The Old Wheel, page 10
part #2 of The Adventures of Holloway Holmes Series
My voice was wet when I finally managed to say, “Are those side cutters in your hand, or are you just happy to see me?”
When he pushed me away, I grunted.
He squatted to pack up his tools, keeping his face turned away, but I didn’t miss the red circles in his cheeks or where my tears still glistened on his skin.
“So, uh, for starters,” I said, “I’m sorry I almost got us killed.”
“I told you to wait,” Holmes said. “I didn’t tell you that there was an anti-personnel mine waiting beneath the window.”
“Right, but somehow you avoided it.”
He shrugged. “Habit.”
“And second, I was not joking about having your babies. You are seriously the most awesomest human on earth.”
“It was a simple trigger mechanism,” he said, and he shouldered the gear bag as he stood. His eyes skated to me and then down to the mine: an ugly steel square secured to the floor. “Anyone with the right knowledge could have done it.”
“Uh huh. No comment about the babies?”
“You know I don’t like that kind of joke.”
“Again, not a joke. And no comment about the phrase ‘most awesomest’?”
He thought about that, head canted, and finally said, “No.”
I couldn’t help it; I smiled. A shaky, washed-out, broken-kneed smile. But a real one.
“If you have no objections, I’ll go first?”
“No objections, Mr. Holmes.”
He watched me again for a moment, like he thought there might have been a joke he missed. Then he started for the door.
After inspecting it, Holmes let us out of the booby-trapped bedroom and into a space that must have been labeled on the floor plan as a family room: a big, high-ceilinged basement room that would have been perfect for a TV and some comfy couches and a pool table. Instead, it had been repurposed as storage space. Steel shelves stood in rows, loaded with cans of Spam and Hormel chili and Vienna sausages and every kind of Campbell’s soup you can imagine. Other shelves held paper towels, bottles of Clorox, toilet paper, stacked green-and-white bars of Fels-Naptha. And other shelves held jugs of water, first aid supplies, unopened packages of batteries.
But the biggest area had been given over to guns and ammunition. Their smell hung in the air: steel and solvent and lubricant. Shotguns. Rifles. Handguns. And boxes and boxes of cartridges. One shelf held what were unmistakably claymores, and I thought of the anti-personnel mine I’d stepped on in the empty bedroom.
Holmes and I moved along each row of shelves, and Holmes’s face was impossible to read. When we’d finished, he motioned for me to stay, and he went to check the remaining doors. Two opened onto similarly empty bedrooms—I could see that much from where I stood—and a third connected with a bathroom. The fourth led into a utility room that was also crammed with prepper storage.
When Holmes came back, he said, “He’s trapped all the egress windows.”
“Jesus.”
Holmes nodded and led me upstairs.
The browns and tans and desert color palette of the basement continued on the main floor. We emerged into a kitchen with manufactured-stone countertops and stainless-steel appliances. I checked the fridge, where our would-be assassin-slash-prepper had stocked protein shakes and cooked chicken breasts. The freezer was empty except for more chicken breasts. A few scratched nonstick pans were soaking in the sink, and the air smelled like processed meat—Slim Jims, I decided. I felt absurdly validated when I spotted the wrappers in the trash.
The open floor plan stretched into a living room, with a fireplace and a sofa and two armchairs in gray upholstery and simple lines. Someone had positioned an office chair with the other furniture as extra seating. The blinds were down in all the windows, which we’d noticed from the outside. The photos on the wall showed the same large family in different locations.
“Him,” I said.
He was one of those white guys with a pink undertone to their skin that no amount of tanning would ever cover up. It was hard to tell in a photo, but I guessed he was close to my and Holmes’s height, maybe a little taller, but carrying a lot more mass. His brown hair was buzzed, and he was clean shaven. Nicely and unmistakably tradmasc, but also unmistakably single, in contrast to the paired-up adults. How about that?
Holmes considered the photo and said, “Because he’s single?”
“Well, yeah. You can tell a single guy lives here.”
“Explain.”
“Uh…I mean, the fridge, the furniture, that shit-show in the basement. The windows. Zero decoration. Take your pick. And none of these photos shows a nuclear family; he’s got pictures, sure, because otherwise people would wonder, but nothing that shows him with a family of his own.”
Holmes seemed to tally all this, and he nodded.
I reached for my phone to take a picture, and then I remembered that I’d thrown it in the back of this guy’s truck. “Garage?”
Holmes took the lead again. The garage looked as new as everything else in the house—no oil stains on the concrete slab, tools neatly hung on pegboards. The first spot was empty, and the second held the black truck, and the third-car was currently being occupied by a boat. I climbed into the bed of the truck, fished out my phone, winced at the scratches it had accumulated during the ride, and got down again.
“He has plates now,” Holmes said.
I unlocked my phone to take a picture, and then I saw the missed calls from Ariana, the missed texts, the string of messages asking me when I was coming, if I was coming, what happened. More missed calls from Dad, too, but those were less life-fucking.
“Shit,” I said under my breath.
“What’s wrong?”
Shaking my head, I tapped out a reply to my rightly furious and probably soon-to-be-ex girlfriend: Sorry, phone died. I totally lost track of time. Can we chill tomorrow?
The message hung there on the screen. No reply.
After a moment, I closed the messaging app and snapped pictures of the license plates that had been conveniently missing when this guy had tried to kill us.
“Jack?”
“I don’t want to talk about it.”
The wind off the lake whistled at the garage door.
When Holmes spoke again, his voice was neutral. “The cab is locked. Would you like me to open it?”
“Let’s finish looking through the house.”
He turned and headed inside without waiting for me.
It was like running a race in slow motion. I caught up to Holmes in the living room, but as soon as I stopped moving, he power-walked his white ass away from me. When I reached the office, where the desk was littered with papers and an old computer made a buzzing noise, he took off again. The hall bathroom. The master bedroom.
I finally cornered him in the master bath, mostly because there were no other doors except the one I was blocking with my body.
Holmes’s face was cool indifference. “Where would you like to search?”
“I didn’t mean it to sound like that.”
“We don’t know how much time we have; we should split up.”
“I forgot I told Ariana I’d do something with her, and she’s pissed at me, and I’m pissed at me, and I didn’t mean to take it out on you.”
He was still for a moment. For the first time, I noticed the freshly crusted blood on his lip, and I realized he’d been biting it at some point between now and when we’d gotten to the house. Maybe when he’d been disarming a landmine, my brain suggested. Maybe he’s freaked out and exhausted and suffering from a serious adrenaline burn too, only you couldn’t be bothered to pay attention to stuff like that; you just assumed he’d be fine.
“H, are you ok?”
“Of course.”
“No, I mean—”
“You forgot your plans with her yesterday as well.”
“Yeah,” I said slowly, trying to parse the voltage of his words. “That’s one reason I’m pissed at myself.”
“You need to correct that. That’s not the behavior of a good boyfriend.”
I ran a hand through my hair; through the window, even with the blinds down, I could see amber lights dotting the lake.
“You need to show her that you are willing to dedicate your time and attention to her if you want this relationship to be successful.”
My vision crossed and doubled. Little amber lights strung like distant beads, and all that dark in between them.
“Yeah,” I finally said. Then I looked at him. “H, are you ok?”
The corner of his mouth trembled. “I should have anticipated, located, and disabled his countermeasures. I took an unacceptable risk, entering the way I did, and I put your life in danger. I miscalculated the nature and extent of the risk in this operation, as well as miscalculating the nature and ability of our opponent.” He bit his lip, raising fresh blood, but the next words tumbled out of him anyway. “And—and I need my medicine, but I don’t think you’ll let me.”
I nodded slowly. My medicine, I thought. That’s one term for it. But all I said was, “How much do you want to take?”
“I typically need sixty milligrams.”
I waited.
H cut his eyes away. “In high-pressure situations, I may require more.”
I wanted to close my eyes. I wanted to say no. But saying no didn’t fix anything; Walker as an institution, with its student body, was proof of that. “Why don’t you take two of the thirties, then?”
His gaze came back, roving my face, searching for something. Then he nodded. He produced the bottle like a magic trick, and he held up two of the pills like they were proof of something before dry-swallowing them.
“No more until we talk about it,” I said.
He was silent for five seconds. Then ten. And then he said, “Yes.”
“I’ll search here,” I said. “Why don’t you take the office?”
He nodded and strode toward me, but when I didn’t move out of the doorway, he slowed.
“I don’t expect you to analyze and compute and perfectly assess everything, H. Nobody should expect that of you; it’s not fair, for starters. You kept me safe, and that’s what you promised you’d do. You should be proud of that.”
“I expect it of myself,” he said quietly. “I must do better.”
When I opened my mouth, he gave a terse shake of his head. I slid aside, and a moment later, he was gone.
My search of the bathroom yielded nothing of interest: hair product, deodorant, toothpaste, a toothbrush that seriously needed to be replaced—and that was coming from me. The bedroom didn’t offer much more: your basic straight guy clothes, mostly jeans and t-shirts and hoodies, with gym clothes mixed in, and a pair of khakis and a white button-up for church. On the wall, Jesus was walking on water, and I wondered what that did to boners, and then I wondered if maybe that was the whole point.
Things got more interesting when I found the box under the bed. It was hard plastic, and it was locked. When I carried it into Holmes, who was scanning through the papers in the office, he gave it a derisive look and opened it—no joke—with a paperclip.
Inside, there were a lot—and I mean a lot—of butt plugs.
And again, that’s coming from me.
“Uh,” I said.
“We suspected his proclivities,” Holmes said as he turned back to the paperwork.
“We did? I mean, I guess I thought—well, I guess I figured he had some sort of connection to the blackmail. But I thought it was more like, hired gun determined to stop us, not, um, white boy who’s super into butt stuff.”
Holmes did that amused little breath through his nose again.
“He’s got a shit-load—um, pun, maybe?—of poppers, a fleshlight, condoms. Ugh!”
Holmes glanced over. “A men’s fitness magazine?”
“A Mormon inspirational men’s fitness magazine,” I said, grimacing as I held it up by the front cover. “And the pages are stuck together.”
“Oh.” Which was Holmes speak for holy fuck.
“I know we’re not supposed to kink shame, but who is this weirdo?”
“I’m not sure it’s a kink.” Holmes gestured to the pile of paperwork. “His name is Kazen Bates, he’s twenty-eight years old, he is employed by his family’s construction business and makes a great deal more money than he would being employed by anyone else, which explains the home, the emergency supplies, and in particular, his ability to afford firearms and ammunition.”
“And he’s Mormon.”
“Of a particularly virulent breed.” Holmes picked up a pamphlet—a stack of them had been pushed to the back of the desk, and it looked like more were waiting to be folded. The front said Brethren in Support of the Daughter of Zion, and then, below, something that looked scriptural: Shake thyself from the dust; arise, and sit down, O Jerusalem: loose thyself from the bands of thy neck, O captive daughter of Zion.
“Is that from the Book of Mormon?” I asked.
“Interestingly,” Holmes said, “it’s from both the Hebrew Bible and the Book of Mormon—that is, if you accept the standard Mormon account.”
“Uh huh.” I took the pamphlet and opened it and scanned the inside.
It had the usual Mormon talking points: sex before marriage was a sin, homosexuality was a sin, blowjobs were a sin, pornography was a sin. How that applied to inspirational men’s fitness magazines, I wasn’t sure. There were hints of some lovely vestigial racism—a few choice quotes from Mormon leaders about staying with your own kind, that sort of thing. And, of course, what I’d come to expect, after growing up in the Salt Lake Valley, as the Mormon-men-over-fifty all-consuming preoccupation with Communism, which, outside of Call of Duty, didn’t seem like much of a threat anymore.
Most of the pamphlet, though, was given over to a screed about homosexuality. The evils of homosexuality. The victims of homosexuality—apparently, the young boys seduced into the lifestyle by older “groomers.” It included a few grainy photos of pre-teens who, I guess, were in the process of being lured away by the evils of butt stuff. And it ended with a call to action: Join us to help our brothers and sisters loose the bands of their necks, that the daughter of Zion may rise!
When I looked up, Holmes was displaying his phone. “They’ve got a webpage, a Twitter account, pages on several crowdfunding websites, that kind of thing, and the nickname for members and supporters is the Danites. They describe themselves as a tactical support organization, but reading between the lines of their propaganda, it sounds like they’re more paramilitary—the suggestion, of course, is that they conduct raids on LGBTQ centers and shelters, which is why they need money for all those guns. It’s difficult to tell from a quick search how much money they currently have—”
“It wouldn’t be difficult for me.”
Holmes leveled a look at me. “—but the crowdfunding pages show millions of dollars raised.”
“You’re kidding me.” But as soon as I said it, I knew he wasn’t. The year I’d gone to high school in Salt Lake, when the Mormon kids got pulled for an hour every day to go to their seminary class and learn how to be better Mormons, I’d picked up some of the basic ideas. And for Mormons, sex was at the top—of pretty much everything, actually. It was the best, purest thing. It was the scariest, most dangerous thing. You shouldn’t think about it. It was ok to think about it, but only once you were married. You should never, never, never jack off (oops). And there was scarier stuff too, like it was better to die than be raped. I wondered how that fit into rescuing people from “groomers.” Maybe they mercifully shot them in the head.
“So, we’ve got an ultra-repressed and closeted homo gunning for us while his public persona is, what? Save the whales, only for straight people?”
“Children are groomed by predators, Jack.”
“Ok, yeah, I’m not trying to make light of that. But these guys getting together in Utah Valley so they can share a communal wet dream about their guns and killing fags, that’s not exactly addressing the problem.”
“How would they share a communal wet dream?”
“My point is, what’s the connection to Aston?”
“We haven’t found one.”
“There’s a connection,” I said. “Trust me. They’ve been porking, and he decided to make sure Aston kept his secret by blackmailing him. Now he knows we’re on to him, and he’s trying to stop us.”
“That doesn’t make any sense. If they’d—”
“Say porking. Please. For my sake.”
“—been sexually involved—”
“H!”
“—and his primary goal was to ensure his secret, there wouldn’t be any need to involve Dawson or demand money from Aston or hide his identity.”
“Maybe his plan is complicated. Maybe his plan has layers.”
Holmes’s brow wrinkled slightly. “And how would he know we were on to him? We haven’t made much progress in this investigation, Jack. We certainly had no idea that someone named Kazen Bates was a person of interest.”
“I don’t know. But I’m telling you, that’s what’s going on.”
“It is a mistake to theorize—”
“Oh my God, I know, I know, I know.” But then I gave him a crooked grin. “If I’m right, though, you have to buy me popcorn at the movies for a year.”
“And if I’m right?”
“Who cares? You’re always right.”
“That hardly seems fair.”
“Are we done in here?”
“I haven’t examined his laptop.”
I moved over to the desk and wiggled the wireless mouse. The laptop woke and displayed a lock screen demanding a PIN.
“Any ideas?”
“Of course,” Holmes said. “Move out of my way and keep watch.”
So, I got the super important job of standing at the window, parting the blinds with one finger and watching a dark street, while Holmes click-clacked like a maniac on the keyboard.
