A Guardian of Innocents Read Online Free PDF

school on your way to work.”
    The problem there was my school was ten minutes in the opposite direction from where Jack worked. That was ten minutes there and ten minutes back, which added up to twenty extra on his drive. Twenty minutes that he knew he couldn’t afford, especially since Jack’s boss had jumped his ass last week about his increasingly frequent tardiness.
    Jack was pouring himself a cup of coffee while he mulled it over. Finally, after a few long seconds of internal debate, he opted to cough up the money.
    “Alright, ten dollars, but no more! Ten bucks’ll get you to school and work till Friday.
    Proud that I had stolen away some of Jack’s whoring money, I glided over to the table and caressed the brown imitation leather wallet. I deliberately mashed my fingertips down on it so I would leave fingerprints for the police to find later. That was the whole point really. I had thirty bucks tucked away in my own wallet and half a tank of gas in the Nova, the ten dollars I said I needed was just an excuse to touch his wallet... with Doris as a witness. By the end of the night, I knew Jack’s fingertips were going to be all over his wallet from buying table dances and tipping the girls working the stage-poles. And all my fingerprints would then be directly beneath his, most of them probably smeared off, but I figured there would be at least one or two of mine they would be able to make out beneath Jack’s prints. And that was exactly how I wanted it.
    I took out a ten dollar bill, slowly, so Jack could see that it was a ten, and a ten only (but also cuz I enjoyed agonizing the son of a bitch) then placed his wallet back down on the table.
    Next, I did something that completely caught him off-guard. I hugged him.
    “Thanks, you’re the best, Dad!” I said, a saccharine sweetness ringing in my voice. I felt sick touching him, and I remember thinking that I couldn’t remember a time before this when I had touched him willingly.
    As I hugged him, I grazed the side of my head against his shoulder, hoping to rub some hairs (and skin cells) off onto his blazer, thinking if the police forensics team found some of my hairs at the crime scene, it would look plausible they had just been blown off his suit when Jack fell dead onto the concrete of Stiletto’s parking lot.   
    After school that day I came home, changed clothes and borrowed a posthole digger from the garage. Jack wouldn’t miss it, but that was only because he was never coming home. I then headed out to a wooded area behind an apartment complex I knew of in Watauga, a small town about twenty minutes west of where I lived.
    I only knew of the place because my adoptive parents and I went there every third or fourth Sunday to visit Doris’ mother, an old woman I lovingly called Grandma Eunice. She was really the only good-hearted person in the family that I knew of growing up. She hated Jack and seemed perpetually suspicious of him. Grandma liked to give him hell anytime he opened his mouth to say something stupid. A lot of times he didn’t even have to say anything, he would just look at her wrong and, “Who the hell do yuh think yuh are? Idiot peckerhead! Ain’t got nuttin tuh say? Stick that lip out a bit more! If yer gonna pout, then for godsakes, POUT! Yeah, yuh heard me, fatboy. What, are yuh gonna cry now?”
    I always loved watching her rip into him; she had this power to make Jack hang his head like a whipped dog.
    When Grandma died a couple of years ago, we of course stopped going over there but I always remembered where the apartments were and how to get there. Sometimes when Jack and Doris had to go out of town, I would stay over there with Grandma a few days and play in the wooded area behind the complex. No one besides me seemed to like to go out there, I was always alone. It felt safe, like the safest place in the world to me.
    So when I forced myself to think of a place where I could dispose of the evidence of my crime, this was