The First Sixteen: A Vigilante Series crime thriller novella - The Prequel Read Online Free PDF Page B

been out of town. However, through further questioning, the
police had determined that Cheryl’s brother, Gary, who had keys to her home,
might have used the car in her absence with a spare key she admitted keeping in
a kitchen drawer.
    When
interviewed, one of Cheryl’s neighbours had stated noticing the car’s
disappearance for a few hours that fateful evening though he had not seen it
leave, return or who might have used it. A woman who lived in the same building
as Gary O’Connor had stated seeing him stagger down the sidewalk at two-thirty
in the morning on the same night when looking out the window after having used
the bathroom. The investigation had led to O’Connor’s arrest with a promise of
serious jail time, despite the fact he had vehemently denied responsibility,
claiming he had been home for the night, reading and watching movies from his
collection of video cassettes.
    A
court date had been set and O’Connor, unable to afford representation, had been
provided with an attorney from the public defender’s office. Into the trial,
the young, unknown defence lawyer had demonstrated how one should defend one’s
client by ripping the prosecution’s case against O’Connor to shreds.
    How
many dark Civics, Sentras and Corollas aged five to
ten years old actually existed in the city, the province, the country? How many license plate numbers included the 580 sequence the witness
had fairly surely seen? It might have been 5B0, SBO, S8O, S80, etc. Had Cheryl’s
car really disappeared that evening or was it parked elsewhere on the street?
After all, she had no reserved parking spot. Did the woman who saw Gary
staggering outside at two-thirty in the morning wear glasses? Yes. Was she
wearing them when she had looked out the window for a few seconds that night?
No.
    And
so on. Cheryl O’Connor’s Civic had been carefully examined for evidence of the
hit and run. However, since automobiles tend to be more robust than one hundred
pound teenagers, insufficient incriminating damage had been found to weigh in
the prosecution’s favour, particularly off the ten year old dinged and
scratched vehicle.
    In
the end, although everyone in the courtroom knew that Gary O’Connor had been
responsible for the death of seventeen year old Amelie Toupin ,
a non-guilty verdict had been rendered due to insufficient proof. O’Connor had
gone home, a free man, an unemployed drunk, a murderer who felt sorry for
himself and blamed society for his misfortune while an innocent young woman,
not even of legal drinking age, slowly rotted in her casket because of his
actions.
    I
had taken the afternoon off, I could afford to with the time I put in, and
followed O’Connor through his usual ritual of going for a late breakfast at a
small greasy spoon near the basement condominium he lived in, courtesy of his
mother, deceased a year earlier. The remainder of the afternoon had dwindled
away with O’Connor slowly sucking down his usual quota of four pints of beer on
tap at a local pub, paid from his rapidly diminishing share of the inheritance
his mother had left.
    As
expected, he had next visited the liquor store at the nearby shopping mall for
a twenty-six ounce bottle of obscure brandy, his cheap evening companion of
late then gone on to the supermarket to buy dinner, a can of no-name pasta in
tomato sauce. Keeping with his schedule, he had headed home where he had dumped
the contents of the pasta can into a dirty pot recouped from the sink and set
it on the burner to heat while he knocked back two hefty shots of brandy – aperitifs
before the evening meal.
    I
watched him as he went through the usual routine, first from a distance and as
the evening wore on, from inside his basement dwelling, the lock on his patio
door nowhere near a challenge for one intent on entering. He’d finished his
dinner, slurping the soggy pasta right out of the pot with a soup spoon – bachelor-style,
some might argue – before settling down on the couch,