Both Ends Burning (Whistleblower Trilogy Book 3) Read online

  Contents

  Copyright

  Story Note

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  EPILOGUE

  Note to Readers

  Dedication

  Afterword

  About the Author

  BOTH ENDS BURNING

  By

  Jim Heskett

  All material copyright 2015 by Jim Heskett. No part of this work may be reproduced without permission.

  Published by Royal Arch Books

  Cover design by Kit Foster

  Www.RoyalArchBooks.com

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  Wait!

  If you haven’t read books 1 and 2 of the Whistleblower Trilogy, start here with Wounded Animals. These three books tell one big story, so be sure to read them in order.

  CHAPTER ONE

  The water burst from the shower head, at first icy cold, then blindingly hot. I had a feeling it was going to be one of those showers; never at the right temperature, always one notch too far in either direction. I’d have to make the best of it, because I was in a strange shower in a strange fabricated apartment in the back of some strange building in Brownsville, Texas. It was an office or some place of business.

  I remembered only pieces of how I got here and the events that led to it.

  I knew there had been death.

  An inch away from Mexico. An inch away from freedom for Omar Qureshi, except he’d been granted no freedom. He’d died because of my failings, and now his death and his brother Kareem’s deaths were both on my hands.

  I lathered while the too-hot water steamed the tiny plastic enclosure and blurred my eyes. Cream walls tainted beige with soap scum and rust. Little cutouts in the plastic walls formed cubbies for soap and shampoo bottles.

  My head throbbed, probably because IntelliCraft’s thug Glenning had kicked me in the temple. Twice. I could move my jaw, so it wasn’t broken, but the dull thudding revolution of pain cycled through each time I blinked.

  The birdshot peppering my shoulder ached as the water ran over it and a diluted stream of blood cascaded down my arm. I’d have to get some bandages. At least the cut on my lower back had healed. How long had it been since Glenning and Thomason had forced me into that car and taken me to the top of Eldorado Canyon? Three weeks? Four?

  I finished my shower as my head was starting to shed the cloud, and memories blinked into existence. Running through the cornfield in South Point, trying to escape the redneck Jed and Glenning and failing. Glenning circling Jed and then killing him. Madly running for the border. Omar floating in the Rio Grande. Snapping Glenning’s neck. My half-sister Susan coming to rescue me and bring me to this strange hidden place.

  And most of all, my dad, a man who was supposed to have died from a stroke, appearing out of a back room. Making me think he’d been dead for two weeks and then materializing from around the corner.

  I slipped out of the shower and left the water running. Dipped into my pants and stole the prepaid cell phone out of a pocket. The first part of Grace’s phone number was still typed into the keypad, since I hadn’t been able to complete the call because of the thug who’d barged into the shack Omar and I were trying to use as shelter.

  I finished typing the number into the sticky plastic keys and she picked up on the second ring.

  “Baby, it’s me.”

  She sighed on the other end of the line. “I’ve been so worried about you. Is everything okay?”

  “Yes and no. I’m safe. I have so much to tell you and I don’t even know where to start. I’m sorry I haven’t checked in for so long.”

  “Did you get him across the border?”

  My lips curled into a frown. “I can’t… maybe I shouldn’t talk about things on the phone. But nothing went as I planned. I can tell you that much.”

  Her breath caught. “If you’re safe, that’s all that matters to me. When are you coming home?”

  “Now. Everything else that’s going on here, I don’t care about it anymore. I just want to see you and be done with it all. I’ll be on the next flight I can possibly get.”

  “I love you.”

  “I love you too. I’ll be home in a few hours.”

  I didn’t want to hang up. I wanted to stay on the phone with her forever, listen to her breathe and talk and tell me I wasn’t worthless. To lie to me that all these failures were somehow not my fault.

  I turned off the shower and dressed quickly. My body felt battered and bruised again, and the ache in my head had centralized where my jaw met my temple. Opening and closing my mouth felt like moving an unhinged joint.

  When I rejoined Dad and Susan in the living room, they hushed their conversation. My father, with his surgically altered face, the man I hadn’t seen in two decades, was still sitting on the coffee table.

  “Are you ready to talk now?” Dad said.

  “No, I’m not. To tell you the truth, I’m not sure if I care about you, or IntelliCraft, or any of this anymore. I feel like I used to be able to trust people, but all of you have ruined that forever. I don’t give a shit about this anymore. I’m tired of failing and everything I do ending in ruin.”

  Dad shook his head. “Not everything is in ruin. I’m sorry about Omar, but you’re still alive. That’s what counts.”

  “I just want to go home and be with my wife, because I’m going to be a dad soon. I can’t put myself in danger like this anymore.”

  He looked me up and down. “Is that my shirt you’re wearing?”

  I nodded. “I lost all my clothes. Since you were dead, I didn’t think you’d mind.”

  “Am I really about to become a grandfather?” he said. “I’ve always wondered what that would feel like.”

  “It’s none of your business, that’s what it’s going to feel like. I’m guessing that with the whole faking-your-death and erasing-your-past business, you’re not going to be popping by anytime soon to babysit.”

  “I understand,” Dad said. “But you should know this: everything I did, I did to keep all of us safe. Kareem was not the pure man you think he was. Neither was his brother. What they wanted to do… it would have ruined many lives. Trusting them almost got you killed, and what do you have to show for it?”

  Given the choice between trusting my dad, and trusting in the things magical mystery man Kareem had told me, the path seemed obvious.

  “I don’t know if I believe you. About anything,” I said. Then I asked Susan, “can you take me to the nearest airport, please?”

  ***

  Susan pulled into the short-term parking at Brownsville/South Padre airport. As I reached out to grab the door handle, she put a hand on my arm.

  “I’m sorry about all this,” she said. “I know you’ve been through a lot. You should never have been involved in the first place.”

  I looked h
er straight in the eye. “What was on the memory card Dad smashed?”

  She pursed her lips. “If you knew the truth, it would only get worse for you.”

  “Fine. What happens next?”

  “Go home and be with your wife. Maybe think about taking her on a long vacation, the kind where you don’t tell anyone where you’re going. Forget about us, and let us deal with it. We’re taking steps here, and it’s best if you stay out of it.”

  “I can do that. I didn’t ask for any of this, and I don’t know why I keep involving myself in it.”

  She patted my arm, and I left her there. Left her and Heath Candle in Brownsville, where I hoped I’d never see or hear from either of them ever again.

  After buying my plane ticket, I had no choice but to sit and wait for the red-eye with no internet to entertain me, since my laptop and my phone were left behind at the house in Three Rivers, where the bodies of Vanessa and Carl were probably still bleeding. Maybe it wouldn’t look so good for my possessions to be found there when the cops eventually came looking for them. Or would they even come?

  When I was hiding out in the shack, Jed had told Glenning that he was a sheriff. If he’d told the truth about that, then my laptop and cell phone being at the scene of two murders could land me in a serious amount of trouble.

  I had an urge to get a rental car and drive back up there, but what if the place was already crawling with cops? A little late for second-guessing now.

  I had two hours to kill before my flight, so I tried to nap. Didn’t work. Instead, I let my brain run wild for a bit, attempting to process everything that had happened. My dad and Kareem had founded IntelliCraft over twenty years ago, and then they’d had a falling out. A war between them, for some reason. Kareem had wanted to do something that my dad had been trying to stop him from doing. Dad had said there were four people who’d founded the company. Who were the other two?

  I reminded myself that I didn’t care about this stuff anymore. I just wanted to go home. But, if that were true, why couldn’t I stop thinking about it? Maybe I should have taken the chance to get answers from my dad while I still could.

  But, then again, how could I trust anything that man told me?

  No. Not my problem. Not my circus, not my monkeys.

  When I was finally able to board the flight, I’d been hovering on the edge of sleep, my eyelids as weighty as garage doors. I went through the boarding process in a half-dream state, showing ID, scanning my ticket, waiting in one line, then another, then finally getting the window seat above the wing of the plane. Picked up the in-flight magazine and flipped a couple pages, started to read something about the best sushi restaurants in Jacksonville.

  I blinked, fell in and out of sleep as the plane started to fill around me. A parade of teenagers in identical soccer uniforms made up about half the passengers. Then a woman with thick glasses sat in the aisle in my row, but the middle seat next to me stayed unoccupied as the rest of the seats went from empty to occupied.

  Would I get a little extra legroom? Hope welled up inside me at the idea of such a small victory. Seemed like something I deserved after everything I’d been through.

  My head felt heavy and my eyes rolled back in my head. I slipped on my seatbelt, then let my eyes close as my head lolled forward, then to the side. Passenger conversations around me blurred into background noise.

  When I woke, someone was sitting down in the middle seat next to me. Damn, just my luck. As he got situated, I peeked, but a baseball cap obscured my view.

  With a groan, he settled into his seat, then turned to me and smiled.

  Thomason, IntelliCraft’s Director of Sales.

  “Hey there, Candle. Long time, no see.”

  CHAPTER TWO

  The man who, along with now-dead Glenning, had kidnapped me and taken me to the top of a mountain in Eldorado Canyon just a few weeks ago, was sitting next to me on the plane. Frank Thomason, IntelliCraft’s Director of Sales.

  My hand shot to my seatbelt buckle, and Thomason grabbed my arm. “Easy there, Candle. The doors to the plane are closed. Neither one of us is leaving, so let’s not do anything stupid.”

  I ripped my arm free and scooted in my seat, away from him. The lady in the aisle seat tossed a glance at us. In the seats in front and behind, passengers were carrying on conversations, oblivious.

  “I could start a scene,” I said in a quiet voice. “Get us both kicked off the plane.”

  “Now, why would you want to do that? They would probably detain you, take your fingerprints, make you speak to a Marshall, and that’s not a good idea. Not after all of the havoc you’ve caused across southern Texas over the last few days. I know about the dead people in Three Rivers. I know you left your cell phone there, and your fingerprints are in that garage where they were keeping that poor El Paso sheriff hostage. Nasty business, that was.”

  I took a deep breath, then let it out as slowly as possible.

  “The body of the one who followed you to Brownsville has been dealt with, and no one has called the cops about Three Rivers,” he said. “Not yet, at least. I could tip them off, or I could have someone go there and retrieve your possessions before we burn that house to the ground. It’s your choice.”

  Damn it. Why hadn’t I gone back for my stuff?

  I needed some time to think it through. But he was waiting for a response, so I tried to change the subject. “No one has been able to answer this for me,” I said. “Maybe you can: why did IntelliCraft lay off everyone in Denver?”

  He waved a hand. “Cost savings. Salaries are a lot cheaper in Dallas. We can get them straight out of college for next-to-nothing.”

  “And the customers suffer for it, but you don’t care, as long as you’re hitting your efficiency numbers.”

  He strapped on his seatbelt. “Cry me a river, son. It’s just business.”

  “How did you get on this flight?” I said. “No one knew where I was.”

  “Oh, please. Child’s play. You used your credit card to pay for this flight. I got a notification, bought a ticket, had the seats switched around. It was pretty easy, actually. And convenient for me, since I happened to already be in Brownsville on another matter.”

  “What matter is that?”

  The flight attendant came through, checking seat belts. From the intercom above, the fuzzy voice of the captain explained how we were first in line for the queue, and would begin taxiing in less than thirty seconds.

  Thomason sighed. “We found the body of Stephen Glenning face down near the Rio Grande last night. His neck snapped. Do you know anything about that?”

  I stared at him, saying nothing. A few rows back, a baby wailed.

  “Glenning was a friend of mine. I personally recruited him to come work for the company, and I’ve spent the last decade mentoring him. Did you know that?”

  “He chased down and murdered Omar right in front of me, then he pointed a gun in my face. I wouldn’t care if he was your little brother. I did what had to be done.”

  His face darkened under the bill of his cap. “I’m sure you don’t care because you’ve proven yourself to be a heartless sociopath on more than one occasion. I’m sure you felt you were justified in killing Glenning. I don’t want to get into a philosophical discussion with you.”

  As the plane started to taxi along the runway, I considered how so many of these IntelliCraft people talked the same way. The lazy, nonchalant way they could ramble about killing people; like how Wyatt Green and Stan Shelton had made a bet about what I would do with Keisha’s body after I’d found her bloodied and bound in the back of my car.

  “Why haven’t you people killed me?” I said. “Glenning could have easily done me in, but he pointed his gun at my shoulder. He was only going to wound me, despite what he said. I’m starting to think it was on purpose.”

  Something in his eyes changed. They grew softer. “Mine is not to reason why, Candle. I do what I’m told.”

  “Just a cog in the wheel, are you?�
��

  “More or less. But, you know, there is one thing we haven’t been able to figure out. You drove the stolen truck to meet that coyote, but you didn’t leave South Point in it. We found it just up the road a ways. I’d guess by those bruises on your temple that someone kicked the crap out of you, so you probably weren’t even capable of driving. So how did you escape?”

  His glare cut through me, but I held firm. “I walked.”

  Thomason chuckled, highlighting the crow’s feet around his eyes. “Sure. Sure you did. You want to hear my theory?”

  I shook my head.

  “I’m going to tell you anyway. I think you made contact with Ms. Susan Palenti, and she came and got you. How did I do? Am I close?”

  I pursed my lips, trying to keep my poker face front and center.

  He smiled, which made his perfectly-coiffed gray hair jiggle. “Ahh, yep, I think I nailed it. You could help us out a lot if you told us where she is. We can’t seem to locate her.”

  “I find that hard to believe.”

  “Well, we may be clever, but we’re not omnipotent. She’s been a tricky one. This Susan woman, the one who you think is your ally… would it change your opinion of her if I told you she worked for us until just a short time ago?”

  I shrugged, but it sent a pulse through my chest. I didn’t know if Susan was my ally or not. “That doesn’t mean anything to me.”

  “Fine, Candle, I can see this isn’t getting us anywhere. I’m just going to lay my cards out on the table, to borrow a cliché. We don’t care about you, or Susan, or any of it, really. There’s only one thing we’re interested in.”

  I noticed he didn’t mention my dad. Maybe they still thought he was dead. Maybe I could keep that piece of knowledge for myself, and somehow use it later.

  “And what is it you’re interested in?” I said.

  “The toy truck.”

  I blinked a few times. “The what?”

  He grinned. “You can pretend you don’t know what I’m talking about, but we know you have it. Or you had it, at least. We know you met with your dad’s attorney in Dallas, and he gave you a box with a toy truck inside it. And hidden away inside that toy truck was a memory stick.”