Unhappily Ever After Bk. 01 Ch. 01

"Tell him from me," I said, bending down to whisper in Helen's ear, "that I'll be coming after him and that I'll be riding a pale horse."

"Lead on, McDuff," I said to my escort after straightening up. "I'm not going over there to make any trouble or to do any damage. The damage has already been done. I merely want to let my former wife know I've received her message loud and clear."

---oooBJSooo---

Sam looked up at me when I managed to break through her circle of paramours. She had a look of abject terror in her eyes. That changed to one of surprise and puzzlement when she saw the smile on my face.

"I just came over to congratulate you on your promotion and the formalisation of your status as your boss's slut. It sure came as a surprise. Why didn't you tell me? I would have brought you something special to commemorate the occasion. A shiny new super-sized dildo or something, perhaps.

"Anyway, I thought I'd just pop over to say goodbye. I believe you have some traditional duties to perform, which will prevent your coming home for the next couple of nights. I really hope you enjoy yourself and that it's all been worth the effort. I now understand why you had to spend so many nights working late and weekends working on cases with your mentors; not to mention the long bonding retreats and South Pacific cruises.

"I hope it all works out for you," I said as I stepped forward. She obviously thought I was coming forward to give her a kiss, so she leaned forward, offering me her cheek. She still had a surprised look on her face. It was as if - like Helen - she couldn't believe I was taking her sluttish infidelity and my own humiliation so well.

But I wasn't stepping forward to kiss her; she'd received her last kiss from me long before that night. No, I put out my left hand. It took her a moment to realise what was happening, and she tentatively stretched out her right hand.

When she saw it was my left hand I'd extended, she swapped hands to match mine. As I took her hand in mine. I reached out with my other hand and removed her wedding and engagement rings from her fourth finger. I was actually surprised that she was still wearing them, considering her plans for the remainder of the weekend. But then I realised that having them on her finger and having them covered in her suitors' ejaculant while she was being gang-banged would be the ultimate sign of my cuckold status.

"You won't be needing these," I said as I dropped them into my jacket pocket. "I wouldn't want them any more cum-stained than they already are.

"Goodbye, Samantha," I added. The look of uncertainty that crossed her face told me she had picked up on the tone of finality in my voice and the fire in my eyes as I shook her hand once before releasing it. "Enjoy your time with your boss and your fuckbuddies."

"I'll explain everything when I get home," she said as I turned to leave.

"There's nothing to explain. And you no longer have a home to return to," I called over my shoulder as I started to walk away from her. "You've made your plans perfectly clear. I just hope that having made your choices, you, your fuckbuddies and your fuck-meister are prepared to pay the high price I will be asking of you all for your betrayal."

I had a hard time navigating my way towards the door. Despite my foreknowledge of her betrayal, my eyes had filled with unshed tears. Just because I knew my marriage had been over for a long time didn't mean I wasn't feeling the pain.

My new friend must have understood what was happening because he steered me in the right direction. He left me standing in the foyer while he stepped away to report that the anticipated trouble had been averted.

His absence gave me time to get my act together. When he returned, I introduced myself.

"I'm Aaron Bourke," I told him, extracting a business card from my wallet and handing it to him. "Thank you for your help tonight. You seem to be quite a nice young fella. It would have been a pity to hurt you."

"I doubt you could have hurt me," he said with a smile. "I'm Matt White, by the way." He dug about in his own wallet and came up with a bent and crumpled card.

"You wouldn't have had a chance against my Taser," he said as he handed me his card.

"That may be true," I answered. "But only if I'd let you get it out of its holster."

"True," he acknowledged my point, although the look on his face indicated he was only humouring me. "But I guess we'll never know."

"Listen," he continued after a brief pause, "I'm sorry about what happened in there. Even though I'm only twenty-eight, I've been through a marriage breakup myself - nothing of the magnitude of the sucker punch you've had to wear, of course - but it was bad enough that it hurt for some time. I guess what made it particularly bad for me was that my wife was having it off with my best friend. And they were doing it in my bed while I was working nights."

"Thank you for telling me that, Matt," I said. "Even though my wife and her boss have been in a relationship for the last two years - and, as I learned tonight, she's been fucking her way up the corporate ladder since she started working for the firm - I don't believe any of her lovers have made it as far as our marital bed; not yet, anyway.

"What I do know, however, is that she and her boss certainly intend to do so. They can humiliate me by conducting their affair in public, but they can't really cuckold me unless they leave their cum in my bed and make me aware of it. But just in case I'm wrong, the locks will be changed, and all her shit will be out of what was our home and on the street before her planned weekend-long fuckfest is over."

---oooBJSooo---

After shaking Matt's hand again, I headed towards the elevators. I was about to press the button when some sixth sense alerted me to danger. On the spur of the moment, I decided to take the stairs down to the basement carpark.

Quietly opening the garage level door, I glanced over towards the elevator and saw two men standing in the shadows. They were dressed in dark clothing and had rolled-up balaclavas on their heads. They appeared to be waiting for something or someone to arrive in the lift.

Just then, the elevator doors opened, and an older couple stepped into the carpark area. The two men sank back into the shadows and let them pass unmolested.

While they were distracted, I slipped back into the stairwell and, after digging Matt's card out of my pocket, called him.

"Hello," he answered. Like me, he'd not had time to enter my number into his contacts file.

"Matt," I said. "This is Aaron Bourke. If you want to see how good that Taser of yours is, come and join me in the stairwell at the carpark level. I think there's a bit of trouble brewing."

The young security guard was standing beside me less than two minutes later. I told him what I'd seen and what I planned to do. We opened the door wide enough to confirm that the two men were still in place. Matt then slithered out through the opening. Once I saw he was using the shadows and the parked cars to cover his movements, I headed back up the stairs to the foyer.

Five minutes later, I felt my phone vibrate in my pocket. After sliding the answer button, I lifted it to my ear. Immediately after answering the call, I heard a whispered, "Go! Go! Go!".

'A bit dramatic,' I thought as I reached over and pressed the down button on the wall.

Just as I was about to step into the elevator, two couples came out of the function room. One of the men yelled, asking me to hold it so they could come down with me.

"I don't think that would be a wise move," I said just before stepping into the car. "I'm expecting a bit of trouble when I arrive in the basement. And it might not be safe."

"Do you need a hand?" one of the men asked. They obviously didn't recognise me as the target of Kingston and Sam's humiliation efforts.

"I'll tell you what," I answered. "Would one of you go and find a couple of security guards. Tell them that one of their people is involved in a difficult situation down in the underground carpark and could use a bit of help. Tell them stealth is the key and that they should come down via the stairs. The trouble will likely be near the elevator entry point, however. Tell them to wait in the stairwell until either their friend or I call them.

One of the men ran back into the function room as the elevator doors slid closed. I switched on my mobile phone's voice recorder during the short journey to the basement.

"Well. Well, Well," I heard a voice say as the doors opened and I stepped out of the car. It was muffled by the woollen balaclava that covered the speaker's face and mouth. "I think this might be the chap we're supposed to meet. Would you be Mr Bourke, by any chance?"

"And if I was?"

"Then we'd like you to come with us. We've been asked to give you something."

"Oh, goody!" I exclaimed. "I love presents. But what if I said that my mother taught me not to go anywhere with strangers?"

"We're not strangers," the second man said, "We're police."

"Oh, well, that's okay then," I said. "Just show me some identification, and I'll follow you to the ends of the earth."

"Why do we always end up with the smart arses?" the first man asked impatiently. Assuming it was a rhetorical question, I didn't comment.

He stepped out of the shadows and made a grab for me. After letting him take hold of my jacket, he pulled me towards him. What surprised him was that I came forward faster than he had anticipated. I flicked my head as we met and crushed his nose with my forehead. Out in the country town where I grew up, they called that a cowboy kiss.

As he let go of me, I drove my knee up between his legs and gave his testicles a bit of a massage. Now we were dancing. As his head came down, he received my other knee in the middle of his face. I couldn't see it, but his nose would have looked like... well, it would have looked like just another part of his face. An observer wouldn't have even known he'd ever had a nose. He was down and out of action for the time being.

His mate was next. He came out of the shadows, swinging. He missed, and as the weight of his punch drove him forward, I gave him a middle finger knuckle punch behind his right ear. That's all it took. He was out for the count.

I turned back to my first assailant as he struggled to get to his feet. I didn't know whether he wanted to come to his fellow attacker's aid or wanted to head for the hills. He ended up doing neither. I grabbed him by the collar of his black shirt and dragged him back into the shadows.

"You might want to go for a walk, my friend," I said to Matt. "It'll probably be best if you don't see this part of the proceedings. In fact, it would be a good idea if you were to wait in the stairwell with your friends. I've let them know that you could require a bit of help. It might be wise to keep them away for a few minutes. I'll call when it's safe to come out.

"Oh, and keep everything between the two of us for the time being, hey?"

"Sure thing Mr Bourke."

"And you were right," he said as he made his way towards the stairwell. "I wouldn't have had a snowball's chance in hell of taking you."

---oooBJSooo---

"Name?" I asked, taking my assailant's right hand in mine.

"Get fucked," he said. The next sound that came out of his mouth was a scream as his index finger snapped.

Before asking him a second time, I removed both his boots and socks. After using his laces to tie his feet together, I stuffed one of the socks in his mouth. Sadly, he was one of those unfortunate people who suffered from foot odour. I was having a hard time avoiding gagging. I didn't really care how my would-be assailant was faring.

"Now, let's try that again," I said. "For every denial or wrong answer, you'll lose another finger. Are you right or left-handed?"

He indicated that he was right-handed by raising his damaged hand. I took him at his word, Not that it really mattered. I was sure he would lose the use of fingers on both hands before we had finished our little tête-à-tête.

"Well, you've already lost your trigger finger."

Placing his right hand under my foot, I lifted his left hand. I then repeated my initial question.

"Name?"

He nodded his head, an action I took to mean that he wanted to answer.

As soon as I removed the sock from his mouth, he spat in my face. I immediately jammed the sock back in and broke the index finger on his left hand. The sock muffled his scream.

"You realise that you're now going to have to have someone wipe your arse for you until your fingers mend. That might be a month or so. It'll be somewhat longer after I run out of fingers and start breaking larger bones."

By the time I'd finished with him, I had his name and that of his friend. I knew who employed them and who had commissioned the little party we were having. Fortunately, it hadn't been intended as a permanent solution to a problem; a hit. They had simply been instructed to encourage me to let sleeping dogs lie.

Following their giving me a little physical counselling, I was to be told that things would go better for me if I didn't interfere in matters that didn't concern me and over which I had no control.

The interesting piece of news was that not long before I had emerged from the elevator, they had received instructions to up the ante. Instead of simply roughing me up, they were to add a few broken bones to my injuries. Nothing life-threatening. But enough to put me in hospital for a few days.

As they say in the political ads, that message was to be delivered by one Fred Haig - the gentleman who would leave this function tonight with five broken fingers, a couple of very tender testicles and a severely broken nose - and authorised by none other than Nathan Kingston, Esquire.

During my later research, I discovered that Mr Kingston had defended numerous members of the criminal fraternity, many of whom still owed him for getting them off whatever charges they faced for whatever crimes they might have 'allegedly' committed.

By the end of our discussion, Mr Haig had agreed with me that he and his friend - Steve Warren - had fallen down the stairs and that they'd crawled over to the elevator in the hope that someone would find them. Unfortunately, they had both passed out. It hadn't been long after regaining consciousness that they had been discovered by the hotel's security people, to whom they would be extremely grateful.

I was ten minutes away from the hotel and cruising towards home when I called Matt White to give him the all-clear to discover the two men. I also gave him a brief rundown of what their stories should sound like.

"Thanks for your help, Matt," I said. "It was a comfort to know you had my back. Give me a call to let me know how this all comes together.

"Oh, and call me if you are looking for a job with better hours and better pay. I don't forget my friends, Matt. And anyone who is prepared to back me when the chips are down comes under that umbrella."

"I appreciate it, Mr Bourke. I'll give you a call in a couple of days. We might talk about that job offer then, if that's all right?"

"That'll be fine, Matt. And it's Aaron to my friends."

I didn't tell him about the items I had liberated from the pockets of my assailants. I thought it best that he didn't know that my assailants were armed with a couple of snub-nosed .38-calibre revolvers and enough ammunition to fight a small war. And I was sure he had no interest in their wallets or phones. I'd left them with their flick knives, a matched pair of brass knuckle dusters and a few other trinkets - sachets of powder and the like - that were likely to attract a bit of attention from the police.

Not long after leaving the hotel, I pulled my car over and checked the two phones. So far as I could tell, neither had an active tracking application. Just to be on the safe side, I removed the batteries from each of them. Fred Haig had given me his phone's PIN, and his companion had his number written on a piece of masking tape stuck on the back of his phone. Nobody said you had to be bright to be a standover merchant. I would bet that, had I wanted to rob them, those same PINs would give me access to their bank debit cards

Before removing the batteries, I'd used Haig's phone to send a text to their boss - he was listed as 'Boss' in his contacts folder.

From what I had read, James Freeman was a well-known member of the criminal underworld. But he also had a reputation for being very big on honour and, having served in Vietnam - picking up a few medals for bravery while over there - had a soft spot for veterans. Having spent six years in the army before starting my building business, I fit into that category. I didn't know whether it would help but thought it might be worth a try.

"From one digger to another," my message said, "please back off. This is not your fight."

I received an answer from my attackers' boss the following morning. It came through on my own phone - not the one belonging to Fred Haigh I'd used. That was a message in itself.

"You certainly did a job on my lads," it said. "Tweedle Dumb is breathing through a couple of straws. And Tweedle Dumber still hasn't regained consciousness. I have a place for you if you're looking for work.

"As far as the other thing goes, the contract has been cancelled. I've found out what it's all about, and it leaves a bad taste in my mouth.

"BTW, I don't know what you said or did to our 'friend' last night, but I received a message not long before your encounter with my lads to the effect that he wanted your injuries to be severe enough that you would spend Christmas in the hospital. It appears he doesn't like you.

"Good luck, Brother. As far as my lads are concerned, you are untouchable. I've done some homework and don't want Stoney Bourke coming after me - LOL.

"Regards, Jim.

"PS. Give me a call if you think I can help."

I was relieved to hear that at least one of Kingston's former clients had withdrawn his services from the marketplace. It didn't mean I was free and clear, though, as I was sure he had a raft of clients he could call upon. But it meant I had a bit of time to strengthen my defences.

After a little thought, I sent back my reply.

"Thanks, Brother. Sorry about your lads. I hope I haven't caused you too much inconvenience.

"And thank you for giving me some breathing space.

"Thank you, too, for the offer of employment. Sadly, I am currently as busy as a one-legged minefield sweeper. On top of that, it appears I've just been handed a new project, so it looks like I will be tied up for the foreseeable future.

"I appreciate your offer of help. I might just need it.

"Cheers, Aaron."

---oooBJSooo---

I carried out a quick sweep of the property as I drove down my kilometre-long driveway and conducted an inspection of my house yard and outbuildings before putting my car away. I then dragged my weary body up the side steps and through the mudroom into the kitchen. After punching in the security code, I grabbed a beer from the fridge and settled onto one of the barstools that lined the breakfast bench.

I had subdivided the best fifty acres from a twelve-hundred-acre piece of country I'd bought while serving in the Army, long before I'd met and married Sam. It was good grazing land but was close enough to town to have development potential when the city started to expand.

Our home had been built on a bluff overlooking a bend in the river that was high enough to be well above anything other than a flood of biblical proportions. It was both private and secure. To make use of the land while waiting for the area to take off - which wouldn't be very far down the track - I have been running three hundred Angus breeders on the place. I had named the property Warragunya, an Aboriginal word meaning 'house by the water'.