SURVIVORS (crime thriller books)

by T. J. Brearton

  He continued around the house. Argon’s bedroom window was on the same plane as the living room windows and too high to see into. By the time Brendan had circled around the entire house he realized that the only vantage point from which to see inside had been where he’d been, alongside the driveway, looking into the kitchen. He found himself back at the side entrance.

  He stepped up again, realizing that the cat had made the entire circumnavigation of Argon’s house with him. As he was looking down at the cat, he heard a voice from inside the house.

  “Whoever you are out there, I’ve got a gun and I’ve called the police! I suggest you leave the property right now!”

  * * *

  Brendan froze. She must have seen him circling the house. Shit.

  “Hey,” he called back. For a moment, he was desperately searching for words. His mind drawing a blank. Then, as if a switch was thrown back on, he was articulate. “I’m a friend of Argon’s? Brendan Healy. I was at the meeting tonight. You were too, right?”

  Nothing. Silence. He figured she was considering what he’d said. Still, he tried to reassure her some more.

  “I’m staying at the house. Argon always keeps the spare key over the side entrance here. I let myself in earlier this afternoon. That’s probably my .38 you’re holding. Please, I’m not going to hurt you or anything.”

  “I know that, I’m the one with the gun.”

  He was about to say something else when she opened the door.

  She had his gun – she hadn’t been bluffing.

  “Did you call the police?” he asked.

  She had such a young face, Brendan felt that maybe she was even younger than he’d first thought – maybe twenty not twenty-five. And there was something odd about her. The way she stood and carried herself, he wondered if she had some kind of condition, like a kind of palsy. One side of her mouth turned down a little. Other than that, it was hard to say. Just, something.

  “No. I didn’t.”

  His pulse slowed. He smiled at her. “Me neither. I was just about to. Then I saw you in the window there.” He pointed at the kitchen. She still seemed undecided. “Can I come in?”

  “Why are you here?”

  “The same as what Russell Gide said at the meeting. I’m a friend of Argon’s. I used to work with him; was a cop here in Hawthorne. That’s why I have a gun. May I have it back, please, Sloane?”

  She jumped when he said her name. She held the gun at her chest, pointed up, like the way the Charlie’s Angels did. It looked too big for her hand. “This looks like Argon’s gun.”

  He nodded. “We have the same kind. He’s the one that got me into those old cowboy kickers. Trust me, it’s mine. What made you look beneath the sink?”

  He held out his hand. She gave him the gun with exaggerated care. She regarded him coolly. “Toilet paper.”

  He took the gun and popped the chamber out. It was empty. The ammunition was in his bag, still in the car. He saw her looking into the empty chamber. He slapped it home and stuck the gun in the waist band of his pants at the small of his back.

  “Still scary, though,” he said.

  She just looked back at him. She didn’t smirk, she didn’t smile, she didn’t frown. Her eyes were big and blue and open. Her face was a bit oblong, but she was attractive. Aside from the corner of her mouth, everything else was symmetrical. It was her voice that made her seem so different. She sounded almost like someone who was deaf, but obviously she wasn’t – she’d heard him through the door.

  He was still standing on the small porch outside the door.

  “I’m going to come in now, okay?”

  As if the cat had been waiting for the go-ahead, it darted inside.

  The girl immediately chased after it, and Brendan stepped back into Argon’s house, feeling a smile form on his lips. Argon knew some interesting folks.

  He thought about the old cop, and where he was now, in the morgue, and the smile faded.

  CHAPTER TEN / Sunday, 6:58 PM

  Jeremy Staryles, young, muscular, well-dressed, looked over at the body on the slab. Then something caught his eye, distracting him. A fly crawled along the edge of the medical examiner’s desk. Staryles swiped at it and scowled as it flew away.

  The medical examiner was oblivious to the fly. He was on the other side of the examination table, squinting through his glasses at the body.

  Seamus Argon was in a black bag. His chest was exposed. His body was corrupted with bruises and cuts. Rigor mortis had come and gone; the flesh was now flaccid, the lividity creating a pool of blood at the base of the cadaver. The medical examiner, an Indian-American man, wielded a scalpel in his gloved hand. He could work now, without the stiff muscles or active blood vessels to impede him.

  Staryles’ phone buzzed in his pocket. He was wearing his usual suit, a Traveler, tailor-fitted with two buttons and plain-front trousers from Jos A Bank. He always wore Traveler suits. He liked their fit, and the name. Staryles figured that was a big part of what he was – a traveler. He was never in the same place for very long. Some people couldn’t live like this: always ready to move at a moment’s notice. It was hell to stay in one place, to do what people called “putting down roots” when they should have been saying “digging a grave.” Like the body on the slab with no more energy flowing through the muscles, no more adenosine triphosphate to keep the skin supple, immobility was livor mortis, stagnation was death.

  He pulled the phone out of the inside pocket of his dark blue suit. He liked the suit’s color a lot – it matched his car, a dark blue 1999 Oldsmobile Cutlass. The car came out of Oldsmobile’s Sixth Generation line which was the last one to bear the Cutlass name. Staryles had requested it specifically after rotating back from Iraq. It had been granted to him without hesitation.

  He held the phone in front of him and read the small display screen, recognizing the incoming number. “Excuse me,” he said to the medical examiner.

  The examiner barely looked up from where he was making a fresh incision.

  Staryles stepped away. He pressed the button to answer the call. Staryles didn’t own a phone that connected to the internet. The organization didn’t issue phones, only close-range, two-way communicators. He used the old-fashioned cells for regular calls, buying minutes as necessary, regularly discarding them and getting new ones.

  “Staryles,” he said.

  The voice on the other end started rapidly conveying information. That was the way it was. Everyone was in such a rush these days; no one had any patience. You kept moving, but you did it with some grace, by God.

  “Hold on.”

  He walked over to a small desk and found a pen and paper, and began to jot down notes. He didn’t carry his own notepad – those were discoverable, traceable items, too. Even if he got rid of the pieces of paper when he was done with them, impressions could be left on the pages underneath, prints could be lifted, a purchasing source could be traced, video footage observed – forget about it. Today’s world you had to do it and eat it and excrete it. He only used scrap paper. He kept notes only as long as he needed them, and then burnt them.

  He wrote down a few notes saying, “Uh-huh. Okay.”

  Laramie, Wyoming.

  “I know of it,” he said conversationally to the caller. Sometimes, these admin-types who called him were the only people he would speak to for days. You had to get in your socialization where you could. Socializing was important to one’s mental health. There were guys out there in Staryles’ line of work who were these rugged individualists. They ended up spending too much time alone, barely speaking to anybody. They started to lose it. They grew impatient, stir-crazy. You had to mix it up.

  “It’s where they tied that gay kid to a fence and beat him to death,” Staryles said. “Sits in a valley between the Snowy Range and the Laramie Range. There’s that abandoned fort there – what the hell – oh, Fort Sanders . . . He used an alias. Got it. Oh that’s cute.”

  He glanced over at the medical exami
ner who was still hunched over the cadaver. If he was listening to Staryles’ conversation, he didn’t show it. Staryles wasn’t concerned whether he was listening or not. Medical examiners were like the pay-as-you-go phones, or the scraps of paper. You used and discarded them as necessary.

  “Okay,” said Staryles, “That’s good background. But let’s talk about his current position.”

  The caller went on. Staryles already knew where Brendan Healy was, of course. The organization had had taps on various phones since the Heilshorn incident and had been keeping surveillance on a number of people, including Sheriff Taber. There was also the State Detective, a guy named Rudy Colinas. Delaney, Bostrom, and a few others. But this was mainly perfunctory. Staryles was aware that the guy they wanted was the one who had slipped surveillance shortly after the incident had reached its climax up in Albany. And now he’d gone under again – but briefly, apparently riding off with some other guy and going God-knows-where throughout the afternoon before reappearing at Argon’s.

  Staryles’ surveillance team had been listening in when Taber called Healy. They knew he was flying into Albany, and Staryles had insisted he should be the one to head to the airport and pick up the guy’s trail. He liked to be the first one to case a subject. Like not having a smartphone and using only scraps of paper, this was another essential: eyes-on.

  The caller, the hyperactive not-enough-sunshine analyst, was rattling off more details about the house on East Street. The house belonged to the corpse on the slab, who was getting a little bit of cosmetic surgery, postmortem. After this, no one would ever know how Staryles had intervened. What a mess.

  Staryles had already understood what the caller was conveying, but wanted to hear every detail just to double-check.

  “Really? Someone there now? Same as the chauffeur?”

  He wrote: Company. Female. 25-30 yrs. NOT the AA sponsor.

  “Uh-huh. That’s good.”

  This detective, Healy, he was something. Staryles wasn’t sure if he’d call the guy smart or not. He’d had the foresight to skip town after the incident in Oneida, but Staryles thought that had more to do with the guy’s mental state than anything else. He was afraid. He was also a bit of a screw-up. He made sloppy mistakes. He had some demon pursuing him, and that always led to error. But the guy had some balls, maybe. Or, he had nothing to lose. Sometimes they were one and the same.

  It was possible that Healy had made Staryles when he’d followed the detective down from Albany Airport. Healy was definitely paranoid, and so probably hyper-vigilant. Everybody was hyper-something these days.

  The admin was still chattering in Staryles’ ear. He made a few more notes, thanked the caller, and left the desk. He neatly folded the paper and slipped it into his pocket with the small cell phone.

  He approached the medical examiner, who still had his back turned. For a moment, the whole thing reminded Staryles of something out of Frankenstein, the only fiction he had ever read. The mad doctor hunched over his unholy creation.

  “How we doing?”

  “Almost done,” said the examiner. He sounded displeased.

  It was no matter. Staryles reached into the other side of his suit, where his gun was holstered snugly against his ribcage.

  “Good,” he said.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN / Sunday, 7:09 PM

  “I have cat allergies,” Sloane said. “I can’t be around that thing. It’s bad enough in here, just the dander it leaves behind. But I would never let Argon get rid of it.”

  She was sitting at the little round table that spanned the kitchen and edge of the living room. Brendan was leaning against the inlaid shelves by the flat screen TV, his arms folded across his chest.

  He felt no closer to knowing how Argon had died, or what secrets he might have possessed that Taber was so hot about. He needed to crank things up a notch. He needed to talk to Argon’s sister. He wanted to try Carrera again, too. Above all, he needed to be doing what he had come here for, what Taber had tasked him with, and find the crucial information which Argon had squirreled away. He needed to check those boxes he’d hauled out of Argon’s closet, look through Argon’s small office, and search the basement.

  The house, he suddenly decided – Argon’s whole house was just like the man himself. Simple, unadorned on the surface, somewhat outdated, but with a basement potentially filled with deeper truths.

  For now, he was fascinated by this young woman, and felt he needed to listen to whatever insights she might possess. It would be rude to just push her aside and go about the rest of his business.

  “Ok,” he said, offering a smile. “The cat’s outside. She can’t do any more damage.”

  Sloane looked back for a moment and a flicker of something crossed her features, like she was hurt by his remark. But then she smiled back. “Just let my antihistamines kick in.”

  She was really something else. That droop of her mouth. The strange, atonal quality of her voice, her penetrating eyes. She was unconventional, but he realized he found her beautiful.

  “I’ll let her back in on my way out. It was nice to meet you. Weird, but nice.”

  She started to get up.

  He uncrossed his arms and stepped forward. “Hey, hold up.”

  She remained poised at the table, looking over at him. His mind shuffled through his options.

  “Would you stay for dinner? Russell and I were supposed to get pizza, but we never did. All I’ve got in my stomach is that awful coffee from Holy Rosary. I’d like to make us some dinner. Would you eat?”

  She was watchful, sitting with her arms out on the table ready to push herself up and out.

  He took a step closer. “I don’t know my way around Argon’s kitchen, either. You could help.”

  She considered this. In the end, maybe it was the chance to be around Argon’s things a little longer that swayed her. She seemed like the type. “Alright. I’m pretty hungry.”

  “Good.”

  He took off his suit jacket and saw that she was observing him. He folded the jacket over his forearm, and then set it down on the couch next to the TV. He looked at her quizzically.

  “Everything alright?”

  “You seem like you’re okay,” she said, almost to herself. “A little overdressed, but possibly okay.”

  He paused and looked down, as though taking himself in. “Yeah, I’m okay.”

  Nothing happened. Then Sloane stood up and opened one of the kitchen cabinets.

  “This is where the big pots are,” she said.

  * * *

  They decided to make spaghetti. Sloane was at the stove, salting the boiling water and about to drop the pasta in. She had tied one of Argon’s aprons around her waist.

  With her back to Brendan, she asked, “Have you been to see Mena yet?”

  “Mena?”

  Sloane glanced over her shoulder. Brendan was chopping tomatoes by the sink. The fact that the tomatoes were still fresh was not lost on him. The idea of Argon planning to cook a meal like this and then suddenly not being around to do it, was, for some reason, the saddest thing.

  “Philomena. Argon’s sister.”

  “Oh,” he said, dropping the diced tomatoes into a pot on the counter. “No, I haven’t.”

  Sloane eyed him while she stirred the spaghetti around in the boiling water. “You did know Argon had a sister.”

  “Yeah,” he said, with a trace of defensiveness.

  I found out a few hours ago.

  “I’m just surprised she hasn’t shown up.”

  Sloane turned around. She wiped her hands on the apron, then placed her palms behind her on the counter, bracing herself that way. “Really?”

  “Yeah. I mean, I’m not looking to pass judgment. But, you know, it’s been a while since the accident, and . . .”

  “That’s interesting.”

  “Why? What’s interesting?”

  “Well, Mena can’t really talk, for one thing. At least, nothing that most people can understand. I can, but I have
an ear for that sort of thing. You may have noticed I sound a little funny myself.”

  “She can’t talk? Why can’t she talk?”

  “Same reason she can’t really move around, either. She had a stroke. She lost control of her, you know . . .” Sloane lifted a hand off the counter and gestured up and down, from her face to her thighs. “Her muscles. She’s in a wheelchair.”

  Brendan fell silent for a moment. He was holding the vegetable knife in one hand and leaning against the sink.

  “You’re just staring into space,” Sloane then said. “You alright? What are you thinking?”

  Brendan looked at her as if seeing her for the first time. It was strange, really strange, these random people popping up, and then him spending time with them. What he realized though, was that this was all because of Argon’s death. People passing away brought others together.

  “Sorry.”

  He needed to let her in. He couldn’t really talk to Cushing, Taber was worrying him, and he didn’t completely trust Russell Gide. No one else at the AA meeting seemed to have been more than an acquaintance of Argon’s, considering him a good guy, and then going on with their rhapsodies on addiction and rants about taxation. Except maybe Santos, who had hinted at more.

  He passed her the pot. “It needs the tomato paste.”

  She turned quickly – she moved like a cat herself – and grabbed a can from the counter beside her, next to the stove. It was tomato paste, already opened and ready to go. He grinned and stood back while she added it.

  “You realize we’re doing this totally backwards,” she said, stirring.

  Brendan’s grin faltered. He wasn’t sure what she meant.