by Chad Zunker
It was a few minutes after eight on Saturday night, and I was somehow still alive. Much to the chagrin of whoever was trying to do away with me. Twenty-four hours ago I was a simple political tracker covering a barbeque cookout and campaign rally at the courthouse in Boerne, Texas. Then the text arrived.
Why had they chosen me?
A question I couldn’t stop asking myself. One of many questions.
A black Range Rover was parked in the driveway. The outside security lights were on by the massive glass front door. I could spot a light on in an upstairs window of the home. After watching for fifteen minutes, I didn’t notice any shadows of movement inside.
I would not use the front door. I had no intention of walking straight up to the house, giving the doorbell a ring with, “Hey, Ted, Sam Callahan here. Yep, I’m still alive. Disappointed? Can we talk about that for a sec?” Staying in the shadows, I hopped the short fence protecting his property, crossed through his well-manicured lawn, kept my eyes and ears open for any dogs, though I did not take Ted for a dog person. He seemed too tidy to want a dog around messing up his stuff. Plus, he traveled too much. But I would still be careful. The last thing I needed right now was a mutt to jump out from nowhere and bite me in the ass. Behind the house, I found a metal stairwell that led me up to multi-level decks that displayed views of the downtown skyline. I eased up the metal stairs to the first deck. My eyes gazed from the skyscrapers over to the renowned tower on the University of Texas campus, just north of downtown. The tower was lit up in burnt orange lights at the moment.
A million dollar view. Or two point four million, to be exact.
A security light was on above the impressive over-sized glass back doors. I cupped my hands to the glass, took a peek inside. A light was on in the kitchen above the sink. I also noticed a light on beyond the railing on the second level, along with a flicker. Maybe a TV? But no other lights. There were no signs of life inside. It sure didn’t look like anyone was home. I wondered about the Range Rover in the driveway. I supposed Ted could easily own two or three cars. Perhaps he was out in the Porsche right now. My eyes surveyed the walls by the doors inside, looking for an alarm keypad. I spotted one near the kitchen. It did not appear as if the house alarm was armed. Shutting down a complicated alarm system was not completely beyond my scope of experience, but I was rusty. Technology had advanced so much in the few years since my last go around. So that would save me a little stress. I pulled out the new compact tool set from my back jeans pocket. A tiny kit I’d purchased at a pawn shop downtown that held miniature screwdrivers, various sized paper clips, some wire, a pair of scissors. It was amazing what you could do with a few simple tools.
Turned out, I didn’t need any of them. The glass door was unlocked. I paused. This made me uneasy. Yes, it was a high-dollar neighborhood. There was a general feeling of safety and security. I’d even noticed a neighborhood rental cop drive slowly by in a Mazda earlier. But I also knew that rich people liked to protect their very expensive stuff. I pushed the glass door open a few inches, leaned in, listened, counted slowly to twenty. No sirens. No sudden loud wails from a hidden security system that had evaded my eyes. And maybe even more important, no charging Rottweiler coming from a back hallway.
I could hear a TV now. Upstairs and around the corner. The flicker. I was sure of it, as the volume was loud, and I could make out the distinct voice of George Clooney engaged in banter. Ocean’s Eleven? There were no other sounds coming from the house.
I slid inside, shut the door behind me. Something didn’t feel right.
Without turning on any lights, I did a quick circle through the kitchen and moved into a small formal living, and then the master bedroom. The bed was made and all lights were out. I made my way up the contemporary stairwell in the middle of the home. I could hear the TV more clearly now. It was definitely Ocean’s Eleven. I could hear George Clooney’s character, Danny, say, “I’m not sure what four nines does, but the ace, I think, is pretty high.” Man, I loved that movie back in the day, probably watched it more than twenty times, used to dream of being as smooth a con as Danny Ocean.
I reached the top of the stairs, peeked around the corner and spotted three doors, all open. I figured two were bedrooms, the other an office. The sound from the TV was coming from the office. I had a bad feeling in the pit of my stomach. Men as OCD as Ted Bowerson don’t walk out of their house and leave the TV on all day. I approached the office, took a slow glance inside the room. A massive glass desk faced the window, away from me. The large flat screen TV hung on the wall to the left. There was George and Brad Pitt and the rest of the gang. A desk lamp was aglow. The office had a balcony with an even more spectacular view of the city. But I paid it zero attention, as my eyes were locked in on the arm and hand I saw sticking out from behind the large black leather executive chair with its back to me.
I took a few more slow steps into the room, peered around the chair. Ted Bowerson. Face down on the desk, laying perfectly still in a stale pool of blood that I could now see had dripped down and collected onto the pristine hardwood floors around the wheels of the chair. He’d been shot through the back of the head, execution style, as his hair was mangled and wet. I was tired of seeing blood. Smelling death. I wondered how long since they’d been there. Maybe right before they came to kill me.
I wasn’t going to stick around to sort it out.
A few minutes later, I was hiding behind a large tree in the darkness of a neighbor’s yard up the street.
My head was full of more questions.
Were they watching Ted’s home? Did I leave any fingerprints inside? Could they somehow tether me to Ted’s murder just like they did with Rick? Every step I took forward only brought more uncertainty and more confusion. And more death. That’s what I was focused on more than anything else right now. I was frightened. And no longer just for my own life. It wasn’t just about me anymore. In the past eighteen hours, I had spoken with only three people about this thing and two were already dead. Bullet holes through both of their heads.
The third person was my mom. I had to get back to DC and get to her before it was too late. She was the only real family I had ever had, even if she’d been absent for most of my life.
SAM CALLAHAN
Age Twenty-Two
Boulder, Colorado
I finished the last exam of my last semester and then met my roommate, Josh, at Farrand Field in the center of campus. It was a beautiful, sunny June day in Boulder. We were in T-shirts, shorts, flip flops. Our summer gear. I gazed around the expansive field, stared at the litter of pretty coeds. Farrand Field was packed with hundreds of students at the moment — as it was on most sunny days. They drank beer, studied, listened to loud music, sunbathed in bikinis, drank more beer, threw Frisbees and footballs around. Most of them would go home in a day or two and then come back for summer classes in two weeks. Some would head off to summer internships. Others, like me and Josh, would be graduating and leaving this place forever.
I was four years down at CU and near certain that my perfect GPA was still locked in place. My final government exam was a breeze. All my papers were in. No professors were threatening to drop me a grade. I had excelled at the top level, was graduating with the highest honors, and I’d already been accepted into Georgetown Law. For the first time in my life, I was starting to feel good about my future. My life before Pastor Isaiah and Alisha was a distant memory. Except for one small piece. Something that had nagged at the back of my mind all this time. Something that had grown in the months leading up to my eventual departure from Colorado to Washington, DC.
Josh opened a small cooler and tossed me a beer. I popped open the can and took a long swig. It was cold and satisfying. I stared at the sunbathers.
“You sure you don’t want to come with me?” Josh asked. “One last roommate hurrah?”
“To the coast? With your family? Nah.”
“My family is cool with it, I swear.”
Josh was headed to Hil
ton Head for two weeks before moving to DC, like me, where he was set to work in politics. It was his second ask. His family was wealthy and was always getting together. I think he felt bad that we had to move out of our apartment early, and I’d have to couch surf for a week before driving to DC. Not that this would bother a guy like me with my past. He also hated that I had no other family. Other than Pastor Isaiah and Alisha, who now had new twin boys in their tiny home. I wasn’t headed back there for break. Alisha already had her hands full. She didn’t need a college student crashing on her living room sofa. The lack of family thing had always really bothered Josh. For someone with two brothers and three sisters, whose parents were still together, and who literally had dozens of uncles and aunts and cousins around, I think he found my situation unfathomable. And unacceptable. No family at all, Sam? He’d asked me several times our first week as new roommates three years ago. I had assured him that was correct. Just me. There was no one else.
“I’m good, Josh. I got things to close out here anyway.”
“Like what?” Josh said, not buying it. “You don’t even have a place to live. My parents will pay for everything. You don’t have to worry about it. We have plenty of room.”
“I appreciate it. But I’m good.”
Josh shrugged, chugged his beer. “Suit yourself, Callahan.”
I smiled. “I always do.”
I wouldn’t tell Josh, but the truth was that I had a meeting in two days with a private investigator. A guy I had hired recently with the little extra cash I was making waiting tables. The investigator had finally found my mother. I was starting to think she was probably dead. Which would have been fine. Maybe easier. The investigator was traveling back into town now.
I didn’t plan to ever tell a living soul about her. Not Josh. Not even Pastor Isaiah.
I guess I just privately wanted to see if she was still alive before I left Colorado and never looked back.
We met in his dusty office, a tiny cluttered square on the second floor of a crumbling building above a dingy pool hall. The place was a dump but it was not like I could afford to hire an expensive investigative firm from the corporate district. Billy Dixon was a former Chicago cop, now semi-retired. Moved to Denver to be near his two granddaughters. He had a thick mustache, glasses, bushy gray hair. He wore the same cheap light blue suit every day. I really liked him. He was sympathetic to my plight and actually seemed pretty good at his job. But it still took us nearly six months to find her. I had engaged his services the day after I’d received my acceptance letter to Georgetown Law.
“Make yourself comfortable, Sammy,” Billy said.
For some reason, he always called me Sammy. I didn’t care. Billy moved in behind his old wooden desk, shoved around thick piles of paperwork. I sat in the same worn folding chair I always did when visiting him. You could hear the crack of billiard balls beneath us in the pool hall, and smell the cigarette smoke seeping up through the floor.
Billy shoved a manila folder toward me.
“Where is she?” I asked.
“Houston.”
I nodded.
“She goes by the name Nancy Weber now. I think she’s changed her name several times over the years, as she’s moved about. I found several different identities. And she’s moved around a lot. All over the south. But she’s been in Houston a few years now. She lives by herself in a tiny apartment in a crummy part of town. Saw different guys coming and going.” Billy paused. “You sure you want to know all of this, Sam?”
“Yes, keep going.”
“She’s not in great shape, to be honest. Lots of drug use, that’s pretty clear. A neighbor said she works a few night shifts a week at the 24-hour deli when she’s sober enough. I got lots of photos. They’re all in the file.”
I hadn’t touched the file yet. Of course my mom was a drug addict.
“She have any other family? Other kids? Anything?”
Billy shook his head, his neck jiggling. “Nothing that I could find.”
I grabbed the file, didn’t open it. I wasn’t sure I wanted to open it.
“You’re certain it’s her?”
Billy sighed, almost like he didn’t want to confirm it. “Yes, it’s her, Sammy. I got DNA evidence from her place, ran the proper tests. A match. It’s all in the file. This is your mother.”
I nodded. “How much do I still owe you?”
“Six hundred.”
I pulled a white envelope from my back pocket, counted it out in cash.
“You want me to keep digging for more?” Billy asked.
I shook my head. “No, this is good. Thanks.”
“Sure. Good luck, son.”
A week later, I pulled my Ford Explorer over onto the side of the highway at dusk, the sun setting behind me, just inside the state line of Colorado. Kansas was only a hundred yards away. I could see the Welcome to Kansas sign up ahead. I was on my way to Washington, DC to start a new life. Unlikely to ever return to my old life. Unlikely to ever walk the same streets that I’d lived on as a kid for nearly three years. I was never coming back. My Explorer was loaded down with all of my earthly possessions, which included two large duffel bags of clothes and a half-dozen banker boxes filled with my collection of school books and folders.
Staring at the state line up ahead of me, I felt the weight of the moment.
I had survived Colorado. I had survived my past.
I reached over to a pile of folders in my passenger seat. I found the manila folder that Billy had prepared for me with the photos of my mother. I had not yet opened it. I just couldn’t do it. It had sat there untouched in the passenger seat of my Explorer for a week. I got out of my car, walked a hundred feet into the grassy plains along the Colorado-Kansas border, away from the noise and traffic of the highway. Then I took out a cigarette lighter and lit the corner of the manila folder on fire. I dropped the folder onto the dirt in front of me, watched it burn up. When it was nothing but ashes, I stomped it out with a shoe and returned to my car.
Then I drove across the state border.
FOURTEEN
Saturday, 10:00 p.m.
Austin, Texas
2 days, 2 hours to Election Day
The Hog had bushy red hair and thick red eyebrows. Tall, maybe 6'4, he must have weighed close to four hundred pounds. He was huge and covered nearly head to toe in designer tattoos. They were crawling up and down both robust arms and appearing again out of his massive brown cargo shorts all the way to his orange flip flops. Even his giant toes had ink marks on them. Most of it looked like a battle scene right out of the Lord of the Rings trilogy with dragons, warlocks, dwarfs, and many other fantastical creatures. The only skin not covered with ink was his face, where he sported a well-trimmed red beard. He looked like the world's largest Irish leprechaun.
Affinity Tattoo & Body Piercing was located in the heart of 6th Street, Austin’s downtown party strip, with live music of every possible variety blaring out of the open doors of dozens of bars, pubs and other hotspots for more than five blocks. It was Saturday night and there was a music festival going on in the city. Crowds of students and young professionals were growing by the minute. It would be an all-out zoo by midnight. The entire street was already blocked off by police barricades, which was fine with me. Easier to get lost in the circus of thousands of inebriated people. No one would be paying too much attention to me. I hoped.
As instructed, I asked the woman near the front counter of the tattoo joint to see the Hog. I felt stupid saying it. Who calls themselves that? But then there didn’t seem to be such a thing as “stupid” in this place, as the woman had two rainbow-colored unicorns frolicking around on her neck, three diamond studs in one nostril, and the word CHILL tattooed in bright pink and purple with lots of tiny hearts above her right eyebrow. She didn’t flinch an inch when I said, “the Hog.” I was led through to the back, where I shook hands with the giant leprechaun. He seemed to be a friendly, but his manner indicated that this was serious business.
He quickly led me through a door to a dark back hallway and into a private office. Three different giant computer screens were set up across a crowded metal desk. Several old posters of classic Atari games covered the walls. Asteroids. Centipede. Defender. Space Invaders. The Hog invited me to sit in a cheap metal folding chair. I got the feeling he didn’t see too many guests. He then fell into a leather office chair on wheels that I thought would burst at the joints but somehow held together under his girth.
“So, you’re friends with Maverick?” he asked, fiddling around on his cluttered desk. He had a surprisingly soft, effeminate voice for such a large man.
“Yeah, that’s right,” I said. The less said, the better. I was not surprised that the Hog referenced Tommy simply as Maverick. He probably didn’t even know Tommy’s real name. Just like Tommy didn’t know the Hog was actually Eugene Bernard Fitzgerald, according to a subscription label I spotted on a copy of Fantasy & Science Fiction that sat in a pile on the floor beside my chair.
“I’d say a damn good friend,” Eugene continued. “Maverick gave me over 10,000 action points for this. You believe that? Shot me right past levels five and six and straight to level seven. Incredible. You must have some seriously dirty pics of him.” He laughed heartily.