From a Dead Sleep (11 page)
“Fuck it,” he muttered before swallowing some bile and reaching for the buckle.
D
iana crawled into bed at 11:34 p.m. The small room was dark, but she could tell her husband was still awake by the sound of his breathing. Lying flat on his back, shirtless and with a forearm behind his head, he lifted the covers for his wife as she slid in next to him. Strong rain pounded the rooftop mercilessly. Water gushing through a drainpipe outside sounded like a waterfall.
“Is she back down?” he asked, not sounding at all tired.
“She went right back to sleep. Probably a bad dream,” she said. “I tried calling Sean again. Still a busy signal. He must have taken the phone off the hook.”
“In no mood for talking, I’d imagine,” he added.
She placed her arm over his chest and rested her head along his shoulder. Clad in one of the oversized, button-down shirts she preferred to sleep in, she could feel the beat of her husband’s heart against her shoulder. Minutes went by as they silently stared at the ceiling; the sound of the storm was almost inaudible against the thoughts racing through their minds. A loud roar of thunder suddenly sent a tremble through the house. When it ended, she spoke.
“Is it possible he’s telling the truth?”
It was the same question Gary had been asking himself throughout the day. “Anything’s possible, but I scoured that bridge. Believe me, for the sake of your brother’s own sanity, I was hoping to find some blood . . . or
anything
.” “Did you check the forest?”
“Around the bridge, we did. We found nothing.”
“Why would he make it up, Gary? It doesn’t make sense.”
He turned to her, cupping her shoulder with his free hand. “I stopped trying to figure out Sean Coleman a long time ago.”
She turned more to him, studying him in the flashes of lightning for several moments. She kissed his lips. “I’m so sorry, honey. You shouldn’t have to deal with stuff like this.”
She ran the inside of her bare thigh against his and placed her hand behind his head, pulling him into a deeper kiss. He smiled in the darkness and pulled his wife on top of him. His hands slid down to her hips.
Pulsed flashes of lightning lit up the room from a side window. Diana let out a surprised gasp as she caught the reflection of a hunched-over figure in the wide mirror above her dresser. She quickly spun up off of Gary and to her knees, her head whipping toward the bedroom door. As another battering of thunder punished the sky above, his wife’s sudden movement led Gary to instinctively reach for his nightstand drawer where he kept a pistol. Instead, his knuckles sent a small half-filled glass of water to the floor where it shattered loudly.
“Mom?” Diane called out.
Gary twisted his body away from the doorway and quickly felt for the small lamp beside him. When the bulb clicked on, he turned back to see Diana lunging toward her now-awake mother.
Dolores stood just inside the doorway, bent at the hip with her forearm resting along the top of a nearby dresser for support. Her pale blue pajama bottoms were clearly wet. She had had an accident. Diana held her mother’s free hand and placed an arm around her waist, concerned that the elderly, stroke-stricken woman might fall.
“Broom!” Dolores groaned, which both Diana and Gary knew to mean
bathroom
.
Dolores’ tired eyes lifted to meet her daughter’s, as a stream of drool slid down the left side of her permanently twisted mouth—a result of the stroke she suffered two years ago.
Diana’s eyes told Gary that she would take care of the problem. As she led her mother away, Gary sat up in bed and studied the mess of broken glass and water steaming its way along a floorboard. Down the hallway, he heard his wife offering instructions of what she was doing in a voice loud enough for her mother to hear. He turned to a seated position on the side of the bed and let his legs dangle. His feet almost touched the floor. His shoulders dropped, and his elbows rested on top of his knees.
“Damn you, Sean.”
Sunday
G
reen. Everything was as bright as day, and green—the sofa, the television set, Rocco . . . The old dachshund’s lifeless eyes looked like a pair of illuminant buttons on a control panel. The goggles Sean had found
were
night-vision goggles.
Sean had thought they might be when he had reached inside the bag in the middle of the storm. His Uncle Zed used to have a similar pair of goggles a couple of years ago. He’d picked them up at a flea market in Frisco, Colorado, and later traded them in town for some ammo. But these were different—much more serious and expensive-looking. Possibly military issue or some mock variety that could be ordered out of a cheesy survivalist magazine. They were made of an imposing black metal, fastened to an elaborate head mount of canvas straps to keep the rubber eyecups suctioned to the wearer’s head, leaving the wearer’s hands free. They looked almost brand new.
Sean lowered the complex gadget from his exhausted, stinging eyes and laid it back down carefully across the small wooden kitchen table in front of him. The table’s bad leg caused it to wobble. His hand found the back of his head and scratched at the persistent itch. A few more hours and the sun would be up and with it a new day, but he feared little light would be shed in the form of answers. In fact, his late night finding prompted more questions than anything.
Other than the goggles, the most notable item in the brief bag was a woven stocking cap, deep purple in color. The fluffy trim along the rim suggested that it was designed for women. There was no suicide note to be found and no forms of identification, just a well-used red ballpoint pen, an empty book of mailing stamps, and a handful of paperclips and binding clips. Not exactly the enlightening evidence he had hoped for.
But Sean was confident that the bag definitely belonged to that stranger on the bridge. Those wide red marks he saw under the dead man’s eyes were the tip-off. They were large and clear enough for a hungover drunk to see from forty yards away. They weren’t caused by large eyeglasses as Sean had initially thought. They were caused by the night-visions, and judging by their prominence, they had been worn by the stranger for quite some time prior to him sending a bullet through the back of his head.
The stranger had to have been the one who buried the bag in the forest, but Sean hadn’t a clue why. However, he did have a clue where the man had come from—Lakeland. It was the only explanation for that page of the newspaper that led Sean to discovering the bag. He had worked all throughout the area and had never seen it sold anywhere other than in the town itself. Judging by the way the stranger was dressed, he probably didn’t live there, but he had certainly come through that way.
Still, there was nothing concrete and certainly nothing that would convince Lumbergh. Sean pictured the condescending expression the chief would have on his face if he marched back into his office and dumped out the contents of the bag on his fancy desk—
“Which
five ‘n dime store did you buy this stuff from, Sean?”
Sean needed more.
Rubbing some sand from his eyes, he picked up the pen and studied it—the third time he had done so since opening the bag. He half expected it to have some convenient information inscribed on its side, like the name of a company. Stuff like that happened often enough on television. This was real life, however, and there was no inscription.
Still, Sean glanced along its side again. He leaned back in his chair to stretch out his back, rapidly clicking the pen open and shut with his thumb.
Curled up on a shaggy, brown rug on the tile floor inside the kitchen, Rocco’s ears raised and his head tilted at the sound of the pen. This caused Sean to smirk.
His eyes narrowed, and he soon found his fingers twisting the pen open, pulling out the deep red ink cartridge and holding each end up to the light, taking turns staring through the cylinders as if they were telescopes.
“Stupid,” he muttered to himself, knowing before he even began that dismantling it was a lame idea—as if some rolled-up treasure map would spill out to the table top.
He dropped the pen parts to the table and held the brief bag itself upside down, above his head, shaking it wildly—for the second time. Nothing.
The book of stamps looked like they could have been bought anywhere. Liberty Bells. First class.
The stocking cap was pretty standard. Most of it was deep purple in color, but the shaggy trim along the bottom sported a lighter shade of purple. Sean held it to his face and breathed in deeply, searching for a scent. He found one: it seemed to him to be perfume. An interesting peculiarity in his mind, as the person on the bridge was undoubtedly a man. He dumped it back on the table with a sigh.
He eyed the page of the newspaper again, lying in a crinkled up wad by itself at the corner of the table. He leaned forward, grabbed it, and began spreading it out as flat as he could along the table top. It was still a little damp, but he was careful not to let it fall apart. The torn edge was fairly smooth, as if someone had placed the full newspaper down on a flat surface, held it down with one hand, and used the other to yank the front page off quickly.
Latching onto the sweating bottle of cold Coors beer beside him, Sean scanned the headlines. There were stories about a new casino opening, a group of lynx that had been spotted in nearby Summit County, a proposal to increase local builder fees, a children’s fishing contest, and a few other typical mountain town items highly unlikely to drive a man to kill himself. He took a swig of beer and flipped the page. His eyes shifted from left to right, like a typewriter, before dropping to the bottom of the page.
It was then that he felt a large lump swell in his throat and his eyes widen. Along the bottom of the edge were a couple short, pen-written sentences, the ink red. He didn’t understand how he had missed it earlier, and wondered if his own fat fingers had gotten in the way. Written in a style that seemed to be partially cursive and partially in manuscript, he read the notes;
Holdings entered into Amendment No.
2
. A briskly drawn arrow pointed to the abbreviated sentence,
Orig.
agreement.
Beside the writings, along the margin of the paper, was a single, standard-looking math problem. Long division, with more digits in the numbers than Sean used to struggle with back in school.
Sean’s lips mouthed the cryptic verbiage as he read it. Maybe it was written by the dead man. Maybe it wasn’t. But the ink was red, which matched the pen.
Slivers of sunlight gleamed through the narrow openings of dusty, half-drawn blinds at the top of Sean’s kitchen window. Abrasive snoring sent steady quivers through the small room as if there were a multicar locomotive engine roaring down a track only ten feet away.
Without warning, a fierce eruption of pounding bounced off the walls of the small home, causing Sean’s groggy body to snap forward in his recliner. With his eyes still closed tightly and his head pleading for coherence, a half-full bottle of beer nearly dropped from his grasp, but he managed to catch it by the neck.
“Coleman!” shouted a sharp, familiar voice from outside the front door. “Coleman! I know you’re in there! Open up!”
“Bailey,” Sean cursed under his breath, still wearing the ripe gray undershirt and dirty jeans from the night before. He had racked his brain until about three a.m., when he slipped away, unsuccessful in his painstaking attempts to make sense of the day before. The dead man’s motivations were still a mystery, as were the clues Sean had unearthed from the mud.
Rocco’s nose went to the ceiling and the tips of his long ears drooped to the floor. Delayed in his reaction to the landlord’s commotion, he ejected a loud, sickly howl into the air—the sound of which echoed that of water jetting through rusty pipes.
Sean trudged out of his chair with an artless stumble, a palm fastened to the side of his head. He yanked open the front door just as his landlord was about to subject it to another rapid beating. Bailey’s fist nearly swiped Sean’s chin.
“Jesus, Bailey! What do you want?” Sean asked, already knowing the answer.
Hank Bailey was a short, stocky man with a round face, round nose, and a reddened, bald head that shone like a bulb under the morning light. He looked half-dressed with his torso clad in a snug, white, tank-style undershirt with frayed armholes. His hairy, thick arms and shoulders were decorated with ancient tattoos from his days as a Marine. They were so faded and stretched that they looked like large splotches of bread mold. His short, stumpy legs were attired in gray, creased trousers with a waistline concealed by his protruding gut.
Sean found Bailey’s scornful, baggy eyes honed in on him like torpedoes.
“Need the rent! Now!” he barked like a drill sergeant. “Now!” Bailey always spoke loudly and in short bursts.
“Just . . . calm down,” Sean replied, wincing and raising his hands in the air as if he was trying to avoid touching something. “Just a minute.”
He retreated into his bedroom and grabbed the forty bucks his uncle had given him from the pocket of his damp work shirt that was crumpled up in a corner on the floor. He scrounged together another eighteen from his wallet and dresser.