I have packed up my life in a few suitcases and taken all that was important, but still it is difficult to leave a place that I called home for so long.
I got used to living in the desert. I loved the wide-open spaces. I love being surrounded by nature, by the bright blue sky, and the three hundred and fifty days of sunshine. I don't know where I'm going and of course I can stay in the Southwest.
That is not outside the realm of possibility. There's Utah and Nevada and even other parts of Southern California.
I get on I-10 E. heading to Blythe, California, on the border with Arizona. I have no set plan or even a clue as to where I'm going. I have made a lot of preparations to make sure that I was able to take off as soon as I needed to, but I have thought little about the plans as to where I would go.
I hoped that a few hours on the road would clear my head, but when I see the sign for Phoenix, I'm no more certain about my new life than I was earlier this morning.
Okay, enough driving. I need to change tactics, I say to myself.
I pull into a Starbucks and instead of going to the drive-thru, I get out and go inside. After ordering a latte, I take a seat and open my computer.
Driving can make decisions easier to make but so can standing still. In this case, I think that sitting down and remaining stationary while actually working through a plan might be of use.
I read her article again, this time with a sounder mind. I understand the words, but they don't make much sense.
Why would she publish all of this?
Why would she betray me like this?
I knew that she wanted to make her career, but I didn't realize that she would go this far.
What about what we had?
Was that just a lie?
Was that just a figment of my imagination?
It feels a lot like it. Maybe everything that I thought we had was just a game, a way for her to get what she wanted. I really didn't think so, but now I have no idea.
Still, sitting here, I realize that I have been in hiding too long. I started a new life and a new identity, but it's no way to live. Perhaps the best thing to do is to go find my uncle and talk to him man-to-man.
Just the thought of that sends cold sweat down my back. My uncle is head of one of the most profitable and successful crime organizations in the Pacific Northwest. He is smart and cunning and I have betrayed him in every way that he could be betrayed except for possibly sleeping with his new wife.
I have testified against him in court. I was raised in a family where talking to the authorities is considered to be a sin.
Though I was never directly involved in the syndicate, not even as a low-level grunt. But everyone was sworn to secrecy even those of us who knew very little.
In my family, it was worse to be a tattletale, a rat, than to be dead.
So, my decision to testify against him was something that I didn’t take lightly. I did it because I had no choice. I did it as retribution for what he did to my father.
That's a long story, of course, but I guess I have time. My old life and my old identity are gone and so are my new ones. Emma's article exposed me in ways that she will never know. There are hitmen working for my uncle who are now after me.
He vowed to have me killed for what I did and I am certain that he intends on keeping that promise.
Unless I do something.
I was never part of the organization, but I was family and that means that I had to abide by the same rules that everyone else did. Of course, I didn't know much of what was going on, but I did know some things.
I kept my mouth shut for a long time, but then he killed my father and everything changed. My father was the second in command. My father was his younger brother and he did everything that my uncle wanted. He was loyal to a fault.
He wanted to take the organization in a new, legal direction and make the hotel and restaurant more profitable. Many families have done that over the years, even some as prominent as the Kennedys.
My uncle started out selling marijuana and then methamphetamines. He established all the right connections with cartels in Mexico, but it wasn't just the drugs that he was involved with.
The business had many subsidiary companies, each acting individually to the benefit of the larger shadowy organization. My mom was a nurse. A Medicare scam came onto his radar one day after he overheard her complaining about how some companies overcharge the government. Once my uncle found out how much money could be made and had his eyes set on it, there was no way of getting him to change his mind. There was no going back.
He pressured my mom and when she said no, he made her do it. He threatened to take her nursing license away by getting a doctor at one of his nursing homes to report her for stealing drugs.
She had no way out. She had to comply.
After that, my father and my mother tried to figure out a way to get out of it. They no longer wanted anything to do with the family and they decided to escape. They were going to move away, but it didn't happen soon enough.
The problem is that there is no escaping my uncle. There is no getting out of the organization. They knew too much and they either had to continue working for him or they were expendable.
My father died in a house fire. My mother escaped but later died in the hospital from smoke inhalation. The fire department found that it was arson, but there were no suspects. A Nest camera from a neighbor saw two men entering the house in the back and then leaving the front after the blaze started, but no one could see their faces and no one was going to talk to the authorities on our behalf.
My uncle and everyone else in the family came to the funeral, pretending that they didn't know what had happened. They sent elaborate floral displays and even tried to eulogize my father, but I put a stop to that. There was no way that his killer was going to speak at his funeral.
Two weeks later, after the insurance company refused to pay due to the fact that the house was set on fire deliberately, my uncle requested that I come see him and offered me a job. The mortgage, the credit card payments, and everything else was now on me to pay.
I had no job and he had an offer that I could not refuse, but of course, I did. I wasn't going to work for him. He had killed my parents and I was going to figure out a way to make him pay.
The problem is that I couldn’t. My uncle is one of the most powerful men in the Pacific Northwest and he always has protection on him. He is social and engaged and there were always guards and friends and women hanging around.
After a while, my sister pleaded with me to stop thinking about it. She had already lost both of our parents and she was terrified of losing me.
She wanted me to just make peace with it. I wasn't involved in the business and for now, my uncle let me be, but I could not make the payments and I was falling further and further behind.
I worked a series of low-wage jobs with no prospects of growth. I had a bachelor’s degree and I kept sending my application anywhere I could without much luck.
Later, I found out why. My uncle had his feelers out and blocked each and every one. Suddenly, I reached a breaking point. I couldn't keep going like this. I needed to vent. I needed to get my frustrations out. So, I started to do the one thing that ever made sense. It was the way that I always figured my life out.
I started to write.
I created an allegory for my life. It was all made up, but it wasn't as well. The main character was a poor young farmer who couldn't make ends meet. His family was just killed by the Lord and he wanted to avenge their deaths, but he also owed the Lord money. This was a metaphor for my life. The story of what I was going through.