Blood Trade: A Sean Coleman Thriller (4 page)

He staggered backwards, wobbly legs trembling. Wide-eyed, he watched in horror as
a man’s large arm pushed open the trunk from inside. The light exposed a menagerie
of tattoos along the arm—most recognizable was one of a large swastika.

The man he’d clubbed at the bypass now climbed out of the trunk. Clasped in his hand
was a large switchblade. Blood dripped from it.

Andrew wanted to run, but he couldn’t breathe and his legs weren’t responding. He
didn’t remember falling backwards, but he suddenly found himself sprawled out on
his back along the frozen driveway. His fluttering eyes gazed up through the surreally
peaceful white flakes that fell from the sky to his face. Among those snowflakes,
he found himself gazing into the eyes of his tattooed attacker.

“You should have given me a ride, shitberg!” the man grunted out. He wiped his mouth
with the back of his arm.

Unable to find his breath, Andrew’s body felt frozen as the man slowly and methodically
approached him. To Andrew, he looked eight feet tall. Cloaked in relative darkness,
his presence was sinister, almost mythical—a grim soul cast in the mold of an angel
of death.

The man flicked his wrist so that his fingers were clasped over the top of the handle
instead of under it.

Andrew saw him grip the handle, readying to plunge it down into his chest to finish
the job.

Andrew’s lips moved in a silent plea for help, but he heard no sound escape his mouth.
He thought of his daughter and all of the things he wished he had told her—the pride
he had in her and all that she meant to him, the love that would last beyond the
grave.

The evil hovering above him seemed to glare down into the trenches of his very soul,
as if recognizing his every thought. Andrew
knew that this sadistic man would be
the last image he would see before he left this earth.

But as his vision grew blurry and his pulse winded down, he sensed another presence
close by. He hoped it was an angel watching over him, ready to guide him to the afterlife.
He mouthed a garbled prayer. The presence, however, wasn’t that of a spirit.

A bright flash of blue light and the juiced sound of something electric sizzled nearby
and then Andrew’s attacker’s body buckled under a crippling force. He barked out
an incoherent sound that was higher in tone than expected from someone his size.
He staggered to the side before dropping to a knee. The blue light lit up the driveway
a second time and the man’s body contorted into an unnatural pose and then collapsed
face first to the cement.

Andrew wasn’t sure what had happened; his mind rushed back to the life draining quickly
from his body. His lower lip quivered uncontrollably. He could no longer turn his
head at all. His limbs were cold, nearly numb. He could see his left arm rise in
the air as if it were reaching for something that wasn’t there.

He realized it wasn’t he who was holding his arm up, but someone else. A man. The
man’s hand was wrapped around it, supporting it.

A face came into view over Andrew, hovering just inches above. The night kept it
mostly unseen, but Andrew was sure he could read concern and compassion etched across
it through the thick lenses of the man’s glasses. The man’s mouth was moving, but
all Andrew could hear was a buzzing noise that no one other than the dying could
hear.

“Poor bugger,” a voice with an accent spoke.

The comment didn’t come from the man who held Andrew. It came from a shadowy figure
that he now noticed standing a few yards away with his hands hugging his hips. There
were two men hovering above, not one.

Andrew felt a wild, impulsive urge to grab onto whatever life
he could manage to
cling to and his fingers went to the face of the man who held him. They ran along
his glasses and then found a mustache, a thick one. Only, it wasn’t real. He tore
half of it from the man’s face. It dangled in the air, swaying in the wind above
the man’s lips.

It was the last thing Andrew Carson saw.

January 24th, 2002

Thursday

Chapter 2

“W
ere you born or have you ever lived in or received medical attention in any of
the following countries since 1977: Cameroon, Central African Republic, Chad, Congo,
Equatorial Guinea, Niger, or Nigeria?”

Sean Coleman glared in irritation over the narrow, neatly kept desk at the woman
who had asked him the awkward question. She was a large, top-heavy individual in
her sixties. Her hair was short and nearly as white as the short-sleeved shirt she
wore. Thick, black, wing-tipped glasses rested upon the edge of her round nose and
her deadpan eyes suggested that she was in no mood for whatever guff she predicted
from the man now silently judging her.

“Jesus. Are you kidding me?” asked Sean. His big body shuffled around uncomfortably
in the orange fiberglass chair that would have been too small for even an average-sized
adult. “I was just in here two days ago. You asked me these exact same questions
then. Do you
really
think that sometime in the past two days I visited a witch doctor
in some half-assed, bamboo hut in Africa?”

The woman’s eyes rose to the ceiling and she folded her thick, flabby arms in front
of her chest. His rant wasn’t the first agitated outburst she’d had to contend with
in her line of work. She sank back into a heap in her towering metal swivel chair.
It let out a painful growl from the movement. Though she was short, her chair let
her hover about six inches above Sean.

She replied in a restrained, seemingly rehearsed tone. “Mr. Coleman, it’s our policy.
We have to ask the same questions every
single time you donate. I don’t like it.
You’ve made it clear that
you
don’t like it. But that’s the policy, and you should
know that by now.”

He slowly gave a curt shake of his head, a grunt escaping his lips. He scoffed at
what he considered nothing more than a waste of time inside a building he would have
rather not been in in the first place. He lowered his gaze to his right hand as he
peeled a cotton ball from the tip of his index finger. The inside of it was stained
crimson from where his skin had been pricked to draw a blood sample. He’d passed
his test for an adequate protein level.

“Fine,” he said abruptly. “Next question.”

“I still need you to answer the last one.”

“No! I’ve never been to any of those places!”

His raised tone stole the glance of a young man in a lab coat who negotiated his
way through a tight hallway behind the woman. The man eyed Sean’s appearance, taking
note of the large, silver badge that hung proudly on Sean’s gray uniform shirt.

“Hi. How are you?” Sean said loudly with wide, mocking eyes.

The man looked away and continued on by.

The woman behind the desk took a breath, leaned forward in her chair again, adjusted
herself, and tapped a single button on the keyboard in front of her. The reflection
in her glasses let Sean see a line of green text change on the small computer monitor
that fed her questions. He could also see his own face in the reflection. It revealed
that he needed a shave.

She proceeded with the questioning. “Have you ever had sex with another man, even
once, since 1977?”

Sean’s eyes narrowed and his face twisted into a sneer so sharp that it could have
been mistaken for a symptom of physical pain. “Why the hell would you even ask me
that? Do I come across as gay to you?”

Her shoulders dropped as if she were a puppet whose strings had just been cut. An
exhausted sigh spewed from her, followed
by a low mutter of something to herself.
She removed her glasses, planted her elbows firmly on her desk, and eclipsed her
face with the palms of her hands.

Minutes later, Sean was back in the building’s intensely lit lobby, seated among
a motley crew of men and women that ran the spectrum of age, ethnicities, and hygiene
practices. His large body was positioned tightly between a short Hispanic woman who
was knitting and a thin boy dressed in a raggedy t-shirt and jeans who couldn’t have
been older than nineteen. Sean looked like a giant beside them. His six-foot-five-inch
frame and broad shoulders towered above the others, forcing both the woman and the
boy to tilt their bodies away from him at unnatural angles.

Sean was largely oblivious to the sporadic conversations that carried on around him
as he contemplated the significance of the year 1977 from the scripted interview
he had just endured. That specific year was used in a number of the questions, which
left him to ponder what kind of global epidemic must have went down back then. He
filed that mystery away in a mental cabinet of the things he’d one day look up on
the World Wide Web—if he ever scraped up enough money to pay for an Internet service.

After selling his blood plasma at the bank for several weeks, he still hadn’t quite
gotten used to the stench in the air—a mix of iodine and bleach. The smell emitted
from all corners of every room.

He noticed a new donor being processed at the front desk. She was an older Arabic-looking
woman with a younger woman, apparently a daughter, who was translating instructions
from the receptionist into whatever foreign tongue they spoke. Both women wore burkas
that covered their hair and bodies.

Sean felt some tension in the air from a few people in the waiting room. Cautious
stares. Whispering. Only a few months had passed since the September 11 attacks,
so the sight of a couple of individuals
clad in Muslim attire in a public area didn’t
go unnoticed. He wasn’t sure if the blank expression the mother’s face wore came
from the inability to understand what she was being told or from despondency over
a misfortune in life that brought her to where she was now.

He understood such misfortune. Less than a year ago, he would have never envisioned
himself sitting in such a place—a purgatory-like holding dock where people were forced
to contemplate their financial failings before being strapped to a bed and drained
of a liquid component in their blood for cash. A lot had happened in a year. A sober
year, at that.

The money was good, though, as everyone sitting in the lobby knew. Forty dollars
for the first donation of the week, fifty for the second. He was often amused that
he was labeled a “donor” and that he was there to “donate” something. These were
terms that implied he was giving something away for free, purely out of the kindness
of his heart. He wasn’t. Still, it was wording that the employees there were clearly
trained to use and use often, probably as a way to help the clientele feel more positive
about themselves.

No one was setting aside two hours of their life to come there and
donate
anything.
Despite all of the posters decorating the lobby that educated participants on how
their plasma was used to save lives, people were there for the money. All of them.

For Sean, the practice had become a lifeline to help his fledgling security business
stay afloat. Up until six months ago, he had merely worked as a contracted guard
for the company. At that time, his uncle, Zed Hansen, owned it. Hansen, however,
had been killed back in July. An unfortunate encounter with an unhinged drug dealer,
believed to have also killed two U.S. border security guards years earlier, ended
Zed’s life. Much to Sean’s surprise, his uncle had left the company’s assets to him
in his will. The company wasn’t some fancy home-security outfit where a guy strapped
to a headset monitored alarm systems from his computer and alerted the police when
necessary. No, Hansen Security was hands on, meaning a
little roughing up might be
required when the moment called for it. Typically, jobs consisted of walking the
grounds of a property or serving as some intimidating muscle at an event.

Sean could have sold off the assets and shut down the business, but he felt that
carrying on the company was not only an opportunity for him to move forward in his
life but also a way to honor his uncle, whom he deeply missed. Zed Hansen was a good
man, like a father to Sean, whose real father abandoned him when he was a child.
Even though Sean didn’t always have faith in himself, his uncle had always had confidence
in Sean. Zed kept him on his payroll, even during the dark days when Sean struggled
with alcohol and his inner demons. Sean’s reputation as a town drunk who engaged
in the occasional public fistfight had cost Zed potential business, but his uncle
had always stood by his side. He was a loyal supporter.

Sean’s demons from those days hadn’t all left, but he managed to keep them at bay.
He hadn’t had a drink since Zed’s funeral. It wasn’t always easy to stay on the wagon,
but he hadn’t fallen off yet.

What he didn’t know at the time of his inheritance was that Hansen Security hadn’t
been doing as well as he had believed. Profits were razor-thin and his uncle owed
the bank a good amount of money. Sean’s name was a detriment to the business. In
a small town, reputation and associations were magnified. Several loyal customers
just didn’t trust him, and with good reason. He was the black sheep of his hometown
of Winston, Colorado, a small, rural community deep within the Rocky Mountains. It
was more than just his label “town drunk.” People knew Sean to be a mean-spirited
bully, an unreliable lush with a security badge, a man who couldn’t “keep his shit
together.”