It’s going to be a long time before you see him again.”

  I got Resnick down the street without being spotted. Wouldn’t be good to be seen leading someone handcuffed down the street. Of course in this neighborhood people would probably turn the other way and wouldn’t want to get involved.

  I shoved him in the back seat and put the seatbelt on him. I wouldn’t want him to get hurt before we got where we were going.

  I followed the signs out of Raleigh to Interstate 95 headed north towards Richmond.

  “What’s going on, man? What did I do?”

  “Shut up.”

  “Talk to me, dammit!”

  I pulled the car over, opened the door, reached down to the floorboard and picked up a rag. And old towel. It reminded me of Miranda. I remember picking it out with her at JC Penney. When it got old she cut it up for rags. It had some oil on it from something I had done to the car. I jerked Resnick’s hair, tilted his head back and shoved the rag into his mouth. He gagged and tried to yell. I slapped him across the face and immediately saw a welt rise up.

  That felt good.

  “I told you to shut up. And I meant it.”

  I got back in the car, pulled out into traffic and got up to the speed limit. A nice ride in the country. My day was looking up already.

  Only thing was… I didn’t know what to do next.

  I drove and thought.

  I had no idea where to go or what to do now that I had Resnick. No plan at all.

  As I came up towards Petersburg an idea began to form and suddenly I knew where to go! It had been years since I’d been there but it was the perfect place.

  When I was young my father had belonged to a hunt club in Charles City called Hawk’s Nest. I don’t guess anyone had been there in years. I hoped I could find it. The road to the clubhouse had been pretty well hidden back then. It might be so overgrown now that I’d never locate it. But I was going to try.

  I got off of Interstate 95 onto I-295 and drove through Prince George County. Not too long later I was turning off onto Route 10 through Hopewell.

  Hopewell is not a nice place. There are several chemical plants there and the smell is overpowering. It’s an infamous place too thanks to the Kepone debacle in the 1970s. That drew national attention.

  Kepone was an insecticide produced by Allied Signal. The company was dumping the waste substance into the nearby James River in the 1960s and 1970s which had a lethal effect on wildlife. As a result of the contamination the James River from Richmond to the Chesapeake Bay was closed to fishing for over a decade.

  Hopewell is also the home to a lot of badasses since it is the home to not one but two federal prisons called the Federal Correctional Complex. It’s also a known speed trap often referred to as the "Million Dollar Mile." I had read one time that Hopewell employs 11 sheriff's deputies working in 14-hour shifts to patrol less than two miles of the highway that lie within the city limits of Hopewell. Of course the sheriff denied that but hundreds of motorists can’t be wrong.

  I made a quick run through the drive thru at McDonald’s to grab something to eat. I hadn’t had anything since I left Norfolk that morning. I didn’t bother getting anything for Resnick. If all went well he wouldn’t even have time to digest the food.

  Once through Hopewell I turned onto Route 156 and crossed the James River on the Benjamin Harris
on Memorial Bridge. A few miles past that I turned right onto the John Tyler Memorial Highway. A long while later I pulled into Charles City. I put Route 614 into the GPS and followed the prompts. I turned left onto 614 once I found it and slowly drove the road looking for the entrance to the hunt club on my right.

  There were no houses in this area and after I went about five miles I came up on a gas station/mini mart. It had changed since I was last in the area but I recognized the place and knew I had gone too far. So I turned around and headed back the way I had come. I was driving slower this time looking to my left for what I knew had to be an overgrown road.

  Evidently Resnick had fallen asleep because I saw his head jerk up in the mirror and his wild eyes looking at me in terror. He began kicking the back of my seat.

  “Stop it!” I yelled but he continued to kick. “One more chance,” I said. He kicked harder. I slammed on the brakes and his body strained forward against the seatbelt and his face slammed into the headrest on my seat. I hit the gas and he

  I looked to my left and saw an old, rusty sign hanging from a tree. It said, “Hawk’s Nest Hunt Club, No Trespassing. It was faded and rusty but I knew that sign and sure enough to the left of it was the overgrown road I had been searching for.

  I put the Tahoe into 4-wheel drive and slowly began my way down the old road. I began to wonder what was back there now. When I was a boy there was a cabin that would sleep eight people, mostly fathers and sons. There was a gas stove for cooking and a wood burning stove for heat.

  Behind the cabin there was an outhouse and a lean-to type of structure where the men would dress out deer and other animals they shot. The smell between the two structures was horrific.

  My mind went back to those cold winter days where my dad and I, Mr. Coleman and his son David and Mr. Cantrell and his two sons would drive up early on a Saturday morning for a week of hunting. We lived in Yorktown then and had to drive through Williamsburg, passing the College of William & Mary to get to Hawk’s Nest.

  Once there we boys would be tasked with gathering enough firewood for however many days we would be staying. Settling in took most of the day Saturday and by the time we were finished with our chores it was dusk and too late to hunt. Of course the next day was Sunday and hunting wasn’t allowed so we’d just hang out around camp or maybe walk the trails to see what was out there, looking for signs of deer, squirrel and rabbits.