Read The Trouble With Bodyguards: Part 2 for Free Online

I got into my car and drove around for hours, searching for him. I walked through the woods around our house, calling his name. I couldn't find him anywhere. It was exactly the same as when he took off after the incident with our mom.
                  “That night, I laid in bed, trying to sleep. I started at every sound, jumping up from my bed and running out into the hall to see if he had come back. The door to his room stood open, the faces of all those women staring at me from the dim room, as if they were judging me. I understood why he had blackened out all of their eyes. I felt so guilty, like somehow all of this had been my fault.
                  “Several weeks went by, and nothing, not a word from him. I called the police, letting them know the situation, and filed a missing persons report. I called his doctors, worried that he hadn't taken his medications with him, and that he had been without them for so long. I didn’t know what he would do, what he was capable of.
                  “One night, I found myself in his room again. Sitting on the edge of his bed, I stared at the pictures glued to his walls, trying to imagine what could have been going through his head when he did the same thing. My gaze was drawn again and again to the image of the only women whose face had not been altered, the one who could see. She was important; she was the key to finding him. I needed to find out who she was.
                  “I scoured the internet, searching for pictures of models that had recently been featured in magazines that could be purchased around here. I went to the bookstore, scooping up every glossy magazine that I could find. Those guys probably thought I had some sort of problem myself, a young man walking out of that place with a hundred magazines a week. I stared at those pages, comparing the women to the photos that were plastered all over his bedroom walls. I found many of them there, their eyes darkened, blinded. I couldn't find her, the one that was so important to him, no matter how hard I looked.
                  “I began to feel despair, as if the whole thing were hopeless. I sat down on the couch, pulling the tab off a can of beer, and flipped on the television. I almost choked on the first drink of that beer, spitting it all over myself and the coffee table in front of me. There she was, the woman that I had been searching for, on the TV.”
                  “Who was it?” asked Alex, her voice small. She already knew who it was, who Rick's brother had been focused on, who had started this whole mess.
                  “It was you,” he said, turning his head and looking at her for the first time in a while. “It was you, the woman behind the lens that had captured the images of all the other women. It was a replay of the interview that you had done so many months before, the one that had caught my brother's attention. You said something that made the whole mess click into place, made it all make sense. 'People don't really see my art in these pictures, they see beautiful women wearing expensive clothes. I want people to see the pain in this beauty, I want them to react. People deserve to feel something.
                  “I searched you out,” he said, “reading interviews that you had done, looking at your work on the internet. I found that you had an office here in town, and I drove by, sort of a stalker myself at this point.” He chuckled uneasily, his cheeks reddening slightly with embarrassment. “But I didn’t know what else to do. I didn't know where he had disappeared to, and you were the only lead that I had.
                  “I was there that day that you were shooting at the fountain,” he said. “I sat in my car, watching, searching the crowd for my brother. I was hoping that he would show up, somewhere, and that I could get a chance to talk to him. Just when I had lost