Page 20 of Saving Noah

Chapter 6

Noah sat on the floor with his back leaned against the door of his apartment and listened to Zach yell at him from the hallway. The heavy metal door offered the highest level of security to the residents of the apartment building, but Noah still felt it moving under Zach’s insistent pounding. Since living there, Noah often referred to the thick door as the lid to his coffin or the door to his tomb. Yes, it offered protection, keeping the people who wanted to hurt him on the outside. But it also served as a barrier, keeping him locked inside…politely hidden away from the rest of the world.

He closed his eyes and started counting inside his head. Slowly. Calmly. Normally he’d grab a pill and do some pushups or sit-ups until the meds worked their magic on his crazy. If he was having an okay day, he’d start feeling some relief somewhere between the three hundred and four hundred mark. If things had gone badly, it could take until eight or nine hundred before the cloudy fog slowly started creeping into his head, smothering his fears. Once the medication wore off, the cycle of torment would start all over again. Zach didn’t want him to take the pills. He didn’t know why he was doing anything Zach said, but for some unknown reason, he wanted to doeverythingZach said.

Well, except open the door. He wasn’t doingthat. Zach kept knocking, begging him to open up and let him fix whatever he’d done wrong.

Right…like it was Zach who’d made a mistake. Between the two of them, it would always be Noah doing shit wrong. He was the Olympic gold medalist in fuckups. He still couldn’t believe how he’d acted with Zach. What a complete idiot; he’d thrown himself at Zach…as if a man like him would be interested in someone like Noah. Well, except maybe for some medical research.

In his defense, Noah could blame a huge part of his stupidity on his lack of social skills. Maybe if he were around other people on a regular basis, he would’ve known Zach was only being nice to him, not pledging his undying love. Zach wanted to explore a friendship with him, and Noah had interpreted his words as ‘let’s fuck like cats in heat.’ The exact same way he’d interpreted Zach’s concern about his health and wellbeing.

Noah hung his head as his face burned in shame. He’d made a fool of himself in front of the first person he’d wanted to impress in three years. Well, he sure as hell hadn’t impressed Zach, but he had certainly made an impression—a bad one. What made him think Zach was interested in more than friendship? Something surely had convinced him it was all right to literally throw himself at a man who’d shown him nothing but disdain straight up until the point when he’d opened his eyes in the emergency room.

Memories tugged and tumbled inside his head. Something had happened in his bedroom with Zach. Not sex. What had Zach said to him? What had he said to Zach? The meds dimmed his memory, but they usually didn’t erase it altogether. Of course, he’d had a lot of medication, between his own prescriptions and what they’d given him at the hospital.

Fuck! He didn’t have a clue what had happened but suspected he’d probably thrown himself at Zach at the hospital as well. Zach had taken a medical oath to do good and heal the sick. He was the bright light of goodness in Noah’s dark world, and Noah had succeeded in screwing up any chance he might have ever had at being friends. Sure, he wanted to be more than friends, had made it pretty damned obvious, but he’d been unrealistic with those expectations. Hell, he couldn’t even leave his apartment building. Other than his ass, what did he have to offer another man?

Zach still knocked on his door. He didn’t sound upset anymore. No, he sounded more like a person trying to gentle a wild animal.Ha! The good doctor was so close to the truth with that one. Where had Noah gone so wrong with his life? How had he gone from being the most popular person in his high school, with three offers of soccer scholarships from excellent colleges, confident in every aspect of his life and not fucking afraid of anything…to what he was now? Would he have done the same thing if he’d known it would all lead tothis? Fuck no, he would’ve kept his mouth shut. Thanks to his ‘do-gooder’ personality, he’d lost everything.

It had seemed like such a simple decision at the time.Do the right thing.What could go wrong?

He couldn’t remember the words he and Zach had exchanged in his bedroom earlier, but he could remember every detail of the train wreck of events that ended up being the demise of Mr. Popularity Noah St. Claire and the creation of John Doe. He closed his eyes and leaned his head against the door, remembering the summer that changed his life forever.

The catalyst for his downfall had been Dante Moretti, and Noah could still remember the first time he’d seen the man. Noah had agreed to work at his dad’s firm that summer before he left for college and started down the path of becoming his own man. He’d hated working there, but his father had been adamant, and Noah rarely questioned his dad’s decisions; he’d learned early on things went much smoother if he just went along with what his parents wanted. So, he’d worked that summer, doing boring shit like making copies, fixing coffee, shredding, and filing. God, how he’d hated shredding and filing. Friday had been the day he’d set aside to do all the filing for the week. Somehow, having the weekend mere hours away helped him make it through the tedious task.

The first time he’d seen Dante Moretti, it had been filing day. Noah had been lugging stack of files to the records library of the building when he’d noticed a thin man, not much older than him, sitting quietly in the waiting area. Noah called it the posh spot, because it was where his father sent his ‘special’ clients—special meaning the ones with the most money.

The posh spot had people in it nearly all day, every day, so it shouldn’t have been that big of a deal; it shouldn’t have caught Noah’s attention. It shouldn’t have, but it did. Dante was incredibly tall, standing well over six feet, but had looked so small sitting in one of Noah’s father’s plush leather chairs. His shoulders were hunched in defeat, and Noah could still remember how Dante’s hands looked like they were trembling. That sad man hadn’t fit in the posh spot.

Noah often wondered what would have happened if he’d just kept walking that day, minded his own business and headed on into the archive room and focused on completing the job so he could start his weekend. Had he only stopped to talk to the frail man because he hated filing? Maybe. Did he end up paying the price for that choice? Definitely.

The train wreck started that day. Noah learned the frail man’s name was Dante Moretti, and he’d accompanied his father, Donovan Moretti. Their first couple of conversations seemed innocent enough, though Noah wondered why Dante always seemed so nervous. Taking pity on the misfit, Noah invited him to lunch the third time he’d found him in the posh spot, and surprisingly enough, Dante had agreed.

When bodyguards trailed their every step, Noah got an idea as to why Dante was perpetually jittery. Who needed bodyguards for lunch to the cheap café across the street?

Dante dropped hints regularly. But if Noah asked a question, Dante would dart his gaze toward the bodyguards standing nearby, shake his head slightly, and move on to another subject. Noah thought of the hints as hand grenades. Dante would launch one of those babies in his direction and then run for his life, leaving Noah standing there, ready to be blown to bits. At first, Noah wanted to tell him not to bring something up if he wasn’t going to talk about it. Then, right in the middle of their seventh ‘meeting,’ Noah realized Dante feared his own father. All the grenades had been about the illegal Moretti business Dante clearly didn’t agree with but was too terrified to do something about or even try to get out of it. Sweet Dante must have been adopted, switched at the hospital, or been the milk man’s baby, because he was nothing like his father.

After that meeting, Noah had changed his terminology; the grenades turned into bread crumbs. Dante would drop one on the ground for him, and Noah would try to follow it. All the hints eventually led to his boring filing job. Using Dante’s crumbs, Noah combed through the files inside the archive and found not the first fucking thing. Nothing. Not one number or note hinted at anything immoral or illegal. The files had been a complete and utter bust—yet Dante had been sure there would be something in there to implicate his father.

Dante had been wrong, but only about the location of the incriminating information. The pile of papers Noah received every week for shredding contained all the evidence. He was supposed to shred the documents as soon as his father gave them to him. Of course, he’d let them pile up with the intention of shredding them all at once. It seemed much more efficient to Noah…plus he’d hated shredding as much as he’d hated filing. So, there it was—all the evidence Dante had hinted at lay innocently in Noah’s shred pile.

Donovan Moretti used his father’s financial firm as a front for money laundering. He also stole money from Noah’s father’s clients—old people, young people, rich people, or poor people; Moretti hadn’t cared. Apparently, Noah’s father hadn’t either.

After that day, the shit went downhill and got faster and faster and faster—until it finally rolled right over Noah. While he’d been trying to come to terms with his father’s involvement, someone had turned the FBI onto Noah. On a Saturday evening, just after a jog on his favorite trail, he found two men in suits waiting for him by his vehicle. After listening to them for only about three minutes, he realized they knew most of the facts he’d managed to dig out of the shred pile involving Donovan Moretti and Noah’s father. They knew it all but didn’t have the cold, hard evidence… Noah did.

He’d tried to blow them off, unsure of how he wanted to handle the situation. An internal battle raged. He couldn’t narc on his own dad. But there was also no way he could sit back and allow hard-working people’s money to be stolen from them. He’d been fucked with either decision he might have made. The FBI, however, had taken the decision away from him. After only one meeting, they’d agreed to give his father immunity if Noah would agree to hand over the evidence and testify against Moretti. It sounded like a perfect solution.

It had been an imperfect fucking solution.

When all the smoke cleared and the shit settled, a jury found Donovan Moretti guilty of money laundering and sentenced him to six years. Noah and his parents were thrown into WITSEC, a witness protection program, with his parents requesting they be placed in a separate location from their one and only son. Noah could still remember how hurt, shocked, and humiliated he’d been when his father had demanded Noah be sent somewhere other than where he was going. Left with no other choice but to go along with the FBI and his parents, Noah had ended up with a new identity—John Doe. He guessed the FBI thought it was funny—JohnFuckingDoe. What the fuck ever. At least poor Dante had scored a reprieve. He’d gotten six short years without his father who headed one of the biggest crime organizations in Las Vegas.

There’d been times during the trial Noah would steal a glance in Dante’s direction, and he’d be floored by the look of appreciation he’d seen in Dante’s eyes. Noah could only imagine how shitty it was for such a soft soul to have been surrounded by such hard evil. A part of him hoped things worked out for Dante Moretti, but the biggest part of him didn’t really give a fuck. Dante had undoubtedly tricked Noah into doing what he didn’t have the balls to do himself. On good days, he could blame Dante for the loss of his life, but he didn’t have many good days, so he mostly blamed himself.

He’d tried to move on and live a normal life as John Doe, but it had turned out to be a virtually impossible task. Alone. Afraid. Paranoid. Absolutely no skills whatsoever. No friends. Moretti was still alive, calling shots from his prison cell, and he’d placed a bounty on Noah’s head that could tempt the angels to turn on Christ. He knew this because the FBI told him—yeah, that helped him put his past behind him and start a new life.

During the first six months, things had gotten progressively worse for him. It started with little things—sleeping with his light on, barricading the door to his apartment, always looking down so no one could see his face and recognize him, never ever making friends because either no one could be trusted or they could end up dead because of him. Before he knew it, he couldn’t leave his apartment.

There was a name for his pussy-ness: agoraphobia. Nice. At least there were others out there as messed up as he was. The FBI eventually had to bring in a handler to take care of him. Cameron Maverick. Noah called Cameron a friend. Cameron called Noah a job.

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