by John A. Daly
Where was he? What had happened to him? He was wearing a hospital gown but he was definitely not in a hospital.
He tried again. On shaky legs, he stood and straightened his back. He took another couple of steps before he felt his bare right foot drag. He grabbed onto something with his hand to maintain his balance, realizing that it was the handle of a refrigerator. When its door swung open from his weight, he nearly went down again. A second later, he found himself glaring at several rows of clear containers that sat inside. Each was filled nearly to the top with a rust-colored fluid.
“Those motherfuckers,” he muttered. His nostrils flared and his dark eyes burned a hole through the wooden door he spotted at the far wall.
A stiff shot with his shoulder splintered the door’s frame and he crashed through. Falling to the white, frozen ground, what felt like an arctic windblast quickly tore his gown from his body, leaving him naked and prone to the brutal elements. Yet, the rage that scorched its way through his soul kept him warm.
When he pulled himself back to his feet, his eyes narrow and tearing from the wind, he saw a white van parked just yards away, outside of a large building. He hobbled his way toward the van, cursing and growling until he reached the passenger side door. He yanked it open and pulled himself inside. There weren’t any keys in the ignition, and his visible breath filled up the cab and steamed up the windshield as he searched for them. When he popped open the glove box, he found what looked to be a handheld taser. He snatched it out and pushed its button. A wicked blast of bright blue light lit up the interior of the van. He’d found himself a weapon.
The people that had done this to him were somewhere inside the large building. He couldn’t leave without settling that score. They had to pay. But just as he opened the van door, a small, intense light in the distance near the corner of the building pierced its way through the night. He closed the door.
The light sped closer for a few more seconds before it went dark. It had to belong to a vehicle. Perhaps a snowmobile. Seconds later, the figure of a bundled up man emerged, running toward the van.
Booth grinned and clumsily climbed over the seat and into the back of vehicle. He hunched down behind the driver’s seat, waiting like a stalking predator.
The van door swung open and the bundled up man slid into the driver’s seat. He quickly reached across the cab for the glove box, his body freezing at the sight of it already hanging open with the taser gone.
“What the blooming hell?” he said with a thick accent.
When he spun his head to look behind him, Booth lunged forward and drove the taser into the temple of his head, lighting up his face with its blast. The man’s body convulsed violently. The frozen, horrified expression on his face made him look as if he wanted to scream, but couldn’t. All the man could do was listen helplessly to the haunting words that suddenly poured out from behind him.
“Your blood won’t save lives like mine, shitberg. But I’m going to have fun taking it anyway.”
Booth kept the juice turned on until the man looked to be on the verge of passing out. When he finally let up, the man’s limp, weakened body fell forward. Booth dropped the taser and latched onto the man’s head with his bulky hands. He screamed with effort as he slammed it repeatedly into the van’s steel dashboard. Warm blood oozed down through Booth’s fingers, widening the sadistic grin that stretched across his face as he continued the man’s torment.
With insane glee, Booth shoved him into the dashboard with such malevolent force that the knobs and levers quickly whittled away, along with the doctor’s face.
Chapter 36
Lumbergh stood bent over at the waist. He was holding both of Carson’s legs at a sharp angle to try and drive more blood back toward his brain, while Jessica placed her ear near Carson’s mouth to listen to his breathing and check his pulse again. Carson had stopped seizing.
The chief ’s head spun when he thought he heard the sound of an automobile engine fire up from somewhere outside in between gusts of wind. He grabbed the overturned rocking chair behind him and dragged it close enough to drape Carson’s ankles across it. He then raced to the shattered bedroom window. Jessica glared at him in confusion.
Lumbergh pulled his Mag light from his side and swept its beam back and forth across the blowing snow. Across the alley behind the building he saw the outline of another smaller building that looked like it could have been used for storage. A door at the front of it was flapping open from the wind.
A pair of brake lights suddenly lit up at the far end of the building. Lumbergh’s head swiveled toward it. “There’s a car back here!” he yelled. “Whose is it?”
“It’s got to be our van,” answered Jessica, not moving her head from Carson.
“Who would be driving it?”
“I don’t know. Phillip maybe. He had the keys.”
Lumbergh whipped the radio to his mouth. “Redick! I need you here now! Right now!”
Redick didn’t answer. The van began moving around the corner of the building.
Lumbergh breathlessly raced for the bedroom door, stopping for a moment before he reached the hallway. “If you let him die, I’m going to do everything in my power to make sure you spend the rest of your life in prison. Do you understand?”
Jessica nodded, only lifting her eyes to Lumbergh for a moment before returning them to Carson, whose glazed eyes swam in disarray.
With shotgun in hand, Lumbergh ran down the hallway.
Some radio air cleared before the chief finally heard Redick’s voice emit from his side. “We’ve got a situation here, Chief.”
“I’ve got a situation here!” Lumbergh yelled out, knowing that Redick couldn’t hear him with his hand off his radio.
He ran out through the garage and into the storm. He saw the flashing red lights of the sheriff ’s car rotating down the road, close to where he thought he’d left his police cruiser. The lights weren’t moving in closer and he didn’t understand why.
The van was steadily heading in the opposite direction, traveling up the snow-covered road with its headlights turned off. Lumbergh could only see the vehicle when the driver tapped the brakes.
“Dammit!” he roared.
He threw the shotgun in a mound of snow beside him, knowing it would only slow him down. He still had his pistol in his holster. He took off after the van on foot, reaching for his radio while doing his best not to slip and fall.
“Redick, get up here! The culprits are getting away. They might have Sean with them!”
“I can’t!” Redick yelled back. “We . . . We ran over someone, God-dammit. They’re mangled under the car!”
Lumbergh’s eyes bulged. A gasp whizzed out his lips. “Is it Sean?”
“No. I . . . I think it’s Martinez. He came running right at us! Why isn’t he with you?”
“Shit!” grunted Lumbergh. “I left him locked up in my car! How in the hell did he get out?”
“How the hell would I know?” Redick screamed back defensively. “You stole him from us, remember?”
Lumbergh cursed, slid the radio back to his side, and yanked out his Glock. He clenched his teeth and ran as quickly as he could, lungi
ng with every stride as the frigid wind and snow pounded his small body. Another flicker of the brake lights showed that the van was now far away and moving too quickly to catch up to on foot.
Lumbergh dropped to the snow on one knee and steadied himself to fire. He knew almost instantly, however, that he couldn’t take the shot. Even after the van’s headlights switched on and gave him a more definitive target in the distance, he couldn’t risk sending the van off the side of the road by blowing out a tire or hitting the driver. Sean might be inside.
Lumbergh crumbled to the snow, falling to both knees, and cursing the world as he turned his head to the sky. The haunting words that Andrew Carson had uttered back in the building floated to the top of his thoughts.
“They’re going to kill him.”
Though it was possible Sean was in that van, the notion didn’t seem likely. If his pursuers were intent on killing him, they wouldn’t have bothered to take him to another location first. They would have put him down where they found him.
A reluctant tear began to slide down Lumbergh’s face as he holstered his gun. He told himself that it was drawn from the wind, but he knew that wasn’t the case. He held his radio to his mouth as his hand shook and told Redick to have his men find out where the road came out and to get some deputies there.
“Head up the road on foot and you’ll find the building,” Lumbergh added. “You’re not that far out. Andrew Carson is inside. He needs medical attention. There’s a woman in there, too. Take her into custody once the ambulance gets here. I’ll explain later.”
“The ambulance is pulling up right now!” Redick shouted excitedly. “Wait! Andrew Carson from Greeley? He’s there?”
Lumbergh switched his radio off. He wasn’t in the mood to explain it all. He climbed to his feet with his head hung low and began making his way back toward the building. He clipped the radio to his side and pulled his Mag light from next to it.
When he flipped the light on, he noticed that there had been a lot of activity along the road. Footprints, tire tracks, and even what appeared to be the ski lines of a snowmobile. Most were faint, having been covered with fresh snow, but he saw a more recent set of skis that led over the shoulder of the road and down a hill.
Lumbergh scoured the side of the hill with his beam and traced the tracks downward until they disappeared behind some trees. The hill was steep. He probably shouldn’t have tried to navigate down it with only one arm to balance himself, but he did. He slipped along the snowy, frozen terrain repeatedly, sliding on his butt when he needed to. It was becoming dangerous, but he didn’t allow anything to discourage his descent.
Whenever his light lit up new ground, he feared he’d find the large body of his brother-in-law lying face down in the snow. Each overturned tree and narrow boulder seemed to resemble that frightful image until his mind let him accept otherwise and allowed him to take a new breath.
The further down he climbed, the more isolated Lumbergh felt both in his thoughts and his soul. How would his family move past what had happened?
On wobbly legs, he ducked between two sagging trees. That’s when his eyes widened at the sight of a thin red laser dot pinned to his chest. He froze in his tracks.
“Bang!” he heard a man’s voice shout out from the dark over the whistle of the wind.
The sound jolted Lumbergh’s body. His mind raced through the process of dropping his light and replacing it with his Glock, but he knew it would take the hidden man in the woods only a fraction of that time to fire off a shot.
“You’ve thrown your last shrimp on the barbie, mate!” the voice shouted.
Lumbergh recognized the bad humor, but more importantly, he now recognized the man’s voice.
It was Sean.
The corners of Lumbergh’s mouth slowly curled into a relieved grin.
Sunday
Chapter 37
Lumbergh watched the beginnings of a new morning flourish out from beyond the distant, snow-covered horizon. Billowy orange clouds with yellow streaks hugging their edges hovered over the crisp outline of a curved mountain range. The crest of treetops resembled goose bumps from so far away.
It would have been an even grander, awe-inspiring sight had it not been viewed from behind the metal grill of the sheriff car’s backseat. He sat there in the warmth of the vehicle’s heater as the engine purred along, waiting alone for the return of one of the deputies who would drive him to Redick’s office. There, multiple charges would be filed against him.
Lumbergh had never had his rights read to him before. It was a somber, surreal experience.
The wind had died down dramatically and the snow was no longer falling. The turbulent weather had left with most of the squad cars and the ambulance that had taken Andrew Carson to the hospital. Carson was going to pull through. He heard one of the EMTs say the injury looked “purely vascular.” The same paramedic got Carson to feel finger-pressure against his toes—a good sign that if there was damage done to his spine, it wasn’t permanent. It was even possible the numbness Carson felt earlier may have stemmed from an old leg injury that was acting up. Regardless, the bullet from his neck still needed to be removed. Carson was likely already in surgery for that.
Carson would soon be reunited with his daughter. Katelyn was said to sound ecstatic over the phone when she heard the news that he had been found. Lumbergh had witnessed the ear-to-ear grin on Carson’s face, in between winces, when he briefly spoke to her from the top of a stretcher as he was lifted into the ambulance.
Jessica and Sean were still being questioned by the sheriff ’s people inside the restaurant. Lumbergh expected Jessica would be taken away for processing at any moment. Her life was a world of hurt: a daughter who was still dying, a brother she learned had been killed, and the knowledge that she was the only one left to go down for everything her family had done.
Dr. Phillip Robinson’s mutilated body was discovered in the abandoned van near Leadville. His legacy would not be to live on as a hero in the medical world, but rather as a man with a twisted mind who was murdered by perhaps an even more twisted person. Norman Booth was on the still on the loose.
Lumbergh lowered his gaze to his freshly wrapped sling before turning his head and peering down the road through the back window at the mob of reporters being held at bay by a few strands of yellow tape and uniformed officers. He couldn’t hear the reporters from that distance, but they looked to be shouting over each other, snapping off pictures, and panning the area with video cameras.
He hoped Redick would at least have the decency not to drive the two of them through that crowd on their way out and let the police chief of Winston be shown as a common perp. Broadcasted on the evening news and in papers with pictures of him humiliated in the back of the sheriff ’s car wasn’t the way Lumbergh wanted the public to learn of what he had done.
He knew his days as the police chief of Winston were over. He’d broken serious laws and the man he’d illegally taken into custody was now dead. Martinez’s body had left with the county coroner an hour earlier, after deputies worked for twenty minutes to pry it out from under the car.
Lumbergh understood that he was likely going to serve time, and the accomplished law enforcement career he’d built over the years wouldn’t co
unt for anything once he got out of prison.
At least he could still face Diana. His wife understood that everything he had done, he had done for her brother. He felt the warmth and unconditional companionship of her voice over the phone when they spoke. Their marriage would remain strong. He felt as though there was more she wanted to tell him, but he told her they’d get to talk in person at the sheriff ’s office. He couldn’t wait to see her face again.
He lifted his head when he felt the passenger door open. He was expecting it to be Redick or one of the deputies. Instead he found Sean taking a seat in front of him. The car creaked under the added weight. A large gauze bandage was fastened to the back of his head.
“What are you doing?” asked Lumbergh.
“Just checking in. You warm enough?”
“I’m fine.”
“Listen, uh . . .” Sean began with a humility in his tone that Lumbergh had never heard before from his brother-in-law. “I want to thank you. I want to thank you for coming after me.” He turned his head to meet Lumbergh’s attention with the corner of his eye. With a chuckle, he added, “I didn’t know you cared.”
Lumbergh blew air from his nose, subtly shaking his head. “A lot of good it did you,” he said. “I didn’t end up helping you at all. You got away on your own.”
“Don’t give me that shit,” said Sean. “You saved Carson’s life. He was dying on that bedroom floor. Jessica couldn’t have kept him alive on her own. You got the paramedics here in time.”
Lumbergh lifted his shoulders in concession. “Fine.”