by H. P. Bayne
“Thanks, Terrence. I appreciate it. I really do. But I think I’ve got to deal with this one on my own.”
“Let me give you one more piece of advice, then, all right? Don’t turn your back on that man. He’s missing something that makes a man human. He’s damn good at hiding it, but it’s there all the same. Whatever you do, don’t get yourself into a situation where he has the upper hand.”
Sully left Terrence with a warm handshake and assurances he’d do what he could to play this safe. He didn’t make any promises, though, no way he could assure Terrence he’d ever find a situation where he had the upper hand.
This was Lowell Braddock, after all. There wasn’t a scenario in existence between the two of them where Lowell wouldn’t insist on coming out on top.
A couple of hours before Forbes Raynor’s imposed deadline, Sully was on the move again.
Sully needed to see someone else first, and another uncomfortable conversation needed to be had.
Thackeray Schuster was where he often seemed to be, sitting in one of the rickety chairs on the side porch, lit cigarette held at the corner of his mouth. His eyebrows lifted as he saw Sully approaching, and his cigarette bobbed in place as he asked the inevitable question.
“What are you doing back here?”
Sully closed the remainder of the distance, and slid into Betty’s old chair. “We need to talk about Lowell Braddock.”
Thackeray turned from Sully, eyes casting over the fence that separated his property from the neighbour’s. It was in dire need of a paint job and a few new boards, but Sully guessed Thackeray wouldn’t be in a hurry to do it. Thackeray had more important concerns and, if Sully guessed at this correctly, was haunted by his own sort of ghosts. Sully knew better than most, ghosts didn’t often let you rest, let alone give you the time or inclination for home maintenance.
Thackeray had yet to respond, and Sully expected he didn’t intend to.
“I know this isn’t an easy topic for either of us, but it’s necessary. That thumb drive, there was something on it concerning Lowell. I didn’t bring it up earlier, because I don’t want to involve Dez. If this is what I think it is, it’s going to end with my brother having to pick sides, and I want to delay that as long as I can. Right now, it’s just you and me.”
He paused, waited. Again, there was no response.
“I know it was about Lowell, all right?” Sully said. “My dad found the drive in my pocket, and it looks like he viewed the contents. My mom doesn’t know what was on it. She didn’t see, but she said whatever it was, Dad was furious and took off to confront Lowell. That’s the last time we saw him alive. Thackeray, I think Lowell did something to my dad to keep him from revealing what was on that drive. He told us Dad had a heart attack and that he gave him a shot of epinephrine. If I was to guess, I’d say he gave him enough to stop his heart. He talked about Dad hitting his head on the way down. I think it’s more likely Lowell hit him and knocked him out. After that, it would have been easy to inject him. I don’t know if there’s any way to know the exact cause of a heart attack. And even if they tested and found a fatal dose of epinephrine caused it, Lowell would just argue he panicked and gave Dad too much. And it would be believable because why would he intend to kill his own brother, right?”
Sully took a breath, searching for calm as those images played in his mind; the likely reality of what had happened to his dad created a pain in his own heart. He battled emotion, sucked it back as he refocused on this conversation.
This non-conversation.
Thackeray allowed the silence to stretch, made no effort to fill it.
“Thackeray, I need you to talk to me. It may be nothing will ever come of this, but I need to know, okay? I need to know. He set you up for a reason, and I think it was about that drive.”
“You don’t understand.”
“What don’t I understand?”
“People like him, they get away with things. They find ways. He killed your dad, and I think he also killed my mom. He got my dad committed, he got me sent to prison. He’s probably involved somehow in setting you up for Mom’s shooting. He’s capable of anything. Don’t you get it? Pursuing this, it’s not going to get you anywhere but dead.”
“So why is he doing all this? I mean, for starters, why set you up?”
“To discredit me, no doubt. Who’s going to buy anything a convicted pervert has to say? Thing is, he had access to the house, so he easily could have planted everything against me. He owns the place.”
“But your parents had it before they met Lowell, didn’t they?”
“Yeah, but when Dad started losing his marbles, and then with the stroke, he couldn’t work anymore. Mom eventually had to remortgage, and she couldn’t afford it on her own. Lowell took over the mortgage, agreed to rent it back to Mom at a decent rate. So, yeah, he figured he could come and go as he pleased around here. He came over quite a bit to talk to Mom, liked to have a hand in all his businesses, he said. But I think it was about more than that. I think he wanted to make sure he was still safe, that I would keep my mouth shut.”
“About what?”
Thackeray fell back into silence, leaving Sully to fill in the blanks.
“Your father saw something, didn’t he? Something Lowell did. And Lowell figured out a way to silence your father. Fact is, no one’s going to listen to the word of a crazy man, are they? No one but you.”
“Dad wouldn’t stop talking about it. ‘River boy, river boy.’ He’d repeat it over and over until I sometimes wanted to just ship him off to Lockwood myself, just so I wouldn’t have to listen to him anymore. But once in a while, he’d have these weird lucid moments, where the ‘crazy’ would go away, and you’d be able to have a proper conversation with him. I was at home with him by myself this one day, and he told me about a vision he’d had—not of the future, but something from the past. He said he’d seen Lowell killing a kid.”
Sully had first seen the ghost of Aiden Braddock years ago, first standing behind Flynn in a police interview room, then next to the river running behind the family’s home. He’d known then, even without a full understanding of his gift, something terrible had happened to the boy.
He rarely saw Aiden, but the fact he saw him at all meant his death was something more than a simple accident, more than a slip from the shore and the pull of a current. There was a human’s murderous hand in it somewhere, and Sully had always felt his built-in finger of suspicion turning on his foster uncle.
But Lowell was a Braddock and, come right down to it, Sully was not. And while Sully had quickly learned to trust his family with his deepest secrets, there were truths he never dared speak for fear of running up against a wall that would separate him from the people who meant the most to him in the world.
Hearing those words spoken out loud by someone else, this darkest suspicion he’d kept to himself for years, set Sully’s head spinning, sent blood rushing from his brain as quickly as the current that had carried Aiden’s body from his home.
Sully’s own voice sounded tinny, spoken from behind the thick pounding in his ears. “What else did your dad say?”
“He didn’t know the kid’s name, but he said the boy had red hair and freckles, was around five years old. He said Lowell drowned him in a river.”
“Did … did you confront Lowell with it?”
“Are you kidding? No way. I was just a kid myself. But I did tell Mom. Back then, she wasn’t putting much stock in the things Dad said, figured he was just off his nut. I was there when Mom told Lowell, though. She used to talk to him about Dad, about how she didn’t know what to do about him. She always told him about the crazy stuff Dad said, and one day she brought up the ‘river boy’ thing. Only Lowell didn’t laugh it off. He got really pale and quiet, and then he started talking about how we should put Dad into Lockwood. Said he was worried Dad might hurt me.
“He’d started his pharmaceutical company by then, and he had these pills he prescribed for Dad. Supposed to hel
p settle his brain and help him rest, he said. He warned us stroke was a rare side effect. Dad’s happened almost right away—so fast I’ve always wondered whether it was Lowell’s intention in the first place. Even then, Mom insisted on keeping Dad at home. It took Dad a few years before he could talk again, and it turned out he was still having those visions. That’s when Lowell started coming around again. He gave Mom a new drug and next thing we knew, Dad was slitting his wrists one night in the bathroom. After that, Mom finally gave in and committed him to Lockwood.”
“So if your dad was out of the picture, why set you up? What was the risk to Lowell if you and your mom didn’t believe Harry?”
Thackeray finally met Sully’s eye. “I said Mom didn’t believe him, I never said I didn’t. I was almost done high school when Dad was committed, old enough to know how to research. I went to the library and found a newspaper story about a search for a five-year-old kid named Aiden Braddock who was found dead by the river. Lowell never talked about his personal life. It was all business with him, or my family’s personal business. Never his. So he hadn’t told us anything about losing his nephew.
“I showed Mom the articles I found, and I reminded her what Dad had said about the drowned kid. Mom brushed it off, said Dad could have seen it in the paper, too, and turned it into something else in his brain. I became fixated on it, though. It took years of stewing about it but, eventually, I decided to confront Lowell with it, and with what I believed he did to my dad. I arranged a meeting with him, and I recorded the conversation on a digital recorder. That’s what was on the thumb drive.”
“Did he admit to anything?”
“Of course not. But I thought I had something, even if it was just the way he initially froze and stuttered when I first brought up Aiden. I don’t think I ever had any real idea what I was going to do with the recording, but I knew I wanted something to show Mom, to prove to her why she shouldn’t trust Lowell. The week after that conversation, the cops showed up with a search warrant and turned up a pile of child porn in my room. Mom had held onto the thumb drive I’d made, kept it at the office, so it didn’t end up getting taken along with everything else of mine. My mother didn’t believe I’d been set up at first. She still swallowed the crap Lowell was feeding her, that I was disturbed like my father. We’d never been close. We fought a lot in my teen years, me accusing her of giving a bigger damn about dad than me.
“Anyway, Mom, it turned out, had some doubts after all, so she went to Lowell about what I’d told her about Dad’s vision. He said I had obviously developed my father’s mental illness and, if it got worse, he’d see to it I was committed to Lockwood with Dad. Without the income I’d been bringing in to help pay the rent, we’d lose our home pretty quick. Lowell offered to write off my share of the rent until I was released from prison, as long as Mom didn’t go around spreading what he called false rumours about him.
“While I was locked up, there were three attempts on my life. Twice, I managed to alert the guards before the guys could stick a knife in. The third, I almost died. If money wasn’t enough to shut my mom and me up, those incidents were. That’s where Lowell really screwed up with Mom, I think. Those attempts ended up being what it took to convince Mom what I was saying was true.”
“Did anyone in jail say they were acting on Lowell’s behalf?”
“No, but they didn’t have to. I knew. I was on a range with sex offenders. Nothing like that should have been happening. Skinners don’t go after other skinners. There was something else behind it, and I can’t think of a single other reason why I would have had a target on my back besides what I knew about Lowell.”
“When did Lowell find out about the thumb drive?”
“Just recently, a few days before the break-in and Mom’s murder. There’d been people watching the house, following me. Then Mom saw the posters about me, with our address. We both figured Lowell was behind all of it somehow, intimidating me into keeping quiet by lording some sort of threat over my head. The posters would have been the perfect cover, if he decided to try to kill me again. The police would have just put it down to some vigilante thing.”
Sully hadn’t seen her, focused as he was on Thackeray, although he guessed Betty had been here for much of the conversation. Now she moved into Sully’s view, standing at her son’s shoulder and placing a hand over it as she nodded at Thackeray’s read of the situation.
“Your mom’s here,” Sully said. Then, to Betty, “Thackeray’s right, isn’t he? You confronted Lowell, told him there was a thumb drive with the recording of that conversation.”
Betty nodded.
“Were you hoping to use it as leverage, to get Lowell to stop having Thackeray followed and threatened?”
Another nod.
The progression was obvious from there. Lowell had approached the manager of the nearby army surplus—the same guy he’d had plastering up posters and stalking Thackeray—and asked Terrence to find the thumb drive. It was likely he’d made his own efforts at the Schuster house first, using the key he’d have as the house’s official owner. When both that and Terrence’s search proved fruitless, Lowell had taken the last, bloody step, disguising himself and relying on the bar’s non-operational surveillance cameras to kill Betty, silencing the one person he’d never be able to discredit. Betty wasn’t perfect, never had been, but she had attained a level of respect for telling it like it was; people trusted her. If she talked, they would listen. And given the break-in, and the obvious reason for it, Betty likely would have been more inclined than ever to take the device to the one place Lowell couldn’t get to it: the police.
Lowell had had to act quickly. With no time to hire someone, and no likelihood he would have entrusted a stranger with that level of dirty work, Lowell had shot Betty himself.
And when Harry somehow managed to slip the drive into Sully’s pocket, it started a chain of events leading to Flynn’s confrontation with his brother—and the murder of a man by one of the few people in his life he should have been able to trust completely.
Sully was not prone to anger, his emotions rarely shifting too far one way or the other. And so he barely recognized what he was feeling now, this sensation of bubbling rage turning his insides into a seething volcano nearing eruption. All thoughts pulled toward a confrontation with the uncle he now despised beyond anything else.
Flynn Braddock—the man who’d raised him, who’d allowed and even asked him to call him “Dad,” who’d given him the love of a family Sully had once only dreamed of—had died because of his need as a father to settle a score over a wrong done to his child.
Now Flynn was dead, and Sully was the one with a score to settle.
“Where are you going?”
Sully didn’t respond to Thackeray’s question, nor did he stop when Betty positioned herself in his path, merely sidestepping her as he left the veranda.
He couldn’t avoid her as she appeared in front of the gate separating yard from sidewalk, forcing Sully to a halt. She stood, glare fixed up on his face, arms crossed as she silently challenged him to disobey her obvious order to leave well enough alone.
“I can’t, Betty,” he said. “He’s my dad.”
His voice broke on the word, preventing any further explanation of his need to do this, to go toe-to-toe with the man who had killed Flynn, who had singlehandedly destroyed two families. Sully channelled his grief back into what he intended to be a more productive anger, something at the end of the road besides endless years without his dad. If he could deal with Lowell, it might be he could prevent his hurting anyone else.
Only one thing was left to say to Betty, the same words he’d repeated numerous times since he’d first looked down on her bloody, lead-riddled body lying on the bar floor.
“I’m sorry.”
He ducked around her, hopping the fence and taking off in a run toward the nearest bus stop.
26
Sully had been about to board a bus for the New Town core when his plan to look fo
r Lowell at his penthouse was derailed.
He considered it a sign that the text message showing on his cellphone screen was from Lowell himself: “Come to the bar. Need to discuss business.”
Business definitely was far from all they needed to discuss, and Sully held onto his fury, allowing it to ferment while he jogged to the next stop for the bus ride that would take him to the Black Fox. Ordinarily, he might have run the entire distance, but he wanted to ensure he wasn’t short of breath or exhausted—or in any other way ill-prepared for the anticipated verbal or physical battle—when he met Lowell.
En route, he turned off his cellphone, not wanting any distractions—or, more specifically, not wanting any from Dez. If he saw his brother’s name and number pop up on his screen, there was a real risk it would throw him off this unfamiliar and dark path.
Of course, Dez wasn’t the only one who’d be looking to influence him in that department. Sully was keenly aware of a presence next to him as he sat in the next-to-last seat on the bus, and he forced himself not to look. Flynn Braddock had always been a calming influence when Sully was anxious or Dez in a temper. The last thing Sully wanted now was calm.
There was no ignoring the hand that flashed in front of his face and settled on his chest, over his heart. Flynn had never been an easy man to ignore in life, and he was proving much the same in death.
Sully kept eyes facing front, his voice a whisper. “Please, Dad, don’t. I need to do this. For you. For Aiden. For Betty. I need it for me. Please, don’t try to stop me.”
The stop nearest the Black Fox was right ahead, and Sully rang the bell, leaving Flynn behind as he went to stand at the rear door. Naturally, he found Flynn there, too, directly in front of him when the bus rolled to a stop and the doors opened, providing a barrier Sully would ordinarily be loath to break.