Read The Bullet List (The Saving Bailey Trilogy, #1) for Free Online Page B

at home and devote her life to taking care of me and him.
    “That’s what a good wife would do,” I remember him saying.
    She left that night; she had had enough of him forcing her to the play the role of a 1950s sitcom wife. She was young and free at heart, and Dad couldn’t comprehend how a woman with a child and husband could want one night to herself.
    Human beings are a strange type of animal; they could be one way, stagnant for many years, and then one day something stirs inside them, a natural instinct to move on, to change. This is what happened to my parents, all at once. Both of my parents snapped and neither of them thought it would cost a person their life. My dad killed four people that night, whether he knows it or not.
    Later, mom told me why dad had come apart. After she left, it dawned on Dad that he was sick of Mom’s taunting him; and he was tired of sitting at home drinking a cola in front of the 6 o’ clock news, every single night. Oh things had been close to perfect for me: I had the perfect parents, and the perfect home. No one thought how I would be affected; they didn’t stop to think that their decisions would ultimately fall on me.
    On that night, Dad acquired a spontaneous thirst for alcohol. With none in the house, and alone with me, he did the only thing any sensible dad would do with a five-year-old child: he took me to a bar . Unbeknownst to Mom, he set out in his 1940s Ford pickup truck, instigated by a thirst for spirits. I nestled in the back seat on top of dirty towels and shirts, which he used during the day while working on various construction sites.
    We arrived at a run-down little bar, and once talking his way into getting me in, we found a spot away from the raucous of drunken men playing pool.
    “Stay right here little lady,” he said, and placed me on a bar stool that was too high for me to possibly get down from on my own. “I am going to get you a soda, don’t leave this stool.”
    I nodded obediently. “Okay Daddy, I want a Coke please,” I said.
    “Coke it is sweetie,” he said tweaking my nose.
    Dad walked into the crowd at the bar and I lost sight of him. Many minutes passed and I became restless and fidgety. I needed to use the bathroom, but I could not climb down from the stool. I turned to a lady sitting next to me and tugged on her shirt to get her attention.
    “Could you please get me down?” I asked her.
    She plucked me off the seat and lowered me down.
    “Thank you,” I said, remembering my manners.
    As soon as my feet touched the ground I was swept up by huge arms. Dad was gripping me tighter than usual and his eyes were bulging, his teeth barred like an angry pit-bull.
    “Let’s take this outside,” a man said to my dad in an angry tone. I smelled the alcohol on his breath.
    “What about my Coke?” I asked, my tiny voice being drowned by the angry words tossed back and forth between my dad and the man.
    “Come on punk, I ain’t scared to fight your ass. There will be nothing but bones left when I’m through with you,” my dad said, with me trembling under his arm.
    I envisioned my dad turning the man into a skeleton, the kind you see hanging from haunted houses on Halloween.
    The man walked outside of the bar, and Dad followed with me still tucked under his arm. I saw the dingy tile change to black asphalt.
    “You sure have a big mouth for someone who can’t bench more than two pounds,” the man said, spitting on the asphalt of the parking lot.
    My dad put me down roughly.
    “You’re mean!” I shouted at the man who was drunk and swaying where he stood.
    “I’ll eat that pretty little girl of yours for breakfast after I take care of you. Or maybe I’ll sell her on the market, got to be worth a couple grand,” he sneered drunkenly.
    My dad struck him in the face for saying so. This punch was the first of many to be laid into the poor body of Jack.
    Jack. That was his name, because people have names so you don’t forget they