Blood Lines

by Mel Odom

  “I figured leavin’ would be self-explanatory.”

  “You were going to leave? Without telling me or Don good-bye?”

  “I’ve told Don good-bye lots of times,” Tyrel said. “Me and you, we said good-bye in the barn the other night.”

  That hurt Shel a lot more than he expected it to.

  The sound of the hospital equipment filled the room for a moment. Outside, Shel heard the low buzz of conversations.

  “Did you kill Dennis Hinton?” Shel asked.

  Tyrel turned toward Shel and gazed straight into his eyes. For a moment Shel hoped that his daddy would say no and that everything had been some incredible mistake.

  Then, as calmly as if he were ordering breakfast, Tyrel said, “Yes, sir. I reckon I did.”

  >> Atwater Apartment Building

  >> Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

  >> 0819 Hours

  Maggie Foley stood outside Apartment 616 and rang the doorbell.

  Beside her, Remy said, “I didn’t hear anything.”

  Maggie hadn’t either. She rapped her knuckles against the door and waited. Despite the nap she’d caught on the airplane during the jump from Fort Davis to Philadelphia, she felt bone-tired. The last two days had been incredibly hectic.

  Rather than break in on Richard McGovern before eight o’clock in the morning, they’d killed an hour at a diner down the street. At present, they still didn’t have the leverage they needed to put pressure on McGovern. All he was guilty of lately was having once been a friend of Victor Gant.

  There were two peepholes in the door. One was at normal eye level, but the second one halved the distance to the floor.

  “Try knocking louder,” Remy suggested. He wore street clothes with a jacket to cover the pistol on his hip.

  “I don’t want to knock much louder,” Maggie said. “People in the other apartments could still be trying to sleep.”

  Growing up in her father’s house, she’d never had to live on top of other people the way the residents in the apartment building had. She couldn’t imagine what that was like. Down the hall, she heard the sounds of a television and a baby crying. The odor of frying eggs and coffee filled the hallway.

  Remy leaned forward and knocked more loudly.

  Maggie felt slightly irritated at him, but she knew he was just doing what he did because he cared about Shel. All of them did.

  “I got a 12-gauge shotgun aimed at the center of this door that says you’re gonna step off now,” a man’s voice said. “Otherwise five-o’s gonna be scraping pieces of you off that other hallway wall.”

  “We’re with the police,” Maggie said.

  “‘With the police’ ain’t the same as being the police,” the man said.

  “Is this Richard McGovern?”

  “Don’t know nobody by that name.”

  “That’s fine. But when I walk away from this door, I’m going to call the Army payroll offices and stop that monthly check that’s been coming to this address.”

  “That’s my girl,” Remy whispered. “I like that.”

  “You can’t do that,” the man said.

  “If Richard McGovern doesn’t live at this address, I can,” Maggie said.

  “He lives here,” the man grumbled.

  “Then I want to talk to him.”

  “He ain’t here.”

  “Then I’m going to suspend that check until I can verify he lives here.”

  The man cursed. “Guess you got me up on the wrong side of the bed this morning. Lemme see some ID.”

  Maggie opened her identification and held it in front of the lower peephole.

  “Says NCIS. Richard McGovern was in the Army. You can’t go cutting off his check.”

  “Open up, McGovern,” Remy said. “We’ve come a long way and we’re going to talk to you.”

  “I ain’t said I was McGovern.”

  “Unless you’re a midget or a second grader with a deep voice, you’re McGovern.” Remy tapped the bottom peephole. “Now open the door. Otherwise we’re going to get a caseworker out here to review your life with a microscope to make a new decision about your benefits.”

  “Man, that ain’t right. I done give up my legs in the service to my country, and you come here and get all up in my grill—for reasons I do not know.”

  “Let us in,” Maggie said. “We’re here to talk about Victor Gant.”

  McGovern was quiet for a moment. “Now that there’s a bad man. Got a lot of bad juju all knotted up in that man’s name.”

  Remy pounded on the door. “Open the door, McGovern.”

  Down the hall a child cried louder.

  Maggie felt bad about that.

  “Dude,” McGovern said, “chill. People live here.”

  The locks slid back. Maggie counted five of them. She stood in the doorway and waited.

  Richard McGovern, now sixty-three years old, was scrawny, and his ebony skin looked gray. Dressed in a sweater and sweatpants that hung on his too-thin legs, he sat in a wheelchair and looked up at them through John Lennon glasses that made his eyes look too big. His hair touched his shoulders, and a scraggly beard adorned his cheeks. An unfiltered cigarette hung from his leathery lips.

  A cutdown double-barrel shotgun lay across his lap. He started to lift it.

  Maggie had her Beretta out from under her jacket and pointed at the man in a heartbeat.

  At the same time, Remy leaned in and grabbed the shotgun. McGovern refused to let go.

  “You’re going to release the weapon,” Remy said, “or I’m going to break your fingers when I take it away from you. Your call.”

  Cursing, McGovern let go of the shotgun. “I want that back. It ain’t safe living here. I got a right to defend myself. I gave my legs to this country.”

  “Let’s go inside,” Maggie said as she put the Beretta away.

  “Lady, this is my house. You can’t just barge into my house. I got rights.”

  Maggie took a deep breath, then looked at Remy. The apartment reeked of marijuana. “Do you detect the presence of a controlled substance?”

  A smile almost flickered to life on Remy’s lips before he caught himself. “I do.”

  “Hey, it ain’t me,” McGovern protested. “It’s those college kids living in the apartment below me. They smoke reefer, smoke rises, and I’m trapped up here with it.”

  “Getting by on a contact high?” Remy asked. He kept moving forward and forced McGovern to keep backing.

  “I’m not happy about it,” McGovern said. “I’ve been talking to the super about it.”

  “Anybody else in the apartment with you?” Remy glanced into the small kitchen to one side.

  Maggie flanked Remy, staying behind far enough to give herself a clear field of fire if she needed it. According to the files Estrella had gotten about the man, he lived alone.

  “No, man,” McGovern said. “It’s just me.”

  In the living room, McGovern spun the wheelchair around and rolled into an empty space in front of the television. The blinds were pulled and the room was dark. Some kind of cheap horror movie was playing on the television set. A knife-wielding character chased a young couple through a forest. They were both screaming, but the set had been muted.

  Maggie stood in the living room and kept watch over McGovern while Remy quickly went through the rest of the apartment.

  “Hey,” McGovern squawked. “Hey! You can’t just go barging through my house!” He started to roll forward.

  Maggie stuck her left foot out and braced it against the wheelchair wheel. McGovern came to a stop rather than push himself around in a circle.

  “Let’s just stay here,” Maggie suggested.

  A few minutes later, Remy reappeared carrying a Baggie filled with grass and some pills. “Does this belong to you?” he asked McGovern.

  McGovern frowned and looked increasingly nervous. “I haven’t ever seen that before. You planted that on me.”

  “Funny thing about Baggies,” Remy said, holding
the bag up for a better look. “They retain fingerprints pretty easily. The dust from the marijuana is going to make any prints on today’s blunt, or anywhere else in the Baggie, easy to find.”

  A worried look tightened McGovern’s face.

  “Want to know what a judge is going to say when he finds out your fingerprints are on the inside of the bag?” Remy raised a speculative eyebrow. “Unless you have a really good excuse.”

  “Look,” McGovern said, “I got an okay thing going here. I know that. I don’t want anything to screw it up.”

  “We’re not here to try to screw it up,” Maggie said. “We’re here to get some answers about Victor Gant.”

  McGovern took a hit off the cigarette dangling from the corner of his mouth. He took it out and looked at it a moment, then dug out his lighter and expertly relit it.

  “Victor isn’t a man whose trust you betray,” McGovern said quietly.

  “Do you think you’re going to have to betray that trust?” Maggie asked.

  “When you’re talking about Victor Gant, you’re not going to have anything good to say. And no cops—not even NCIS agents—would ever come snooping around to give Victor some kind of good citizenship award.”

  Maggie knew that was true. She sat in a sagging easy chair across from McGovern. “Do you remember Dennis Hinton?” she asked.

  51

  >> Intensive Care Unit

  >> Las Palmas Medical Center

  >> El Paso, Texas

  >> 0721 Hours (Central Time Zone)

  In the wake of his daddy’s confirmation that he’d killed Dennis Hinton, Shel took a moment to gather his thoughts. Then he asked the question that he most feared to get an answer to.

  “Why?”

  Tyrel lay back and stared at the ceiling. He licked his lips. “You really want to get into this, Shelton?”

  “I don’t have a choice, Daddy.” Shel knew his voice sounded cold and distant. It was the only way he could speak at the moment.

  “Might be easier if you had someone else asking these questions.”

  “Yes, sir. It might. But I don’t think, after all these years, that you should be looking for the easy way out of this.”

  Tyrel snorted. “There ain’t no way out of this. If there was, don’t you think I’d have found it by now?”

  Shel didn’t answer, but he had to wonder if he was going to be strong enough to deal with everything he was about to learn.

  “And it ain’t me I’m worried about making it easier on,” Tyrel concluded.

  “Not like you to be worried about me.”

  Tyrel nodded. “I guess I got that coming.”

  Shel didn’t say anything, though he was sorely tempted.

  “This might be something your brother is more suited for. I bet a lot of people have come to him and told on themselves. He’s probably used to it.”

  “I bet Don ain’t heard as many confessions to murders as I have,” Shel said, intentionally being harsh about the situation.

  A wan smile pulled at Tyrel’s face. “Well, sir, I’d have to say you got me there. I bet he ain’t.” He looked around. “They got any water somewhere? I’m getting dry.”

  Shel poured water from the carafe beside the bed into a plastic cup and added a flexible straw. Tyrel tried to hold the cup, but he was shaking so badly that he couldn’t do it. In the end Shel had to hold it for him.

  Tyrel drank for a moment, then nodded. “That’s good. Thank you.”

  Unable to speak, Shel put the cup to one side. He sat in the straight-backed chair and listened. He wished that Max were there with him instead of off with Don. This wasn’t something he wanted to be alone to deal with.

  “I knew Dennis Hinton pretty good,” Tyrel said. “We was friends. That was back during the days of the PBRs out of Qui Nhon. You familiar with that?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “They called it the Brown Water Navy. And them boys that worked them boats was some of the bravest men I ever knew. Charlie wanted Qui Nhon and those supply routes along Highway 19 shut down. They worked hard to get it done. A lotta men got killed over there.”

  “How’d you know Dennis Hinton?” Shel asked.

  “Just from around Qui Nhon. He was outgoing and obnoxious. Didn’t have a shy bone in his body. They said he was a killer out in the jungle, a good shot and cold enough to get it done. But he didn’t glory in it like some did. He was just taking care of his country.”

  Shel felt a little more saddened. It would have been better if Hinton had been like Victor Gant, a bad man in a bad place. But if Hinton was a good soldier, his loss was even harder to take. And his murder less understandable.

  “Hinton wasn’t in your unit?” Shel asked.

  “No sir. Just a guy I knew from the bars and the football games.” Tyrel looked at Shel. “We played a lot of football over there. A lot of us played in high school before we joined up.”

  Shel was surprised. He didn’t know his daddy had played high school sports. No one had ever talked about it.

  “I played quarterback,” Tyrel said. “In high school. I had an arm. Still had it over there. Denny—that’s what everybody called him that knew him—had played wide receiver. They didn’t like us playing together. He could get loose, and I could find him.”

  “You were friends?”

  Tyrel paused, then nodded. “Yeah.”

  “Then why did you kill him?”

  Tyrel took a breath and let it out. He licked his lips. “Lemme tell it the way I need to. You got any questions after that, you ask ’em. Okay?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Over in Qui Nhon, we didn’t think too much about the future,” Tyrel said. “It didn’t pay much to do it, because every day you’d see guys evac’d out of the jungle. Sometimes they were wounded, but most of the time they were dead. Kinda reminded us all we might be on short time.”

  Shel knew what his daddy was talking about. Things hadn’t been as severe in the places he’d served, but the losses that had occurred made everyone sit up and take notice.

  “So we did what young soldiers do when they’re away from home and facing death on a daily basis,” Tyrel said. “We went numb to it. We told ourselves that it wouldn’t happen to us. We kept our heads low during firefights and worked to keep our butts together. You know what that’s like.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Just took things one breath at a time when we were in the field. But back in Qui Nhon, it was different. Soldiers drank, and they spent time with the working girls. I didn’t have nothing to do with the women. Your mom and I were exchanging letters, and I guess I knew I had something waiting on me when I got back home even though we hadn’t talked about it.”

  As he listened to his daddy, Shel couldn’t help realizing that the Tyrel McHenry he was hearing about was a different man, a twenty-one-year-old who’d never been far from Fort Davis. He hadn’t been worldly, and he hadn’t seen the horrors of war. Shel remembered what his own loss of innocence had been like, and that wasn’t as bad as Vietnam.

  “That night I killed Denny, I was with Victor Gant and his team,” Tyrel said.

  “I can’t see you and him together.”

  Tyrel laughed hollowly. “That’s ’cause you only know Victor Gant as a bad man. But back then in Vietnam, Victor Gant was everything we wanted to be. Soldiers told stories about him. The brass deferred to him during military action. He knew Charlie like nobody knew Charlie. They said if you got signed onto Victor Gant’s penetration team and went hunting targets out in the brush, he could keep you from getting killed. The way they talked, you’d have thought bullets bounced off of him.”

  Shel listened to his daddy speak and knew that he wasn’t in that hospital room anymore. Tyrel was back in Vietnam.

  “We all wanted to be with him,” Tyrel said. “Because we all wanted to go back home. They said he was the man that could get you there.”

  >> Atwater Apartment Building

  >> Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
/>
  >> 0833 Hours

  “Victor Gant was the most evil man I ever knew over there. There was nothin’ he wouldn’t do. Nobody he wouldn’t kill.” Richard McGovern took a drag on his cigarette, then blew smoke at the stained ceiling.

  Maggie watched McGovern and locked into the man’s body language. The wheelchair threw some things off, but there were always tells she could read as a profiler—the eyes, the shoulders, and what he did with his hands.

  Remy lounged at the window behind McGovern, just out of the man’s sight. Maggie knew Remy had chosen the position on purpose. No matter what he did, McGovern would know Remy was there just out of sight, and he’d have to wonder what he was doing. McGovern also had to wonder how Remy took everything he said.

  “For somebody that didn’t like him much, seems you sure stayed around him a long time,” Remy said.

  McGovern tried to look back over his shoulder but couldn’t. That frustrated him—Maggie read that in his eyes.

  “There was nobody like Victor Gant in the jungle,” McGovern said. “The man could keep you alive, that’s for sure. We’d be in firefights, nobody knowing who was who, and Victor Gant could keep things straight. Like he had radar in his head or something. Never seen anything like it before. Never since, either.” He gave up trying to look over his shoulder and concentrated on Maggie. “I wasn’t hooked up with Victor Gant ’cause I liked the dude. I was just looking out for my own self.”

  “Nobody can blame you for that,” Maggie agreed.

  “That’s what I’m talking about.” McGovern nodded and took another hit off the cigarette.

  “Do you think you owe Victor Gant anything?”

  “You mean, would I lie to protect him?”

  “Yes,” Maggie replied.

  “No.” McGovern shook his head. “I haven’t seen him in thirty years. Not since I come back with no legs. That day I went down in the jungle, Victor didn’t even come after me. If it hadn’t been for the PJs, I wouldn’t have come back at all.”