[Whistleblower 01.0] Wounded Animals

by Jim Heskett

  But I had to. I had to do it. Or maybe I could find him, and then we could do something about the situation together.

  I walked through the living room, taking note of how plain and boring everything was. Maybe I thought a man who could turn water into wine would have cauldrons laying about, or a time machine, or something crazy. But the house was the usual assortment of IKEA furniture and electronics that every other house on this street probably had. No television, which was also not unusual for Boulder.

  I glanced in the kitchen, didn’t see anything out of the ordinary, then turned down the hallway. Three doors, so I went to the one at the end first. Bathroom. Nothing to see here. The door on the left seemed to be the master bedroom, with a queen-size bed, dresser, and a recliner chair. A stack of books sat on a nightstand next to the chair, mostly comprised of the kind of low-class thrillers you’d see at an airport bookstore.

  “This can’t be it,” I said, flipping through the stack of books. “There has to be more than this. Come on, Kareem, give me something I can use.”

  I went back into the hallway and opened the third door, into a room with no furniture, just some pillows arranged on the floor around a small table. A golden Buddha sat atop it, with some candles and a vase full of flowers. Definitely the most ornately decorated room in the house. Prayer room. I couldn’t picture him in here.

  Then the front door opened. “Candle, you’re in here, right?”

  Darren.

  Chapter Twenty

  SHELTON HAD WARNED me that Darren would show up at the house, but I’d still clung to the foolish idea that maybe I could get to Kareem first and explain everything. Maybe the magic man would have a plan to deal with all these people.

  No such luck. I would have to share this house with a man who had slit the throat of another man in front of me. In my own house, even.

  When I’d first met Darren, he seemed a little conniving, maybe even malicious. Definitely upwardly-mobile, as they used to say about corporate climbers when I was younger. I recalled watching him make that call with the phone he’d taken from the dumpster. But now that I’d seen what he was capable of, Kareem’s warnings about a bad man among the trainees seemed like a terrible understatement. Darren was pure evil.

  “Where are you?” he called in a sing-song voice. “Are we playing hide and seek?”

  “I’m back here.”

  He peered around the doorway, purple latex gloves on his hands and a wicked grin on his face. “What the hell is that thing?” he said, pointing at the Buddha statue at my feet.

  “It’s a prayer altar. Do you really not recognize Buddha?”

  He shrugged. “I don’t get out much, so you’ll excuse me if I don’t recognize some religious icon on sight. But I’m not really interested in Haddadi’s religious leanings, I’m a lot more curious for you to tell me what you’ve found so far.”

  “Nothing. He’s not here.”

  Fire burned in Darren’s eyes. “No shit, asshole, he’s plainly not here. Why don’t we steer away from talking about what’s obvious, and instead you tell me about where he’s gone?”

  I looked around the room, trying to think of something to say. One thing I hadn’t noticed in the house before was any kind of personal pictures or family pictures anywhere. There were framed photos of the Great Stupa Buddhist retreat near the little mountain town of Red Feather, but that was about it. “I don’t really… I mean, it’s not like he left a note on the fridge saying where he went.”

  Darren hefted the Buddha statue with a grunt, then flung it across the room. It crashed through a window to the outside. “That fucker was heavy. So are you telling me you checked the fridge door for a note?”

  I was a little stunned by the sudden destruction. Cold outside air rushed into the room to balance the room’s heat, along with a whistle of wind through the hole in the glass. I shook my head.

  “Then go look,” Darren said, a sneer on his face. “We’re going to be thorough because you’re new at this. Little details are important when you’re looking for someone.”

  I left the room as the sounds of crashing, ripping, and tearing happened behind me. In the kitchen, nothing hung on the stainless steel refrigerator. I felt like an idiot for even looking.

  But someone had been here, not too long ago. The food scents gave that away. Had it been Kareem? And what would it matter if he had been here, because he wasn’t now?

  As I turned back to the hallway, Darren emerged, dragging a floor lamp behind him. “Move,” he said, and I jumped out of the way as he thrust it through the kitchen window.

  “This is a really nice house,” he said as he played with a set of knives hanging from a magnetic strip above the sink.

  “What good does it do to bust out all the windows?”

  He rifled through the drawers in the kitchen, dumping utensils, pasta boxes, spices, and canned goods on the floor. “It makes me feel better, that’s what good it does. Why don’t you go into the living room and cut a hole through those nice Bose speakers he has in there?”

  “I’m not going to trash Kareem’s house for no reason,” I said.

  He stopped his attempt to break a wooden ladle in half and got right in my face. His breath smelled like hamburger. “You’re going to do whatever the fuck I tell you to do. I think you know something that you’re not telling me. If I don’t like your attitude here today, Candle, all I have to do is make one little phone call to set a whole chain of events in motion. I would have thought by now you understood how serious we are about this. Who else are we going to have to kill to get through to you?”

  “I understand. But maybe if you told me why we were doing all this. Why Kareem is so important to you, and why I have to be the one who kills him.”

  Darren lifted a glass bowl from the counter and smashed it against the wall, sending shards of glass in every direction with a rumbling crash. “That is above my pay grade. I’m just a grunt like you. Wyatt tells me what to do, then I tell you what to do, then we all do what we’re told to do. It’s how this whole thing called a hierarchy works, Mr. Trainer Man. You look like you’re old enough to know better, so your question makes you sound a little ignorant, to be honest.”

  “But why would Wyatt want him dead? What has he done that’s so bad he’s got a hit out on Kareem?”

  He took a break from destroying the kitchen to catch his breath. “That’s Wyatt’s business. If he wanted you to know, I’m sure he would have told you himself. He’s on a plane headed for Denver International right now, so maybe you can ask him yourself.”

  “I’m going to do what you people ask. I will. But I need more information.”

  “You’re not going to get it, Candle, so why don’t you stop acting like a whiny little bitch and make yourself useful?”

  I felt a buzzing in my pocket. My hand slipped into it automatically and came out holding my phone. Someone was calling me, and the number on the caller ID said it was Grace.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  MY EYES FLICKED between the ringing phone and Darren. His bushy eyebrows climbed an inch up his forehead and his mouth dropped open as he craned his neck to read the name on the caller ID.

  My wife was calling me. It was really her.

  Darren swiped at my hands. I leaned back to keep the phone out of his reach.

  He growled. His closed fist sailed through the air toward my jaw, but I was quick enough to move my head to the side. The pain meds and my lingering aches had slowed me, but Darren was as sluggish and awkward as kidnapper/sales executive Glenning.

  I let him continue the motion of his punch all the way through, then I slammed a shoulder into his side once he was off-balance. He toppled out of the kitchen and into the living room, collapsing on a black leather couch.

  “Don’t you answer that fucking phone,” he shouted as he scrambled to his feet.

  I looked down. It was still ringing.

  As I lifted my other hand to accept the call, something smacked me on the side of th
e head. I caught flashes of brown twinkling before my eyes. My vision blurred for a split second, then I realized it was flakes of potpourri as the glass bowl rattled at my feet.

  I blinked, and before I knew it, Darren was leaping toward me, hands out in front, screaming like a banshee. But he was still too slow and impulsive. I squatted and threw my hands up in time to meet his torso, then vaulted him over me into the kitchen. His momentum carried him into the oven, and I heard the ping sound his head made when it connected with the glass and stainless steel.

  My phone had stopped ringing.

  Behind me, Darren was moaning, gripping his head in his hands. He tried to get to his feet, but he slipped and landed on his butt.

  I needed to call Grace back, but not here.

  “You listen to me, you overrated piece of shit,” he said from the floor. “You toss me your cell phone right now and I’ll take it easy on you. If you don’t, you’re going to suffer. I can promise you that.”

  No time to think. I dashed toward the front door, leaping over a coffee table, digging a hand into my pocket to remove the car keys.

  I didn’t bother to shut the door behind me, and I scaled the gate in two quick movements. A kitchen knife sailed past my head. A second one bounced off my shoulder, cutting into my jacket.

  I held out the car keys and slipped on a patch of ice on the road. The keys went flying, landing in the snow. I’d seen them cast a wide arc and fall on the other side of the street, somewhere along a line of parked cars.

  A third kitchen knife sailed past me. I changed direction, jumping another low fence into someone’s yard. Heard Darren bellowing behind me.

  I ran through the yard, hurdling over a lawn chair dusted with snow. When I came around to the other side of the house, I hopped the fence and went back into the road. Darren was still in that back yard.

  Think, Candle, think. Is Grace out? Is she safe?

  Darren disappeared behind the back of a house.

  I crossed the road and hunkered down between a row of cars parked along the street and a steep hill. Raised up above a parked car, but didn’t see Darren. I poked around in the mounds of collected roadside snow but didn’t find the car keys anywhere.

  I took a few steps up the steep hill, struggling to get my feet under me in the snow. A tamped-down part a few feet to my left indicated hiking trail. I jumped over to it so I could get a bit higher up the hill and look for Darren. Didn’t see him.

  I kept low and moved along the hiking trail, staying sideways and moving back toward the company car. How could I keep him distracted while looking for those car keys?

  I started to descend the hill once I had the rental car in my sights. The snow around it was patchy and uneven, and the keys could have landed somewhere over there.

  “Where are you, Candle?” Darren said, but I still couldn’t see him. “This isn’t going to reflect well when I report back to Wyatt. You were almost cooperating, but now you’ve really fucked yourself. All bets are off, you stupid shit.”

  He was right. I’d lost any goodwill accumulated by agreeing to kill Kareem. There was no turning back now, so I had to get away from Darren and plot my next move. Had to call Grace back.

  Once I was next to the car, I started patting around the snow, looking for a hole where the keys could have landed.

  “Come on out,” he said. He was close. But I still couldn’t tell where the voice came from.

  Then I saw it. A depression in the snow and something silvery and black inside.

  Darren popped up on the other side of a car, fifteen feet away. “Stop running, you fuck!”

  I snatched the keys and jumped over the hood of the car, like a Hollywood stunt driver.

  As I opened the car door and slammed the keys into the ignition, Darren was scrambling through the snow to get to me, his chest heaving. He was shouting, but the windows were up and I didn’t hear a word of it.

  Maybe I’d doomed myself and Grace. But she had called, and that meant more than some grainy little Polaroid picture. This was the sign I’d been waiting for.

  Started the car, slammed my foot on the gas. As I sped away down the curvy street, I saw Darren start up a car and throw snow into the air as he peeled out of a parking spot.

  I’d never been in a car chase before. What was I supposed to do if he caught up with me? Would he ram the car and try to drive me off the road into some innocent person’s house? Couldn’t put anyone else in danger, no matter what.

  With one hand on the wheel, careening through the neighborhood, I glanced down at the phone in my other hand. Dialed Grace’s number. Went straight to voicemail.

  “Shit, shit, shit! What the hell is going on here?”

  I dialed again, still voicemail.

  So now I had a sociopathic killer chasing me, and my wife had tried to make contact, but she wasn’t answering her phone. I had no idea where to go or what to do next.

  A tiny seed of an idea popped into my head that maybe she was at home and couldn’t answer the phone for some reason, but if I sped there, she’d be waiting.

  She’d be there and I could grab her and we’d get out and away from all this. Move far away, as Kareem had advised me that night at Ernie’s bar. That had been a week ago, but a world away.

  It was a terrible idea because racing back to my house seemed like the most obvious thing, something Darren would be expecting me to do. But my house was just as good a place as any. These ruthless people could find me anywhere.

  As I turned out of the Boulder neighborhood, I caught sight of Darren’s car turning onto my side street. I geared down to accelerate and joined the traffic, headed for the highway.

  My phone rang again. I didn’t recognize the number, but my finger jabbed the screen to accept the call. “Grace?”

  “Nope,” Darren said. “Where are you going, Candle?”

  His voice was so calm and even. It sent a rush of anger through my blood like nothing I’d ever experienced before. “Fuck you, Darren. Fuck Wyatt, Detective Shelton, and those two lackeys who kidnapped me. Fuck all of you people. I don’t care what you do anymore. I’m going to get my wife back and if you get in my way, I’ll cut you down.”

  I couldn’t believe the words coming out of my own mouth. Especially since they had all the power and I had no kind of a plan. But something was driving me. I’d been beaten and bruised and made to watch terrible things and I was determined to take some control back. Let them know they didn’t own me.

  “Such a mouth on you. I wish you wouldn’t say such terrible things. I would’ve thought we’d made it painfully clear—”

  I hung up on him and joined the highway. I could see him in my rearview mirror, but I didn’t care. He was wearing a grin and shaking his head.

  At first, I wondered why he was smiling, but it was probably because I hadn’t yet noticed the giant traffic jam up ahead. When I realized that I was a half mile back in the line of cars, my head started pounding. Ambulance up ahead, both lanes blocked near the beginning of the hill that led out of Boulder Valley. Construction equipment littered the sides of the highway.

  There was a cop letting cars pass on the shoulder one by one, but the line was so long, I figured I might have a half hour to wait.

  I glanced in the rearview and saw Darren, about fifteen cars back. He was leaning out of his window, with a hand raised to block out the sun.

  He opened his car door.

  My skin prickled. I was trapped between two cars, and Darren was walking toward me, down the line of cars. His hands were in his pockets and his cheeks were concave as if he were whistling. Not a care in the world.

  He would reach my car in less than a minute. With a chuckle, he slipped a hand into his pocket and pulled out a knife. He kept it low but pointed the tip of the blade at me.

  I looked everywhere, trying to think. My brain felt muddy and my eyes bleary, but my heart was racing faster than a hamster on a wheel. Nowhere to go. The car ahead of me inched forward, clearing a little bit of spac
e.

  Then an idea materialized. Checked the side view mirror. He was five cars back, taking his time, strolling along.

  “Okay, psycho, just a little closer.”

  He ran a hand through his hair and pulled his jacket tight around his body. Two cars away. Then when he opened his mouth to speak, I yanked the wheel hard to the right and gunned it. Because of the construction, there was a break in the barrier wall on the side of the road. I screamed over the shoulder onto the dirt road next to the highway, and revved the engine to power the car over a few hills. Snowy mud flew under the rental car’s tires as I prayed I wouldn’t get stuck.

  I drove up a dirt embankment toward an unfinished exit ramp, a little worried this car might not be able to climb the steep incline. The wheels spun, trying to catch, flinging mud behind the car. I geared down to first, and one final punch got me up onto the gravel.

  To my right was a dirt road, leading off into the nothingness of farmland. To my left was a partially-finished bridge over the highway, headed north toward the eastern edge of Boulder.

  I turned onto the bridge, and caught Darren running back to his car out of my peripheral vision. By the time he’d get off the highway, I’d be at least a minute or two in front of him. He probably knew where I was going, but all I needed was a couple minutes of lead time to get home safely.

  Driving the city streets out of Boulder and back to my house seemed to take forever. Stop lights, traffic, construction zones. My head was empty, focused only on reaching home. I had to get home. I had to figure out what to do next. Nothing else mattered beyond getting home and finding out how Grace had been able to call me.

  Maybe she was out, and free. She might be home, right now, waiting for me. I clung to that idea with a fierceness that defied logic.

  Through Boulder and Louisville and Lafayette, I navigated toward Denver proper. Always forward, toward my destination.