Deserved

1.

'Would I get to keep my dick?' He had one hand on his hip. Brother was actually serious.

'What?!'

'Well.' Hunter began, 'If my legs got blown off but my hair was okay, would I still have a dick, like a working dick?'

I shook my head in amusement. Typical Hunter. He stared at me, holding out his palms as if he didn't understand my bewilderment.

'If I lost both my legs I mean sure it'd suck, but I'd have you to carry me around in your hulk like arms and I could still work here. I mean how could I not, there's a whole load of metal loving pussy I've yet to dip my wick in.'

One thing I loved aside from the rain, was lifting weights. He liked to poke fun at my larger than average muscle ratio.

I punched his arm and he wiggled his eyebrows again, as he served one of the groupies. I recognised her. She'd been here a lot over the past week or so, sashaying her hips and licking her scarlet painted lips. She batted her thick mascara slicked eye lashes in my direction and I turned my back, heading towards the store room. Hunter served the woman, throwing her a few of his tried and tested lines, and I closed the door, resting my head against the gnarled wood.

Have I been tempted by our female bar flies before?

Hell yeah.

I'm only human. A man, at that. Biologically we're visual beings. Show us a pair of doe eyes, and an hour glass figure wrapped up in a clinging low cut dress and we're interested. But with me, that's as far as its ever gone. I'm not a virgin, far from it, but lets just say I haven't had sex in a long time. A really long time. The store room window had been boarded shut a long time ago, but I could still hear the rain, and the drone of voices in the bar. But tonight, that somber mood didn't shift. I eyed a bottle of Jim Beam , my fingers touching cool, smooth glass, and I withdrew it from the racking. I needed something.

Hell I always needed something. I was a hairs breadth from dependancy, but I didn't have an addictive personality. That was my saviour. Sometimes I'd wallow in the cold, detached isolation that had become my life. Other times it was remembering what I'd seen, that made me wake up and appreciate what I had. I'd spent two long, arduous, sleep deprived tours in Iraq, followed by a year of aid work in and around the Kurdish regions. Years of misery at military school for both Hunter and I, led to the inevitable progression of war. Our tours there however, made us more determined to head back on our own terms. We worked for free, rebuilding homes, visiting the families affected by the 1987 Halabja genocide, laid down new roads and assisted with fixing electrical issues and even installing cable tv in the local tea house.

Best of all, we swapped our rifles for pens, teaching kids English. That was the last time I felt useful, hopeful, and needed. Not that I was ungrateful for the bar, I mean I did love this place. It was rustic, rough around the edges, and it attracted the kinda crowd that didn't ask too many questions or gossip. Living on the periphery of Cedar Creek, we may have fallen into the trap of gaining ourselves a gathering of small town busy bodies. The kinda folk that are so nosy they fear anyone who hadn't beared their dirty laundry in public. The kinda people who treat anyone that doesn't fall into their little boxes like some medieval witch. And we didn't fit into a box.

Our clientele consisted of the local charter of the Sons of Mayhem, a gang of bikers, and because of the music we chose, we attracted metal fans, metal bands on our open mike and band nights and stragglers. That's the only way I can describe them. Guys like me, with no direction, no wife to go home to, the guys working eighty hour weeks in trucks destined for long ass drives out into the middle of nowhere. The place wasn't conventional. But nor were Hunter and I.

I heard rapping on the door and I moved away, glad that I hadn't opened the bottle.

'Could do with a hand out here brew, things are hotting up.'

I looked past Hunter to see two groupies dancing on the bar, Coyote Ugly style, and the band in full flow. The place had filled up quickly, in spite of the dreary, dismal, driving rain. We'd make a fortune tonight, it'd tide us over for the slower winter evenings that were creeping up at speed. My friend asked no questions related to my hiding out in the store room, he never did. We had this quiet unspoken agreement between us. We both had a colourful past, but we were making the best of the cards we'd been dealt. We'd seen a lot of death and destruction together, enough for ten lifetimes, both on the front line and the years that followed in Iraq. It was a case of he didn't ask and I didn't say.

And vice versa.

I'm Dominic Weisz. Ex Corporal, humanitarian, bar tender and perennial loner. And what's true today, was true yesterday. Everyday before and everyday since.

I did not kill Abby Mae Whitman.