Wounded Animals (Whistleblower Series Book 1) (17 page)

“Do you realize how expensive a nationwide manhunt is?” Shelton said.

“I have not been in your country, you fools,” Kareem said.

“We should have killed you the night you first found little Candle here,” Shelton said. “That was an oversight on our part, but I think we course-corrected since then.”

“I will speak to Wyatt Green and no one else,” Kareem said. “This is a business dealing, and I have no interest in conversing with his inferiors.”

Business dealing?

“The time for playing nice is over, Haddadi,” Shelton said. “You forced our hand, and now we’re on plan B. Before you die, just know that all of this could have been avoided if you had done what we wanted.”

“We do thank you for coming to Candle’s house, though,” Darren said. “Logistically, you saved us a lot of work. We can tie off your death and get Candle situated in one neat, little package.”

Kareem’s eyes were still closed. His face changed not even a little when Darren had talked about killing him.

I considered the layout. I was in front of the couch, three feet from Kareem. Shelton and Darren were ten feet from me, in front of the door. A coffee table between us. I wouldn’t have time to rush them before they could shoot. I had to get them away from that door. “Guys, please, maybe we can—”

Darren pulled the trigger, and the sound was like a cannon blast. Kareem’s chest exploded in an arc of red. A mist of blood fell across the coffee table, onto a stack of books. Ruined the cover of
Your Baby’s First Year for Dummies
.

Kareem slumped in the chair, gasping for breath. Still alive, but bleeding a geyser from the hole in his chest.

I fell to my knees.

Darren checked the barrel of the gun, then waved it at me.

“Get up,” Shelton said. “It’s convenient that we got your DNA in his house, but you’re still going to have to shoot him. They’re going to test your body for evidence, and it’s important that you pull the trigger. Sounds like semantics, I know, but it’s the little details that sell the story.”

The room spun, and my eyelids weighed a hundred pounds. My body wanted to shut down, to refuse the chaos in front of my eyes. Kareem was still alive, but losing a lot of blood onto my chair.

Darren walked to me, wiped his gun with a rag, then placed it in my hand. He lifted me from the ground, then walked me back over to where he had been standing. I went with him, in shock.

“This good?” he said to Shelton.

Shelton eyed the distance and nodded. “Make it a clean shot, though. Don’t go blowing a hole in his head and messing up his teeth or anything like that. We don’t want to make it too hard on the forensic team.”

I looked at the gun in my hand and felt myself lifting it toward Darren.

Darren placed his hands on top of my arm and repositioned it so it faced Kareem. “Now, Candle, no point in being a hero. This will all be over soon, so let’s not make it harder than it needs to be.”

I wavered in my spot, pointing a pistol at Kareem Haddadi. I was going to shoot him, and then Shelton was going to arrest me for murder. I’d never see my wife again. This was it; the last few moments of my life.

A knock at the door. “Candle? You in there? Was that a gunshot I heard?”

Despite the door muffling the sound, I could tell the voice belonged to Rodrick. Darren and Shelton both turned to look at the door, and I reacted. Lifted the gun. Shot Darren in the back. Heard the sound like an explosion as the force of the recoil moved me back a few inches.

He yelped. Spun around, a hole in his stomach.

I don’t know who was more surprised: Shelton or me. He watched Darren stumble backward, bump into the wall, then sink to the floor, Shelton seemingly unaware that he had a gun in his own hand.

Shoot him
, said a little voice in my head.

I pivoted the gun and pulled the trigger. I felt my arm vibrate. I saw Shelton thrown back against my front door, a hole in his head. He slid down the doorframe as blood started to pour from the hole.

His eyes were crossed as if he’d tried to look at the bullet just before it entered his forehead. That’s the kind of image that stays with you for a lifetime. Darren and Shelton were against my front door, trails of their blood marking their passages.

Kareem gasped, and it pulled me back into real life. Shelton was dead, and Darren was writhing next to him, gurgling and choking. I couldn’t imagine the horror he felt, knowing that his life was leaving him in burgundy on my living room floor.

Also, I didn’t care what Darren felt. I wanted him to die in terror. Then I couldn’t believe I’d thought that.

“Rodrick, it’s Tucker,” I shouted. “I’m okay. They’re all dead now, so I’m safe.”

“Who is dead? What the hell is going on in there? I’m calling the cops.”

I stepped back and dropped the pistol. Then I turned to Kareem, who was trying to sit up.

“Don’t move,” I said as I knelt by his side and took his hand. “You’re going to be okay. I’ll call an ambulance and they’ll fix it.”

He coughed, and a dribble of blood ran from his mouth to his chin. “Do not bother. I will be dead soon.”

He spoke in wheezes, barely able to breathe. The bullet had probably punctured his lung. I knew he was dead too, but I couldn’t believe how calm he was about his situation.

“You mentioned my dad before. What does he have to do with all this?” I said, squeezing Kareem’s hand to keep him awake.

“It does not matter now.”

“Please, tell me.”

“A long time ago, your father and I worked together. We were friends before that, and that is how I met you.”

I had zero recollection of any of this. The man dying in my living room reading chair was friends with my father? Must have been after he left my mother and we left Texas, or I would have remembered.

“With your father’s passing after his stroke…”

A switch flipped in my head. That explained those text messages and voicemails from Aunt Judy.

My dad was dead. Heath Candle, dead. Twenty years had passed since I’d seen him, and now, his death was the least interesting thing that had happened all week.

“His inheritance would fall to you. At least that is what he told me he would do, several years ago. Leave it to you.”

Maybe Wyatt was after Dad’s money.

“Is all of this over some stupid blackmail?”

Kareem laughed, a sick gurgling sound. “No, it has nothing to do with that.”

Nothing to do with the money? I didn’t understand.

“If you see him,” Kareem said, “tell him that I have failed.”

See who? What was he babbling about?

Through the mist of all this new information, I reminded myself that Grace was the only thing that mattered. “Kareem, where is my wife?”

His eyes were beginning to glaze over. “I am sorry, young Candle, I do not know.”

He closed his eyes.

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

Darren, Shelton, Kareem… they were all dead. I had no idea where my wife was. I had shot and killed two men, seen others die before my eyes. Kareem hadn’t done anything to save his own life. He’d sat in the chair, quiet, eyes closed, and let it happen. Had he known there was nothing he could do to stop them?

I opened the front door of my house and felt the cold late November air rush over my body. I wanted it to freeze me, to slow my brain, to take away all of these feelings. But it wouldn’t do that. I could still think and reason and feel and do all of the other human things I detested at that moment.

I stepped outside as a light snow began to fall from charcoal-colored clouds. Life was empty; there was no purpose to anything. All of these people murdered over money. My money, apparently.

With both my mom and dad gone, now that meant I was alone.

I hadn’t known that Kareem and my father were acquainted. Dad and I hadn’t talked for so long, why would he leave me anything? The man never gave a shit about me before or after he left my mom and disappeared to south Texas.

My wife’s boss Rodrick stood at the edge of my lawn, phone in hand. He was close to hyperventilating. “Jesus, buddy, you’re covered in blood.”

I sat on the front porch and breathed deeply. I checked myself for new wounds, but I’d managed not to catch any stray bullets. I was alive, at least. Not that my life had any value left.

Rodrick was still talking, but I couldn’t hear him.

I looked around the cul de sac, wondered which of the neighbors would come rushing out to see the commotion, or call the police, if Rodrick hadn’t done that already.

I felt a hand on my shoulder. “Candle? Can you hear me?”

His face was etched with panic. Breathing hard, neck muscles strained.

“Oh, hey, Rodrick,” I said, dazed. “When did you get here?”

“You need to start talking to me. What happened here? Why are you covered in blood? Were those gunshots in your house a minute ago?”

“I don’t know if you’d believe me if I told you.”

“What am I going to find if I walk in there?”

I sighed, a little bit of my sanity returning. I could appreciate that Rodrick was freaking out, and my lack of answers wasn’t helping. “It’s probably better if you don’t go in there. Some people, they kidnapped Grace, to force me to kill someone else. All the shit hit the fan just now, and they’re all dead inside my house.”

“All? How many people did you kill?”

I opened my mouth to speak, then paused. Struck momentarily by the craziness of what I was about to say. “Two. But there are three people in there. One of them, I didn’t kill. He was a good man, or I
think
he was a good man. I’m not sure. In a way, he’s the reason for this whole thing.”

“I called the police,” Rodrick said. “If it’s over, then where’s Grace?”

I shrugged, resigned to the reality that she was probably dead. How many times had I lost hope, regained it, then had it stolen away from me again over the last few days? I’d never even found anything that could be considered a clue to lead me to her.

Then my eyes fell on the plastic-bag-wrapped newspaper in Alan’s front yard, and I had a vision of the Polaroid Shelton had shown me. Grace, with a newspaper next to her sleeping body.

Newspaper. Alan.

I drew in a breath as if for the first time. I wanted to scream, to cry, to beat my chest.

I jumped to my feet, then wobbled a little. “Rodrick, wait here for the police. I’ll be right back.”

I went inside and picked up the gun I’d used to kill Shelton. I started out the door, then another idea struck and I went upstairs to the bedroom and opened the nightstand. I picked up the stun gun Kareem had slipped into my pocket the night I’d met him.

With my two implements of destruction in hand, I tried not to look at the bodies as I left my house and crossed the yard. I glanced at Rodrick, who was standing under a tree, clutching his phone to his chest.

He was pointing at the gun in my hand and saying something, but I couldn’t hear him. I felt terrible for the guy, the confusion and disorder he must have been feeling.

But it was almost over. I knocked on Alan’s door.

In a minute, he came to the door. Opened it, and I pressed the stun gun into his chest before he had a chance to even open his mouth. He convulsed and fell to the floor, his bathrobe fluttering around him. I stepped over his limp body.

Alan’s house was a split-level with an entryway, then immediate stairs up to the kitchen and dining room, or stairs down to the living room. I knelt to look in the living room. The lights were off.

I looked up the stairs but couldn’t see anything.

“Hey there, Candle,” I heard Wyatt’s voice from upstairs. “I’m up here.”

I climbed the stairs, gun out. At the dinner table sat Wyatt, a shotgun across his lap. He was wearing a fedora, with a trench coat wrapped around his ample frame. He looked like a chubby private eye.

“Don’t be too hard on your poor neighbor there. We got his parents gagged and hog-tied in a warehouse in Cleveland. His dad was a hell of a fighter, nearly broke the jaw of one of our guys and dislocated the shoulder of another one. What I’m getting at is, this ain’t his fault. You have no idea how hard it was to orchestrate all of this.”

My teeth gritted so hard I could barely open my mouth. “Where is Grace?”

Wyatt sighed, then coughed. “I had hoped for this to all go down one way, not the way it did, know what I mean? Kareem was supposed to die, you were supposed to go to jail for killing him, and everyone would live happily ever after.”

“Where…is…my…wife?”

“But then you had to get all Indiana Jones on me, interfering with the plan every chance you got. I’ve learned a thing or two about managing people from this experience, I’ll tell you what. For example—”

“Darren is dead.”

Wyatt stroked the barrel of the shotgun. “I figured as much. It’s a shame because the kid had so much potential. Real eager to please, know what I mean? I had a feeling you were going to find a way to mess up things with my boy. Thought I’d best stay out of it and wait over here.”

He coughed for a few seconds until he took out a handkerchief and unleashed a torrent of mucus into it.

“Feeling okay?” I said with a sneer.

“Damn altitude gets me every time. I hate Colorado.”

He raised the shotgun, and I pointed the pistol at him.

“Now, Candle, m’boy, this here is a twelve-gauge. I’ll put thirty holes in you compared to one little pinprick you might put in me. Why don’t you have yourself a good think about that.”

“The one hole I put in Shelton’s forehead seemed to be good enough.”

He frowned. “I wish you hadn’t done that. Shelton was a good man. Well, if I can’t have it the way I want it, then I guess I’ll have to settle for the way I can get it. With Kareem Haddadi gone, I can still find a way to make it look like murder, but it just won’t have the same poetic justice I was going for.”

“Tell me where she is, or you die.”

“You don’t understand the score, now do you? If you’re alive, missing, in jail, it doesn’t matter. When Haddadi took it upon himself to reach out to you, we had to escalate things, but it would have turned out the same way. When your dad passed, we changed the plan.”