Get caught up:
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Lt. Blake Despain once again felt his anger boiling within and was compelled to action due to the inaction of others. Since the death of his daughter and the local agency’s apparent lack of closure, he had been driven by the desire… the need to come find the scumbag who’d taken his only child from him. Vengeance upon said scumbag would be his.
Despain felt like a force of nature as he stood, looking out the apartment’s sliding glass doors, watching the waves roll in along the Atlantic coast. It was fall now and too chilly to keep the doors open. In the summer he most assuredly would have enjoyed the breeze and the smell of the sea. A long time ago… before he’d been a cop… before he’d joined the SWAT team… he’d been in the Navy. He always enjoyed the smell of the ocean and this city, Oceanside, centered as it was in Virginia on the Atlantic coast, almost felt like coming home. The word “home” in his thoughts made his blood boil again. Home was where family should be. He didn’t have any left. THAT was why he was here. It wasn’t home. It was headquarters.
Dressing casually so as not to stand out, and leaving his handgun in the apartment, Despain went out for a stroll. He didn’t want to clash with the local police; he still considered them all brothers and sisters in arms. He knew that they would be duty bound to arrest him if they caught him; at least, if he fulfilled his planned purpose here. He had no doubt that someone at his home agency near St. Louis had connected the dots and made a phone call. That didn’t matter. What mattered was the mission: finding the rat bastard who had killed his little girl; his last family… and rubbing the bastard out of existence.
Being without his handgun didn’t mean he wasn’t armed. Tucked into the pockets of his pants and coat were assorted items he well knew how to use as weapons. The 9” collapsed baton opened to a length of 26 inches and he was skilled in its use, open or closed. He had a number of knives on his person: a fixed blade at the small of his back, another strapped under his coat on his left forearm, a neck knife, two folders – one in either front pocket of his pants and assorted other items that had sharp edges he could use to cut if need be. He had two flashlights with him as well: one in the left cargo pocket of his pants and the other, longer and slimmer, in the left shoulder pocket of his coat that was meant for a pen. Laced around his waist, under his belt through most of the belt loops of his pants were four pairs of flexi-cuffs. No, he was not unarmed.
He’d spent the past couple weeks learning the area around his apartment. He knew the back alleys, the dead ends, the fence lines, the jogging path and its side paths. He had learned about the existence of a local gang called The Breakers and had, after weeks of analyzing crime data from newspapers and gathering all the local intel he could from a variety of sources, determined that the most likely killer of his daughter had been a member of that gang. Today he went out to learn more specifically about them. Where was their headquarters? What was the command hierarchy? What crimes did they commit to support their gang? Could he identify which one had murdered his daughter?
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Read the rest of this episode, part of Season Three, in the anthology ebook available exclusively on Amazon for kindle: http://amzn.to/2jcbPVB
