Blood Trade: A Sean Coleman Thriller (16 page)

“Do you live by yourself, Sean?” she asked in an upbeat tone.

“Yeah,” he answered quickly, almost dismissively. “How did you get my address?”

She grinned, turning her head to the side a bit as she continued down the hallway.
“It’s in the GSL computer system. It was pretty easy to get.”

A scoffing chuckle fell from his mouth. GSL had refused to give him Jessica’s address,
but his
own
information was apparently up for grabs. He nearly voiced his grievance
but stopped himself short, deciding not to tip his hand that he had sought her out
earlier that night. It was advice lent to him by an old episode of
Simon & Simon
for dismantling someone’s lies:
The less you pretend to know, the tighter they’ll
tie their own noose.
He was going to give her the rope.

“You want something to drink?” he asked, knowing he had nothing but a couple of diet
sodas and a glass of tap water to offer.

She declined with a “No thank you.”

He removed a couple of sweatshirts from an old worn-out wingchair that was close
to the stove. The clothes were still unfolded and not yet put away from a laundry
load two days earlier. Foam stuffing dangled from the outside of a large tear in
the side of the chair’s cushion.

“Have a seat,” he said with forced courtesy. “Warmest spot in the house.”

She grinned and said thank you, unzipping her jacket and looking to Sean to offer
to take it from her. He didn’t. She kept it on and took her seat.

He snatched the remote control off an end table and switched off a muted rerun of
Barnaby Jones
with the flick of a wrist.

“Did you let the Carsons know what I told you?” he asked before plopping himself
down on his recliner.

Her eyebrows rose a bit. “Yes. They were appreciative. I think it was comforting
for them to know that progress was being made. They’re remaining hopeful. We all
are.”

He nodded, silently amazed at how easily the lies were pouring from her mouth. The
way she delivered them was convincing, seemingly sincere. Whatever preconceived notions
he had formed of her from those weeks in the plasma bank were quickly disintegrating
before his very eyes.

“You look different.” He nodded at her appearance. “Heading
out on a date?” He wasn’t
sure why that was the question that had come to his mind.

“No,” she quickly answered. “I just went out with some people after work. There’s
usually a lot going on in Lakeland on Friday nights. I figured I’d take a couple
of co-workers up on their invitation to join them for once.”

He nodded.

After some uncomfortable silence slaved by, she told him how she had been talked
into trying her hand at karaoke and sang a poor rendition of Belinda Carlisle’s “Heaven
Is a Place on Earth” in front of a room full of strangers. She laughed afterwards,
and he let the ends of his lips curl a bit.

It was the kind of conversation he had dreamed of one day having with her, but Sean
knew none of it was real. That made it all the harder to listen.

“So what did you want to talk to me about?” he asked, heading off a new sentence
she was about to start.

“Oh, okay,” she said, a little taken aback. She swallowed and nodded uncomfortably
before continuing. “Earlier, when I asked you if you knew the name of the man police
suspect, you said no.”

“Right,” he replied, curious what was coming next.

“Well, please forgive my bluntness, but I wasn’t so sure you were telling me the
truth.”

His mouth subtly fought a grin, recognizing the irony in her statement. He said nothing.

“I mean. . .” she continued with some shakiness in her voice. “You hesitated before
you answered the question, and my guess is that you might know the suspect’s name
but that you didn’t want to tell it to me because you were afraid of getting your
police friend in trouble.”

It was suddenly clear to him that she was there on a mission—a mission to extract
the knowledge he had of the police case. His attraction to her was going to be used
as the siphon. That was her
plan anyway. It was as if the two of them were back at
the plasma bank, with him on the bed and her sticking a needle in his arm. Instead
of blood being drawn from him, however, information was the intended acquisition.

Sean nodded, his eyes glazed over and his mind secretly running on all cylinders.
Why was the suspect’s name so important to her? Why did it matter?
If his earlier
theory was right, and she was indeed Andrew Carson’s mistress, he could understand
a curiosity over the details of the case. But the fact that she would dig into Sean’s
account to find his address, spruce herself up, and drive out to his home in the
middle of the night to get such information didn’t add up. Those weren’t acts of
impulsive curiosity. There was something more methodical to it—something more purposeful.

His mind whipped back to what he had seen in the GSL parking lot after Jessica thought
he had already driven off—her impassioned phone conversation. He recalled the look
of desperation in her face—the look of fear. As he despondently glared into her eyes
as the two now sat silently in his living room, he began to observe just a hint of
that same desperation and fear forming along the contours of her face.

Eye-opening sobriety suddenly struck him. He believed he finally understood what
was going on. He hoped a single test would confirm the conclusion he had reached,
and before he opened his mouth to speak, he held his eyes on hers, prepared to gauge
whatever reaction they were about to unknowingly disclose.

“Steve McGarrett,” he said. It was the name of the lead character from
Hawaii Five-O
;
a name he was convinced would mean absolutely nothing to her.

That’s when he saw it, a subtle sense of relief in her eyes and a deep breath drifting
out of her mouth from low in her chest. She was never worried about the fate of Andrew
Carson. She was worried about herself, and perhaps the suspect the police were looking
for: Norman Booth.

“Ever heard of him?” he asked, remaining calm.

She shook her head. “No. I’m afraid not.”

“Well, you didn’t hear that name from me, okay?” he said with a raised eyebrow.

“Of course not,” she said, letting a quick, nervous grin show. “Thank you. I’m sorry
I stopped by so late, Mr. Coleman.”

“Sean.”

“What?”

“That’s what you called me when you wanted inside and were making small-talk with
me just now—when you wanted my help. You called me Sean. Not Mr. Coleman. You can
keep calling me Sean.”

“Okay. I’ll do that,” she said, offering a polite smile before standing up from her
chair and reaching for the zipper of her jacket.

“You’re not leaving, are you?” he quickly asked, wearing a contrived look of disappointment
across his face. “What’s your hurry?”

“I’d really better—” she started to say before Sean cut her off.

“Because I wanted to ask
you
a question.”

“Oh, okay,” she said.

Her jaw squared as she seemed to be fighting back the urge to roll her eyes, probably
predicting he was about to ask her out to dinner sometime. She reluctantly sat back
down.

He glared at her without expression for a moment, wondering if she was at all suspicious
of how heavily he was judging her. “Ever hear of a town in Utah named Hanksville?”
he blurted out.

Her eyes narrowed at the odd question. The mild grin vanished from her face, and
she shook her head no.

“I guess there’s no real reason you should have. It’s a tiny little town. A speck
on the map. Some shithole in the middle of the desert, surrounded by miles and miles
of dirt, rock, and scrub.”

Jessica’s face twisted tighter in confusion.

“Not many people live there. There’s only a few buildings along a highway. One diner.
One gas station. A couple of rundown motels
for travelers driving off the beaten
path, coming to or from Lake Powell. Powell’s about an hour’s drive away from Hanksville.”

She now looked as if she was forcing herself to appear intrigued by Sean’s words.
She clearly wanted to leave. “I take it you’ve been there?”

“Yeah. Back in high school. Senior year. Some of the other guys on the football team
planned a road trip to Powell over spring break. Two days out on the water.”

“That sounds like fun.”

He ignored her comment. “I knew that none of them wanted me along, but I had a few
bucks to spend from washing dishes at a local diner. I
imposed
myself. Told them
I’d pay for half of the gas myself. I just needed to get out of Winston for a while.”

She nodded.

“Anyway, after about a five-hour drive in an old, full-sized van with no air-conditioning—the
last half of it through the Utah wasteland—we stopped to fill up in Hanksville. The
gas station there is actually pretty cool looking. It’s called something like Hollow
Rock or Hollow Mountain. The building, the store, is inside of a cave that was blasted
through one of these huge orange-colored rocks that you can find all around the area.
I mean, they really are big.” His eyes left hers and dropped to the floor before
he continued. “While they were filling up, I told a couple of the guys that I was
going inside to take a dump.”

Jessica winced.

“When I came back out, the van was gone. They’d left without me.” When his gaze returned
to hers, he found her eyes wide.

“Did they do it on purpose?” she asked. “Was it some kind of joke?” She finally sounded
interested.

“Who knows?” he answered. “They later told me it was an accident, but that’s pretty
hard to believe. There were seven of us inside that van. You’d think one of them
would have noticed that someone was missing.”

“When they came back for you?”

“They
didn’t
come back for me. I waited there for over an hour, outside that gas
station in the hot sun, feeling the eyes of the attendant inside glued to my back
as I paced back and forth. She felt sorry for me. She checked on me a couple of times.”
A brief chuckle spilled from Sean’s mouth as he recalled the memory. “That old lady
at the register lived out in the middle of nowhere where she worked at a rundown
gas station, had about four teeth left in her mouth, and there she was feeling sorry
for
me
. I kept thinking that every moving dot that popped up over the horizon would
be the guys returning for me, but it was never them. A couple of families. Groups
of friends. No one by themself like I was.”

Jessica now seemed legitimately invested in his story. There was sadness in her eyes
that didn’t appear phony. It was the sadness he’d often witnessed while watching
her from afar at the plasma bank.

He continued. “One of those couples were brave enough to let a big guy who looked
like me hitch a ride to the marina at Lake Powell. I knew they were heading that
way because they had jet-skis in tow. By the time I got there, though, the guys had
already left on the houseboat. Gone for two days.”

Her jaw dropped. “Well, what did you do?” she asked. “Did another boat take you out
to them? One of the park rangers?”

“No. I didn’t want anyone to.”

“Well, why not?”

“Because their actions spoke louder than their words. At some point, you’ve got to
accept that you’re just not supposed to be somewhere. It’s not because you’re a loner
or a lone wolf or whatever. It’s because the rest of the pack just doesn’t want you
anywhere near them.” He could read the confusion in her eyes.

“Why are you telling me this, Sean?” she asked, sadness in her voice.

He gazed at her for a moment. “Because I can think of exactly three times in my life
when I felt like the biggest asshole on the
planet. That day was one of those times.
Another was the day my dad walked out on me.” He focused an angry glare on her uncertain
eyes. “The last one was today, when I drove down to Greeley to help search for Andrew
Carson’s body and found that his family has no idea who the fuck you are.”

Jessica’s face turned completely pale, just as it had the day before in the GSL parking
lot when he had first mentioned Carson’s name to her. Her mouth was open but no words
came out. She leaned forward in her chair, clawing her fingers into the armrests
as if she was considering bolting toward the door. The doubt in her eyes signaled
to Sean, however, that she didn’t think she could make it past him if he tried to
stop her.

She was right.

“What did you do to Andrew Carson?” he growled. He suddenly stood up.

The quick action made her leap from her chair and hold her open hands out in front
of her defensively. Her body trembled as she shook her head. Tears began to build
up in her eyes.

“Do you think I’m fucking stupid?” he roared, his chest tight and fists clenched.
A twisted sneer etched across his face. “You show up here in the middle of the night,
looking all hot, and I’m gonna blabber everything out like some love struck school
kid without figuring out what you’re doing?”

The tears were now streaming down her face. Her whole body shook.

“Where’s Andrew Carson’s body? Where?”

“I need help,” she murmured.

“What?” he grunted.

“I need help!” she screamed so loudly that Sean found himself cringing and taking
a step backward.

Her eyes sporadically shot from one end of the room to the other, and when she happened
to turn her head to the side far enough for him to see the profile of her face, he
noticed a small, clear tube
wedged at the center of her ear. It didn’t look like
a hearing aid, at least not the kind his mother wore. It looked more advanced, like
a listening device.

A loud crash at the rear of the building grabbed their attention. Sean recognized
the noise as the back door being whipped open and striking the adjacent wall. His
head snapped back to Jessica, quickly meeting her eyes.

Loud, rapid footsteps clanged their way down the hallway toward them. A man dressed
all in black surged around the hallway corner. Sean charged him.