THE HAMMER FILES: Jack Misses the Mark

This entry is part 7 of 11 in the series Chapter 2: An Inheritance of Grief

The Unseen Signs

The cold night air followed me back to my office. The familiar smell of dust and old paper was a comfort, a truth I could always count on. But the quiet felt different now. Frank’s words still echoed, a bell tolling a debt I never knew I owed.

I put the box and the photo on my desk. Two ghosts on a field of gray. The photo was of a teenage Angela, smiling, her face a map of the future that had been stolen from her. Her hair was a bright, unruly mess, her eyes full of a life she had been forced to leave behind. I put the photo down and picked up the worn wooden box, the one Erma had called a gift. I ran my thumb over the wrapping paper, a silent conversation with a ghost.

I thought about the last time I had seen Angela. And I thought about the first night I had seen Jackie Angel again, the last time. The cryptic message she’d whispered to me in that diner. “Remember December.” I had written it off as a half-remembered line from a song, a nervous tic from a frightened woman.

Now, it was a church bell ringing in my head. A warning.

I thought about the warning Jackie Angel had given me. The one about Rocco Racini. I’d seen it as a woman trying to warn me of trouble. But what if it was more? What if she was asking me to rescue her from the people who had her held in check? What if the cryptic clue “Remember December”, her very own birth month was a breadcrumb she hoped would lead me to her?

And what if I, Jack Hammer, had been too lost in my own self-pity to hear them?

The guilt was a concrete fact. I had missed it all. I had missed my daughter. I had missed her own cries for help. Now, with a new name—Racini—and a new mission, I was a man on a mission of atonement. I owed them. I owed her.

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Chapter 2: An Inheritance of Grief