Coldwater Revenge by James Ross (e novels to read online TXT) 📗

hill beyond it. When he tried to stand, his hamburger-ed knees refused to bend and punished him for trying. Stumbling onto the dirt road and goose-stepping up the hill to his brother’s truck, he held his clawed hands to his chest like a battered Frankenstein. He wondered later why he had not anticipated what came next.

From inside Joe’s truck came a high-pitched bleat of horror. The door flew open and the sound from inside rose in scale and volume. “Tom! Tom! Tom! What happened?”

“Ignored your advice,” he croaked, stumbling against the truck’s chest-high fender. Susan’s fingertips hovered near his chest as though uncertain where to press that wouldn’t hurt.

“Who did this to you?”

“Frankie Heller.” The words came out in gasps. “A dog the size of a Shetland pony, someone I didn’t get a look at and a few acres of shrapnel and broken glass.”

Susan pried his hands from his chest. Her face drained of color when she saw what was left of his palms. “They’re raw!” Her voice skidded octaves unable to find footing. “We have to get you to a hospital.”

“Need to think, first.” Susan put her hand beneath his arms and helped him into the truck. “Where’s your car?”

She started the truck and gestured to where its headlights washed over a late model BMW nose down in a ditch. “I turned off my lights so no one would see me and I ended up down there.”

Tom rested his head on the back of the seat and tried not to feel all of the places that hurt. He wheezed out a question, “What made you come here?” But her whispered answer made it no farther than the windshield, and he was too weary to ask twice.

They rode in silence along the familiar route that led to the tree lined drive and the house above the lake. She drove the truck across the terraced lawn and down to the boathouse, then lifted Tom’s arm over her shoulder and helped him climb the wooden steps to the loft. There, she eased him onto the bed and began the sanguinary task of removing his shredded clothes. He could have used a bit in his teeth for that part. Poised over impacted wounds with a pint of alcohol and an already bloody cloth, she warned, “This is going to hurt.” But he was past the point of caring.

As MadDog used to say, “If you can’t listen, you’ve got to feel.” usually with a belt in his hand.

When Susan finished cleaning and bandaging, she draped Tom in a thin, nautical-themed sheet and then, almost as an afterthought, closed the distance between their faces and slowly joined them at the lips. Hands and knees immobilized in gauze, he had to call on ancient memory to fill in the parts that might otherwise have come next.

A long minute later she drew back, tucking her legs beneath her. “I don’t know why I did that.”

“I do.”

She leaned her head to the side and waited.

“You wanted to. So you suppressed all the reasons why you shouldn’t.”

“You’ve added wisdom to looks. How seductive.”

He laughed and lifted the contrary evidence of his bandaged hands. “What we want trumps what we know better every time.”

She leaned over Tom’s naked torso and pressed her lips to the top of his head. He kept his eyes straight ahead.

“Did you find what you were looking for out there?” she murmured.

“Pieces.”

“Worth nearly getting killed for?”

Someone thought they were worth killing for.

“What did you find out?” He raised his shoulders. She reached for the bottle of alcohol. “Don’t make me use this again.”

Keep it vague and see where this mummy kissing goes? Or answer the question and stick a fork in the hope of it going anywhere? After a moment of indecision, he forced a lungful of breath past cracked lips and balanced a bandaged hand at her waist. “I think I know who killed Billy. And maybe why.”

Susan stiffened and pulled away.

“I think your friend Suliman and Dr. Hassad are the same person. That he used Billy to smuggle stuff from his Canadian lab into the U. S. and used NeuroGene to distribute it.”

“Frankie Heller told you this?”

“Dave Willow’s partner told Joe and me about the distribution part. Hassad confirmed it. I saw him this morning in his office in Montreal. He’s the same guy who was sitting across from you at Billy’s funeral-–the one you know as Suliman. I showed Billy’s photo to him and he claimed not to know the man in it. But Willow identified the same photo as the man who broke into the NeuroGene mail room and his former partner Mike Sharp identified him as the guy who delivered Hassad’s packages.”

“What packages?”

“Sharp and Hassad say it was research samples: vials, petri dishes and the like. When I asked Willow to guess what might be in them, he said that with a bio-research company as cover, he didn’t even want to think of the possibilities. That part I believe.”

“And what part don’t you?”

“Sharp says the package service was an arrangement between him and Hassad and that Willow knew nothing about it. Hassad says he dealt with them both.”

Susan shook her head. “I don’t know, Tom. I can’t imagine Dave Willow involved with anything not completely above board, or anyone trusting Billy with anything important. He’d screw it up. Or rip them off.”

“Willow’s no angel, Susan. At least not in business. And he wasn’t Mr. Niceguy when I ran into him in your driveway a few hours ago.”

She looked away. “I didn’t invite him in.”

A gust of cool air billowed the curtains at the edge of the sliding glass door. It was a moment before Tom regained his train of thought. “Billy was just the mailman, Susan. My guess is that he got started doing occasional dope deliveries for Frankie Heller. When Hassad/Suliman became involved with NeuroGene, he probably looked up his old GI Joe pal and recruited him. Billy was already in the illegal package business. It probably wasn’t too difficult