White Space Season 2

and burst into sobbing, heaving tears.
    He flashed back to when Teddy was just 6 years old, back when he looked up to his Daddy so much. Back before he was the strict asshole bad guy he turned into after catching Teddy with his first blunt. Bruce remembered his son making him an elaborate drawing of the two of them together, fishing. While Teddy had drawn stuff all the time for Mommy, this was the first drawing he’d ever made for Bruce.
    “That is so beautiful, Son,” he said, hugging his boy.
    Bruce caught his reflection in the mirror, and shook his head in disgust — at both the situation and with himself.
    I punched Jerry Barlow. Jesus Christ.
    He thought of his son looking down from Heaven, ashamed at what he’d become. He didn’t picture his son as he was when he died, a 17-year-old young man. He pictured him as the 6-year-old boy who had once admired him more than anything else in the world. Who had looked up to Daddy like he had an S on his chest and a big, red cape billowing behind him.
    Bruce turned on the radio to kill some time before driving home.
    He found a sports show on satellite that he liked to listen to whenever he had a chance. He leaned back in the seat and closed his eyes. The hosts, two guys, Rod and Rick, were making fun of the Seahawks again , and their rookie wide receiver who got busted sending photos of his junk to a wrong number, which just happened to belong to his pastor. Bruce laughed. “What a moron,” he said to his empty cabin.
    The radio signal started to crackle with a strange warble, as if stuck between stations.
    Fucking signal is always bullshit around here.
    Bruce put the truck into drive and tapped on the gas, inching it through the lot and aiming his tires toward a better signal. It was funny how a few feet could mean all the difference in the world between crystal clear and utter crap.
    When Rod’s voice came back loud and clear, Bruce put the truck into park and sat, engine still running, in case he had to move again.
    Just as Rick was about to play an interview with the pastor, the warble was back. And with it a static that Bruce hadn’t heard since the old days of regular AM radio.
    Bruce went to move the truck again, but his hand froze instead. Just like his body.
    What the hell?
    Suddenly, Bruce heard something in the static, another voice, like bleed from another station. Something seemed oddly familiar about the voice, even though he couldn’t make out who it was, what they were saying, or even if it was a man or woman. He perked his ears trying to make sense of the words, until a single syllable rose in repeat over the static.
    “Kill, kill, kill … ”
    What the hell? Is this some sorta joke? Some weird metal music or something?
    The static grew louder, and he heard a snippet of the sport’s station ID being played before the warble drowned it, and the words returned.
    “Kill, kill, kill, kill … ”
    Kill? Kill who?
    “Kill Alex Heller.”

    * * * *

CHAPTER 6 — Liz Heller

    Liz woke to the sound of Aubrey on the baby monitor, murmuring in her sleep. The clock read 12:01 a.m. She still had plenty of time to stay buried beneath the covers, but her mind immediately whirred into motion, contemplating the day’s big move.
    As much as she couldn’t wait to leave Hamilton Island, it felt as if she were closing the door on her past, a door which for some reason, Liz was frightened to close. California was the new start her family desperately needed. Yet, part of her still felt like leaving the island meant leaving Roger behind.
    Liz reached down to trace her fingers along her wedding ring, the ring she’d never removed except for a few times when washing dishes in the sink, afraid it would slip from her finger — a fear made all the more real since she’d lost her engagement ring nearly a decade before.
    “Don’t worry,” Roger had said when she first lost it, then spent nearly a week tearing the house to pieces in search. “It’ll turn up someday.”
    “But it’s the ring you gave me,” she said. “The ring has a story, one of our best. It’s personal history, and I can’t stand to think it might be gone forever.”
    Roger wasn’t much of a jewelry guy. He didn’t know a diamond from a peridot, but he had seen this ring in a jeweler’s window one day early in their dating, and to hear him tell the story, it had practically whispered his name as he passed. It was silver rather than gold, which Liz preferred, with two thin bands