Hard Candy Read Online Free PDF Page A

knew how to kill someone in ten seconds.

    Rock didn’t know if it was his overwhelming sense of loyalty to Easy or guilt that made him take care of Candice and guard her with his own life. Today he watched his protégée prance toward his apartment door as she prepared to leave. She’d grown into a beautiful young lady, a far cry from the rail-thin tomboy that had shown up on his doorstep.
    Rock had protested initially when she first told him she planned to move out. He knew deep down inside that one day she’d grow up and leave his home. He also knew of her intentions on the streets. Rock had failed to take revenge on the people responsible for the massacre of the Hardaway family. At the time, he felt he was too emotional after the murders to exact revenge, but he’d also been very preoccupied with caring for Candice. He refused to carry out hits while his emotions were running wild. Being emotional while working could cost him his life. Rock’s philosophy was that emotions weakened one’s natural instincts.
    In the end, all of the suspects ended up literally getting away with murder. Rock knew who they were and their street affiliations. The streets were always talking. He had even taken pictures of them and done a history workup on them, complete with addresses and criminal histories, and had stored the information in a secure hiding spot from Candice. Or so he thought.
    Rock watched Candice as she walked out of the door. He started coughing fiercely as soon as she left. He coughed until he began to gag. He looked down at the towel he held to his mouth and stared at the Rorschach inkblot pattern of bright red blood. He didn’t know how much longer he’d be able to hide his illness from Candice, whose face he could see in his mind’s eye.
    He closed his eyes and felt nostalgic about how far he’d come and how much he had grown to love the little girl who had shown up at his door so many years ago.

    Rock had been drafted into the United States Marines when he was just seventeen years old. He never protested the draft because he’d grown up extremely poor. When the United States first went to war with Vietnam, he’d heard on the streets that the soldiers were being paid high salaries and provided with great benefits, so he didn’t bother to dodge the draft like some of the guys he knew from his neighborhood. When he left for the war, his mother never shed a tear for him. He had been a great burden to her, another mouth to feed. He’d been sent to Vietnam a boy and returned a man.
    Rock joined the Marine Corps Forces Special Operations Command and became a trained Scout Sniper. He had served the United States proudly until he was assigned to a POW (prisoner of war) rescue mission. Rock was to be the countersniper assigned to assist the Force Recon officers, a group of elite reconnaissance Marines who carried out deep reconnaissance operations.
    When he and the other highly trained Marines arrived in the remote village in Vietnam, they had instructions and intelligence information necessary to find the American POWs. But all of those plans went out of the window when they arrived and found nothing but women and children in the camp. Some of the Recon Marines, believing that the women were hiding and covering up for the Vietnamese soldiers, began beating and torturing some of the women and children, cutting them with knives and pouring salt on their wounds, and removing fingernails and toenails. Of course, these methods didn’t work. The intel was bad from the very beginning, and the Vietnamese civilians suffered enormously because of it.
    Rock witnessed a Marine attempt to rape and sodomize a five-year-old Vietnamese girl. The white Marine had been behaving erratically throughout the entire mission. He would laugh at nothing in particular, and he liked to collect bones from dead bodies they’d pass in the jungle. The Marine grabbed the little girl, kicking and