Blood of Cain (Sean O'Brien (Mystery/Thrillers)) (37 page)

She crossed the street and walked back toward the truck. A low-rider Chevy Malibu turned the corner onto Dumaine. Courtney could see two men in the car, dark features. The driver’s head was shaved, tats up his neck. The passenger wore his hair in a purple Mohawk, sleeves cut from his black T-shirt, thick silver chain around his neck. Rap music pulsated from the car. The passenger stuck his head out the open window and shouted, “Lookin’ fine, Mama. You want some scratch? Crystal. Best in the city.”

Courtney ignored the man.

“Talkin’ to you, bitch!”

She walked straight ahead, music from an approaching ice cream truck,
Turkey in the Straw,
crossing with the rap beat. Two teenage boys on skateboards coasted by Courtney. They skated around a man standing on the corner, watching the traffic. Watching the people. He wore dark glasses, ear-bud in one ear, and a baseball cap backwards on his round head.

Courtney was within fifty feet of her Toyota truck. She walked faster, the ice cream truck coming down Dumaine. And then she spotted them. Two men in a van. The van was parked on the side of the street, a parked car in front of it and one behind it. Courtney could see the driver start the engine.

The teens on the skateboards turned around and were heading back in her direction. As they got closer, she smiled at them and said, “You guys look hot. You want some ice cream?”

One teen, silver ring through a nostril, inflamed acne on his cheeks and chin said, “Sure. Sounds good.”

The other teen, a taller boy with dirty blond dreadlocks, grinned. “You buyin’?”

“Yes, I am.” She handed them a ten-dollar bill. “Go back to the corner, there’s a blue van parked between the white car and the black car. Stop the ice cream truck by the parked van and buy your ice cream.”

“No problem,” said the dreadlocked boy.

Each boy used his left foot and leg to build speed on his skateboard, kicking off the pavement, rocketing back toward the van.

Courtney watched them a moment. She could see movement in the van, the men watching her. The moment the teenagers flagged down the ice cream truck, near the front of the van, Courtney bolted and ran for the Toyota. She fumbled with the keys, unlocking the door and sliding in behind the steering wheel. She started the motor, her heart racing. She glanced in the side-view mirror pulling away from the curb.

Her stomach turned. One man had jumped from the van, pointing a pistol at the teens and the ice cream truck driver. Courtney could see that the gunman was shouting, gesturing with the pistol. She zoomed away from the curb, accelerating down Dumaine, passing the bar where the old bluesman strummed his guitar and had a stare on his face that seemed to look a thousand yards away.

The setting sun was coating the tree tops in a blood red profile when I left my mother’s home. I pulled to a stop at the end of her long driveway, windows in the Jeep down, and simply stared at the hand-drawn puffin on her mailbox. At that moment, the puffin lit by an enchanted light from a dying sun, the air now cooler, I felt more alive than I had in a long time. The quirky little bird on the box was like a long lost renaissance masterpiece treasure that I’d found. Even in this village of the weird, the Celtic McMansions, doublewides, warehouses, cow pasture lawns, new cars and trucks parked near abandon old cars, I felt like I’d arrived in the Promised Land.

I’d spent the last four hours trying to make up for forty-three years. Four hours of getting to know a mother—my mother, someone I never knew existed. I heard about my family on her side and my father’s side, where they were raised, how they’d met, and how much they’d loved each other. My thoughts moved in a whirlwind of what was, what is, and what might have been.

If the course to your future is shaped by your past, and you discover your past is made from a lie, what does that say about the present, and how will that affect your future?

I thought hard about that. I tried to put it in some kind of perspective, to hold this moment in time up to the light, hoping for clarity, hoping for a better insight into who I was—who I’d become as a man. I thought about genetics. I reflected on the loving upbringing I had from my adoptive parents, but on the outside looking in, from a scientific viewpoint—my life could have been a psychological experiment. My identity and persona under the microscope, a petri dish specimen in the venerable controversy of nature verse nurture.

And then there was my new-found brother, Dillon. Did genetics, a brutal rape of our mother, play a role in him becoming a killer—someone who’d rape and kill a member of his own family? His sister. My sister. Our sister. Was he conceived in evil? Or is the seed of evil planted in all of us, lying dormant in some people under the loam of good, in others sprouting deep roots, luring and hanging in temptation from the tree of life? Can good be short-circuited in anyone’s fuse box by the rising of a black tide under the influence of a dark moon?

My mother raped by a priest inside a church, his offspring spawned to reproduce the cycle. Uncle Dillon. No wonder Courtney was so damn confused, so angry.

What I knew now was my biological father was dead, murdered. My mother is alive, but apparently ill. Courtney Burke was my niece. Dillon Flanagan was my brother. And the daughter who Andrea Logan conceived was still out there somewhere—anonymous. Maybe that was the nugget of hope found in the mix of pebbles and mud at the bottom of a gold pan.

There were two ways to show to the media, and ultimately the voters, that Courtney wasn’t Andrea’s daughter—my daughter. The first was to find Courtney, do the DNA testing. The second was to prove she wasn’t a serial killer, but that would mean finding the person who was the killer. The image of an army of news reporters, satellite trucks, helicopters closing in on my mother’s trailer, in her condition, caused my head to throb above my left eye. I wondered if Detective Grant had made any progress. I picked up one of my disposable mobile phones and started to call him.

Then I spotted the pickup truck.

Same white truck that had moved slowly by me when I was about to drive up my mother’s driveway. Same wide off-road mud tires. The truck was parked under cottonwood and oak trees across the street from my mother’s mailbox. The sun set in the horizon behind the truck, framing a silhouette of a man looking at me through binoculars.

I started to turn right, head for the highway and the first decent motel I could find. But then the cross-roads of time—of forty-three years and the last four hours, added up to that single moment for me to turn left rather than right. The clarity I sought, the meaning I was searching for, immediately started down a brand new path for me. The first destination was that pickup truck and whoever I found behind the wheel.

I headed for the truck. Drove across the scraggly lawn or pasture, kicking up dust in the orange sunlight, scattering cow shit and grass, going straight for the driver’s side door. I reached for my Glock stopping beside his door. The truck window was down. He turned his head toward me. Narrow face red from the sun. Thin lips. His nose had been broken and reset, leaving a white scar and slight hump on the bridge. No expression. No surprise. Nothing but a cold stare, smoky gray eyes, pupils like pewter dots. His dirty blond hair was pulled back in a ponytail.

I could smell burning weed. I held the Glock in my lap and said, “Good evening.”

No response.

“You must be the neighborhood watch. You watched me arrive at the house across the street, and you are watching me leave. Why the special interest?”

No response.

“I see. You’re a good listener. Not much of a talker. Well, listen to this, pal. That lady in the trailer is my mother.”

His eyes opened a notch, nostrils flaring. I had his attention. “Yes, my mother. Which means Dillon Flanagan is my brother.”

The carotid artery on the left side of his neck throbbed. He touched the tip of his nose with his index finger and said, “Take your game elsewhere. In one minute I can have a dozen men here.”

“Good. They can carry your body away, because in two seconds I can turn what’s left of your brain into applesauce.” I saw his right hand move. “Don’t be stupid. Right now we’re simply communicating. You pull a gun on me and it turns to war, turns to one body bag--yours.”

He stared at me, dry swallowed, his jawline like a rock. “Tell Dillon that his younger brother, Sean, sends his regards. I’m sending something else: a warning. Tell him Courtney Burke is off limits. She’s to be left alone, unharmed. If he does something to her, tell him there is nowhere on earth that he can hide. I will find him.”

The man in the truck half grinned. He propped his elbow on the inside of the door. “Mister, I don’t know who the fuck you are or who you think you are, but you ought to go back to fuckin’ Florida. Dillon Flanagan will tear you a new asshole. You got no idea who you’re messing with, okay? He’s a prophet. The man can only be found when he wants to be found. You being at his mother’s house won’t set well with him. You won’t have to find him, he’ll find you, and he knows how to do it through others. The man can walk through trees.”

“Give him my message.”

I put the Jeep in gear and drove back across the grass to the street, turned left, and headed toward the highway and a hotel. A shower, food, and some aspirin couldn’t happen fast enough. I dialed Detective Dan Grant’s mobile, wondering if he’d answer an incoming number he didn’t recognize. He did answer.

“Dan, it’s Sean. I found Courtney Burke’s grandmother. I know Courtney’s story, and it’s a horrific one. I know who she’s hunting for and why.”

“Where the hell are you?”

“I’m in the Carolinas. Lonnie Ebert was stabbed to death with an ice pick.”

“Tell me something I don’t know, Sean.”

“How about the name of the man who probably did it because he used an ice pick when he killed his brother-in-law after raping and strangling his wife … the killer’s own sister.”

“Who might that be?”

“Courtney’s uncle … my brother.”

“Oh shit.”

“Well said.”

“We haven’t been able to match that partial print on the ice pick. It was the only one that wasn’t Courtney Burke’s print. So you are related to Courtney, but you’re not her father …”

“I’m her uncle.”

There was a few seconds of silence. I could hear him breathing through the receiver, a dog barking in the background. He cleared his throat and said, “Sean … man … I’m not sure how to tell you this anyway but just tell it straight. They found a body of a girl. Outside of New Orleans. It looks a hell of a lot like Courtney. They’ll have to use dental records if they can find any teeth. Someone just about shot her head off. News media are all over it. The New Orleans PD will be processing the DNA fast. Whatever the results, it’ll have an impact on who becomes the next president of the United States.”

I checked into the first motel I found off an Interstate exit near Augusta. All rooms were ground level, most overlooking the parking lot in the front or the highway out back. The room smelled of bleach, cigarette smoke, and cheap perfume. The burgundy carpet was worn, a framed print of the Augusta National Golf Course hanging unevenly on the wall.

I turned on the television and found a cable news channel. The images were of police cruisers at a crime scene, blue lights flashing, paramedics, and emergency personnel converging on a wetland dotted with swamps and cypress trees.

The video cut to a twenty-something blonde reporter standing next to an airboat. She looked into the camera and said, “Police are still out here searching for the murder weapon in this grisly killing of the young woman. Investigators say the body had no identification near it, no purse or any personal effects. The body was discovered by a guide who operates a narrated boat tour of the Barataria Swamp. He said he saw what he first thought was trash near a cypress tree, but upon closer examination he found the young woman’s partially clothed body. Police don’t know if she had been raped. As to the rampant speculation that this could be the body of Courtney Burke, spotted in New Orleans just days ago … no one knows until DNA testing is complete. The victim, shot more than a dozen times in the head, was believed to have been about the same age and height as Burke. Detectives say the ends of her fingers were hacked off. Senator Logan was quoted as saying his prayers go out for the victim’s family, whomever they may be. His democratic challenger, Governor Les Connors, had no comment pending the completion of the police investigation. Reporting from Jefferson Parrish, this is Lisa Fisher, News Channel Four.”

I shut off the TV and left the stale room to get some fresh air. I had to run. To sweat. Had to clear my mind. Excess adrenaline floated like an oil slick over my heart. I needed to pound the earth with my feet, to sweat, to focus only on the potential of clear vision at the horizon and run to the edge of the world. I sprinted across the hotel parking lot, down a street, across a field and followed a path that led to a slow-moving river. I ran hard along the riverbank.

I ran by two teenage boys who were skipping stones off the surface. Bolted around an old black man fishing with a cane pole. He sat on a milk crate, threading a fat, wriggling worm onto a hook. I jogged deeper into the woods, causing a flock of wild turkeys to take flight, the beat of their wings like thunder rising from the ground.

The temperature dropped and a light rain began falling. I ran through the rain, the drops getting larger and hitting my face. Within a minute I had arrived at an old cemetery, many of the headstones partially covered in moss. Some of the grave-markers chipped and broken, a wrought iron fence worn-out, stooping, the gate sagging from age and rust. I stopped running and stood at the perimeter of the cemetery to catch my breath. I don’t know why, but I opened the unlocked gate, the hinges moaning, and I stepped inside. I walked around the graves, trying to read the inscriptions. I stood there, rain pouring, thinking about my mother, thinking about her love for art, for people—for the earth and the birds and creatures that lived among us.