by John A. Daly
Maybe it was the crispness of the air or the calmness that came with the solitude surrounding him, but he managed to regain his temperament and clear his head. His thoughts went back to Jessica.
He couldn’t bring himself to understand quite why he had taken such an interest in her. She was largely a stranger—someone who hadn’t given him any reason to care about her. Yet, the image of tears streaming down her face wouldn’t leave his mind. He was determined to get a copy of that newspaper and figure out what had triggered the episode. And once Sean Coleman was determined to do something, he wasn’t going to sleep until he got it done.
When he was finished changing the flat, he slammed the trunk shut and climbed back inside his car. The engine had been running the entire time, so the cab was almost sweltering from the forced air of the heater. He glanced at the small, plastic digital clock that he’d stuck to his dashboard years ago. It was nearly ten-thirty.
He wondered if someone in particular would still be awake.
Chapter 4
It was late—too late to just walk up to the front of the small house and ring the doorbell. Sean slid around to the back, ducking under the leafless, drooping branches of aspens. He was careful to make as little noise as possible, even as the crunching of hardening snow accompanied every step.
As he approached the back porch, he detected a sound that resembled that of a dull, repetitive moan funneling out from behind the house’s walls. He feared the person he had come to see was already fast asleep, snoring.
He crept across the wooden porch, nearly losing his breath when a loud creak halted him in his tracks. There was no audible reaction from inside, so he continued on until he reached the back corner of the house. There, a two-pane window with its curtains open was lit up from pulsating flashes of a television screen inside. Sean slid his body in under the windowsill and then steadily lifted his head up like a submarine periscope.
A subtle grin formed across his face when he spotted the image of a portly thirteen-year-old boy with short brown hair sitting at the edge of his bed. He was watching an old episode of Magnum, P.I. The boy was dressed in snug pajamas and his body was hunched forward as he sat Indian-style. He appeared to have a clipboard in one hand and a pen or pencil in the other.
Sean carefully tapped the back of his knuckles on the outside of the frosty window. “Toby!” he said as loudly as a whisper would allow him.
There was no reaction from the child. The boy seemed totally captivated by an action scene on TV featuring actor Tom Selleck clad in a bright Aloha shirt and inexplicably short shorts running across a sprawling green yard with a pair of black dogs chasing after him.
“Toby!” Sean spoke in a slightly louder, more forceful tone. He heard the moaning noise again. It was coming from the other side of the house. This time it was louder. He feared that he was beginning to stir Toby’s mother, who would not at all view Sean as a welcome guest—not just at night, but any time.
Joan Parker was a single mother, doing her best to raise her son on her own, and if there was any negative influence that she didn’t want anywhere near her boy, it was Sean Coleman. To her, Sean embodied everything she didn’t want her son to one day grow to be. She knew Sean the same way much of town knew him, as a crass drunk who viewed life through a lens of bitterness. As far as she was concerned, he could bring nothing but harm to the development of her impressionable son.
Sean dropped to a knee in the snow and slid his back up against the side of the house, staying out of sight in case Joan happened to peer out a window. He waited for the noise to dissipate before climbing back to his feet and lifting his head up to Toby’s window to get the boy’s attention again.
The piercing brightness of a flashlight suddenly blinded Sean from just inside the window. Toby Parker let out a terrifying, high-pitched scream.
Sean’s eyes bulged and he stood straight up, frantically putting his finger to his mouth to plead for the boy’s silence.
“Oh! Hi, Sean!” spoke Toby through the glass in a demeanor so calm and contrary to the outlandish display Sean had just witnessed that Sean half-believed it was imagined.
“Toby!” Sean heard the boy’s mother cry out in concern from the other room. “Are you okay?”
“Yeah, Mom!” the boy loudly replied, holding back laughter as he put his hand to his mouth. “I’m sorry about that. I just got scared by something on the television.”
Sean remained hunched forward, his eyes shifting back and forth across the house, nervously bobbing up and down while trying to formulate what his next move should be.
“You’re just watching Magnum, right?” she loudly asked.
Toby draped his head back over his shoulder. “That’s right, Mom! You know how scary Doberman pinschers can be! They were bred to turn ferocious and aggressive on command, after all!”
Toby turned back to Sean with wide eyes. With a nod of his head, he silently mouthed, “Did you know that?”
Sean raised his shoulders and threw his hands in the air in bewilderment.
“Okay, well, just turn it off when it’s over, okay?” Joan shouted from inside the house.
“Will do, Mamacita!”
Sean twisted his wrist in a rolling motion, and Toby figured out he was being directed to open the window. Once the boy had unlatched it, Sean helped him push the screenless pane upwards until the two stood face to face.
“Sean, why were you doing that thing with your hand?” the boy asked in a whisper. “My window slides up and down. You can’t crank my window open.”
Sean shook his head dismissively. “Whatever. I have a favor to ask.”
Toby’s eyes lit up with excitement. “I bet I know what it is!”
“I kind of doubt it,” Sean quickly replied at a restrained volume.
“You need money, don’t you?” Toby asked with an all-knowing smirk. “I have seventy-eight dollars I can give you. I saved it up from my allowance and Christmas money. I was going to use it to buy a Special Edition Space Station Erector set. You can build cranes, ships, and even robots, Sean! Robots!”
“Shh,” hissed Sean, holding his finger up to his mouth again.
“Sorry,” Toby said before continuing. “I’m not talking about a robot like R2-D2 or C-3PO. The picture on the box looks more like a cartoon robot like that one from the Jetsons named Rosie. Do you remember that show? Meet George Jetson! But I’d rather give the money to you, since we’re buddies and buddies help each other out!”
Sean’s face contorted in puzzlement. He was used to the boy’s longwinded dialogue and tendency to shift from topic to topic in a single breath. He’d been told that it was a symptom of Asperger syndrome, a mild form of the mental disorder, autism, that Toby lived with. The premise of the oration, however, confused Sean.
“I don’t want your money,” he said. “Why would you even think that?”
“Well, I read in the paper that you’ve been donating your sperm. I kept asking Mom why you would do that, and she wouldn’t tell me at first. Instead, she just kept telling me to stop saying that word.”
Sean’s hand clenched his forehead as Toby continued.
“After a bunch of times of asking her
, she finally told me that there are people who pay a lot of money for sperm, so I used deductive reasoning,” he said importantly, “to determine that you were doing it to make some extra money. Personally, I think it’s neat that there will be a bunch of little Sean Colemans running around in a couple of years. Do you think you’ll ever get to play with them?”
Sean glared back in scorn. He knew the boy was not at fault for the words that came out of his mouth. He was only responding to what he had read in the paper. But hearing the words leave his mouth angered Sean nonetheless.
To Toby, nothing of what he read about Sean Coleman ever changed the way he viewed the gruff security guard. In Toby’s eyes, Sean could do no wrong. The boy was an unconditionally loyal cohort. He idolized Sean, much to the dismay of his mother. He did so for reasons Sean never fully understood. It didn’t seem to matter how rude or dismissive he was to the boy at times. Toby was there for him, and Sean had come to discreetly value that relationship, living in a town in which he had few friends.
“Can you still get on the Interweb from the computer in your room?”
Toby laughed. “It’s the Internet, silly. Sure I can. Did you want me to help you sell some things on eBay?”
“Toby, this has nothing to do with money, okay? I just need you to look up something for me.”
Toby opened up his mouth to say something, but Sean quickly placed his hand over his lips, concerned the boy’s mother would hear her son’s voice that seemed to be rising in volume with each utterance.
“Just listen,” Sean whispered. “Can you bring up the Denver Post’s home page, or web page, or whatever it’s called? There’s an article on it that I need to read.”
With wide, attentive eyes, Toby nodded his head. Sean removed his hand from the boy’s mouth. Toby hustled over to a white wooden desk at the corner of his room.
Upon the desk were a thick computer monitor and a large keyboard. Toby pressed a button on the keyboard, which replaced an animation of flying toasters on the monitor with a bright, white screen. His hand latched onto the computer mouse and he began clicking and weaving from window to window until the digital sound of a phone dialing emitted from somewhere under the desk. It was followed with a low, screeching noise, and then what sounded like radio static.
Toby turned his head to Sean during the clamor and smiled, waving his hand in acknowledgment. Once the noises ended, Toby turned his attention back to his monitor and began typing on his keyboard. A page slowly loaded, and though Sean was a few yards away, he could make out the Denver Post’s newspaper logo at the very top of the screen.
Sean cupped his hand to the side of his mouth and whispered to the boy to look for a picture. He described the photograph that he had seen on Jessica’s monitor back at the plasma bank. Toby nodded his head and clicked from screen to screen, patiently waiting for each page to leisurely load—the hindrance of a slow connection.
Sean blew warm breath into his hands as the lowering temperature began to sink under his skin. His hair was now white from a thin layer of snow that had settled across it, and he noticed that snow was also entering the boy’s room through his open window. Toby’s shoulders rose and his arms pressed tightly to his body to ward off the cold as he continued to work the computer.
Several minutes went by with Sean’s strained glare scrutinizing images on the screen that clearly weren’t the one for which he was looking. When it came, slowly loading from the top of the photograph to the bottom, he noticed the unique shade of the man’s hair first, then his smile, and then the girl beside him.
“Toby!” he whispered. “That’s it! What does the article say?”
Toby nodded and his lips began working silently as his gaze flashed along the screen. The brightness from the monitor lit up his as if he were holding a flashlight under his chin.
“It’s about a man who’s missing!” he said excitedly at an uncomfortable volume. His long eyelashes blinked erratically.
“What’s his name?” Sean asked, softening his voice to urge Toby to do the same.
Toby’s head spun back and forth from the computer to Sean.
“His name is Andrew Carson!” the boy answered emphatically, again too loud.
Sean’s face twisted in frustration. He raised his finger to his mouth and clenched his teeth. It became apparent to him that there was virtually no chance of the boy relaying all details of the article to him without his mother hearing the commotion and being alerted to Sean’s presence. He also didn’t trust the boy to get the content of the article right.
“Can you move that thing over here, Toby?”
“Do you mean the computer?”
“Yeah.”
“I sure can’t, Sean. I would have to unplug all of the cords that go from the computer to the surge protector on the floor. If I did that, which I can certainly do, the phone cord wouldn’t reach the jack in the wall, so there would be no Internet connection. Also, I would have. . .”
“A simple no would have been fine,” Sean mumbled to himself, tuning out the rest of the boy’s explanation. His eyes lifted to the window frame and intently traced its edges. He then peered down inside the room and noticed no obstructive furniture directly below. He raised his arms and pressed the palms of his hands along the bottom of the open window, pushing it open wider with a grunt.
“Toby, I’m coming in.”
“Oh, neat!” The boy breathlessly stood up from his chair, looking as if he was about to pull out a tub of popcorn and enjoy the show.
The bottom of the window frame sat about five feet off the ground—just high enough to make it awkward for Sean to try and slide inside. He clenched his hands onto the windowsill and pushed his body upward just a few inches before ducking inside the window, doubling over, and letting his shoulders angle toward the floor.
He slid along his chest and then his stomach, pressing his sprawled out hands along the carpet. His body was almost entirely inside when he felt something tugging at the cuff of one of his pant legs. He briskly shook his leg to free himself from whatever he was hung up on. That’s when he felt something give.
He fell to the floor hard, and when he did, he felt something else coming after him. He twisted his head just in time to see one end of a curtain rod swinging from its perch. He had somehow hooked a curtain tieback with his leg and now the entire window treatment was collapsing before his very eyes.
“Watch out!” Toby screamed.
The curtain rod swung into the side of a three-foot-tall dresser where a ceramic piggy bank, in the shape of an actual pig, exploded on impact. The rod crashed to the floor along with shrapnel from the bank and gobs of loose change, the clatter sounding like the jackpot payout of a slot machine.
Sean’s breath left him when he heard the imposing sound of loud, heavy footsteps galloping from down the hallway outside the boy’s room. He climbed to his knees, and after exchanging glances with Toby who also had a look of concern on his face, he glared at the door that was decorated with small posters and drawings. He knew there was no sense in trying to hide or escape. At any second, the door would swing open, the lights would flip on, and standing there would be the dainty frame of Joan Parker. Her eyes would search the room for about half a second before they found him, an
d then a hellfire of verbal fury would be unleashed—one that would likely wake up the entire neighborhood.
But when that door did swing open and that light did turn on, the sight presenting itself wasn’t one that anyone could have expected. It was one of pure terror.
The first thing Sean saw was a long buck knife that looked monstrously large in the hand of the virtually naked man tightly clenching it. Every raw muscle in the man’s body was recoiled and looked ready to explode under his dark, tattooed skin. Long, wild, black hair nearly covered his entire face. His wide, savage eyes burned through the strands.
Toby screamed. Sean reached for the back waistband of his pants, instinctively searching for the gun that he sometimes kept there. Nothing. He’d left it in the car. With his heart nearly beating a hole through his chest, he lunged to his feet and shoved Toby behind him as he grabbed the top of the nearby desk chair with his other hand. He brandished it in front of him in a defensive position.
“Coleman!” the man shouted out in astonishment.
Sean almost recognized the voice. Teeth clenched and arms locked in battle-readiness, he was prepared for physical confrontation.
The man held up his empty hand in a calming motion. The savagery in his eyes dissipated into anger. He was wearing only tight, gray underwear briefs. Old animal and military tattoos in green ink lined his arms and chest, the latter throbbing as precautionary adrenaline surged through him. “What the hell are you doing here?”
Sean’s fight or flight mindset wouldn’t let him process who the man was at first—only that he wasn’t a stranger.