by John A. Daly
Quietly he moved to the open doorway of his office. There, he dropped to a knee before peering out into the darkened hallway of the police station, his gun pointed out in front of him with his arm straight and parallel with the floor. He scoped out the two solid wooden doors at the entrance that were closed and appeared still locked. His head then spun toward the back door of the building.
He made his way down the hallway, keeping low and scanning the interior of each side room in the small architecture. He scrutinized each nook and cranny, searching behind every desk and file cabinet until he was certain that he was the only one inside the building.
He slowly walked toward the entrance. Beads of sweat ran down the sides of his face as he stood straight and pressed his shoulder against one of the front doors. With the muzzle of his gun, he pulled back the shade that covered the door’s window.
“Show yourself, you son of a bitch,” he muttered. His heavy breathing left an imprint on the frosty glass.
A dim street lamp lit up the narrow parking lot in front of the station. The only car in the lot was his Jeep and the fresh snow revealed no new tracks. None from tires, none from shoes.
He patted his front pocket to make sure his keys were snugly inside, and then carefully unlocked the door, twisted the knob, and opened it up about an inch or two. The cry of dry hinges brought a wince to his face and he mouthed a silent obscenity. He crouched and slid his arm and head outside. Large flakes of snow fell from the sky, coming down in a steady stream, tapping his shoulder and head as his eyes carefully panned the outside area.
Nothing looked out of place until his gaze drifted far beyond the street and quiet nearby shops to the town square where the silhouette of Zed Hansen’s statue stood. Beneath it, there had always stood two newspaper vending machines, but now there was only one; at least, only one that he could see from his distance. It was a peculiar discrepancy, but nothing that warranted immediate attention.
He took a few steps outside, searching for anything else that looked wrong as the cold, stewing wind pressed up against his body. He found nothing. Satisfied, he stepped back inside and closed the door behind him, then locked it.
He took a deep breath and let the silence settle back in. He slid the gun back into its holster and let his shoulders sink as the tension receded from them. Wiping dampness from the back of his neck, he made his way back down the hallway to his office, taking a moment to first adjust the thermostat along a wall.
A subtle tapping noise that would have otherwise gone unnoticed had things not been so quiet stole his attention. His face tightened. He craned his head toward the back door where the sound seemed to be coming. It was an intermittent noise, but it continued.
Aware that there was no outside light at the back of the building, Lumbergh retrieved a flashlight from his office. He lit it up and carefully made his way toward the back door. The percussion didn’t sound as if anyone was trying to enter; more like something was brushing up against the door, possibly due to the strengthening wind.
He kept his gun holstered, not sensing danger, but instead complying with an urge to settle the nagging curiosity. Still, there was an eerie chill in the air that tensed his muscles—something frigid that didn’t feel spawned from a draft outside.
He approached the door and glided the flashlight beam along its edges before twisting the lock on the doorknob at its side, then slid the deadbolt. He wedged the flashlight in his armpit and slid his hand around the doorknob. His fingers trembled under the ray of light.
With a twist and a pull, the door barely budged. Some frost and ice had built up around the doorframe. Gritting his teeth, he planted a foot against the wall and gave the door a hard tug.
When it flew open, the flashlight fell and crashed to the floor. It rolled along the tile in a semicircle, still illuminated, as a blast of cold air poured in.
“Come on,” he mumbled as he lowered to one knee and retrieved the flashlight.
He guided the beam through the open doorway. An object hung directly at its center. It was the color of pale, human flesh.
He gasped and fell to his butt, biting his lip and dropping the flashlight. He quickly grabbed his Glock.
Holding his breath, he targeted the object and nearly shouted out a warning but then held back when his eyes more clearly interpreted its shape. The bottom of the object was partially lit up by the flashlight lying on the floor. Two animal hooves were revealed.
Keeping his gun trained on the object, Lumbergh quickly climbed to his feet and flipped on a nearby light switch. Though the light fixture was halfway down the hallway behind him, there was enough light to expose the horrific sight dangling in the wind before him.
It was a dead pig, hairless, strung up by a thick rope wrapped around its throat. Its limp body looked nearly frozen and it spun slowly in the wind. The animal’s long tongue protruded sickly from its mouth, suggesting that it may very well have been strangled to death from the very rope that it now hung from. It wasn’t fully grown. Young. Probably less than a hundred pounds.
Snow clung to many parts of its body. It had been there for a while, dangling outside the seldom-used door for at least a couple of hours, likely before Lumbergh had even returned to the office from his house after a quick dinner. He carefully slid past the animal to the small staircase that led to the alley behind the building. He found no footprints in the snow.
The concerns he had had over the past week were now substantiated; his fears were not unwarranted. The veiled threats he’d received were not part of some hoax. This was real.
Lumbergh was the “baby pig.” He was a cop of small physical stature who until now was ignorant about the situation he had gotten himself into by killing Lautaro Montoya’s older brother. Lautaro had arrived in Winston, and Lumbergh’s family wasn’t safe.
Chapter 6
Sean tossed a small, split log into the mouth of the old cast iron stove in the corner of the frigid room. In his other hand, he held a fried-chicken drumstick that had been sitting by its lonesome in the cardboard bucket at the back of his refrigerator for at least a week. He sank his teeth into it and enjoyed its spices as he watched the flames in the stove devour new fuel.
He had been fond of the stove from the time he was a child. On the few occasions when he and his sister got to spend the night over at their Uncle Zed’s, the two children would sit in front of it for what seemed like hours with their arms wrapped around their folded legs as they warmed themselves and played silly word games.
The stove seemed much larger and more intimidating back then. With the steel door at its front missing, the fire inside almost made it look like one was staring down the Devil’s throat. Diana used to worry that some sporadic cave-in of the wood inside would send a stray ember hurling through the air and onto one of them as they played. Sean had relished stoking that concern.
More than once back then he had faked getting burned, rolling around on the large woven rug that lined the wooden floor beneath the stove, screaming wildly. He once even brought his sister to tears. Zed always fought back a smile while denouncing Sean for his niece’s benefit, but that curl along the side of his mouth was unmistakable. Sean recognized it, and his uncle knew he did.
The stove hadn’t been moved from th
at spot in years. It still sat right at the edge of the small living area that led into the front office of Zed’s old business. Sean owned the building now, and it became his new home after his uncle’s death. The building was nearly paid off, with Zed having made the monthly mortgage payments for a couple of decades. Sean was thankful for this. Just eighteen more months and he’d have a big expense off his hands. Until then, he’d likely let the vampires at GSL Plasma continue to drain him of his blood.
Surrounded by the crisp scent of burning wood, he retreated to the old, well-used aluminum desk that was pressed up against one of the surrounding wood-paneled walls. He pulled the chain of the small lamp with a deep-green shade that sat on the desk and pushed aside a stack of bills and invoices that lay beside it.
He took a moment to unwrap the thick gauze strip that had held a cotton ball to his arm for the last few hours where the plasma needle had been removed. The puncture had probably healed about ten minutes after it had been wrapped, but often he’d forget it was there until much later in the night. He dropped the dressing in a wastebasket underneath the desk. From his back pocket, he retrieved the folded up Denver Post article that Toby had printed out for him. He straightened it out along the top of his desk and used the sides of his hands as steamrollers to marginalize the creases.
He sat down on a metal folding chair that creaked with dissent, his eyes squinting as he examined the article’s content. He read of how a man named Andrew Carson had gone missing from his home in Greeley, Colorado, a week earlier. A picture of Carson and a young woman accompanied the article. A significant amount of blood was found at the crime scene, both in the garage of his house and on his driveway. It was “believed to be Carson’s,” as the Post writer put it.
There were signs of a physical altercation, though the details of that evidence weren’t printed because the case was still active. The police believed he had been attacked as he arrived home from having dinner with his daughter, Katelyn, at a restaurant in Fort Collins that night. Katelyn was the young woman pictured next to Carson in the photograph. Robbery was not thought to be a motive, though the article didn’t explain why.
Much of the piece detailed the exhaustive efforts taking place in search of the missing man, including the open-land areas that surrounded his neighborhood. Part of the article profiled Katelyn, a recent college graduate with a nursing degree who worked at a clinic in Greeley. The statements the Post printed from her were those of an understandably scared and distraught young woman who was desperate to have her father back.
“We argued the last time we talked,” she was quoted. “I wish that hadn’t been the case.”
A picture on the second page showed Katelyn standing in what appeared to be a field, though the light snow that covered the land behind her didn’t make that apparent. She was clad in a light-blue winter jacket and jeans as she organized a search party, pointing off into an unseen direction. Toby’s color printer had really captured the redness of her wind-beaten face that showed her in the middle of barking out instructions to volunteers. Beside her stood two people described in the photo’s caption as her boyfriend and her mother. The mother was noted to be Andrew Carson’s ex-wife.
Sean smirked at the boyfriend’s appearance. He was a dead ringer for the fictional character Harry Potter—thin, with floppy brown hair, circular glasses, and a scarf wrapped around his neck.
Sean was about to continue reading when his attention was caught by something in the picture that felt so familiar that it sent butterflies through his gut. A unique shade of red.
He yanked open a shallow desk drawer and snatched the old magnifying glass that his uncle had used when working on the weapons in his gun collection. He held the thick, circular lens in front of the photo and saw that the red was a woman’s hair. He studied the face of the woman closely. It took him only seconds to determine that it was Jessica. She wasn’t standing with Carson’s family, but rather off in the background by herself, probably unaware she was being photographed.
He completed the rest of the article, and when he got to the very last sentence, he read that Katelyn Carson’s mother Molly, her boyfriend Derek, and her cousin Jess were assisting Katelyn in her search efforts.
“Jess… Jessica,” Sean said aloud. Jessica from GSL Plasma was the niece of the missing man.
He raised his head. His tired eyes stared forward at the wall in front of him. Below a high shelf of old, dusty country music records hung several pictures. Many were of his uncle showing off his hunting and fishing prizes or firing a rifle at a distant target. One toward the bottom of the wall revealed a younger Zed Hansen with dark hair and a darker mustache. He was down on one knee beside Sean as a child. Both were gripping a fishing line that was heavy from the weight of a large rainbow trout that dangled from an unseen hook somewhere below their interlaced fingers.
There was an unmistakable fountain of pride gushing from his uncle’s eyes in the photo. The closer Sean looked, the more it seemed, however, that there was something else etched behind those eyes. It was as if his uncle was requesting something of him.
Zed was a man who had always gone out of his way to help others in need and he never asked for anything in return. However, at that moment, Sean experienced a sensation in his gut that Zed was indeed trying to call on his nephew’s services from beyond the grave—perhaps in payment for leaving behind the means for Sean to build his own legacy. Those eyes were telling him to step up and do something good for someone else—someone who had also lost an uncle.
Elsewhere in Winston that night, Lumbergh had come to several conclusions about his past and his present. Not just his own present, but Diana’s, too. The plan was to draw Lautaro out into the open. Lumbergh sent away his family and all nonessential employees at the police station for their own safety. Whenever Lautaro was set to strike, Lumbergh didn’t want any innocent parties caught in the crossfire.
His line of work had already affected one innocent, albeit resilient, party. Lumbergh wanted to avoid more complications. He made the few calls he knew he had to.
He believed that Ron Oldhorse’s military training would prove invaluable in bringing down Lautaro. Oldhorse had agreed. The chief and recluse shared a mutual benefit. Oldhorse made it clear he appreciated the large favor Lumbergh had done for him in the Montoya shooting aftermath. It was something that neither forgot, but also something that neither could mention.
Lumbergh had scrubbed Oldhorse’s name from the official police report, eliminating all mention of him in the details of how Alvar Montoya died—as per Oldhorse’s request. The truth was that while Lumbergh was indeed responsible for ending Montoya’s life with a bullet between his eyes, he would have never had the chance to take the shot if it wasn’t for Ron Oldhorse. Lumbergh let his mind wander along memories he dared not utter aloud.
Oldhorse had happened upon the shootout in the mountains just as Montoya was about to end Lumbergh’s life. Lumbergh had been flat on his back, bleeding profusely and barely able to move, with his firearm on the ground just a few feet away. Montoya had been standing over him with his gun raised. An arrow that Oldhorse shot into Montoya’s back from afar removed that advantage. Lumbergh had regained his pistol and ended things.
Lumbergh’s teeth chomped harder on his chewing gum at the recollection. The omission had been a tough call for him to mak
e. He was a man who had risen up the law enforcement ranks in Chicago to police lieutenant, in large part, by doing everything by the book. When Oldhorse had confided in him that there was a federal arrest warrant out for him stemming from an incident in South Dakota years earlier, however, Lumbergh had a serious decision to make. He could stick to the truth and watch the highly publicized event with federal implications result in the man who had just saved his life being hauled away in handcuffs, or he could withhold a superficial portion of the story in order to achieve a different type of justice for someone he was highly indebted to.
Oldhorse had instinctively reclaimed the arrow from Montoya’s body at the scene, as he would have from an animal he had hunted down and killed. Lumbergh believed the deception would be easy to pull off while not damaging the case.
As far as the official record was concerned, Oldhorse happened upon the scene after the shooting had already ended. Thus, the news media was largely satisfied when given the story that it was a nearby hunter, who wished to remain anonymous, who assisted Lumbergh afterwards. Oldhorse escaped all of the celebrity that fell squarely on the shoulders of Lumbergh. It suited both men well, most of the time.
Lumbergh wanted to make certain no one without a badge got involved in his police work again.
Friday
Chapter 7
Sean awoke the next morning with a strong sense of purpose flowing through his veins. He’d slept well that night, which was a rarity. Typically, he tossed and turned in bed until the wee hours of the morning while his mind continually redirected him to a hundred different thoughts.
He’d sometimes dwell on the past. He’d think about the relationships he’d lost throughout his life, including the one with his father. Other times, he’d contemplate why it had always been so hard for him to capture the endearment of a woman—someone who could open her heart to him and see through his rough exterior to find something worth sticking around for. And then he’d worry that he had indeed found such a person in Lisa, yet managed to let the opportunity slip right through his fingers.