Blood Trade: A Sean Coleman Thriller (24 page)

“A hardware store in . . . Las Cruces?”

Lumbergh’s eyes nearly bulged out of his head. “Las Cruces, New Mexico?” he breathlessly
asked.

“Yes. NM.”

“Cash or charge? Is there a name on it?”

“He charged it himself.
Alex Martinez
.”

“What was the date of the charge?”

When Bartels answered that it was January 7 of the current year, Lumbergh tossed
the radio to Redick, who was unprepared for it, fumbling it in his hands and nearly
letting it drop to the snowy ground.

The chief briskly jumped up onto the porch at the front of the police station and
raced inside. He snagged a clipboard off a sidewall above the reception desk and
slammed it down flat. Quickly licking his thumb, he fingered through the short stack
of papers pinned to its base. He soon verified that the three days Martinez had taken
off earlier in the month for a family emergency spanned from January sixth to the
eighth.

The sheriff reentered the station, meeting Lumbergh’s enlightened glare with confusion.

“What is it?” Redick asked.

Lumbergh didn’t answer. Instead, he hurried to the small, barred holding cell where
Martinez had been placed. The intern was sitting on a short metal bench bolted to
the cement floor; his legs sprawled out in front of him and his fingers interlaced
behind his head as if he were relaxing.

Lumbergh glared at him, his chest throbbing along with his pulse, watching the hint
of another snide smile begin to form on Martinez’s lips. He didn’t let him finish
it.

“You’re not working with Lautaro Montoya at all,” he began.

Martinez’s eyes glazed over as if his hand had just been caught in a cookie jar.
The smile slowly dissipated.

“You don’t know any more about where he is than I do. He
doesn’t know you. You don’t
know him. You don’t even know if he ever left Mexico, do you?”

Martinez was silent.

“Those calls I received. The threats. They didn’t come from Montoya. They came from
you—from a cellphone you bought in Las Cruces. That pig strung up at the back door.
What happened at Oldhorse’s cabin. It was all you. Nobody else.”

The intern turned his face to the side, suddenly unable to make eye contact with
Lumbergh. Redick watched from beside the chief, not saying a thing.

“This isn’t about Alvar Montoya at all, is it?” Lumbergh continued. “It’s about some
sick obsession you have with
me
.”

Martinez shook his head, seemingly in annoyance. A deep sigh left his mouth, followed
with an unexpected giggle.

Redick cringed at the nonsensical reaction.

Lumbergh’s patience had been expended. “What do you want?” he roared in a voice so
loud that the two other men in the room jumped. A vein protruded at the center of
Lumbergh’s reddened forehead as his body shook.

Martinez’s unfocused eyes nervously darted back and forth. When they stopped, they
rose to meet the raw anger in Lumbergh’s face. Martinez slowly rose to his feet and
walked to the steel bars that separated him from the lawmen. He rested his forehead
at the center of two of the bars as he glared at Lumbergh.

“I’m not the one who was obsessed with you, baby pig,” he said in a tone that carried
a lifetime of exhaustive torment.

Lumbergh and Martinez stared at each other intently, neither man’s eyes revealing
a hint of subservience.

Redick broke the stalemate. “Who was obsessed with him then, Martinez?”

Martinez’s eyes narrowed. His face shifted into a sneer. “
Mi madre
,” he uttered with
unfiltered disgust.

The chief didn’t visibly react to his words, but Redick’s face tightened.

“Jesus H. Christ,” the sheriff said. “Fantastic. A nut-job with mommy issues.” He
threw up his hands and turned his back, walking a few steps away while he rubbed
the base of his skull with his hand.

Lumbergh asked Martinez what he meant. The intern took a step back from the bars,
lowered his head, and clenched his forehead in his hand. He turned his back to the
lawmen and placed his other hand on the back wall of the cell. He seemed to be drained
of emotional energy.

“She wanted me to
be
you!” he bellowed, shaking his head. “An old woman’s dying wish.
She told me to go to Winston and learn from the man who slayed Alvar Montoya.
The
Great Chief Lumbergh
. The legend. She told me to learn to be the man that I wasn’t
that day.”

“
What
day?” asked Lumbergh, holding his temper.

Martinez began to sob, his head bobbing up and down. After a few moments, he regained
some composure. “The day my father was killed.”

When Martinez spun to face Lumbergh, his eyes were red and wet with tears. He peered
at the chief with an expression that suggested he was waiting for a response.

“Are you going to make us guess on the rest of that story, Martinez?” asked Redick.

The prisoner’s lower lip trembled. He used the back of his arm to wipe away the dampness
from his face.

“Alvar Montoya killed him,” said Lumbergh. “Didn’t he?”

Martinez snarled and lunged forward, latching his hand onto the bars in front of
him and showing his teeth. “Right in front of me, Chief. September thirteenth, 1993.
He beat my father to death, right there in our living room, and I just stood there
and watched. I couldn’t move! I didn’t do a fucking thing!”

Lumbergh turned to Redick, who raised his eyebrows in acknowledgment.

Martinez continued. “All my father was guilty of was selling a half-dozen joints
on Montoya’s turf. He was just trying to make a living to feed his family! He was
just trying to put food on our table.”

His chest rose up and fell steadily while the rest of him remained still. His eyes
were wild and irrational.

“Before he turned to leave, he looked at me . . . and he smiled. That bastard smiled
with his those big yellow teeth of his! ‘
Marranito
,’ he said. When my mother came
home, she found me kneeling in my father’s blood beside him.”

A grimace distorted Redick’s face. “Then why in the hell have you been carrying on
all this shit with the chief and his family? He killed the man who killed your father,
for God’s sake!”

“No he didn’t!” Martinez screamed out in primal fury. His face was red and twisted.
He grabbed onto the bars before him and slammed his head into the steel. Four or
five times his skull rattled the cage before blood from the earlier wound on his
head began pouring again. “He was the same child that
I
was that day! The same baby
pig! He didn’t kill Montoya. His Indian friend did! My mother called me a coward
for not trying to stop the man who was murdering my father, but you were no better
than me. You were worse! You took the credit for what a better man did—the man who
saved your ass!”

Lumbergh could feel Redick’s confused gaze bearing down on him from behind. He knew
he had some explaining to do, but that was the least of his worries at that very
moment.

Blood drained down Martinez’s face between his eyes before streaming to either side
of his nose. When it reached his mouth, he continued. “I wanted to see for myself
what you did when you faced the terror of another Montoya coming to hunt you down.
I wanted to see if you would be the same sniveling coward that you were that day.
You did just what I thought you’d do; you had Oldhorse
hover over you like some parent
protecting his child from monsters underneath his bed!”

The blood that had been boiling under Lumbergh’s skin finally erupted. He launched
forward and reached through the cell’s bars, latched onto Martinez’s head and yanked
it hard into the steel. Martinez wailed in pain. Lumbergh kept up the pressure, trying
to defy physics by attempting to pull the man’s head through the bars with nothing
but brute force.

Redick moved to intervene.

“Stand down!” Lumbergh snapped at him. “I swear to God, Richard, don’t you put your
hands on me right now!”

The derangement in Lumbergh’s eyes kept Redick at bay for the moment.

Lumbergh knew the truce wouldn’t last long. His head spun back to Martinez. “That’s
why you planted a bomb in Oldhorse’s house? You were going to kill him so he couldn’t
help me take down some sick fuck that’s not even after me?” he yelled. “All because
I didn’t live up to some superhero expectation you’ve been carrying around in that
fucked up head of yours?”

Martinez screamed in pain at the bars pressed up against his temples. After a lot
of squirming, he finally managed to jerk his head loose from Lumbergh’s one-handed
grip. His eyes bulged and his hands clutched the sides of his head.

“I don’t give a shit what you think of me, Martinez,” Lumbergh growled, his jaw locked
as he glared at the intern. “All I care about is getting my brother-in-law back.
You saw what happened to him. Your bullshit game is over. You’re going to prison.
If you want to catch any kind of break on the things you’ve done, you need to start
talking! Now!”

Martinez fell to his knees, erupting into a hideous cackle that seemed to switch
between laughter and sobbing. “The red fox has him now, Chief,” he blathered. “She
brought him back to her den.”

Lumbergh leaned forward, his strained eyes blinking. “What are you talking about?
What red fox?”

“You’re the
legend
, Chief!” Martinez bellowed. “
You
figure it out!”

His head lifted up to face the overhead light fixture at the center of the room.
He glared at it in wonderment like an infant enthralled with a mobile hanging over
his bed. His lips moved, but only whispers and babble drifted out.

“Why were you at Sean’s house last night?” Lumbergh yelled. “What did you see?”

Martinez now appeared to be in a hypnotic state. His eyes no longer recognized Lumbergh.
Instead, they were transfixed on the ceiling while gibberish continued to drop from
his mouth.

Lumbergh swore loudly and made a beeline for a nearby desk. He grabbed a chain of
keys from its top, sorting until he found the one for the cell. The moment he spun
back around, he felt Redick’s hand wrapped around his wrist.

“I think we’ve already jeopardized this case enough, Gary,” he said with eyes burning
a hole through the chief. “You’re not putting your hands on him again. Let’s get
this back into some realm of the law.”

Lumbergh yanked his hand away. He glared at
Redick, nearly choking on his own breath, fighting back the urge to shove him out
of the way.

“Listen,” Redick began in a restrained tone. “We’ve got this guy on what he did to
Oldhorse and your officer. We don’t want to screw that up. He poses no threat to
anyone anymore. You’re safe. You’re wife’s safe. There’s no bogeyman out there with
the last name of Montoya coming after either of you.”

Lumbergh winced in annoyance at Redick’s words, shaking his head but knowing deep
inside that there was nothing amiss with the statement. “He knows what happened to
Sean.”

“Maybe,” replied Redick. “But think about this for a minute.” He nudged Lumbergh
into the hallway out of earshot from Martinez before he continued. “Think about this:
When you take Montoya
out of the equation, what are we left with? Some nut responsible
for shooting your officer and blowing up your Indian friend. That’s awful, but that
nut’s now in our custody. Whatever happened to Sean is totally unrelated.”

“Who cares if it’s unrelated?” Lumbergh shot back, his face twisted in aggravation.

“Just hear me out. All we know about your brother-in-law is that something happened
at his place, someone got hurt, and someone was taken out to a car. For all we know,
a couple of his friends came over last night, they scuffled after having too much
to drink, and then went somewhere else.”

“Sean doesn’t
have
any friends!” Lumbergh shouted, his fist clenched. “And he hasn’t
had a drink in months. Someone broke through his back door, for God’s sake! These
weren’t people who were friends with him.”

Redick held his hands out in front of him, trying to cool Lumbergh down. “Please
listen to me,” he said calmly. “Could some people have broken in
because
Sean didn’t
answer the door? Maybe they came over for a visit, saw his car was there, and were
worried that he wasn’t answering the door. Maybe they broke in and found him hurt
and passed out so they took him to an emergency room.”

Lumbergh’s tilted face twisted in disbelief. “Why are you doing this, Richard? You
know that’s not what happened. All of your investigative training and instincts
tell
you
that’s not what happened.”

He recognized the disingenuousness in Redick’s changing demeanor as the sheriff tried
to convince him that his mind had been poisoned by the fear of a man as dangerous
as Lautaro Montoya on the loose and seeking vengeance. He listened to him suggest
that there was likely a perfectly reasonable explanation for Sean’s disappearance
that had nothing to do with foul play. When the sheriff reminded him that Sean hadn’t
even been missing for twenty-four hours yet, Lumbergh could no longer silently entertain
the display.

“I get it, Richard,” he said in a composed tone that seemed to catch Redick by surprise.
“In that cell over there, you’ve got a tightly wrapped package—a bullet point on
your resume. You’re not going to give that up for Sean Coleman—the town joke.”

Redick’s eyes narrowed angrily. “I’m not willing to let the man who injured and could
have killed two men—two friends of yours—off the hook for what he did just because
you refuse to do things by the book.”

Lumbergh shook his head. “But you were willing to give me some leeway when you thought
it might lead to a bigger fish, weren’t you?”

“That’s different and you know it. And if Martinez is telling the truth, and you
kept Oldhorse’s name out of the police file on the Alvar Montoya shooting, you’ve
already got more than one problem on your hands.”