Blood Trade: A Sean Coleman Thriller (8 page)

“Just listen,” Sean whispered. “Can you bring up the
Denver Post’s
home page, or
web page, or whatever it’s called? There’s an article on it that I need to read.”

With wide, attentive eyes, Toby nodded his head. Sean removed his hand from the boy’s
mouth. Toby hustled over to a white wooden desk at the corner of his room.

Upon the desk were a thick computer monitor and a large keyboard. Toby pressed a
button on the keyboard, which replaced an animation of flying toasters on the monitor
with a bright, white screen. His hand latched onto the computer mouse and he began
clicking and weaving from window to window until the digital sound of a phone dialing
emitted from somewhere under the desk. It was followed with a low, screeching noise,
and then what sounded like radio static.

Toby turned his head to Sean during the clamor and smiled, waving his hand in acknowledgment.
Once the noises ended, Toby turned his attention back to his monitor and began typing
on his keyboard. A page slowly loaded, and though Sean was a few yards away, he could
make out the
Denver Post’s
newspaper logo at the very top of the screen.

Sean cupped his hand to the side of his mouth and whispered to the boy to look for
a picture. He described the photograph that he had seen on Jessica’s monitor back
at the plasma bank. Toby nodded his head and clicked from screen to screen, patiently
waiting for each page to leisurely load—the hindrance of a slow connection.

Sean blew warm breath into his hands as the lowering temperature began to sink under
his skin. His hair was now white from a thin layer of snow that had settled across
it, and he noticed that snow was also entering the boy’s room through his open window.
Toby’s shoulders rose and his arms pressed tightly to his body to ward off the cold
as he continued to work the computer.

Several minutes went by with Sean’s strained glare scrutinizing images on the screen
that clearly weren’t the one for which he was looking. When it came, slowly loading
from the top of the photograph to the bottom, he noticed the unique shade of the
man’s hair first, then his smile, and then the girl beside him.

“Toby!” he whispered. “That’s it! What does the article say?”

Toby nodded and his lips began working silently as his gaze flashed along the screen.
The brightness from the monitor lit up his as if he were holding a flashlight under
his chin.

“It’s about a man who’s missing!” he said excitedly at an uncomfortable volume. His
long eyelashes blinked erratically.

“What’s his name?” Sean asked, softening his voice to urge Toby to do the same.

Toby’s head spun back and forth from the computer to Sean.

“His name is Andrew Carson!” the boy answered emphatically, again too loud.

Sean’s face twisted in frustration. He raised his finger to his mouth and clenched
his teeth. It became apparent to him that there was virtually no chance of the boy
relaying all details of the article to him without his mother hearing the commotion
and being alerted to Sean’s presence. He also didn’t trust the boy to get the content
of the article right.

“Can you move that thing over here, Toby?”

“Do you mean the computer?”

“Yeah.”

“I sure can’t, Sean. I would have to unplug all of the cords that go from the computer
to the surge protector on the floor. If I did that, which I can certainly do, the
phone cord wouldn’t reach the jack in the wall, so there would be no Internet connection.
Also, I would have. . .”

“A simple
no
would have been fine,” Sean mumbled to himself, tuning out the rest
of the boy’s explanation. His eyes lifted to the window frame and intently traced
its edges. He then peered down inside the room and noticed no obstructive furniture
directly below. He raised his arms and pressed the palms of his hands along the bottom
of the open window, pushing it open wider with a grunt.

“Toby, I’m coming in.”

“Oh, neat!” The boy breathlessly stood up from his chair, looking as if he was about
to pull out a tub of popcorn and enjoy the show.

The bottom of the window frame sat about five feet off the ground—just high enough
to make it awkward for Sean to try and slide inside. He clenched his hands onto the
windowsill and pushed his body upward just a few inches before ducking inside the
window, doubling over, and letting his shoulders angle toward the floor.

He slid along his chest and then his stomach, pressing his sprawled out hands along
the carpet. His body was almost entirely inside when he felt something tugging at
the cuff of one of his pant legs. He briskly shook his leg to free himself from whatever
he was hung up on. That’s when he felt something give.

He fell to the floor hard, and when he did, he felt something else coming after him.
He twisted his head just in time to see one end of a curtain rod swinging from its
perch. He had somehow hooked a curtain tieback with his leg and now the entire window
treatment was collapsing before his very eyes.

“Watch out!” Toby screamed.

The curtain rod swung into the side of a three-foot-tall dresser where a ceramic
piggy bank, in the shape of an actual pig, exploded on impact. The rod crashed to
the floor along with shrapnel from the bank and gobs of loose change, the clatter
sounding like the jackpot payout of a slot machine.

Sean’s breath left him when he heard the imposing sound of loud, heavy footsteps
galloping from down the hallway outside the boy’s room. He climbed to his knees,
and after exchanging glances with Toby who also had a look of concern on his face,
he glared at the door that was decorated with small posters and drawings. He knew
there was no sense in trying to hide or escape. At any second, the door would swing
open, the lights would flip on, and standing there would be the dainty frame of Joan
Parker. Her eyes would search the room for about half a second before they found
him, and then a hellfire of verbal fury would be unleashed—one that would likely
wake up the entire neighborhood.

But when that door did swing open and that light did turn on, the sight presenting
itself wasn’t one that anyone could have expected. It was one of pure terror.

The first thing Sean saw was a long buck knife that looked monstrously large in the
hand of the virtually naked man tightly clenching it. Every raw muscle in the man’s
body was recoiled and looked ready to explode under his dark, tattooed skin. Long,
wild, black hair nearly covered his entire face. His wide, savage eyes burned through
the strands.

Toby screamed. Sean reached for the back waistband of his pants, instinctively searching
for the gun that he sometimes kept there. Nothing. He’d left it in the car. With
his heart nearly beating a hole through his chest, he lunged to his feet and shoved
Toby behind him as he grabbed the top of the nearby desk chair with his other hand.
He brandished it in front of him in a defensive position.

“Coleman!” the man shouted out in astonishment.

Sean almost recognized the voice. Teeth clenched and arms locked in battle-readiness,
he was prepared for physical confrontation.

The man held up his empty hand in a calming motion. The savagery in his eyes dissipated
into anger. He was wearing only tight, gray underwear briefs. Old animal and military
tattoos in green ink lined his arms and chest, the latter throbbing as precautionary
adrenaline surged through him. “What the hell are you doing here?”

Sean’s fight or flight mindset wouldn’t let him process who the man was at first—only
that he wasn’t a stranger.

“Oh. Hi, Ron Oldhorse!” Toby explicably welcomed.

Sean’s eyes widened and his mouth gaped open. “Oldhorse?” He suddenly pictured the
man clothed in denim with his long hair tied back in a ponytail, the way he was used
to seeing him.

Both men stared at each other, cautiously sizing one another up and down, struggling
to understand the other’s presence in the bedroom.

Sean knew Ron Oldhorse, but not well. The rumor was that he was formerly in the armed
forces, but Sean didn’t know for sure. All he knew was that the man lived as a hermit
in the hills outside of Winston. Of Native American heritage, Oldhorse chose to live
largely as his ancestors did, hunting for his own food and growing his own crops.
He owned a bare-bones cabin with no modern conveniences that was so old and weatherworn
that anyone who happened to stumble across it in the woods would probably think it
was uninhabitable and had been abandoned decades ago.

Oldhorse had played an incidental but important role in bringing Alvar Montoya, the
man who had murdered Sean’s uncle, to justice. For that, Sean respected him, but
he couldn’t wrap his mind around why the man would possibly be standing before him
now, looking the way he did.

“It’s okay, Sean,” said Toby. “You don’t have to be scared. I just
didn’t know that
Ron Oldhorse was coming over tonight. That’s why I yelled. Mom’s always telling me
that I yell before thinking sometimes, and that I need to process things first.”
He swallowed quickly before continuing. “I actually thought I was making some good
progress until tonight.”

Both men, still breathing heavily in the awkwardness enveloping the room, held onto
their weapons.

Sean frowned. “Why would he be spending the night, Toby?”

Lighter footsteps trounced down the hallway and then Joan appeared by Oldhorse’s
side, dressed in a dull blue robe. Her short, graying hair was matted to her head,
framing angry eyes.

“You’ve got to be kidding me,” Sean muttered, lowering his chair to the floor.

Joan slid under Oldhorse’s outstretched arm and stood in front of him to face Sean.
She was trembling in anger as she glared at him. Oldhorse lowered his knife to his
side.

“Sean! Why in the hell are you here?” she screamed so loudly that the others winced.

Sean and Toby exchanged glances.

“Don’t look at my son!” she snapped, commanding the attention back to her. “Why are
you here?”

Oldhorse shook his head, taking a breath before he turned around and quietly left
the room.

“I wanted him to look something up on the Interweb for me,” said Sean.

“Internet,” Toby whispered.

Sean ignored him.

“At eleven o’clock at night?” she wailed, throwing her hands up in the air and glaring
a hole through Sean’s very soul.

Sean’s face soured and he found himself subtly nodding. “I guess you have a point
there.”

Her head cocked to an angle and her eyes blinked repeatedly, reflecting the audacity
of Sean’s words.

“But it was for something important!” he added up with some gusto in his voice.

“What, Sean? What was so important that you had to sneak in here and scare the hell
out of my son in the middle of the night?”

“Me?” he sputtered. “I’m not the one who ran in here waving a knife around!”

“We thought someone had broken in!” she yelled, her nostrils flaring to the size
of nickels as she tightened her fists. “What am I saying? Someone
did
break in!
You
broke in!”

Toby interjected. “Mom, I actually let him in and—”

“Shut up, Toby!” she bit out.

The boy’s gaze went to the floor.

She ordered her son to close the window where the chilling breeze and blowing snow
were still flooding into the room.

“Listen,” Sean said. “He has an article up on the screen here that I need to read,
and then I’ll be gone.”

“Oh, no,” she quickly replied with her eyebrows raised authoritatively. “You’re not
spending another second inside my home. You’re going to leave right now.”

“Please. This will just take a couple of minutes.”

“No!”

“Mom!” Toby interrupted. “I can just print out the article for him and he can take
it with him. Can I do that?”

The expression on Sean’s face twisted into one of perplexity. He looked to Toby,
completely forgetting his mother for the moment. “Are you telling me you could have
just printed that out on paper and handed it to me through the window?”

Toby nodded enthusiastically, his face wearing a wide smile.

“Why didn’t you tell me that before I climbed inside?”

Toby raised his shoulders and answered, “I wanted you to see my room.”

Joan’s face contorted with perplexity, emulating Sean’s as she twisted her head to
glare at her son.

So painfully slow was the speed at which the printer-head glided back and forth across
the sheet of paper it had been fed that it took all the strength Sean could muster
not to prematurely yank it out of the machine. It gave him a chance to notice that
Toby’s pajamas had a pattern of dachshunds prancing along in rows. Sean used to own
a dachshund. It also compelled Toby to show Sean the notes he’d taken on the episode
of
Magnum, P.I.
he had been watching that night.

Sean just wanted to leave, especially with Joan hovering in the corner of the room
like a buzzard training a scornful eye on the back of his head. She tapped one of
her slipper-clad feet, which seemed to count down the seconds until the print job
was done. Still, Toby’s account of the investigative skills he’d taken away from
the television episode forced Sean to fight back a smirk.

Sean had long fancied himself an amateur investigator—a man with a keen eye for detail
and a knack for forming conclusions based on available evidence. Though there were
often mixed results when it came to the accuracy of those conclusions, Toby believed
Sean to be the real deal—an expert in the realm of examination and analysis. Sean
had once told Toby that he gathered those instincts from watching crime shows on
television, and the boy had clearly taken the remark to heart.

Once the second sheet of paper, a bit crinkled from fresh ink, finally slid onto
the plastic tray attached to the printer, Joan’s raised finger pointed Sean to the
front door. Sean snatched the printed article and acknowledged Toby with the nod
of his head before briskly making his way through the narrow hallway that led through
the heart of the small house. Lots of pictures decorated the walls; all were either
of Toby alone or the boy with his mother. They spanned several years.