by John A. Daly
“Can I come inside?” she said in response to his scowl. “It’s cold out here.”
He stood there for a moment, revealing little emotion. “Sure,” he finally said.
She stepped inside, and as she did, her sweet, alluring scent caught his notice. He had never known her to wear perfume from their past meetings at the plasma bank. It never before seemed to suit her, but clearly there was another side of Jessica that he was about to meet.
He noticed her car parked out front before closing the door behind them and sealing off the cold air that had spilled inside. He flipped on the inside light and watched Jessica’s pretty face as her eyes wandered around the room that consisted of little more than a tall wooden countertop with a barstool behind it and certification papers adorning the walls.
“Do you live here . . .? Where you work?” she asked.
“Yeah. In the back.” He nudged her toward the living area with the jerk of his head.
She turned and strolled down the lit, tight hallway, glancing at the random collage of framed pictures that hung along it. They were mostly family pictures, several of Zed with his niece and nephew when they were younger and some from his early days in the service. A black and white one, from a different era, which hung horizontally featured Zed and Sean’s father when they were teenagers—slicked back hair, rolled-up shirtsleeves, and baggy jeans.
“Do you live by yourself, Sean?” she asked in an upbeat tone.
“Yeah,” he answered quickly, almost dismissively. “How did you get my address?”
She grinned, turning her head to the side a bit as she continued down the hallway. “It’s in the GSL computer system. It was pretty easy to get.”
A scoffing chuckle fell from his mouth. GSL had refused to give him Jessica’s address, but his own information was apparently up for grabs. He nearly voiced his grievance but stopped himself short, deciding not to tip his hand that he had sought her out earlier that night. It was advice lent to him by an old episode of Simon & Simon for dismantling someone’s lies: The less you pretend to know, the tighter they’ll tie their own noose. He was going to give her the rope.
“You want something to drink?” he asked, knowing he had nothing but a couple of diet sodas and a glass of tap water to offer.
She declined with a “No thank you.”
He removed a couple of sweatshirts from an old worn-out wingchair that was close to the stove. The clothes were still unfolded and not yet put away from a laundry load two days earlier. Foam stuffing dangled from the outside of a large tear in the side of the chair’s cushion.
“Have a seat,” he said with forced courtesy. “Warmest spot in the house.”
She grinned and said thank you, unzipping her jacket and looking to Sean to offer to take it from her. He didn’t. She kept it on and took her seat.
He snatched the remote control off an end table and switched off a muted rerun of Barnaby Jones with the flick of a wrist.
“Did you let the Carsons know what I told you?” he asked before plopping himself down on his recliner.
Her eyebrows rose a bit. “Yes. They were appreciative. I think it was comforting for them to know that progress was being made. They’re remaining hopeful. We all are.”
He nodded, silently amazed at how easily the lies were pouring from her mouth. The way she delivered them was convincing, seemingly sincere. Whatever preconceived notions he had formed of her from those weeks in the plasma bank were quickly disintegrating before his very eyes.
“You look different.” He nodded at her appearance. “Heading out on a date?” He wasn’t sure why that was the question that had come to his mind.
“No,” she quickly answered. “I just went out with some people after work. There’s usually a lot going on in Lakeland on Friday nights. I figured I’d take a couple of co-workers up on their invitation to join them for once.”
He nodded.
After some uncomfortable silence slaved by, she told him how she had been talked into trying her hand at karaoke and sang a poor rendition of Belinda Carlisle’s “Heaven Is a Place on Earth” in front of a room full of strangers. She laughed afterwards, and he let the ends of his lips curl a bit.
It was the kind of conversation he had dreamed of one day having with her, but Sean knew none of it was real. That made it all the harder to listen.
“So what did you want to talk to me about?” he asked, heading off a new sentence she was about to start.
“Oh, okay,” she said, a little taken aback. She swallowed and nodded uncomfortably before continuing. “Earlier, when I asked you if you knew the name of the man police suspect, you said no.”
“Right,” he replied, curious what was coming next.
“Well, please forgive my bluntness, but I wasn’t so sure you were telling me the truth.”
His mouth subtly fought a grin, recognizing the irony in her statement. He said nothing.
“I mean. . .” she continued with some shakiness in her voice. “You hesitated before you answered the question, and my guess is that you might know the suspect’s name but that you didn’t want to tell it to me because you were afraid of getting your police friend in trouble.”
It was suddenly clear to him that she was there on a mission—a mission to extract the knowledge he had of the police case. His attraction to her was going to be used as the siphon. That was her plan anyway. It was as if the two of them were back at the plasma bank, with him on the bed and her sticking a needle in his arm. Instead of blood being drawn from him, however, information was the intended acquisition.
Sean nodded, his eyes glazed over and his mind secretly running on all cylinders. Why was the suspect’s name so important to her? Why did it matter? If his earlier theory was right, and she was indeed Andrew Carson’s mistress, he could understand a curiosity over the details of the case. But the fact that she would dig into Sean’s account to find his address, spruce herself up, and drive out to his home in the middle of the night to get such information didn’t add up. Those weren’t acts of impulsive curiosity. There was something more methodical to it—something more purposeful.
His mind whipped back to what he had seen in the GSL parking lot after Jessica thought he had already driven off—her impassioned phone conversation. He recalled the look of desperation in her face—the look of fear. As he despondently glared into her eyes as the two now sat silently in his living room, he began to observe just a hint of that same desperation and fear forming along the contours of her face.
Eye-opening sobriety suddenly struck him. He believed he finally understood what was going on. He hoped a single test would confirm the conclusion he had reached, and before he opened his mouth to speak, he held his eyes on hers, prepared to gauge whatever reaction they were about to unknowingly disclose.
“Steve McGarrett,” he said. It was the name of the lead character from Hawaii Five-O; a name he was convinced would mean absolutely nothing to her.
That’s when he saw it, a subtle sense of relief in her eyes and a deep breath drifting out of her mouth from low in her chest. She was never worried about the fate of Andrew Carson. She was worried about herself, and perhaps the suspect the police were looking for: Norman Booth.
She shook her head. “No. I’m afraid not.”
“Well, you didn’t hear that name from me, okay?” he said with a raised eyebrow.
“Of course not,” she said, letting a quick, nervous grin show. “Thank you. I’m sorry I stopped by so late, Mr. Coleman.”
“Sean.”
“What?”
“That’s what you called me when you wanted inside and were making small-talk with me just now—when you wanted my help. You called me Sean. Not Mr. Coleman. You can keep calling me Sean.”
“Okay. I’ll do that,” she said, offering a polite smile before standing up from her chair and reaching for the zipper of her jacket.
“You’re not leaving, are you?” he quickly asked, wearing a contrived look of disappointment across his face. “What’s your hurry?”
“I’d really better—” she started to say before Sean cut her off.
“Because I wanted to ask you a question.”
“Oh, okay,” she said.
Her jaw squared as she seemed to be fighting back the urge to roll her eyes, probably predicting he was about to ask her out to dinner sometime. She reluctantly sat back down.
He glared at her without expression for a moment, wondering if she was at all suspicious of how heavily he was judging her. “Ever hear of a town in Utah named Hanksville?” he blurted out.
Her eyes narrowed at the odd question. The mild grin vanished from her face, and she shook her head no.
“I guess there’s no real reason you should have. It’s a tiny little town. A speck on the map. Some shithole in the middle of the desert, surrounded by miles and miles of dirt, rock, and scrub.”
Jessica’s face twisted tighter in confusion.
“Not many people live there. There’s only a few buildings along a highway. One diner. One gas station. A couple of rundown motels for travelers driving off the beaten path, coming to or from Lake Powell. Powell’s about an hour’s drive away from Hanksville.”
She now looked as if she was forcing herself to appear intrigued by Sean’s words. She clearly wanted to leave. “I take it you’ve been there?”
“Yeah. Back in high school. Senior year. Some of the other guys on the football team planned a road trip to Powell over spring break. Two days out on the water.”
“That sounds like fun.”
He ignored her comment. “I knew that none of them wanted me along, but I had a few bucks to spend from washing dishes at a local diner. I imposed myself. Told them I’d pay for half of the gas myself. I just needed to get out of Winston for a while.”
She nodded.
“Anyway, after about a five-hour drive in an old, full-sized van with no air-conditioning—the last half of it through the Utah wasteland—we stopped to fill up in Hanksville. The gas station there is actually pretty cool looking. It’s called something like Hollow Rock or Hollow Mountain. The building, the store, is inside of a cave that was blasted through one of these huge orange-colored rocks that you can find all around the area. I mean, they really are big.” His eyes left hers and dropped to the floor before he continued. “While they were filling up, I told a couple of the guys that I was going inside to take a dump.”
Jessica winced.
“When I came back out, the van was gone. They’d left without me.” When his gaze returned to hers, he found her eyes wide.
“Did they do it on purpose?” she asked. “Was it some kind of joke?” She finally sounded interested.
“Who knows?” he answered. “They later told me it was an accident, but that’s pretty hard to believe. There were seven of us inside that van. You’d think one of them would have noticed that someone was missing.”
“When they came back for you?”
“They didn’t come back for me. I waited there for over an hour, outside that gas station in the hot sun, feeling the eyes of the attendant inside glued to my back as I paced back and forth. She felt sorry for me. She checked on me a couple of times.” A brief chuckle spilled from Sean’s mouth as he recalled the memory. “That old lady at the register lived out in the middle of nowhere where she worked at a rundown gas station, had about four teeth left in her mouth, and there she was feeling sorry for me. I kept thinking that every moving dot that popped up over the horizon would be the guys returning for me, but it was never them. A couple of families. Groups of friends. No one by themself like I was.”
Jessica now seemed legitimately invested in his story. There was sadness in her eyes that didn’t appear phony. It was the sadness he’d often witnessed while watching her from afar at the plasma bank.
He continued. “One of those couples were brave enough to let a big guy who looked like me hitch a ride to the marina at Lake Powell. I knew they were heading that way because they had jet-skis in tow. By the time I got there, though, the guys had already left on the houseboat. Gone for two days.”
Her jaw dropped. “Well, what did you do?” she asked. “Did another boat take you out to them? One of the park rangers?”
“No. I didn’t want anyone to.”
“Well, why not?”
“Because their actions spoke louder than their words. At some point, you’ve got to accept that you’re just not supposed to be somewhere. It’s not because you’re a loner or a lone wolf or whatever. It’s because the rest of the pack just doesn’t want you anywhere near them.” He could read the confusion in her eyes.
“Why are you telling me this, Sean?” she asked, sadness in her voice.
He gazed at her for a moment. “Because I can think of exactly three times in my life when I felt like the biggest asshole on the planet. That day was one of those times. Another was the day my dad walked out on me.” He focused an angry glare on her uncertain eyes. “The last one was today, when I drove down to Greeley to help search for Andrew Carson’s body and found that his family has no idea who the fuck you are.”
Jessica’s face turned completely pale, just as it had the day before in the GSL parking lot when he had first mentioned Carson’s name to her. Her mouth was open but no words came out. She leaned forward in her chair, clawing her fingers into the armrests as if she was considering bolting toward the door. The doubt in her eyes signaled to Sean, however, that she didn’t think she could make it past him if he tried to stop her.
She was right.
“What did you do to Andrew Carson?” he growled. He suddenly stood up.
The quick action made her leap from her chair and hold her open hands out in front of her defensively. Her body trembled as she shook her head. Tears began to build up in her eyes.
“Do you think I’m fucking stupid?” he roared, his chest tight and fists clenched. A twisted sneer etched across his face. “You show up here in the middle of the night, looking all hot, and I’m gonna blabber everything out like some love struck school kid without figuring out what you’re doing?”
The tears were now streaming down her face. Her whole body shook.
“Where’s Andrew Carson’s body? Where?”
“I need help,” she murmured.
“What?” he grunted.
“I need help!” she screamed so loudly that Sean found himself cringing and taking a step backward.
Her eyes sporadically shot from one end of the room to the other, and when she happened to turn her head to the side far enough for him to see the profile of her face, he noticed a small, clear tube wedged at the center of her ear. It didn’t look like a hearing aid, at least not the kind his mother wore. It looked more advanced, like a listening device.
A loud crash at the rear of the building grabbed their attention. Sean recognized the noise as the back door being whipped open and striking the adjacent wall. His head snapped back to Jessica, quickly meeting her eyes.
Loud, rapid footsteps clanged their way down the hallway toward them. A man dressed all in black surged around the hallway corner. Sean charged him.
He wrapped one of his hands around the stranger’s neck and slammed him backwards into the wall of the hallway, the impact sending several framed pictures falling to the floor in unison. Shattered glass sprayed in a dozen directions.
The man was of average height and weight, which made him considerably smaller than Sean and unable to mount an effective offense. He had short brown hair and wore glasses with thick black frames. The thick lenses made his frantic eyes look abnormally large. They grew even wider from the pressure now around his neck. He clearly wasn’t Norman Booth, but the man’s identity was the last thing on Sean’s mind at that moment.
The man’s hand rose, and when it did, Sean saw a black, shiny object gripped tightly in his fingers. He grabbed the man’s wrist and pinned it to the wall where the rest of the man’s body was constrained. A blue flame of light suddenly emitted from the object and reflected off of the man’s glasses. It was accompanied by the loud sound of an electric charge. A taser; he was trying to shock Sean.