MASTERS OF MENACE
Michael Lawrence. The name resonates in my head with all the intensity of church bells and with all the pain of a gunshot.
Michael Lawrence. I look at the coffin being lowered in the grave and I think about the vow I made early in my eulogy.
Michael Lawrence. I have never met this man, but I will make sure he is ended. I will make sure he knows what he has done, the pain he has caused.
Michael Lawrence. The man who killed the only father I ever knew, the man I swore to put behind bars.
Two years later
I drove into the empty driveway and stared at the vacant house. Since the house was paid off I let it sit on the block while I finished my journalism degree. I always managed to find internships that would get me out of the state, or spend the summers with friends or boyfriends. Anywhere but here. But now I was back. I was back and Michael Lawrence would pay.
Many people considered my obsession with Michael Lawrence to be misguided. After all, he wasn’t at the crime scene. But he didn’t have to be. Dad had spent most of his life trying to put the vicious members of Michael Lawrence’s gang behind bars. I had spent much of my teenage life leaving in the slight fear of death threats and being used as leverage against Dad. Although the man who pulled the trigger might not have been Lawrence, he had to be behind the crime.
The pain of that sunny day in the graveyard still wracked me and provided me with my motivation. Without that anger and hate I would have never gotten through college, I would have never come back here. But I made a vow to my father that day that I would bring Michael Lawrence to justice.
The police had never been able to prove he was connected to the crime directly. They brought some guy named Charley to court for his murder, but I knew Michael Lawrence was the one behind it. He ran the biggest motorcycle gang in the entire region—they were also criminal bodyguards and ran a security ring. His men were always for hire to make sure whatever your nefarious deed was got done without you being detected. It sickened me. Violence and death followed him everywhere. As, I reflected, it followed me.
Almost all my worldly possessions fit into two suitcases and a duffel bag. I left the suitcases for the morning, slung the duffel over my shoulder, and walked to the front door of the little house. I paused at the front briefly. The porch light wasn’t on—probably didn’t even work anymore—and night was falling quickly. I unlocked the door and went inside.
The house was roasting. Once a month I paid for a housekeeper to come out here and make sure nothing had been stolen and that wild animals weren’t invading, and I came down every summer to give the house a good scrubbing, but for the most part no one had even entered the house since my father’s death. And the A/C had definitely never been turned on in that time. The baking South Carolina heat had turned the house into a furnace.
Praying against all hope the A/C still worked I flipped on the thermostat and, mercifully, the whoosh of cool air flooded the ducts. Crisis averted, I turned my attention to the rest of the house. Nothing had even been moved in the past two years. Under the dust and disinfectant I could still smell Dad, his comforting musk. I slung the duffel bag on the couch and unzipped it, pulling out the flag I received at his funeral. Stoney-faced, I put the triangle on the mantle and stepped back. “This will always be your home, Daddy.”
I wandered through the rest of the house, trailing my fingers across surfaces, remembering growing up here. When I stepped into the house for the first time as a scared and lonely seven-year-old; the smell of burnt food and the ding of the delivery man at the door; the sounds my dad and his cop friends playing poker and drinking beer while I watched cartoons; where my high school boyfriend broke up with and Dad held me
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