by John A. Daly
“Well, there wasn’t any blood on the uniform that the asshole in front of us was wearing. He may have just stolen it from a locker or something.”
“But Josh Jones knew his name.”
“I know, but he kept saying Martin, while you called him Marty. My guess is that people that know him call him Marty. Right?”
She nodded her head.
“Yeah, our boy in the Volvo probably just read Martin off of a name badge. I don’t think he and the guy in your kitchen knew exactly what they’d find at your house. They wouldn’t risk a murder beat just to get inside the wall and look around. I think the old guy was as surprised to find you there as you were to have him show up at your door.”
She absorbed his logic, then brushed her hair over her shoulder and glanced out her window at an old, abandoned drive-in movie theater that rested along a large lot of dirt. The speakers and their poles were missing, but the large, peeling screen still towered above the flat, open land.
“Are you guys pretty tight?” he asked.
“Who?”
“You and Marty.”
Her face soured. “Why would you ask that?”
Sean kept his eyes to the road and shrugged his shoulders. “Well, I’m pretty sure that if I worked from that guard station where Marty worked, and didn’t get very close to the people driving in and out through my gate, I can’t imagine any of them would be able to identify my uniform when I’m not the one wearing it.”
He noticed the rise in her eyebrows when he flashed her a quick glance. Before she could respond, he continued. “I’ve worked a few guard stations in my time, you know,” he said in a way that implied he was bragging about the experience.
“No, I didn’t know that,” she said with an eye roll.
He continued. “Plus, I noticed two mostly empty wine glasses on your kitchen counter. With your husband out of the state . . .”
“Yes, Mr. Coleman,” she interrupted in annoyance. “I know him a little better than the other residents. Okay? But it’s not what you think.”
Sean pursed his lips and he fought back the urge to smirk. “I wasn’t thinking anything. I just thought you might want to know that he’s probably okay.”
Lisa felt embarrassed, but at the same time a little impressed. If she had judged Sean by his appearance and demeanor alone, she wouldn’t have concluded him to be particularly intellectual. Contrarily, he seemed brighter than how he presented himself. At the very least, he was a keen observer. He’d known almost immediately back at the cottage that something wasn’t right about Josh Jones. And despite no one believing him in his own town, he was able to figure out the identity of the man he’d seen on the bridge, even if it meant driving halfway across the country to confirm it.
“I think you might be selling yourself short as a security guard, Mr. Coleman. You’d make a good investigator.”
For the first time since she’d met him, she noticed the man’s mouth curl into a smile—a dopey smile that he clearly wasn’t comfortable displaying. It seemed to her that he’d just heard what might have been the most flattering compliment anyone had ever paid him. He twisted his head away from her a bit in nonchalant fashion, like a young student who had just been praised by a teacher he had a crush on.
Or maybe that was just her impression, being a teacher. Her attention eased back to the car they were following. Its speed didn’t seem to fluctuate. It was as if the man behind the wheel was on a casual Sunday drive. A thought tickled her mind of how they’d left Josh Jones sprawled out on the floor, unconscious in her hallway, as well as the pandemonium that led up to that moment.
“Wait a minute,” she said out loud. “When we turned on the radio that Josh Jones was wearing, the guard we heard said that Marty wasn’t at his post and that the gate was left open. Doesn’t that mean that they did do something to him?”
His eyebrows arched. “You’ve got a point . . .”
She wasn’t sure what about his expression changed, but it seemed to, even if minutely. Perhaps he had considered the idea as well, but he didn’t want to lend credence to it because he was sure the thought would worry her.
She sighed, looking back out the side window. If there had been a confrontation, maybe Sean’s hope was that Marty had just gotten beat up and not killed. It was certainly her hope.
When the first police car screeched to a halt at the gated entrance in front of Bluff Walk Road, the officer found a pale, hunched over figure with short, blonde hair that was partially stained red, stumbling his way out to the road from behind an assemblage of trees. Clad only in a t-shirt and plaid boxer shorts, he’d been beaten, gagged, and still had twisted and torn strips of thick duct tape wrapped around his wrists.
Minutes later, sirens blasted their way up through the winding, flush hills of the upscale community, causing scores of birds to flee the tops of thick trees. Marty Rutt told an attentive, stout female officer the story of a seemingly kind older man wearing a hat who’d asked for directions from his Volvo at the front gate. Marty described how their conversation was cut short when he happened to glance over his shoulder and notice some movement across the screen of one of the security monitors inside the window of his guard station. Someone was scaling their way over the front wall, just about fifty yards down, out of view from the front of the station. Marty quickly apologized to the misplaced traveler and took off on foot, in pursuit of the intruder.
The athletic guard quickly caught up with who he believed to be a teenager and tackled him to the ground. The kid had brown hair, spiked in the front, and repeatedly shouted during their tussle that he was just there to see his girlfriend.
After Marty had gotten the boy pinned chest-down in the grass with a knee lodged into his back, he held up his radio to his mouth when he’d heard rapid footsteps approaching from behind him. It was the older man from the front gate.
“It’s okay. I’ve got this!” he’d shouted to the man who he’d believed had come to help him.
The man wasn’t there to assist the guard, but rather to come to the aid of the captive. Marty saw something black and shiny clasped in the fist of the man a mere second before it was smashed down along the crest of his skull.
Marty remembered little after that, other than taking some stomps to his face and ribs, and the angered voice of the older man scolding the younger one. When he awoke with a fierce, throbbing headache and gasping for breath from under a couple of cracked ribs, he found himself stripped and his arms hugging a large elm tree with his wrists bound together on the opposite side.
Chapter 47
“What do you mean he doesn’t work for them?”
“That’s what they’re telling me, Chief,” answered Jefferson. “They don’t have a Kyle Kimble that works for them. The government employee number is bogus. They’re sure the ID is a fake.”
Lumbergh’s jaw tightened. “Well the man’s not fake!” he barked in frustration. “He’s got a wallet full of credit cards, a Nevada driver’s license, and a picture of him beside his wife—who’s also very real because she’s with Sean right now.” Listening to the words coming out of his own mouth was fueling his frustration. What Diana had told him about Sean only added to the fire. “And now someone else is dead!”
The chief was barely able to keep up with his breath. His hand was clenched so tightly to the transmitter of his Jeep’s radio that he nearly cracked its frame. He bit down on his lip and used the back of his hand to clear strands of spit from the sides of his mouth. With his teeth tightened, he brought the transmitter back to his face.
“Chief?” Jefferson said with some anxiety in his voice.
“The second you hear back from the Traverse City P.D., you get back to me! Do you understand?”
“Chief, there’s more.”
“Spit it out, Jefferson.”
“I’ve been trying to. The Feds didn’t know Kimble, but they knew the name Moretti. It really got their attention. They want to talk to you about him, the man in charge. They wou
ldn’t give me the skinny.”
Lumbergh’s eyes softened and he nodded his head. “Okay, I’ll be back soon.”
Moments later, he’d made it to the end of Pine View Road and it felt good to leave the self-imposed detour of dirt and gravel and be back on a paved street where he could push the accelerator down. Speeding along Colorado Road 1007, the RPM gauge steadily rose along with the chief ’s anxiety. A deficiency of modern technology at his disposal left him feeling irritated and naked. Back in Chicago, streaming a landline call through a police radio would have been as simple as pressing a button. Out of his Winston office, it just wasn’t an option. So, his eagerness to sync up with the Feds and learn of the man his brother-in-law referred to as Moretti was pulling at his chest.
“A Las Vegas big shot,” he muttered through clenched teeth as he shook his head. It was the phrase Sean had used with Diana. “What the hell does that mean?”
Whoever the individual was, the FBI in Las Vegas was aware of him, which meant he was a man of importance—most likely not in a good way.
Lumbergh experienced torment caused by the growingly familiar feeling of being left completely out of the loop, leaving him to frolic around in his own aimless speculation. He was used to being the man in the know—the man in charge. But at that very moment, the best he could do to serve any practical purpose was to get back to town as quickly as he could while he listened for updates from Jefferson. Sean, on the other hand, was right in the middle of something big and consequential, and Lumbergh prayed that whatever it was, it wouldn’t lead to anyone else getting killed.
The chief quickly passed up a slow-moving, rust-red pickup only to get stuck behind a beige Dodge moving at an even slower pace while a caravan of vehicles approached from the oncoming lane. He swore in frustration and longed for the police cruiser and its siren. For now, the horn would have to do, and he laid on it hard. When the Dodge began veering onto the shoulder to let him pass, Lumbergh accelerated and flew around a blind curve that had quickly presented itself. He was driving at a speed he knew was reckless while edging across two yellow lines. When a range of thick spruce gave way to the horrifying sight of an oncoming car that blared its own horn in panic, he yelled and cranked his steering wheel far to the right. His Jeep skidded across the shoulder and onto an uneven, downward slope. The decline was masked with tall grass and unattended weeds. His foot cranked down on the brake pedal, and every mundane object inside the car that wasn’t bolted down flew forward and onto the floorboard. The vehicle came to an abrupt dead stop that left his damp, clenched fingers cemented to the steering wheel and his heart bemoaning his poor decision.
With enlarged eyes, he swallowed some bile and uttered aloud the phrase, “To serve and protect.” It was a reminder of the key responsibilities of his job—responsibilities that seemed at that moment to warrant reciting.
A stream of sweat ran down his brow as he rolled down his window to fire out an overchewed wad of gum that he released from his clamped jaw. He took a few short breaths and let his pulse normalize. As he did, the image of the white car he’d nearly collided with hovered in his glazed vision like a single, subliminal frame from an art film. Below its tinted windshield and gleaming, silver grill hung a frame of blue mountains under an orange sky. A Nevada state license plate.
By geographical standards, Nevada and Colorado were only separated by a single state, but Utah was a large state and close to six hundred miles, and numerous mountain ranges separated the region from the Nevada state line. Aside from that, Colorado Road 1007 was an obscure route. It marked the rural, sparsely populated boundary between Lakeland and Winston, and was normally only used by local commuters and a few ranchers. While the appearance of a Nevada plate was by no means a foreign sight within Colorado, it was highly unusual and perhaps unheard of for one to turn up there in the backwoods, far away from the action of the downtown area in northern Lakeland.
A long, white car would have never been mistaken for a dark sedan, even by a teenage busboy who didn’t know his automobile makes. Still, Kyle Kimble, Moretti The Big Shot, and even the disappearance of Chad Grimes—the shop owner from Lakeland— appeared to have ties to Nevada. Though the significance felt thin, Lumbergh’s refined law enforcement instincts weren’t quite prepared to treat the unusual finding as an absolute coincidence.
He reached into his pocket and pulled out a fresh stick of gum that he unwrapped in what would have appeared to a casual observer as one quick motion. He flung it into his mouth and checked for oncoming traffic before flipping a U-turn across the road and setting off in the direction of the white Cadillac.
The man who’d made it as far as Meyers Bridge was not alone before he ended his life. That was the conclusion that Oldhorse made after spending the better part of the morning tracking his trail up the long and lofty ravine. The markings of a single man had been joined by those of at least three others who looked to have been in pursuit of him. A pack of wolves chasing a deer.
Oldhorse was now on private land, but he cared little. He was engrossed in tracing the split nerve back to its root.
As two aggressive squirrels spiraled their way up a tall pine’s trunk high above the rocky terrace that loomed above him, Oldhorse imagined that the prey had either fallen or been thrown off of the jagged ledge above. The impact of his body had left an obvious trail of disruption with its rapid decent, all the way down the steep wall. He’d survived the fall though, only to get into an altercation with one of his pursuers along the shore.
Oldhorse scaled his way up the gorge at a pace that would have rivaled expert climbers, effortlessly digging his fingers and the toes of his moccasins into every delicate wedge and crevice. When he reached the top and examined the surface of the plateau, he found not only tracks but a family of .30-30 rifle shells. Their nestling together along the ground attested that their owner had fired shots down toward the river from his perched position.
All four sets of tracks congregated at that point, having emerged from the thick forest that lay to the east.
Oldhorse dipped one of his coarse and weathered hands into a pouch on the side of his pack and retrieved a dark strip of elk jerky that he’d dried himself. He gnawed on it with the back of his teeth before tearing a chunk off, devouring its taste and letting it slide down his throat.
His tapered eyes pierced through the maze of tall stalks of chipped bark and their thick crowns of intertwined branches. A deep breath filtered out through his nose before he entered into a corridor of the forest that seemed darker than it had any right to be.
Chapter 48
“What is that?” Lisa asked.
“What’s what?”
“That welt, or whatever it is on the back of your head. You keep touching it. Did you hurt yourself back at the house?”
Sean rolled his eyes and shook his head. “It’s nothing. It’s been there forever.”
“Forever?” she said with a mark of confusion in her tone and inquisitiveness in her eyes. It didn’t take long for her to recognize that he’d rather not continue with the topic, so she was surprised after a few seconds when he did.
“I don’t mean forever, forever. I wasn’t born with it. It just . . . Well, I don’t know how long it’s been there. My head just started itching one day and it’s never really stopped.” His eyes lowered to the circular gauges along the dashboard of his car.
“That doesn’t sound healthy,” she said with her eyes blinking in thought. “You should probably get that looked at.”
“Yeah, probably.” His forehead formed ripples and his eyes angled toward her. “Do you always ask this many questions?”
She let her gaze drift back to the road in front of them and she shrugged her shoulders a bit. “No. Not really. Maybe if I did, I would have figured out who my husband really was.”
He said nothing.
Peering above some trees on the side of the road ahead was a large, sky-blue metal canopy with multicolored stripes jetting diagonally down its wide edge.
Beside it, the tall price sign of a gas station came into view.
He let up on the gas pedal while keeping a steady eye on the car they’d been following. Lisa sat up in her seat and turned to him.
“You’re stopping?” she asked with some zest.
“Yeah.”
“Thank you,” she said, with her lips hinting at a grin. She placed her hand on his large shoulder to demonstrate to him her appreciation. “You’re doing the right thing.”
He grunted and shook his head in disappointment before whipping the car sharply into the parking lot. “Don’t thank me. I only stopped because we’re out of gas.”
She leaned forward and peered between the spokes of the steering wheel. Under the dashboard, the needle drooped well below the letter “E” and the low-gas indicator was brightly lit.
“It’s been on for the last five miles,” he said when he quickly pulled up to the nearest pump and jammed on the brakes. “Which means we probably only have another two. We’ve got to make this fast!”
He cranked the gearshift into park and turned off the ignition. The door flew open with a loud creak and he was out in no time, fumbling for the hooked gas nozzle on the side of the pump.
Lisa watched the Volvo glide farther and farther away, and part of her wanted it to keep going so that the she and the man she’d come to know throughout the day would be cut loose from their foolhardy pursuit.
“Oh, you got to be kidding me!” Sean snarled from outside the car. “Prepay?”
He lowered his head through the open driver’s side window and asked her in an almost timid manner if she had a credit card.
With a dispirited sigh, she answered, “Back at the cottage.”
“Dammit!” he moaned before snapping straight and pounding a fist on top of the roof of his car.
“Sean, we need to let this go,” she said, mostly to his torso that she could see through the window. “We’ll go inside, call the police, and tell them which direction he’s headed in. They’ll take over from here.”