When I dropped Lily off at school, I should have known something wasn't right.
The sluggish way she moved; the slight bags under her eyes... I'd just summed it up as a bad night's sleep, until I got the call.
I was in the taxi, ready to start the day as your ordinary, everyday taxi driver, while hunched over the latest gadget: an EFTPOS skimmer. It worked exactly like the ATM skimmers that had Benjamin arrested, only smaller and better designed. As I was connecting the last few wires, my old-fashioned indestructible Nokia rang.
"Hello?" I answered, squishing my phone between my ear and shoulder, working with a pair of blunt wire cutters.
"Hello, Mr Langley?" The voice said. "My name is Sharon and I'm calling from Herman Dempsey High School in regards to your daughter, Lily."
I paused.
"Is everything okay?" I asked.
"Well, there's been an incident. Lily has been sent to the hospital."
Those words... they made the whole world stop. There was an unbearable, horrific feeling welling in the pit of my stomach. It conjured up the worst possible situations in my head and made them images flash just behind my eyes, one after the other, with no foreseeable end.
With my voice rough and cracking, I whispered:
"Tell me everything."
© A.G. Travers 2015
YOU ARE READING
Charade
General FictionDo you think good people are capable of bad things? Vic and Benjamin think so... Victor Langley loves his daughter with all his heart, so when she's diagnosed with cancer, he knows he has to do everything to save her. He makes a deal with a rogue do...
