Unlovable

Unlovable

Book One in the Port Fare
Series

Sherry Gammon

Copyright 2011 Sherry Gammon for
Wordpaintings Unlimited

WWW.WordpaintingsUnlimited.blogspot.com

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All rights reserved.

ISBN:
10:
978-1-257-37986-6

ISBN-13:
978-1-257-37986-6

Dedication:

This book is dedicated to:

My beta readers; for all your help and
wonderful suggestions.

My family; you make my Life a beautiful place
to be.

And most importantly; to my Father in
Heaven.

Cover
Design
:

My beautiful cover was designed by Digital Artist
Paul Beeley. He does so much more than design great covers!! Check
out his web pages and see the magic!

Webpage:
http://create-imaginations.com/

And his Flickr page:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/paul-beeley/

Preface

Before I could reach his lifeless
form, Alan grabbed my face and lifted me onto my tiptoes; my lungs
battered begged for air. Dragging his slimy mouth along my neck he
muttered, “I’ve waited so long to have you, I’m afraid I’m not
going to be able to control myself as long as I’d
hoped.”

He then stopped and pinched his eyes
shut before dropping me back to the ground. “No, Alan, you can wait
a bit longer for your revenge,” he counseled himself while stroking
my hair. “But maybe a little taste wouldn’t hurt.” He jerked my
face to his, dropping his foul lips to mine.

Something inside me snapped. If I was
going to die, I was going to go out fighting, so fight I did. I
raked my fingers over his face, digging up flesh, and while forcing
my thumbs into his eyes, I brought my leg up between his, hard,
crushing his groin.

He stumbled and fell on top of me,
pinning my battered body to the ground. His weight added unwanted
pressure to my already tender ribs, and I screamed out.

However, Alan’s screams overshadowed
mine; he was in serious pain. I began scratching, biting, and
punching every inch of him I could make purchase with, holding
nothing back. Still reeling from my well-placed knee, he spewed out
a list of profanities a mile long as I broke free and forced my
broken body across the kitchen floor toward the gun. I was almost
to the drawer, when, from his prostate position, he hooked my foot,
dragging me back several feet.

I looked back at his sweaty face, now
scarred and bleeding thanks to my fingernails as he leered at me.
“You. Will. Pay. For. That.” Reaching into a pocket by his left
knee…

SETH

“
Absolutely pathetic!” You’d
think I really was an awkward high school senior instead of
a
top of my class,
MET agent. Yet, here I sat
at my
ridiculously oversized desk, spinning a cheap Bic pen in tight
little circles, lamenting my lack of courage
.

“
Get a grip, Seth, and talk
to her already!” I shoved the pen back into the desk drawer and
slammed it shut. Only my self-imposed chastisement didn’t help. I
couldn’t do it. I couldn’t get up the nerve to ask Maggie Brown out
on a date to save my life.

I crossed over to the window, frowning
down at my scarred cowboy boots clapping against the linoleum
floor. Not exactly my first choice in footwear, but they did
provide me with a convenient place to hide my sidearm. It’s not as
if I could meander around the high school with a gun strapped to my
chest.

Okay, focus. Maybe I should try making
small talk with her; that’s assuming I don’t choke to death on my
tongue first.

While considering a few other lame
scenarios, my eyes wandered over my dreary surroundings. It was
your vintage government-issued office. Aside from the obese desk
that lay sprawled across the center of the room, cold and lifeless,
a rusted gray filing cabinet sat stuffed in the corner, with a gray
pleather chair leaning cock-eyed against it. A seriously
out-of-date laptop, which was, believe it or not, gray, hummed
loudly in the top right corner of the desk. The only bright spot of
color in the room was the half-empty blue and red Diet Pepsi can
parked in the center of my desk.

Fortunately, I seldom had to be in my
office. I worked throughout Upstate New York with the Mobile
Enforcement Team, or MET. Being a specialized unit of the DEA, our
job is to work specifically with local authorities in helping to
dismantle drug trafficking in urban areas. For the past five
months, I’ve been working undercover at Port Fare High pretending
to be a student. Heroin use was on the rise in Port Fare, with
three reported deaths from overdose last summer alone. The dealers
were making it stronger, therefore, more addictive, and
cheaper.

My assignment was to
buddy up
to the popular
kids, figure out who was using, and from whom they were buying the
stuff. That meant I had to spend most of my days with the school’s
cheer captain and her groupies. Thanks to my wealth, she and her
clique readily accepted me into their circle. She was the
quintessential social climber and one shallow girl. I learned right
off she wasn’t using heroin, but I wasn’t too sure about some of
her friends.

There were three others
working undercover at the school besides myself. One agent worked
with the different sports teams, another covered the known drug
users at the school, and the last was a
floater
. His job was to blend quietly
into the background.

I hated deceiving the
students, but the dealers had to be stopped, too many lives were
being wasted.
I appeased my guilty
conscience by telling myself we weren’t after the kids who were
using the stuff, we wanted their supplier.

The case actually began last winter. I
was on an assignment near Syracuse with my team captain, Booker
Gatto. We were tracking a particularly unscrupulous drug dealer,
trying to learn who his supplier was. The scum dealer’s MO was to
hang out around the local elementary schools. He would lace candy
and other goodies with drugs before offering it to them in hopes of
getting them addicted. Nine children lost their lives before he was
killed in a shootout at a local pool hall. We lost one agent that
day. He left a wife and two small children behind.

The dead dealer’s fingerprints and
dental records turned up a big fat zero. His identity went to the
grave with him, and we buried him simply as John Doe. Booker felt
the situation was suspicious and had the case file sealed to the
public to protect the team from retaliation.

We never learned who his supplier was,
but we did stop the flow of heroin into the area, temporarily
anyway. It seems there’s always another piece of trash waiting in
the wings to fill the void.

Word on the street was that Rochester
was the new hot spot for our elusive supplier, more specifically,
the community of Port Fare. My town. Since volunteering for the
assignment at the high school, I’d grown to know these kids. Most
were good kids, some were a little lost, but overall they were a
good group. I made it my personal mission to catch the low-life if
it was the last thing I did.

My thoughts of the high
school brought me back around to my other problem. Maggie. She
didn’t fit into my assignment at the school, and I seldom,
actually
never
got
up the nerve to talk to her. The few times I’d run into her in the
hallway, my tongue had swollen to the size of a small whale,
essentially blocking off the oxygen supply to my brain.

Before I could tear myself up again,
my office door flew open. In sauntered my team leader and best
friend, Booker. No, he was more than a friend, he was like a
brother to me.

I laughed at him in his black, full
dress uniform, including the standard issue Glock pistol tucked
into a leather holster at his waist. I hated our wool uniforms, too
itchy. Luckily for me, jeans and tee shirts were the required
uniform of my current assignment, along with the boots, of
course.

“
What’s up, Book?” I went
back to my desk and sat down, my pleather chair squawking out in
protest.

“
We got a new lead on the
heroin ring. It’s the most promising one yet.” Booker shoved the
door closed roughly behind him causing the glass to rattle in its
frame. Flipping open a thin manila folder he took three photos out,
tossing the top one onto my desk.

“
This is Felix Hoffman,”
Booker said, tapping the photo of a seedy-looking man with stringy
red hair and a pockmarked face. “He’s a small-time thug with a
record a mile long, mostly for dealing marijuana, but it seems he
has new aspirations. He was seen in Applegate Park talking to a
couple of new guys last week.”

“
I’m guessing we don’t know
who these
new guys
are?” The man in the photo had
creep
written all over him.
Definitely not someone I’d want to run into in a dark alley, not
without my Glock, anyway.

“
Nope. However, word on the
street is they have a powerful contact.” He dropped down onto the
corner of my gray desk and continued.

“
Do you remember that
stabbing last week in Applegate Park?” I nodded. “Cole’s the doctor
assigned to her case. He called me this morning when she came out
of her coma, and I went over to interview her.”

He set the file down and pulled out a
small blue notepad from his breast pocket, flipping over a few
pages. “Her name is Michelle Stringer, 18 years of age. She went
into the park looking to score some grass, and came across our new
friends instead. They intro’d themselves to her simply as Bill and
Alan and tried to convince her to buy some heroin from them. She
said she wasn’t interested, but this guy Alan was insistent that
she try it. He said he only offered the good stuff, and she
wouldn’t regret it.

“
He began bullying her
around.” Booker’s eyes darkened as he spoke. He held zero tolerance
for men who abused women. Understandable on all accounts, but
especially after what he’d been through. “But it seems our Ms.
Stringer is a second degree black belt,” Booker said. “She got a
few good kicks in until this Alan character drew out a
pearl-handled knife from his pants. He proceeded to shove her into
their car.”

“
What kind of car?” I sat up
and reached for the pen I’d been spinning earlier, along with a
slip of yellow paper from my desk drawer.

“
Beige,” Booker said,
rolling his eyes.

“
That narrows it down.” I
sat back, tossing the pen onto my desk.

“
She did say it had several
rust spots,” he offered, jotting something down in his
notebook.

“
Ms. Stringer stated Alan
had fastened her wrists together with cable ties, and that he
really got off on cutting her up with his knife, telling her he
could make her scream for hours before she died if he
wanted.”

“
Guy sounds like a real …
charmer,” I said, forcing back a coarse remark.

“
After he finished with her,
she was kicked to the curb, literally, and left for dead. An older
man out walking his dog found her almost immediately and called
9-1-1. It’s probably the only reason she’s alive, and the fact that
Cole was the doctor on duty when she was brought in. I don’t
believe she would have made it otherwise. The guy’s a miracle
worker.”

“
What about the other guy?
Bill, right?”

“
Alan and his huge knife
demanded most of her attention. She did say Bill wasn’t too happy
about Alan using a knife on her. The two men had an intense
argument, but Alan was determined to punish her for kicking him.
When Alan threatened to carve Bill up if he didn’t shut his mouth,
the argument pretty much ended.”