Blind Instinct: A Tess Barrett Thriller

by Michael W. Sherer

  The question made me pause. If Marcus had been out looking for Travis, he’d been checking out some pretty odd places.

  “I don’t like him,” Tess said. “I just don’t trust him.”

  “Who, Marcus? Travis hand-picked him.”

  “You weren’t there! You didn’t see what happened!”

  “You mean to Kenny?”

  At least she had the decency to blush. “Well, you were there, but you know…”

  I sighed. Yeah, I knew. I’d been out cold. If someone hadn’t jumped me and cold-cocked me, I might have had a fighting chance. Or I suppose I could be dead, like Kenny.

  “I’m telling you, Oliver,” she whispered fiercely, “Marcus shot him in cold blood. Kenny was trying to protect me.”

  “Maybe so, but like it or not, Marcus is in charge. You have to keep your nose clean.”

  She pouted, but didn’t say anything. In a moment, she put her headphones back on and went back to her music assignment.

  Tess finished the rest of her homework quickly, and I went to find Alice to ask if I could go home. Angry voices belonging to Marcus and Alice spilled out of the kitchen. Though difficult to make out, some words, like Tess’s and my names, carried clearly enough. I briefly considered eavesdropping, but decided whatever I might learn wasn’t worth the risk of getting caught. I needed the job, and I could guess the subject of the argument in the kitchen. I turned around and went the other way, out the front door.

  The rain had let up, patches of blue sky visible in the banks of gray clouds. In the driveway in front of the guesthouse Red was taking advantage of the lull to wash the grime from one of the SUVs. He looked up and nodded as I headed for the garage. Without thinking I abruptly changed direction and stopped a few yards away from him. He squatted by a rear wheel with a bucket of sudsy water and a stiff-bristled brush cleaning the wheel covers. He scrubbed in a circular motion, waiting me out. Red had driven me home one night and had checked my apartment for bogeymen under the bed. Not that I think there are monsters hiding behind the dust-bunnies down there, but I had a sense I could trust Red.

  “Marcus went out today?” I said finally, deciding how to play my cards.

  Red nodded. “Trying to figure out what the hell happened to Barrett.”

  “You know where he went?”

  Red started to answer, but hesitated before shaking his head.

  “Anyone go with him?” I asked.

  Red turned to look at me then, his face expressionless. He didn’t answer, which was all the answer I needed.

  “She’s a good kid.” I nudged a stray pebble with my toe. “A little spoiled, but she doesn’t deserve to get caught in the middle of whatever crap is going on.”

  He stared at me a moment longer, gave me a short nod and turned back to his work. I lingered, thinking I should say something else, but nothing came to me.

  Chapter 7

  Rose Dunn leaned across the seat of her Continental GT before Austin could react and planted a wet kiss on Austin’s cheek. A wave of alcohol vapor followed her in, nauseating him. He jerked his head away and swiped at it with the back of his hand. It came away a horrid shade of pink his mother called “Incrediberry” or “Glam Slam.” One of those stupid names cosmetic companies thought were cute. Austin wasn’t much on fashion, but he knew the names—and the colors—were a scam to get older women like his mom to buy them thinking that a shade of lipstick would make them young again.

  “What’d you do that for?” he said. “God, Mom, not here in front of everyone. How many times do I have to tell you?”

  The vodka fumes dissipated somewhat as she straightened up She was starting in on the Bloody Marys and Screwdrivers earlier and earlier these days. Austin took note of the stylish tennis dress she wore with a pink designer tennis sweater draped over her shoulders. It was a wonder she could drive let alone play tennis, but then she probably didn’t bother taking her racquet out once she got to the club. Austin was pretty sure the pro at the club was giving her lessons in something besides tennis.

  “Oh, right, I forgot,” she said, her sweet smile turning to the sarcastic sneer she normally wore. “I might embarrass you. Whatever.”

  Austin yanked on the door handle and climbed out, his face already burning. He turned and tried to smile.

  “I’ll see you later, Mom.”

  She waved cheerily. “Don’t forget, I have an appointment this afternoon.”

  “I’ll get a ride home, don’t worry.” Austin glanced around to see who might be looking and quickly closed the door.

  Four cars back, a hulking black SUV with tinted windows waited at the curb with its wheels already turned into the through lane. As soon as Austin’s mom drove away, the SUV pulled out and followed at a discreet distance. Austin turned his head and watched an identical SUV turn into an empty slot in the faculty parking lot. Two men in suits climbed out as Austin walked to the front door of the main school building. They cut across the grassy lawn on a path that would intersect his, and fell in several yards behind him.

  Inside, the dim hallway was empty. His footsteps echoed hollowly as he made his way to his classroom. He’d already missed half of fifth period and wondered for the umpteenth time why he had to go home for lunch. It would be so much easier to eat at school, but his mother insisted for some reason. Half the time she wasn’t home anyway, so it didn’t matter. Maybe if he brought it up he could convince his father that lunch at home was a dumb idea.

  The door behind him opened with a huff of air and closed with a soft thunk. The footsteps of the pair behind him echoed in syncopated rhythm with his own. He didn’t know why the government bothered with assigning a Secret Service detail to him. They did little to protect him. All they did was attract attention to him. Austin was sure he caught a lot more flak because he had a detail than he would have if they weren’t around.

  Muted voices from around a corner brought his attention back to his surroundings. He frowned. No one was supposed to be out of class. His pulse raced. All he needed now was a confrontation with a teacher, or worse, the headmaster. There was nothing for it. Ahead lay his class; behind tromped the Secret Service. He lowered his head and rounded the corner. The voices stopped. He raised his eyes and saw his worst nightmare.

  Doug Herlihy slouched against a locker, spinning a basketball in the palm of his hand. His two homies, Blaise and Donnie, faced him with eager grins. All three turned simultaneously when Austin turned the corner, and their smiles grew wider. Austin broke into a cold sweat. The week before the trio had shaken him down for his allowance and had taken his iPod, too. The only reason he hadn’t lost his phone to them, too, was because he’d plugged it into its charger and forgotten it that day. Normally, he kept a wide berth when he sensed any of them around. His heart beat faster. He didn’t want to give up his phone to these yahoos. Heck, he didn’t want to give them anything, but three against one, odds weren’t in his favor. Who was he fooling? One on one, he’d still be chicken.

  That’s when he lost it. Sort of. The goons behind him were no use despite the Sig Sauer P229 pistols they carried. They wouldn’t step in unless he was threatened by terrorists with assault rifles, or suicide bombers. He was on his own. Suddenly, the game app on his phone popped into his head. His avatar, Wolfsbane, took no crap from anyone or anything the game threw at him, from werewolves to vampires to zombies. With every step he took, he felt the strength of his alter ego spread from the steady pounding of his heart into his limbs. And the closer he got, the more his foes took on the likeness of the creatures in Never Bitten.

  “Well, well,” Doug said, pushing away from the locker. “What do we have here?”

  Doug’s canine teeth grew into long, sharp fangs and his brows drew together in an ominous, dark line. A chunk of rotted skin fell off Donnie’s cheek, revealing jawbone and teeth. Blaise suddenly looked like he hadn’t shaved in weeks. Rage coursed through Austin’s body, and his vision turned red.

  “Look, it’s Afterthought!” Blaise
snickered.

  “Shut up.” Austin said.

  “More like afterbirth,” Donnie slobbered, his left eye rolling half out of its socket.

  “Shut up!” Doug commanded. He took a step forward and held out his hand. “Gotta pay a toll if you want to pass.”

  Austin picked up his pace. Only a few more steps now.

  When Austin didn’t slow, Doug’s brow furrowed. “I’m not screwing around here, punk. Give it up.”

  Austin planted his foot inside Doug’s reach and threw a punch into his midsection with all his weight behind it.

  “Fuck off,” he snarled, and walked away.

  Doug doubled over in pain, mouth working like a fish to suck in oxygen. His buddies gaped at Austin as he strode away.

  Austin felt his avatar slowly leave his body as if leaking through a small drain somewhere. In its place, Austin’s muscles weakened to Jell-O and his knees quaked. But he held his head high and kept on walking. He thought of the threesome behind him and smiled.

  Damn, that felt good.

  Chapter 8

  The sound of voices intruded on Tess’s concentration, causing her to hit the rewind button for the reader app on her laptop. She listened to the sentence again, but the voices still disrupted her focus. As if homework hadn’t been hard enough when worried thoughts of Travis kept sneaking up on her. What an incredibly awful day it had been. With a sigh, she closed out of the reader. Nearly finished with the passage for Comp/Gov class anyway, she could listen to the rest before she went to bed. For now, she turned her attention to the voices elsewhere in the house.

  Her hearing was no more acute than it had been before the accident. She just noticed sounds more without the sensory input of sight to occupy her brain. The same was true for her sense of smell, though she’d trained with Yoshi to process and recognize smells in a way someone might learn to read with their eyes. She couldn’t smell any better than Oliver or anyone else, but her enhanced ability to recognize and name scents had prompted her reaction to Marcus earlier. While Oliver may have noticed an odor immediately, and even noted its unpleasantness, she’d noticed its components, its unusual nature and had tried to identify it. When she’d pointed it out to Oliver, he’d identified at least a portion of it—manure. Not dog poop, though. Something with a grassy note. And then there had been the other, metallic scent, unrelated to the manure.

  Tess shrugged it off. She’d think about it later. The voices closed in despite the speakers’ attempts to converse in hushed tones. Two people approached from the direction of the front of the house. Alice’s voice was easily recognizable. But Tess didn’t know the man she was talking to. Someone Alice knew, apparently. It must be a tradesman from one of the many services Alice employed to maintain the house and grounds. Tess waited, expecting them to pass by on their way to Alice’s office, but they paused outside the library door. She held her breath.

  The door opened.

  “Tess?” Alice sounded tentative. “You have a visitor.”

  Footsteps crossed the hardwood to the Oriental rug under her feet that Tess still remembered so vividly. She stood and turned, facing the man as he stopped.

  “I’m pleased to meet you, Tess,” he said. He spoke softly but his voice was a resonant baritone. “My name is Jack Turnbull.”

  Tess put out her hand. “Nice to meet you, Mr. Turnbull.”

  He chuckled and shook her hand firmly. “It’s General, actually, but please call me Jack. I was a friend of your father’s, and even closer to your Uncle Travis.”

  “You were friends with Dad? I’m surprised we’ve never met.”

  “I spend most of my time in Washington, D.C., so it was difficult to find time to visit. Now I’m sorry I never did. I would like to have known you growing up. You’ve turned into an extraordinary young woman.”

  Definitely not ordinary, Tess thought ruefully. She didn’t know anyone her age who was blind. But she didn’t feel extraordinary in any sense. It was just one of those compliments adults pay when they’re trying to be nice.

  “Why did you want to see me?” She didn’t feel comfortable using his name yet.

  “I have something important I need to discuss with you,” he said. “Perhaps somewhere a little more private?”

  Tess gripped the back of the chair to keep her hand from shaking as her pulse quickened. “Alice?”

  “It’s all right, Tess,” Alice said. “You can trust him.”

  “Then why the long discussion on the way in here?”

  “You heard that?” Alice said, her voice incredulous.

  “I didn’t have to hear the words to know how long it was, and how heated, I might add.”

  Turnbull laughed, startling her. “She’s ready, Alice. I told you not to worry.”

  “Ready for what?” Tess demanded. “I’m always the last to know what’s going on around here.”

  “You can use James’s office,” Alice told the general. “It’s clean.” There was a pause then Alice said, “Yoshi sweeps it every day. I don’t trust anyone else.”

  “That will be fine,” Turnbull said. “Tess? I assume you know where it is.”

  Tess was still digesting what Alice had said. Though he often had a broom in his hands, Yoshi didn’t do indoor housework. Which meant that Alice was referring to bugs, the electronic kind. Tess shook her head. She still couldn’t get used to the fact that Alice and Yoshi were much more than they purported to be. Her whole life Tess had thought of them as an odd appendage to her family. She knew they were housekeeper and gardener, but they’d always felt more like eccentric relatives. Two weeks earlier, they’d fended off three armed attackers with their bare hands.

  “Tess?” Alice’s voice broke through her thoughts.

  “Yes, of course I know,” Tess said. “Follow me.”

  She turned ninety degrees and counted off the number of paces she knew would take her to the bookcases along the wall. She put her hands out and felt along the shelves, fingers nimbly taking in information and letting her know where she stood. They found the edge of a section, counted books in toward the center of the shelf and stopped. Tess tipped three books back on their spines and reached in over them until her fingers touched the small wood panel that slid aside, revealing a hidden keypad. She tapped in the remembered sequence and heard the familiar click. She righted the books, grasped the edge of the shelf with her fingertips and pulled. The entire section swung out on well-oiled hinges.

  The general let out a low whistle. “I’ll be damned. A panic room. Very clever.”

  “It’s my dad’s office,” Tess corrected him.

  “And a very nice one at that,” he said, his voice moving past her into the room beyond. “James always did keep things close to the vest. Travis didn’t keep many secrets from me, but James was a different story.”

  She followed him inside, burning with curiosity about his comments, and pulled the bookcase shut behind her. Inside her father’s office, the door was simply a section of wood-paneled wall, but between the two sides, the door contained both soundproofing and a sandwich of thick steel and Kevlar plates with sand as the filling. The door alone weighed several tons, more than the doors on most bank vaults. As she turned around, she caught the subtle scents of leather and something woodsy, comforting smells that made her think of the grandparents she never knew.

  “Sorry for intruding,” Turnbull said. “But I need your help.”

  “My help?”

  He took her arm gently and steered her to a chair. “Let me explain and maybe you won’t be so surprised. I’ve been a friend of your family for a long time. I knew your grandparents.”

  “But—”

  “I know. They died before you were born.”

  Her father had never talked about it much, but Tess had been aware of having no grandparents like other kids when she was growing up. Her mother’s parents, too, had died when Tess was still a toddler.

  “Why does everyone in this family die so young?” she said.

  �
�Just rotten luck is all.” The general’s voice was soft. “I was stationed at Ft. Irwin in California back then, and I knew the boys when they were growing up—your father, James, and Travis. Your grandparents died when the boys were still fairly young, though there’s an age gap between them. I think James might have just turned twenty at the time. Travis was maybe eleven or twelve. Their parents hadn’t planned for it, of course, so there was no will, no instructions.”

  “How did they get by?” Tess knew her father had been resourceful, but couldn’t imagine what it would be like to take responsibility for a younger sibling after losing her parents.

  “Ted and Joanie—your grandparents—had life insurance, and they’d been doing pretty well, so they had some money set aside. The boys were taken care of financially. But I was concerned about them, so I petitioned the court for guardianship, which it granted. The boys continued to live in the house, but I kept tabs on them. I was so proud of Travis when he joined the military. Of course, I was proud of your father, too, for getting him through the teen years. Sally—your mom—helped, too, even before she and James got married.”

  “What does this have to do with me?”

  The general chuckled. “Sorry. I got caught up in my own story. I just wanted you to have some background, Tess, so you get a feel for who I am and understand my position here. I’ve been on the board of directors of your dad’s company ever since he started developing computer games in your grandparents’ garage. James asked me to be the company’s first director, in fact, even before he asked his own dad, your grandfather. Here’s the thing; I’m sure you know that your parents left the company to you.”

  “I know it’s in some kind of trust fund until I turn twenty-one. Uncle Travis controls my shares until then.”

  “Exactly right. But Travis is missing.”

  Tess thought about the implications. “Which means the shares come back to me.”

  “Well, technically they’re yours anyway, but until you turn twenty-one you still don’t control those shares, which means you can’t vote unless the board of directors approves. Or, the board could appoint an interim guardian.”