Both Ends Burning (Whistleblower Trilogy Book 3) (17 page)

“For a second,” Thomason said, “I thought you broke my jaw, back in that motel room. I have to hand it to you, kid, you were quick. Much quicker than an old man like me. And your little distraction earned you one more visit to your wife, so hooray for you.”

“The cops are coming,” I said.

“Yes, and this is going to be a tricky one.” He reached behind into his jacket pocket and removed a stun gun. He pressed the button and light crackled between the two points at the end, just as they had on a similar weapon, a month ago, when Kareem had met me at Ernie’s Bar.

The magical man, dead. His brother, dead. So many others as well.

Thomason lurched forward, struggling to breathe. “Wow, this altitude gets me every time. Now, why don’t you play along and come over here, so we can make sure your prints get on this baton?”

Dog came out from between the Snowcats, padding on quiet feet in the snow. After Thomason killed me, would he kill my dog too? Seemed like the kind of thing he’d do.

“Did you like what I did to your next-door neighbor? I decided to handle that one myself.”

Rage welled up inside me. Clouded my thinking. “You’re evil.”

“I’ve had enough of your bitching and moaning. You think I like having to come out here and deal with this personally? I should be on a beach in Costa Rica. I shouldn’t be trifling with such matters as petulant children who think they have a higher moral standing.”

Dog lowered his head and sidestepped, moving within a few feet of Thomason.

“What’s the point of all this?” I said. “All these people dead. All this chaos.”

“It’s just business. That’s all. It’s always just been business. Your leash has been entirely too long, young Candle. I accept some of the blame because I’ve been too lenient with you. After you murdered Wyatt, Glenning told me he wanted to flay the skin from your bones and drag you behind his car down I-35. I said no, but I should have let him do it. Short-sighted, on my part. But all that ends today.”

He pressed the button on the stun gun and then sprinted at me.

Dog raised his head, bared his teeth, and leaped at Thomason. He sank his teeth into Thomason’s exposed wrist.

Thomason fell to the ground, howling, flailing, trying to push Dog off him. They twisted in the snow, the sounds of Dog’s growling and Thomason’s screams melding together.

He’d dropped both the baton and the stun gun.

I scrambled across the snow and picked up the stick. I figured the stun gun might be wet and may or may not work.

Dog had Thomason pinned, and I knelt in the snow next to them. Dog looked up at me, released his grip on Thomason’s wrist.

I pressed the baton against his neck and pushed. The wound in my hand screamed at me, but I ignored it.

Thomason’s eyes shifted from Dog to me as his face went red. His eyes pleading. He tried to open his mouth to speak as his chest heaved.

I straddled him to keep him in place, keeping pressure on his neck. I knew I should stop. I knew that he held IntelliCraft’s secrets in his head, but I couldn’t help myself. For everything he and his people had done, he needed to die.

He struggled, so I pushed harder. Felt the strain in my injured hand, but I gritted my teeth and pushed as he started to sink into the packed snow.

He gasped, choking, spurting. Drool cascaded from his lips.

I pushed harder.

Ten seconds later, his eyes rolled back into his head and a last little breath escaped his lips.

Thomason was dead.

I dropped the baton and Dog sniffed at Thomason’s temple. Dog looked up at me, the fur around his face red with Thomason’s blood. Tail wagging.

I got to my feet and ran back to my dad. Turned him over.

He drew in a breath. His head was split open, blood pouring down his face. He opened his mouth and some blood dribbled in, which made him cough.

“Dad?”

“Tucker, I’m sorry. It wasn’t supposed to be like this.”

“Don’t talk, Dad, you’re going to be okay. I can hear the cops coming, and you’re not that injured. There will be an ambulance.”

He shook his head and pointed down. I followed his finger to see a red swath of clothing covering his stomach. Blood leaking out, coating the snow around us. “There was one more of them back in the village. Your friend with the shotgun took care of him, but not before he gave me this.”

Rodrick had come through.

“Is Grace okay?”

“I think so. I left to make sure there weren’t any more of them in the village. And to come find you.”

He coughed again, which sped up the rate of blood leaking onto the snow. The red patch had ballooned into a circle the size of a trash can lid.

“I wanted to make it right,” he said.

“Maybe you still can.”

“How?”

I fished into my pocket for the cell phone. Flipped it open. Squinting to see the screen in the bright light, I scrolled through the menu until I located the apps section. Found it: voice recorder.

I clicked on it, then held it over his face. “Go ahead.”

“What do I say?”

“Tell me who you are and what you did. Tell me about IntelliCraft.”

“My name is Heathcliff Alexander Candle. I formed a company with Muhammed—also known as Kareem—and Omar Qureshi, along with Frank Thomason, in Texas. We were IntelliCraft. We were initially supposed to be a military contractor, but…”

He paused to cough more blood.

“We sold our technology to Iran, Pakistan, and other countries, without the US government’s knowledge. This went on for more than twenty years.”

He stopped, gagging, blood jumping from his lips and into the air with each blast.

“Is there any evidence of this, Dad? Is there a way we can prove what you’re saying?”

“Yes. There are bills of sale in a safe deposit box at a Nordea bank in Stockholm, under the name Roman Carter.”

He tried to go on, but a coughing fit stopped him. More blood sprayed from his mouth.

“I don’t have much time left,” he said, which came out as a barely recognizable gurgling sound. “You asked Susan before about why IntelliCraft hasn’t ever killed you,” he said.

I clicked the button to shut off the recorder. “Yes?”

“There’s something I never told you. Something about your mother.”

He coughed, murmured, groaned. He tried to open his mouth and speak, but a grunt came out. Tears dribbled down the side of his face.

“What about my mother?” I said.

Our eyes locked as his breath became rapid, then slowed, then stopped. His eyes went glassy.

Shouts came from behind me, followed by the sound of boots crunching snow. I slipped the phone in my pocket, then passed a hand across his eyes to close them. If it weren’t for the blood on his face already caking in the frigid air, I’d have said he looked peaceful.

“You!” said a deep voice. “Put your hands behind your head!”

I got to my feet, laced my fingers over my scalp, and looked down one last time at the body of the man who’d been my father.

EPILOGUE

The clouds painted on the ceiling stared back at me as I rocked back and forth on the glider. Naturally, we bought the gliding ottoman as well, so with my feet up, my body cruised forward and backward like floating on water.

My left hand still didn’t work very well, so I mostly did everything with my right. I was two or three surgeries away from being healed, and they’d told me it would never be back to normal. Guess I’d have to scratch learning the guitar off my bucket list.

I used my left arm to hold the little one while my right hand kept the bottle in his face. Breast milk sloshed back and forth as he sucked.

Halfway through the bottle, his little eyes dimmed, and he lost some steam.

“Nope,” I said, “you gotta finish the whole thing. Mom says so.”

I tugged at the bottle a bit to wake him up, and his eyes flashed open, then he started sucking madly. When he’s really into it, his right eye jitters up and down, like the flicker of a light bulb. It’s the cutest thing ever.

He burned through the last two ounces of the bottle in sixty seconds.

I set the bottle on the floor next to the chair and turned him over, to lay him on my chest. Patted his back. He fidgeted a bit, because this wasn’t his favorite position.

“Nope. None of that fussy stuff. Come on, baby, let’s get a burp. The meal’s not done until you burp.”

Now, you might think, given the fact that I have a dog named Dog and a cat named Kitty, that my son’s name might actually be Baby. Not the case.

After thirty seconds of vigorous back-patting, he let loose a gurgling belch, and I held him out at arm’s length. The bullet wound in my hand still sometimes ached, usually when I tried to grip anything.

He smiled at me, turning his head left and right as he did.

“There we go. Don’t you feel better now? Let’s go see what’s in that diaper.”

I carried him to the changing table and laid him down. He cackled, grinning, kicking his legs. He loved the changing table. Maybe because of the soft cover Grace had put on it, or maybe he was getting old enough to know that wearing pee and poop is no fun.

I unzipped his sleep sack and undid the three buttons on his onesie, then pushed it up onto his chest, away from the blast zone. Gave his diaper a big sniff. I undid both sides, then folded it back. No poo, only a little pee.

“Did he poop?” Grace said from downstairs.

“No, just more pee,” I said.

Slapped on a new diaper, then I leaned down close to his face, which made him grin wider.

“Hey, smiley. You stay here for just a second, okay? Dad needs to wash his hands.”

He cooed, and I patted his tubby milk-pot belly before heading to the bathroom. I stared at myself in the mirror while I waited for the water to warm.

My dad’s last words echoed in my brain.

There’s something I never told you. Something about your mother.

I hadn’t found out what those words meant. Over the last several months, I’d had plenty of time to develop various theories. It had something to do with why IntelliCraft had never killed me, that much I knew. They’d threatened me, injured me, made me think I was in mortal danger, but they’d never gone all the way. It would have been so easy for them to take me out, but I was always a little out of reach. Protected.

Something about my mother. Maybe Dad was trying to tell me that she’d somehow made a deal that I was never to be harmed. But that seemed odd because she’d passed away many years ago. Why would they still honor that agreement? And, that would imply that she was involved in IntelliCraft.

I also considered that it was somehow related to the safe deposit box in Stockholm where my dad had secretly kept evidence of the company’s dealings. Maybe they thought I knew the location, and were going to force me to tell them where it was. But, they’d had plenty of opportunities to ask me about it, and hadn’t ever said a word.

My newest theory was that Heath Candle was not actually my father. I suppose it could have been Edgar Hartford, or Frank Thomason, or maybe even Wyatt Green, although he seemed a little too young. If one of them were my dad, it would explain why they were so keen to recruit me into IntelliCraft. Keep me close.

Sometimes, I considered the possibility that Kareem was my father, but that didn’t seem reasonable. I’m no geneticist, but my skin seemed too fair for that to be true. Unless I’d received all of my mother’s genes.

I tested the water and pumped a glob of soap into my hands, then held them under the sink for a few seconds. Toweled off, then rubbed some hand lotion into my skin.

I went back into the baby’s room, and he grinned when he saw me. I finished putting his clothes back on, hoisted him over my shoulder, then carried him down the stairs, where Grace was sitting on the couch, hooked up to the breast pump machine.

The little box sat to her left, with tubes running into her shirt into the cups that made her boobs look enormous and boxy. The machine hissed its
wrick-churr, wrick-churr
sound as it milked her.

She smiled at me. “How is our boy now? Happy with a full tummy?”

Dog looked up at me from his spot, nestled next to my wife. I poked him in the side, and he scooted over. I sat next to her and gripped the baby under his armpits, then held him out so he could see both of us at once. He cackled and made that
ahh-goo
sound that was almost like a word but not quite.

“You okay?” she said.

Must have been my staring-off-into-space look. I snapped out of it. “Yeah. Just thinking about my mom lately.”

She nodded. “Getting close to that time of year again, isn’t it?”

I set the baby on my lap, laced my fingers through hers, and squeezed. “I’m okay, really.”

“Thank you for changing his diaper. I appreciate it.”

“You do?” I said, raising an eyebrow. “How much do you appreciate it? A little, or a lot?”

“We’ll see,” she said as she adjusted the knobs on the breast pump.

My eyes drifted over the baby’s head to the area opposite the couch, where a chair used to be, the last chair Kareem had ever sat in. Where he’d taken a bullet and breathed his last breath, and I’d been spurred on to find the truth about the company.

I didn’t think about that nearly as much as I used to, but it did come to mind sometimes, whenever I said my son’s name out loud.

<<<>>>

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