Blood Trade: A Sean Coleman Thriller (7 page)

Hughes had somehow discovered that he was selling his plasma to make ends meet—maybe
followed him to the bank one night. It
was the only explanation; Sean had told no
one of the practice that he found degrading.

The
sperm
angle was pure media sensationalism. He knew Hughes didn’t simply get the
story wrong. Hughes
knew
the truth. He just wanted to spice things up and magnify
the potential for humiliation at Sean’s expense. Hughes knew what
Beacon
readers
wanted. They needed
massive
failure from Sean Coleman—big time embarrassment. And
in the latest edition of the
Winston Beacon
, it was being served to them on a silver
platter. A lawsuit would have been the logical recourse for such an act of defamation,
but Sean wasn’t the suing type. He settled scores with his fists.

All he had wanted to do was pacify a nagging curiosity. All he’d wanted to do was
find out which news story had so upset Jessica, a woman he barely knew from the plasma
bank. Instead, he was now roaring toward Roy Hughes’ doorstep. He pictured himself
dragging the pencil-necked reporter out into the snow and slamming both of the man’s
small hands in the metal door of his Nova. Hughes wouldn’t be able to type anything
more about Sean if his fingers were all broken.

“First Amendment, my ass!” Sean barked as he took a corner far too quickly for the
road conditions. His rear tires swung forward, and he gasped as he felt the automobile
slide out of control.

“Shit!”

He clenched his steering wheel and turned it sharply to try to regain some traction,
but the move did no good. The car spun wildly, sending every stray item that littered
the dashboard and console onto his lap. Headlights swept quickly across a thick grouping
of snow-capped trees, setting them ablaze in white light as they drew rapidly near.

Sean straightened his arms and pressed his back deeply into his seat to brace for
impact as his heart punished his chest. A wicked jolt brought all momentum to an
abrupt halt, peeling him from the
vinyl beneath him for a moment before he collapsed
back down into a seated position.

Deep breaths spewed from his lungs as his large eyes surveyed the white, heavy branches
that now draped over the hood of his car. Snow continued to fall in dense particles.
He watched in silence as they landed on his windshield.

Once the glaze that coated his eyes began to evaporate, he formed a fist and angrily
hammered it across the top of his dashboard. From under his seat, he retrieved a
twelve-inch-long black Mag flashlight. He flipped it on, surprised the beam was strong
as it was considering he couldn’t remember the last time he had replaced its batteries.

He tugged on the inside door handle and was relieved that he could swing the door
open without any problems. It was a good sign that the frame of his car was spared
significant damage. He carefully pulled himself out into the cold and kept a hand
on the hood for balance as he shuffled his way on uncertain footing to the front
of the car.

His eyes winced to keep the snow and chilly breeze from bringing them to tears as
he stood at the edge of a small ditch. Ducking under the thick limbs full of snow,
he leaned around to the grill of the car and spotted no damage. He’d assumed he had
struck the trunk of a tree head-on, but he hadn’t. He’d stopped a couple of feet
short of it.

He made his way to the other side of the car, where he discovered the real obstruction—a
large, rounded rock just outside of the ditch at the shoulder of the road. His tire
had nailed it squarely and was now completely flat.

“Dammit,” he muttered.

The truth was that it could have been far worse. A new tire was at least a manageable
expense; a new car was not. Even luckier was Roy Hughes.

Hughes had probably already turned in for the evening, being on an early-morning
delivery schedule. He was probably fast asleep
under warm, comfortable covers, smack
dab in the middle of some dream about the next hit-piece he would run on Sean. He
was safe, at least for now.

Sean popped his trunk and pushed aside piles of wadded up clothes, gear, and trash
until he’d freed up enough room to pull out his spare tire and the metal jack underneath
it. He recalled the day he had first learned to change a tire. His uncle had taught
him the skill when he was around ten years old—the kind of training that normally
would have been carried out by one’s father. By then, Sean’s father had already left.

“Patience. . .” Zed would tell Sean when he’d have trouble lining up the jack or
threading the lug nuts back on correctly. “Patience is bitter, but its fruit is sweet.”

Zed claimed to have come up with the quote, but Sean always suspected he was fibbing.
Still, it begrudgingly seemed to be the right advice as Sean had worked on removing
the flat back then. The irony of the scene wasn’t lost on him. He half suspected
that from high above, his uncle had had something to do with blowing out the tire.

Maybe it was the crispness of the air or the calmness that came with the solitude
surrounding him, but he managed to regain his temperament and clear his head. His
thoughts went back to Jessica.

He couldn’t bring himself to understand quite why he had taken such an interest in
her. She was largely a stranger—someone who hadn’t given him any reason to care about
her. Yet, the image of tears streaming down her face wouldn’t leave his mind. He
was determined to get a copy of that newspaper and figure out what had triggered
the episode. And once Sean Coleman was determined to do something, he wasn’t going
to sleep until he got it done.

When he was finished changing the flat, he slammed the trunk shut and climbed back
inside his car. The engine had been running the entire time, so the cab was almost
sweltering from the forced air
of the heater. He glanced at the small, plastic digital
clock that he’d stuck to his dashboard years ago. It was nearly ten-thirty.

He wondered if someone in particular would still be awake.

Chapter 4

I
t was late—too late to just walk up to the front of the small house and ring the
doorbell. Sean slid around to the back, ducking under the leafless, drooping branches
of aspens. He was careful to make as little noise as possible, even as the crunching
of hardening snow accompanied every step.

As he approached the back porch, he detected a sound that resembled that of a dull,
repetitive moan funneling out from behind the house’s walls. He feared the person
he had come to see was already fast asleep, snoring.

He crept across the wooden porch, nearly losing his breath when a loud creak halted
him in his tracks. There was no audible reaction from inside, so he continued on
until he reached the back corner of the house. There, a two-pane window with its
curtains open was lit up from pulsating flashes of a television screen inside. Sean
slid his body in under the windowsill and then steadily lifted his head up like a
submarine periscope.

A subtle grin formed across his face when he spotted the image of a portly thirteen-year-old
boy with short brown hair sitting at the edge of his bed. He was watching an old
episode of
Magnum, P.I
. The boy was dressed in snug pajamas and his body was hunched
forward as he sat Indian-style. He appeared to have a clipboard in one hand and a
pen or pencil in the other.

Sean carefully tapped the back of his knuckles on the outside of the frosty window.
“Toby!” he said as loudly as a whisper would allow him.

There was no reaction from the child. The boy seemed totally captivated by an action
scene on TV featuring actor Tom Selleck clad in a bright Aloha shirt and inexplicably
short shorts running across a sprawling green yard with a pair of black dogs chasing
after him.

“Toby!” Sean spoke in a slightly louder, more forceful tone. He heard the moaning
noise again. It was coming from the other side of the house. This time it was louder.
He feared that he was beginning to stir Toby’s mother, who would not at all view
Sean as a welcome guest—not just at night, but
any
time.

Joan Parker was a single mother, doing her best to raise her son on her own, and
if there was any negative influence that she didn’t want anywhere near her boy, it
was Sean Coleman. To her, Sean embodied everything she didn’t want her son to one
day grow to be. She knew Sean the same way much of town knew him, as a crass drunk
who viewed life through a lens of bitterness. As far as she was concerned, he could
bring nothing but harm to the development of her impressionable son.

Sean dropped to a knee in the snow and slid his back up against the side of the house,
staying out of sight in case Joan happened to peer out a window. He waited for the
noise to dissipate before climbing back to his feet and lifting his head up to Toby’s
window to get the boy’s attention again.

The piercing brightness of a flashlight suddenly blinded Sean from just inside the
window. Toby Parker let out a terrifying, high-pitched scream.

Sean’s eyes bulged and he stood straight up, frantically putting his finger to his
mouth to plead for the boy’s silence.

“Oh! Hi, Sean!” spoke Toby through the glass in a demeanor so calm and contrary to
the outlandish display Sean had just witnessed that Sean half-believed it was imagined.

“Toby!” Sean heard the boy’s mother cry out in concern from the other room. “Are
you okay?”

“Yeah, Mom!” the boy loudly replied, holding back laughter as
he put his hand to
his mouth. “I’m sorry about that. I just got scared by something on the television.”

Sean remained hunched forward, his eyes shifting back and forth across the house,
nervously bobbing up and down while trying to formulate what his next move should
be.

“You’re just watching
Magnum
, right?” she loudly asked.

Toby draped his head back over his shoulder. “That’s right, Mom! You know how scary
Doberman pinschers can be! They were bred to turn ferocious and aggressive on command,
after all!”

Toby turned back to Sean with wide eyes. With a nod of his head, he silently mouthed,
“Did you know that?”

Sean raised his shoulders and threw his hands in the air in bewilderment.

“Okay, well, just turn it off when it’s over, okay?” Joan shouted from inside the
house.

“Will do, Mamacita!”

Sean twisted his wrist in a rolling motion, and Toby figured out he was being directed
to open the window. Once the boy had unlatched it, Sean helped him push the screenless
pane upwards until the two stood face to face.

“Sean, why were you doing that thing with your hand?” the boy asked in a whisper.
“My window slides up and down. You can’t crank my window open.”

Sean shook his head dismissively. “Whatever. I have a favor to ask.”

Toby’s eyes lit up with excitement. “I bet I know what it is!”

“I kind of doubt it,” Sean quickly replied at a restrained volume.

“You need money, don’t you?” Toby asked with an all-knowing smirk. “I have seventy-eight
dollars I can give you. I saved it up from my allowance and Christmas money. I was
going to use it to buy a Special Edition Space Station Erector set. You can build
cranes, ships, and even robots, Sean! Robots!”

“Shh,” hissed Sean, holding his finger up to his mouth again.

“Sorry,” Toby said before continuing. “I’m not talking about a robot like R2-D2 or
C-3PO. The picture on the box looks more like a cartoon robot like that one from
the
Jetsons
named Rosie. Do you remember that show?
Meet George Jetson!
But I’d rather
give the money to you, since we’re buddies and buddies help each other out!”

Sean’s face contorted in puzzlement. He was used to the boy’s longwinded dialogue
and tendency to shift from topic to topic in a single breath. He’d been told that
it was a symptom of Asperger syndrome, a mild form of the mental disorder, autism,
that Toby lived with. The premise of the oration, however, confused Sean.

“I don’t want your money,” he said. “Why would you even think that?”

“Well, I read in the paper that you’ve been donating your sperm. I kept asking Mom
why you would do that, and she wouldn’t tell me at first. Instead, she just kept
telling me to stop saying that word.”

Sean’s hand clenched his forehead as Toby continued.

“After a bunch of times of asking her, she finally told me that there are people
who pay a lot of money for sperm, so I used
deductive reasoning,
” he said importantly,
“to determine that you were doing it to make some extra money. Personally, I think
it’s neat that there will be a bunch of little Sean Colemans running around in a
couple of years. Do you think you’ll ever get to play with them?”

Sean glared back in scorn. He knew the boy was not at fault for the words that came
out of his mouth. He was only responding to what he had read in the paper. But hearing
the words leave his mouth angered Sean nonetheless.

To Toby, nothing of what he read about Sean Coleman ever changed the way he viewed
the gruff security guard. In Toby’s eyes, Sean could do no wrong. The boy was an
unconditionally loyal cohort. He idolized Sean, much to the dismay of his mother.
He did so for reasons Sean never fully understood. It didn’t seem to matter how rude
or dismissive he was to the boy at times. Toby was there for
him, and Sean had come
to discreetly value that relationship, living in a town in which he had few friends.

“Can you still get on the Interweb from the computer in your room?”

Toby laughed. “It’s the
Internet
, silly. Sure I can. Did you want me to help you
sell some things on eBay?”

“Toby, this has nothing to do with money, okay? I just need you to look up something
for me.”

Toby opened up his mouth to say something, but Sean quickly placed his hand over
his lips, concerned the boy’s mother would hear her son’s voice that seemed to be
rising in volume with each utterance.