[Whistleblower 01.0] Wounded Animals

by Jim Heskett

  My neighborhood felt cold and thin. When I turned onto my street, the maybe-meth dealer was standing out in front of his house. He wouldn’t have recognized the car I was in, but I think he saw my face. He cocked his head a little when I glanced at him. I probably looked like hell, with everything that had happened to me over the last week.

  But I didn’t pay any more attention to him than that split second. I slowed a little, remembering I’d been yelled at more than once because children played in this street. Almost there.

  Closer to my cul de sac, I saw a strange car parked next to the curb by my house. Darren had said that Wyatt was coming, but this was a beat-up truck. Wyatt probably drove a BMW.

  Then I saw someone sitting on my front step, a figure with hands on knees and face down. A spark ignited within me; could that be my wife in front of our house? But why would she sit out in the cold, instead of going inside?

  I pulled into the cul de sac, and my heart gurgled when the figure lifted his head.

  Not Grace, but Kareem.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  KAREEM HADDADI SMILED at me from my front porch. I parked the car in the middle of the cul de sac, barely even noticing where I was. The man at the heart of all this, the man everyone had been searching for, had surprised me once again by appearing in the last place I would have expected to find him.

  I stumbled out of the car, feeling the accumulation of all my injuries. Adrenaline had drained all the effects of the last painkiller I’d swallowed.

  “You,” I said, just about the only thing I could think of to say.

  He stood and walked across my front yard. Instead of a t-shirt and jeans, he was wearing a suit. Looked professional today, at least. “Candle, it is so wonderful to see you. I wish our reunion could have been under different circumstances.”

  The only time we’d met before had been at night, and he had seemed to wear a glow around his skin. Mystical. Now, the person standing before me was just an ordinary man. “You’re not magical at all, are you?”

  His lips curled into a crooked smile as he shrugged. “I suppose that is a matter of perspective.”

  “Perspective?”

  “Indeed. Please forgive me the deception. I had to get your attention that night, although it does not seem to have done any good.”

  “I think I’ve figured out how you did everything but the rat. If you didn’t reanimate a dead rat outside that bar, how did you make it look like you did?”

  “Misdirection.” He then pointed back at the house. “Wouldn’t you like to come inside? We have much to discuss.”

  I followed him in. Kareem was a fraud. No magic man. For all I knew, he was in league with Wyatt and Darren and this whole sick game they were playing. “Where have you been?”

  “The last few days, Sweden. I own a textile business, and there was an unfortunate problem at one of the factories. I had no choice but to visit. Before that, Japan, and before that, I was here. But you knew that already. I understand you’ve been to my house in Boulder, even.”

  He pointed at the couch and I eased into the seat, my bones and muscles screaming at me. He sat across from me in a chair.

  “Where’s my wife?”

  His face fell. “I feared you would suspect me.”

  The hurt in his voice sounded genuine, but I didn’t let the doubt show on my face. I didn’t know who to believe, and the mass of confusion was beginning to swell to a breaking point.

  When I didn’t reply, he continued. “I’m afraid I don’t know where your wife is. Mr. Wyatt Green is the only person who knows where she is. All of the events that have transpired over the last few days have been because of him.”

  Anger welled up inside me. “If you knew about everything that was happening, why didn’t you help me? Why didn’t you call the police or send someone?”

  “I hoped that you and your wife would leave, because I suspected that the situation would escalate.”

  I needed answers, not riddles. “How was I supposed to know how grave this was, when you wouldn’t tell me anything concrete?”

  He took a deep breath and pushed his hands down the length of his thighs, rolling out wrinkles in his slacks. “I have failed you. I am terribly sorry, my young friend. I only learned of the seriousness of your troubles these last few days when I returned home, and I got here as soon as I could.”

  “So what happens next?” I said.

  “I am sure someone will arrive soon to kill me.”

  I nodded. “Yeah, that person is me. They said it was the only way to get her back.”

  “These people, they are not the honorable kind. They were never going to give her back to you. They would only dangle her as bait to force you to do their bidding.”

  “But why? What’s the point of all this?”

  He leaned forward and cast a grim look at me. “Look closely at my face. Do you not recognize me?”

  I squinted, taking in the lines, wrinkles, curves of his features. Maybe there was something there, but I couldn’t place it. Just as in how the name Haddadi had seemed familiar when they’d first said it at the top of Eldo Canyon.

  “We met, you and I, but it was a long time ago. You were just a child, so I am not surprised you cannot recall.”

  I focused again, trying to think of his face as if I’d seen it in my youth. Attempted to imagine me looking up at him, taller and grown up compared to a little kid me. A second look didn’t help, there was still nothing there.

  He frowned when he saw the continued confusion on my face. “Candle, everything that has happened is because of your father and I. Because of what we have done. I’ve tried to make it right, but it’s not been an easy task.”

  Before I could reply, something hit the door, and it rattled against the frame. Then, a succession of quick bangs, and the frame splintered.

  The door opened, and Darren stood there with Detective Shelton. Both of them with guns. They strode in, and Shelton hooked his leg to kick the door closed behind him.

  “You just had to make this so fucking difficult,” Darren said, his face twisted into the most malicious expression I’d ever seen. “You want to subvert destiny, but you can’t fight it, can you?”

  I stood up with my hands out in front of me. But I had no idea what I was going to do next; they had real weapons, and Darren wasn’t likely to make the mistake again of coming close enough to let me grapple with him.

  Kareem still sat in the chair, his eyes closed. He placed each of his hands palm-up on his knees, and proceeded to inhale slowly through his nose and out his mouth.

  “Get up, Haddadi,” Shelton said.

  “You’ve been a difficult man to find,” Darren said. “Making us run all over the goddamn country. Where have you been hiding out from us?”

  “Do you realize how expensive a nationwide manhunt is?” Shelton said.

  “I have not been in your country, you fools,” Kareem said.

  “We should have killed you the night you first found little Candle here,” Shelton said. “That was an oversight on our part, but I think we course-corrected since then.”

  “I will speak to Wyatt Green and no one else,” Kareem said. “This is a business dealing, and I have no interest in conversing with his inferiors.”

  Business dealing?

  “The time for playing nice is over, Haddadi,” Shelton said. “You forced our hand, and now we’re on plan B. Before you die, just know all of this could have been avoided if you had done what we wanted.”

  “We do thank you for coming to Candle’s house, though,” Darren said. “Logistically, you saved us a lot of work. We can tie off your death and get Candle situated in one neat, little package.”

  Kareem’s eyes were still closed. His face changed not even a little when Darren had talked about killing him.

  I considered the layout. I was in front of the couch, three feet from Kareem. Shelton and Darren were ten feet from me, in front of the door. A coffee table between us. I wouldn’t have time to rus
h them before they could shoot. I had to get them away from that door. “Guys, please, maybe we can—”

  Darren pulled the trigger, and the sound was like a cannon blast. Kareem’s chest exploded in an arc of red. A mist of blood fell across the coffee table, onto a stack of books. Ruined the cover of Your Baby’s First Year for Dummies.

  Kareem slumped in the chair, gasping for breath. Still alive, but bleeding a geyser from the hole in his chest.

  I fell to my knees.

  Darren checked the barrel of the gun, then waved it at me.

  “Get up,” Shelton said. “It’s convenient that we got your DNA in his house, but you’re still going to have to shoot him. They’re going to test your body for evidence, and it’s important that you pull the trigger. Sounds like semantics, I know, but it’s the little details that sell the story.”

  The room spun, and my eyelids weighed a hundred pounds. My body wanted to shut down, to refuse the chaos in front of my eyes. Kareem was still alive, but losing a lot of blood onto my chair.

  Darren walked to me, wiped his gun with a rag, then placed it in my hand. He lifted me from the ground, then walked me back over to where he had been standing. I went with him, in shock.

  “This good?” he said to Shelton.

  Shelton eyed the distance and nodded. “Make it a clean shot, though. Don’t go blowing a hole in his head and messing up his teeth or anything like that. We don’t want to make it too hard on the forensic team.”

  I looked at the gun in my hand and felt myself lifting it toward Darren.

  Darren placed his hands on top of my arm and repositioned it so it faced Kareem. “Now, Candle, no point in being a hero. This will all be over soon, so let’s not make it harder than it needs to be.”

  I wavered in my spot, pointing a pistol at Kareem Haddadi. I was going to shoot him, and then Shelton was going to arrest me for murder. I’d never see my wife again. This was it; the last few moments of my life.

  A knock at the door. “Candle? You in there? Was that a gunshot I heard?”

  Despite the door muffling the sound, I could tell the voice belonged to Rodrick. Darren and Shelton both turned to look at the door, and I reacted. Lifted the gun. Shot Darren in the back. Heard the sound like an explosion as the force of the recoil moved me back a few inches.

  He yelped. Spun around, a hole in his stomach.

  I don’t know who was more surprised: Shelton or me. He watched Darren stumble backward, bump into the wall, then sink to the floor, Shelton seemingly unaware that he had a gun in his own hand.

  Shoot him, said a little voice in my head.

  I pivoted the gun and pulled the trigger. I felt my arm vibrate. I saw Shelton thrown back against my front door, a hole in his head. He slid down the doorframe as blood started to pour from the hole.

  His eyes were crossed as if he’d tried to look at the bullet just before it entered his forehead. That’s the kind of image that stays with you for a lifetime. Darren and Shelton were against my front door, trails of their blood marking their passages.

  Kareem gasped, and it pulled me back into real life. Shelton was dead, and Darren was writhing next to him, gurgling and choking. I couldn’t imagine the horror he felt, knowing that his life was leaving him in burgundy on my living room floor.

  Also, I didn’t care what Darren felt. I wanted him to die in terror. Then I couldn’t believe I’d thought that.

  “Rodrick, it’s Tucker,” I shouted. “I’m okay. They’re all dead now, so I’m safe.”

  “Who is dead? What the hell is going on in there? I’m calling the cops.”

  I stepped back and dropped the pistol. Then I turned to Kareem, who was trying to sit up.

  “Don’t move,” I said as I knelt by his side and took his hand. “You’re going to be okay. I’ll call an ambulance and they’ll fix it.”

  He coughed, and a dribble of blood ran from his mouth to his chin. “Do not bother. I will be dead soon.”

  He spoke in wheezes, barely able to breathe. The bullet had probably punctured his lung. I knew he was dead too, but I couldn’t believe how calm he was about his situation.

  “You mentioned my dad before. What does he have to do with all this?” I said, squeezing Kareem’s hand to keep him awake.

  “It does not matter now.”

  “Please, tell me.”

  “A long time ago, your father and I worked together. We were friends before that, and that is how I met you.”

  I had zero recollection of any of this. The man dying in my living room reading chair was friends with my father? Must have been after he left my mother and we left Texas, or I would have remembered.

  “With your father’s passing after his stroke…”

  A switch flipped in my head. That explained those text messages and voicemails from Aunt Judy.

  My dad was dead. Heath Candle, dead. Twenty years had passed since I’d seen him, and now, his death was the least interesting thing that had happened all week.

  “His inheritance would fall to you. At least that is what he told me he would do, several years ago. Leave it to you.”

  Maybe Wyatt was after Dad’s money.

  “Is all of this over some stupid blackmail?”

  Kareem laughed, a sick gurgling sound. “No, it has nothing to do with that.”

  Nothing to do with the money? I didn’t understand.

  “If you see him,” Kareem said, “tell him that I have failed.”

  See who? What was he babbling about?

  Through the mist of all this new information, I reminded myself Grace was the only thing that mattered. “Kareem, where is my wife?”

  His eyes were beginning to glaze over. “I am sorry, young Candle, I do not know.”

  He closed his eyes.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  DARREN, SHELTON, KAREEM… they were all dead. I had no idea where my wife was. I had shot and killed two men, seen others die before my eyes. Kareem hadn’t done anything to save his own life. He’d sat in the chair, quiet, eyes closed, and let it happen. Had he known there was nothing he could do to stop them?

  I opened the front door of my house and felt the cold late November air rush over my body. I wanted it to freeze me, to slow my brain, to take away all of these feelings. But it wouldn’t do that. I could still think and reason and feel and do all of the other human things I detested at that moment.

  I stepped outside as a light snow began to fall from charcoal-colored clouds. Life was empty; there was no purpose to anything. All of these people murdered over money. My money, apparently.

  With both my mom and dad gone, now I was alone.

  I hadn’t known that Kareem and my father were acquainted. Dad and I hadn’t talked for so long, why would he leave me anything? The man never gave a shit about me before or after he left my mom and disappeared to south Texas.

  My wife’s boss Rodrick stood at the edge of my lawn, phone in hand. He was close to hyperventilating. “Jesus, buddy, you’re covered in blood.”

  I sat on the front porch and breathed deeply. I checked myself for new wounds, but I’d managed not to catch any stray bullets. I was alive, at least. Not that my life had any value left.

  Rodrick was still talking, but I couldn’t hear him.

  I looked around the cul de sac, wondered which of the neighbors would come rushing out to see the commotion, or call the police, if Rodrick hadn’t done that already.

  I felt a hand on my shoulder. “Candle? Can you hear me?”

  His face was etched with panic. Breathing hard, neck muscles strained.

  “Oh, hey, Rodrick,” I said, dazed. “When did you get here?”

  “You need to start talking to me. What happened here? Why are you covered in blood? Were those gunshots in your house a minute ago?”

  “I don’t know if you’d believe me if I told you.”

  “What am I going to find if I walk in there?”

  I sighed, a little bit of my sanity returning. I could appreciate that Rodrick
was freaking out, and my lack of answers wasn’t helping. “It’s probably better if you don’t go in there. Some people, they kidnapped Grace, to force me to kill someone else. All the shit hit the fan just now, and they’re all dead inside my house.”

  “All? How many people did you kill?”

  I opened my mouth to speak, then paused. Struck momentarily by the craziness of what I was about to say. “Two. But there are three people in there. One of them, I didn’t kill. He was a good man, or I think he was a good man. I’m not sure. In a way, he’s the reason for this whole thing.”

  “I called the police,” Rodrick said. “If it’s over, then where’s Grace?”

  I shrugged, resigned to the reality that she was probably dead. How many times had I lost hope, regained it, then had it stolen away from me again over the last few days? I’d never even found anything that could be considered a clue to lead me to her.

  Then my eyes fell on the plastic bag-wrapped newspaper in Alan’s front yard, and I had a vision of the Polaroid Shelton had shown me. Grace, with a newspaper next to her sleeping body.

  Newspaper. Alan.

  I drew in a breath as if for the first time. I wanted to scream, to cry, to beat my chest.

  I jumped to my feet, then wobbled a little. “Rodrick, wait here for the police. I’ll be right back.”

  I went inside and picked up the gun I’d used to kill Shelton. I started out the door, then another idea struck and I went upstairs to the bedroom and opened the nightstand. I picked up the stun gun Kareem had slipped into my pocket the night I’d met him.

  With my two implements of destruction in hand, I tried not to look at the bodies as I left my house and crossed the yard. I glanced at Rodrick, who was standing under a tree, clutching his phone to his chest.

  He was pointing at the gun in my hand and saying something, but I couldn’t hear him. I felt terrible for the guy, the confusion and disorder he must have been feeling.

  But it was almost over. I knocked on Alan’s door.

  In a minute, he came to the door. Opened it, and I pressed the stun gun into his chest before he had a chance to even open his mouth. He convulsed and fell to the floor, his bathrobe fluttering around him. I stepped over his limp body.