PART 1
“Do not come, Dad. If you step through that door, they are going to kill you,” my son warned me over the phone.
Wyatt hung up before I could ask him a single question. New Year’s Eve was only seven days away, and his voice sounded like a man who had already surrendered to his fate. My son was thirty four years old, a former college boxer who had never asked me for help, not even when he cracked a rib back in school. That was the only reason I refused to obey his warning.
At sixty eight years old, everyone around the quiet streets of Springfield knew me as Abraham Yates, a retired truck driver living alone in a weathered apartment while driving a twenty year old pickup truck. Nobody ever suspected that my rusty vehicle belonged to the true founder of Heartland Freight Systems, a massive logistics enterprise owning yards, warehouses, and hundreds of semi trucks operating between Kansas City and Omaha. I had learned early in life that visible wealth only attracts fake smiles, so for decades I dressed like a man no one would ever bother to rob.
I pulled up to Wyatt’s home in the upscale neighborhood of Chestnut Hill shortly after eleven o’clock on the night of December thirty first. From the street, I could hear loud music, booming laughter, and the clinking of champagne glasses. Looking through the lit windows, I saw my daughter-in-law, Sabrina, greeting party guests in a sleek black dress. Her father, Irving Palmer, was uncorking an expensive bottle of wine that I had personally bought Wyatt to celebrate his recent promotion. Sabrina’s mother, Piper, was casually wearing my late wife’s favorite coat, a cherished keepsake that Wyatt kept purely out of affection.
My son was nowhere to be seen at his own party.
I slipped around the back of the property and entered through the heavy mechanical room door because I knew the keypad code from paying for the original construction. The damp basement smelled strongly of standing water, harsh bleach, and clinical medicine. I found Wyatt lying motionless on the cold concrete floor in just a thin t-shirt, his right leg severely deformed and his knee so swollen it hardly looked human. An industrial steel chain was wrapped tightly around his left ankle, anchored securely to a solid concrete column.
When I gently touched his trembling shoulder, he instantly flinched and shielded his face.
“It is me, son,” I whispered softly.
He slowly pried his swollen eyes open with immense difficulty. “I explicitly told you not to come here, Dad.”
“Who did this horrible thing to you?” I demanded, holding back my rage.
“Sabrina and her father did it,” Wyatt gasped out. “They smashed my knee with a heavy sledgehammer, and then they started injecting me with strange chemicals. They want me to sign over a full power of attorney so they can sell off my logistics companies and move every dollar out of the bank accounts. As soon as this party upstairs ends, they plan to make it look like a tragic drug overdose.”
I fed him fresh water bit by bit so he would not choke. He had fresh needle marks scattered along both of his arms and had clearly lost all track of time. He had only managed to send me that desperate warning because Sabrina had accidentally left her smartphone on a nearby counter while carrying a food tray upstairs.
Suddenly, the sharp click of high heels echoed down the basement wooden stairs.
I quickly squeezed behind a heavy storage shelf and turned on my smartphone audio recorder. Sabrina descended into the basement holding a cold plate of rice, crouching down right in front of my bound son with a fake smile.
“This is your final chance, my love,” Sabrina said calmly. “You sign these legal papers tonight, and then all of us can finally rest.”
“I am never going to sign those documents,” Wyatt answered weakly.
She casually placed the plate on the floor and deliberately pressed the sharp heel of her shoe directly into his crushed knee joint, causing Wyatt to scream out in agony.
“Then I suppose we will just have to keep practicing until your hand learns how to obey,” Sabrina mocked him softly.
I tightly clenched my fists in the dark shadows while the noisy countdown to the new year began directly above our heads. I simply could not believe the horror unfolding right before my eyes.
