Both Ends Burning (Whistleblower Trilogy Book 3)

by Jim Heskett

“Yep, come on over. We can work something out.”

  ***

  I pulled up to Rodrick’s house just after the lunch rush, barely managing to miss most of the traffic. I thought of the last time I’d come here, all full of apologies after accusing him of knowing where Grace had gone, before I knew she’d been kidnapped. That was only a few weeks ago, but it felt like years.

  Before I’d ever pulled a trigger. Before I’d killed anyone.

  Knocked on the door, and he greeted me with a warm smile. “Come in, come in,” he said.

  He waved me into his house, one of those pristine white-carpeted open-style ranch homes that seemed to have just rolled off the assembly line.

  “Janine told me you went up to Keystone and spent the day with them yesterday,” I said. “I appreciate you doing that.”

  He gave me an odd look as if he’d been caught doing something he shouldn’t. But it melted from his face quickly. “I said I wanted to help, and my wife is on retreat this week, so I have plenty of free time.”

  “Still,” I said, “you didn’t have to do that.”

  “I can’t imagine what it’s like for them to be hiding out up there, not knowing what’s going on. I know they’re not supposed to leave, so I thought it was the least I could do.”

  “Thank you.”

  “I’d have gone up again today, but I’ve got my son with me.”

  He nodded at a teenager sitting on the couch, whose face was lit up by the glow of a phone screen. The kid wasn’t paying the slightest attention to us.

  “Noah,” Rodrick said, “this is my friend Candle. Candle, this is my son Noah.”

  Noah looked up, and I experienced the strangest déjà vu. He had messy dreadlocks just like Zeke, the guy who’d driven me from Dallas to Austin. Same crunchy vibe, but without the leathery skin and years of drug abuse adding bags under his eyes. I wondered whatever happened to Zeke. I no longer had his phone number.

  “Sup?” Noah said.

  “Hi, Noah. I’m Candle.”

  Noah slipped the phone into his pocket and sauntered across the room. The kid’s jeans were so tight, I wondered how he was able to walk like that. The whole skinny jeans thing missed me completely; give me baggy or give me nothing.

  He smelled like smoke. Cigarettes, at least, and likely other kinds as well.

  “Let me go grab my wallet,” Noah said, then disappeared into a back bedroom.

  Rodrick stared at me for a few seconds, and his face was pulled into a frown. He opened his mouth a couple times, then shut it just as quickly. Pained look on his face.

  “What’s up?” I said. “You okay?”

  “I, uh, I need to talk to you. I’m not sure if now is the right time, but there’s something I need to tell you.”

  Noah came back out into the living room. I held up a finger to Rodrick. Whatever he had to tell me could wait.

  “We’re gonna take a ride. Are you ready to go?” Noah said.

  I shot a glance at Rodrick and he nodded.

  “Okay,” I said. “I guess so.”

  ***

  Noah and I drove into Denver, me driving and him playing music from his phone through the car’s speakers. He kept changing the song every few seconds, unable to settle on anything he liked. The kid fidgeted a lot, constantly shifting his position in the seat.

  “You into White Widow?” I said.

  He scoffed. “I can’t even. That hippie jam band crap gets on my nerves.”

  “Yeah, me too. So, your dad’s really okay with this? With getting a fake ID?”

  Noah smirked. “Dad’s cool. He knows I’ve had one for, like, forever. He doesn’t sweat me too much about stuff like this.”

  “I see.” My dad hadn’t been around to be cool or not cool about fake IDs when I was Noah’s age. Mom’s boyfriends never did much to parent me.

  The anniversary of Mom’s death was tomorrow. Ten years ago today, I’d been in the hospital, holding her limp hand and begging her to wake up.

  We passed a bank and I caught the time on the billboard display out of the corner of my eye. “Shouldn’t you be in school right now?”

  “Winter break, dude.”

  “Right. I don’t have much of a concept of time lately.”

  “Time is a tricky thing,” Noah said. “Sometimes it’s fast, sometimes it’s slow. I just try to ride the wave, know what I mean? I’m just cruising along, being cool with not driving the ship.”

  Noah, the poet/philosopher, navigated us into downtown Denver, and we found a spot to park on Colfax Avenue, under the blinking lights of a liquor store. Parts of Colfax are sketchy, not the kinds of places you’d want to go at night. Or in the daytime, usually.

  Noah had led me right to one of those places.

  We got out of the car as a biting wind picked up, and I held my jacket closed to save some of my body heat. Today had taken a nasty turn into frigid temps.

  A homeless man with an illegible cardboard sign turned to face me, and I shook my head at him. Felt a little guilty for it, but he nodded and mumbled something at me, big smile on his face.

  I followed Noah along the street lined with dirty snow, to a bar that had been boarded up. Cars whizzed by behind us, churning up piles of slush onto the sidewalk.

  “This place doesn’t look open,” I said.

  He smirked. “Naw, dude. We’re not trying to hit up the bar. It’s upstairs.” He pointed at a little door to the left of the bar, then he walked to it and banged on a metal screen door.

  About a minute later, a tubby bald guy in a wifebeater peered through the screen door at us. “Hey Noah,” he said. “Ain’t seen you around here in a long minute.”

  “Yeah, I know. Homework and shit. Can we come in? It’s cold as balls out here on the street.”

  The guy eyed me, then sucked through his teeth. “Is this your uncle or something?”

  Noah laughed. “He’s a friend.”

  “You know he doesn’t like strangers,” the man said. “Not after last time.”

  “It’s cool,” I said. “I’m cool.”

  Noah shot me a look that said you’re not helping, so I shut my mouth and kept my eyes on my shoes.

  “Last time wasn’t my fault,” Noah said. “Come on, open up.”

  The man behind the screen door sighed, then he pushed it open. “Whatever it is, make it quick. Some people are coming by in a minute, and it might not be good for you guys to be around for it. Unhappy customers, you know. Might get ugly.”

  I followed the two of them up a set of creaky stairs with flaking paint and into an apartment on the second floor. A cloud of smoke burst from the door as our host opened it.

  Inside, it was like a drug paradise: dozens of bongs and pipes lying around, a collection of couches and bean bag chairs and walls covered in blacklight posters of mushrooms. I counted six people lounging on the various places to sit. At the center of it all was a man with cornrows and tattoos on his face. Smoke billowing through the air glowed in the light coming in through the windows. Some beastly gangsta music thumped from enormous speakers stacked against the walls. It was as if I’d just stepped into a rap video.

  Then I noticed the gun on the coffee table, right next to a tin of syringes.

  “Who the fuck is this?” shouted the man with the cornrows, pointing at me. He snapped his fingers and someone turned down the music.

  “This is Candle,” Noah said, then he proceeded to ignore me as he sat at a table with the tubby guy and started packing weed into a bong.

  Cornrows left the couch and sauntered across the room to me. He looked me up and down, flashing his tongue piercing when he opened his mouth. “What you need?”

  “I, uh, need to get a fake ID.”

  He sniffed. “How long til you’re 21?”

  “Yeah, it’s not to buy beer.”

  He frowned. “I know, man, that was supposed to be a joke. What state?”

  “I don’t know, I guess Colorado is fine.”

  As Noah coughed his wa
y through a bong hit, Cornrows stared at me. I wanted to leave. The hair on the back of my neck tickled my skin.

  Finally, Cornrows sniffed again. “Alright, man, we good. Follow me.”

  I tossed a glance at Noah, but he wasn’t paying attention to me. Cornrows walked me into a back bedroom, where I was immediately hit by a blast of neon green light. The light came from a computer tower, which had a clear glass door on one side showing the innards. On a desk above the tower, three widescreen monitors blinked as he hit the power buttons on all of them in three quick jabbing motions.

  “Do you build your own computers?” I said.

  He tapped the tower. “I got this baby overclocked all the way to 200% of stock, but it won’t boot past BIOS at anything above that. I think it’s the RAM timings, maybe. Anyway, I ain’t got time to fuck with it right now.”

  “Water cooled?” I said, spitting out the only piece of home computer building trivia I knew.

  He flashed me a grin. “Yeah. Thermaltake system with a single 120mm fan. Had a scare the other day with a little leak, but it’s all good now.”

  “Nice,” I said, bobbing my head and trying to look knowledgeable.

  “Come on, man, have a seat.”

  He patted the chair next to him, and I hunkered down as he opened up a Photoshop window. “Who you wanna be?” he said.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  I took a late afternoon flight to Dallas, grumbling at how much last-minute plane tickets cost. Securing safety for my family was going to bankrupt me.

  Flying with a fake ID had been a lot easier than it seemed. No one had cared that I paid cash for the flight. I slogged through the TSA line, thinking that, at any second, men with walkie talkies were going to yank me out of line and throw me into a little room for questioning.

  But it was smooth sailing the whole way.

  I couldn’t escape the irony that I was going back to Dallas one more time. Back to the land of congested highways and toll roads and abundant fried Mexican food, where people said y’all and didn’t think there was anything strange about it. Back where I’d come from, although I didn’t like to consider that fact.

  But I had a purpose. I had a plan.

  The plan was half-baked, dangerous, driven by impulse, and almost guaranteed to fail. I was going to break into the home of IntelliCraft’s CEO and snoop through his possessions to find some kind of incriminating evidence of drug dealing or whatever the hell it was they were doing. Something to replace whatever was lost on the memory card Thomason was searching for.

  Did I know for sure that he had anything like that? Not at all. Was I grasping at straws because I had nothing else to go on? Roger that.

  Via some public information that was too easily found on the internet, I’d discovered that Edgar Hartford lived in the uber-fancy Dallas suburb of Southlake. Not too far from DFW airport.

  I’d hunt around for a crawl space or an attic window, and circumvent the house alarm that way. I didn’t know for sure that he had an alarm, but fancy houses usually do. It was a risk, but worth a shot. Maybe he wouldn’t even be home.

  I took a cab to the neighborhood, a place snootily named Monticello Estates. My jaw dropped as we entered the area, full of towering houses set back from the road, lit up by thousands of dollars of Christmas lights. Down every side street, I saw the kind of houses that had names on the gates, like The Willows and Ivy Cottage and Green Acres. Some of these places, you’d need a golf cart to get the mail every day. I’m sure at least one of these houses used one.

  “Nice neighborhood,” the cabbie said as we drove through. “I had a buddy used to do yard work for one of these families. The guy shorted him for twenty hours of labor, on account of the fact that he used the wrong kind of fertilizer. Ain’t that messed up?”

  “Sure is,” I said.

  “You try to do right, and the world shits on you anyway. My wife says it all evens out in the end, but I don’t buy it. I’m always telling her you can’t get justice in this world. Maybe in the next, eh buddy?”

  “Maybe so.”

  I had the cabbie drop me off a few streets over from my destination, just in case. Told him I was meeting a friend. The cabbie didn’t care, he just wanted to get paid. I saw him press a button on the meter at the last second to kick up the fare a few bucks. Maybe he figured he could squeeze it out of me, given the neighborhood. No justice, indeed.

  I walked the streets of Monticello Estates with my jacket collar up and my cap pulled low. Neighborhoods like this usually had private security firms patrolling. If one of them saw me, might be game over. But there were no people out walking or cars driving around now, nighttime in December in the cold.

  “Pay no attention to me, good people of Monticello Estates,” I said to no one in particular. “Please go back to your private theater viewing rooms, drinking your fine barrel-aged bourbons and leveraging your liquid assets to plot your next corporate takeover. I won’t stop you.”

  Edgar Hartford’s house was a massive stone thing with white columns out front and a tall wrought iron gate surrounding the property. I half-expected the fence to be electrified or to have security cameras every few feet, but I didn’t find any evidence of either thing. I walked half the fence to be sure, staying on the street and trying my best to casually toss my head to steal glances.

  At the corner of the property, the fence ended in a stone pillar with certain stones jutting out at odd angles, which looked like perfect hand and foot holds.

  I cast one last look around, and still didn’t see anyone else out in the dimly-lit night. People in Dallas don’t walk, anyway. Most of the streets don’t have sidewalks for them to use.

  “This is it, Candle. You’re committing yourself now. No turning back after this.”

  I swallowed hard and ascended the pillar. When I dropped to the other side, I now realized I was trespassing, for the second time in two days. Breaking the law. Considering all of the other things I’d done in the last month, this wasn’t nearly as bad as some. I’d killed people. Maybe in self-defense, but that didn’t make it any less troubling, at least to me.

  Thick grass shuffled under my feet, surprisingly green for December. I remembered fields of yellow in the winter months when I was younger.

  I crossed to the side, keeping my distance and staying low. I circled for five minutes, searching for a crawlspace entrance. Didn’t find anything. And no easy way to scale the house to find any attic window to open.

  That had been a terrible idea. Looked like I’d have to get inside the regular way.

  It took me a full minute of walking back through a row of garden hedges to get close enough to locate the front entrance. A massive door at the front of the house was lit by floodlights, so that was a no go. Besides, this late at night, it would be locked, anyway.

  No cars in the circular driveway in front of the house. They would be stashed away in the garage. A few lights in the house were on, and I sat in the grass for ten minutes, waiting to see if they would change. Nothing happened.

  “So, either no one is home, or they are home, and they’re staying in one room. Time to keep looking and come up with a new brilliant plan.”

  Near the back of the house, a sliding glass door led into a sunroom. If anything were going to be unlocked, that would be it.

  Checked the time on my phone. 8 pm. Now, I just had to figure out what I would do when I opened it.

  ***

  About twenty minutes later, I decided I’d waited long enough. A few lights in the house had shifted off and on, so there were definitely people home. I figured that if the house had an alarm—which it probably did—I was more likely to get in before it was set if there were still lights on. If they even left the alarm off during non-bedtime hours.

  Way too many guesses. Assumptions would get me caught, but they were the best I could do.

  I wished I’d had the luxury to wait and attempt this at a better time, maybe with some help. But with Thomason’s warning that he was going to ra
in hellfire down, I needed to hurry. I’d already wasted seventy-two hours tooling around Denver, harassing Alison, assaulting security guards, getting fake IDs. Thomason hadn’t given me a firm deadline, but he’d left the impression that time was of the essence.

  I couldn’t leave Dallas empty-handed.

  “Okay, Candle,” I whispered to a newly-planted tree, “just remember why you’re here. This is for Grace and little Candle, because of the raining of the hellfire and all that.”

  As I crossed a grassy backyard section full of hedge animals made to look like elephants, a tennis court, a basketball court, and Koi ponds, I thought back to the conversation with Thomason on the plane. When I asked him why IntelliCraft hadn’t killed me already. They’d so freely killed many others around me, but aside from some bumps and bruises, hadn’t seriously harmed me.

  Outside that shack near the Rio Grande, Glenning had threatened to kill me slowly, but would he have actually gone through with it? Somehow, I doubted it. Wyatt Green and Darren had implied they were going to kill me, but I don’t think they would have, either. I think they wanted to scare me.

  Why had I been spared? Why was I so important, or lucky, or blessed by the gods? Or was I simply misreading the whole situation, and they hadn’t had the opportunity to kill me yet?

  When I finally reached the patio, a motion sensor clicked on, casting light in a wide swath around me. I jumped to the left, out of the path of the beam.

  While I panted, I took the latex gloves out of my back pocket and slipped them on. When my pulse had slowed enough that I was a few shades below heart attack level, I crossed the patio and tried the sliding glass door. Just as I’d hoped, it was unlocked. Crept inside a sunroom filled with patio furniture and more than a dozen hanging plants. The humidity in this room brought an immediate sheen of sweat to my exposed skin. As I slinked along in a crouch, tentacles of hanging plants brushed against my shoulders and head. All this foliage reminded me of the jungly area by the pond where Omar and I had met the coyote.

  Where Omar had died and floated down the Rio Grande like a piece of driftwood.