Friday Flash on Saturday :-)

Hi everyone.

I've decided to share with you something I am working on. It's just a short snippet, hence the Flash name.

I would love it if you could let me know what you think. Of course it is unedited...so forgive me the mistakes and typos...*vbg*

Here goes...

The Heritage


Jack Donovan should be used to it by now but every now and then his stomach still heaved with that sick feeling right down in his gut. The routines that dictated his current situation were so ingrained he doubted he would ever be rid of them completely. If he ever got back to a normal life that is. They had become affectations to his personality, inexplicably merged with the person he was and the person he had become. It had now reached the stage that he couldn’t remember a time when he wasn’t looking behind him, planning an escape route. The obvious difference was his appearance, with his neatly trimmed goatee covering the cleft in his chin and his thick dark brown hair long enough to be tied up with a strip of leather. He even smelled different. It must be the expensive after-shave. Working for a mob boss meant he had to not only talk the talk, but walk the walk. He didn't mind that part of it, but it came at a huge price.

Even his own family wouldn’t recognize him, and he didn't want them to. That was the idea of course, but he really itched for a decent haircut and a clean shave.

He was over it.

Over the secrecy. Over the fear. Over playing the part of someone who represented what he hated most in this world.
That bloody annoying knot in his stomach had been there for so long now; all tightly clenched up like a wind-up toy about to go off. It had a name and he knew what it was.

Terror, pure and unadulterated.

It would be stupid not to feel fear when you spend day after day, hour after hour, scrambling to stay one step ahead of discovery, but he’d come to live with it in a fashion. His only option was to accept it because no matter what he did, it came with the territory. If you didn’t feel fear, you lost your edge and you died. Plain and simple. When you’ve been under cover for nearly two years you don’t have much choice. You just get on with it.

There were times, if he let his concentration slipped even a fraction, he managed to forget the fear just for a short time. Not that he consciously tried to do that, but sometimes the exhaustion caught him unawares and in at that fleeting moment between alertness and dreams he imagined he was back in his old life. The time when he had a life.

But any reprieve he got was short lived, which was probably a good thing since he couldn’t afford to spend time remembering what came before. Distractions like that could cost him not only the case, but he could end up dead, or worse – his family and all those he cared about could be in danger. Ever alert to the sounds and events around him, the slightest noise had him instantly awake, ready and reaching for his gun.

God — how he hated it but it was too late now. So much depended on him keeping his cover intact and he was in too deep now to give up on two years of hard work.

He hated the fear, but knew it was a necessary evil. It was the self-loathing that was the most difficult to deal with. He despised the things he’d done to ingratiate himself into the Mackenzie family. Not that he’d had much of a choice, since Patrick was one sadistic bastard and it took a hell of a lot of action to get him to trust you. Proving himself had involved hurting more people than he cared to think about and as much as the department had tried to help him out by setting up a fake record, he’d had to prove himself over and over out there on the streets before he’d been fully accepted. He was still proving himself everyday, but over the last few months he’d managed to make himself part of the personal protection team that surrounded Mac, as Patrick Mackenzie was known. Officially he was a driver, but what he really did was keep Mac’s hands clean by dirtying his own.

If all went according to plan, after tonight he would be doing his last job for the Mackenzie family. Two years of planning was finally about to pay off. His head hurt and his heart was pounding in his chest as he willed himself to keep it together. His palms were so slick with sweat he could barely hold the steering wheel of the Lexus as he drove towards the meeting. A meeting he hoped would settle this business once and for all.

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That's it folks....please let me know what you think...