Blood Trade: A Sean Coleman Thriller (10 page)

When it flew open, the flashlight fell and crashed to the floor. It rolled along
the tile in a semicircle, still illuminated, as a blast of cold air poured in.

“Come on,” he mumbled as he lowered to one knee and retrieved the flashlight.

He guided the beam through the open doorway. An object hung directly at its center.
It was the color of pale, human flesh.

He gasped and fell to his butt, biting his lip and dropping the flashlight. He quickly
grabbed his Glock.

Holding his breath, he targeted the object and nearly shouted out a warning but then
held back when his eyes more clearly interpreted its shape. The bottom of the object
was partially lit up by the flashlight lying on the floor. Two animal hooves were
revealed.

Keeping his gun trained on the object, Lumbergh quickly climbed to his feet and flipped
on a nearby light switch. Though the light
fixture was halfway down the hallway behind
him, there was enough light to expose the horrific sight dangling in the wind before
him.

It was a dead pig, hairless, strung up by a thick rope wrapped around its throat.
Its limp body looked nearly frozen and it spun slowly in the wind. The animal’s long
tongue protruded sickly from its mouth, suggesting that it may very well have been
strangled to death from the very rope that it now hung from. It wasn’t fully grown.
Young. Probably less than a hundred pounds.

Snow clung to many parts of its body. It had been there for a while, dangling outside
the seldom-used door for at least a couple of hours, likely before Lumbergh had even
returned to the office from his house after a quick dinner. He carefully slid past
the animal to the small staircase that led to the alley behind the building. He found
no footprints in the snow.

The concerns he had had over the past week were now substantiated; his fears were
not unwarranted. The veiled threats he’d received were not part of some hoax. This
was real.

Lumbergh was the “baby pig.” He was a cop of small physical stature who until now
was ignorant about the situation he had gotten himself into by killing Lautaro Montoya’s
older brother. Lautaro had arrived in Winston, and Lumbergh’s family wasn’t safe.

Chapter 6

S
ean tossed a small, split log into the mouth of the old cast iron stove in the
corner of the frigid room. In his other hand, he held a fried-chicken drumstick that
had been sitting by its lonesome in the cardboard bucket at the back of his refrigerator
for at least a week. He sank his teeth into it and enjoyed its spices as he watched
the flames in the stove devour new fuel.

He had been fond of the stove from the time he was a child. On the few occasions
when he and his sister got to spend the night over at their Uncle Zed’s, the two
children would sit in front of it for what seemed like hours with their arms wrapped
around their folded legs as they warmed themselves and played silly word games.

The stove seemed much larger and more intimidating back then. With the steel door
at its front missing, the fire inside almost made it look like one was staring down
the Devil’s throat. Diana used to worry that some sporadic cave-in of the wood inside
would send a stray ember hurling through the air and onto one of them as they played.
Sean had relished stoking that concern.

More than once back then he had faked getting burned, rolling around on the large
woven rug that lined the wooden floor beneath the stove, screaming wildly. He once
even brought his sister to tears. Zed always fought back a smile while denouncing
Sean for his niece’s benefit, but that curl along the side of his mouth was unmistakable.
Sean recognized it, and his uncle knew he did.

The stove hadn’t been moved from that spot in years. It still sat right at the edge
of the small living area that led into the front office
of Zed’s old business. Sean
owned the building now, and it became his new home after his uncle’s death. The building
was nearly paid off, with Zed having made the monthly mortgage payments for a couple
of decades. Sean was thankful for this. Just eighteen more months and he’d have a
big expense off his hands. Until then, he’d likely let the vampires at GSL Plasma
continue to drain him of his blood.

Surrounded by the crisp scent of burning wood, he retreated to the old, well-used
aluminum desk that was pressed up against one of the surrounding wood-paneled walls.
He pulled the chain of the small lamp with a deep-green shade that sat on the desk
and pushed aside a stack of bills and invoices that lay beside it.

He took a moment to unwrap the thick gauze strip that had held a cotton ball to his
arm for the last few hours where the plasma needle had been removed. The puncture
had probably healed about ten minutes after it had been wrapped, but often he’d forget
it was there until much later in the night. He dropped the dressing in a wastebasket
underneath the desk. From his back pocket, he retrieved the folded up
Denver Post
article that Toby had printed out for him. He straightened it out along the top of
his desk and used the sides of his hands as steamrollers to marginalize the creases.

He sat down on a metal folding chair that creaked with dissent, his eyes squinting
as he examined the article’s content. He read of how a man named Andrew Carson had
gone missing from his home in Greeley, Colorado, a week earlier. A picture of Carson
and a young woman accompanied the article. A significant amount of blood was found
at the crime scene, both in the garage of his house and on his driveway. It was “believed
to be Carson’s,” as the
Post
writer put it.

There were signs of a physical altercation, though the details of that evidence weren’t
printed because the case was still active. The police believed he had been attacked
as he arrived home from having dinner with his daughter, Katelyn, at a restaurant
in Fort Collins that
night. Katelyn was the young woman pictured next to Carson in
the photograph. Robbery was not thought to be a motive, though the article didn’t
explain why.

Much of the piece detailed the exhaustive efforts taking place in search of the missing
man, including the open-land areas that surrounded his neighborhood. Part of the
article profiled Katelyn, a recent college graduate with a nursing degree who worked
at a clinic in Greeley. The statements the
Post
printed from her were those of an
understandably scared and distraught young woman who was desperate to have her father
back.

“We argued the last time we talked,” she was quoted. “I wish that hadn’t been the
case.”

A picture on the second page showed Katelyn standing in what appeared to be a field,
though the light snow that covered the land behind her didn’t make that apparent.
She was clad in a light-blue winter jacket and jeans as she organized a search party,
pointing off into an unseen direction. Toby’s color printer had really captured the
redness of her wind-beaten face that showed her in the middle of barking out instructions
to volunteers. Beside her stood two people described in the photo’s caption as her
boyfriend and her mother. The mother was noted to be Andrew Carson’s ex-wife.

Sean smirked at the boyfriend’s appearance. He was a dead ringer for the fictional
character Harry Potter—thin, with floppy brown hair, circular glasses, and a scarf
wrapped around his neck.

Sean was about to continue reading when his attention was caught by something in
the picture that felt so familiar that it sent butterflies through his gut. A unique
shade of red.

He yanked open a shallow desk drawer and snatched the old magnifying glass that his
uncle had used when working on the weapons in his gun collection. He held the thick,
circular lens in front of the photo and saw that the red was a woman’s hair. He studied
the face of the woman closely. It took him only seconds to determine that it was
Jessica. She wasn’t standing with Carson’s family, but rather
off in the background
by herself, probably unaware she was being photographed.

He completed the rest of the article, and when he got to the very last sentence,
he read that Katelyn Carson’s mother Molly, her boyfriend Derek, and her cousin Jess
were assisting Katelyn in her search efforts.

“Jess… Jessica,” Sean said aloud. Jessica from GSL Plasma was the niece of the missing
man.

He raised his head. His tired eyes stared forward at the wall in front of him. Below
a high shelf of old, dusty country music records hung several pictures. Many were
of his uncle showing off his hunting and fishing prizes or firing a rifle at a distant
target. One toward the bottom of the wall revealed a younger Zed Hansen with dark
hair and a darker mustache. He was down on one knee beside Sean as a child. Both
were gripping a fishing line that was heavy from the weight of a large rainbow trout
that dangled from an unseen hook somewhere below their interlaced fingers.

There was an unmistakable fountain of pride gushing from his uncle’s eyes in the
photo. The closer Sean looked, the more it seemed, however, that there was something
else etched behind those eyes. It was as if his uncle was requesting something of
him.

Zed was a man who had always gone out of his way to help others in need and he never
asked for anything in return. However, at that moment, Sean experienced a sensation
in his gut that Zed was indeed trying to call on his nephew’s services from beyond
the grave—perhaps in payment for leaving behind the means for Sean to build his own
legacy. Those eyes were telling him to step up and do something good for someone
else—someone who had also lost an uncle.

Elsewhere in Winston that night, Lumbergh had come to several conclusions about his
past and his present. Not just his own present,
but Diana’s, too. The plan was to
draw Lautaro out into the open. Lumbergh sent away his family and all nonessential
employees at the police station for their own safety. Whenever Lautaro was set to
strike, Lumbergh didn’t want any innocent parties caught in the crossfire.

His line of work had already affected one innocent, albeit resilient, party. Lumbergh
wanted to avoid more complications. He made the few calls he knew he had to.

He believed that Ron Oldhorse’s military training would prove invaluable in bringing
down Lautaro. Oldhorse had agreed. The chief and recluse shared a mutual benefit.
Oldhorse made it clear he appreciated the large favor Lumbergh had done for him in
the Montoya shooting aftermath. It was something that neither forgot, but also something
that neither could mention.

Lumbergh had scrubbed Oldhorse’s name from the official police report, eliminating
all mention of him in the details of how Alvar Montoya died—as per Oldhorse’s request.
The truth was that while Lumbergh was indeed responsible for ending Montoya’s life
with a bullet between his eyes, he would have never had the chance to take the shot
if it wasn’t for Ron Oldhorse. Lumbergh let his mind wander along memories he dared
not utter aloud.

Oldhorse had happened upon the shootout in the mountains just as Montoya was about
to end Lumbergh’s life. Lumbergh had been flat on his back, bleeding profusely and
barely able to move, with his firearm on the ground just a few feet away. Montoya
had been standing over him with his gun raised. An arrow that Oldhorse shot into
Montoya’s back from afar removed that advantage. Lumbergh had regained his pistol
and ended things.

Lumbergh’s teeth chomped harder on his chewing gum at the recollection. The omission
had been a tough call for him to make. He was a man who had risen up the law enforcement
ranks in Chicago to police lieutenant, in large part, by doing everything
by the
book
. When Oldhorse had confided in him that there was a federal arrest
warrant out
for him stemming from an incident in South Dakota years earlier, however, Lumbergh
had a serious decision to make. He could stick to the truth and watch the highly
publicized event with federal implications result in the man who had just saved his
life being hauled away in handcuffs, or he could withhold a superficial portion of
the story in order to achieve a different type of justice for someone he was highly
indebted to.

Oldhorse had instinctively reclaimed the arrow from Montoya’s body at the scene,
as he would have from an animal he had hunted down and killed. Lumbergh believed
the deception would be easy to pull off while not damaging the case.

As far as the official record was concerned, Oldhorse happened upon the scene after
the shooting had already ended. Thus, the news media was largely satisfied when given
the story that it was a nearby hunter, who wished to remain anonymous, who assisted
Lumbergh afterwards. Oldhorse escaped all of the celebrity that fell squarely on
the shoulders of Lumbergh. It suited both men well, most of the time.

Lumbergh wanted to make certain no one without a badge got involved in his police
work again.