Blood Trade: A Sean Coleman Thriller (22 page)

Aggression exploded beneath Lumbergh’s skin. He clenched his teeth and lunged forward,
using his good hand to grab Martinez around his throat and squeeze it mercilessly.
“Where’s Sean?” he screamed as Martinez’s eyes bulged from their sockets and his
mouth gaped open. “No more games!”

Lumbergh quickly felt Redick’s arms wrapped around him, trying to pull him off of
Martinez.

Lumbergh wouldn’t let go.

“Chief!” Redick yelled.

The deputy standing behind Martinez grabbed onto Lumbergh’s wrist with both of his
hands and pried his clenched fingers from Martinez. Lumbergh and Redick stumbled
backward into the desk behind them, with Lumbergh nearly falling to the floor.

Martinez coughed and gagged loudly before erupting into hideous, strained laughter.

Redick escorted Lumbergh out into the hallway and back to his office.

“What in the hell are you doing?” he snarled.

“This guy knows where Sean is!” Lumbergh snapped back. “My brother-in-law may already
be dead and he’s jerking us around!”

“Listen. If Montoya wanted Sean dead, he would have killed him last night and left
his body for you to find. We don’t know what’s going on with Sean, and no one can
blame you for being pissed, but we can’t just beat a confession out of this guy!”

Lumbergh’s chest pumped in and out with deep breaths as he stared down the sheriff.
“Why not?”

The sheriff ’s eyes widened. “What’s happened to you, Gary? When we first met, you
were a disciplined law enforcement professional. As clean as a whistle. You did everything
by the book. Everything! You prided yourself on it, and you were a role model for
all of us.” Redick shook his head, taking a moment to raise his
hand and lift his
hat just long enough to scratch his forehead. “Some killer breaks out of a Mexican
prison, and he’s been threatening you and your family, and today’s the first I hear
about it? If someone like that’s in my county, I need to know about it! Hell, the
feds
probably need to know about it!” He threw his hands in the air. “What were you
going to do, Gary? Have one of your men just shoot this guy on sight and sort out
the legalities later?”

Lumbergh spoke quickly. “You don’t know what this family is capable of, Richard.
Alvar Montoya was as sick a son of a bitch as you could imagine. Killing was the
man’s hobby. You heard what Martinez said just now. We don’t even know what all these
brothers did in Mexico. The body count could be in the dozens!”

“It doesn’t matter. We’re not a lawless country like Mexico. We live in the United
States!” Redick emphasized. “We have a justice system! I don’t need to tell you this
stuff.”

Lumbergh knew the sheriff was correct, and his silence seemed to acknowledge that
fact to Redick. Lumbergh also understood that the sheriff had always been more of
a politician at heart than an instinctive pursuant of justice. His record meant something
to him. If he felt that there was a chance of a case dismissal due to police brutality,
he’d probably go as far as
personally
advising Martinez to lawyer-up.

“Listen,” said Redick. “I’m certain we can get the D.A. to cut this jackass some
type of deal in return for his cooperation. If he’s really just Montoya’s stooge,
it shouldn’t be a problem.”

Lumbergh shot him a wicked glare. “He’s far more than a stooge. He shot one of my
officers! What kind of deal do you think they’re going to want to give him?”

“I know that, but Jefferson’s going to be just fine. The paramedics said the bullet
passed right through. By now, he’s probably propped up in some hospital bed in Lakeland,
flirting with a nurse.”

Lumbergh took exception to the sheriff ’s cavalier attitude toward his officer’s
well-being. Redick had clearly never been shot
at or forced into the kind of life
or death situation that Jefferson had just been through. If he had, he never would
have made such a lame joke. Lumbergh worked to calm himself down.

“Richard,” he began in a more mundane tone, “I’m not convinced Martinez is going
to roll. He worked in this building for months. What we’re dealing with today was
part of a larger plan. There’s clearly some kind of personal stake in this for him.
I’m not sure what it is yet, but the man has clearly pledged his loyalty to Montoya.”

The sheriff offered no visual reaction to what the chief said, but Lumbergh hoped
his silence meant that he was letting the words bounce off the inside of his head.

“What do you want to do then?” Redick finally asked.

“Don’t process him yet. Don’t put him into the system. Give me some more time with
him. Let me figure—”

Before he could continue, both men heard a man’s voice stream out of a black police
radio hooked to Redick’s belt. “Sheriff, this is Chester. Come back?”

Redick pulled the radio to his mouth, its long antenna nearly poking him in the eye
as he did. He turned up the volume and acknowledged his deputy.

“We’ve got a match on Martinez’s shoeprint at the crime scene, but he wasn’t either
of the two people who dragged Coleman out.”

Lumbergh exchanged a confused glance with Redick.

Redick spoke into the radio. “Where did you find it?”

“The tracks on the side of the house that lead into the forest, parallel to the ones
Chief Lumbergh left this morning.”

Lumbergh felt his stomach tighten. He reached for the radio. Redick handed it to
him.

“Chester, this is Chief Lumbergh. Is it possible that one of the two sets of prints
that led in and out of the house also belong to Martinez? At two different times,
wearing two different pairs of shoes?”

“I sure don’t think so, Chief,” the deputy replied. “The size is wrong. The weight
and stride look wrong, too. I think the smaller set
might even belong to a woman.
The larger set is from a man larger and heavier than Martinez.”

“What do you think that means?” Redick asked Lumbergh.

Lumbergh thanked the deputy and handed the radio back to Redick. “It means Martinez
didn’t help take Sean.”

“He could have been a lookout for the other two,” Redick said. “You know, for headlights
coming down the road?”

“No. That wouldn’t make any sense. Martinez wouldn’t have even been able to see the
road from that side of the house. And there wasn’t any interaction between him and
the other two. None.”

“What are you saying, Gary?” asked Redick. “That he had nothing to do with Sean’s
abduction? How can that be?”

Lumbergh didn’t know the answer. His gaze went blank as he tried to piece together
what the new information meant. His eyes finally focused back on Redick. “Even if
he wasn’t in on it, he saw what happened. He had to have. None of the accusations
I’ve been throwing at him since the moment I tossed him into the back of my car has
come as a surprise to him,” he told the sheriff. “He’s been playing up to it. That
crack about Sean being asleep? I never told him that Sean was dragged outside. You
know, as opposed to being forced into the car at gunpoint or something. He knows
what happened in Sean’s house last night. He
saw
what happened.”

Redick opened his mouth to respond, but before he could utter a word, both men’s
attention was suddenly seized by the racket of the front door of the building being
swung open and crashing into the wall behind it.

Lumbergh darted out into the hallway where he saw a breathless Toby Parker stumbling
through the doorway. There were bloodstains smeared along his thick winter coat.
His eyes were riddled with sheer fear and panic, and when they found Lumbergh, he
screamed out.

“Ron Oldhorse is hurt bad, Chief! He’s bleeding. He’s out in my mom’s car! Hurry!”

His words prompted a finally quieted Alex Martinez to erupt
into hysterical laughter
in the next room. The sound of his deranged glee flooded throughout the entire building
as he stomped his feet on the floor.

“This is perfect!” he cried out. “The
real
hero has arrived!”

Chapter 18

W
hen a blur of light streamed in between Sean’s awakening, narrowly open eyelids,
he gasped and quickly spun to his back. Feeling he was still under attack, he instinctively
threw a wild punch into the air above him. He connected with nothing.

The abrupt movement was followed by a wave of pain that tore through his skull, and
a sense in his stomach that he might need to vomit. He held his forearm in front
of his eyes, dimming the penetrating glare from the overhead light.

His throat was dry, as if he hadn’t had a thing to drink in a week. He let out a
heaving cough and turned to his side, realizing for the first time that he was no
longer in his living room.

It wasn’t hardwood that was sprawled out beneath him, but concrete, gray in color
and cold to the touch. In fact, it was so cold and the air around him was so damp
that he thought for a moment he was outside among the winter elements.

He wasn’t. Four imposing metal walls surrounded him in a room that was probably twelve-by-twelve
feet in size. A tall ceiling stared down. Its two rows of fluorescent lights began
to seem less interrogatory and undefined once Sean’s eyes had time to adjust. When
clarity prevailed, a staggered collection of fire sprinkler heads and piping that
hung from the ceiling came into view. Mounted along the upper area of the back wall
was a long metal box that housed four fans. None was moving. A large metal door stood
at the front of the room.

Within moments, he realized that he was sitting in an old walk-in freezer. It wasn’t
all that different than one he used to move stock in and out of when he worked at
a restaurant in Winston for a short time as a teenager. This one, however, was stripped
bare other than a thin mattress from a cot that had been tossed on the floor beside
him, a large rubber bucket in the corner, and a rectangular, topless cardboard box
that sat near the door. The word “peaches” and a brand name were written on the side.

There was no shelving inside. It appeared to have been taken out based on some floor
discoloration and long, even scratches along the concrete that led underneath the
door.

He could hear no operating sound from the fans at all. The brisk temperature inside
the room, however, suggested that they had been running fairly recently. Whatever
his captors had in store for him, it wasn’t to freeze him to death. Still, he could
see his breath.

He climbed to his knees and then to his feet, taking a moment to let his groggy body
find some balance and stability. He hadn’t a clue what had been injected into his
body, but whatever it was had worked fast and kept him out for some time. There was
a moment when he remembered gaining consciousness earlier, just for a second or two.
He was sure he had been crammed in the trunk of a vehicle.

There was a small window embedded in the upper half of the freezer door. It was circular
and resembled a porthole on a submarine. It was no more than a foot in diameter.
The glass was thick but clear. Sean couldn’t see through it, however, because something
was placed over it on the other side—something of dark material. Perhaps a coat.

He reached for the long bar handle of the door, tried to push it out, but found,
unsurprisingly, that it was locked. He took a couple of steps back, then lunged forward,
slamming the sole of his boot squarely into the handle. The hit was solid and loud,
but generated no better results. He repeated the move over and over again,
sometimes
edging his foot up higher and sometimes lower, looking for a weak point with any
amount of give. He found none.

“Fuck!” he grumbled when his leg began to ache.

His gaze crept down to the cardboard box beside him. Sitting inside it were a half-dozen
bottled waters, a couple of peaches, a bag of store-bought cookies, and a few slices
of pizza that appeared to be leftovers.

“Room service,” he muttered. He peered over his shoulder at the bucket sitting in
the corner.

“And the bathroom.”

His regulated his breathing as he carefully assessed his predicament. A dozen thoughts
drained from his head like water through a colander. He thought about Jessica, knowing
that she was the one who had brought him to the floor with a taser. She was involved
in what had happened to Andrew Carson—either directly or indirectly. That was crystal
clear. Beyond that, he understood little else. As hard as it was to believe, there
was a sinister side to the quiet, attractive woman he had watched for weeks back
at the plasma bank. She lived in a world of secrets.

Sean was more than a physical prisoner. He was a prisoner to the stinging uncertainty
that clouded his fate. He recognized that the natural inclination of most people
would be to feel fear in such a situation, but all he felt was anger. He was angry
that he let himself be taken from his home. He was angry that his captors had the
gall to toy with him so dangerously.

“Jessica!” he shouted. He savagely slammed his fist against the door. “Get over here!
I know you and your asshole boyfriend are out there!” The truth was that Sean didn’t
know that, but as he’d once learned from an episode of
The Fall Guy
, it was best,
even in weakness, to exude awareness and a sense that you’re holding some cards.
“Jessica!”

He pressed the side of his head up against the small window that
still hosted a trace
of frost. He listened carefully for movement while angling his eyes to try and see
past the edge of whatever material was covering the window from the other side. He
came up empty on both ends.

He paced the room with his hands on his hips, controlling his breathing and calming
himself down. He eyed the pipes that lined the ceiling and thought about trying to
dislodge one of them to use as a possible weapon. He couldn’t quite reach them, however,
and they were too narrow and pressed too tightly to the ceiling for him to jump up
and hang from one until his weight brought it down.