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his every move.
Moving into an apartment on the east side of Oshkosh as a sex offender on
parole wasn’t much of an improvement. He put the glass to his lips and
swallowed a large gulp before setting it back down on the wet ring.
    Admittedly, he deserved the time he
spent behind bars. The nineties had been filled with more drugs than he would
have liked to admit. While his classmates were going off to college or getting
jobs, Fred was dealing drugs out of his parents’ garage. It started out as a
small operation, yet before he knew it, he was in too deep. The game and money
had been too good to him.
    Up until he got caught of course,
but the few years he spent in county jail didn’t straighten him out. He was
back at it again, but this time, with a sidekick half his age. He never should
have gotten involved with that girl. Although she claimed she was eighteen,
Melinda was only sixteen, and he was slapped with sexually abusing a child before
he knew it. Drugs, money, and women were all poison; delicious poisons he had a
hard time staying away from.
    He hit the button on the answering
machine again, listening to the man’s voice from earlier today. “Mr. Sullivan,
it’s recently come to my attention that your name, as well as my own, is on a
list. This list was created by someone we both came across in our earlier
years.” The man cleared his throat before he continued. This part got to Fred
every time he listened to it. “Holston Parker. I don’t
want to say much about it other than that I think we should talk. I think you
should know the kind of danger that you’re in. That maybe we’re both in. I’ll
meet you at six o’ clock at Polito’s on High Avenue.
I’ll be wearing a baseball cap and glasses.”
    It was 5:30, and he still hadn’t
decided if he was going to meet this guy. For one thing, he never even
mentioned his own name. Fred had no idea who the caller was or why he thought
they were both in danger.
    He had heard about the story of
Holston Parker while he was in prison. The hometown hero had made national
news. Holston Parker had made every single drug dealer, murderer and psychopath
next to Fred look like sweet little kittens.
    Fred had never heard of Holston
Parker before the news broke about his murder. He tried to sort through his
drug-filled memories of the nineties, but nothing about Holston Parker
surfaced. The first time he had seen the guy was in the photos in the
newspapers.
    So the fact that Fred’s name was on
some list made no sense to him whatsoever. He wondered what the list was for
anyway. Did it matter if his name was on this apparent list if Holston Parker
was dead, anyway? What danger could he possibly be in?
    He swirled the last drink of Scotch
in his glass as he thought of the harm in meeting this guy. It was in a public
place in downtown Oshkosh in the early evening. The Wisconsin summer stayed
light until around nine anyway. According to his parole, he wasn’t allowed to
carry firearms, but he didn’t feel like he needed any protection. After all, he
didn’t have anything to hide, and as far as he was concerned, didn’t have any
enemies anymore. The crowd he ran with back in the nineties was long gone. They
had all broken up and gone separate ways. Some probably dead, others in jail,
maybe out of state or otherwise. Hell, he didn’t even remember half of the guys
anyway.
    Fred was in his mid-fifties now,
the heyday of his youth long past him. He sat here with nothing to show for his
name other than a small, rented apartment in small-town Wisconsin. No family or
friends. They were long gone, disowning him for his past. He didn’t blame them,
but it was just so lonely.
    He was lucky enough to get shift
work at a packaging plant that kept him just busy enough and paid him barely
enough to afford living expenses, including food and the crap apartment he was
sitting in. Everyone told him how horrible prison would be, however no one had
told him how miserable he would feel