Rugged Guard - Jason Collins

1

Parker

“Edward Williams was a complicated man,” Eddie, my younger brother murmured as he flipped through another one of Dad’s old notebooks. “I don’t even know what half this stuff means. You think Dad was working on opening his own casino or something?”

“Anything’s possible.” I shrugged, pulling one of the several cardboard boxes in the living room closer to my side. “Dad was… always looking for the next big thing in business.”

“Yeah, too bad the next big thing was never in Park City.” Eddie chuckled. “How convenient, right?”

I smiled at my brother’s joke even though it felt a little too close to the truth to really be funny to me. Our father didn’t spend much time at home with his family, often choosing to spend his nights and weekends in different cities all over the globe. When I was younger, I admired my dad’s work ethic, the way he seemed so dedicated to chasing leads for his business and keeping all of us clothed and fed.

But once I got older, I realized that providing for his family was my dad’s excuse for his behavior, a shield he hid behind when he didn’t feel like telling my mom where he’d been for the last week or two. Of course, his answer was always different, his excuses always thin yet still plausible.

I was working with a client in Dubai.

I was just hanging out in Vegas with the new CEO.

There was an emergency in Paris I needed to take care of.

I never took the time to verify my dad’s reasons for why he was barely ever home with his family, and honestly, I wasn’t in the mood to start now. Since his passing a few weeks ago, I’d felt kind of numb to exploring the idea of him, no longer interested in finding out what made him tick.

I just wanted my dad back, the little moments we’d had together, the afternoons we’d spent on the porch after his visits with the doctor. In his later years, after he got sick, my dad spent the better portion of every conversation we had complaining about his doctor, accusing the guy of having no clue what he was doing and being way too young to have him as a patient. But whenever I asked if he wanted to change doctors, my father waved off the idea like it was the craziest thing he’d ever heard.

And it was those same moments that felt like the summary of my dad as a person. He was layered in a way I never quite understood, a mystery that wasn’t asking to be solved.

A man who complained about his doctor after every visit but refused to give him up.

A man who seemed to spend as little time with his family, with his children, as he possibly could but refused to give up on us.

“You’re thinking about him too, huh?” Eddie asked with a small smile.

“It’s hard not to,” I admitted. “I mean, we are still going through his stuff.”

“True.” Eddie shrugged. “But hey, at least we haven’t found any more of those letters.”

“Those letters?”

“You know, the ones where someone was threatening to destroy Dad if he didn’t make things right?” Eddie replied. “The one that was probably sent by whoever Dad was sending those checks to.”

“Oh. Right.” I nodded before I took in a deep breath. “Sorry. I think I just put all of that out of my mind.”

I inwardly groaned as I thought back to the letters that we’d found in one of Dad’s nightstand drawers. They were clearly attempts at blackmail, vaguely threatening without naming anything too specific, but they still seemed to have done the trick. Or at least that’s what Eddie and I thought, judging by the years’ worth of checks we found hidden away in his nightstand.

Who the hell was Dad paying off?

I thought I knew everything about his debts, especially since Eddie and I had been managing them in my father’s old age. He hadn’t asked us to take over the responsibility, but we added it to our list of things to do around the place after we’d opened up our own Bed and Breakfast in town. We were lucky enough to have Dad invest the seed money for the business, even though Eddie and I kept the place humming all on our own.

“I bet it was a mob boss,” Eddie suggested. “Whoever Dad owed all that money to.”

“How do you know he owed it?” I replied. “How do you know someone just wasn’t trying to take

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