From a Dead Sleep (29 page)

“No wallet,” he muttered.

The loud, unexpected pulse of the doorbell commanded quick silence from both of them. Sean jolted before snapping a look toward Lisa who quickly scrambled to her feet and gazed numbly back. He yanked his gun from behind his waistband and held it at attention.

“Were you expecting anyone?” he whispered sharply.

She shook her head.

He squared his jaw and motioned for her to stay put. He carefully stepped over the dead body and blood, staying close to the wall as he made his way down the hallway toward the front door.

Unsure whether to abide Sean’s wishes, Lisa crept her way up to the dead man but went no farther. She watched Sean from there.

He reached the end of the corridor and poked his head around the corner. She saw him steal a glance through the small shattered window along the front door. He turned to her just as the bell rang a second time. This time, it was followed quickly with hard banging.

“Hello?” a male voice shouted. “I’m with security! Is everything okay?”

“It’s some guy with a uniform!” Sean hissed.

She scurried down the hallway to his side. She peered around the corner, along his shoulder. Even amongst the chaos, he found himself taking note of how pleasant her hair smelled. The man at the door’s face was only partially visible from their vantage point, but his uniform was unmistakably that of the gated community’s security team.

“It’s okay,” she declared as she whisked by Sean and toward the front door.

“Wait!” he said, still assessing the situation.

Before he knew it, she was working feverishly to unlock the door. Her rapid breathing muffled the sound of broken glass crackling beneath her shoes.

He grunted and quickly slid his pistol down the back of his pants.

“Mrs. Kimble?” came the man’s voice.

She nodded. “Yes!”

“I thought I heard what sounded like a gunshot from the road. Was there . . . an accident?”

“Someone attacked me!” she exclaimed as she swung open the door, causing a sheet of shattered glass to crumble to the floor.

She lunged forward to embrace the man, but quickly realized that it wasn’t Marty. In fact the guard who stood before her looked more like a teenager—wide-eyed with an oily complexion and short, brown hair that was spiked along his bangs. He was a bit on the short side, thin and unable to fill out his uniform that looked a size too large. He looked to be in his early twenties and smelled of cigarette smoke.

“You were at–attacked, ma’am?” He spoke in a shaky, nervous voice. He swallowed hard with his eyes fixated on Lisa’s beat-up mouth. He quickly fumbled for the handgun in a black, leather holster at his side and drew it out in front of him. “Is the p–p–perpetrator still here?” he quickly asked as he used his free hand to hook Lisa’s shoulder, pulling her to shelter behind him. His trigger hand shook noticeably.

“No. No, no,” she quickly clarified. “He’s dead!”

“What?” the guard yelped in confusion.

“He’s dead!” Sean stated loudly from the hallway.

“Jesus!” the guard cried as he dropped to a knee and briskly swung his gun in the direction of the new voice.

Sean’s eyes widened, and he quickly raised his open hands out in front of him to expose that he wasn’t a threat.

“No!” Lisa yelled to the guard.

“Calm down, kid!” shouted Sean. “The bad guy’s dead! He’s in the hallway!”

“Just . . . Everybody shut up for a second! Please!” pleaded the newly out-of-breath guard who struggled to cling to some semblance of professionalism.

He rose back up to his rubbery legs and asked Sean if he was Mr. Kimble. Before the big man could answer, Lisa explained Sean to be a friend and that her husband wasn’t there. She continued on, excitedly relaying a vague version of the series of events that had just taken place from the moment the gunman appeared at her door. She said nothing of the death of her husband, which Sean found interesting. The three walked down the hallway to the body with the guard reluctantly in the lead and Sean hovering closely behind him.

Sean studied the young guard as he leaned over the body in curiosity with his gun aimed down cautiously at the corpse.

He glanced back at Sean and Lisa with a sick look on his face. “You sure he’s dead?”

“Oh yeah,” Sean answered confidently with a raised eyebrow, observing the kid’s reaction. “What’s your name?”

“Josh. Josh Jones,” he answered with his eyes now directed back on the body.

Sean leered at the kid like a hawk, evaluating his movements and mannerisms.

“Have either of you already called the police?” asked Josh.

“No,” replied Lisa. “We were about to.”

“I’ll do it,” he said with a nod back toward the entrance of the house.

The three made their way back toward the front room. Lisa led the way and Sean motioned the guard in front of him.

As they left the hallway, Sean’s forearm slammed into the side of Josh’s neck like it was discharged from a mortar. He hammered the smaller man up against the wall behind him, yanking on his wrist and sending the guard’s firearm to the floor where Sean quickly kicked it down the hallway. Framed pictures crashed to the floor, knocked loose from their mounted positions as he smashed the overwhelmed kid’s head into the drywall.

Sean could hear Lisa’s pleading screams at the violent beating that she turned around to witness. Shocked and confused, she demanded for Sean to stop. The guard looked like a rag-doll in the hands of the much larger Sean who repeatedly slammed his thigh into his gut. Josh crumbled to the floor with bulging eyes, mouth gaping for air.

“What are you doing?” Lisa screamed. “Stop it!”

She could hear desperate, gasping sounds wheezing out from the kid’s mouth. She lunged toward Sean and fiercely grabbed onto his short hair with one hand while she sunk her fingernails into his flesh just above his eye. He winced and unloaded an open hand to her sternum that sent her stumbling backwards onto her butt.

“He’s full of shit!” he snarled defensively before planting the sole of his boot into Josh’s neck and pinning him to the floor along the baseboard of the wall.

He retrieved his pistol from his pants and swung the weapon up before his body, pointing it directly toward Josh’s horrified, pain-stricken face. The kid’s eyes were crossed as they homed in on the silver barrel just inches away.

“Stop it!” Lisa screamed again, this time from her knees. Tears streamed down her bruised face

Sean turned to her. “He’s no goddamned security guard!” he shouted. “This asshole stumbles in here, sees breaking and entering, assault and battery, and a
dead
guy on the floor, for God’s sake! And he hasn’t touched his radio once!” He aimed his pistol toward the black, compact walkie-talkie opposite the guard’s gun holster to direct her attention to it. “It ain’t even turned on!”

Her face twisted in confusion. “Tell me you’re joking!” she cried out. “You’re beating the shit out of him because he didn’t call anyone on his radio?”

Sean’s head shook in disgust.

“If you’ve got back-up, you use it!” he snarled while keeping his boot on the kid and glaring angrily into his eyes. It was a line he remembered Jimmy Smits delivering on an episode of
NYPD Blue.

“Where’s your name tag, asshole?” he interrogated. “The guy down front had a shiny gold pin right there on his shirt pocket! Where’s yours?”

He pried his foot from under Josh’s neck and shoved it into his chest to keep him pinned. Josh let out a sick breath before several hoarse coughs erupted from his gaping mouth.

“I just started!” the kid unnervingly answered. Speaking must have been painful because his hand went right to his throat. “I’m getting it next week!”

Sean shook his head, sneering skeptically in response. He turned back to Lisa. “The guard down front at the gate . . . Do you know him? Don’t say his name, but do you know him?”

She nodded, and Sean’s head spun back to Josh.

“The guy down front, the pretty boy with the blonde hair . . . Tell me his name!”

“Martin! His name is Martin!”

“He’s right!” Lisa injected. “That’s his name. Call him! Call him right now and we’ll straighten this all out! This kid’s just trying to help us!”

The gears in Sean’s brain spun rapidly as he glared down at the sight before him—a helpless, beaten kid pinned to the floor and looking up at him in anguish. Seconds went by. He thought of what had happened with Tariq back in Winston, but he also sensed that Jones’s story was being adlibbed the same way as the one Sean himself had fed to the two children down the hill.

“Nah,” he said. “I ain’t buying it!”

“Oh my God!” shouted Lisa, throwing her hands up in the air. “Why not?!”

“I came back to your house for a reason. That letter . . . The envelope I told you about, that your husband sent . . . It was in your mailbox.”

Her demeanor sobered, eyes narrowing in befuddlement. “You opened it?”

“Hell, yeah, I opened it! I didn’t drive halfway across the country just to hand you your mail!” Sean quipped. “The guy I shot . . . He’s not on his own. Not by a longshot!”

Josh’s face was blank when Lisa’s attention turned to him.

“Your husband was in some deep shit,” said Sean. He steadied his gun hand and guided his pistol closer to Josh’s face. “But you already know that, don’t you, dickhead?”

“Please, mister! I swear to God I work here! I just started!”

Sean yelled at him to shut up. He bit down on his lip and shoved his gun to the back of his pants before lunging forward and pressing his knee down on Jones’s chest to keep him floored. Jones squirmed wildly as Sean’s hands reached under his body. When he felt Sean’s spread fingers cradle each cheek of his buttocks, his eyes bulged from the aggravated violation.

“What are you doing, man?” he cried in utter appall that matched the expression on Lisa’s face.

Sean leapt back to his feet and retrieved his gun, directing it back on Josh Jones. “Yeah, that’s what I thought! He doesn’t have a wallet either!”

“So?” Lisa asked.

“So . . . Neither one of these guys are carrying a wallet! The only reason a man doesn’t carry a wallet is if he doesn’t want to be identified!” Sean couldn’t place which television show he’d acquired the theory from, but he felt the logic to be sound.

Jones shook his head fiercely. “It’s in my locker, back at the station!”

“Bullshit!” yelled Sean.

“What was in the letter?” asked Lisa in a constrained tone that grabbed his attention. Her concern for the kid on the floor had seemingly drifted to the back burner for a moment.

“A lot of shit, but I ain’t gonna tell you any more in front of
Josh
Jones
here.” He placed some sarcastic stank on the pronunciation of his name.

Her eyes fluttered back to the man on the floor. They soon honed in on his chest.

“Oh my God!” Lisa suddenly shouted.

“What?”

When she quickly crawled over to Josh, Sean warned her not to get too close. Her narrowed eyes quickly traced up and down the guard’s body before they widened in confirmation of the button that was missing from the center of his shirt.

“He’s wearing Marty’s shirt! That’s Marty’s shirt!”

“Son of a bitch!” yelled Sean before planting a hard kick into Josh’s gut.

“Where’s Marty?” Lisa screamed.

Sean leaned forward and grabbed the radio from the kid’s belt and yanked it loose. The second he flipped the “ON” switch, a loud, angry voice erupted from the speaker in mid-sentence: “. . . aren’t you at your post, Marty? One of the residents just told me that the front gate is wide open!”

Sean snarled and glared at the wide-eyed Josh who raised his hands defensively but not quickly enough to blunt the heel of Sean’s boot that came crashing down along his skull. Josh was out cold with a stream of blood quickly creeping out from under his gelled hair along the side of his head.

“Josh Jones my ass,” Sean mumbled as he surveyed the sight before him. “Fake-ass name. Might as well have been John Doe.”

Lisa’s shaking hand covered her mouth as she winced at the view of the beaten stranger and the realization that he had done something to the nice man she had spent time with the night before. She looked to Sean for some sort of direction, acknowledging that his suspicions had validity to them after all.

“What was my husband into, Mr. Coleman?” she asked in a single breath. “The guy you shot . . . He asked me all kinds of questions about him. None of them made any sense.”

“Later. We need to leave. Right now!”

She shook her head. “Leave?”

“Yes.”

“Why don’t we call the police?”

“No time. There may be more of them outside somewhere. He was planning on using your phone, remember?” he said. “Probably to call his friends.”

He grabbed onto her wrist and pulled her close. She resisted only for a second, out of impulse. She hardly knew this man whose firm grip was cutting off the circulation to her hand, but she understood that if he wanted to hurt her, he would have done it already. He’d saved her life, probably twice, and there was no one else around to trust.

She was whisked out the front door beside him, following his lead. When they got to the front steps, he quickly climbed over the railing that he had unceremoniously been forced to tumble over when the chaos first erupted. From under a pine shrub, he grabbed the manila envelope he had retrieved from the mailbox down the road. It was now decorated with dirt and chips of mulch.

He held his gun in front of him as his eyes carefully scanned the area. He saw and heard no one.

“My car!” she yelled as the two trounced down the steps toward the driveway. “His car has me blocked in.”

“We’re not taking your car; we’re taking mine.”

He led her down a slope into the thick foliage at the edge of the curved driveway, glancing back at it as they disappeared behind a row of trees. He thought in the moment that he caught a glimpse of a small, gray car parked where the drive met the road, but he wasn’t about to stick around for a closer look. The large, flush trees felt like a protective shield as he did his best to estimate how far west he had parked his car. He slid his gun back into his pants as he kept the envelope clutched to his side.