Out of nowhere, the male criminal looked at the female one like he was about to kill her.

  No. Not in MY house!

  I struggled as hard as when he had me pinned.

  But then the criminal stared into my eyes with his much colder and deader ones from a minute ago.

  There was no doubt in my mind that he’d kill me if I tempted him.

  I fell still after a few seconds of intense eye-contact. No matter what I wanted, or what was fair, or any of that, I got the distinct impression that if I didn’t stop immediately, I’d be dead too quick to regret it.

  Confirming my compliance, he turned back to his phone.

  And so went the last interaction I ever had with my grandson.

  Some time after I stopped paying attention for the sake of blood pressure, my bones vibrated from the explosion.

  That put me squarely into the kind of fight-or-flight that I hadn’t felt for what had to be decades.

  Like so many these days, this was not a useful instinct. Not while I was taped to this chair.

  But finally, around the time I came back to my senses after enough yelling and explosions to make Michael Bay jealous, the criminals left. Without a goddamned care in the world for all the mess they’d tracked onto my carpet.

  And without so much as an apology for ruining my night… Week? Month, probably… Year?

  Anyway, they left.

  And I was distracting myself.

  Even while trying to occupy my thoughts with anything else, I had my chair’s armrests in a deathgrip. This was doubly redundant with the layers of duct tape ensuring not only that my hands stayed well and truly fastened to the chair, but that they were more strongly adhered than any grip I could possibly manage in my old age.

  Not that I didn’t give it the even older and more redundant college try.

  But that was a distraction too. The ‘what’ of it wasn’t important.

  I always knew their kids were bad eggs. Far as I could tell, this was inevitable. Even still… Held hostage by my own grandson…

  What was the world coming to? Oh right…

  Granted, I never told him about that.

  Neither, apparently, did his disappointment of a father.

  Nor that disappointment’s thug of a wife.

  So I’d been surprised when the prodigal disappointing thug approached me to rent a dock space. Still, family was family.

  I’d figured it was the least I could do to charge double rent for the extra service of keeping his name off the books. Guy named ‘Simmons’ docking at ‘Simmons Pier’?

  Someone would look into that. And when they did, the truth wouldn’t be far behind.

  My shame would be known to whoever was curious instead of safely kept by me, to be medicated into nonexistence.

  If you spot this story on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.

  Given my general distaste for authority figures, it’s to my surprising amount of dismay that the police don’t show up. Not for the rest of the night. Not on their own, anyway.

  Didn’t any of those suits call for backup?

  Minutes passed. Or maybe hours. Probably less than that. Hard to tell.

  The only thing I had to measure time by were my songs. And the frantic footsteps always outside, never bothering to check on me. And the sirens and the splashing and the heavy machinery making so much racket that I could barely hear my music.

  But apparently, none of that required my input, or even permission as the owner of the property they were doing it on. All the noise and vibrations were just too close to have come from anywhere else but my own damn dock.

  But eventually, my door did open.

  And in came… The bartender. A crimson-haired strumpet that just happened to run the closest bar to my house. Even outside her bar, she still maintained her long-standing reciprocation of my longer-standing disinterest in talking to her.

  Charlie was crying.

  I didn’t ask why.

  She didn’t answer.

  But after a lot of silent, tear-filled unwinding of my best tape, she did get my hands free from the chair.

  Things happened more quickly after that. Not more easily though.

  Wanting to just rip off what I wished was a band-aid, I gritted my teeth, ripped off most of my beard along with the tape, and immediately called the police. My method wasn’t a phone, but rather the most blood-curdling scream I’ve ever heard come out of my mouth.

  Turns out, they were already onsite. They’d even followed Charlie to my house to escort her back to her bar. They had the entire pier cordoned off, but wouldn’t risk venturing further until daylight.

  No matter what I told them, I just got the same bullshit about needing to stay where I was and not to step outside.

  Apparently, they thought someone had planted explosives all over, right under my nose.

  Which they hadn’t. I was too diligent about scanning. Unless they’d been planted while I was tied to the damn chair. Or after that, when I was forbidden from leaving my damn house.

  And to make matters worse, I was fresh out of whiskey. That girl couldn’t have at least brought some with her.

  Pointedly grumbling in what I knew even through the wall to be the direction of her bar, I dumped my glass of presumptively-poured ice cubes into the sink.

  But what the hell had happened out there? My house was apparently undamaged. So there was that. But this was my livelihood we were talking about.

  I did eventually discover the issue. My confusion only lasted until I stepped outside.

  There, I saw the goddamned chunks bitten out of my goddamned dock in a goddamned radius around where my goddamned grandson was parking his goddamned boat.

  Half a year later, I got a surprise in my email. An unpleasant surprise. As usual. A reminder of the biggest goddamned mess I’ve ever been party to.

  Out of nowhere, I felt like someone threw acid on my upper lip.

  Immediately covering the spot with my hand to staunch the bleeding, my hand came back… Clean?

  Oh. More phantom pain from that night… My beard still hadn’t grown back all the way.

  At this point in my life, I was afraid it never would. And with how patchy it was…

  Speaking of never, at least that was the next time I saw either my fugitive grandson or his Harley Quinn of a girlfriend.

  The Cops couldn’t find a thing. Nor could the FBI. Or the CIA. Or the National Guard. Or the entire goddamned internet. At least in terms of whereabouts…

  Jameson Simmons and Stephanie Williams might as well have left their birth certificates lying around with how much identifying evidence there was.

  But then they just up and vanished without a trace. And there were all the rumors about her uncle assassinating some kid?

  Of course, the shit hit the fan after that. And of course, that fan had to be pointed directly at me.

  Even through the months of contractors coming in and rebuilding a dock slower than I would’ve thought possible… Mountains of insurance paperwork… Every reporter alive showing up at my door…

  After I’d told my exact same story, over and over, to what statistically must have been every authority figure in the city…

  In the email, along with that unwelcome reminder, were a bunch of numbers and things.

  Tapping on the link, I logged in with the credentials listed. There were two savings accounts.

  In the one labeled ‘Rent’, I found exactly four times what that punk kid contractually owed for parking.

  But the other account had even more. The only clue to its purpose was the account name. ‘Damages’.

  All told, it was more than the whole night had cost me. In money, anyway.

  With a grumble, I set up the wire transfer. “Goddamned terrorists…”

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