Gabe butted his cigarette out angrily. Damn, I need to give up this filthy habit. He’d smoked a full pack that night. Being on stakeout did that to him. No excuse. I need to quit. Training his night-vision binoculars on the house he was watching, he looked for activity. Everything was quiet.

It had been a long, boring night. Mafia boss Augustin Fazande owned the house although he didn’t live in it himself. They suspected the house was used for drug trafficking. The police had had it under surveillance for over a week now with no results.

Gabe’d been so happy when he’d reached his goal and made detective, but sometimes it could be a boring job. This was one of those tedious long nights. Several times he’d fought drowsiness and wished his partner hadn’t come down with the flu that night. Gabe had told him to go home. He didn’t expect anything to come down that night anyway and he had a feeling nothing would. The thugs knew they were under surveillance. They were smart, the bastards.

He leaned back against the seat, keeping his gaze trained on the house, and let his thoughts wander off to when he’d joined the force and why. His parents had died, leaving him and his sister orphaned. He’d been ten and Chantelle was three at the time. A sadness darkened his heart. She couldn’t even remember their parents and only knew them from photos.

An imprint of that horrible night remained engraved in his memory. No amount of counseling was able to erase it and he experienced nightmares to this day. He’d never forget the assailants’ faces. They were embedded in his brain like a photograph that would never fade.

His father had been a detective and on a big case. Gabe didn’t know much about it because his dad rarely talked about his work, but he was so proud of his father and often bragged about him at school. He’d overheard his father one evening telling his mother that he was almost ready to blow open the case he’d been working and wrap it up. Then they’d all go on a holiday.

Then one fateful night he was sound asleep when loud voices had woken him. At first he thought his parents were quarreling, but then he realized the voices were not theirs. He’d sneaked out of bed, out of his room, and peeked through the balustrade. There were two men downstairs in the foyer, pistols with silencers on them pointed at his parents. He’d so often watched his father clean his weapons, so he knew how to identify the silencers. His father had his arm around his mother. Both were in their nightclothes. Gabe could hear his mother’s soft crying. He’d been terrified and hadn’t known what to do. The argument continued for a few minutes, then after two soft thuds, suddenly his parents crumpled to the floor. His mother lay in an awkward position on her side, blood soaking her white nightgown. His father lay on his back, blood pouring from his head, his eyes gazing lifelessly at the ceiling.

His parents were dead. Shot. He’d stifled a cry, causing one of the thugs to look up and Gabe had clamped a hand over his mouth to squash the scream that crept up to his mouth, then the sobs that he could barely control. He’d quickly moved back to hide behind the wall.

“I heard something,” the man said. “They had kids. Think they woke up and saw us?”

“Fuck. Never mind. I’m not in the business of killing kids. We have to split. Now!” the other man answered.

Gabe heard the front door open and close and he ran as fast as he could to his parents’ bedroom to the telephone on the nightstand. He called the police, ran to his sister’s room, and crawled into bed with her. She’d slept through it all.

A nice female police officer had driven them to their grandparents’ house. And it was that night when Gabe had lain awake, heartbroken and sobbing, that he’d vowed to become a cop, a detective like his father. He’d get the bastards who had killed his parents. He never told the police he had seen the assailants’ faces. No. He’d remember them forever. He would avenge his parents’ senseless deaths when he grew up.

His grandparents had raised them and had protested mightily when, after he finished college, he announced he was joining the police force. Once he graduated from the police academy, it became his private task to look for his parents’ murderers. Even though the police had done a full-scale investigation, they’d never found the killers and it had become a cold case.

Gabe sighed. After digging through hundreds of mug shots, he had found out who they were, but to this day he hadn’t been able to find them either. It could be they were no longer in Louisiana or they were dead. Twenty-four years was a long time. Sometimes he was sorry he hadn’t told the police he’d seen their faces. Maybe they would have caught them and put them behind bars. Maybe? Most surely. It was a stupid mistake he now regretted. But hell, he was only a boy when it had happened and he’d been scared shitless that they’d shoot him, too.

He hadn’t given up. He wasn’t quite as obsessed anymore, but he still searched, spent hours digging through files on the computers at work and reading up on different cases. He really needed to let it go after all these years and believe that his parents’ killers were dead. Maybe he needed to get a hobby. A hobby? How about a family, a little voice whispered, an echo from his now very old grandparents, who often asked if he was ever going to get married, have a family, and settle down.