From A Dead Sleep Page 23

  Her face twisted in confusion. “Tell me you’re joking!” she cried out. “You’re beating the shit out of him because he didn’t call anyone on his radio?”

  Sean’s head shook in disgust.

  “If you’ve got back-up, you use it!” he snarled while keeping his boot on the kid and glaring angrily into his eyes. It was a line he remembered Jimmy Smits delivering on an episode of NYPD Blue.

  “Where’s your name tag, asshole?” he interrogated. “The guy down front had a shiny gold pin right there on his shirt pocket! Where’s yours?”

  He pried his foot from under Josh’s neck and shoved it into his chest to keep him pinned. Josh let out a sick breath before several hoarse coughs erupted from his gaping mouth.

  “I just started!” the kid unnervingly answered. Speaking must have been painful because his hand went right to his throat. “I’m getting it next week!”

  Sean shook his head, sneering skeptically in response. He turned back to Lisa. “The guard down front at the gate . . . Do you know him? Don’t say his name, but do you know him?”

  She nodded, and Sean’s head spun back to Josh.

  “The guy down front, the pretty boy with the blonde hair . . . Tell me his name!”

  “Martin! His name is Martin!”

  “He’s right!” Lisa injected. “That’s his name. Call him! Call him right now and we’ll straighten this all out! This kid’s just trying to help us!”

  The gears in Sean’s brain spun rapidly as he glared down at the sight before him—a helpless, beaten kid pinned to the floor and looking up at him in anguish. Seconds went by. He thought of what had happened with Tariq back in Winston, but he also sensed that Jones’s story was being adlibbed the same way as the one Sean himself had fed to the two children down the hill.

  “Nah,” he said. “I ain’t buying it!”

  “Oh my God!” shouted Lisa, throwing her hands up in the air. “Why not?!”

  “I came back to your house for a reason. That letter . . . The envelope I told you about, that your husband sent . . . It was in your mailbox.”

  Her demeanor sobered, eyes narrowing in befuddlement. “You opened it?”

  “Hell, yeah, I opened it! I didn’t drive halfway across the country just to hand you your mail!” Sean quipped. “The guy I shot . . . He’s not on his own. Not by a longshot!”

  Josh’s face was blank when Lisa’s attention turned to him.

  “Your husband was in some deep shit,” said Sean. He steadied his gun hand and guided his pistol closer to Josh’s face. “But you already know that, don’t you, dickhead?”

  “Please, mister! I swear to God I work here! I just started!”

  Sean yelled at him to shut up. He bit down on his lip and shoved his gun to the back of his pants before lunging forward and pressing his knee down on Jones’s chest to keep him floored. Jones squirmed wildly as Sean’s hands reached under his body. When he felt Sean’s spread fingers cradle each cheek of his buttocks, his eyes bulged from the aggravated violation.

  “What are you doing, man?” he cried in utter appall that matched the expression on Lisa’s face.

  Sean leapt back to his feet and retrieved his gun, directing it back on Josh Jones. “Yeah, that’s what I thought! He doesn’t have a wallet either!”

  “So?” Lisa asked.

  “So . . . Neither one of these guys are carrying a wallet! The only reason a man doesn’t carry a wallet is if he doesn’t want to be identified!” Sean couldn’t place which television show he’d acquired the theory from, but he felt the logic to be sound.

  Jones shook his head fiercely. “It’s in my locker, back at the station!”

  “Bullshit!” yelled Sean.

  “What was in the letter?” asked Lisa in a constrained tone that grabbed his attention. Her concern for the kid on the floor had seemingly drifted to the back burner for a moment.

  “A lot of shit, but I ain’t gonna tell you any more in front of Josh Jones here.” He placed some sarcastic stank on the pronunciation of his name.

  Her eyes fluttered back to the man on the floor. They soon honed in on his chest.

  “Oh my God!” Lisa suddenly shouted.

  “What?”

  When she quickly crawled over to Josh, Sean warned her not to get too close. Her narrowed eyes quickly traced up and down the guard’s body before they widened in confirmation of the button that was missing from the center of his shirt.

  “He’s wearing Marty’s shirt! That’s Marty’s shirt!”

  “Son of a bitch!” yelled Sean before planting a hard kick into Josh’s gut.

  “Where’s Marty?” Lisa screamed.

  Sean leaned forward and grabbed the radio from the kid’s belt and yanked it loose. The second he flipped the “ON” switch, a loud, angry voice erupted from the speaker in mid-sentence: “. . . aren’t you at your post, Marty? One of the residents just told me that the front gate is wide open!”

  Sean snarled and glared at the wide-eyed Josh who raised his hands defensively but not quickly enough to blunt the heel of Sean’s boot that came crashing down along his skull. Josh was out cold with a stream of blood quickly creeping out from under his gelled hair along the side of his head.

  “Josh Jones my ass,” Sean mumbled as he surveyed the sight before him. “Fake-ass name. Might as well have been John Doe.”

  Lisa’s shaking hand covered her mouth as she winced at the view of the beaten stranger and the realization that he had done something to the nice man she had spent time with the night before. She looked to Sean for some sort of direction, acknowledging that his suspicions had validity to them after all.

  “What was my husband into, Mr. Coleman?” she asked in a single breath. “The guy you shot . . . He asked me all kinds of questions about him. None of them made any sense.”

  “Later. We need to leave. Right now!”

  She shook her head. “Leave?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why don’t we call the police?”

  “No time. There may be more of them outside somewhere. He was planning on using your phone, remember?” he said. “Probably to call his friends.”

  He grabbed onto her wrist and pulled her close. She resisted only for a second, out of impulse. She hardly knew this man whose firm grip was cutting off the circulation to her hand, but she understood that if he wanted to hurt her, he would have done it already. He’d saved her life, probably twice, and there was no one else around to trust.

  She was whisked out the front door beside him, following his lead. When they got to the front steps, he quickly climbed over the railing that he had unceremoniously been forced to tumble over when the chaos first erupted. From under a pine shrub, he grabbed the manila envelope he had retrieved from the mailbox down the road. It was now decorated with dirt and chips of mulch.

  He held his gun in front of him as his eyes carefully scanned the area. He saw and heard no one.

  “My car!” she yelled as the two trounced down the steps toward the driveway. “His car has me blocked in.”

  “We’re not taking your car; we’re taking mine.”

  He led her down a slope into the thick foliage at the edge of the curved driveway, glancing back at it as they disappeared behind a row of trees. He thought in the moment that he caught a glimpse of a small, gray car parked where the drive met the road, but he wasn’t about to stick around for a closer look. The large, flush trees felt like a protective shield as he did his best to estimate how far west he had parked his car. He slid his gun back into his pants as he kept the envelope clutched to his side.

  For Lisa, she felt that her last glance back at the cottage was like watching a door close on her life as she had come to know it.

  They made their way through the forest and before long Sean heard the sound of crashing water—the same sound he had heard on the other side of the large wall in front of the cul-de-sac he had parked by. They approached an opening in the woods where sunlight divided the trees like a hot knife thro
ugh butter.

  “Your car is down here?” she asked, breathing heavily.

  The sun’s reflection across a body of water glimmered brightly, almost blindingly in contrast to the cover of the forest. The steepness of the hill turned abruptly sharp, causing both of them to pick up speed as they flailed down the slope across elevated roots and through low-lying limbs.

  Something on the ground hooked Sean’s foot. He lost his balance and stumbled wildly forward. His arms flung before him to break his fall as he crashed chest first into what looked for a second like snow under the radiant sun. But it wasn’t snow. It was sand—soft, white sand like one would see in the trenches at a golf course. Lisa leapt down to his side where she saw him scrambling to climb to his feet after grabbing the envelope that he had dropped.

  As he rose and adjusted his eyes, it was as if he had entered a portal into a different world. Sleek, crystal-blue waves stemming out from an endless horizon of water that crashed when they reached the shore. A large schooner could be seen far from land, skimming smoothly across the water. Seagulls hovered in the air, crying out into a light breeze as they dropped in unison to greet an elderly man with glasses and a brown leisure hat. A young child beside him held scraps of bread above his head. The child’s laughter sounded as foreign as French to Sean at that moment.

  “I don’t get it! Did you come in a boat?” he heard Lisa ask.

  Geography had admittedly never been Sean’s strong suit, and he hadn’t a clue until just then that Lake Michigan resembled a coastal ocean. It was radiant and beautiful, like a painting, crushing the preconceived notion of a large pool of glorified sewer water that he had long pictured in his head.

  “What?” he asked, realizing that she’d spoken.

  “Where’s your car?”

  Their attention immediately turned to the sharp sound of wood snapping somewhere up along the hillside they had just repelled down. He peered to his left where he saw the large, imposing wall at the far end of the beach about a hundred yards away where sand flowed out from under slabs of concrete and large rocks.

  “Come on!”

  He grabbed her wrist again.

  She complied but glanced back at the old man and apparently his grandkid as they ran, wondering if she should have pled for their help or asked them to call the police.

  Sean continually snapped his head back to check for anyone coming after them as they sprinted through the sand that hindered their forward motion. No one.

  When they reached the wall, the out-of-breath duo climbed up a short hill of gravel and jagged chunks of broken cement to an adjacent retaining wall. Sean bent and deftly hoisted her up by her ankle with surprising grace, glaring back down the beach as he did. He gasped as he made out a male figure jogging out from the forest and onto the beach. He reached for his gun, drawing it out in front of him in one fluent motion. When a female figure joined the male in an affectionate embrace, however, Sean took a breath.

  Lisa had hooked her arms across the top of the wall and pulled herself up. Sean did the same, but it took two tries. They straddled the top and crawled their way along, prying some imposing tree branches aside in the process. The sound of traffic trickled in through the leaves before they crossed an intersection where the two walls met. One last stolen glance from Sean detected no one. They dropped down to the other side of the wall where they were no longer visible from the beach.

  Moments later, the bald tires from the old Nova whined as Sean rounded a corner quickly. Lisa’s small body was pumping with adrenaline. She hadn’t bothered with a seatbelt and she paid the price for that oversight when the sharp turn sent her sliding along the front seat’s slick vinyl and into Sean’s shoulder. She felt the sweat of his sleeve along her face for only a moment before scrambling back to her side.

  She spun around to face the rear window, straddling the seat and draping her arms over the backboard to check for pursuers.

  “You see anyone?” he asked, finding it difficult to share his attention between the curves of the road and the rearview mirror.

  She shook her head, chest heaving in and out. She swallowed and turned toward him with questioning eyes.

  “Please pull over,” she asked in a tone that echoed her glazed and reddened eyes.

  “What?”

  “Just . . . I need a minute. We need to figure this out.”

  He checked the mirror again while a couple strands of sweat traced the outline of his jaw before disappearing into the scruff of his shallow beard. Once content that they weren’t being followed, he took a left turn at the next intersection and quickly whipped down the first side street.

  The two found themselves at the inlet of a residential dead end where he was sure they couldn’t be seen from the main road. The unfinished homes that surrounded them were skeletons of natural wood and plastic tarps. Only a couple of them looked anywhere close to being finished.

  Lisa began to speak, but he stopped her with a finger. He turned his head to glare out the back for a good ten seconds to verify they didn’t have any company. He then turned his attention to her.

  “We need to call the police. Do you have a cellphone?”

  He shook his head and held out his hand in an attempt to calm her though his heart wasn’t beating any slower than hers. “You need to know some things before we do anything else.”

  She looked at him as if he were crazy. “We have to call the police!” she shouted like a mother scolding her child. “Are you kidding me? I was attacked! People are trying to kill me!”

  “I know that!” he snapped back. “I was there, remember? What you don’t know is the whole story! There’s more going on here than . . .” He wasn’t sure where to begin. “There’s a lot of stuff you don’t know about!”

  He reached between his legs and pulled the large envelope out from under his thigh. “Your husband wrote you a letter,” he said gravely. “Read it before we call anyone.”

  The Previous Friday

  Chapter 32

  An uneven row of green and brown beer bottles implode at their centers as speeding lead slashes through them like they were decapitated by the single swipe of a samurai sword. Fine, glass shrapnel floats in the light breeze behind them, appearing as dust before dissipating into nothingness.

  The rest of the men look to be cackling like crows around me, and they are slapping their hands together in applause. I join in when Alvar twists his head in our direction. The glare from the diminishing, early evening sunlight bounces off his glasses and his mane of silver hair, sparing me from the fountain of pride that is most certainly emitting from his dark eyes judging from the way that those crooked, yellow teeth of his show in a smile. The small shadows cast inside the deep pockmarks along both sides of his cheeks make his face look like one of the numerous weathered rocks that line the forest floor. In his large hands, he’s holding a weapon Frank described to me as a “scoped thirty-thirty rifle.” I have no idea what the number means but it looks shorter in length than most rifles I’ve seen. It has a wooden stock behind black metal and it doesn’t really seem to fit Alvar, who’s a city guy like the rest of us. Neither do his new cowboy boots that he bought in town yesterday. But when in Rome, I suppose . . .

  The scenery here is beautiful. It really is. Standing among the tall, needled trees and struck with the surrounding smell of pine, it’s an aura I’d nearly forgotten.

  From his post about forty yards away beside the remnants of the bottles, Tony excitedly yells something into his walkie-talkie, which prompts everyone else to laugh. It’s absurd that he’s even using the radio. It’s not as if the others couldn’t hear him if he just raised his voice. He’s not all that far away. Alvar likes his toys though, and he likes them even more when he has a playmate. The transmitters are fancy, with more buttons than you’d find on a phone. I’m sure each feature has its own useful purpose, but right now they’re as pointless as two paper cups with a long string fastened between them.

  Frank is squeezing a rush of saline
solution up his nose again. It’s the third time I’ve seen him shove the tip of that white tube up his nostrils today. His allergies don’t like the climate. I’m surprised he even came along on this trip. He’s getting up there in age, and if there’s any muscle work needed, it shouldn’t be anything that Alvar can’t handle. Clad in a burgundy polo shirt and slacks, he’s cleaned up a little more than usual.

  “Your head’s getting a little color,” I tell him after eying the redness along his bald, freckled head.

  Without bothering to turn around to face me, he raises his middle finger in response. He’s not enjoying himself at all out here in the wilderness.

  I glance over at Moretti and Arianna. He’s decked out in a charcoal Italian suit that was probably tailor-made for him years ago. It still looks sleek and in fine shape, but its buttons are pulled so tight that it seems they could burst at any second. Every shoe-polished, black, glistening hair is in place along his broad scalp. Arianna is dressed to kill in a short, black cocktail dress far more suitable for a night out on the Vegas strip than in the mountains of Colorado. Moretti never misses an opportunity to show her off to business partners though, and tonight will be no different. She’s clearly feeling the chill from the stirring wind, even with a fur stole draped over her bronze-colored shoulders. Her toned arms are crossed in front of her, and her glossy, thick lips are puckered in annoyance.

  Moretti notices my attention turned to them and he nudges his stout elbow into Arianna’s side, misinterpreting my gaze as an appeal for someone to relay to me whatever joke Tony just made. Visibly irritated by his touch, her yellowish eyes greet mine and she signs to me what Moretti is certain to believe is an interpretation.

  “Have you ever fucked in the forest?” is the message she articulates with her hands.