The Legend of Kareem (2 page)

Kareem.

CHAPTER TWO

My young friend,

As I write this letter at JFK airport, I cannot help but feel responsible for everything that has happened to you. I had hoped that my warning to you would have kept you away and out of all this, but it seems not to have mattered. Mistakes were made. I should have been more forceful with you.

Wyatt Green is a vindictive and evil man. I am sure you are discovering that for yourself. I have only just learned the extent of his activities over the last few days, and I am rushing to meet you as soon as possible. I hope I am not too late.

This letter is to act as insurance, in case something should happen to me when I am en route or when I arrive. I do not think it is in your best interest to know everything, and I think your danger would only be increased if that were the case. Please believe me.

But I do think you need to know one thing: I have a brother who lives in Austin, named Omar. I have been unable to reach him over the last few months. He is a good man, and a man who can be trusted. I am coming to Colorado to intercept Wyatt and end this war. If I am unable to complete this task, you must please go to Austin, find Omar, and get him to safety. He is in grave danger.

He knows only some of the problems that lie at the heart of all this trouble. But I beg you, do not ask him questions. Telling you what he knows will only lead to more complications for the both of you.

I have failed him, and I have failed you too. I hope I still have a chance to make things right.

Sincerely,

Kareem Haddadi

***

Inside my house, with Kitty pawing at the frayed hem of my jeans and Dog licking his balls on the couch next to me, I read the letter at least a dozen times. As per usual Kareem-speak, it scored a perfect 10 on the vague scale and a 1.5 on the helpful scale.

He’d written it the day before he’d died. A letter from a dead man.

“I have no idea what I’m supposed to do with this,” I said to Dog. He licked my hand in reply, and Kitty didn’t stop trying to dismantle my denim.

I set the letter on the coffee table, the one that had been spotted with Kareem’s blood a few days ago. Within twenty feet of where I was sitting, two wicked men had died at my hand. Another three had died in this house, but not of my doing. The rug had been removed and replaced with a similar one, and the cleaning crew made the rest of the house look presentable. I didn’t want Grace to see blood and guts when she would come home tomorrow.

While I walked the dog, I cycled through possible responses to the letter. First, and most obvious, would be to ignore it. Kareem wanted me to go to Austin and pick out Omar Haddadi out of the million-plus people who lived there? In light of the promise I’d made to Grace about never leaving her side again, ignoring it seemed like the most viable option. She’d been kidnapped and subjected to awful things, even though she’d slept through it all. I couldn’t leave her.

Besides, I’d told her it was over.

The next option would be to involve the cops on some level. I’d talked to enough of them over the last few days about Alan and Wyatt Green and the rest of them, I was on a first-name basis with a couple of the detectives.

But Kareem’s letter had such secrecy about it. As if talking about this would put Omar in danger. And after “Detective” Stan Shelton, I didn’t trust cops.

And the third, most ludicrous option would be for me to charge off on some blind mission to rescue a guy I’d never met, whose brother—even though he’d claimed to have known me since I was a little kid—I’d just met two weeks ago in a bar in Boulder.

Insane, right? No way could I let myself get sucked back into this drama after I’d just finished with it. I didn’t even know how far I trusted Kareem to begin with. The man hadn’t been straight with me from the day we met, and watching him die wasn’t something I wanted to repeat with anyone else, ever again.

I wasn’t going. No way.

CHAPTER THREE

Grace and I spent the first three days post-hospital in a hotel room, at my insistence. She’d wanted to go home, but I didn’t want her to see Alan’s house and relapse into those memories just yet. I changed my mind at the last minute.

Her parents came by occasionally, but we mostly sent them to take care of our house. We kept this time for us. To watch bad TV, eat room service, and talk about the experience. I hoped she might decompress if given safe and neutral territory.

Grace had no concept of how long she’d been kidnapped. She didn’t even know she’d been abducted until she woke up with me hovering above her. They’d snatched her in the middle of the night, and she slept almost the whole time. The only person she ever saw was Alan, and in her drugged state, she didn’t fear him. He wasn’t threatening to her.

So, to her, it was only traumatic in hindsight, and the fact that the experience was over helped that slip away a little more each day in our hotel.

I often thought about Kareem’s letter, and considered telling Grace about it. But I couldn’t bring myself to do it. I had a feeling she’d tell me to go to Texas and see what I could do. But I wouldn’t leave her. I couldn’t leave her.

On the morning of the third day, I came out of the shower to find my jeans on the bed and her reading Kareem’s letter. I’d left it in the back pocket.

“What’s this?” she said.

I scratched my back where IntelliCraft Director of Sales Thomason had cut me a week ago, because the stitches were itching. “It’s nothing.”

She crossed her arms, then chewed on her lower lip for a few seconds. My resolve to keep it in started to break away. Then she sighed, and the needle-point of her glare finally broke the surface.

“Okay. Kareem sent me a letter about his brother who lives in Austin, that he’s in trouble or something, and that I need to find him and take him somewhere safe. But I’m not going to go. I barely knew Kareem, and I don’t know this Omar guy at all. There’s no reason for me to abandon you and rush out the door on some stupid quest to help some guy I don’t know.”

She eyed me up and down. “If you need to go, I’ll understand. I don’t want to keep you from this if it’s important.”

“No,” I said. “It’s not important, and I’m not going.”

***

Grace and I drove from the hotel to our our house while her family went to get some lamb korma takeout from her favorite Indian place. A light snow began to fall as we neared home. I told her the story about the first time I’d experienced a heavy snow, only a few months after I’d moved to Colorado. How the flakes were massive, like torn up pieces of paper so white it almost made the night sky look like daytime.

She smiled at my story, even though I suspected I’d told her that one before. She smiled a lot more often now than she had on our first day out of the hospital.

I watched her closely as we pulled into the neighborhood. Not sure what I was expecting. Sweaty palms at the sight of our street? Panic attack since this was the place she’d been kidnapped?

Instead, she nodded at the house on the corner of our street. “Did I miss anything with the meth house lately?”

“It’s funny you should say that because I met the guy who lives there.”

Her eyes grew. “No.”

“Yeah, I did. He pulled me out of the car when it crashed. He seemed alright, I guess, maybe I’d even call him friendly. I’m so used to him staring out from behind the blinds of the windows. Weird to see his whole face.”

She reached out and put a hand on my belly, one of the many places on my body that still ached from the car crash and the other scuffles I’d had. “You feeling okay?”

“Yeah, just sore. I was lucky, I think. No broken bones or serious internal bleeding.”

We arrived at our cul de sac, and I carefully monitored her expression. She was staring right at Alan’s house. Her face looked flat, but her lips curled down into a bit of a frown. Couldn’t imagine what was going through her mind.

“We don’t have to be here. We can go back to the hotel.” Not that we could afford that since I was still destined for unemployment in a few weeks. I was officially on medical leave until then. So, no work, but at least they were paying me for the time being. Or, maybe this thing about my dad’s inheritance might come through to bless my finances. I hadn’t looked into it yet since I’d been in and out of the hospital, attending to Grace.

“No, I think I’ll be okay. I want to go home.”

I parked in the driveway and raced around the car to help her out before she could open the door. She wasn’t pregnant enough to need help sitting and standing, but she did grunt a bit when changing positions.

I took her by the hand and led her to the front door, keeping my body between her and the house where she’d spent a week drugged in the basement. She didn’t look at it.

When I opened the door, Dog came rushing at us, bouncing across the living room.

“Who is this?” Grace said in a baby voice, dropping to one knee. Dog loved her instantly. Tail in overdrive, licking the palm of her hand. He’d been living in a house that smelled like her for days, so he probably thought he already knew her.

Kitty, on the other hand, hung back, not sure what to make of Grace coming home just yet. Kitty could be fickle like that.

“He’s cute,” Grace said, ruffling the dog’s fur. “I approve.”

“Good, because I don’t think we can get rid of him. Squatters’ rights or something like that.”

I helped her to the couch, and she asked me to prepare some tea for her. I obliged.

Just as I put the kettle on to boil, my phone rang. Dallas area code.

“Hello?”

“Is this Tucker Candle?”

“Speaking.”

“Mr. Candle, my name is Luther Fredrick, and I’m an estate attorney down here in Grapevine. Sorry to call you out of the blue, but I need to discuss a legal matter.”

My mouth felt a few degrees drier as the steam from the kettle began to billow out of the little hole.

“Okay,” I said.

“Mr. Candle, I represent your father’s estate, one Mr. Heathcliff Candle. Am I correct in the statement that this man was your father?”

“Okay,” I said.

“The thing is, Mr. Candle, that there are some irregularities in Heath’s finances, and as the executor of his will, we need to speak to you about them before we can proceed.”

Smoky jets of steam pulsed and swirled through the hole in the top of the kettle. Executor? Why in the world would he have made me executor?

I lifted the kettle off the stove, feeling the heat warm my forearm. “I see. What do I need to do?”

“How soon can you get to Dallas?”

***

After listening to Luther spout a few more details, I hung up the phone as I poured the tea into the mug, processing the conversation.

Grace cleared her throat behind me. “What was that about?”

I looked at my wife, her round belly, her face worn from days in the hospital and the events before that. She’d improved quite a bit in our few days lounging around in the hotel, but she still wasn’t right.

I wouldn’t leave her. I couldn’t leave her.

“My father’s attorney, or maybe not his attorney, but some lawyer who has something to do with his will. There’s a problem with it and they need to speak to me. In Dallas.”

“They couldn’t do that over the phone?”

“He said there are documents that can’t be faxed, or something like that. Plus items in his care that he needs to physically hand to me. It states that in the will.”

She sat back, eying me. I set the tea in front of her and retreated to the chair across from the couch, and she wouldn’t take her laser eyes off me.

“Ooh,” she said, then leaned forward. She reached out to grab my hand, then put it on her warm belly. Some little pushes—almost like vibrations—came back against my hand. “He was kicking non-stop in the hospital,” she said. “I guess he got tired of me laying around all day.”

“Little Candle doesn’t do well with boredom, like his dad.”

She smiled at me, then it slowly faded.

“I’m not going to go,” I said. “This will stuff can wait.”

She picked up the tea and sipped it. “Sure seems like the stars are aligning to drag you back to Texas one more time.”

“Sounds like it, yeah.”

“Will you go to your dad’s place in Corpus Christi, too? Pick up his personal items and that kind of thing?”

“I’m not going to go. No way. I’m not leaving you.”

She considered this for a while, hot vapor from the tea blurring her face. “Maybe you should go.”

“What?”

“If you need to go down there and take care of your dad’s estate, then look up this Omar guy and tell him to get out of town, you can go. You’ll be gone a day or two? I’m feeling much better about everything than I did just a few days ago.”