by John A. Daly
Lumbergh traced his aim back and forth from the fallen deputy to Redick.
“What the hell are you doing, Gary?” Redick shouted. “This is no good. Think about your career!”
“I’m thinking about my family! You don’t give a shit about that! I get it. Now get your fat ass over here.”
Once Redick grew near, Gary told him to slowly remove his pistol from its holster and toss it over the guardrail.
“You wouldn’t shoot me, Gary!” Redick shouted. “You’re not that kind of man!”
“I don’t even know what kind of man I am anymore, Richard. Don’t presume that you do. Now toss your gun!”
Redick did.
Lumbergh ordered both men to stand at the front of the car with their hands spread out along the hood. They complied, looking as if they were being placed under arrest.
Lumbergh reached inside the sheriff ’s car and unlocked the rear door.
“No, Gary!” yelled Redick.
“Shut up!” yelled Lumbergh, taking a few steps backwards to the door.
A couple of slow moving cars passed by them in the right lane, seemingly unfazed by the scene playing out just feet from them. Keeping his firearm aimed at the lawmen, Lumbergh opened the door and lowered his head just enough so that Martinez could hear his voice.
The intern’s now alert, examining eyes belied that he wasn’t sure what was coming next.
Lumbergh’s gaze moved to the lawmen. “Your mother was right about me,” he said to Martinez. “She knew what kind of man I am. She knew what I was capable of. If you want to see what I do to people who fuck with my family, you’ll come with me now. I’ll show you why murals of me decorate towns in Mexico. I’ll show you why your people celebrate me. I don’t need Ron Oldhorse or anyone else to put a bullet between someone’s eyes when my family gets hurt. Come with me now and give me my target.”
His attention slid to Martinez. It was greeted by the trademark toothy grin and the electric, eager-to-learn look that Lumbergh had come to know well.
Chapter 24
Sean carefully made his way up the wooden staircase, one step at a time. An inactive light bulb hovered above him. He spotted a switch on the wall, but stayed in the dark. With his arms out in front of him and his hands gripping the revolver, he aimed the gun at the open door at the top of the stairs. A strand of sweat slowly slid down the side of his face. When it reached the corner of his mouth, he tasted its salt.
About halfway up the staircase, a loud creak came from the pressure of his weight on one of the steps. His face tightened and he took a breath before quickly hustling up the remaining steps. When he reached the top, he nearly hugged the linoleum floor with his chest, swinging his arm around the corner of the doorframe, watching for movement. All he found was a tiny, barely lit room that housed several stacked, medium-sized cardboard boxes and an old white refrigerator that emitted a tepid hum. The sound of fierce, whistling wind could be heard from outside. Sporadic gusts drew groans from the walls.
Sean saw a pair of dark curtains covering the wall beside him and discreetly tugged on the fabric, hoping to find a window waiting behind it. Instead, he found thick wooden planks nailed securely into the wall, blocking whatever possible escape route existed behind them.
It took him a moment to figure out where the room’s dim light source was coming from, but his adjusting eyes finally homed in on a child’s nightlight plugged into a low electrical outlet. It read “Barbie” in pink, cursive lettering below an image of the classic toy doll.
He looked at the boxes and strained to read their labels. He made out terms like “cast tape,” “electrodes foam,” and “vacutainer tubes.” Some of the terms felt familiar to him, as if he’d seen them in writing before. He cautiously climbed to his feet, pointing the gun toward an open doorway at the opposite end of the room. It looked like it led out into a hallway.
Something inside of him urged him to bolt down the corridor with his gun drawn, needling his way through the building, taking aim, and pulling the trigger on anyone who got in his way. He felt justified in doing whatever it took to get outside and away from danger.
Yet, there was also a nagging voice in his head calling for a more cautious approach. There were many unanswered questions peppering his head like spitballs from an annoying school kid. Whatever moral dilemma Jessica was struggling with (as he had gathered from her comments behind the freezer door) had relevance. The fact that the people who abducted him had something to do with Andrew Carson’s death, yet chose not to kill Sean, meant something. That same voice in his head told him that he should open up some of the boxes beside him and see what was inside.
Switching his attention back and forth from the hallway to the boxes, he reached his left arm over his right and tugged at the top flaps of one of the boxes that had already had its packaging tape stripped off. He opened it up without much noise and tilted it at an angle until the glow of the nightlight exposed its contents.
Plastic containers, very large ones. He was familiar with the type. Two days a week, he watched others just like them fill up with brown fluid from tubes in people’s arms, including his own.
They were blood plasma supplies, just like the ones used at GSL.
At first, it seemed likely that Jessica had taken them from work, but when he stared intently at the nearly detached large mailing label secured to the box, he saw neither the name “GSL” nor “Plasma.” The name appeared to belong to an individual at a post office box in Leadville, Colorado, a former silver-mining town nearly twenty-five miles south of Winston. Is that where I am? Leadville?
The last name on the label looked like “Robinson.” Sean had trouble making out the first name.
He gently tore the rest of the label from the box and took it to the refrigerator. He guardedly opened the refrigerator door a crack, just enough to trigger the bulb inside to turn on. Through the sliver of light that crept out from behind the door, he could read the first name. Phillip Robinson.
He wedged the label into his pocket and had nearly closed the door when something from inside the refrigerator caught his eye—a unique color that he recognized—glowing from the bright bulb behind it. A very distinctive shade of pale yellow.
He opened the door wider and saw a few dozen of the same containers he’d just seen in the box, only these ones were filled nearly to their tops with a liquid that appeared to be plasma.
It was the kind of display he had seen many times at GSL. Whenever a donor’s sitting was finished, the container their plasma was collected in was removed from a centrifuge machine and placed in a large metallic refrigerator along the back wall. The only notable difference between those containers and the ones he now saw before him was their labels. At GSL they were digitally printed with a good deal of information, including a donor identification number. All these had were patches of masking tape with handwritten dates. The ones in the front displayed the current date while the ones toward the back were marked “1/18.” A week ago. There appeared to be at least four containers filled per day.
Sean carefully closed the door, letting his eyes drift to the floor as he struggled to make sense of his finding. No explanation immediately presented itself.
He shook his head and peered around the corner of the room out into the hallway. The darkened corridor went on for a couple hundred feet. He was inside a much larger building than he had realized. Several closed doors lined one side of the hallway, while only one lined the left halfway down. The floor shared the same linoleum he stood on, suggesting he was not inside a residence, but a place of business.
The door closest to him, about ten feet away, was the only one open. A dull, quivering light from inside the doorway lit up the opposite wall of the hallway, creating a dancing projection like what would come from a television screen. Was someone inside watching TV? There was no sound.
Each step Sean took forward was careful and deliberate. He straightened his arms and pointed the gun in front of him, controlling his breath. When he reached the doorway, he tensed every nerve and swung inside, ready to put down anyone that jumped out at him.
There was no one there. It was a mostly empty, windowless room with a half-dozen black and white monitors mounted along the wall. All were on and each displayed a separate view. A small wooden desk was positioned below them, its chair lying on its side on the floor, as if it had been knocked over. A nearby suspended shelf with a file cabinet under it overflowed with large textbooks. Several of the book bindings displayed a red cross along their spines. On top of the shelf was a small desk lamp shining down at a sharp angle, exposing the good amount of clutter on top of the desk. It included a frosted medical jar made of glass that had what looked like milk inside it. The rest of the room was virtually bare.
Beside the fallen chair on the floor was a shattered ceramic beverage mug. It sat in a dark pool of liquid that smelled like coffee. About half of the rubble was still together in a single piece. On its face was what looked to be a hand-painted pink heart. Within its outline read the phrase “Best Uncle Ever!”
Sean guessed that the man who now lay in the basement must have inadvertently knocked the mug and chair to the floor when he saw Sean’s mock suicide attempt on the monitor. He probably frantically dashed down the staircase at that point. Sure enough, he recognized the interior of the freezer displayed across one of the monitors. The man he’d knocked cold was still lying motionless on the floor, just as he’d left him, partially tucked underneath the mattress.
Four of the monitors displayed outside shots. The pictures on them confirmed to Sean that it was nighttime and also that the storm he’d been hearing about on the radio over the past couple of days had hit. A near whiteout of fast-moving waves of blowing snow overwhelmed each view. Because the snow seemed to be moving at a different angle in each of them, Sean estimated that every camera was stationed on a different side of the building.
In one of the shots, he thought he could make out a small, empty parking lot. At the corner of the screen there appeared to stand a tall business sign. It was unlit and unreadable. Another shot gave coverage to the back side of the building. At least, that’s what Sean guessed from the sight of a large dumpster that sat in front of a short wire fence. He moved his face closer to the monitor when he noticed another object in the picture along the right edge of the screen. It looked like a car bumper and part of a taillight, but he wasn’t sure. It really could have been anything.
Still, his lips curled into a grin. He slid his fingers into his pants pocket and pulled out the ring of keys he had taken from the freezer door. Though not labeled, one of them had teeth that looked like ones made for a car ignition. He knew he wasn’t going to make it far on foot in the middle of a snowstorm. Having access to a car brightened his hopes for a successful escape. He had nearly exited the room to look for a back door when his gaze was captured by the image broadcast across the last monitor.
At first, the long object on the screen appeared to be a light-colored tarp with large lettering across it, tossed over some large boxes. Upon a closer look, however, he realized that what he was seeing was a twin-sized bed. The lettering across its top cover wasn’t lettering at all, but rather arms—bare, human arms that overlapped a sheet or blanket.
The shape of a body hadn’t been immediately decipherable below the cover because the head was concealed by what looked to be an angled tube jetting out from it.
The longer Sean stared into the screen, the more defined the image became. Beside the bed was a tall, vertical metal rod. From it hung a couple of IV containers with thin tubes running into the person’s arm. On the other side of the bed stood a short table with what looked to be medical equipment. Some of it seemed to be for monitoring purposes. Most notable was what appeared to be a centrifuge machine like the ones commonly used at GSL Plasma. Whoever was lying in that bed seemed to have something seriously wrong, he decided.
He lowered his head to the raised puddle of coffee that lay unmoving on the floor. When he did, he recalled the pool of blood from the photograph on Lumbergh’s computer, the one taken from the Andrew Carson crime scene. There was so much blood that Sean was certain Carson had been killed. But what if he hadn’t been? What if he had been only severely injured, and was now being kept alive by the people who took him, somewhere in this building?
Sean thought about what Jessica had told him through the freezer door—that what had happened to Carson was an unfortunate accident. If that were true, it could explain why they didn’t let him die. What it wouldn’t explain was why they took him from his home instead of simply calling for an ambulance or taking him to a hospital.
The irrefutable reality was that these people were ruthless and up to something significantly lawless. The fact that Sean had been taken from his home against his will and locked in a freezer was only more proof of that. Whatever was supposed to be completed in the next day or two was worth a huge price to them—something serious enough to warrant all the deception and felonies they had committed.
If they were willing to go as far as they already have, what more are they willing to do? he wondered. Would Carson be safe here if I escaped and went for help? In the monitor, he made out what appeared to be some kind of restraints wrapped around the bedridden man’s arms.
A jolt of anxiety suddenly ripped through Sean when the beginning of a loud song blared out from the dark. The gun nearly fell from his hand before he swung it in multiple directions, desperately searching for its source. It seemed to be coming from somewhere inside the room, which dropped his heart down into his stomach. If there was anyone else in the building, they’d likely hear what felt to him like a tornado siren echoing into the outside hallway, drawing attention to the precise spot where he stood.
“I like big butts and I cannot lie,” the rap lyrics trumpeted out. “You other brothers can’t deny…”
“You’re fucking kidding me,” Sean muttered under his breath, his pulse racing.
When he realized that the sound was pouring out from the desk just a couple of feet from him, he quickly yanked open the top drawer and found a black cellphone lying there among loose papers. He snatched it and backed himself into the corner of the room away from the doorway. Training his gun on the open door, he glanced down at the phone, looking for an off switch.
When he flipped the lid open, he pushed the first colored button he spotted. The song stopped. Sean breathed a sigh of relief, but before the air had time to escape his lungs, he heard a man’s voice emitting from the phone’s small speaker.
“Hello?” spoke the voice in w
hat sounded to him like a British accent.
His eyes widened. He glared down at the small, digitized display monitor on the phone. It read, “Dr. Phil.”
He froze. He’d heard that name mentioned before by his sister—something to do with Oprah Winfrey. He was certain, however, that the two men couldn’t be one and the same.
“You there, mate?” the voice asked.
Sean’s first impulse was to search again for the real off button, and end the call. However, it promptly occurred to him that whoever was on the other end could be in on what was happening. The name Phillip Robinson hovered in his mind—the addressee on the boxes at the top of the stairs. Could he be “Dr. Phil?”
If the man was part of the ring and he didn’t receive the response he was expecting—likely from the person who was now lying on the floor of the freezer downstairs—he would immediately suspect that something was wrong.
Even without fully grasping the situation he was in, Sean knew he couldn’t afford that. He also couldn’t afford to let the phone start ringing again.
He held the phone to his mouth and said in an altered tone, “Yeah?”
Chapter 25
“Y ou shot out their tires in the middle of a snowstorm, Chief? Fellow law enforcement officers? That’s pretty cold.”
“Is that a joke?” Lumbergh replied to Martinez.
The intern now seemed eerily at ease in the backseat of the police cruiser. His broad smile could be seen from the rearview mirror, lit up by a pair of oncoming headlights. He leaned forward with his face near the grill and chuckled. “Ah. Snowstorm. Cold. Very good. Chief. No. There was no pun intended.”