White Night

Chapter 46

Something was screwed up. The cop told him he was being moved for his own safety, then they got ambushed, rammed, shot at, and she nearly blew out her partner's brains.

The Chinese cop got him safely to The Brooklyn Hospital Center, where nurses hooked him up to all the machines again and re-dressed his shoulder. The cops said it wasn't Hansen, but they were wrong. No one else had the clout to get assassins and cops on his side like that, and no one else wanted him dead. At least Michael knew that Detective Connors was clean. He'd be dead if she wasn't, but she was blind to the truth behind all of this. Hansen needed him silenced before he advanced his shining political career.

Michael hadn't asked to be sucked back into all this. He'd finally started to move on from the horrors of that year. People acted like when you bury someone that was the end, but it was just the beginning.

Everyone said he was eighteen and "an adult," but his world changed overnight. The days after he buried his mom were spent packing up her jewelry and clothes into cardboard boxes, taking some to Goodwill, and holding onto the rest as precious reminders of when he had a family. Reminders lost when his scumbag landlord threw them out, or sold them when he missed a month's rent after he lost his job when the assault charges came through two years later. The last of his family dumped in the trash or pawned, and another reason to be furious at the world.

He'd been frightened then, with nothing but the clothes on his back, no job, no apartment, eventually even losing his shitty little car that he'd saved for just to pay the fine awarded to Hansen after the assault—compensation for pain and suffering of a broken nose. Hansen's compensation for the pain and suffering he'd caused Michael? None, it was ruled an accident, something about the "rule of two." Hansen slams into them on a crossing, but as he only broke one law and not two, it wasn't criminal negligence, so just a fine paid to the state. The judge even praised Hansen for his "kind" offer to pay for Michael's mother's funeral.

Hansen was the reason she was being buried.

He saw Hansen's face during the court case, nothing there but a cold stare and tight lips.

Two years later, Michael was lost. He picked up a bunch of minimum wage jobs, but the temporary jobs didn't cover both food and rent, so he chose food. Well, drink anyway, and literally bounced from rock to hard place.

During one particularly hard bounce, he ran into Hansen and a bunch of friends leaving a bar after celebrating Hansen's birthday. Celebrating...

Hansen's friends told him to back off, that Hansen had been through enough. He'd been through enough? And when he got into a shoving match with one of them, Hansen intervened and Michael lost it and the tiny life he'd clung to.

And now Michael had moved on, let it all go, the rage that he felt toward Hansen and the world, but the Councilor had still attempted to have him killed.

Now it was Hansen's turn to lose everything.

Michael would be trapped in hospital for a few more days, hooked up to machines and tubes, but then he would take the fight to Hansen. What happened after that didn't matter. Mrs. B, Angelo, his co-workers would all be safe when Hansen was dead, and he owed them that, he owed his mother that...