SURVIVORS: a gripping thriller full of suspense (Titan Trilogy Book 2) (8 page)

Then she had looked at him again.

Brendan had hoped to talk to her after the meeting, but she’d slipped away. They’d all seemed eager to scurry back to their regular lives, he thought.

He asked Russell who she was, but Russell said he only knew her first name – Sloane – and that they had never really talked.

So, the AA meeting had been a little bit of a bust. The consensus was that Argon was a decent guy, funny, pretty quiet, genuinely interested in people, with a hint that he’d been proactive about the threats posed by big business and banking. Brendan may have already known that, but it was one thing to have your opinion about someone and another thing to have it reinforced by other people. The night had at least offered that.

The thing was, Brendan realized as he turned down Argon’s driveway and started to slow his pace, it had come at a price.

He could tell even from the outside that Argon’s house had been visited while he was at the meeting.

* * *

For one thing, the cat was sitting in the driveway, near the rear bumper of the rental car.

For another, almost every light in the house was on.

Brendan felt his body tensing up. His gun was inside under the bathroom sink. For all he knew, someone was still in the house right now. They might even have his gun.

Brendan ducked down behind the rental car. He crept alongside of it and then jogged off onto the dark lawn beyond the edge of the driveway. Argon’s property had some nice trees – two large oaks out in front, maples, and sugar bushes. Brendan took some cover and tried to get a view of the inside of the house. He took out his cell phone, ready to dial the police.

No more going it alone for Brendan Healy. He would get the cops here and let them check the place out thoroughly.

He realized that he didn’t have the Mount Pleasant Police number in his phone because he’d used Argon’s landline to call them earlier. And Carrera’s number was written on the notepad on Argon’s kitchen table. He would have to dial 911.

He wanted to hold off on that. Besides, this could be one of the cops from Mount Pleasant at last coming to collect some of Argon’s stuff – whatever was going to be needed at the funeral, pictures, and so on. Brendan might even know them – he was sure there were guys in the Mount Pleasant Department who were still there from his days. It had only been a few years.

But he hadn’t seen a cruiser parked outside. Maybe they’d come in their own car, on their own time – unusual for cops though that might be. He had told Cushing he was staying here, and Cushing had been a prick. Maybe he had sent someone over in plainclothes to rattle Brendan’s chain. There had been a few cars parked on East Drive just beyond the driveway. He’d scanned them for the suspicious dark blue sedan.

Brendan crouched in the dark watching the house, looking at the lit-up kitchen, which he had the best view of. He inputted 911 on his phone and was ready to tap the screen and connect the call.

Then he saw a face in the kitchen window.

Brendan’s thumb stayed hovering just above the screen. It was the young woman he’d seen at the meeting. She was looking down, like she was using the sink. Then she looked up and out the window.

Brendan flinched, but he had good cover, and she probably couldn’t see much from the bright kitchen.

After a moment, she walked away from the windows, out of view.

Brendan glanced down at his phone.

“Dammit,” he whispered.

He slipped the phone back into his pocket. He left the cover of the trees and stepped onto the driveway, where the cat was still sitting. She looked up at him and her tail twitched on the asphalt. As he neared, she hopped up onto all fours and rubbed against his legs.

He still needed to be careful. He had no idea why she was there, and she might not be alone. Brendan glanced down at the cat, who padded along beside him, thinking that they were about to go back inside and get something to eat.

His heart was pounding. He could feel the adrenaline surging. When he got to the side door, he gave the doorknob a soft quarter-turn and found it unlocked. He paused there, his hand on the knob, thinking.

Then he let the doorknob back the other way till the latch settled in the jamb. He backed away from the door. He decided he needed to look around more. Check the other windows.

Brendan went to the back of the house, and tried to get a view of the living room. Unfortunately, the windows were just too high. Standing on his tip-toes, Brendan realized something. At his feet were two basement windows, the kind that just peeked over the ground line. Argon had a full basement. Who knew what he kept stored down there. In the rush of everything, the arrival at Argon’s, and Russell Gide’s interruption, Brendan hadn’t even considered the basement. Where was the entrance? He realized there was one room he’d never ventured into earlier – the office. The way down to the basement might be in there.

He continued around the house. Argon’s bedroom window was on the same plane as the living room windows and too high to see into. By the time Brendan had circled around the entire house he realized that the only vantage point from which to see inside had been where he’d been, alongside the driveway, looking into the kitchen. He found himself back at the side entrance.

He stepped up again, realizing that the cat had made the entire circumnavigation of Argon’s house with him. As he was looking down at the cat, he heard a voice from inside the house.

“Whoever you are out there, I’ve got a gun and I’ve called the police! I suggest you leave the property right now!”

* * *

Brendan froze. She must have seen him circling the house.
Shit.

“Hey,” he called back. For a moment, he was desperately searching for words. His mind drawing a blank. Then, as if a switch was thrown back on, he was articulate. “I’m a friend of Argon’s? Brendan Healy. I was at the meeting tonight. You were too, right?”

Nothing. Silence. He figured she was considering what he’d said. Still, he tried to reassure her some more.

“I’m staying at the house. Argon always keeps the spare key over the side entrance here. I let myself in earlier this afternoon. That’s probably my .38 you’re holding. Please, I’m not going to hurt you or anything.”

“I know
that
, I’m the one with the gun.”

He was about to say something else when she opened the door.

She had his gun – she hadn’t been bluffing.

“Did you call the police?” he asked.

She had such a young face, Brendan felt that maybe she was even younger than he’d first thought – maybe twenty not twenty-five. And there was something odd about her. The way she stood and carried herself, he wondered if she had some kind of condition, like a kind of palsy. One side of her mouth turned down a little. Other than that, it was hard to say. Just, something.

“No. I didn’t.”

His pulse slowed. He smiled at her. “Me neither. I was just about to. Then I saw you in the window there.” He pointed at the kitchen. She still seemed undecided. “Can I come in?”

“Why are you here?”

“The same as what Russell Gide said at the meeting. I’m a friend of Argon’s. I used to work with him; was a cop here in Hawthorne. That’s why I have a gun. May I have it back, please, Sloane?”

She jumped when he said her name. She held the gun at her chest, pointed up, like the way the Charlie’s Angels did. It looked too big for her hand. “This looks like Argon’s gun.”

He nodded. “We have the same kind. He’s the one that got me into those old cowboy kickers. Trust me, it’s mine. What made you look beneath the sink?”

He held out his hand. She gave him the gun with exaggerated care. She regarded him coolly. “Toilet paper.”

He took the gun and popped the chamber out. It was empty. The ammunition was in his bag, still in the car. He saw her looking into the empty chamber. He slapped it home and stuck the gun in the waist band of his pants at the small of his back.

“Still scary, though,” he said.

She just looked back at him. She didn’t smirk, she didn’t smile, she didn’t frown. Her eyes were big and blue and open. Her face was a bit oblong, but she was attractive. Aside from the corner of her mouth, everything else was symmetrical. It was her voice that made her seem so different. She sounded almost like someone who was deaf, but obviously she wasn’t – she’d heard him through the door.

He was still standing on the small porch outside the door.

“I’m going to come in now, okay?”

As if the cat had been waiting for the go-ahead, it darted inside.

The girl immediately chased after it, and Brendan stepped back into Argon’s house, feeling a smile form on his lips. Argon knew some interesting folks.

He thought about the old cop, and where he was now, in the morgue, and the smile faded.

CHAPTER TEN / Sunday, 6:58 PM

Jeremy Staryles, young, muscular, well-dressed, looked over at the body on the slab. Then something caught his eye, distracting him. A fly crawled along the edge of the medical examiner’s desk. Staryles swiped at it and scowled as it flew away.

The medical examiner was oblivious to the fly. He was on the other side of the examination table, squinting through his glasses at the body.

Seamus Argon was in a black bag. His chest was exposed. His body was corrupted with bruises and cuts. Rigor mortis had come and gone; the flesh was now flaccid, the lividity creating a pool of blood at the base of the cadaver. The medical examiner, an Indian-American man, wielded a scalpel in his gloved hand. He could work now, without the stiff muscles or active blood vessels to impede him.

Staryles’ phone buzzed in his pocket. He was wearing his usual suit, a Traveler, tailor-fitted with two buttons and plain-front trousers from
Jos A Bank
. He always wore Traveler suits. He liked their fit, and the name. Staryles figured that was a big part of what he was – a traveler. He was never in the same place for very long. Some people couldn’t live like this: always ready to move at a moment’s notice. It was hell to stay in one place, to do what people called “putting down roots” when they should have been saying “digging a grave.” Like the body on the slab with no more energy flowing through the muscles, no more adenosine triphosphate to keep the skin supple, immobility was livor mortis, stagnation was death.

He pulled the phone out of the inside pocket of his dark blue suit. He liked the suit’s color a lot – it matched his car, a dark blue 1999 Oldsmobile Cutlass. The car came out of Oldsmobile’s Sixth Generation line which was the last one to bear the Cutlass name. Staryles had requested it specifically after rotating back from Iraq. It had been granted to him without hesitation.

He held the phone in front of him and read the small display screen, recognizing the incoming number. “Excuse me,” he said to the medical examiner.

The examiner barely looked up from where he was making a fresh incision.

Staryles stepped away. He pressed the button to answer the call. Staryles didn’t own a phone that connected to the internet. The organization didn’t issue phones, only close-range, two-way communicators. He used the old-fashioned cells for regular calls, buying minutes as necessary, regularly discarding them and getting new ones.

“Staryles,” he said.

The voice on the other end started rapidly conveying information. That was the way it was. Everyone was in such a rush these days; no one had any patience. You kept moving, but you did it with some grace, by God.

“Hold on.”

He walked over to a small desk and found a pen and paper, and began to jot down notes. He didn’t carry his own notepad – those were discoverable, traceable items, too. Even if he got rid of the pieces of paper when he was done with them, impressions could be left on the pages underneath, prints could be lifted, a purchasing source could be traced, video footage observed – forget about it. Today’s world you had to do it and eat it and excrete it. He only used scrap paper. He kept notes only as long as he needed them, and then burnt them.

He wrote down a few notes saying, “Uh-huh. Okay.”

Laramie, Wyoming.

“I know of it,” he said conversationally to the caller. Sometimes, these admin-types who called him were the only people he would speak to for days. You had to get in your socialization where you could. Socializing was important to one’s mental health. There were guys out there in Staryles’ line of work who were these rugged individualists. They ended up spending too much time alone, barely speaking to anybody. They started to lose it. They grew impatient, stir-crazy. You had to mix it up.

“It’s where they tied that gay kid to a fence and beat him to death,” Staryles said. “Sits in a valley between the Snowy Range and the Laramie Range. There’s that abandoned fort there – what the hell – oh, Fort Sanders . . . He used an alias. Got it. Oh that’s cute.”

He glanced over at the medical examiner who was still hunched over the cadaver. If he was listening to Staryles’ conversation, he didn’t show it. Staryles wasn’t concerned whether he was listening or not. Medical examiners were like the pay-as-you-go phones, or the scraps of paper. You used and discarded them as necessary.

“Okay,” said Staryles, “That’s good background. But let’s talk about his current position.”

The caller went on. Staryles already knew where Brendan Healy was, of course. The organization had had taps on various phones since the Heilshorn incident and had been keeping surveillance on a number of people, including Sheriff Taber. There was also the State Detective, a guy named Rudy Colinas. Delaney, Bostrom, and a few others. But this was mainly perfunctory. Staryles was aware that the guy they wanted was the one who had slipped surveillance shortly after the incident had reached its climax up in Albany. And now he’d gone under again – but briefly, apparently riding off with some other guy and going God-knows-where throughout the afternoon before reappearing at Argon’s.

Staryles’ surveillance team had been listening in when Taber called Healy. They knew he was flying into Albany, and Staryles had insisted he should be the one to head to the airport and pick up the guy’s trail. He liked to be the first one to case a subject. Like not having a smartphone and using only scraps of paper, this was another essential: eyes-on.

The caller, the hyperactive not-enough-sunshine analyst, was rattling off more details about the house on East Street. The house belonged to the corpse on the slab, who was getting a little bit of cosmetic surgery, postmortem. After this, no one would ever know how Staryles had intervened. What a mess.

Staryles had already understood what the caller was conveying, but wanted to hear every detail just to double-check.

“Really? Someone there now? Same as the chauffeur?”

He wrote:
Company. Female. 25-30 yrs.
NOT the AA sponsor.

“Uh-huh. That’s good.”

This detective, Healy, he was something. Staryles wasn’t sure if he’d call the guy smart or not. He’d had the foresight to skip town after the incident in Oneida, but Staryles thought that had more to do with the guy’s mental state than anything else. He was afraid. He was also a bit of a screw-up. He made sloppy mistakes. He had some demon pursuing him, and that always led to error. But the guy had some balls, maybe. Or, he had nothing to lose. Sometimes they were one and the same.

It was possible that Healy had made Staryles when he’d followed the detective down from Albany Airport. Healy was definitely paranoid, and so probably hyper-vigilant. Everybody was hyper-something these days.

The admin was still chattering in Staryles’ ear. He made a few more notes, thanked the caller, and left the desk. He neatly folded the paper and slipped it into his pocket with the small cell phone.

He approached the medical examiner, who still had his back turned. For a moment, the whole thing reminded Staryles of something out of
Frankenstein
, the only fiction he had ever read. The mad doctor hunched over his unholy creation.

“How we doing?”

“Almost done,” said the examiner. He sounded displeased.

It was no matter. Staryles reached into the other side of his suit, where his gun was holstered snugly against his ribcage.

“Good,” he said.