Blood Lines

50

›› Intensive Care Unit

›› Las Palmas Medical Center

›› El Paso, Texas

›› 0704 Hours (Central Time Zone)

For a moment, staring into his daddy’s partially opened eyes above the oxygen mask he wore, Shel didn’t know what to say.

Tyrel didn’t look happy to see him there. Then again, remembering how the bruises and scabs on his daddy’s face had gotten there, Shel figured his daddy had every right not to be feeling kindly toward him.

“Where am I?” his daddy croaked.

“El Paso,” Shel said. “Las Palmas.”

Tyrel frowned at that. “Why am I in the hospital?”

“You had a heart attack, Daddy.” Shel’s voice nearly broke when he said that.

“Don’t remember no heart attack. Seems like that’s something a person oughta remember. As long as he woke back up.” Tyrel looked at the machines. “Well… am I gonna live?”

Shel wasn’t really surprised by the matter-of-fact tone in his daddy’s voice, but it still sounded strange at that moment and in that place.

“Yes, sir.”

“That might not be the best thing.”

“It ain’t like you to give up.”

“Didn’t say I was giving up, now did I?” Tyrel’s voice was sharp and cold. “Just said it mighta been better, is all. Or do you want to try to tell me that me and you in this place right now is what you wanted?”

His daddy’s anger turned Shel more angry himself, and that squeezed some of the sympathy out of him. Tyrel didn’t look at him, and Shel was grateful for that. He didn’t know what would show on his face.

“Reckon not,” Shel said.

“How’d you find me?” Tyrel asked.

“The police found you. They tried to book you under the identification you were carrying, but they couldn’t.”

“They could tell that identification was fake?” Tyrel grinned wryly. “I paid good money for that. I probably wouldn’t have made it through the border checkpoint either.”

“Running was stupid.”

“You calling me stupid, Shelton?”

Even though his daddy was lying in the hospital bed, a chill of deathly fear raced through Shel. Even when they’d fought in the barn, he’d never said anything disrespectful.

“No, sir.”

“You’d best not be.”

Gathering some of his defiance back, Shel asked, “What would you call it?”

Tyrel shook his head slowly. The mask bobbed across his face. “All I had left. Wasn’t anything else I coulda done at that point. Running was it.”

“Didn’t help anything.”

“Everything that coulda been helped was forty years ago.”

Shel drew in a quiet breath and folded his arms.

“How’s that boy?” his daddy asked.

Puzzled, Shel looked at his daddy.

“The boy that was choking,” Tyrel said irritably.

Shel couldn’t believe his daddy. The man was lying in bed after a heart attack, had killed three men in his escape, and was possibly facing a military execution, and yet he wanted to know about a boy he’d probably never see again in his life.

“He’s good, Daddy,” Shel said. “Him and his mama were there when the ambulance got there and took you away. The police interviewed them because you’d been seen talking to them before you went down.”

“At least there’s that. Boy that young, he ought to do him some more living.”

Impatience stung Shel. “What did you think you were doing by leaving?”

“For a smart man who’s been in the Marines and taken some of them college classes they offer, you sure act like thinking’s a new thing for you.”

Heat flamed Shel’s face.

“I figured leavin’ would be self-explanatory.”

“You were going to leave? Without telling me or Don good-bye?”

“I’ve told Don good-bye lots of times,” Tyrel said. “Me and you, we said good-bye in the barn the other night.”

That hurt Shel a lot more than he expected it to.

The sound of the hospital equipment filled the room for a moment. Outside, Shel heard the low buzz of conversations.

“Did you kill Dennis Hinton?” Shel asked.

Tyrel turned toward Shel and gazed straight into his eyes. For a moment Shel hoped that his daddy would say no and that everything had been some incredible mistake.

Then, as calmly as if he were ordering breakfast, Tyrel said, “Yes, sir. I reckon I did.”

›› Atwater Apartment Building

›› Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

›› 0819 Hours

Maggie Foley stood outside Apartment 616 and rang the doorbell.

Beside her, Remy said, “I didn’t hear anything.”

Maggie hadn’t either. She rapped her knuckles against the door and waited. Despite the nap she’d caught on the airplane during the jump from Fort Davis to Philadelphia, she felt bone-tired. The last two days had been incredibly hectic.

Rather than break in on Richard McGovern before eight o’clock in the morning, they’d killed an hour at a diner down the street. At present, they still didn’t have the leverage they needed to put pressure on McGovern. All he was guilty of lately was having once been a friend of Victor Gant.

There were two peepholes in the door. One was at normal eye level, but the second one halved the distance to the floor.

“Try knocking louder,” Remy suggested. He wore street clothes with a jacket to cover the pistol on his hip.

“I don’t want to knock much louder,” Maggie said. “People in the other apartments could still be trying to sleep.”

Growing up in her father’s house, she’d never had to live on top of other people the way the residents in the apartment building had. She couldn’t imagine what that was like. Down the hall, she heard the sounds of a television and a baby crying. The odor of frying eggs and coffee filled the hallway.

Remy leaned forward and knocked more loudly.

Maggie felt slightly irritated at him, but she knew he was just doing what he did because he cared about Shel. All of them did.

“I got a 12-gauge shotgun aimed at the center of this door that says you’re gonna step off now,” a man’s voice said. “Otherwise five-o’s gonna be scraping pieces of you off that other hallway wall.”

“We’re with the police,” Maggie said.

“‘With the police’ ain’t the same as being the police,” the man said.

“Is this Richard McGovern?”

“Don’t know nobody by that name.”

“That’s fine. But when I walk away from this door, I’m going to call the Army payroll offices and stop that monthly check that’s been coming to this address.”

“That’s my girl,” Remy whispered. “I like that.”

“You can’t do that,” the man said.

“If Richard McGovern doesn’t live at this address, I can,” Maggie said.

“He lives here,” the man grumbled.

“Then I want to talk to him.”

“He ain’t here.”

“Then I’m going to suspend that check until I can verify he lives here.”

The man cursed. “Guess you got me up on the wrong side of the bed this morning. Lemme see some ID.”

Maggie opened her identification and held it in front of the lower peephole.

“Says NCIS. Richard McGovern was in the Army. You can’t go cutting off his check.”

“Open up, McGovern,” Remy said. “We’ve come a long way and we’re going to talk to you.”

“I ain’t said I was McGovern.”

“Unless you’re a midget or a second grader with a deep voice, you’re McGovern.” Remy tapped the bottom peephole. “Now open the door. Otherwise we’re going to get a caseworker out here to review your life with a microscope to make a new decision about your benefits.”

“Man, that ain’t right. I done give up my legs in the service to my country, and you come here and get all up in my grill-for reasons I do not know.”

“Let us in,” Maggie said. “We’re here to talk about Victor Gant.”

McGovern was quiet for a moment. “Now that there’s a bad man. Got a lot of bad juju all knotted up in that man’s name.”

Remy pounded on the door. “Open the door, McGovern.”

Down the hall a child cried louder.

Maggie felt bad about that.

“Dude,” McGovern said, “chill. People live here.”

The locks slid back. Maggie counted five of them. She stood in the doorway and waited.

Richard McGovern, now sixty-three years old, was scrawny, and his ebony skin looked gray. Dressed in a sweater and sweatpants that hung on his too-thin legs, he sat in a wheelchair and looked up at them through John Lennon glasses that made his eyes look too big. His hair touched his shoulders, and a scraggly beard adorned his cheeks. An unfiltered cigarette hung from his leathery lips.

A cutdown double-barrel shotgun lay across his lap. He started to lift it.

Maggie had her Beretta out from under her jacket and pointed at the man in a heartbeat.

At the same time, Remy leaned in and grabbed the shotgun. McGovern refused to let go.

“You’re going to release the weapon,” Remy said, “or I’m going to break your fingers when I take it away from you. Your call.”

Cursing, McGovern let go of the shotgun. “I want that back. It ain’t safe living here. I got a right to defend myself. I gave my legs to this country.”

“Let’s go inside,” Maggie said as she put the Beretta away.

“Lady, this is my house. You can’t just barge into my house. I got rights.”

Maggie took a deep breath, then looked at Remy. The apartment reeked of marijuana. “Do you detect the presence of a controlled substance?”

A smile almost flickered to life on Remy’s lips before he caught himself. “I do.”

“Hey, it ain’t me,” McGovern protested. “It’s those college kids living in the apartment below me. They smoke reefer, smoke rises, and I’m trapped up here with it.”

“Getting by on a contact high?” Remy asked. He kept moving forward and forced McGovern to keep backing.

“I’m not happy about it,” McGovern said. “I’ve been talking to the super about it.”

“Anybody else in the apartment with you?” Remy glanced into the small kitchen to one side.

Maggie flanked Remy, staying behind far enough to give herself a clear field of fire if she needed it. According to the files Estrella had gotten about the man, he lived alone.

“No, man,” McGovern said. “It’s just me.”

In the living room, McGovern spun the wheelchair around and rolled into an empty space in front of the television. The blinds were pulled and the room was dark. Some kind of cheap horror movie was playing on the television set. A knife-wielding character chased a young couple through a forest. They were both screaming, but the set had been muted.

Maggie stood in the living room and kept watch over McGovern while Remy quickly went through the rest of the apartment.

“Hey,” McGovern squawked. “Hey! You can’t just go barging through my house!” He started to roll forward.

Maggie stuck her left foot out and braced it against the wheelchair wheel. McGovern came to a stop rather than push himself around in a circle.

“Let’s just stay here,” Maggie suggested.

A few minutes later, Remy reappeared carrying a Baggie filled with grass and some pills. “Does this belong to you?” he asked McGovern.

McGovern frowned and looked increasingly nervous. “I haven’t ever seen that before. You planted that on me.”

“Funny thing about Baggies,” Remy said, holding the bag up for a better look. “They retain fingerprints pretty easily. The dust from the marijuana is going to make any prints on today’s blunt, or anywhere else in the Baggie, easy to find.”

A worried look tightened McGovern’s face.

“Want to know what a judge is going to say when he finds out your fingerprints are on the inside of the bag?” Remy raised a speculative eyebrow. “Unless you have a really good excuse.”

“Look,” McGovern said, “I got an okay thing going here. I know that. I don’t want anything to screw it up.”

“We’re not here to try to screw it up,” Maggie said. “We’re here to get some answers about Victor Gant.”

McGovern took a hit off the cigarette dangling from the corner of his mouth. He took it out and looked at it a moment, then dug out his lighter and expertly relit it.

“Victor isn’t a man whose trust you betray,” McGovern said quietly.

“Do you think you’re going to have to betray that trust?” Maggie asked.

“When you’re talking about Victor Gant, you’re not going to have anything good to say. And no cops-not even NCIS agents-would ever come snooping around to give Victor some kind of good citizenship award.”

Maggie knew that was true. She sat in a sagging easy chair across from McGovern. “Do you remember Dennis Hinton?” she asked.