Wounded Animals (Whistleblower Series Book 1)

by Jim Heskett

  “Darren?”

  I’d last seen him the day before in Dallas, and now here he was, in Denver, standing before me in khakis and a pea coat, white earbuds dangling from his ears, dragging a rolling bag behind him. Maybe I should have been more surprised, but with all the crazy stuff going on over the last few days, I barely registered an increase in my heartbeat.

  “What are you doing here?” I said.

  He frowned, which made his eyebrows join together to form a massive structure across his forehead. He bent to one knee and took the earbuds out. “You don’t look so good, Mr. Candle. Are you okay?”

  I felt my face pull down again. “No, Darren, I’ve had a rough couple of days. I’m pretty far from okay, to tell you the truth.”

  He put a hand on my shoulder and squeezed. The empathy in his look had made me forget for a moment how much this kid creeped me out. When he touched me, it all came back.

  “I’m really sorry to hear that,” he said. “I don’t always understand the universe’s plan, either.”

  “What are you doing here?” I asked again.

  “I just got off an airplane.”

  I couldn’t tell if he was being sarcastic. “Okay, fair enough, but what are you doing in Denver?”

  “Oh, I see. I have a meeting with one of your TSE’s tomorrow morning. They’re considering me for a Technical Account Manager position already. Can you believe that? I just finished Design training yesterday, and they’re already talking about moving me to another team. I just hope I don’t screw up the interview.”

  No surprises there. The kid had corporate climber written all over him. Despite his humility, I’m sure he knew they’d smelled it on him during his initial interview. Still, it was strange that they would send him out here because there were TSE’s in the Dallas office too.

  Difficult to believe that any of this was a fortunate accident. There had been too many of them this week.

  “Maybe this isn’t the best time, seeing as how you’re having such a bad day, but I wanted to tell you how much I appreciated the training you gave us on the software. You’re excellent at what you do, Mr. Candle.”

  His words barely registered, but the ‘mister’ still irked me. “Candle, please. Call me Candle.”

  “Right, I forgot you told me that already. Well, I have to catch up with the shuttle and get my rental car and all that, but, before I forget, there’s just one more thing.” He reached into his back pocket and pulled out a card. “I was going to come find you at the Denver office and give this to you, but I’ll just do it now. Wyatt wanted me to make sure you had a copy of his business card. You know, in case you change your mind about the offer. He said it would be terrible to let you go, what with all the great things you’ve done for the company.”

  He held the card out to me, and I reluctantly accepted it. The last thing I needed right now was to deal with another one of Wyatt’s move-to-Texas hard sell sessions.

  I nodded as he turned and inserted his headphones back into his ears. As he started to walk away, he gave me a look over his shoulder, then he added a wink before disappearing into a row of cars.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  I drove through Denver, clutching the business card in one hand. No doubt in my mind at all that Darren had appeared at the airport deliberately, to send me Wyatt’s latest effort to recruit me. Things like that just don’t happen in real life.

  Plus, he’d said he had to catch the shuttle, but the rental car shuttles picked up at the terminal, not from the parking lot. That was one small detail they hadn’t fact-checked beforehand.

  All of these events of the last few days were connected, but I couldn’t figure out how. Nothing in my life made sense anymore.

  Grace. Finding her was all that mattered.

  I’d called everyone I knew who had been close to her. I’d impulsively confronted her boss, and that had been a dead end.

  Kareem’s warnings about going to Dallas still galloped through my head. The old magic man had warned about grave things coming from Dallas. Had my trip there caused Grace’s disappearance?

  Was this all my fault, or had she left me for some unrelated reason?

  I needed answers, so I went to the only place I knew of where I might be able to find Kareem: Ernie’s Bar. Despite having no reason to assume he’d be there, it was the only place in the world I’d ever seen him before. The internet had no trace of a Kareem Haddadi in America, so there was no hope of getting an address for a home visit.

  I pulled into the gravel parking lot around dinnertime, and my stomach growled accordingly. A handful of cars out front. I had a suspicion that Kareem didn’t have a car; maybe he didn’t need one. Maybe he flew in on a magic carpet or a broomstick, sprinkling fairy dust as he arrived to wipe the memories of those who may have seen him.

  I slammed the car door behind me, feeling the tension worm through my back and neck. If he wasn’t here, I didn’t know what I was going to do next. A tiny glint of hope of finding Kareem was all I had left.

  Inside the bar, I welcomed the dim lights, the sounds of clinking glasses, and the smell of fried foods. I waved to the bartender and took a seat at a back booth, the same one Kareem had been sitting at before.

  Something ancient murmured from the jukebox. I hadn’t even noticed it last time I was here because I didn’t realize bars still had those things. Some kind of obscure classic rock.

  After a couple minutes, the bartender came to my table, pen and notepad in hand. “What’ll it be today?”

  “Burger with bacon, fries, and a Guinness. No, wait, something lighter. Fat Tire.”

  “You got it, chief. Want that burger well done?”

  “Sure.” He turned to leave, but I caught his attention. “You don’t remember me coming in here the other day, do you? I was with a guy, kinda Middle-Eastern looking. We left together.”

  “Sorry, don’t take it personal, but it’s hard to remember faces.”

  I waved him off. I could see most of the bar from my perch at the rounded booth. There were five people on barstools and another four or five at tables, none of them the man I was looking for. One man at the end of the bar caught my attention: he was wearing a suit, his posture slumped with his elbows on the bar. He was staring longingly at the line of bottles. Bad day at work, probably. He was the same person I’d been just a few days ago.

  My food came and I scarfed it down. Being kidnapped at the police station and then having to fight off my kidnappers at the top of Eldorado Canyon had given me quite an appetite.

  The Fat Tire didn’t last long, so I ordered another. And then another. After that, I switched to rum and Diet Coke.

  The bar’s front door opened a few times in the first couple hours, and each time, a gurgle of hope pulsed through me. After the fourth disappointment, that hope abated to a small trickle.

  After rum and diet number three, I got up to take a leak. The world spun as I stood, and I laughed because everything had seemed so normal when I was sitting down. The world had just become drunk, and I’d turned on the channel at exactly the right time.

  I thought about the woman at the airport with the baby sling, how cute the little guy had been with his giant oval eyes and gummy grin. Had the woman been terrified when she was a new parent or was she confident right out of the gate? Maybe some people were made to be that way.

  For some reason, my father popped into my head. His bright blue eyes, his shiny bald head, which I had been so scared of inheriting when I was a teenager. I never did, but I used to agonize over my widow’s peak in the mirror, always worried it had receded since the last investigation.

  My father had been a stern man, when he was home, at least. I related to him by the quality of the gifts he brought me after his trips. When I got a little older, I realized they were all airport gifts. Snow globes and coffee mugs from various cities. I despised him for being a business trip afterthought.

  The pathway to the bathroom was fraught with peril. Tables, chairs, people, and bar
stools stood in my way. The chairs were the trickiest, as those clever bastards seemed to move a little each time I put another foot on the floor.

  I giggled again. Had walking ever been this hard? Each time my head moved forward, the world tilted in a different direction.

  My face made contact with something hard and cold, and a voice grumbled as my nose smushed. When I opened my eyes, I found myself looking at a furious man holding an empty mug of beer. The beer, it seemed, was all over his shirt.

  He bared teeth at me. “Damn it. Watch where the fuck you’re going.”

  “I would love to,” I said, “but those sneaky chairs keep making it difficult for me. You have no idea how challenging it was to arrive at this juncture. I consider myself a capable man, for the most part.”

  The bar patron looked over his shoulder at the bartender, who shook his head as he wiped his hands with a rag.

  “You’re cut off, chief,” the bartender said.

  So these two were acquainted. Good to know. “It is within your right to deny me beverages, good sir. I do not wish to sully the good name of this establishment.” I have no idea why I started talking like a Dickens character, but it felt right at the moment. I was almost free of my tension and couldn’t care less that I was a few inches away from getting punched in the face by a grubby bar regular.

  “You owe me a beer, asshole,” the bar patron said. “Not some shitty domestic, either. Something good. You know, for my pain and suffering.”

  “Then you shall surely have it.” I patted the angry man on the shoulder and stumbled into the bathroom. I did my business in there, even managing to get most of my pee into the urinal. Pretty good for three beers and three rum and Cokes. Like I said before, I don’t drink much.

  On the way back out, I spied the angry man sitting at the end of the bar. He had a fresh mug, which I assumed was going on my tab. I angled my head away from him, thinking I could veer right and keep my distance. But my feet kept pointing in that direction. I had almost zero control over where I was going. With each step, I tumbled closer and closer to him, because he was a terrorist compound and I was a satellite-guided missile. Why on earth had I thought of that analogy?

  He caught me at the last second and raised his mug above his head, so I merely bumped into him without causing too much beer damage. Still, he didn’t seem pleased.

  He stood up and threw an elbow into my chest, which sent me straight to the ground. The tape covering the bandage on my back tore and I felt a reminder of the pain.

  “You don’t know when to fucking quit, do you?”

  “You must believe me when I tell you that the room schematics must have changed since I went into the bathroom. What was once there has now moved here, and vice versa. It’s the only logical conclusion.”

  He clenched his fists and stood over me. He grabbed me by the shirt collar and pulled me up, then was about to smack me in the face when a loud crack behind him made his face go blank.

  I looked past his shoulder at the bartender, who was holding a cricket bat. A cricket bat? Where did he even get such a thing?

  “Alright, Tommy, that’s enough. Let this guy go. If anything gets broken, I am going to be seriously pissed off.”

  “I’m very sorry, Tommy,” I said. “I didn’t mean to cause any trouble. It’s just that the walking part of being a human has completely escaped me tonight.”

  He released my collar and I steadied myself as well as I could, under the circumstances. The world still spun around me. With all the excitement, I now noticed my throat had gone dry.

  “Bartender, I need one more rum and diet, please.”

  The bartender laughed and slid the cricket bat back behind the counter. “You’ve got to me kidding me. Get out of here, and don’t come back. You’ve lost your privileges at Ernie’s.”

  Now I realized what a terrible thing I had done. If I couldn’t come back, how was I supposed to find Kareem? This was the only place I knew, as slim a chance as it was.

  “Please, don’t do this to me,” I said, an inch away from begging. “If I don’t find him, then the hazmat guys and the hiking and the blood on the tile will be for nothing, and even then, it might not get me my wife back. Have some pity on me, please?”

  The bartender sighed and lifted the cricket bat again. “You’re starting to get on my nerves. We run a quiet bar here, and you’re causing a disturbance.”

  I threw up my hands. “Okay, okay, I’m going.”

  I strutted out of the bar, only bumping into one chair on the way out. They were all staring at me, but I didn’t care about that.

  When I found my car, it took me a few tries to get my key into the ignition. I reclined the seat, closed my eyes, and everything went black in less than two seconds.

  ***

  When I opened my eyes, the sky had grown fully dark. The neon glow of Ernie’s lights blurred my vision, but I could see nothing else around them. The front windshield was dirty, dotted with streaks of brown.

  I slipped my phone from my pocket and checked the time. Almost ten. I looked left and right, saw only a handful of cars still in the parking lot. A couple of stars blinked in the night sky.

  “Oh, Candle, what the hell have you done to yourself?” I said. “Getting drunk on a school night like some frat pledge?”

  I stretched, yawned, and felt the cut on my back pulse with my heartbeat. Since it had been a long time since I’d had an injury, I’d forgotten how the pain fades and comes back, always reminding you that it hasn’t gone away.

  I didn’t find Kareem. Had my kidnappers—Thomason and the unnamed driver—not mentioned him that morning, I might have thought he was a ghost or a figment of my imagination. But the man who had set all of this chaos in motion was nowhere to be found, and was the only person who might be able to provide me with answers.

  The person who had set all this in motion.

  What if Kareem was behind all that was going on? Maybe all that supposed-magic in the parking lot was some reverse psychology voodoo to get me to fall into some trap that he’d set out. Get me to go to Texas so he could kidnap Grace.

  Despite being suspicious, I’d bought into his sales pitch, that’s for sure.

  However, the end result seemed the same. My boss Alison would have sent me to Dallas with or without Kareem’s warning so I couldn’t figure out what he might stand to gain from my cross-country trip. No, much more likely that someone else had engineered all of this.

  My tongue was like sandpaper against the roof of my mouth. I tasted something sour, as if I’d maybe puked in my mouth a little while I was napping. Or passed out, or whatever you want to call it.

  I felt sober enough to drive, or something close to it, so I slipped the keys into the ignition. Maybe a little buzzed still, but I could take the city streets home and go the speed limit. Not that I condoned driving drunk, because I wasn’t a brazen college kid anymore.

  I threw the car into reverse and checked the rearview mirror, wondering if maybe I should call a cab instead.

  And everything stopped.

  In my rearview mirror, I saw hair. Dark braids. The shape of a person. There was someone in the back seat of my car.

  I whirled around, then slammed on the brake when the car started to roll. Not a person, but another body. This time it was Keisha, the only female trainee in the Design boot camp. Polite Keisha, with her smooth-as-silk customer service voice.

  Her throat was also slit, blood darkening the front of her blouse and my cloth backseat. Her wrists were tied together with duct tape, and silvery tape also covered her mouth.

  I’d said goodbye to her at the same time as Paul, and now here she was: just as dead as my other trainee. Two out of the four boot camp class had been erased from the earth.

  Keisha was dead. In my car.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  I floored it. Out of Ernie’s parking lot, into the street. I didn’t care that I was still a little buzzed and not able to focus properly on the road. I just had to ge
t away, and I’d driven for over a mile before I realized that I was bringing poor dead Keisha with me, trapped in my back seat. An unwilling passenger.

  I swerved into some office complex parking lot, barely lit up by a couple of floodlights. Didn’t bother to check if there were any people around who might have heard the squealing of my tires.

  What the hell was I doing, driving through the streets of Boulder with a dead body in the back seat of my car? My life was pure insanity.

  I threw it into park and jumped out of the car. Took a few steps back. I wanted to run, to escape, to leave everything behind and disappear. But, of course, I couldn’t do that. My wife was missing and probably in serious trouble. I needed to report the disappearance to a real cop, but I couldn’t do that as long as my back seat was bloody, unless I wanted to go to jail under suspicion of murder.

  The situation didn’t look good. Within twenty-four hours, two people I knew had shown up dead around me. I had been cleared of the first crime. I had an alibi. This second body, not so much. I didn’t remember seeing the body in my car when I stumbled out of the bar, but I was hammered. Could someone have inserted a dead body in the back of my car while I was passed out in the front seat? Seemed impossible.

  I could think of no way out of this situation other than to get rid of the body. As crazy as that sounded, it seemed like the only viable option. Maybe if I’d had more time, I could have come up with something better, but time did not appear to be one of my luxuries.

  I got back in the car, now noticing the smell coming from the back. Rusty, sour. Blood and bile. The same thing I’d smelled coming up the stairs in my house before I found Paul.

  I hadn’t grieved for Paul on any personal level because I barely knew him. I didn’t know if I would grieve for Keisha, but as I drove the city streets toward Denver, I was overcome by the senselessness of the loss of life. They were both so young, smart, and full of promise. Now they were gone forever, and probably because of me.