Blood Trade: A Sean Coleman Thriller (18 page)

He gnawed on a string of homemade deer jerky. It was nearly frozen from the long,
cold night he had endured outside Lumbergh’s house. As he walked, his narrow, hawk-like
eyes carefully scrutinized a pair of tire tracks carved into the snow along the lightly
used road that spanned the base of his hill.

He often referred to it as
his hill
because he was the only person who lived on it—a
steep slope heavily covered with pine and aspen that kept his cabin concealed from
view from the road. However, he believed in his heart that the hill, as everything,
belonged to nature.

The small, rustic home sat a few hundred yards above where he stood, wedged in a
rocky crevice along a small clearing.

He slowed his pace once he noticed that the tracks came to a halt just below an unmarked
path he’d often use to scale the hill up to his cabin. At that point, the vehicle
had performed a sharp U-turn, doubling back down the road.

A lost traveler perhaps?
It was possible. The tires looked like they belonged to
a compact car; most of the locals drove four-wheel drive vehicles in the winter.
Once a set of footprints revealed themselves in the snow, however, Oldhorse knew
whoever had come there had done so for a purpose. The driver, who looked to be a
man, had
exited the vehicle and made his way on up toward the cabin before turning
around and coming back.

Oldhorse shoved the jerky back into his pack and pulled out a large hunting knife
from a sheath at his side. He gripped it tightly in his weathered hand and doubled
back down the road a ways before veering onto the adjacent slope of the hill. He
disappeared behind large rocks and trees, jogging his way up an embankment with purposeful
footing that sometimes brought snow up past his knees.

Though the footprints that began at the road provided clear-cut evidence that the
visitor had already come and gone, Oldhorse wasn’t taking any chances—not with a
twisted man seeking vengeance on the loose. He climbed up above where his cabin rested,
nestling his body in between the thick trunk of a snow-covered tree and a rock formation
that jetted out of the ground at a largely vertical angle. He had a view of the backside
of his cabin from there. Nothing looked out of place.

He cautiously made his way down to its rear, keeping his body low and sometimes slithering
down snow mounds like a reptile sliding down sand. His disciplined eyes never strayed
from the cabin’s long back window. He looked for movement inside and saw none.

When he reached the window, he carefully peered through a gap between the pair of
olive-green curtains Joan had bought for him as a gift a month earlier.

“They’ll make your cabin homier,” she had told him with a grin.

He skimmed the interior through the glass as best he could. Nothing seemed out of
place. He quickly tapped the window with his hand, ducking down afterwards and placing
an ear to the wooden wall of the cabin to listen for movement. There was none.

He slid along the side of home and then peered around the corner to the front. There,
he found the footprints that led all the way up to his front step.

The porch had largely been spared from the snowfall, thanks to
the overhang of the
roof where a thin row of icicles clenched onto a crude drainpipe. Still, icy footprints
could be seen along the worn wooden planks, frozen flat from the moisture under the
visitor’s shoes that had turned solid from the overnight winds.

Oldhorse scanned the pattern they left along the wood. His heart skipped a beat when
he noticed the heel-half of a print sticking out from under his front door. The visitor
had entered his home.

Perhaps there was an innocent explanation. Maybe it was one of the local townsfolk
looking for a custom woodcarving as a gift for someone. Oldhorse occasionally sold
such creations to the general store in Winston for resale. Maybe the visitor knocked,
and when no one answered, they poked their head inside to make sure Oldhorse was
all right. After all, he never locked his door. He saw no need to, thus whoever came
in wasn’t exactly breaking and entering.

Everyone in town who knew Oldhorse, however, understood how territorial he was. The
thought of one of them entering his home uninvited seemed unlikely. So when he twisted
the knob and pressed his elbow against the door, he let it glide all the way open
before entering, knife in hand.

His controlled breathing was the only sound heard inside the small building, that
and the faint whistle of a gust of wind that pressed against the outside of the cabin
for the briefest of moments. There was a very subtle scent lingering in the air,
possibly cologne. It seemed slightly familiar, though he couldn’t quite place where
he had inhaled it before.

Initially, nothing looked out of place. Nothing appeared missing or jostled. Any
wet footprints left by the man who had entered had already dried up. However, Oldhorse
could tell by some matting along the long rug that covered much of the inside floor
that it had been stood upon.

His steady gaze glided along the furnishings of the cabin, scrutinizing the sleeping
area, the stone fireplace, and the cooking area. Everything looked just as he had
left it—everything except a
large, thick hunting bow that clung to a short peg sticking
out from a wall in the far corner of the building.

It was hanging at a slightly different angle than how he had left it. Most people
wouldn’t have noticed such a discrepancy, but Oldhorse had a keen, almost eerie eye
for detail. It was possible that during the night, a strong gust of wind had struck
the outside of the cabin with such strength that the bow was shaken a bit and its
position along the wall was altered. Yet, a sixth sense at the back of Oldhorse’s
mind was warning him that Mother Nature wasn’t to blame for the variance.

He moved in close. Tiny, scraggly paint shavings—the color of his bow—littered the
wooden floor beneath it. He dropped to a knee and closely examined the bottom of
the bow. Something had been crudely inscribed on it, probably with a standard pocketknife.

EL VERDADERO HEROE?

Oldhorse glanced around the room again. His hand clasped the lower limb of the bow
to turn it and see if there was anything more written. What he noticed instead was
that the weapon didn’t feel right. It felt heavier than it normally did.

As it occurred to him that this bow he now tugged was the same one he had used to
drive an aluminum arrow right between Alvar Montoya’s lungs, a high-pitched, digital
noise sounding like a wristwatch alarm emitted from behind it.

Oldhorse’s eyes widened when he saw a tiny red light bulb begin to flash quickly
from behind the weapon. Two short, thin metal pipes were now visible as well.

The knife fell from his hand.

He spun and darted in the opposite direction. He didn’t have a half-second to spare
and knew it wasn’t enough to make it to the door in time. With a snarl, he dove through
the air, crashing through the thin glass of the window at the rear of the cabin.
A deafening explosion tore through the heart of the building.

Shrapnel ripped its way through his clothes and skin before he crashed to the ground
outside, hitting his head against a large rock
hidden in the snow. Chards of splintered
wood and shattered glass fell across his outstretched body. A dust-like residue rained
down on him.

With trembling arms he crawled aimlessly along the frozen earth, instinctively putting
some space between himself and the cabin. He felt faint and disoriented as blood
oozed from a gash across his skull. His legs were soaked with blood as well, streaming
out from the spread-open flesh beneath his shredded clothes. A torturous ringing
pounded his skull, letting him hear nothing else.

Then the pain set in. His legs felt like they were on fire from the hot shrapnel
embedded in them. The worst sensation came from the back of his right thigh. He twisted
his body to gauge the damage and found remnants of a metal tube protruding from it.
It was a piece of the pipe bomb that had gone off in his cabin.

Before another thought was allowed to cross his mind, he felt his arms collapse out
from under him. He fell flat to his chest. With his head throbbing and vision blurring,
he knew he was about to lose consciousness.

He struggled to stay awake but quickly found his head buried in the cold snow. Peculiar
thoughts danced randomly through his mind as he drifted away. He thought it was a
shame that the curtains Joan had bought him were now likely ruined. He pondered if
Jefferson would now need to take his place outside Lumbergh’s cabin that night. He
also thought of the familiar scent of cologne he’d smelled inside his cabin.

The answer came to him where he’d smelled it before.

Chapter 13

“Y
ou told him where you were staying?” Lumbergh shouted into his office phone, slamming
his elbow down across his desk and shaking his head in aggravation.

Jefferson poked his head around the corner, his inquisitive eyes silently inquiring
if the phone conversation was pertinent to Lautaro Montoya. Lumbergh waved him off
before reaching into his desk for his prescription bottle. He removed the lid and
emptied out a couple of capsules onto his desk.

“Gary,” Diana said on the other line, her voice shaking. “I was worried about you.
You sent us away without explaining what was going on.”

“Honey, the fewer people that know where you are right now, the better. Do you understand?”

“No!” she shrilled. “I
don’t
understand. Tell me what’s going on! What has you so
scared? Are you in danger? Are
we
in danger?”

He could hear her getting choked up, fighting back tears. He pursed his lips and
closed his eyes, forcing himself for a moment to empathize with the position he had
put her in.

“Just tell me what’s going on,” she whispered.

His voice softened. “Listen, everything’s going to be fine. I promise you. Just a
couple more days of this and things will be back to normal. Trust me.”

He hoped his words sounded more reassuring to her than they did to him. Besides not
wanting his wife to worry, he feared if word got out that Alvar Montoya’s brother
was in Colorado, the chances of
capturing him would be greatly diminished. If the
county sheriff or feds got involved, and a media circus caravanned back into Winston,
Lautaro Montoya might get scared off—but only for a while.

He knew Montoya would never let it go and the threat of him seeking retribution would
forever be hanging over the head of the chief.

It was time to end things—not later but now. Only when the Montoya family tree was
uprooted and fed into a wood chipper would life return to normal.

“What were you telling me about Sean?” Lumbergh asked, eager to change the topic.
“He’s not returning your calls?”

Diana reluctantly let the prior discussion simmer and told her husband of the conversation
she had had with her brother the night before. She explained that Sean had promised
to call her right back after he heard a knock at his door, but never did. The rest
of the night and even in the morning she was greeted with nothing but busy signals
when she called his number.

“You think a friend might have come over and they got drunk?” he asked after sliding
the capsules into his mouth and gulping them down with a swig of coffee. “He could
be sleeping off a stupor.”

Dead silence lingered on the other end, and he could feel his wife’s disapproving
glare through the receiver.

“He doesn’t do that anymore, Gary,” she finally said. “And who would have come over?
Sean’s never had
any
drinking buddies.”

Lumbergh smirked, fighting back the urge to suggest that Sean Coleman hadn’t
any
kind of buddies, let alone
drinking
buddies. The expression on his face, however,
suddenly turned serious. He felt his gut drop to the floor. His pulse accelerated
as some bile forced its way down his throat.

It hadn’t occurred to him until that very moment that Sean could be a target of Lautaro
Montoya. No one outside of Winston should have known that the two were related by
marriage. Sean’s name was never mentioned in the papers or on television in the weeks
following
the Montoya shooting. His last name differed from his uncle’s, so an outsider
shouldn’t have been able to make a connection to Montoya’s victim either.

All along, Lumbergh had viewed Sean as a potential liability to the situation—someone
who would find a way to inadvertently screw up the capture of Lautaro Montoya if
he was made privy to what was going on.

Had the determined Mexican somehow figured it out?
he had to wonder.
Had he followed
Sean home from the police station the other day? Did he learn the truth by striking
up a conversation with someone in town?

The phone receiver shook in his hand. His knuckles turned white.

“I’ll check on him, okay honey?” he said, hoping the tremble in his voice wasn’t
noticeable to her.

She told him that there was something else they needed to talk about—something not
related to Sean or where she and her mother were staying. She tried to elaborate,
but he was frantic to wrap up the conversation. He told his wife he loved her, said
they’d talk more later, and slammed down the phone.

“Jefferson!” a panicked Lumbergh yelled from his office. He launched to his feet
and yanked his jacket off the coatrack in the corner of the room. His good arm went
into its sleeve in no time.

He yelled Jefferson’s name a second time.

His officer finally appeared in the hallway, breathing hard with half of his shirt
dangling out from his waistline. “I was in the bathroom. What is it?”

“Grab the shotgun!”

Chapter 14

T
he side of Lumbergh’s face smacked up against the police cruiser’s passenger seat
when his officer took a hard, sharp turn. The speeding vehicle nearly spun out of
control on the slick road, but Jefferson’s quick wheel work kept them from sliding
into a ditch on the shoulder.