Blood of Cain (Sean O'Brien (Mystery/Thrillers))

by Lowe, Tom

  “Take care of Nick.” I disconnected.

  ***

  The sign next to the road read: Bar-B-Q Tonite–Wet T-shirt Fri Nite. I pulled onto the gravel lot where more than twenty motorcycles were parked near the Lone Wolf Saloon, a low-slung, ramshackle bar built from cypress wood, oak, and red brick. The aged building sat among tall pines and palmetto palm trees. Neon beer signs, Budweiser, Miller, and Pabst Blue Ribbon smoldered from behind dirty windows and a large porch with sagging patched screens the color of charcoal. The wind changed and from the far left of the building, hardwood smoke drifted across the parking lot, the smoke escorting the smells of charred pork, fat dripping on hot coals, and beer.

  I spotted the motorcycle—the Harley with a Robin’s egg blue gas tank, the skull and crossbones on both sides. It sat further away from the other motorcycles. I walked across the lot, towards the left side of the saloon, the hot sun winking off flattened beer cans and paper pieces of exploded fireworks lodged between the gravel. Coming from the back of the building, I heard loud voices, laughter, and amiable cursing mixed in the smoke and humidity.

  I rounded the corner of the building and saw two sweating cooks turning ribs and pork shoulders over pot-bellied grills as bikers sat in lawn chairs or stood in small groups talking and telling jokes. Blake Shelton sang a country song from the outdoor, all-weather speakers. A fifty-something biker, with a ZZ Top gray beard down to his belt and faded blue tats over both arms, tossed a horseshoe into a sawdust pit with a steel pole in the center.

  Among those standing, I looked for the tallest man. Within a few seconds, eyes were drifting my way. I wasn’t a regular. Wasn’t wearing a sleeveless denim jacket or leathers. I was a different species edging myself on the perimeter of their little savanna, about to sip from their watering hole. I stepped over to a rough-hewed bar and bought an iced-down bottle of Corona from a blonde female bartender wearing short cut-off jeans and a tank shirt. I gave her a five-dollar tip. She smiled and said, “You here for the barbecue? We have some of the best in Florida, they’re barbecuing gator, too. It’s real good.” She moistened her full bottom lip.

  “Matter of fact, that’s one of the reasons I’m here. My old friend Sam Nichols said I should drop by today. I was going to come by during Bike Week, but the place was a little crowded.”

  “Oh my God. We must have had a zillion customers that week. It’s second to the Daytona 500 week.”

  I smiled and sipped the beer.

  “What’d you say’s your friend’s name?”

  “Sam Nichols. Some folks know him as Pirate.”

  She grinned and wiped her hands with a small white towel. “Yep, Sammy the Pirate.” She looked around. “Don’t see him out here. He was inside earlier. Saw him shootin’ pool when I was stocking the bar. He’s so big, I can’t miss him. Plus he always wears that yellow pirate’s bandana, kinda like Hulk Hogan wears.”

  I smiled. “Got to use the toilet. Good talking with you.” I picked up my bottle of beer, didn’t lock eyes with any of the Vikings, stepped around the banana plants, walked back down a dirt path to the parking lot and entered the Lone Wolf Saloon.

  42

  A rustic bar ran almost the entire length of the far wall. I quickly did inventory. Less than a dozen bikers scattered at tables. Four guys sitting at the bar. One bartender. Two waitresses, showing a lot of skin, working the tables. A Mexican cook stood in a kitchen area beyond the bar, filling tacos and grilling burgers. To the far right were three pool tables, pockets of soft light falling in sharp cones from the lamps above each table.

  I watched shadows move around the tables. Fur. Ink. Denim and black motorcycle boots. Every few seconds a body leaned into the cones of light and made a shot. The orange tips of cigarettes glowed, smoke funneling through the lamps like indoor chimneys.

  I stepped to the bar and waited, standing because if I sat, the Glock might show a slight bulge under my shirt. In a place like this, I wanted to lower the risks wherever and whenever possible.

  “Hep you,” said the bartender in a South Georgia accent. He had a scruffy sleep-deprived face and pupils expanded as large as his irises. He wore a T-shirt with an image of a red-eyed wolf and a caption that read:

  Lone Wolf Saloon

  Who’s Afraid of the Big, Bad Wolf?

  I said, “Sure, you have a Corona?”

  “Comin’ up.”

  I watched him pop the top on the bottle, and I glanced over to a discolored mirror behind the bar where I saw eyes drifting from tables over to where I stood. My guess is that they thought I was an undercover cop.

  “Be three bucks,” said the bartender.

  I handed him a five. “Keep the change.” I made small talk with him for a minute as I casually glanced around, never making eye contact with anyone, watching the pool tables each time a player leaned into the light to make a shot.

  The yellow bandana.

  A giant of a man wore it. He had to go at least six-six, shoulders like a water buffalo. When he lined up the cue ball to make a fresh break, I could see the muscles move like waves under his brown skin. He wore a hoop earring—arms covered in multi-colored tattoos. Dirty blond hair curled and matted like grapes from where the bandana tied behind his head.

  I watched him call a shot, line it up, and sink the eight ball. He grinned, playfully punching the other player on the arm. “Gotta split.” I overheard him saying. “My old lady’s coming back from Utah. Been gone a fuckin’ week visiting her mama out West. I got the worst case of blue balls, bluer then that number two ball.” He laughed, placed the stick in a rack and left. He walked past me, the smell of testosterone and body odor followed him out the door.

  I gave it a few seconds, listening for the sound of a Harley engine starting. I inhaled deeply, turned and walked across the floor of the bar. He stood outside on a wooden deck elevated off the ground a foot or so. He lit a cigarette with a Zippo lighter, the smell of lighter fluid in the breeze. I walked up to him and said, “Hey, man, you got a light?”

  He looked at me oddly, his bloodshot eyes searching my face. “Sure.” He fished in his pants pocket for his lighter. “Where’s your smoke?”

  “Here.” I reached inside my shirt and retrieved the icepick he used on Nick. “You left something behind. Thought I’d return it.” Before he could fully register what I said, I drove the icepick into the center of his left shoulder. Between the rotator cuff. All the way in to the wooden handle. To the bone. The cigarette toppled from his mouth.

  He swung at my head with a powerful right hook. I danced backward, his fist missing my chin by an inch. He yelled, “Mother fucker! You’re a dead man!”

  “I heard that earlier from your pal, Carlos Bandini.”

  He charged me—an enraged brown bear. I knew the embedded icepick was taking some of his prowess down. But to be caught in his massive arms and body slammed could lead to a broken back. I dodged his attack and kicked him in the side of his thick skull. He fell for a moment, shook it off, and stood, blood pouring down his chest and over his belly. He pulled the icepick out of his shoulder, grinned, and swiped in the air at me. “I’m gonna stick this through your neck. Shoulda done it to your pal. Next time I’m gonna skin that curly-headed bastard.”

  He lurched forward, the icepick barely missing my chest. He jabbed, the steel point raking down my forearm. When he thrust again, I used both hands to pull his arm hard. Pulled him off balance. He fell, dropping the icepick. I grabbed the pick and slammed it through the center of his palm, skewering him to the wooden deck. Then I drove my fist into his jaw with a hard right, a fast left and another right. His eyes rolled. I hit him again. I grabbed him by the bandana and lifted his head off the deck. I leaned into his face and said, “If you ever touch Nick again, they’ll find your body parts in the same place they’ll find Bandini’s, that’ll be on the windows of cars because after the vultures digest what’s left of you, that’s all you be. Bird shit on a window. You stuck the icepick into Lonnie Ebert, didn’t you? Answ
er me!”

  He grinned through blood and loose teeth. “Fuck you, dead man. He’ll come huntin’ you.”

  “Who? Bandini? I found him.”

  “You’ll never find him ‘til he wants you to.”

  The front screened door opened and two bikers stepped out. One slid a long, serrated knife from a sheath on his belt. I reached behind my shirt and leveled the Glock at them. “Drop the knife!” They did as ordered, both with palms facing out. I glanced over at Pirate’s Harley-Davidson. The skull and crossbones, the vacant eye sockets in the skull staring at me. I looked down at Pirate, barely conscious, the dropped cigarette smoldering near his shoulder. I said, “Didn’t you learn how to use an ashtray? That’s a fire hazard.”

  I turned and shot a bullet between the eyes of the black skull painted on the gas tank. Gasoline poured out, splashing over flattened beer cans and remnants of fireworks. I picked up the burning cigarette and tossed into the puddle of gas. Then I turned and ran to my Jeep. I started the engine and roared out of the parking lot as the Pirate’s motorcycle exploded in an orange ball of fire that reached higher than the brick chimney on the Lone Wolf Saloon.

  ***

  Blood dripped from my arm as I drove fast, my thoughts bouncing from Nick to Courtney Burke. I didn’t know if the damage I did to Bandini and his henchman, Pirate, would build up more fear than anger in them. But I did know that to do nothing would prevent nothing. I learned a long time ago that a douse of preventive medicine can lower the risks of disease. Bandini was a cancer walking on two legs. Maybe I’d cut it off at the knee. Maybe not.

  Who had Pirate been referring to when he said, ‘You’ll never find him ‘till he wants you to.’ If it wasn’t Carlos Bandini, then who was it? Maybe Pirate was doing what cons do … conning. Deception is their reality.

  I pulled into the parking lot of a strip shopping center. I went inside a drug store, bought gauze, tape, and a bottle of hydrogen-peroxide. Outside, I stood beside my Jeep in the lot and poured half the bottle over the deep wound the icepick carved into my forearm. White bubbles boiled up out of the six-inch gash. I dressed the cut and got back in my Jeep, heading for the marina.

  I drove through the Florida countryside, beneath the canopies of live oaks on both sides of the road, their thick limbs arching over the highway. I had a sudden urge to pick up little Max and head back to our old cabin on the St. Johns River. To canoe down river and fish for bass hiding in the shallows around the cypress knees. To lie back in the canoe under the warm sun and simply drift in the slow current, letting the ancient river guide me, floating like a reed basket on the Nile. I wanted the St. Johns to carry me and my little dog around the mossy bends and shoals laden with bald cypress trees, honeysuckles, and weeping willows whose slender fingers scratched the back of the old river.

  Maybe I could push the events of the last few days out of my mind, push Andrea Logan’s appearance back into a college yearbook, into a black and white memory, a static image in alphabetical order with no biological order—no lifeline connection to the present. Maybe I could learn to not care how and why Courtney Burke knew about the birthmark on my arm—to let her find whatever eats at her soul without trying to save it for her—to somehow keep Nick from taking such a bad and humiliating beating. Maybe the old river could rock the cradle of my world and return the genies to the bottle, to lock away the time capsule of my life and allow me to live in the present, the moment, without worrying about what I do disturbing the future of others.

  But I couldn’t. Whoever I was, whatever gene pool my conscience floated in, I had no choice but to be engaged because it wasn’t only about me. And for the good of others, I wished it was.

  The buzzing of my phone lying in the center console interrupted my thoughts. I answered and Dave Collins said, “Where are you?”

  I never like conversations starting with that question. “Highway 92. Why?”

  “Don’t come back to the marina, at least not right now.”

  I figured his warning had to do with my fiery exit from the Lone Wolf Saloon. “Why shouldn’t I come back there?”

  “News media are everywhere. Thicker than thieves, and probably just as unsavory. They smell blood, Sean. Not so much yours as Senator Logan’s.”

  “What happened?”

  “Apparently, the DNA testing that the local constables are doing was leaked to the media. They know the cops are testing DNA samples from you and Andrea, hoping to get a sample from Courtney Burke to prove one way or the other whether she, the alleged serial killer, is the biological daughter from Andrea’s former relationship with you. Problem is … nobody can find the girl. But since Senator Logan is the presumed presidential nominee, you can bet the farm that a lot people are looking for her now. And her life just might be in even greater danger.”

  43

  Boots Langley was about to drop a mouse into the snake cage when his mobile phone rang. He looked into the red eyes of the albino python coiled in the glass enclosure, its tongue tasting the rodent molecules in the air. “Bon appetite,” he said, taking the top off a small Styrofoam container and setting the mouse in one corner of the cage.

  Boots shuffled to the kitchen, looked at the missed call and hit the re-dial button. Isaac Solminski answered and said, “We’re on the road. Next stop is near Charleston. Is Courtney still there?”

  “Yes, brother. She’s tucked in the trailer down by the creek. She’s a good kid. Very independent, and scared. Maybe Bandini won’t find her down here.”

  “You know them … revenge doesn’t have an expiration date in their mind. But rumor has it that the guy Courtney knows, Sean O’Brien, the man who Courtney said has a unique Shamrock birthmark, supposedly gave Bandini a spanking and warned him to stay away from her.”

  “Really? Well maybe he will.”

  “He’s a small threat compared to what’s going on with that poor child now.”

  “What?”

  “I’m driving and listening to it all on NPR. They’re saying Courtney might be the daughter of Senator Lloyd Logan’s wife, Andrea. And the father might be Sean O’Brien. Maybe that’s Courtney’s family connection to him. Cops and probably the Democrats, for that matter, are searching for her. If her DNA is a match, the entire presidential election could be drastically affected.”

  “This could get nasty.”

  “Boots, watch the news online or on TV. And tell Courtney what I just shared with you. I fear for her now more than ever.”

  ***

  Courtney Burke watched the setting sun ignite Bullfrog Creek in a river of fire, deep crimson and orange, a breeze across the water creating a sea of winking gold coins on the surface. She sat on the seawall overlooking the creek, tearing bits of bread from a hotdog bun and tossing the pieces to a mother mallard duck and three ducklings. Courtney said, “Ya’ll share. Everybody will get some bread.”

  She smiled and looked over her shoulder as Boots approached. He sat beside her. “That mama duck was born here on the creek a few years ago. I can tell because she has that little piece of her beak chipped. Looks like a gator tooth caused it. Anyway, this is her second brood.”

  “She seems to be a great mom.” Courtney watched him look at the ducks and then at her. “What’s going on, Boots?”

  “Sean O’Brien, the good Samaritan.”

  “What about him?”

  “Do you know a woman named Andrea Logan?”

  “No. Who’s she?”

  “She’s the wife of the man who may be the next president of the United States.”

  “What’s that have to do with me?”

  “Well, I was about to feed Sheba a morsel when my brother called.” Boots told her everything Isaac told him, and then added, “There will be a lot of people trying to locate you. Isaac and I both believe this could be very dangerous for you. Your face is on all the news stations and online. You’re welcome to stay here as long as you can. Maybe you could find a way to get to someplace like Costa Rica. Just disappear until this thing w
orks its way out.”

  “I’m not their daughter any more than I’m a serial killer.”

  “I know you said your mother and father were murdered. Before his death, what was your father like?”

  “A salesman. Life of the party. And then one day, before his death, it changed. Daddy was an Irish traveler, sort of like gypsies. Here today, gone tomorrow. Mama usually worked in hospitals from time to time. She was a natural healer, real good with patients. One day Daddy left Mama and me in our trailer home in South Carolina. He came back a year later. Never admitted to her where he’d been all that time, and he never seemed the same since. Said he was lookin’ for work, but he always found trouble.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that. Do you have siblings?”

  “No.”

  “How long were your parents together before you were born?”

  “About four years. They told me they’d almost giving up trying to have a baby. Mama said her eggs didn’t always drop like most women. When she became pregnant with me, she called it divine intervention, and I was supposed to be her angel.” She lowered her voice to a whisper. “But I’m not so sure that I was, and that bothers me a lot now, you know?”

  “This may sound like a strange question, but I’m strange, okay? Could your parents have adopted you?”

  She looked at Boots, her eyes widening, face skeptical, thoughts racing. “No. I have pictures from the time I was a tiny baby.”

  “You might have been adopted out right after you were born. That appears to be the case of the infant girl fathered by Sean O’Brien and given up for adoption by her mother. And, as I mentioned, that woman’s husband is running for president of the United States. Look, Courtney, maybe you should consider ending this hunt for your uncle. If he is the Prophet, he’s more aligned with the devil than God. If you turn yourself in, it could be safer for you in the long run.”