Chapter 12

The next day, Mike, Mary and I talked for an hour or so. They’d gotten me a lawyer to help with the lawsuit and introduced me before they left. He was hard-nosed and middle-aged. He told me what he’d been able to find out and a lot of it was the same as Eve. Police had compelled a blood sample when she refused the breath test and she tested positive for cocaine in addition to having a blood alcohol that should have rendered her incapable of even standing up.

“You should be prepared for an initial offer to settle the matter out of court. Laugh at it,” he told me. “Your story is worth a million dollars to the right gossip outlet. TMZ would pay it in a heartbeat to get you to talk about your injuries. They’ll offer you about half that and medical costs.”

I nodded. “I’ve heard that the other driver has a history of fucking up behind the wheel,” I wrote. “This is supposed to be her third time crashing a car.”

“THIRD?!!?” he blurted. “I only have two!”

“She supposedly stole her father’s car twice. Once when she was fourteen. She only hit a parked car that time and money smoothed it over. Last time, someone got hurt and the money made it go away. I’m her third strike.

He mulled that over. “You found that out from a hospital bed?” he asked.

“Not exactly,” I admitted. “I work in computer security. I have several friends, colleagues and co-workers that are what you’d call white-hat hackers. When word got out that I was hurt by a drunk driver, they started looking into the driver.”

He nodded. “I didn’t know about the parked car. We might not be able to use that.”

I nodded. “You have the traffic cam footage from the crash?” I asked.

“There is none,” he said. “They said there’s a technical glitch that deleted all the footage and the backups.”

“That’s highly suspicious,” I wrote. “It sounds like Daddy’s money is buying some ‘justice’ for his little girl.”

He nodded. “Unfortunately, all we can do is demand an investigation, which they’ll drag their feet on.”

“I’ll see if I can get the footage,” I told him.

“Your friends?”

I nodded again. Damn it! I needed to stop that.

He smiled. “If we can get our hands on that, we’ve got them over a barrel,” he said.

“If it’s like that, then I want to bankrupt them both. Her father’s just as guilty as she is at this point. He’s proven to her that she can do whatever she wants and there’s no consequences. So long as he has the means, he’ll continue to bail her out.”

He nodded. “I like your attitude. Go for the throat and to Hell with her being sixteen.”

I shrugged feebly. “She could have killed someone. It could just as easily have been a family of four coming home from a New Years party. Me being in a truck probably saved my life. If she’d slammed into a car instead of a higher vehicle, I’d probably be dead. Did the cops calculate how fast she was going?”

“They were on a high-speed chase. It was over 90,” he told me.

“I’d personally love to see jail time for her. I know it’ll be minimal, but it might be the wake-up call she needs to get her head out of her ass.”

He chuckled at that. “I expect that she’ll try to sneak in here to try to make you a more personal offer to settle everything. I’m going to have a recording device planted in the room so that you’re protected from that. We’ll have to put up some sort of sign that the room’s under surveillance, for legal purposes. I’ve also asked that your visitor list be restricted to the people that have been to see you already. That way, if she’s in here, she’s trespassing.”

“I have a few others that I expect, but that should be fine. Just talk to the family and let them know that everyone coming to the hospital to see me needs to let the staff know ahead of time.” I wrote that down and flexed my hand, noting that it was starting to cramp with all the writing I’d been doing. “Wish I had my laptop,” I commented.

“I’ll let them know outside that you want it,” he promised.

We worked out a system where we put a sign on the door that declared the room was under surveillance so that no one could enter the room without knowing they’d be recorded and the recorder turned out to be a camera that did both video and audio. We put it in the back corner, so it would see the door when it opened.

Mike and Mary went home after bringing the kids in to see me after the lawyer left. They said they’d call and promised to be back when I needed them. Linda and Bill left a few days after that and that left me with my mothers here. They took good care of me, making sure I had what I needed, but eventually they had to return to their lives too. Rosa returned to Austin with a short letter for Lizzy, thanking her for being concerned and assuring her that I was on the road to recovery. I was promised a place to stay if I needed to convalesce. I had no doubt about the care I’d get. Rosa would see to it. She’d march into my favorite strip club and enlist the ladies that remembered me to come play nursie until I was well enough to play horsey.

Then it was just me and the biological one. It wasn’t so bad. I told her I’d forgiven Bill and even let him hug me. That made her happy and her eyes brimmed with tears. The Pierces came to see me and they were horrified at the state of me. I was a mess of casts and surgeries. My prognosis was at least three months of bed rest and another three to six months of physiotherapy. They stayed for a few nights, staying in the apartment with Mom. I talked to them about seeing Sabrina during the crash and talking to her a couple of times in the past when I’d needed her. The thought of their daughter being able to watch over me gave them some peace and we all wept a little. They were tears of relief though, not sorrow or loss as they’d been in the past.

We talked and they told me that if I was ever coming back to Denver, I could stay with them. I’d gotten the same promise from Linda and from Mom. I promised them that I’d let them know the next time I was passing close to Denver. “I haven’t been back since the accident, but your place was always my first stop when I talked about visiting.”

“Not your mother’s place?” Hope asked, surprised.

“Things were very ... strained in the family, even before the accident. Afterwards, they broke down completely. This is the first time I’ve spoken to some of them since the end of my first year at college.”

They nodded, understanding. “We know that if Sabrina had lived, that the two of you would be married by now,” Carl told me. “We’ve come to think of you as our own. I know we never told you that, but I know that I would have given Sabrina away to you someday, so I hope you’ll think of us as family.”

I smiled at them both. “I already do,” I told them. “I don’t call as much as I used to, but I’ve tried to keep in touch. I’m sorry I didn’t call on New Year’s. I decided to sleep in that day,” I smirked a little at the joke.

Hope smiled at me and leaned over to kiss my cheek. “You just get well and promise us more grandchildren. Mike can’t do all the work.”

I chuckled at that. “I promise,” I said. “Once I find a girl that I can be proud to bring home to meet you.”

We had a pleasant visit and they got along well enough with my mother, but had avoided the topic of her third son while they were there.

January turned into February. I hadn’t heard from Chloe Sinclair, her father or a lawyer so far. I HAD gotten my settlement for the accident in Denver. The $40,000 was a drop in the bucket compared to my medical fees here and I still felt it was a slap in the face for the years of anguish I’d spent after losing Sabrina, but it was the way the system worked.

Eve had come through and supplied (anonymously, of course) all the traffic cam footage that had been “lost” by LAPD. The lawyer was delighted by that and told me that he was still playing cat and mouse with their lawyers and they were claiming that Chloe was just a passenger in the SUV and the driver had taken off running and not been noticed. Eve had also left behind some sort of program to tell her when people accessed the specific traffic cams from my accident and had the login of the person that deleted them. That got turned over to the District Attorney and turned into a rather embarrassing investigation. I heard later on that he ended up in a wheelchair when someone in prison found out he’d been a cop. That all happened much later though. It was decided that I was going to get my pound of flesh first.

Valentine’s Day, the casts on my arm and leg came off. I was still on bed rest for another month due to the pelvic fracture and hip damage, but I had both my arms working again.

Eve came to see me about once a week. She’d hacked the hospital records to see how my condition was. She and I settled into a friendship that didn’t quite manage to develop past friends into more. We’d never be lovers, that was for sure, but she was more comfortable with me. It turned out that she was NOT the girl in the costume picture she’d sent to me. She’d found it online.

“When you’re feeling all better, I have a present for you,” she said with a smirk when she came to see me late in the day on Valentine’s Day.

“Oh?” I asked, intrigued. “Your gift of the traffic cams was about the best thing I could have hoped for,” I told her. “What do you have that can top that?”

“You’ll see,” she said with another smirk. “Before I give it to you though, I need to give you a high end course on actual hacking. When you’re working for the government or law enforcement, they generally frown on some of the techniques and the particular uses for them.”

I nodded and we got to work on turning me into one of the bad guys. It wasn’t about being a criminal, at least not to me. I learned how to protect my identity while hacking, how to prevent myself from getting caught by police or by the kinds of private security firms that I actually worked for and she got me into techniques. She didn’t have me do anything illegal, but showed me where the weak points were and how to use them to break in. She helped me find the back-doors and promised to show me spots in the deep web and dark web that I could use to further my hacking hobby later on if I chose to follow the rabbit-hole.

It was interesting and some of it made me more interested in my own job, thinking of these problems as leaks and wondering how to plug them. Others made me think of selfish ways to use them. There were several porn sites that I’d never wanted to pay to access, but thought I might try to access from below to get the content. I never planned to get rich or collapse the banking system or hack the CIA or any of that legend-level hacking. I thought it might be fun to access some free porn and play a prank or two.

I was starting to see from Eve’s lessons how immensely hard it was to hide from someone online and was kind of proud that I’d managed to stay under her radar for so long in Austin. She had access to a lot of databases that she shouldn’t and she managed to keep access without anyone coming down on her.

Mom had stayed with me through this time and I was set to be released sometime in April. I’d started my physical rehabilitation with my arm and some gentle movements of my leg. By the time the doctors told me that my pelvis was healed enough to get up and moving, my muscles had deteriorated a lot. I had both Mom and Eve worried about me when they saw me after my first sessions. I was white-faced, weeping from the pain and desperate for relief and sleep.

I gradually got better and the pain medication got to be less and less necessary. I got to like the pain-killers though and that was a problem. The doctors pulled me off of them as soon as I told them I was worried about addiction from my own reactions. After that, I had to make do with far less impressive relief and I struggled through most of April.

Dad finally came to see me about a week before I was released. He hated to fly and the roads through Colorado were too treacherous in winter to drive, but he finally managed to find a window of decent weather and drove down to see me. I’d kept everyone aware of my condition with photos and video chats, so he wasn’t in shock at my condition. He admitted that I looked a lot better than I had initially. Fortunately, I was able to speak at that point, the swelling in my jaw and face had gone down quite a bit and the bones had healed. I was still short nine teeth, but that was a problem for a dental surgeon once I was on the road to recovery.

“Look, Pete,” he started awkwardly, “I’m not real good with words. I’m glad you’re doing better. We were all worried when we found out about the accident. Your brother said that you and he talked some while he was here and straightened things out. I was happy to hear that. I was worried that you weren’t going to ever get to a point that you could forgive him. That’s what I was trying to do that day. I’m sorry that I didn’t listen to you when you tried to leave.”

I nodded. “I’m sorry I kicked you,” I told him. “There was no way we were gonna solve anything in that room. Everyone told me that they were angry or disapproved, but you all had time to process it. Trapped in a room with them and you and Mom supporting them, I lost my mind. At the time, it was them or me, in my head. I couldn’t be anything but enraged at them and you two weren’t far behind. I needed time to get out of there. Things might have been better if I’d woken up without them watching me, but I still would have needed to get out of there. I was bitter and pissed off. I’d held back from a lot of the party life in LA because I was trying to stay faithful to Linda for that first year. It pissed me off to know that they’d been at it even before I left.”

He nodded. “I’m good at construction,” he admitted. “Not so good with people. Your mother told me afterwards that calling you names earned me some of what I’d gotten. Choking you out accounted for the rest. I’m just glad you stopped when you did.”

I nodded. “I didn’t want to hurt you. I wanted to kill Billy, but Mike got him back into the house before I could get my hands on him.”

“That’s okay,” he said. “There were plenty of days I wanted to kill Billy myself. Especially in those early days with him and Linda. I couldn’t well whip him every time he came home from a date with her, but every so often, he’d find himself in trouble for something minor. I never grounded you for not shoveling the driveway, did I?”

I shook my head. “No, I can’t say that you did,” I pointed out. “Billy got grounded for that?”

“Twice,” he confided. “I’d generally find something to punish him for once a month and I’d ground him for it. Your mother gave me grief about it a few times, but none of us approved of what they did to you. Once it came out ... Well, if he hadn’t been standing with Linda, I might have let you boys scrap it out. The way he told you was designed to push your buttons. We didn’t say anything to him until after Linda’s prom and then we lowered the boom on him. We sat the two of them down and told them that they’d torn our family apart with their reckless attitude. We grounded Billy for the summer and told Linda that we had no control over her to ground her, but that she couldn’t come over to the house while Billy was grounded.”

This was a story I hadn’t heard before and I smiled a little, thinking about how that must have irritated Billy. “How long did it last?” I asked.

“We let him off after a month,” he admitted. “By the end of it, he was miserable. Nothing like having your brother steal your girl, but still pretty miserable. We told them both that if they ever fucked up like that again, we’d never speak to them again.”

“It’s nice to know that the road wasn’t smooth for them,” I said, “not just from the standpoint of an angry victim, but because they worked for it. They’re committed to each other and that’s important for their marriage.”

“An expert on marriage now?” he asked, amused.

“Mike and Mary were my whole family for years. I watched their marriage from the start. I felt like Sabrina and I would have had the same kind of relationship if she’d made it.”

He nodded. “I wished we could have known her,” he said sadly. “She looked like she made you very happy. I ... WE were all glad of that. I may have made some crack or another about it, but I hoped she’d help you get over the anger.”

“She did,” I told him. “She still does.” I talked to him about the times Sabrina came to visit me and he nodded attentively. Grandma Hamilton had been superstitious and he was familiar with ghosts and spirits. The missing bottle was an interesting one to him.