Blaze (Queen's Birds of Prey 2)

Curt Williams was about as pissed off as he’d ever been. His kids were driving him insane and pissing him off. What is their problem, was what he kept asking himself. All he wanted was a place to live and some cash. Why did they have such a problem with him having either of those?

He’d tried twice now to get to the house that they’d taken from him, and both times he’d been met there by a pack of wild dogs. Curt knew that they were wolves, and more than likely that pack that had made sure that he wasn’t able to get onto their land again.

The last time he’d been able to get on pack land and into their storage units, he’d made a killing off taking some of their stash. As soon as he’d broken into their smoke house, he’d been glad that he’d brought himself a wagon. Otherwise he would have only been able to take a few things. As it was, Curt had been able to take not just some meat for himself, but enough to make himself about five grand off the deal. Who knew that people in the area would be excited to have a taste of the old country way of preserving foodstuffs?

He’d taken dried hams and sausages, and fat back bacon that was still in slab form. That had been the most requested item that he’d taken. People wanted more of that than they had anything else. Yet, the ham? Well, he’d enjoyed the entire thing. Then he’d used the bone, just like his grannie had, to make soup beans and a side of corn bread. That had been some good eating—right up until it was all gone, that is. Since then, he’d not had a decent meal.

Now he was cut off from his source. Curt wondered if these people knew what a gold mine they were sitting on. And if they did, why the hell weren’t they sharing it with the world? Not that he wanted them doing that. Once he was able to get there and pull more out, he didn’t want them flooding the market and taking all his business.

Curt had always thought of himself as a thinker. He could not just think his way out of trouble, but he had a way of making money off his thoughts. An entrepreneur, he supposed, was what he might call himself. A person with the ideas and the way to make cash.

“For me, anyway.” Curt thought of all the cash that he’d lost over the years. It had been a blast. Both losing and winning had been a great deal of fun for him. “No one understands the thrill of it. Even though I do lose a lot more than I gain, it’s like I’m king of the world either way.”

Sure, he figured that he had gone a little overboard with a couple of things. Like, using the house and the money that was supposed to fix it up was a bad idea. Curt knew that now. But a man could not turn down a sure thing when it hit him, now could he?

Laughing to himself, he went down to breakfast at the hotel he was staying in. It had been a stroke of genius to have the bills go to his daughter. Of all the people in the world, Clara would not see him on the streets. Just as he was flipping over his waffle when the bell dinged, the manager came to stand with him.

“I need to speak to you, Curt. Your daughter said that she wasn’t paying your bill to stay here. I told her how you’d been here a week already, depending on her to pay up, and she told me that she wasn’t paying anything for you.” Curt took his waffle out of the maker and sat down to fix it all up. “How do you propose to pay your bill here, Curt? You told me that I could depend on her.”

“Then call my son.” He said that his phone was no longer in service, and someone at the house had said that he wasn’t expected to return there. “What the hell does that mean, not expected to return? He’s kicked me to the curb so that I couldn’t bother his shit, and now he’s gone? I’ll go there today after I eat and get you some cash. The damned kids have no respect for their elders anymore, do they, Hamilton?”

“It’s Ben, for the ninth time. My name is Ben Donaldson. Don’t you listen to people when they tell you who they are?” Curt took a bite of his waffle to keep from answering him. “I’m not going to bother telling you that you’ve racked up a pretty sizeable bill, Curt. You will pay it by the end of the day or I’ll have you arrested. You’ve taken advantage of my good will enough.”

When he walked away, Curt just chuckled to himself. People just didn’t have much patience anymore. It was like they were set to go, go, go all the time, and not even stop to smell the roses.

Curt was a man that not only stopped to look at the beautiful, but sometimes would sit for hours just thinking and looking at a pretty view. Of course, he was trying to think of ways to make a buck off the prettiness of whatever it was that caught his attention. He thought that was why he’d never had heart troubles. Curt was a slow moving kind of person. The best ideas came to him when he was just sitting down.

After having three more waffles, he went back to his room. It wasn’t even the best room he’d ever had, and the man Harley, or whatever his name was, was acting like Curt was taking food from his mouth. Not to mention the place wasn’t even filled up. There were at least three empty rooms in the place, even on a weekend.

It wasn’t until he picked up his newspaper that he realized that it was only Tuesday, not Saturday as he’d thought. Today he’d have to go to where Bryson worked to figure out how come he wasn’t paying up for his own dad. He was going to have to get physical on him if things didn’t go the way he wanted.

Curt tried to remember the last time he’d seen his kids. It had been a few months at least. He knew that they both had a job, but he couldn’t have told anyone what it was they did at the places they worked.

Bryson worked at a coloring book place, he thought. He wasn’t sure that was what

it was, really, but he knew that his boy had to have certain pencils and some other crap to do it. Curt was really ashamed to tell people that Bryson worked at a coloring job, so he told them that he was the big manager. It was certainly better than telling them that his boy used crayons all the time.

Clara worked in an office someplace. It must have been in a bad part of town or something, because he knew she’d had to take defense classes, as well as learn how to shoot a gun. He’d thought about the gun she’d gotten a couple of years ago. It might have been longer; he just didn’t remember shit like that. He wanted that gun, just to sell it off for some cash. But she was pretty smart about hiding it. He’d yet to be able to find out where the sucker was.

Finding the building where his son worked was proving to be difficult. Since he didn’t know the name of the place, he was sure that he could pick out the building. There were a couple that he thought for sure was it, but one of them had been closed down for a few years, he thought it looked like. The other one said it was being remodeled.

The cell phone numbers for his kids didn’t do him any good now either. They both said that they were no longer in service. Even his own had hit the crapper today. Curt was sure that they’d cut him out of that program too.

It had taken him a few weeks to get a phone matched up to their bill. The two of them had the same company, that he had been aware of. But snitching himself one of their bills had been harder than he thought it should have been. They didn’t leave their stuff out for him to look at when he was around.

It wasn’t like he wanted to pay on them or anything. He just wanted a few numbers off the bill so he could get him service too. Curt was actually surprised that it had worked. He figured that once they got their bill he’d be cut off like he was now. The number of years that it worked had been astounding to him.

They were stupid, was all he could think about his kids. They’d given him shit about his gambling when they had shitty jobs that couldn’t even keep them in cell phone service. It was enough to make him ashamed of claiming them as his kids sometimes.

Stopping a man to ask him where the coloring place was got him nowhere fast. The man just looked at him like he was stupid or something. Threatening the man for being so rude when he was far enough away from him, Curt looked up in time to see his son with a beautiful woman. He might not have known it was his boy, but he looked so much like someone he knew long ago that it had taken him a minute to put it together. When he turned and smiled at the woman, Curt made his way to the other side of the street to find the building that he’d been looking for. It, too, was closed up for remodeling.

“I need some money.” Bryson looked at him with so much anger that Curt took a step back. “Christ almighty, son, you looked just like your momma there for a minute. Just give me some cash and I won’t be bothering you today anymore. Oh, you forgot to pay the hotel bill where I’m staying too.”

“No.” The women looked at him like he was a bug or something when Bryson spoke. Curt didn’t have time for this, and asked his son what he meant by telling his own daddy no. “Just what it sounds like. Two letters—even you should know what it means. You certainly told Mom that enough when she asked you to stop gambling away the food money.”

“This here isn’t the time to be bringing stuff up like that. You got yourself a pretty woman here, and she don’t want to hear about that kinda stuff.” He eyed the girl. “Son, you’re not paying for her, are you? Christ, if so, then you can share her a bit. I wouldn’t mind even sloppy—”

The punch to his face felt like he was having his head ripped off. When he fell to the ground, he just laid there. The woman had her fists doubled up like she was going to hit him again. That just wasn’t right, her knocking him to the ground like he was a nobody. Especially if his son was paying for her for the day.