The Sullivan Gray Series Box Set

by H. P. Bayne

  Dez made for the side door, deciding it gave Sully the best option to get out an upper floor window unnoticed, the quiet park across the road making the front a better choice for escape than on most properties. He was relieved when Thackeray came to the door almost immediately.

  Dez hadn’t had a chance to open his mouth before Thackeray proved Bulldog correct, that he’d been watching. “I didn’t see the guy’s dog, all right?”

  “Good to know, but I didn’t come here about that,” Dez said. “I’ve got something I wanted to discuss with you that’s a little more important than lost dogs. You have a minute?”

  “I was just down at the station because I was told someone wanted to talk to me about the investigation. I sat there with my thumb up my ass for twenty minutes before someone finally came and told me no one had time to talk to me, and to call some jerk named Raynor later. If you’re here to tell me to go back, you can forget it. I’m done with cops for today.”

  “I didn’t come here to tell you to go back. And I’m not here to speak to you about the investigation into your mom’s death. I wanted to ask about your dad, actually.”

  Thackeray’s eyes snapped onto Dez’s before narrowing perceptibly. “What about him?”

  Dez, still conscious of allowing Sully the needed escape, motioned to two chairs on the veranda. “Mind if we sit?”

  Thackeray looked no less suspicious, but agreed to the conversation anyway, and Dez guessed the fact the other man was shutting the door behind himself and lowering into one of the chairs had more to do with his own curiosity than a particular desire to cooperate.

  Dez took the remaining chair. It resembled something he’d seen in his grandparents’ old house, and he sat gingerly lest the object’s obvious age rendered it too fragile for his solid weight.

  “Your father is Harry Schuster, right?”

  “What’s this about?”

  “I can’t get into details just yet.”

  Thackeray crossed his arms. “Then neither can I.”

  Dez considered how best to move forward, decided some quid pro quo was likely necessary. “His name came up in an investigation recently. There’s no file started at this point. I’m just making some inquiries. Someone reported he attacked them.”

  “That’s impossible.”

  “Because he’s at Lockwood?”

  Thackeray had yet to uncross his arms. “Because he’s physically incapable of doing anything other than drooling.”

  “The complainant said Harry seemed plenty capable of getting around. Does he have some sort of physical disability?”

  “Sure, if a severe stroke counts. He had one years back, never recovered. He sits in a wheelchair all day and stares at the wall. We used to put the TV on for him, mostly to make ourselves feel better. I doubt he had any clue what was on it. Once he got to be too much, Lockwood agreed to take him. They give him a nice window to look out. Not that it means much.”

  “You’re sure he’s not aware of anything?”

  “My mom used to think he was more aware than we realized, that he was just trapped inside himself somewhere, but I think she just said that to keep herself sane. There was no sense both of them ending up in the loony bin.”

  “How long ago did he have the stroke?”

  “Must be close to fifteen years now. I was a teenager.”

  “How old was he?”

  “I can’t remember, exactly. I’m not good with dates. But he would have been a little over forty, I think.”

  “Seems young for a stroke.”

  “Not for him,” Thackeray said. “The way his brain worked—or didn’t work, depending how you view things—I’m surprised he didn’t have one sooner.”

  “What do you mean?”

  Dez was reaching, he knew that. And apparently so did Thackeray.

  “Look, I don’t get what this has to do with whatever you’re investigating. I told you he’s incapable of attacking anyone. If you don’t believe me, ask Dr. Gerhardt at Lockwood. I don’t think he ever had good news for us about Dad’s condition.”

  Dez gave it a moment, trying to figure out a next move. There was no good way to go about it, come right down to it, no way to find out what he needed without giving away more than he was comfortable revealing.

  In the end, Sully solved it for him—although he created a whole new problem in the process.

  Thackeray’s attention was caught by the nearby sound of a vehicle door shutting, causing him to crane his neck toward the front of the house where he’d parked his car. Whatever he saw had him up and out of his chair with a shouted, “Hey!”

  Dez followed, assuming someone was making off with the man’s vehicle. His first thought was that he’d see Bulldog’s stout form behind the wheel.

  Who he saw instead was Sully.

  Thackeray’s eyes shifted wildly between Dez and his vehicle, now leaving its spot on the street and accelerating away. “He’s stealing my car!”

  The assessment was unnecessary and yet Dez realized he’d needed the verbal nudge to move past the shock at seeing his brother committing auto theft. It wasn’t something Sully would do.

  It really wasn’t something Sully would do.

  Dez ran for the cruiser and was behind the wheel and starting the vehicle before he realized Thackeray had gotten in beside him. There was no time to argue the fact, to order or wrestle the guy out of the car, and so Dez simply took off after Thackeray’s beater.

  The reason for the inexplicable theft was becoming increasingly and terrifyingly obvious to Dez, but he asked the question anyway.

  “Hey, Thackeray? Did that used to be your dad’s car, by chance?”

  “Yeah, why?”

  The affirmation, while expected on some level, nonetheless left Dez sitting in a cold chill. The last time Harry had possessed Sully, it had nearly killed him.

  What it meant this time remained to be seen.

  17

  It had been years since Harold Schuster had last been behind the wheel, and it showed.

  Thackeray’s inherited car, a 1993 Toyota, swerved several times, narrowly missed two parked cars and blew through a stop sign before it started to show signs of corrected driving.

  Dez wavered back and forth between thoughts of flipping on his lights and siren and simply following silently, wanting to attract as little attention to his brother—and to himself—as possible. Proper procedure was to call this in as a vehicle theft in progress, but that would mean alerting his colleagues to the fact his brother was behind the wheel of the car in question. Setting aside the fact no one besides Dez was likely to buy into the fact his brother was possessed by the wandering spirit of a man in a semi-comatose state, Sully was also a suspect in a serious crime. This was just the sort of thing Raynor would be looking for, an excuse to arrest and charge Sully properly, to hold him in custody so he could try to wrest a confession out of him on Betty’s murder.

  And it didn’t help the optics of the situation, Sully breaking into the house of his dead boss and taking off in her son’s car.

  Dez figured he’d better try to get a handle on just how bad the damage was. “Do you know who’s behind the wheel up there?”

  Thackeray’s eyes, when Dez looked to his right, were glued to the back of his Toyota. “Damn right I do. I saw him getting in. It’s that guy from the Black Fox. The one who worked with my mom, Sullivan something or other. He was at my place two days ago. Now I’m wondering what he’s got to do with all of this. Makes me think he was just there to scope it out.”

  Damn.

  “Shouldn’t you be trying to pull him over?” Thackeray asked. “You don’t even have your lights and siren on.”

  “I’m trying not to spook him.” It was a lousy attempt at an explanation and Dez knew it.

  Unfortunately so did Thackeray. “That’s bullshit. What the hell is going on here?”

  Dez used a few silent seconds to consider his options and discovered he had none. None but the truth. “Listen, man, there
’s something I think I’m going to have to tell you. Sully’s actually my brother and he’s not really himself right now. This is going to sound weird but I think he’s possessed.”

  Thackeray’s response was about what Dez expected, the words proving enough to draw the man’s eyes from his stolen car to zero in on the police officer beside him. “What the hell is this?”

  “I know it sounds crazy.”

  “Crazy doesn’t even begin to cover it.”

  That was probably true, and so Dez did what he could to fill in the rest, providing Thackeray with a brief history of what had happened and what they’d learned since the initial break-in and Betty’s subsequent shooting.

  By the end of it, Dez wasn’t sure he was any further ahead in convincing the man, who sat firmly in silence as Dez continued to trail the Toyota at a distance.

  Dez had never been what anyone would consider patient, and he quickly found his brain squirming with the lack of response. “You get all that?”

  Another couple of seconds passed before Thackeray answered. “So you’re trying to tell me my father’s ghost or spirit or whatever is leaving his body and possessing your brother?”

  “Yeah. Look, I wouldn’t buy it either if I hadn’t seen it with my own eyes.”

  “Maybe your brother’s just crackers or something. Ever occur to you he’s got some sort of dissociative disorder, one of those split personality things?”

  “That wouldn’t explain his seeing your father all those times.”

  “What you’re telling me doesn’t explain it either,” Thackeray said. “He’s still alive, so how can he be a ghost?”

  “We’re working on that. We talked to someone who wondered whether it might be because he was psychic though, and someone else told me Harry used to be able to see ghosts and predict the future. So I’m wondering whether that theory might hold up. I mean, what if he is like your mom said, completely aware and just trapped inside himself? Maybe he’s figured out a way to leave his body.”

  “And possess random people?”

  “Sully’s not random,” Dez said. “He’s like your dad. He’s got a gift.”

  “More like a curse.” The words had been muttered, but loudly enough Dez had no trouble making them out.

  “It’s not easy for Sully, either,” Dez said. “It took him years to get a grip on it, and he’s still not all the way there. I mean, this wouldn’t be happening now if he had.”

  Thackeray slumped in his seat, looking like a man who wanted to be anywhere else. “It probably would. They used to call him Harbinger Harry. He’d go into these trances like some bargain-bin Nostradamus and walk around the neighbourhood at all hours, muttering predictions. Spooked the hell out of people and made life at school a real bitch for me. He was exhausted all the time, self-medicated with sleeping pills and other garbage. But nothing helped. Mom used to say his gift, or whatever it was, burned through him. Doctors said all the pills caused the stroke. Mom always believed it was more than that, that it had something to do with all the crap he saw.”

  Dez thought back to what Lowell had said about Sully, to that unsettling conversation about having him committed. “So no one ever talked about having your dad put in Lockwood? I mean, before the stroke?”

  “Oh, lots of people talked about it. People at school, people in the park, people in the stores, people on the street. Everyone had an opinion on the matter and everyone felt the need to share. With me at least. My mom would have told them to take a flying fuck.”

  The accuracy of the comment regarding Betty’s likely response drew an unexpected chuckle from Dez. “Yeah, I could see that. Betty obviously wasn’t having it.”

  “She figured she could help him handle it. Turned out she was wrong. In the end, it took my father somehow managing to slash his wrists. It was Dr. Gerhardt and the guy supplying my father’s meds who convinced my mom he should go into Lockwood.”

  Dez had already paid a visit to Gerhardt and was in no rush to see him again anytime soon. “Who was supplying the drugs?”

  It took what felt like a long time for Thackeray to supply the name and, when he did, it had the sound of a man spitting out spoiled meat. “Lowell Braddock.”

  This time, it was Dez who fell into silence, shock at the revelation robbing him of thought and any immediate verbal response.

  Thackeray, prison having fast-tracked his education in the subtle art of people-reading, was on it before Dez could recover. “You know him.”

  Dez thought about it, decided lying was off the table, too many truths having already been shared between cop and ex-con. “He’s my uncle.”

  “Son of a bitch.” And, just like that, the shaky trust Dez had built with Thackeray was gone, the man’s voice resuming the edge it had possessed in those first moments on the veranda. “What the hell do the two of you want from me? What are you after here, huh?”

  “We’re trying to figure out what happened to your mom. The sergeant in charge of the investigation is wrongly assuming Sully had something to do with it, and he’s going full bore trying to prove it.”

  “And he’s wrong,” Thackeray said. “Your brother didn’t do it.”

  It was neither a question nor an observation of Dez’s belief. It was a statement.

  “You know,” Dez said. “How?”

  “I’ve met killers. I was on remand with a couple, spent time in prison with others. Sullivan’s no killer.” Thackeray paused a moment, as if thinking through what he wanted to say next. “Look, I know what it is to be wrongly accused. I didn’t do what they accused me of either. You cops do that, get something in your heads and twist everything you find to fit it.”

  Conditioning over a frequent accusation had Dez meeting it with his usual defence. “No, we don’t.” Then, he considered Raynor. “Most of the time, anyway.”

  Up ahead, the Toyota navigated a turn which would lead to the freeway and, from there, toward New Town, KR’s grandly designed and relatively new downtown core. Dez couldn’t imagine the Harry Schuster he’d heard described spending much, if any, time in New Town. Someone like him would have been the sore thumb on an otherwise lily-white and well-manicured hand.

  “Why would he be heading toward New Town?” Dez asked.

  “How should I know? He’s your brother.”

  “Right now, I think he’s your father. Do you have any idea what he might want, what he might be after?”

  “I never really knew my dad. He was already starting to lose it by the time I was old enough to really get to know him. We didn’t exactly sit around and have long heart-to-hearts.”

  “And you don’t visit him now?”

  “What for? He wouldn’t be aware of me being there, so why bother?”

  “You’re sure about that?”

  “Not really your business, is it?” Thackeray said. “Mind your own.”

  Dez took a quick glance at the man beside him, eyes staring straight ahead at the back of the car. “You do appreciate, right now at least, your business and mine are pretty much intertwined.”

  Despite the truth of the comment, it wasn’t enough to pull answers from Thackeray. And so the two of them remained quiet until they followed the Toyota into the northern edge of New Town, joining the slow sweep of traffic fighting to make headway at the start of end-of-day rush hour. New Town wasn’t Dez’s patch, but he’d spent enough time here to expect what they were getting, which was an increase in traffic snarls the further they crawled into the area’s core. At this pace, it was just possible Dez could jump out, run to the Toyota, and drag his brother out. But every time he considered doing so, traffic opened up and sent them further forward.

  Not until they approached a major intersection, one that sat at the very centre of New Town, connecting two major arteries, did the situation take a turn for the absolute worst.

  Dez knew Sully or Harry, or whoever he was, had to know he was being followed by a police vehicle, and yet he’d avoided any real dangerous driving, limiting traffic infring
ements to a disinclination to signal. But now, he was up there blowing the start of a red light.

  The two cars in front of Dez stopped as required and he flipped on his lights and blared his siren for a couple seconds to try to create the opening he needed to continue the semi-pursuit.

  But the driver at the front of the line failed to notice immediately—long enough that New Town rush-hour drivers in the crossing lanes had already moved forward where they were now stuck in the middle of a crowded intersection, waiting on a light to change somewhere up ahead. That left Dez stuck, watching helplessly as the Toyota maneuvered into a rare gap in traffic, managed a left-hand turn, and disappeared from sight.

  Dez slammed a hand against the steering wheel, the movement and the accompanying curse causing Thackeray, just visible in Dez’s peripheral vision, to jump.

  “What now?” Thackeray asked. “He’s still got my car.”

  The answer hit Dez out of nowhere, had him whipping out of the traffic lane into a ten-minute loading zone outside one of the high-rise office towers. Pulling the keys, he issued a quick direction to Thackeray. “Wait here. I think I know where he’s headed.”

  “Screw that. If my parole officer sees me sitting in a cop car, she’ll want my ass in her office in five minutes.”

  “Suit yourself,” Dez said. “But I can’t wait for you. I think he’s heading to my uncle’s office.”

  For whatever reason, the theory proved sufficient to cause Thackeray to rethink any intention of joining in a foot pursuit, allowing Dez to sprint unhindered through the solid stretch of stalled home-goers as he crossed six lanes of traffic on each of the two major streets.

  The high-rise housing LOBRA Pharmaceuticals’s head office was visible, one of several towers glinting in the late afternoon sun. By the time he got close enough to see the main entrance, Dez had worked up a sweat.

  While he ran, it had occurred to him there was another reason Harry had targeted Sully. Besides being more open to possession than a disciplined psychic or a non-gifted person, Sully was Lowell’s foster nephew. If Harry wanted at Lowell, Sully could be the in he needed for easy access.