By the time father and daughter were pulled out and rushed to the hospital, and even though the paramedics were speeding well over a hundred miles-per-hour to get them there, only one of the two would make it out of that hospital alive.
Only one would be beaten down by Monica and called a murderer despite his own wounds.
Only one would never be the same again.
CHAPTER ONE
Three Years Later
No hitting. I’ll send you right back in if you don’t play fair.
Jason, tie your shoes before you trip and fall.
Stop bothering that girl, Mikey. Can’t you see she doesn’t want to be bothered?
Charly Johnson, in the courtyard of Sacred Hearts Daycare Center making sure the four-year- olds got their recess time in, grabbed yet another kid who was running wildly and redirected him too. Three years ago she was the dean of girls at one of the largest public schools in L.A. The trajectory of her career had no downside. But now she was working at a daycare, making twelve bucks an hour and almost never making ends meet. She had fallen far.
After surviving the horrific shooting that claimed the life of her husband, she was arrested as an accomplice in his crimes. After they realized she had nothing to do with it, and the suddenly missing money was not something she had the opportunity to take, the charges were eventually dropped and she was allowed to identify his killer from a police mugshot book. The man, a contract killer for the mob named Meeker Tabloski, was tried, convicted, and sentenced to Life in prison. He was killed in prison within days of his arrival. That part of her nightmare, she thought, was over.
But because Darryl had stolen money that remained unaccounted for, although she insisted that the cops or the killer took it when they arrived at her home, the Feds seized that home, their bank accounts, their cars, Darryl’s boat, everything. They left Charly with nothing but the clothes on her back. She kept her job, initially, until the parents complained vociferously about having what they declared was a mob-connected thief on staff. She wasn’t convicted of anything, had never had ties to any mobster in her life, but they still declared her guilty. She was let go by the school district.
She fought it at first, insisting that she had done nothing wrong and was being wrongfully terminated. But she wasn’t tenured. She could be dismissed summarily, and was. And although her only crime was that she married Darryl Johnson and Darryl had stolen money from the mob, no lawyer would take her case. And nobody else wanted to hear it either. By association alone, her employer and almost every single one of her friends, wanted no parts of her.
And when all was said and done, and Charly was broke and so broken she could barely see straight, the Feds had the nerve to consider filing charges on her again.
“For doing what?” she asked them repeatedly. They never answered, just kept threatening her with charges as if they just knew she was lying about that money.
She and Darryl had intermingled their lives so decidedly, the way most married couples did, that they figured his loss was her loss, and his gain had to be her gain. But there was no gain. It was just a loss all around. Because Darryl, her husband, was gone too. It was a lot.
“How’s it going?”
Charly looked over her shoulder and saw that Rhee Daniels, her friend and the owner of the daycare, had walked up behind her. She glanced at Rhee, and then looked back at the hyperactive kids. “It’s going,” she said.
Rhee looked at the kids and shook her head. “The wild bunch. It’s as if every parent with a bad child wants them to come to my daycare.”
But Charly wouldn’t go along with that. “They aren’t bad,” she said to her boss. “They’re just full of life. They’re rambunctious. That’s a good thing.”
Rhee laughed. “Yeah, okay. If you say so,” she said.
Charly rubbed her forehead. Rhee Daniels, an old friend from college and the only person willing to give Charly a job when she needed one the most, was a lot of positive things. She was loyal. She was fun to be around. But treating the kids in her daycare with the kind of respect they should be accorded was not one of her positive attributes.
And as if to prove Charly’s point, Rhee screamed loudly at one of the kids. “Mikey, leave Amber alone with your stupid butt! Boy, you hear me? Leave that girl alone!” Then she yelled at him in even more frustration, even though he was no longer pulling on Amber’s hair: “You so stupid!” she yelled.
“Come on, Rhee,” Charly said, feeling for the kid.
“What?” Rhee asked. “I didn’t call him bad.”
“You shouldn’t call him stupid either.” Charly knew the job Rhee had given to her was her only lifeline, and losing it could render her homeless again, but that didn’t mean she wasn’t going to tell her friend how she truly felt.
Even if her friend wasn’t trying to hear it. “Child please,” Rhee said to Charly. “Some kids are bad, and some kids are stupid. I happen to have both kinds in my daycare. You can bury your head in the sand all you want and pretend we got the future Barack and Michelle Obama up in this bitch. I can’t do that. The truth is still the truth.”
“It’s not true,” Charly objected, “but if you keep calling them such negative names long enough it can become true. And the last thing these kids need is for the Pygmalion Effect to infect them.”
Rhee looked at Charly. “The Pig-what?”
Charly looked at her friend. Sometimes she forgot that Rhee partied far more than she studied in college. “We don’t want to put all of those negative labels on our kids that later becomes a self-fulfilling prophesy for them,” Charly said. “That’s what.”
“Then they need to stop acting like zip-dang fools,” said Rhee. “They stop acting like they don’t have any home training, then I’ll stop treating them like they don’t have any home training. I don’t play with these kids.” Then she handed Charly an envelope. “This came for you,” she said.
Charly looked at the envelope, then took it from Rhee’s hand.
Because Charly was often forced to move whenever the area she was living in became too violent even by her now low standards, and she therefore wasn’t living in what she’d call a permanent residence by any stretch of the imagination, Rhee allowed her to use her home address on all of her business correspondences. Since Rhee knew she couldn’t pay Charly very much money, which meant Charly had to live in those low-income, tough areas to survive, she had no problem letting her old friend use her address.
The fact that Charly was arrested, too, when Darryl first died, kept her standards low as well. Because the arrest itself was still on her record. It required an explanation whenever a background check was pulled on her. And despite her explanation, it always got her a rejection. Why should they hire somebody who had to explain their involvement in a theft and murder when they could hire somebody who didn’t have that baggage?
Charly looked at the state the letter was coming from, and tried to remember just what job she applied for in Kentucky. But she couldn’t remember. She’d been applying, for almost three years running, for far too many jobs to remember exactly.
Besides, she knew what a letter meant. If a potential employer sent a letter rather than called her on the phone, she knew it meant a flat turn down or a we selected a more suitable candidate even when they didn’t so much as give Charly an interview. She was never excited when a letter arrived.