Chapter 2

I joined the Marines the day I turned eighteen. I had no particular desire to serve my country, but I did have a burning desire to fuck with my old man’s head. The S.O.B. Was and is an autocrat: a peacenik in public but a terror at home, an emotional – and, in my case, occasionally physical abuser. He was also a doctor, and got terrific mileage out of his “respect for human life” while seeming to try doing his worst to ruin my mom’s and mine.

In short, it was a perfect setup to create a candidate for the Marines (known only half-jokingly as Uncle Sam’s Mistreated Children). We won’t get into the psychology of all that. I’m not sure I understand it myself, but the prospect of coming back to Florida and kicking the cocksucker’s ass was part of it too.

My 20 years in the Corps left me with an education, a decent retirement as a Master Sergeant, and nothing really pressing to do with the rest of my life. I’d saved up enough to get a decent little house in northern Palm Beach County, situated on three acres of former ranch land along SR 706. I had a 5-lane, 25-meter pool installed for swimming laps Recon Marines, like those pussy SEALs, live in the water. Hey ... my SEAL friends would be insulted if I were nice about it.

I had a privacy fence installed around the house and yard and – partially to help me stay in shape – planted 450 bougainvillea shrubs to form a dense hedge outside the fence. After a couple of years it was so thick even a Recon team couldn’t have wiggled through. Spending nearly half of your life sneaking, peeking and ducking gives you a (perhaps exaggerated) interest in privacy. With some carefully-sited video cameras, motion detecting LED floods and a good alarm system, my castle was as secure as I could make it without a moat and a pet dragon. I’d briefly considered dogs instead of the dragon, but I’m not really a dog person. They’re too noisy.

All of that pretty much wiped my savings, so I had to find work. I picked up a job as an instructor for a firearms and self-defense academy in a town about a hour’s drive away. That was okay for a while but I got tired of dealing with pseudo-macho wannabee tough guys, so I started looking for something else to do. About then, a retired Lieutenant Colonel for whom I’d worked asked if I’d like to be a reader/editor for a book he was writing. That went well, and gave me the idea of doing something similar on my own. I wrote a book about Marine snipers that sold reasonably well, then decided to try some fiction. In a year or so I had sold a couple of adventure novels aimed at the armchair wannabees, and suddenly I was my own boss for the first time in my life.

My life doesn’t suck. I write in the morning, swim a mile in my pool or a couple in the ocean at Juno Beach, run my habitual five miles with ten gallons of water in a backpack (old habits die hard, and gaining weight wasn’t an option as the Good Doctor had turned into a fat slob and there was no way... ).

And then my life changed.

My mother, showing more gumption than I had ever imagined she would, dumped my father a couple of years after I left town when she found out he was having an affair with a 25-year-old nurse at the hospital. She got the Lexus, the house, some stocks the old bastard hadn’t bothered to hide away, and a fat alimony check. Pops got the nurse. A few months later I got a baby sister named Meghan, a redhead like her mother.

I didn’t see much of Meg over the years. We’d never really bonded, and visiting meant being around my old man, who – humanitarian that he wasn’t – delighted in insulting my chosen profession. I retaliated by fucking Heather, the nurse, whenever I was home on leave. The Good Doctor found out and she wisely chose to file for HER divorce, since she was sick of his bullshit anyway. Her brother’s firm were the leading family law practitioners in West Palm Beach, so she got little Meghan, the Cayenne, and another chunk of the doctor’s income. By then he had so much money I doubt that he missed it, and I’m sure he didn’t miss Heather and the kid. She continued her country club lifestyle, Meg went to the best school in Palm Beach, and I went to Afghanistan again, feeling pretty pleased with myself for having messed with the old man.