Pike (The Pawn Duet #1) - T.M. Frazier Page 0,41

question of why.

Gutter takes a swig of his beer, then tosses it back into the boat behind him. He reaches for two more from the cooler and pops the tops of both, pushing one into my hand. “Pike’s been giving me money for years. He says it’s a debt he’s paying on account of me saving his life or some shit, but I can’t get him to stop. Even threatened to burn it once, and he threatened to buy me a damned house if I didn’t keep it.” He sighs and looks to his hands where he’s holding what I can see now is a picture. “But this here isn’t about a debt.” He hands me the picture. It’s of a woman and a man holding a baby in their arms. “It’s about kindness, even though the lord knows I don’t deserve it.”

The couple looks to be in their late twenties. They’re smiling down at the baby between them with love shining in their eyes. “Who are they?”

He points to the picture. “That, there, is my daughter, Edie and her husband, Glen. That’s my granddaughter, Julia.” He rubs a dirt caked finger over her little chubby face. “I did a lot of bad shit in my life. Not to them specifically, but it affected them for sure.” Gutter sighs, his voice laced in regret. “Dumb shit that cost me my little girl.” He waves his hand dismissing his emotions, explaining with a simple, “There was no contact order and such in place back then. Haven’t spoken a word to her since she was eight years old.”

My logic requires me to ask the obvious question. “Why don’t you try and make contact?”

Gutter shakes his head. “That boat sunk a long time ago, and it takes a man to know when the people he loves are truly better without him. But these pictures…” He smiles down at it once more. “They make an old man happy to know that they’re okay. That they’re happy. Even if I had nothing to do with that happiness.”

I open my mouth to argue, feeling the need to tell him something that would make him feel better, but Gutter holds up his hands, cutting me off before I can get a word out. “I’m not saying that for a rebuttal or for flattery, kiddo. I’m not a goddamned democrat. I’m saying it because it’s true.”

“So, Pike brings you pictures of your family…?” It’s not quite a question.

Gutter looks back at Pike who wipes the sweat from his brow with his forearm. He casts a quick glance our way before kneeling back over the motor.

“One day, I told him I’d like to see them again, not in person because it’s best not to drag the past out of the swamp out of season, but maybe in a picture. I don’t have the internets out here, and I’m not about to go somewhere and sign up for the social medias and have the fucking Russians monitor my every fucking move.” He gives a middle finger to the sky.

I raise an eyebrow.

“Russian satellites,” he explains.

“So, he prints pictures out from social media and brings them to you?”

Gutter chuckles, “Something like that.” He tucks the picture back in his pocket and pats the fabric. “He don’t need to bring me no goddamned money, but this...this is like bringing an old man back a little piece of his broken heart.”

My heart squeezes for Gutter as his eyes glass over with unshed tears. He takes another swig of his beer and shakes his head as if to shake off a lifetime of regret. “Now,” he says, slapping his thigh with his hand. “Let’s talk about you. Tell me everything.”

I pause with my beer halfway to my lips. “Everything?”

He nudges my shoulder with his. “Yep, everything that’s happened to bring you to Pike and to be sitting your pretty ass on my snake boat in the middle of the goddamned swamp.”

At first, I think he’s joking, but there’s no laughter on his face as he stares at me with a serious kind of intensity. “Go on, girl. I ain’t done nothing good enough in my life to be worth the honor of judging anyone else, so don’t you be worried about that.” He looks back over his shoulder at Pike. “Besides, the rate that boy’s fucking up my motor, we might be here all night.”

With nothing but time on our hands and the call of the frogs and crickets surrounding us, I tell him