Chapter 1

Danny

It was simple really; he wanted her, and she didn’t want a dam thing to do with him and he was going to change that. Simple really.

He was constantly scoping her out from across the office floor. She never looked his way or when she did by accident, she would quickly avert her eyes. He got angry with her. Why would she not return his look?

Danny was a waif of a man, standing only five foot six, and lucky if he could tip the scale over one hundred and forty pounds, he was always the shortest guy in a group. He always had been and growing up in the catholic orphanage he learned to use his height restriction to his advantage.

When people first met Danny they were never intimidated, he was just too small to present as any kind of physical threat. It wasn’t until you looked into his eyes, then most people shuddered as they immediately reevaluated. There was just something behind the eyes lids that demanded a double take to ensure you saw what you saw.

Danny’s eyes could make grown women tremble. The rage and anger within were palpable to anyone who looked into his eyes for any time at all. As one little girl put it, “He was the scariest monster of them all.” Danny liked her.

Danny was smart, smart-mouthed, and very devious. He couldn’t fight, he was too small but he had a great memory and a vault he stored all of life’s slights in. It didn’t have to be a wrong, Danny counted slights as well. If a girl didn’t look him in the eye he took it as a slight. Slights were bad. Danny needed people to recognize him, to know he was there. When they didn’t he felt slighted.

You slighted Danny and he threw it into his vault of pain. Danny nurtured the vault and the pain it stored. He had to keep the vault door locked because when he opened the door it was like a wind tunnel explosion of his poisonous thoughts would burst forth. He had scared himself more than once letting the vault door fly open. He always tried to guard against that now. Or at least until he could control the resulting damage the storm would cause. He tried, oh man how he tried.

But, sometimes the dam vault door had a mind of its own and that was scariest of all. It was trying to open now. He could feel it like eyes on your back. It was there, haunting him, pleading with him in its own way to be allowed to let his demons out to play. Danny gritted his teeth. “In a while, in a little while,”. He whispered to the night air.

Danny was standing outside of an apartment building four blocks from their mutual place of work. He couldn’t help himself because the demons wanted her. They wanted to play with Carrie because Carrie didn’t want to play with them. Carrie had slighted him too many times now. He would not stand for it anymore. Not another week was going to go by without him and Carrie coming to an understanding. The understanding would be that Danny Boy Freison mattered and she better treat him like she knew he mattered.

Danny was eight years old when his parents were shot to death at a nightclub in New York. Just two more mass murder statistics for the media. They were just a young happy couple with a son they adored who was out for an adult night on their ninth wedding anniversary. Danny was with his best friend baby sitter Jane at home sleeping when the police came.

Danny called Jane his best friend because when she stayed with him she played lots and lots of games with him, and would even let him stay up a little to finish some of the games. Jane would wrestle with him, give him huge bear hugs and they even had tickle fights and even though he couldn’t win, Danny loved the play. He really liked Jane and thought more of her as his big sister than anything else. It could be said that he, in his eight-year-old way loved her like that sister.

Danny was a precocious and highly energetic little man. Jane liked him as a little brother as well however, when the police arrived that fateful night and notified her that Danny’s parents we dead there was nothing the eighteen-year-old could do but inform the police she couldn’t stay because tomorrow she had school.

Not understanding what was happening Danny was told by the old cop to pack a small suitcase and that he was to be taken by the policemen to a local emergency shelter for victims and victims’ families.

The two cops had just come from dealing with a flipped-out PCP psycho and both of them were suffering aches and pains all over. The maniac had put up one hell of a fight and it had taken cloth cops, rolling around in the mud, the blood and the beer that was knocked off tables as the two cops fought to calm the psycho down. It took everything thing the two of them hard to get the guy into the car and then lock up. Fuck anyone who thought this prick should be in a hospital. He was crazy and needed to be locked up.

The two had grumbled and bitched about being sent out again but hell they still had a quarter of their shift to work so accepted the easy call to go get the kid. Neither one had kids. The older white guy had been married twice but was such a controlling bastard both women left him within a year. He just wasn’t a nice guy.

The younger black cop had anger issues he was sort of trying to work through and tonight didn’t help. He wanted to rip someone’s head off.

That’s the two that were taking the child to an emergency shelter after informing him his parents were dead. They just honestly never thought about his feelings. Facts were facts, life was shit, get used to it, kid.

As Danny came down the stairs to the foyer the young cop wrapped up what he was saying to Jane, “I heard it was quick, they were the first ones shot.” He saw Danny coming down the stairs. Danny looked to Jane. She had her head down, she didn’t want Danny to see that she was crying.

She raised her left hand in a half wave and choked out, “Bye Danny,” and walked out the door, then ran down the block. She was crying out loud as she reached the end of Danny’s lawn. She needed her Mom and she shuffled, half ran and stumbled her way the four houses down the road from Danny’s house. She wailed, “Oh, Danny,” more than once. It was the first truly painful emotional moment in her life. She needed her mom.

At the emergency shelter, other kids and people were going through terrible things themselves. Some older boys, under sixteen years old, drew Danny into a conversation and they concluded that Jane had called the cops and ratted him out.

That she only pretended to like him to use him for sick reasons. She had always been hugging him and wrestling with him and tickling him and she even kissed him on the head every time she left. She was sick.

Danny was convinced, when Jane never came to see him at the shelter, to see his time with Jane as one of abuse rather than good. The boys had fun manipulating Danny’s thinking.

The older boys helped Danny understand Jane was actually the second woman to betray him. His mother was the first for dying. He could never forgive her for that. Never!

He had only flash memories of the shelter and they were not good ones. He had cried his heart out there almost every night and a poison took root right then.

His next stop was the catholic orphanage in the north of the state. Danny would never forget his first day there.

He would always remember being dropped off by the cops and walking up the walkway to the big three-story, at least forty windows across in length, red stone brick building. When he arrived at the door the horseshoe door knocker was too high for him to reach. He didn’t want to go in anyway.

Even at eight years old he knew that if he went in he would never come out. A goose walked over his grave. That’s what his mom used to say when a shiver flashed through his body. Something sure didn’t feel right. He was about to turn away when the door screeched and opened.

Through the door stepped a penguin. A white-faced penguin. He smiled at his thought.

“You must be Danny Freison get in here.” She waved him forward with a sweeping hand. He came inside and didn’t know where to go so turned back to see the penguin close the door and lock it. Danny now knew it was a prison like the shelter guys told him it would be.

The penguin stepped around Danny and snapped, “Follow me,” and kept walking down the hall to the last door at the other end of the hall. They had crossed another hall running both ways at the midpoint and then followed the penguin into another room. It was a medical room. Like the doctor’s office. Another penguin was there and the two exchanged words that Danny didn’t focus on then the first penguin walked out and left him with the second.

She was grossly fat and when she turned Danny counted at least three chins, but he thought there was another one hiding under the third and huge green eyes popping out of her face. A big ugly bullfrog came to mind, and he named her frog right then and there. She told him to strip. To take off all his clothes and throw them in the waste container to the side.

Now in Danny’s mind, he had already been abused by the first older woman he had made friends with and he wasn’t going to be used again. His grief and anger over the night Jane just left were fresh and, in a way, beginning to drive him.

He said no, he would not get undressed before her.

The huge woman took four steps towards Danny and dropped him to the floor with a forehand slap. Danny saw starlights exploding twice. The first time when she hit him the second when his unprotected head hit the floor. He was going to pass out then he felt a yank on his jacket collar and being lifted to his feet. He was wobbly. Frog had to hold him up with one hand.

She just held him there and stared at him until she saw some sense return to his eyes. “You are new here,” She had an accent that Danny didn’t recognize. It was German and the accent made the words ugly to Danny’s ears. The ugly sound fit the Frog. Danny was trying to comprehend what he was hearing. That was the first violent act he had ever been subjected to. He had wrestled and been punched by angry playmates before but that was it.

He couldn’t understand her or for sure didn’t try. He did not comprehend a word again until the pause in her speech and then heard that word again, “Strip.”

What Danny hadn’t heard and what she had said was because he was new she only gave him a cuff. Another hesitation in moving when she said move and he would get ten swats with the paddle.

Nope, Danny didn’t hear any of that. Just strip. He wasn’t going to. He shook his head and then he felt her left hand hit the side of his little head and the stars burst forth again!

Next, he realized that he had feet and was stumbling along, being dragged by one arm by the Frog. She was taking long strides that Danny couldn’t match and she just tugged him along every second step as he fell that little behind. She kept him with her.

They entered an office where the first penguin was sitting at a computer. As Frog entered, she barked something and the other penguin pointed at a closed office door. Frog knocked on the door rather softly with how aggressive she had been up to that moment.