“The worst house on the worst block, where can I find it?”

The kid folded forward and let his forehead rest on his knees. “Dude, Tyler’s already got kicked around by life. Can’t you just cut him a break?”

“No. Tell me where the house is.”

The punk muttered the address and I slipped out of the alley and made my way to what really was the worst part of the Point. It was block after block of run-down single-family homes covered in graffiti and with bars on the windows. It was a neighborhood with asphalt instead of grass in the yards and a place where your neighbor was more than likely selling drugs rather than Girl Scout cookies. It was a neighborhood where, if you saw a woman on the street corner, she wasn’t waiting for her kid to get out of school, she was waiting for a john to pull up so she could offer him a twenty-dollar blow job.

I found the worst house on the block with no trouble. There were rusted bikes in the front yard leaning up against the warped and cracked siding . . . like seven of them. There was a collection of broken coolers and a menagerie of car tires making an obstacle course to the front door. I debated knocking to see if the person in charge of this mess would come to the door, but decided against it. I didn’t have time to waste and getting a rusted door slammed in my face just to have to force my way inside anyway seemed pointless, so I just put my shoulder against the flimsy wooden door and shoved. I heard the lock creak and the handle break away from the frame, but the whole thing barely moved.

I swore under my breath and put more of my weight into the motion. I heard something fall and a male voice bellow from somewhere inside. Once there was enough space to squeeze through, I entered the house and almost instantly regretted my decision. When the kid said the dad was the kind that never got rid of anything, maybe I had been so worried about finding the kid that I failed to read between the lines and realize that the dad was a hoarder. No wonder the kids had been pulled from the home. I hadn’t ever been anywhere as horribly putrid or vile as the inside of this home.

It was alive with bugs and rodents. The smell was so pungent that I could practically see it hanging in the air in front of me. It smelled like trash, bodily fluids, and a general waste of life, with boxes, piles of trash, dirty clothing, and random junk that blocked me everywhere I turned.

I heard the voice calling out the name “Tyler” and then a litany of swearwords as I carefully picked my way through the maze of refuse and rubbish. The voice was slurred and sounded mean, so I couldn’t blame the kid for wanting to get out of this hellhole. I just didn’t know how all this came to have anything to do with me.

I knocked into a hidden shelf that was covered from top to bottom with empty beer cans and the ensuing noise made my skin crawl. I kept expecting the guy attached to the screaming voice to show up, but there was no sound of movement as I continued to navigate my way through the mess. It made me tense and had me on high alert, but once I picked my way through the junk and entered what I assumed was the main living area of the house, everything became clear.

The guy was sitting on a sagging couch. I could barely pick him out among the empty food containers and empty bottles and cans. He was listing to one side and it was pretty clear that he only had full function and total mobility on one side of his body. One arm hung listlessly at his side and one side of his face didn’t react at all when he caught sight of me. The half of his face that did have mobility twitched and pulled tight in anger. It took a second but recognition slipped in, and all the bits and pieces that were missing from the puzzle started to click into place.

I lifted an eyebrow at the man as he continued to glare at me from the couch.

“You already destroyed my entire life, you foreign piece of shit. What are you doing here, Gates?”

I looked around at the mounds of stuff piled on top of more stuff and then glanced down at the floor, which literally seemed to move under my feet.

“If you had kept your hands to yourself, neither one of us would be here.” Sitting across from me, forever altered and forever trapped in a prison of his own making, was the man that I had pulled off of Key and beaten within an inch of his life all those years ago.

“Fuck you. Get out of my house.”

I could see how badly he wanted to get to his feet and confront me, but he lacked the strength to accomplish this.

“Where is your son?”

The man’s face pinched in a furious frown and his good hand curled into a fist.

“I don’t know. The little bastard took off weeks ago and I haven’t seen him.”

“You mean he didn’t want to stay here in these luxurious accommodations?” I let the sarcasm drip from my voice.

The man growled and finally clawed and lumbered his way to his feet. One arm was useless by his side and one leg was slower and limped more than the other as he shuffled toward me.

“My old lady bailed when I ended up in the hospital after you were done with me. Couldn’t really explain why I had my ass handed to me at a strip club, so the bitch got all uppity and took off, sticking me with the brats. I can’t hardly fucking move thanks to you and yet I’m supposed to raise kids and take care of this shithole?”

“From what I hear, the state took your kids, and apparently the things you were doing to them mean this pigsty is exactly what you deserve.”

One side of the man’s face twitched and his eyes narrowed. “We all get what we deserve in the end, so where does that leave you, Gates?”

It was a good question. The answer was: probably where I started—in hell.

“I need to find your boy. You messed him up good and he’s going to get himself in the same kind of trouble you found yourself in.”

“I don’t know where he is and I don’t care. He’s the one that called the state and had the girls yanked outta here. Now I don’t got anyone to help me out around here. I might as well die.”

The smell of the hovel was starting to get to me, and I could see the guy wouldn’t be of any help even if he did know where his kid was at. This was a broken, twisted human being, and I could understand why his son held me personally responsible for his awful home life. Before I had given the old man a beatdown, he had no doubt been a terrible man, but some of that evil had been taken out of the home and spread around the Point. When I crippled him, made him homebound, undoubtedly all that awfulness had been trapped in these walls and buried the poor kids here right along with the hoard. He couldn’t victimize the outside world so he kept all his deviant and violent tendencies right at home.