The Man Who Settled The Score

By Andrew Hood

JOHN HANNEBERY NEVER WANTED TO BE A HITMAN.

He had no system for it. 

And, although a dark part of him took pleasure in hurting people, bad people, he had no passion for this purpose. 

That was until Susan Mitchell, one he cared most about, gave him her list of nine names...

J

• Language: English
• Publisher: Shawline Publishing Group
• Release date: Mar 15, 2022
• ISBN: 9781922701046

Book preview

THE

MAN WHO

SETTLED THE

SCORE

The Man Who Settled The Score Copyright © 2021 Andrew Hood.

All Rights Reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the author. The only exception is by a reviewer, who may quote short excerpts in a review.

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Printed in Australia

First Printing:

First Printing: March 2022

Shawline Publishing Group Pty Ltd

www.shawlinepublishing.com.au

Paperback ISBN- 9781922701015

Ebook ISBN- 9781922701046

THE

MAN WHO

SETTLED THE

SCORE

ANDREW HOOD

AWARD WINNING AUTHOR OF THE WEEKLY TIPPING POINT

This book is dedicated to my uncle Michael Cantsilieris. Thank you for so many wonderful memories. Well miss you already.

Acknowledgements:

It has taken me over two years to write, rewrite, and edit this book. There are so many people that contributed to it over that time that it will be impossible for me to list them all, but I will do my best to capture just a few.

As always, foremost I need to acknowledge the love and support that I have received from my wife - Liz. Everything that I am and is good in my life all started from the moment I met you, my love. Thank you!

Next, I need to thank and acknowledge my beautiful children - Lynton, Harrison and Rose and my mother and father - Ed and Lill. I am so lucky to be surrounded by the love of all of you and I am grateful for it every day.

Finally, I would like to thank my Publisher, Shawline Publishing and especially Bradley Shaw who took a chance on me when no other Publisher would. I am glad to be part of your growing business and hope that this book repays the investment that you have made in me and some extra so that you can pay it forward to another emerging author.

We all have people in our lives that make an impact. Whether they are family, friends, or even work colleagues, they are important to us and without them the sun would not shine as bright. So, to all the people that support me and improve my life, I thank you!

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Andrew Hood was born in Victoria Australia in 1973 and now lives in New South Wales with his wife and three children. Andrew is an author, blogger, Sales Director and family man.

Andrew’s first book ‘The Man Who Corrupted Heaven’ has been published across multiple countries and has since been nominated for the 2022 Miles Franklin Literary Award and the New South Wales Premier’s Literary Award for New Talent.

His personal blog ‘The Weekly Tipping Point’ was listed at No.39 in the Top 101 Best & Most Inspiring Blogs and he has since been a guest blogger on ‘The Guided Mind’ and ‘Change Your Thoughts - Change Your Life’ blogs since 2014.

PREFACE

This book won’t be for everyone. It is not the natural sequel to ‘The Man Who Corrupted Heaven’ that some of my loyal readers might have been expecting. Having said that, I’m hoping that it reads just fine even for those who have not read the original book.

In some sections, this book is much more violent and confronting, although I assure you never for a cheap thrill, or unnecessarily so. For me, it is important that you feel the pain of my characters, for only then will you be able to put yourself into their shoes. Only then, will you consider the implications that they must consider. I need you to live their violence so that you won’t need to live your own to fully understand my message.

I considered watering parts of this book down to make it more accessible, but you, the reader, deserve better than that. You deserve the full truth of this story and not just a Hollywood makeover. I guess that’s why I felt compelled to write this warning.

So, after much consideration, I decided that I had to write the book I had to write.

This is it.

I sincerely hope that you like it.

Andrew

PROLOGUE

MOST OF US ARE TAUGHT that our universe started with a big bang. And it seems we know quite a bit about what happened in the universe ever since. But we know almost nothing about what happened before that big explosion. It leaves us with the question, ‘Did God simply roll the dice on this universe and let chaos reign, or did he have a plan for us?’

I chose to believe that he rolled the dice. Because if my childhood was somehow part of his plan, I would like to punch him in the face.

As you can see, sometimes in a story, the start is not the best place to begin. Sometimes you must go back even further than the start to give a story context.

Let me give you some context.

For as long as I can recall, my name has been John Hannebery, but I’m quite sure that it was not the name that I was born with. The orphanage I was sent to when my parents died, had a habit of scrubbing and replacing a child’s identity so that they could keep themselves clear of any claimants, that may come along and whisk us out of there.

You simply entered that building having one name, and by the time they had fitted you out with a standard-issue grey t-shirt and trousers, you had another. It was a time before computer records were controlled centrally, as they are now, so it was as easy as burning one birth certificate and forging another in its ashes. Perhaps even create a fictional back-story about how the child was dropped at their doorstep by a distraught teenage drug-addicted mother, who, quite conveniently, refused to give her name, and was never to be seen again.

It leads us to ask the obvious question. ‘Why would an orphanage not want to reunite a child with its extended family?’ The unfortunate answer was because there was very little profit in it. Especially when you could sell a child on the black market for so much more.

If you were a man of means, with an unhealthy appetite for small children, how much would you pay to get your hands on a young boy or girl with no connections to the world. A child whose name, or origin, could not be traced back to anyone, anywhere. The item of your sordid desires, packaged up for you with a bow on top and no need to ever look over your shoulder.

I’m sure they paid handsomely and happily. I know this because some of them were returning customers, come back to sample a little more of the local selection. ‘I think I’ll have a blonde this time,’ they might say, looking about the room. Children were simply plucked from playroom and were never seen again. We were just like the lobsters you see in Chinese restaurants, suffocating in a tank of stale water, waiting to be selected for execution. I have nightmares still about what may have happened to those kids.

You may, or may not, be surprised to hear that it was a church-run orphanage. Supposed men of faith, charged with the job or protecting the innocent in the eyes of the lord. They knew all the prayers. Well, they knew the words anyway, if not the meaning.

I do feel compelled to say however, that not all of them were bad. The good ones just didn’t last long enough to help us in any meaningful way. I can only assume that they were either pushed out, or the cover-up was so strong that they were shamed into leaving. They would be there with their sad smiles one day and not the next. Often just long enough for an inexperienced child to get its hopes up. Then, one day, without warning, that good Sister or Brother would disappear forever, and the other bastards would be walking around with a smirk plastered across their faces. Us more experienced ones knew the look, we’d seen it before.

You could always tell the kids who hadn’t, though, they were the sad cases that stood at the entrance peering out into the car park, hopeful that at any moment their hero may come bounding around the corner in a cape.

I was that kid once, but never twice. Hope is a dangerous distraction when survival is required. The everyday dangers internally were enough to keep me busy. I guess it was helpful being the big, ugly kid. I was always a foot bigger than those of my own age and probably still am to most these days.

I’m not saying I didn’t cop my fair share of abuse. I may not have been on-sold like the little pretty ones, but I was punished just the same. You will hear more about that later.

I do need to acknowledge though, that it was in that horrid place that I met my brother Isaac, and later his partner Susan. Our bonds were forged in something more adhesive than blood, and more nourishing than community. They were forged in misery. We were all that each other had in this world.

It hurts the muscle of my heart to say that Isaac died of pancreatic cancer about three years ago. Susan almost followed him with a very similar affliction a year later. Somehow on her death bed, she scraped through. I expect that Cancer is somewhere now licking its wounds waiting to pounce again.

I made a promise to her that I would make them pay for what they did to us back then, and make sure that it never happens to another child.

With a childhood like ours, you either get tough, or you break. In my case, I did both.

Let’s go to church.

CHURCH

FORGIVE ME FATHER, for I have sinned…

That’s what they say, isn’t it?? They do on TV anyway.

They then say something like, ‘My last confession was a year ago,’ only that is not exactly true. For me, it was at least thirty years ago when I was four. You see, as a child I was forced to confess, a lot. I even confessed to things I didn’t do or understand.

Can you be forgiven for something that you don’t understand and you’re quite sure you didn’t do in the first place? I doubt it, but I was told what to say and I said it, through gritted teeth and a swollen eye.

Scratch answering that question, it’s better if I do all the talking. I will never have the strength, nor the time, to get through this entire confession if I must stop and ask you questions. Or even worse, wait for you to answer them.

No, Father, for now just sit back and take this all in. You have been kind enough to give me this time and I intend to take full advantage of it. I have never been a selfish man, but today I’m going to indulge myself, because at the end of the day, this is what this experience is supposed to be about. I get a few things off my chest, I’m forgiven, and we all move on with our lives as if everything is ok.

You are a lucky man, though. This will be my final confession and you have the front row seat at this show.

Ahhhh... ‘My final confession’ I like the sound of that. It rolls off the tongue like a magic carpet defying gravity for the first time. It breaks the bond between the old and the new.

Even hearing myself talking to you like this makes me feel a little smarter than usual. I think I’m going to like this new me.

Oh, and I know that it is not usually customary, but I am going to tell you my name, just because I have no reason not to. Are you ready? Good, here it is - John Hannebery.

I wonder how many of the sinners that have sat in this confession box have dared to disclose their names? They must sit here and slowly bleed their pathetic sins, their masturbations, their adultery, and yet how many would have the courage to use their name? How many of them would have the courage to give their precious sin an owner?

As you can probably tell already, I’m a little different from most. Everything changed for me back when I was a child. If we get time, we can talk about that later, but I’m still unsure if my little confession will take that path. I’m making it up as I go along you see.

If this confession is going to work, I think that it is important to note that I don’t care what you think of me, or almost anyone else for that matter. I invite you to judge me. Take my little story to heart and cast your stones, if you will. It won’t bother me a bit. Why? Well, when you have pointed a gun at your own head as many times as I have, without pulling the trigger, you start to laugh when others try to do the same. What is the worst anyone else could do to me? Lock me up, help me pull the trigger that my own finger doesn’t have the strength for.

No, in my entire life there have only ever been two people that I have cared anything about. One was my brother Isaac, who is now dead, and the other is our Susan. She almost died from cancer eight months ago but managed to just scrape through. They say she has five years left at most and then she’ll be gone too. I think death will need every day of that five years to recover from the last fight it picked with her. When it comes after her next time, it had better be ready.

Strange that I called her ‘our Susan’ just now. I only really found her a year ago and she was always Isaac’s girl but right now she and I are all each other has left. I guess that’s another story.

As I tell this little story, there will be some things that I may share with you from my background, a little insight here and there, and others that you will just need to judge me for by my actions. After all, isn’t it our actions that define us, not our history? To society I am a killer, they don’t care what was done to me as a child. And rightly so. When I am gone, my actions and this confession will be the only validation of who I ever was.

There I go, getting all philosophical. This is not the usual me. This process is bringing out a whole new side to my personality.

No, I need to stop it. I don’t want to misrepresent myself. I am a thug, a killer, a man who likes to hear people break. It is all I have ever been within the confines of this world. I don’t feel sympathy for any of the victims I have damaged because I don’t make the decisions. I simply follow orders. Does a dentist’s drill feel sorry for the tooth? No, it carries out the dentists’ command and bores the hole.

That’s me, the drill, the hammer, the instrument. The moment that it gets personal for me is the moment all is lost. I will touch on why a little later in my story.

I want you to know that I’m not completely heartless though. No women or children were harmed in the creation of this lifetime, and never an innocent. No, the people I went after had it coming. I’m not saying that women can’t be bad, I have just never been sufficiently damaged to harbor enough hatred toward them. But men, they can be real motherfuckers.

Whoops, sorry, probably shouldn’t have said that in here, a church of all places. I will try to keep the swearing to the barest minimum from here on out.

The titles ‘Hitman’ or ‘Killer’ are still quite new strings to my bow. It started only eight months ago, and I still get a little embarrassed whenever I introduce myself as such. I wonder if there needs to be a certain amount of death before you qualify for the titles, or will just one or two deaths do? If I get time, I will need to look that one up. Don’t worry though, I more than qualify at eight, but that little question of qualification always stuck in my head.

I keep getting distracted. That will need to stop now if we are to get through this.

Let me ask you a rhetorical question. What do you give a man who has everything?

The answer – a gun, a list, and a mission.

So that is where we will start.

A GUN, A LIST AND A MISSION

AS I SAID EARLIER, all three of them were a gift! The gun, the list, and the mission, that is. I will get to this soon enough, but I want to give you a little history lesson about me first or none of it will make any sense.

Father, you may be one of those that believe that some people are simply born bad. Perhaps that is how you will categorise me in a time after all that I have done. But I am quite sure that I have not always been this way. You could say that I am a product of my upbringing.

You see, I still remember a time before this insatiable desire to inflict pain. Back when my heart was pure, and no evil was yet done to me. I never admitted this to my brother Isaac while he was alive, because he had nothing, and I never wanted him to see me as entitled. It might not seem like much to you, but to a child in an orphanage, a single memory of a life before is a prized possession. I cared for Isaac enough that I never told him my little secret.

What was this pre-violent prize that I hold so dear, you are probably thinking? A single vision of my mother.

I’m sure that my father must have been about, but his face never quite rendered into the archive of my memory. My mother, on the other hand, I remember her face clearly.

It is impossible to say how old I may have been, three or four perhaps, but I remember. Her hair, the colour of chestnuts and the smell of citrus. Her eyes, the sweetest chocolate, and her smile, endless. That one single smile she gave me shortly before her end is all I have left of my innocence. The way it started in her cheeks and lifted the corners of her mouth upwards like an almighty red curtain being pulled aside to reveal the sun itself. I seem to have clung to this memory so tightly that it has squeezed out any other memory from before or after that moment. I was good then, I’m quite sure about it because I smiled back in a way that I never smiled since. It was honest, sincere, and loving. These are all things no other person could ever say about me from that day on.

Other than Isaac, I never told anyone else at the orphanage about this either, or they would have used it against me in some way. That place had a way of doing that. Taking the one thing that you held precious and polluting it.

No Father, I knew within moments of getting to that terrible place, at four years old, that my old life was gone. I was so young that I probably shouldn’t remember that, but I do. You wake up fast when your mother and father die in front of you. It was like someone throwing a bucket of ice-cold maturity water onto my face and freezing away my childhood.

Now that I have demonstrated that I wasn’t born bad, I guess that you are wondering if there was some moment, some tipping point, that pushed me over the edge?

Well, I’m not sure that there was one single big moment that broke me forever, but there sure were a few big ones that played their part.

One such occasion I remember was the first time at the orphanage that I was singled out for ‘special attention’. Perhaps, unlike some of the other broken souls, I still had a smear of innocence across my cheeks. Perhaps I was just next in line. What does it matter either way? I can tell you right now that it was the only time. I can’t remember ever walking into that office of theirs with anything but a feeling a complete dread. I can also tell you, Father, that the tears of a five-year-old can be bitter, but tears of an abused child fall like acid rain. I will spare you the details, but they broke me that day and every other week or so afterwards for two years.

I wonder Father, do you feel sorry for me yet?

If you do, hold on to that thought because I’m not quite done. On one occasion, another unfortunate child had been chosen for entertainment instead of me. I can distinctly remember sitting on my bed feeling happy that at least on that night I was spared. Can you imagine, Father, feeling happy that another child was being molested and it was a guaranteed free night-pass? I can tell you; I have lived with that little nugget of guilt my entire life.

Anyway, back to my little story. I’m happily sitting on my bed, free pass in hand, when I get summoned to that fucking office anyway. When I get there this time though, something is not quite right. This time I was not alone. If you have tears to spare Father, you might