Life After College

Thank you to koolchick for reviewing. feedback is always welcomed, especially if it\'s good. you see, you review, and i\'ll send up a chapter a day later, just like that!! it also helps that this chapter was just one i couldn\'t wait until next week to give to you readers. enjoy!!

Scribbles05

Story is mine. no taking. you otta know by now, surely........


Chapter 10


“Hello Andrew.” Camile said into the camera with a big smile on her face. She was walking up the stairs of what looked like my house. “Benny and I walked in and saw you sleeping so peacefully, we decided not to wake you and just take little Sammy home.” My eyes grew wide as I saw her make a turn upstairs to Damon’s room. My heart was racing as fast as a car competing in the Daytona 500. And when they opened the door to his room, I started panting and groaning, like I was watching the superbowl. I couldn’t keep still. “I love what you did with his room, Andrew. Very cute. But I’m not going to keep going on and on. I’m just going to get Sammy and get out you and Richard’s way, okay?” She peeled back my son’s sheets and picked him up. He started to wake up and when he saw those two strangers in his face, he started to cry.

He reached a little hand towards the camera. “Mama! Mama! Mama!” He yelled in convulsive gasps. Tears were rolling down his now red cheeks. That’s when I started to cry. He called for me and I was too doped up with medicine to hear him.

“NO!! PLEASE!!” I yelled at the screen. I started to sweat profusely and their was a pain that I started to feel in my chest.

“Awwww. Don’t cry sweetheart.” She looked into the camera. “Mamas right here.” Then, she all of a sudden changed attitudes. Her smile was gone and was replaced with a stern, evil look. “Alright. That’s enough. Cut that shit off and lets go.” She looked at Damon as he was still calling for me. “Shut up! You little shit!” Then the tape went out.

“MOTHERFUCKER!!!!” I jumped up, knocking over the coffee table in the process, and ran to the hall closet and picked up Dicky’s metal baseball bat. I ran outside still in my pink boxers, blue robe, and bare foot, hoping I could catch them just leaving. When I saw them starting the car, the pain in my chest radiated to my left arm. I knew I was not in my right mind. My body was so full of rage, if given the chance to get close enough, I was going to kill the both of them. I’m not the sweet, frail, metro sexual, gay man everybody takes me to be. You make me mad enough, there WILL be hell to pay. They started to pull off and I ran clean out the house -leaving the door wide open- and sprinted like a fucking cheetah down the street, bat in hand and ready to strike. But unfortunately, the machine out matched my two bare feet and I lost them. The sound of my son crying in the backseat was left to haunt me. Pissed off, I started swinging the bat in frustration in the middle of the street. Thinking about it now, I believe I was probably actually legally insane at that moment.

Sixty seconds too late, Dicky came down the road and stopped when he saw me crying hysterically, pacing, and on occasion, swinging the bat. “What the....?” He whispered. “Drew?!” He walked to me, careful of the bat. “Honey, what’s wrong?”

“He’s gone!”

“What? Who’s gone?”

“Our baby’s gone!” I swung in the air again, this time Dicky caught it pulled it away from me. When he did, I realized just how much pain I was in and grabbed my left arm. My breath was starting to leave me and a began to pant. Then I collapsed on the sidewalk.

Dicky kneeled next to me. “Shit! Shit!”

Jessica heard all the commotion and opened her front door. “Richard?! Are you okay?!”

“Call an ambulance! He’s having a heart attack!”

************

When I woke up, I was laying on a hospital bed. I still felt a bit woozy, but was okay....... considering. I was still heartbroken. Nothing those doctors could’ve given me would’ve taken that away, unless they could bring me back my son. I turned to my side and curled into a ball.

Dicky walked in a few minutes later. He sat on the edge of the bed and rubbed my back. “This may sound stupid, especially after everything that’s happened today, but how are you feeling?”

“Like shit.” I mumbled. I turned around and looked at him. His eyes were a pinkish color and tears were still present around them, where he tried to quickly wipe his tears away before he came in my room. I sat up slowly and wrapped my arms around him. “Did you look at the tape?”

“Yeah. I went home and looked at it when the doctors told me you were okay and resting.” He pressed his face into the crook of my neck and sighed tiredly. “How could she do this?” He shook his head in disbelief. “How could she do this to us?” Dicky started to cry. During all of my time of knowing him, including college, I had never seen Dicky cry. Every so often, you’d see watery eyes if he was laughing really hard, or he was cutting onions. If he had before, I’d never seen it. Atleast not until that day.

We wrapped our arms around each other and I let him cry. “We are going to get him back.” I whispered in his ear. “I know we will.”

Work on getting Damon back was already underway. Though his lieutenant and friends at work told him he should stay at home, Dicky refused, dressed in his uniform, and went out looking for our son every morning from sun up to sun down. I, on the other hand, agreed to their suggestion and stayed home. I called the hospital and told Mr. Alex Walton that I wasn’t coming in, I was afraid that if I did, I wouldn’t perform my best and hurt someone. And that’s never good. Mr. Walton told me to take as much time as I needed to. My job would still be there and my check was still coming in the mail.

************

It had been three days since our baby was taken from us. And everyday, it was slowly killing Dicky. He woke up every morning at 6:30 without breakfast, worked all day without lunch, and came home late at night and went straight to bed without dinner. The next morning would come and he’d do the same thing all over again. His body looked tired and weak, and he refused to stop.

It was early morning when I felt Dicky moving out of bed one day. “You going to search again?” I asked him softly.

“Yeah.” He answered without looking back at me. He stood and went to the bathroom. When he came back, he started to put on his uniform.

“Would you like for me to fix you some breakfast atleast?”

“I’m fine.”

I got out of bed and walked to him. Gently, I placed my hands on either side of his cheek. “Baby, you haven’t eaten in days. Look at you. You can barely hold yourself up.”

Slowly, he knocked my hands away. “I said I’m fine. I have to go.” He kissed my cheek, then started down the hall towards the stairs.

“Dicky, you’re gonna have to stop some time!”

He whirled around abruptly. “No! I will not stop! Those bastards have our son and I WILL get him back!” He started down the stairs. “Don’t wait up for me.” I heard the door slam.

While Dicky was out all day, everyday, I sat at home alone going over the situation. At times, I would sit in the living room until dark and think about what happened to Damon. *Why did this happen? Why did Camile have to come back? Was it my fault? If I hadn’t taken that medicine and went to sleep, would Damon still be here? Should I have listened to Dicky and let him take Damon upstairs to sleep, away from my grasp? It IS my fault. I had a bad feeling something was going to happen and I didn’t protect Damon enough to stop it.* I sat in the dark and cried, like I did every night since that day.

Dicky came home to a completely dark house that night. Except to the bathroom, I hadn’t moved from that arm chair in livingroom since that morning. “Drew?” He called out.

“Yeah?” I murmured. He followed my voice and walked, carefully, into the room.

“Why are you sitting in the dark?”

“I just didn’t feel like seeing any light. I’m in a dark mood.”

“Anybody call?”

“Yeah. I didn’t answer, so I just took the phone off the hook.”

“Well, I tried to call you.”

“Really?” I said unenthused. “About what?”

“We got word that a lady saw a couple fitting the description of Camile and her friend, walking into a Salvation Army store with a little boy. They were driving a red beat up Buick. The same Buick we saw. Luckily the woman had enough sense to write down the license plate number.”

“Have they found the car yet?”

“No. We just found this out a little while ago. They forced me to go home and said they would handle it.”

“Funny. You’ll listen to them, but wouldn’t listen to me this morning.”

Dicky sighed. “Damn it, Drew....”

“Damn it nothing! Am I supposed to sit here and go crazy by myself, while you are out all day and night killing yourself?! This kidnapping happened to the both of us. So we need to fix this together.” I stood up and carefully reached for his face in the dark. “I’m not saying you need to completely give up on it and not search for Damon. Couldn’t be further from the truth. But what will you look like when Damon comes home and sees you looking like skin and bones, with bags under your eyes? You’ll scare the poor boy to death.” We both laughed a bit.

“I guess you’re right.” He kissed me and gave me a hug.

“I know I’m right. There are lots of other officers out there that I believe will be okay to search without you being there all the time.”

“Okay, Mom. I’ll slow down. Lets go in the kitchen and fix us something to eat.”

The next morning, police were in our house setting up taps on our phone lines and issued two patrols outside our house all day and night. One of the men on patrol was Dicky’s partner and friend, Officer Dalton Jones.

It had been a full week since Damon was taken and there was no sign that he was even alive since the last we heard about him being at the Salvation Army. I was trying to be strong and not snap, but the pressure was intensifying and I felt like I was going to go nuts.

Dicky and I were sitting in the dining room with the officers, listening to them tell of what steps they were going to take next. I was sitting quiet, looking at the large arrangement of police equipment, tape recorders, headphones, and guns spread across my dining table, and as they were talking, all I could hear was Damon crying on the camera and screaming, “Mama! Mama! Mama!” over and over. The fear was apparent on his little face. I imagine, I will never forget that for as long as I live. I put my hands over my face and cried. Dicky, who had been talking to Jones, turned to me and put his arm around my shoulder. “It’s going to be okay, baby. We’re going to get him back.” He rubbed my back and tried to soothe me while the other men excused themselves to give us some privacy.

The best news I had heard in a long time, came that afternoon when Jones came in the house and said they found the car. Like a flash, Dicky grabbed his badge and gun and rode with Jones to the scene. That time, I didn’t mind him leaving. I was at home alone -with the exception of a few officers in the dining room and a patrol car outside- and waited by the phone. The phone finally rang and before I answered it, the officers put on their headphones then signaled for me to pick it up. “H-Hello?” I stammered.

“Baby?”

“Dicky?! What is it?!”

“I can’t tell you right now. Just meet us at the station.” The line went dead. An officer drove me to the station and I ran down the hall to the front desk. “Has Richard gotten here yet?” I asked the man.

“Not yet. Have a seat. I’m sure he will be on his way soon.”

So, I sat in a chair and waited anxiously. My hands were shaking and my feet were bouncing. I knew that if I didn’t calm down, I’d end up back in the hospital. I kept my head lowered and tried to breathe.

After what seemed like forever, I finally heard some movement in the station. Then I heard it.................soft patter of little feet and someone saying, “Mama! Mama! Mama!” cheerfully. I looked up and there was Damon running to my legs. I immediately scooped him up and started to cry. It seemed like I was doing a lot of that lately. “Dicky, how did you.......? Where.......?” I was at a loss for words.

Dicky smiled. “We found him in a rundown apartment complex about three hours from here. We cuffed Camile, but her boyfriend ran away before we got there. Damon was found in one of the empty rooms in the back, sitting in the middle of the floor. He went nuts when he saw me.”

I stood up with Damon in my arms. “I can imagine. Seven days away from home to live with complete strangers at three is hard.” I lifted the boy up and looked at him in the face. “But you’re not going away like that again.”

“I hungry.”

I smiled. It felt so good to see his little face again. “I know you are, sweetie. We’re going to go eat right now.”


TBC........ was it a tear jerker? let me know. i thrive on feedback.