From a Dead Sleep (41 page)

“These assholes took a lot from me,” he said as she was deliberating asking another question. “When we catch up to that little fucker, I’m gonna make him feel some pain.”

“Is that what we’re doing?” she said. “We’re just going to, what? Run him off the road so you can kick his ass again?”

“At least.”

“I don’t think that’s a good idea. These people are dangerous.”

“As Josh’s buddy found out, so am I.”

She sighed and shook her head. “Kyle sent the ledger to the FBI. They have what they need to put Moretti away. They’ll take care of him.”

“Don’t count on it,” he barked. “If there’s such good shit in that ledger, he wouldn’t have needed to blow his own brains out to try and frame Moretti for murder.”

Her hand went to her mouth and her shoulders fell forward, fighting back the urge to cry at his insensitive remarks.

She didn’t look at him, but heard him grunt and then add in a more restrained tone, “Listen, I’m just saying that if he felt so hopeless that the only way out of his situation was to kill himself,” he said more carefully, “and pin his murder on Moretti, it’s a pretty safe bet that there aren’t enough goodies in that book alone to put the man in prison. I saw your husband’s face as he sat on that bridge. He wasn’t confident. He was desperate.”

She nodded subtly, acknowledging that he had a point.

“Besides, I’ve ruined your husband’s plan. I told the cops it was suicide. Moretti’s off the hook for his murder.”

She dwelled on his words, wiping her face, her eyes threatening tears.

His attention returned to the road and he immediately stomped on the brake.

“Come on!” he roared at an SUV hauling a boat trailer that continually padded its brakes in front of them. The larger speedboat that rested across its prongs stood high enough to obstruct his view of the Volvo.

When he asked her if she could still see Jones from her side, she gave a quick glimpse ahead from her vantage point and nodded. “He’s in the right lane.”

He tapped the steering wheel in annoyance and scratched at the back of his head, where she’d seen the bald patch, seeming to consider trying to pass the traffic from the opposite lane once he had an opening.

“No, I’d better not,” he said out loud. “Boats on trailers make for good cover.”

He turned to Lisa, seemingly feeling the need to elaborate on his remark. “I don’t want to give anything away in case Jones is checking his mirrors,” he said with a smirk. “A little something I picked up from an episode of
Hardcastle and McCormick
.”

She looked at him with confusion.

He glowered at the boat in front of them. “Guess that’s lost on you . . .”

“. . . I guess.” She shook her head slightly.

Despite the cluster between them and the Volvo, they seemed to be slowly catching up.

“Where the hell’s he going?” he mused aloud.

“Back to Vegas?” she speculated.

“Not directly. That’s a rental car with Michigan plates. They got it locally.”

“Do you think there are more of them here? Maybe he’s meeting someone.”

“Josh Jones is no seasoned professional,” he said. “I’m sure of that. Unless, is it possible that Moretti or the silver-haired man Toby mentioned are here in Michigan?”

He seemed to be talking more to himself than her, so she waited for him to answer himself.

“Let’s follow him for now,” he declared, nodding to convince himself. “We’ll see where he stops.”

“And then we’ll call the police? Right?” she asked hopefully.

“Sure.”

She suspected the man next to her wasn’t being sincere, but she found a morsel of comfort in the notion that ramming Josh Jones’s car was off the table.

Sean seemed to force himself to breathe moderately and settled into a more discreet posture among the transit.

Minutes of silence passed that felt awkward in the tight quarters.

Lisa felt compelled to say something. “What do you do for a living, Mr. Coleman?”

He chuckled at the attempt at small talk under the circumstances.

“I’m a security guard . . . At least I was.”

It explained some of his mannerisms. “What kind of security guard?”

“Property mainly. Not a ton of responsibility, I guess. Just keeping things safe.” He shook his head, seemingly at his own unimpassioned description of the job, as if it seemed completely insignificant.

“Well, you kept
me
safe, Mr. Coleman,” she said with a timid grin, seeing through his attempt to downplay his modest livelihood. “Thank you.”

He gave her a quick grin, showing appreciation for the honest gratitude coming from her. She could see he was more accustomed to receiving praise delivered under a veil of sarcasm. He tried to hide it behind the stony set of his jaw, but she could see through the tough façade. She didn’t like to think of what could have happened to her if she’d faced her assailant alone. Her gaze dropped to her hands knotted in her lap.

“You’re welcome.”

He seemed to mull something over, but settled for: “I wish I could have saved him.”

Her sad eyes rose to his, and she felt as though she was witnessing a rare moment of genuine compassion from a man who seemed seldom ready to offer any.

“I tried everything that morning,” he explained, not looking to her. “I yelled my ass off and waved my arms in the air. I ran across that bridge as fast as I could. If I had gotten to him a couple seconds faster, I might have been able to stop him.”

She fought back a tear and found a way to curl the sides of her mouth in a display of graciousness. “Kyle was never an easy person to get the attention of,” she said. “God, I guess I wasn’t either. How could I have been so stupid?”

“What do you mean?” he asked.

She suspected he already knew what she meant with the statement.

“Our marriage. Everything. It was all a lie. I honest to God believed that he worked for the FBI. I thought I was married to a federal agent who was doing something noble for a living.” She shook her head before continuing. “My whole life, I’ve battled this notion people have about me that I’m naïve, and the truth is that I’m the biggest idiot on the planet!”

He kept his eyes on the road, sensing either venting or ranting brewing.

“The lengths he went to!” she continued. “I mean, there were times when I dropped him off at work, for God’s sake. I met his coworkers! And this whole time, he worked for some kind of gangster!”

She gazed out her window, not wanting to meet his eyes in her raw openness. She watched a layer of tall and thin leafy trees glide by. They wove in the light breeze as if they were trying to offer her some comfort.

“And he was sleeping with another woman,” she added with bitterness in her voice, still not looking to him. “I suppose I should have at least suspected
that
. He’d been so distant for so long. I attributed it to his job. Another woman . . . Why . . .?”

“He’s getting off!” he interrupted.

“Excuse me?” she replied, her face twisted in disgust. She was unsure if she’d heard him right.

“Up ahead. He’s turning. Highway 31. Do you know where that goes?”

She wondered if the man next to her had heard a thing she’d just said. “It leads over to the west coastline. South of here,” she answered with the frown still etched across her lips.

“Is anything down there?”

“Some towns . . . Honor, Benzonia. A couple of lakes.”

“Is there an airport?”

“Yes. There’s one a little further down in Manistee. I’ve come through it before.”

He nodded and rubbed the back of his head with his thumb. “Can you rent cars at that airport?”

She now turned to him. “Yes, you can.”

His stare tightened on the road as he flipped on his turn signal. “I think Josh Jones is looking to catch a flight.”

She looked ahead.
A flight?

Chapter 45

H
e found early on that his venture up the river was not a fruitless effort. Ron Oldhorse discovered a plethora of manmade blemishes along the terrain that would have gone completely unnoticed by most people. Sporadic footprints, overturned rocks along the damp earth of the riverside, and trampled vegetation. Oldhorse determined that they were left by a single individual who’d shuffled his pace back and forth between a brisk jog and a tired walk.

After he took a moment to scoop up a splash of cold river water into a leather canteen given to him by an elder tribesman, he lifted his head to the steep and rocky shoreline. Far ahead from where he stood at a ravine base, several sizable and mostly round rocks rested in an angled clump along a sheer section of the gorge. They seemed to piggyback each other, with the larger rocks on the bottom. Something artificial drew his attention to the bottom of the rubble; it appeared to be a dark fabric.

He jogged up through the natural quarry, skipping gracefully from rock to rock until he reached it. The fabric had some elastic on the end that emerged from a narrow crevice between the rocks. When he tugged on it, he found a sleeve. He jostled the rocks and stones and let them tumble to the shore so he could free more of the garment. It was a man’s jacket—black in color and made of vinyl. It wasn’t particularly large.

It had been there a couple of days, as established from its dampness from the recent weather, but it was in decent shape. It hadn’t been snagged by the rocks; it had been purposefully concealed between them and probably only became visible due to the unsteadiness of the pile.

Oldhorse inspected the jacket closely. Along with some dirt and grime smudged into the fabric, he found dark red stains across one of the sleeves. He held the sleeve to his broad nose and determined it to be blood. He carefully folded the garment and found some space for it in one of the pockets of his backpack.

A sharp breeze cut through the gully. The air felt cooler to him than it should have with the sun still hovering unhindered high above. It was as if nature was warning him of what he would find ahead if he kept searching.

The wad of gum in Lumbergh’s mouth was clamped tightly in his jaw as the radial tires that propped up the left side of his Jeep hugged the edge of Pine View Road. It was a narrow, dirt road that he typically avoided due to his queasiness over its long and steep drop to the river that lay a couple hundred feet below.

It was an obscure route in getting back to Winston, but the trail followed the cold, raging water the dead body had been swept away in before it poured into the reservoir at Beggar’s Basin. He felt compelled to trace its path back as far as he could, even though the road stuck to the mountain range that veered northwest which would take him away from Meyers Bridge.

He had no expectations of finding anything of note, especially from such a height. However, he hoped that positioning himself in the proximity of where the ghastly series of events had begun would somehow give him a fresh perspective of the questions he was struggling to answer in his mind.

He peered down the long and winding trail of water, watching from afar the white foam churn and crash against large boulders that looked like stones from such a distance.

He took a breath and reached for his radio when the sound of blaring static belched out from its speaker. It was followed promptly with Jefferson’s voice calling out the chief ’s name.

“I was just getting ready to call you, Jefferson,” he spoke into the speaker. “What’s up?”

“Sean just called into the office.”

Lumbergh sat up straight in his seat. His pulse accelerated. “Good. Where is he?”

“Well, I’m not sure.”

“You’re not sure?”

“No. He called collect so his caller I.D. information didn’t show up on that little screen.”

Lumbergh scowled into his speaker. “Well, what did he say?”

“Not much really.”

The chief waited for him to continue, but nothing followed. “You still there, Jefferson?”

“I think he said that he killed someone.”

Lumbergh’s head jerked backward. “Killed someone?”

“Yeah.”

“The man we found in the river?”

“I don’t think so.”

The chief was quickly losing patience with his officer. “Jefferson, this is ridiculous. What the hell’s going on?”

The officer told him of the conversation, and the chief could sense that he was bracing for a scathing indictment of his own incompetence. Instead, Lumbergh clenched his steering wheel until his knuckles turned white and took a deep breath. He then pushed in the button on his radio transceiver. “If he calls back, ask him where he is before saying anything else, got it? It’s important.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Now I’ve got something else for you. I need you to call the FBI office in Las Vegas, Nevada. Look up the number. The guy we pulled out of the river was one of their agents. His name is Kyle Kimble.” He relayed Kimble’s identification number along with additional details to his astounded officer who struggled to keep up with the unraveling onslaught of new information. He ended with: “Tell them that we think his death might have something to do with the double murder from yesterday. Tell them everything we know, got it?”

“Yes,” Jefferson answered with noticeable shakiness in his voice. After a brief pause, he asked, “How do you think the FBI is mixed up in all of this?”