Stone ColdChapter 2 free porn video

The next few weeks were a study in emotional disturbance. Something had broken inside me. Something fundamental – my whole personality shifted. I still had the same moral compass, but how I went about my life and how I expressed myself changed. I no longer trusted anyone. Everyone I interacted with was now scrutinized. I didn’t expose my feelings or thinking to anyone.

I had no patience any more. If you were doing a job for me, you’d better be doing it right and correctly. No more molly coddling, as my father would have put it. People in lines at stores in front of me who didn’t know what they wanted would get my ire. Incompetence was highlighted and made apparent. I know I was a lot harder to get along with. Interestingly, my efficiency at work went up a lot, but my popularity plummeted. I was ok with that. I was hired to get the job done, not be chummy with people. I didn’t have any friends at work much anyway. My entire social life had revolved around or just plain been Sarah.

I didn’t date. All sexual activity just stopped dead. I didn’t even masturbate any more. I sought out self defense and martial art classes, although I was very specific on the practicality of it. I did three Aikido classes before I realized this really was an art, and less practical than, say, Karate, Systema or Krav Maga. I tried some Brazilian Ju-Jitsu and it was great for one on one, but had a rather glaring hole in the whole approach were if you were facing more than one opponent, you’d get your arse kicked. By trying to find people to teach me, doing a crash courses in everything I found tired me out at the end of each day It became a nightly occurrence for me to just fall into bed.

I learned to shoot as well. I spent three weekends on a course in Arizona to learn how to shoot and deal with urban disturbances when weapons were involved. It was all very silly – learning to roll and shoot – but the sense of knowing how to use a weapon was quite powerful. I got quite good with a .40. I ended up buying my own Heckler & Koch USP handgun in the .40 configuration. I even applied for a concealed carry permit. When it was granted I never actually used it, but it felt good knowing I could.

I have no idea why I was suddenly so obsessed with self-defense, in all its different aspects. I had some fuzzy idea that I was trying to learn how to never be in that situation with someone like Sam again, where all I did was take it. He was bigger than me, stronger than me and I had no practical fighting experience. Never again, although to be honest, I was also smart enough to realize the likelihood of being in such a situation again was very slight. But that didn’t stop my drive.

I did look at and sign the divorce papers in the end. I mean, what was the point of not doing so? As Sarah had said, she’d asked for nothing. I got an email about two weeks after I signed them and sent them back asking for a copy of our wedding album, but by then I’d already destroyed it.

In fact, I’d destroyed everything of hers. When I got home after the final confrontation, I found she’d already been there and grabbed a few keepsake things – some jewelry her mother had left her, that had been in her family for a few generations, a few items of clothing, her stuffed toys from her childhood, things like that. I could tell though. I knew everything she owned, just like she knew everything of mine. She left me a post-it note in the kitchen that just said, “I’m sorry.”

I’d debated what to do with her stuff – donate it all to charity or have a bonfire. We were in an apartment, so I when I decided that a Viking funeral for my marriage was called for, it required me to rent a truck and move all her stuff to an abandoned housing lot outside of the city. I spent the evening ceremoniously burning her stuff, and some of mine that was bought with her. I was also drunk off my ass. A bottle of Jack Daniels Silver slowly consumed over the night will do that to you. Still I shouldn’t have been doing anything with fire being hammered, but, oh well, hindsight is always 20-20, isn’t it?

I remember screaming and yelling and dancing and throwing things on the pile, announcing to the world what it was and then laughing and cackling hysterically.

I woke up the next morning in my car. My tongue stuck to the top of my mouth, my eyes crusted over and with a hangover from hell. I had figured that would be the start of my new normal, the moving on phase.

Looking back, I don’t really think I ever moved on. I think I’m still stuck in those days of being in that house, listening to them fuck.

I quit working for Bardels Inc when I got a review that basically said, “Your work ethic and ability to get stuff done is off the charts, but no one wants to work for you so you need to go get counseling.”

Fuck that. I was hired to get stuff done, not win a popularity contest. I figured I could do the job on my own terms and started my own engineering consultancy company. I named it Newt Engineering. Oh yeah, the Newt thing.

I’m now known as Newt to pretty much everyone. Trevor is long dead and buried. When it came out that Sarah had gone, when I was still working for Bardels, a couple of the girls there had decided I would be their new project. I didn’t know them at all and they didn’t know me. They tried all sorts of stupid shit that I wasn’t about to do. They wanted to give me a ‘make over’. They called it the ‘New Trevor Project’.

Somehow, that got abbreviated to Newt. New Trevor became new Trev, then New T, and finally Newt. It stuck - I didn’t much care – I was OK with it, since as Trevor I had been was pretty much dead anyway. I was harder, colder and less interested in other people now.

To be clear though, I still had my moral compass. I was still very aware of wrong and right – even though I had less patience, I was still very aware of ethics and justice. I just wasn’t about to put up with all the little petty shit people do every day because they aren’t thinking about it. And there’s a lot of that.

The only time my moral compass went screwy was when I thought about Sam Fellows and my wife, Sarah. Well, in terms of Sam Fellows, it just didn’t even register. I could quite happily put a bullet between his eyes and sleep the sleep of the just. There was no question about that.

But Sarah ... one minute I wanted our life back, the next I wanted her to burn in hell because of what she’d allowed to happen. No, encouraged to happen. She could have walked away from Sam Fellows, but she didn’t. She went with him, was having his child – all the promises to me, the wedding vows, all out of the window. Their happiness was at the expense of mine, and she just did it. I hated her as much as I loved her, and I went back and forth. If she had suddenly shown up saying she’d made a mistake, and could we get back together, I don’t know what I’d have done. It’s a terrible thing, to not know your own mind and feelings - to not be able to trust them. I’m sure this is what came out in the fact that I didn’t seem to be able to trust anyone else any more.

This showed up in the last project I worked on for Bardels. I tell this story because it’ll become relevant later, so bear with me.

It was a job in Mexico City. I was there to help fix up three crumbling warehouses. I say ‘fix up’, but realistically it was pretty much a tear down and rebuild situation, but the company concerned – some shipping company – didn’t have the permits for that, so it was called a ‘fix up’.

I was there for eight weeks, and while I was there, I cast around to find someone to teach me something martial arts wise I hadn’t already found. I found a little Mexican dude named ChenChilla. He didn’t seem to have any other name, just ChenChilla. And he didn’t seem disinclined to take my gringo dollars to teach me Escrima, the stick combat art from the Philippines. And this guy was good. Very, very good. He wasn’t a bad teacher, either. The two don’t always go hand in hand. Being good at a martial art doesn’t mean you have the capability to pas that expertise on. I had no idea what else he did for a living, although I was about to find out.

One evening, after working out in a local park where he’d not only shown me a lot, but also kicked my ass a fair bit too, we were sitting in his local favorite watering hole, having a couple of cold Tecate’s. The cantina was basic, as was everything about ChenChilla. There was a small jukebox in the corner. Three giggling girls who were almost certainly under age sat next to it while a smattering of other guys all drinking quietly watched the soccer game on the aging TV over the bar. ChenChilla kept glancing at the girls and I was starting to wonder if he had some kind of young girl fetish, and if so, what I would do about it. If anything. My moral compass was warring with my newfound dis-interest in other people’s lives. It wasn’t lost on me that I wasn’t about to be able to stop ChenChilla anyway. Not with his skillset. So I sat quietly watching the situation unfold.

We were working on our second beer, talking in low tones about how stupid Mexican Wrestling was compared to the original Olympic sport when the evening came to a precipitous end. Four very large guys in loose grey suits came into the bar. They were tooled up with Glock machine pistols and making no bones about it. Conversation ceased in the bar as they entered. You could see the barman almost crap himself. They stood in the doorway, squinting as their eyes adjusted to the dark interior, such a contrast from the glare of the sun outside.

I looked at them, then at ChenChilla, noticing him very slowly and with almost no movement ease his heavier Escrima sticks out of his bag on the floor.

The four in the door way saw what they were looking for, and while one waved his gun at the bar keep, the other three walked over to the girls, who were sitting in the corner and trying to squirm down in their seats so as not be noticed. One of the guys hung back by our table, right next to ChenChilla, while the other two walked right up to where the girls were sitting.

One of the tooled up thugs waved his gun barking at the girls to stand up and when they did, he grabbed one savagely by the hair and was about to drag her out when the bar exploded. I saw exploded, because that’s what it felt like.

ChenChilla stood up smoothly and in the same motion brought his heavy Escrima stick up in an arc that ended at the head of the goon standing next to the table. There was a spray of blood and the guy sank like a sack of potatoes. ChenChilla was already on his way to have a go at the two holding the girls, and as I looked back, I could see the guy in the doorway raising his weapon.

I honestly didn’t know what to do. I had no weapon – I hadn’t brought my gun with me from the US and I just looked around desperately. I looked at out table, but all we had were frosty mugs of beer. In a moment of inspiration, I picked up one and threw it as hard as I could at the guy in the door. It hit him square in the face, and he went down, although I could tell he was not out.

I turned my attention to the rest of the bar. Everyone else was either cowering or heading to the back door, as were the two girls the third had been with. She was left alone with the guy with a fist full of her hair. Some friends!

ChenChilla was engaged with one of the guys with the guns and I noticed that no one had fired yet – it was close quarters and I suspect they were afraid of hitting each other, or the girls they were obviously here to abduct.

That notion went out of the window as ChenChilla, with a vicious one-two motion of his sticks, took out the second of the two holding the girl, as the man let go of his target and tried to bring his weapon to bear. ChenChilla reached out his hand to the girl and as he did so, a stucco of gunfire sounded, louder than you’d think, and three blood spurts erupted out of his chest. The guy at the door had levered himself up and shot at ChenChilla from the ground.

One of the men still in the tavern tentatively approached the man on the floor from behind and brained him with a bottle of beer, smashing it on his head. I know how it looks in movies, but in real life, beer bottles are hard and if it smashes on your skull then you’ve got hit pretty bad. The bad guy went down again. I nodded at the guy who had saved us all, who then dropped the remains of the bottle and made a beeline for the back exit, trying to hide his face. He didn’t need people coming after him later.

I ran over to where ChenChilla was on the ground – he was still breathing, and he looked up at me in agony. He managed to raise a hand and gestured at the cowering, crying girl and croaked, “Take ... her ... get...” and then he fell back. He was unconscious, not dead, because he was still breathing if only slightly, but he probably wouldn’t be for long if he didn’t get attention fast.

“Llamar a la policía,” I screamed at the barkeep, hoping my spanish was correct.

The guy that ChenChilla had first taken out – the one standing by out table starting stirring I made a snap decision. I looked at the cowering girl behind him and stood up, grabbed her hand and dragged her towards the back exit.

She looked at me with fearful eyes. “You speak English?” I asked her.

She nodded, and said, “Si.”

“Back door. We need to get out of here.” I headed to the door and she followed. We pulled out into the back alley and I looked both ways; it was clear. Everyone else had gone, including the guy who’d smashed the thug in the doorway with the beer bottle.

“I have a car around the corner, lets get to it. We need to get the hell out of here.” The girl, who I noticed had amazingly clear tan skin, nodded.

Well, that was pretty much it. We ran to the corner, walked briskly down the street to my car. Once inside I had trouble resisting the temptation to scream away, tires smoking. I drove her away smoothly instead, rubber necking to see if anyone was watching, the whole time.

She wasn’t talkative. I think she was in shock. I threw her a blanket to keep her warm, which seemed a bit stupid given we were in Mexico. I’d heard somewhere along the line that people in shock start shivering and you are supposed to keep them warm, so whatever.

After twenty minutes of aimless driving, both of us had started to calm down a little. We weren’t being followed, or if we were, they were doing a better job than I could detect.

Eventually, she said, hesitantly, “Will you take me home?”

e?”

“Your home?” I said, looking over at her and needing clarifica ion.

“Si. My home. It’s not to far.”

“Sure,” I nodded. Frankly, the faster I could get this target of opportunity out of my car, the better. I think I knew what ChenChilla’s day job was now – I think we he was supposed to look out for this girl. God knows whose daughter she was.

About forty minutes later, we pulled up outside a huge mansion. I mean, big high walls, very large menacing men outside, the whole movie version of a kingpins pad.

She got out of the car and several men came running from the doorway, all carrying weapons. I looked at her hesitantly, and she just touched me on the arm and said, “It’ll be fine. Thank you. I owe you my life.”

“If it’s all the same to you, I’d rather just go,” I said, stiffly. I didn’t need this in my life.

“I understand.” She leaned in, kissed me on the cheek – and I was suddenly aware this was the first female touch I’d had in months, since before Sarah had left – and then she got out of the car, calling to the men who were running towards her.

She slammed the door and I was gone. I didn’t need to explain myself to anyone, particularly not large thug with guns. I didn’t want to be involved in whatever her father was involved with; I just wanted to finish the warehouses and get out of town. Another city I would never return to.

However, that story didn’t end there.

Three days later, I walked back to my hotel room, wondering what to do for dinner that night, and also wondering how ChenChilla was – if he’d survived or not. I wasn’t going to talk to the Federales in Mexico over this. I didn’t want to be involved, so I had no way to find out, short of going back to the bar to ask the bar keep, and that was not going to happen. I’d never been so scared in my life. I didn’t need to reminisce about it.

I was also thinking about how I felt about looking at him bleeding out on the floor. ChenChilla was about the closest thing to a friend I had at this point but I still didn’t care to the point of putting myself at risk to find out his fate. I’d become hard inside to the point where I was even starting to scare myself. I was wondering if perhaps I should see someone, some therapist or something, when I opened the room door, walked in and found some large guy sitting in the easy chair in my room, drinking one of my beers.

He raised the beer to me and said, “Don’t worry, no one here to hurt you. Quite the opposite. But, if you keep drinking this shit, I may have to...” It was said with a smile that didn’t quite reach his eyes. This was a dangerous man and I just stood stock-still.

“Come in Mr. Stevenson. I’m here to bring you a message from a man who would very much like to shake your hand and give you his heartiest thanks.”

I relaxed a little, and closed the door and dropped my backpack on the floor.

“Here, have a beer, even if it is terrible. I think after a days work building warehouses, you’d need one.” He got up and opened the room fridge and passed me one of the Tecate’s in there.

I sat on the bed, he sat in the chair and I took a long slurp, waiting for him to get to the point of whatever he was there for.

“Not a man of many words, no? Although, if I had been dumped like you were, I suspect I wouldn’t either. I think quite a lot of people would have died if that happened to me, to be honest.”

I just looked at him. I didn’t have anything to say. Obviously they’d – whoever ‘they’ were - had done their homework.

“Look, you did something the other day, rescued a very important personage from a potentially very deadly situation. Her father is very, very grateful. It took us a couple of days to run you down – thankfully Persephone did at least get your car number – and we wanted to be sure you weren’t ... involved. It doesn’t appear you are. Just at the wrong place at the right time. ChenChilla did survive by the way. He sends his regards and is also grateful for you picking up his duties. He feels extremely bad that he failed – although my employer won’t hear of it. When someone takes three bullets for your daughter, well, I’m sure he’ll have a job for life, even if he doesn’t want to work.

“The fact is, our little organization doesn’t know quite what to do. You place us in an awkward position. Your contribution is public, but there doesn’t appear to actually be anything we can do for you in return. Honor demands we rebalance and yes, there is honor among thieves even today in Mexico, but we are at a loss. Is there anything you want Mr. Stevenson? That we are unaware of?”

I took another sip and considered the question. ‘Yes, I’d quite like you to put out a hit on Sam Fellows, and Sarah, his fiancée, ‘ went through my mind, but I wasn’t that far gone to even suggest it. They might attempt to do it.

“No,” I said, simply. I honestly didn’t have anything else to say, and I didn’t want to offer any encouragement to what was obviously the representative of a very dangerous organization. I just wanted to be left alone.

“I suspected as much. Much as it might be nice to have some revenge on Mr. Fellows, I suspect that are at heart you are still a decent man. Well. In that case, this is what we propose. I’m leaving you a phone,” he said, as he put down the half finished beer pulling a small flip phone out his pocket and threw it to me.

“There is one number in there. This phone will always work anywhere in the world there is a cellular connection. If you need something no one else can do, something no one else will do no matter what it is, we’ll do our best to accomplish it. It’s a one-time, honest to god genie wish, Mr. Stevenson. Use it wisely.”

He got up to go went to the door, then stopped, and looked down at me saying, “One last thing. As one man to another, I want to thank you for your actions. Persephone is ... important to me. We are supposed to be married in the year to come, the merging of two important houses. I don’t for a moment suspect she will want to, and I would never make her, but an older man can dream. She matters, and you kept her alive and out of the clutches of ... those others. You have my thanks and my sword is at your side if you should ever need it. Remember. One phone call. Don’t lose the phone. And for gods sake, stop drinking this swill.”

The last was said with a smile, he handed me the empty bottle, and then he was out the door and gone.

I just sat there, finished my beer and looked at the phone, wondering if I called the number, who would answer it.

In the end I just put it in my suitcase and went to get some dinner.

I had other adventures. I ended up getting several contracts that took me all over the world. I employed a sixty two year old woman in Maryland to basically be my office admin, while I actually went places and did things. I had no fear of any situation – I wouldn’t say that I had a death wish, just that I didn’t much care any more. I took contracts no one else would, and built a bridge in the Sudan, and while I was there, I took an unpaid gig to drill wells around the region, and helped finish off a school that had been partially completed.

My office manager, Marjory Trellis, held it down in the US as I traveled. I basically took a laptop, an iPad, my phone, and clothes and went everywhere. I actually ended up giving up the apartment that Sarah and I had shared; I was never in it, it just sat there, sucking up money and acting as storage for my ‘stuff’, as George Carlin put it. There didn’t seem any point in keeping it on, so I put everything I cared about into real storage, gave the rest away to charity and lived out of a suitcase for the next few years.

Now, to be clear, when I wasn’t on a project, I lived in the high-end hotels. I mean, I had the money, why not? But lots of the projects, well, I was almost in a mud hut, directing small teams to get the job done as soon as I could, as cheaply as possible. I almost always came in either under budget or in less time, or rarely, both. A few projects dragged on longer than they should, but that’s life. I rarely even returned to Maryland to be honest. What’s the point? There was nothing for me there. I visited once a year, and took Marjory and her career cop husband out for dinner, and that was about it.

But I saw the world. I helped rebuild the power system to hospitals and schools in Egypt. I helped build roads and bridges in Serbia. I blew up some collapsed mines in South Africa. I saw and did lots of things that I’m proud off; I think I helped make the world a better place.

One of my favorite jobs was in El Salvador. They’d just had another earthquake, and I went down to help demolish some of the buildings that were going to fall down anyway. Demolishing buildings so they come down safely and with the smallest footprint is actually harder than you think, particularly when there are other buildings close to them you don’t want to destabilize.

But that wasn’t the best part. The best part, - well, I say best, but in terms of sheer satisfaction, it was the best, – was that I got to know a small Jesuit Mission close by. They were small, only twenty priests and volunteers, but they ran a small orphanage or maybe twenty or thirty children. But they did it all, not only the orphanage, but the school too. Now, when I think of a religious orphanage, well I’ve seen the movies. I’ve seen Annie, The Saint and The Blues Brothers. My feelings on those kinds of things aren’t that positive.

But these guys. These guys had to be seen to be believed. It was weird. None of the priests or ‘lay people’ as the volunteers called themselves, were career religious. At least they weren’t in previous lives. All of them had found ‘the calling’ late in life. They’d all seen life and as such, understood what the world was, and what it took to make your way in it.

When I discovered them, or more to the point, when they discovered me, they need a new roof on the main school building. It was going to come down by itself soon. When I got up there, I found it was almost certainly the same joists and tiling that had been put up when the mission had been built, over one hundred and fifty years previous. I thought it was a testament to the people who originally built it; true craftsman, without doubt.

So I got stuck in there and did my best, with my small crew, to replace the roof with another one that would stand the test of time.

While I was doing that, I both struck up a friendship with some of the priests – who, despite being priests, drank almost as much as I did, particularly ‘Brother Tony’, who I strongly suspected had run a bar in a past life, his knowledge of drink was so encyclopedic. What’s more, they made their own booze. These guys were like the most self-sufficient people I’ve ever seen. In the quad of their mission, they grew vegetables, and part of the children’s tasks were caring for chickens and cows, from which they got milk and eggs.

These guys were boozers, weren’t afraid of hanging out and there were no topics off limits to them. It was quite astounding. They didn’t give a shit about the rest of the world, or what the Vatican thought, or any of that. They didn’t watch the news or partake in local politics. They were their own little island of religious sanity, so it was put to me.

I didn’t really have any use for religion, and made no secret of it, but none of them held that against me. As one put it, “You don’t need to be religious to be a good person.” I was going to prove that one wrong later, that was for sure.

But really impressed me was sitting there, sitting in the rafters of the roof, listening to the lessons they gave the kids. You’d think for a religious school, they’d be indoctrinating the kids like nobodies businesses. But no. What they did was indoctrinated them with the parables. It was never, “you must be good because some all powerful dude in the sky will judge you after you die”, it was always “You need to be good because that’s what makes the world go round. That’s how civilization works. Here’s some stories that illustrate that...”

Of course they did do religious instruction, but then they also added in other religions, and compared and contrasted Christianity with other faiths, like Islam, Buddhism, Shintoism and so on. We had that in school when I was a kid in Barnsley – R.E. it was called then, Religious Education. But these guys used real world examples and it was very engrossing. I know if I, – Mr. Atheist through and through -was interested, then the kids down there would be eating it up.

And then, - and this was the absolute kicker to me, – they held classes in ‘critical thinking’. They taught the kids how to ask questions, When it was respectful, when it was not, when it was necessary and when it was not, and what happens when the two conditions were in conflict. They were taught what a straw man was, how to argue and debate, and not from a ‘how to win this argument’ point of view, but from a ‘what is the truth, as I see it, based on my experience?’ point of view.

It was absolutely astounding. I wish all schooling was like this. The world would change in one generation if it was.

I was sad when the project was done and we ran out of money. I talked to Marjory about it afterwards, and always had her listening for more projects in El Salvador or Ecuador, so I could go back and reacquaint myself with Brother Tony and his crew.

I was actually in the Sudan, building aqueducts for water irrigation, when the divorce was complete. I couldn’t even find a decent drink, but the next day a bottle of Southern Comfort arrived – well, Southern Comfort in a plastic flask, anyway. Sent to me from Marjory, who knew all my history. I did get very drunk the next day, with a bunch of the local crew, who had never seen Southern Comfort, or alcohol at all, since it’s banned. Good thing we didn’t care, right?

I remember waking up and thinking, “well, this is the day. Free man of today,” and finding the white hot core of rage and anger was still there, as glowing hot as it had been that day when it all spilled over. It was less prevalent, day to day, in terms of dominating my thoughts every moment, but it was still there. If I thought about Sarah, or Sam, or that week at all, it came on almost immediately. Obviously I hadn’t got over it, or anywhere close. But for some reason, that was ok. It was part of my life and I had a right to be angry about it. Both of them had gotten off Scott free and that rankled, along with the treatment of me. I just did my best not to think about it too much and move along. When it came up, as it often did when I had nothing to do, or there was alcohol involved, well, I was not pleasant company.