by John A. Daly
It was hanging at a slightly different angle than how he had left it. Most people wouldn’t have noticed such a discrepancy, but Oldhorse had a keen, almost eerie eye for detail. It was possible that during the night, a strong gust of wind had struck the outside of the cabin with such strength that the bow was shaken a bit and its position along the wall was altered. Yet, a sixth sense at the back of Oldhorse’s mind was warning him that Mother Nature wasn’t to blame for the variance.
He moved in close. Tiny, scraggly paint shavings—the color of his bow—littered the wooden floor beneath it. He dropped to a knee and closely examined the bottom of the bow. Something had been crudely inscribed on it, probably with a standard pocketknife.
EL VERDADERO HEROE?
Oldhorse glanced around the room again. His hand clasped the lower limb of the bow to turn it and see if there was anything more written. What he noticed instead was that the weapon didn’t feel right. It felt heavier than it normally did.
As it occurred to him that this bow he now tugged was the same one he had used to drive an aluminum arrow right between Alvar Montoya’s lungs, a high-pitched, digital noise sounding like a wristwatch alarm emitted from behind it.
Oldhorse’s eyes widened when he saw a tiny red light bulb begin to flash quickly from behind the weapon. Two short, thin metal pipes were now visible as well.
The knife fell from his hand.
He spun and darted in the opposite direction. He didn’t have a half-second to spare and knew it wasn’t enough to make it to the door in time. With a snarl, he dove through the air, crashing through the thin glass of the window at the rear of the cabin. A deafening explosion tore through the heart of the building.
Shrapnel ripped its way through his clothes and skin before he crashed to the ground outside, hitting his head against a large rock hidden in the snow. Chards of splintered wood and shattered glass fell across his outstretched body. A dust-like residue rained down on him.
With trembling arms he crawled aimlessly along the frozen earth, instinctively putting some space between himself and the cabin. He felt faint and disoriented as blood oozed from a gash across his skull. His legs were soaked with blood as well, streaming out from the spread-open flesh beneath his shredded clothes. A torturous ringing pounded his skull, letting him hear nothing else.
Then the pain set in. His legs felt like they were on fire from the hot shrapnel embedded in them. The worst sensation came from the back of his right thigh. He twisted his body to gauge the damage and found remnants of a metal tube protruding from it. It was a piece of the pipe bomb that had gone off in his cabin.
Before another thought was allowed to cross his mind, he felt his arms collapse out from under him. He fell flat to his chest. With his head throbbing and vision blurring, he knew he was about to lose consciousness.
He struggled to stay awake but quickly found his head buried in the cold snow. Peculiar thoughts danced randomly through his mind as he drifted away. He thought it was a shame that the curtains Joan had bought him were now likely ruined. He pondered if Jefferson would now need to take his place outside Lumbergh’s cabin that night. He also thought of the familiar scent of cologne he’d smelled inside his cabin.
The answer came to him where he’d smelled it before.
Chapter 13
“You told him where you were staying?” Lumbergh shouted into his office phone, slamming his elbow down across his desk and shaking his head in aggravation.
Jefferson poked his head around the corner, his inquisitive eyes silently inquiring if the phone conversation was pertinent to Lautaro Montoya. Lumbergh waved him off before reaching into his desk for his prescription bottle. He removed the lid and emptied out a couple of capsules onto his desk.
“Gary,” Diana said on the other line, her voice shaking. “I was worried about you. You sent us away without explaining what was going on.”
“Honey, the fewer people that know where you are right now, the better. Do you understand?”
“No!” she shrilled. “I don’t understand. Tell me what’s going on! What has you so scared? Are you in danger? Are we in danger?”
He could hear her getting choked up, fighting back tears. He pursed his lips and closed his eyes, forcing himself for a moment to empathize with the position he had put her in.
“Just tell me what’s going on,” she whispered.
His voice softened. “Listen, everything’s going to be fine. I promise you. Just a couple more days of this and things will be back to normal. Trust me.”
He hoped his words sounded more reassuring to her than they did to him. Besides not wanting his wife to worry, he feared if word got out that Alvar Montoya’s brother was in Colorado, the chances of capturing him would be greatly diminished. If the county sheriff or feds got involved, and a media circus caravanned back into Winston, Lautaro Montoya might get scared off—but only for a while.
He knew Montoya would never let it go and the threat of him seeking retribution would forever be hanging over the head of the chief.
It was time to end things—not later but now. Only when the Montoya family tree was uprooted and fed into a wood chipper would life return to normal.
“What were you telling me about Sean?” Lumbergh asked, eager to change the topic. “He’s not returning your calls?”
Diana reluctantly let the prior discussion simmer and told her husband of the conversation she had had with her brother the night before. She explained that Sean had promised to call her right back after he heard a knock at his door, but never did. The rest of the night and even in the morning she was greeted with nothing but busy signals when she called his number.
“You think a friend might have come over and they got drunk?” he asked after sliding the capsules into his mouth and gulping them down with a swig of coffee. “He could be sleeping off a stupor.”
Dead silence lingered on the other end, and he could feel his wife’s disapproving glare through the receiver.
“He doesn’t do that anymore, Gary,” she finally said. “And who would have come over? Sean’s never had any drinking buddies.”
Lumbergh smirked, fighting back the urge to suggest that Sean Coleman hadn’t any kind of buddies, let alone drinking buddies. The expression on his face, however, suddenly turned serious. He felt his gut drop to the floor. His pulse accelerated as some bile forced its way down his throat.
It hadn’t occurred to him until that very moment that Sean could be a target of Lautaro Montoya. No one outside of Winston should have known that the two were related by marriage. Sean’s name was never mentioned in the papers or on television in the weeks following the Montoya shooting. His last name differed from his uncle’s, so an outsider shouldn’t have been able to make a connection to Montoya’s victim either.
All along, Lumbergh had viewed Sean as a potential liability to the situation—someone who would find a way to inadvertently screw up the capture of Lautaro Montoya if he was made privy to what was going on.
Had the determined Mexican somehow figured it out? he had to wonder. Had he followed Sean home from the police station the other day? Did he learn the truth by striking up a conversation with someone in town?
The phone receiv
er shook in his hand. His knuckles turned white.
“I’ll check on him, okay honey?” he said, hoping the tremble in his voice wasn’t noticeable to her.
She told him that there was something else they needed to talk about—something not related to Sean or where she and her mother were staying. She tried to elaborate, but he was frantic to wrap up the conversation. He told his wife he loved her, said they’d talk more later, and slammed down the phone.
“Jefferson!” a panicked Lumbergh yelled from his office. He launched to his feet and yanked his jacket off the coatrack in the corner of the room. His good arm went into its sleeve in no time.
He yelled Jefferson’s name a second time.
His officer finally appeared in the hallway, breathing hard with half of his shirt dangling out from his waistline. “I was in the bathroom. What is it?”
“Grab the shotgun!”
Chapter 14
The side of Lumbergh’s face smacked up against the police cruiser’s passenger seat when his officer took a hard, sharp turn. The speeding vehicle nearly spun out of control on the slick road, but Jefferson’s quick wheel work kept them from sliding into a ditch on the shoulder.
“Get us there, but get us there in one piece,” said Lumbergh in as calm of a voice as he could muster. His teeth mashed a wad of gum as he reached under his jacket and pulled his Glock from its open-top holster. He quickly checked its action.
“How would he know that Sean’s your brother-in-law?” asked a breathless Jefferson as he pumped the gas pedal and sent fountains of slush high into the air behind them.
“Let’s hope that he doesn’t, and that there’s nothing to this.”
Jefferson’s tongue protruded from his mouth as he negotiated the twists of the snow-covered road. A trail of sweat ran down the side of his face.
Lumbergh tapped his foot nervously on the floorboard, feeling his own heart beat against his chest. “When we get there, I’ll take the front and you circle around back. Got it?”
“Are you okay with your arm?”
“I’ll be fine.”
When they rounded a bend, the white crest of Sean’s roof came into view. Once they jetted past a row of trees, the rest of the small building revealed itself. Sean’s car was parked out front.
“Be okay,” Lumbergh mumbled under his breath before realizing that his officer hadn’t yet begun to apply the brakes.
They were coming in way too fast for the road conditions.
“Jefferson!” Lumbergh wailed.
“Shit!” cried the officer. He pinned the brake pedal to the floor with a stomp. His wide eyes consumed the sight of the rapidly nearing Nova. He grasped the steering wheel vice-like and Lumbergh braced his body as best he could. The cruiser veered at a widening angle.
Lumbergh closed his eyes and clenched his teeth before a loud collision brought the men’s slowing momentum to a dead halt.
“Dammit!” Lumbergh moaned, seeing the dented rear of Sean’s car pressed up against his side of the cruiser. He turned to Jefferson, whose mouth was left dangling open. The officer’s wide eyes apologized profusely to his boss.
“I’m going out your side,” stated Lumbergh, his mind having already moved past the wreck. “Get out!”
The two men quickly but awkwardly climbed outside of the vehicle through the driver side door. As Lumbergh circled around to the opposite side of the car, he noticed a pair of tire tracks in the snow that belonged to neither them nor the Nova.
Jefferson let out a loud cough and looked to his boss for direction.
Holding his gun out in front of him, Lumbergh motioned Jefferson around to the back of the building. Shotgun in hand, the officer disappeared from view. Lumbergh trotted to the front door. He checked the doorknob and found it locked.
“Sean?” he yelled, pounding the wooden door with the back of his clenched fist. “You in there?”
No answer.
“Jefferson?” he cried out.
He heard the officer reply after few seconds. “The rear door’s busted open back here! Hang on!”
“Shit!” Lumbergh snarled. He took a few steps, training his gun on the front door and waiting for Jefferson to secure the inside.
It was taking longer than it seemed it should, and Lumbergh desperately began praying that Jefferson wasn’t standing there in shock over the sight of his brother-in-law’s dead body. His mind was a busy intersection of horrific thoughts and unconscionable consequences.
“Talk to me, Jefferson!” he cried out, his heightened voice trembling.
“I’m near the front door!” came Jefferson’s muffled reply from inside. “He’s not here.”
Those three words allowed a deep breath of relief to escape the chief ’s lungs, but only before the officer continued.
“Something’s wrong, though. There’s blood, and the place has been trashed.”
Jefferson unlocked and opened the front door, and Lumbergh slid in. The men quickly made their way down the hallway from the front area to the living room where it smelled strongly as if something was burnt.
“Careful,” warned Jefferson, taking wide steps at the end of the hallway. “There’s broken glass.”
Lumbergh’s eyes shifted from the shattered picture frames that lay in a clump on the floor to the overturned stove, now cold, that had left a large black singe mark across a portion of the hardwood floor. Sean’s phone and its unhooked receiver were lying close by. “You said there was blood?”
Jefferson pointed to a dried crimson puddle on the floor not far from the stove. It wasn’t large, likely coming from a superficial, non-life-threatening wound. Whether or not that wound belonged to Sean, Lumbergh had no way of knowing.
“Chief, I don’t think Sean left here on his own,” Lumbergh heard his officer state.
“Why do you say that?”
“There’s a bunch of footprints and tire tracks out back. From multiple people, I think. It looks like they dragged someone out of here.”
Lumbergh quickly pushed his way past Jefferson and made a beeline for the back door. He took note of the splintered frame along the doorway and carefully maneuvered his body in a way that kept him from stepping on the plethora of prints embedded in the snow. It wasn’t easy with one arm but he managed once he holstered his gun.
Jefferson watched him from inside the doorway. His head was lowered and there was nervousness in his eyes. Lumbergh didn’t know if his disposition stemmed from Sean’s disappearance or the officer’s epiphany that he had smeared away some of the prints with his own feet when he hastily entered the building.
If it was the latter, Jefferson’s worries were unwarranted. There were tracks everywhere—plenty of clean imprints, though the rising temperature from the morning sun was beginning to deform them.
Two deep lines along the snow likely came from the heels of Sean’s shoes as he was dragged outside and pulled into the vehicle whose tracks matched those from the front of the building. They had circled around to the other side.
Lumbergh made out two sets of footprints—one quite small and the other of average s
ize. Did Montoya have help?
“Jefferson, go back through the house and out the front door. Don’t use Sean’s phone. It’s evidence. From the car, get the county sheriff on the line. Let him know what’s going on. Everything.”
“Everything?”
“Yes. The conditions have changed. We need all available resources on this. A forensics team and someone who can hopefully match up these tire tracks to a specific type of car. We’ll need to circulate those pictures of Montoya. Is Martinez still in town? Can you reach him on the radio and have him swing by the office, make some copies, and bring them over?”
“Yeah. I think he’s still around. But aren’t those pictures old and out of date?”
“They are but they’re all we’ve got. They’re better than nothing.”
Jefferson disappeared back inside.
After squatting down and examining the tracks closer, Lumbergh noticed just how narrow the smaller set of footprints was. They almost looked as if they could belong to a woman. A minute later, he went back inside to better scrutinize the damage caused by the apparent scuffle.
There were no shell casings anywhere on the floor. It appeared that the fight didn’t escalate beyond that of a brawl, but it was a wild brawl. Sean didn’t go down quietly. If there had just been one unarmed intruder—even Montoya himself—he likely wouldn’t have stood a chance against a man of Sean’s size and propensity to use his fists. But with two people, it seemed they had eventually overwhelmed him.
If Montoya simply wanted Sean dead, he would have killed him there and left his body behind to be found. There had to be more to the game, and Lumbergh could only fathom that Sean was being used as a pawn to toy with him, perhaps draw him out into the open in order to fulfill his sick hunger for revenge.