Wounded Animals (Whistleblower Series Book 1) (15 page)

CHAPTER NINETEEN

Kareem Haddadi’s house was in south Boulder, in an area of town near the National Center for Atmospheric Research building, perched at the foot of the Flatiron Mountains.

Grace and I used to hike on the trails leading into the foothills all the time before her pregnancy started sapping her energy. Just a couple years ago, we’d spend entire weekends hiking up trails to Bear Peak, Royal Arch, and others between NCAR and Chautauqua Park, then eating and drinking ourselves silly at Southern Sun afterward.

The house was an expansive three-story modern building with a four car garage and what appeared to be a massive greenhouse. Buddhist prayer flags decorated the gate across the front.

I wasn’t sure what I had been expecting, but not a giant mansion in one of the wealthiest parts of town. A guy who lived here should wear sharply tailored suits and expensive shoes, not a Led Zeppelin t-shirt and sneakers, as he had the night I’d met him at the bar. Didn’t make sense, but I supposed I knew almost nothing about the man.

Except that I had a mission to kill him. Thinking about that fact sent me into cold sweats.

“Focus, Candle,” I said to the dashboard. “Remember what’s at stake.”

I parked across the street and sifted through the envelope to see if there was anything else in the packet that might help me once I was inside. Didn’t find much, just the one sheet with this address, a note with the code to the front gate, and a set of keys that looked fresh out of the key maker machine at Home Depot.

My last round of painkillers was starting to wear off and the thump in my chest and back resurfaced. I popped another pill from the three I’d stashed in my pocket. Relief was on its way, T-minus fifteen minutes or so. Maybe I should have let them take me to the hospital, but it didn’t matter much now.

As I left the car and crossed the street, I flashed on the image of the Polaroid picture Shelton had shown me. Would it be easy to fake something like that? Possibly, but I couldn’t shake the nagging feeling that Grace might still be alive. I had to tell myself that all of this insanity wasn’t for nothing, even if it was.

I keyed in the gate code and walked through a garden of carefully sculpted hedges, a light snow covering the tops of them like icing on a cake. Then I slipped the key into the lock as I looked around for any nosy neighbors. Quiet fancy Boulder neighborhood, no one would suspect anything strange. This town had no idea what real crime was like; the worst they ever saw here were low-grade frat boy riots after big football games.

Inside the house, I was struck by a flurry of food-related odors. Most of them, I couldn’t place, but I distinctly smelled lamb and curry. Definitely curry. How long did that scent linger?

I stepped into an open living room connected to a kitchen on the right and a hallway on the left. The walls were a stark white. Small amount of furnishings, as if the person who lived here didn’t need or want much. No art on the walls or trinkets, just a lot of open space.

“Okay, magic man, tell me or show me something. Give me some help.”

But I wasn’t sure what I expected to find. Something that was supposed to lead me to Kareem, and then what? I somehow find a handy crowbar and bash his brains in? Would I really be able to carry out such a gruesome and heinous act as killing another human being who had done nothing to me?

But I had to. I had to do it. Or maybe I could find him, and then we could do something about the situation together.

I walked through the living room, taking note of how plain and boring everything was. Maybe I thought that a man who could turn water into wine would have cauldrons laying about, or a time machine, or something crazy. But the house was the usual assortment of IKEA furniture and electronics that every other house on this street probably had. No television, which was also not unusual for Boulder.

I glanced in the kitchen, didn’t see anything out of the ordinary, then turned down the hallway. Three doors, so I went to the one at the end first. Bathroom. Nothing to see here. The door on the left seemed to be the master bedroom, with a queen-sized bed, dresser, and a recliner chair. A stack of books sat on a nightstand next to the chair, mostly comprised of the kind of low-class thrillers you’d see at an airport bookstore.

“This can’t be it,” I said, flipping through the stack of books. “There has to be more than this. Come on, Kareem, give me something I can use.”

I went back into the hallway and opened the third door, into a room with no furniture, just some pillows arranged on the floor around a small table. A golden Buddha sat atop it, with some candles and a vase full of flowers. Definitely the most ornately decorated room in the house. Prayer room. I couldn’t picture him in here.

Then the front door opened. “Candle, you’re in here, right?”

Darren.

CHAPTER TWENTY

Shelton had warned me that Darren would show up at the house, but I’d still clung to the foolish idea that maybe I could get to Kareem first and explain everything. Maybe the magic man would have a plan to deal with all these people.

No such luck. I would have to share this house with a man who had slit the throat of another man in front of me. In my own house, even.

When I’d first met Darren, he seemed a little conniving, maybe even malicious. Definitely upwardly-mobile, as they used to say about corporate climbers when I was younger. I recalled watching him make that call with the phone he’d taken from the dumpster. But now that I’d seen what he was capable of, Kareem’s warnings about a
bad man
among the trainees seemed like a terrible understatement. Darren was pure evil.

“Where are you?” he called in a sing-song voice. “Are we playing hide and seek?”

“I’m back here.”

He peered around the doorway, purple latex gloves on his hands and a wicked grin on his face. “What the hell is that thing?” he said, pointing at the Buddha statue at my feet.

“It’s a prayer altar. Do you really not recognize Buddha?”

He shrugged. “I don’t get out much, so you’ll excuse me if I don’t recognize some religious icon on sight. But I’m not really interested in Haddadi’s religious leanings, I’m a lot more curious for you to tell me what you’ve found so far.”

“Nothing. He’s not here.”

Fire burned in Darren’s eyes. “No shit, asshole, he’s plainly not here. Why don’t we steer away from talking about what’s obvious, and instead you tell me about where he’s gone?”

I looked around the room, trying to think of something to say. One thing I hadn’t noticed in the house before was any kind of personal pictures or family pictures anywhere. There were framed photos of the Great Stupa Buddhist retreat near the little mountain town of Red Feather, but that was about it. “I don’t really… I mean, it’s not like he left a note on the fridge saying where he went.”

Darren hefted the Buddha statue with a grunt, then flung it across the room. It crashed through a window to the outside. “That fucker was heavy. So are you telling me that you checked the fridge door for a note?”

I was a little stunned by the sudden destruction. Cold outside air rushed into the room to balance the room’s heat, along with a whistle of wind through the hole in the glass. I shook my head.

“Then go look,” Darren said, a sneer on his face. “We’re going to be thorough because you’re new at this. Little details are important when you’re looking for someone.”

I left the room as the sounds of crashing, ripping, and tearing happened behind me. In the kitchen, nothing hung on the stainless steel refrigerator. I felt like an idiot for even looking.

But someone had been here, not too long ago. The food scents gave that away. Had it been Kareem? And what would it matter if he had been here, because he wasn’t now?

As I turned back to the hallway, Darren emerged, dragging a floor lamp behind him. “Move,” he said, and I jumped out of the way as he thrust it through the kitchen window.

“This is a really nice house,” he said as he played with a set of knives hanging from a magnetic strip above the sink.

“What good does it do to bust out all the windows?”

He rifled through the drawers in the kitchen, dumping utensils, pasta boxes, spices, and canned goods on the floor. “It makes me feel better, that’s what good it does. Why don’t you go into the living room and cut a hole through those nice Bose speakers he has in there?”

“I’m not going to trash Kareem’s house for no reason,” I said.

He stopped his attempt to break a wooden ladle in half and got right in my face. His breath smelled like hamburger. “You’re going to do whatever the fuck I tell you to do. I think you know something that you’re not telling me. If I don’t like your attitude here today, Candle, all I have to do is make one little phone call to set a whole chain of events in motion. I would have thought by now that you understood how serious we are about this. Who else are we going to have to kill to get through to you?”

“I understand. But maybe if you told me why we were doing all this. Why Kareem is so important to you, and why I have to be the one who kills him.”

Darren lifted a glass bowl from the counter and smashed it against the wall, sending shards of glass in every direction with a rumbling crash. “That is above my pay grade. I’m just a grunt like you. Wyatt tells me what to do, then I tell you what to do, then we all do what we’re told to do. It’s how this whole thing called a hierarchy works, Mr. Trainer Man. You look like you’re old enough to know better, so your question makes you sound a little ignorant, to be honest.”

“But why would Wyatt want him dead? What has he done that’s so bad he’s got a hit out on Kareem?”

He took a break from destroying the kitchen to catch his breath. “That’s Wyatt’s business. If he wanted you to know, I’m sure he would have told you himself. He’s on a plane headed for Denver International right now, so maybe you can ask him yourself.”

“I’m going to do what you people ask. I will. But I need more information.”

“You’re not going to get it, Candle, so why don’t you stop acting like a whiny little bitch and make yourself useful?”

I felt a buzzing in my pocket. My hand slipped into it automatically and came out holding my phone. Someone was calling me, and the number on the caller ID said it was Grace.

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

My eyes flicked between the ringing phone and Darren. His bushy eyebrows climbed an inch up his forehead and his mouth dropped open as he craned his neck to read the name on the caller ID.

My wife was calling me. It was really her.

Darren swiped at my hands. I leaned back to keep the phone out of his reach.

He growled. His closed fist sailed through the air toward my jaw, but I was quick enough to move my head to the side. The pain meds and my lingering aches had slowed me, but Darren was as sluggish and awkward as kidnapper/sales executive Glenning.

I let him continue the motion of his punch all the way through, then I threw a shoulder into his side once he was off-balance. He toppled out of the kitchen and into the living room, collapsing on a black leather couch.

“Don’t you answer that fucking phone,” he shouted as he scrambled to his feet.

I looked down. It was still ringing.

As I lifted my other hand to accept the call, something smacked me on the side of the head. I caught flashes of brown twinkling before my eyes. My vision blurred for a split second, then I realized it was flakes of potpourri as the glass bowl rattled at my feet.

I blinked, and before I knew it, Darren was leaping toward me, hands out in front, screaming like a banshee. But he was still too slow and impulsive. I squatted and threw my hands up in time to meet his torso, then vaulted him over me into the kitchen. His momentum carried him into the oven, and I heard the ping sound his head made when it connected with the glass and stainless steel.

My phone had stopped ringing.

Behind me, Darren was moaning, gripping his head in his hands. He tried to get to his feet, but he slipped and landed on his butt.

I needed to call Grace back, but not here.

“You listen to me, you overrated piece of shit,” he said from the floor. “You toss me your cell phone right now and I’ll take it easy on you. If you don’t, you’re going to suffer. I can promise you that.”

No time to think. I dashed toward the front door, leaping over a coffee table, digging a hand into my pocket to remove the car keys.

I didn’t bother to shut the door behind me, and I scaled the gate in two quick movements. A kitchen knife sailed past my head. A second one bounced off my shoulder, cutting into my jacket.

I held out the car keys and slipped on a patch of ice on the road. The keys went flying, landing in the snow. I’d seen them cast a wide arc and fall on the other side of the street, somewhere along a line of parked cars.

A third kitchen knife sailed past me. I changed direction, jumping another low fence into someone’s yard. Heard Darren bellowing behind me.

I ran through the yard, hurdling over a lawn chair dusted with snow. When I came around to the other side of the house, I hopped the fence and went back into the road. Darren was still in that back yard.

Think, Candle, think. Is Grace out? Is she safe?

Darren disappeared behind the back of a house.

I crossed the road and hunkered down between a row of cars parked along the street and a steep hill. Raised up above a parked car, but didn’t see Darren. I poked around in the mounds of collected roadside snow but didn’t find the car keys anywhere.

I took a few steps up the steep hill, struggling to get my feet under me in the snow. A tamped-down part a few feet to my left indicated hiking trail. I jumped over to it so I could get a bit higher up the hill and look for Darren. Didn’t see him.

I kept low and moved along the hiking trail, staying sideways and moving back toward the company car. How could I keep him distracted while looking for those car keys?