Chapter 4 – No Hard Feelings

Strange as it might seem, I don’t know my real name. Jeffry, I think. That’s just a guess though, based on some vague memories of being called ‘Jeffie’ when I was very little. But I’m not sure. Nor do I know my actual age. On paper—as Joseph Tyler Kettleman—my age is thirty seven. But I’m probably a couple years older. Or a bit younger, maybe.

For the first half of my life—the part after ‘Jeffie’ but before Kettleman—I was Jonathan Sturgis. That name was given to me by the man who raised me, Jim Flint, after he killed my parents.

Well, my father anyway. I’m not sure who killed my mother. But it happened right in front of me.

As I listened to the melodic click-clack of tracks passing beneath the train, I thought back on that night. It was so long ago, the memories were little more than a patchwork of moments. What I remember most starkly was the blood. Everywhere. And my mother’s eyes, open and vacant. And shaking her, trying to wake her up.

The first time I heard Flint speak, it was cold and quiet: “No women, no children.”

BOOM. BOOM. BOOM.

I was misted with blood and the man standing over my mom and me—and two others—dropped to the floor. One was screaming.

BOOM.

No more screaming.

I don’t remember being afraid, but I was very little. Two or three. Maybe four. Flint had dropped his weapon and scooped me up.

As an adult looking back now, I can see that Flint had very little choice. Whatever my real father had done to call down the wrath of the Mafia, Flint had done as he always did. He could not have anticipated the presence of a child in the remote cabin.

And once the job was finished, he couldn’t very well leave the little boy—me—to starve to death. So he took me with him.

Why he didn’t just drop me off in front of a church or something, I’ll never know. Guilt?

Flint was not a typical hitman. He was a Texan, learned to kill in the military. When the government stopped paying, he found other ways to make a living doing what he was good at.

For whatever reason, Flint took it upon himself to see that I was taken care of. The first few years we were alone mostly, though there was a woman—Ms. Jen—that he would leave me with for a week or two on occasion.

Then came the boarding schools. I became Jonny Sturgis sometime before enrolling at St. Steven’s in Austin, Texas. The backstory I learned, and held true to, was that my parents had died in a car accident and that my uncle, Flint, had been appointed guardian.