by John A. Daly
“You’re sure of that?” Meagher asked.
In answering yes, Lumbergh recognized that he’d taken full ownership of being wrong in his dismissal of the claims made to him Saturday morning by his brother-in-law. It was a bitter pill to swallow.
Sean’s whereabouts were still unknown, but at least Lumbergh had a lead now in the form of the dead agent, and he was sure the FBI in Las Vegas would be able to shed a bright light over everything that was going on in his town.
Chapter 42
Until Monday night, Ron Oldhorse hadn’t been privy to Sean Coleman’s story of the mysterious man who’d shot himself on Meyers Bridge. He didn’t make it into town all that often and never read the newspaper, for he had no interest in the local gossip. But after a double murder occurred in the mountains that he considered his backyard and he was asked to help find a lost child who was chased into the woods by a maniac, he grew concerned by the evil that had come to Winston.
He’d planned to spend the morning bow hunting along the eastern ridge of Aimes Pass, but felt compelled to begin the crisp, bright day at Meyers Bridge. He went there unsure of what he was looking for or hoped to find.
Oldhorse never had much use for Sean Coleman and didn’t believe him to be an honorable man. Still, the security guard’s account that he’d overheard from the chief and his officer during the night’s search triggered his curiosity. Like Jefferson, Oldhorse wondered if it had some relevance to the arrival of the murderer— that is, if there was any truth to what Coleman had said.
There was a personal stake in his interest as well. He’d liked Zed Hansen. Oldhorse didn’t really consider Zed a friend. The tribesman had no friends. However, he respected the kind gentleman who’d always kept his word in their dealings. While most of Winston was uneasy with Oldhorse’s solitary, naturalistic lifestyle and was skeptical of his past, Zed was different. He showed reverence to Oldhorse and treated the man as an equal rather than as an eccentric novelty.
If Sean was telling the truth, three days and one heavy rainstorm had passed through since the mystery man’s dead body had fallen to the river. If there was any trail of where the man had come from, it was far from fresh. Oldhorse, however, relished the challenge.
There wasn’t much to find by the bridge itself other than some prints from a small person who Oldhorse deemed the same as those left the night before by Toby Parker. North of the bridge, however, there were plentiful signs of human activity. On the east side of the river, the moist earth was littered with the footprints created by a large man. Their depth suggested that they were left during or shortly after the rainstorm on Saturday night, which was after Sean had already brought his claim to the police station. This led Oldhorse to deduct that they were left by Coleman himself, who was most likely pillaging the area in hopes of finding the same type of trace evidence that Oldhorse was now in search of. By Oldhorse’s assessment, Coleman had indeed found something.
An object had been exhumed from under the moist earth. A crater in the soil and a few rocks were the focus of a lot of attention.
The tip of a large, compound hunting bow jetted out from the unzipped flap of a customized camouflage backpack that Oldhorse wore across his shoulders. The top of the bow lurked high above his mane of scraggly hair that was loosely tied back in a ponytail. He scrutinized the crater and noticed something small and shiny resting at its center. He dropped to a knee to investigate.
He dug his fingers inside and pulled out a couple of metal paperclips, the standard kind used for bundling papers. His hawkish eyes inspected them closely before he stood back up and shoved them in the front pocket of his jeans.
When widening out his search, he found a trail of trampled and broken grass that led to the southeast. A few trace footprints were small enough for Oldhorse to determine that they belonged to someone other than Sean, but larger than Toby. This got his juices flowing, but they appeared to lead back in the direction of the road. This implied that the origin of whoever left them lay to the north, upriver.
Chapter 43
Sean found it nearly impossible to take his eyes off the widow’s expressionless gaze while she sat quietly in his car across the parking lot, sheltered by a shade tree. Lisa hadn’t uttered a word since finishing the letter. In his hand, Sean held the well-used receiver from a pay phone outside of a convenience store, having just confirmed a collect call to the Winston Police Department.
He could only imagine the confusion and pain that Lisa must be experiencing, having found out in the same day not only that her husband had killed himself, but that their whole marriage was a lie— one that had nearly gotten her killed less than an hour ago.
The somberness that surrounded her displayed a stark contrast to the typical summer action of an upper-scale, carefree community in northern Michigan. The area was flush with people—a mix of midlife crises driving convertibles and vacationing tourists toting their families around in minivans and SUVs—all seemingly happy in their lives.
Sean watched her hold a damp rag against her raw eye. Cradled inside it were cubes of ice he had stolen from a plastic bag inside the machine beside where he stood. Even with her beaten face and her defeated spirit, she hadn’t lost the remarkable beauty he had earlier witnessed from the forest. The fact that her asshole husband couldn’t keep his pants on for that struck him as total idiocy.
“Where the fuck are you?” Jefferson yelled into the receiver so loudly that Sean nearly dropped the phone.
Sean’s eyes narrowed. He was taken back by the officer’s unexpected verbal assault.
“What the hell’s your problem, Jefferson?” he quickly replied. “Put Lumbergh on the phone! I need to talk to an adult!”
“The chief ’s not here, Sean! He’s down at Beggar’s Basin where they found the guy you shot!”
Back in Winston, Jefferson’s eyes bulged from behind his sloppy, paper-riddled desk at the sound of his own words. He hastily covered the phone receiver with his meaty hand and silently mouthed an obscenity over his shoulder before checking to see if anyone else in the office had heard him. The theory that Sean Coleman was behind the death of the man dragged from the river that morning was his own. His suspicions and eagerness to stick it to Sean had gotten the better of him, and he knew immediately that he had screwed up. Sean needed to come back to Winston where things could be sorted out. In a thoughtless moment, Jefferson feared that he had just scared off the man who surely held the answers to everything that had gone on over the past few days. He held the phone back to his ear and timidly listened for Sean’s response. He could have never predicted what it would be.
“What in the hell are you talking about? The guy I shot isn’t even in Colorado!”
“What?” Jefferson shouted as he leapt to his feet. “You did shoot somebody?!”
He could almost hear Sean scowl into the receiver. “Sean, listen to me,” he said in a careful and much more restrained tone, as if he was trying to talk Sean down off the ledge of a tall building. “You need to turn yourself in. Tell me where you are.”
He placed his hand over the phone and snapped to attention the office secretary who had just approached the copy machine beside his cubicle. “Was there a caller ID number for this call?” he asked in a hushed spurt. “Does one show up on that little screen for a collect call?”
“Turn myself in?” Sean snarled over the phone line. “What the hell for? What’s going on?”
“Sean, I’m sure there’s a good explanation for whatever happened,” Jefferson said. “We can talk about it here. We’ll get the chief in on this and just sort everything out.”
Sean was having none of it. He winced and slammed the receiver down on the payphone’s metal hook.
“Idiot!” he shouted into the air before glancing at Lisa who was still seated in the car. His outburst went unnoticed by her.
Under heavy breath, he picked up the phone and placed a second collect call to the person he wished he had tried first. He could hear the alarm in his sister�
��s voice when the operator asked her if she would accept the call.
“Yes. Thank God,” Diana stated over the line.
Sean was still burning. “D, I just talked to Jefferson and—”
“Sean, where the hell have you been?” she broke in before he could finish. “Someone killed Uncle Zed!”
His stomach sank and his legs went wobbly. His sister continued on, but he heard little of what she said. He fell to a knee and placed the palm of his hand on the sidewalk underneath him. Keeping the phone to his ear, he looked across the parking lot where he noticed an expression of concern on Lisa’s face. She was staring back at him. She quickly climbed out of the car and ran to his side.
She asked him repeatedly if he was alright, but he didn’t answer.
“Do you have any clue what’s been going on here for the past couple of days?” Diana asked.
After a few seconds more of processing, he finally answered, “No.”
He listened as she launched into a breathless summary of the double murder that went down at his apartment and how Toby survived with the help of their uncle. She relayed the description Toby had given from the hospital of a tall, silver-haired man with ugly teeth who had come looking for Sean. She told him of Rocco.
“This morning, they found a body downriver, Sean,” she added. “He was wearing a black trench coat. He had blonde hair. A hole in the back of his head, just like you told Gary. Sean, what happened on that bridge? Who is this man who came looking for you?”
He said nothing. The despair depicted in his eyes steadily corroded into anger. After a few seconds, he muttered in a tone that his sister couldn’t recognize, “How did they know to come looking for me?”
“What?” Lisa and Diana asked him at the same time.
“The newspaper!” he answered to his own question before slamming his fist into the brick wall of the building behind him. “Roy Hughes. He wrote about what I saw in the Beacon!”
His eyes transcended into recollection of what Toby had told him the morning he’d left. The boy had known about what had gone down at Meyers Bridge from a piece Roy Hughes had written in The Winston Beacon. The article was only printed for entertainment purposes, to make Sean look like a lunatic for once again wasting the police chief ’s time. Yet, the headline clearly captured the attention of Moretti’s crew who were looking for Kyle Kimble. The article let them know that Kimble had died at his own hand.
The gears in Sean’s head ground away and he remained unresponsive to the querying voices around him. He imagined how the large man who Toby described as having silver hair had seen Sean’s name in the paper and came to his home to find out what more Sean had seen or knew. And once that man had gotten inside Sean’s apartment, he would have found Kyle Kimble’s bag and concluded that it was Sean Coleman who had possession of Moretti’s ledger—the one that should now be in the hands of the FBI. Zed, Bailey, and Toby were all in the wrong place at the wrong time.
“I led them right to you,” Sean said to Lisa without looking at her.
Kyle Kimble had made it clear in the letter to his wife that she would be safe at the cottage in Michigan because Moretti knew nothing of it. With an address turning up in Sean’s apartment, however, they were probably able to look up the property information somehow and see who owned it. When Kimble’s name came up, they most likely figured it was worth their time to check out what was there. Maybe something that could incriminate them. Maybe even the ledger.
Sean sat down on the sidewalk, resting his back against the building with the phone still glued to his ear. He lowered his head.
“And if I hadn’t passed out at Meyers Bridge Friday night, none of this would have happened,” he said to no one in particular. “It would have ended that morning. I gave those sons of bitches a trail and they followed it, and people are dead because of it.” His eyes finally rose to meet hers. “And they nearly killed you.”
“Sean, what are you talking about?” he heard his sister’s voice say through the receiver. “Are you there with someone?”
“Diana, listen to me,” he said into the phone. “The man behind all of this . . . his name is Moretti. He’s some kind of Las Vegas big shot. The dead man in the river . . . his name is Kyle Kimble. I’m here with his wife. Moretti’s people tried to kill her.” He took a second to catch his breath before continuing. “I stopped them. I need to talk to Gary.”
“Oh shit! Oh shit!” he heard Lisa suddenly shout.
He glanced to her; her attention was turned to the nearby street. She dropped to a knee beside him, covering the side of her face with her hand. There was a crippling fear in her eyes.
He frowned. “What is it?”
“The guard!” She spoke with her face wrenched in a grimace. “Josh Jones! He just drove by!”
He scrambled to his feet and peered over the tops of cars parked in front of a row of gas pumps. Out of the corner of his eye, he caught the backend of a fast-moving, beige Volvo disappearing behind the corner of the building with a river of other cars trailing behind it. The rental sticker along the back window looked to be the same one Sean had seen in the cottage driveway. There was no indication that the driver had seen either one of them.
“Are you sure it was him?” he asked, his jaw set in determination.
She nodded. “I never forget a face.”
He turned back to the phone. “Sis, have Gary call the Traverse City Police Department. In Michigan. They’ll find a dead body at One-Fourteen Bluff Walk Road. He’s one of Moretti’s guys. They’re the same people who shot Uncle Zed.”
“A dead person? In Michigan?” Diana’s tone was incredulous. “You’re in Michigan?”
“Yes, write it down. One-Fourteen Bluff Walk Road. I’ll call you back when I can! There’s a lot more, but I have to go!”
“Sean, wait! Just stay on the phone! Let me try and get Gary on the radio.”
“No time! Just tell him!” He slammed down the phone and darted in the direction of his Nova. His eyes were ablaze with anger and reckoning. Josh Jones was with the people that killed his uncle— that killed Rocco—and he wasn’t about to let him get away.
“What are you doing?” screamed Lisa, who jogged after him with her hands in the air.
He opened the driver’s side door and already had a foot on the floorboard before he turned to acknowledge her. “Those bastards shot and killed my uncle! The same people that were after your husband and are now after you. Josh Jones is one of them.”
“Just call the police!” she pleaded. “Describe the car to them! Tell them the direction he’s headed in! Let them take care of it!”
The Nova groaned in dissent when Sean’s weight crashed down across the front seat. The ignition cranked, and the engine roared with the trademark soundness that Uncle Zed had helped Sean maintain from the car over the years.
The door slammed shut and Sean draped his head outside the open window. “I don’t have time to explain it all to them! The police never believe me anyway! He’s getting away!”
Her eyelids fluttered like a butterfly’s wings. She shook her head and asked, “What about me?”
“Stay here and call the police yourself if you want, or come with me! I don’t give a shit, but I need to leave now!”
The tires pealed when he shifted into reverse and slammed onto the gas pedal. He turned his car in the direction of the road. Lisa stood in front of him. She looked like a deer frozen in front of a pair of headlights. By the expression on her face, it looked like her heart was beating faster than his.
“Make a decision!” he snarled out the window.
A second later, the passenger side door sprung open and she was inside. As tires screeched again, she cursed under her breath, mumbling something about whether or not she had made the right choice.
He could understand her dilemma. She barely knew him, this gritty man who sat an arm’s length away from her, but she had to be convinced he was on her side. With all they’d been through, she had to know. It had
been a sign of trust when she’d opened that door and gotten in.
And as the Nova barreled down the street, Sean figured that with no one else in the world left to trust, Lisa’s trust in him had to mean something.
Chapter 44
“Was there anyone else with him?” asked Sean before he sped up and cut off a yellow Volkswagen Bug who honked in objection.
“In the car?”
“Yeah.”
Lisa shook her head. “I don’t think so. It didn’t look like it.”
Sean grunted in annoyance at the thickness of traffic that had seemingly come out of nowhere and was hindering him from catching up with the beige Volvo. They could still see Josh Jones’s car from a distance, far in front of them, but he was clearly in as much of a hurry as they were, weaving in and out of a clog of other cars.
For the first time since they’d met, Lisa found herself closely studying the appearance of the man whose introduction had changed her world. His short but scraggly beard only partially covered the rough complexion of his skin. His yellowed teeth and unkempt hair added no positive accentuation. Sprawled along his shirt were several small holes from years of wear and tear that would have forced most people to retire it to a trashcan or pile of rags somewhere in a garage long ago. His boots were nearly threads at the toes.
An empty beer can along with an assortment of flattened candy wrappers and other trash decorated the backseat and the floorboards.
“Are you homeless?” she asked.
His strained eyes that had been narrowed on the road slightly widened as he turned to the woman who sat beside him. “Homeless?”
His reaction brought embarrassment to her battered face.
“I’m sorry,” she quickly stated before letting her gaze return to the road. “It’s just that you had said before that you’d watched my husband fall from a bridge, and that no one had believed what you’d seen.”