The Legend of Kareem (5 page)

CHAPTER SEVEN

I spent the night at a crappy motel in north Austin. The remote control for the television was anchored to the TV by a chain. I don’t know who would steal a remote control, but the motel had definitely found a way to keep me from doing it.

Checked in with Grace and still had her full support after I explained my progress so far. She said her sister was keeping her busy with home improvement projects like cleaning out the garage to make space for her car.

She told me that Dog had started sleeping on my side of the bed, which made sense. That was probably his plan all along, the conniving little interloper. I’d deal with that when I got home.

In the morning, I took a cab out to Elm Creek Drive, to the former residence of one Mr. Omar Qureshi. Trailer park neighborhood filled with double-wides and porches made of 2x4s. Despite the crisp December morning air, lots of kids were running about in shorts and t-shirts, spraying each other with colorful and futuristic-looking water guns. A few people sipping coffee on porches eyed me as I walked through the gravel lot, checking the address listed on my phone.

I located the trailer, a mobile home with bowed and faded blue siding. Rocking horse in the front yard next to a rusted car battery.

I knocked on the door, and after some shuffling inside, it cracked open. A pair of eyes materialized from the dark interior, then a face with a massive black beard.

“What do you want?” he said.

“This is going to sound weird, but I’m looking for Omar Qureshi. I understand he used to live here.”

The bearded man looked me up and down, whistling air through his nose. He reached to his left, then inserted a toothpick in his mouth. “Who wants to know?”

“My name is Candle.”

“What kind of a name is Candle?”

“A last name. Look, I’m a friend of his, but I haven’t been able to find him lately and I know he used to live here. It’s important that I get in touch with him now, as soon as possible.”

The man grunted. Didn’t seem to buy my line. “If you’re a friend of Omar’s, seems mighty strange that you wouldn’t know what happened to him. He hasn’t been around here in a couple years.”

I paused, trying to figure a way I could get this guy on my side. Didn’t see that we had much in common I could use for leverage. “I know, but you see, it’s been a long time. I need to find him, so I’d really appreciate it if you could point me in the right direction.”

He opened the door, revealing a naked belly billowing over a pair of grungy boxer shorts. From inside, a baby’s cries leaked out into the air.

He stepped out onto his porch, wearing only his skivvies, then flicked his toothpick at me. “You listen to me: the last thing in the world I need is to bring that mess into this house again. I don’t like that you’re coming around here, making trouble for me and my family. Omar ain’t here, and I got nothing else to say on the matter.”

I stammered. “I don’t want to make any trouble, sir, I just need to locate him. It’s urgent.”

“That two-bit liar has caused enough grief for me.”

He got in my face, the smell of cheap beer assaulting my nostrils. He sucked his teeth and fluttered his eyes over my face. Something was about to happen.

“Step off my property.”

Anger bubbled up from my toes. Maybe he didn’t want to tell me where Omar was, but this guy didn’t have to act like such a jerk. “No. Just tell me where he is.”

His hand shot out and grabbed me by the neck. For a big guy, he was quite lithe. His eyes lit up with fire as he applied pressure. Felt the pulse in my neck throb in my head as he blared the whites of his eyes at me.

I latched onto his fingers, but his grip was too strong. He bared his teeth and squeezed harder, and he pushed up, trying to lift me off my feet.

Since I couldn’t pry his fingers away, and I had about twenty seconds of air left before Skivvies knocked me unconscious, I threaded my arm in between his two arms, then used my other hand to push my forearm up, like a lever. The motion took less than a second, and his grip broke against the sudden force of my push.

He reared back and swung, but I had plenty of time to lean out of range of his meaty right-hook. While he was twisted and off-balance, I jumped to the side, put my hands under his armpits, and pushed him off the porch. I jumped after him, wrapped an arm around his belly, then swept his leg to knock him on the ground, facing down.

I drove my knee into his back, then secured both of his wrists.

With his face in the dirt, he yelled, “what the hell are you, some kind of ninja?”

I kept the pressure on his back and pulled his arms toward me, not letting him up. “Not quite, you dumbass. All I want to know is where I can find Omar Qureshi. Whatever beef you have with him isn’t any of my business, and I don’t really care.”

“Go fuck yourself,” the man said, and I responded by digging my knee further into his back and yanking his arms higher. If I pressed any harder, I’d dislocate both his shoulders.

He wailed, and I held him there until he calmed down. “Fine,” he said. “Palm Grove. It’s in the phone book.”

I rolled off and took a couple quick steps back in case he was tempted to throw another punch. But he only grunted into a sit, massaging his shoulders. “Get the hell off my property,” he said. “Don’t ever come back.”

I nodded and retreated, keeping an eye on him as I backed up to the waiting cab. The taxi driver’s mouth was hanging open, his eyebrows gathered together in the middle of his forehead.

As I got in the cab and told the driver our destination, I couldn’t help but wonder who I was going to meet. What had he done to make this redneck so furious at the mention of his name?

***

On the cab ride to Palm Grove, I conducted a little internet research on it. A group home in south Austin, in the same neighborhood as St. Edward’s University, a college I’d once considered attending.

Group home.

So, this Omar was either mentally challenged or had some kind of disability so severe that he couldn’t live on his own. Neither was good news if the goal was to explain to him that he needed to get out of town.

I hadn’t thought much about what I was going to say to Omar, but I started to put my plan into action. Visualized the scenarios of how the conversation would go. I would explain that he was in danger from the same people that had killed his brother. I would get him out of that house, we’d find a way to get a car, and I’d take him somewhere safe so he could explain this whole mess to me.

Then I’d worry about my supposed-sister Susan. But Omar first.

The driver pulled up in front of a large three-story house on a tree-clogged street. “Do I need to wait for you this time?” he said.

“I don’t know how long I’ll be, so I don’t think so.” I paid him and he left me standing on the street corner.

Worries about all the things that could go wrong occurred to me as I walked up the pathway to the house. I checked every possible angle of the street for anyone sitting in cars, or looking out from window shades, but didn’t see a single suspicious thing.

Rang the doorbell. The front door buzzed, and I opened it into a walled-off entryway that ended with a glass booth like you see in concert halls. A woman with wire-rimmed glasses sat behind the booth, smiling at me.

“Can I help you, sir?” her voice came through the intercom.

I approached the glass and tried to pretend I wasn’t nervous. “I’m here to see Omar, please.”

“Is he expecting you?” she said as she lifted a clipboard and scanned a finger across it.

“I’m not on a guest list or anything like that. It’s kinda last-minute, but I don’t have an appointment, no.”

She adjusted her glasses, her expression flat. “Then I can’t let you in, sir.”

I gripped the edge of the counter below the glass booth. “Please, it’s critical that I get in to see him today.”

“Omar is resting right now. I’d rather not disturb him unless he’s expecting you.”

“Tell him it’s about Kareem, and it’s urgent. It’s about his brother.”

The lady’s eyebrows raised a fraction above the rims of her glasses at the mention of Kareem’s name, and she considered my question for a few seconds. “Okay, I’ll ask him. But if he isn’t interested in talking to you, you will have to leave. Understand?”

“I got it. Thank you.”

She disappeared, and I spend some time reading printouts stapled to a cork board on the door next to the glass booth. Flu shot warnings, the benefits of hand-washing, that sort of thing.

A minute later, the door buzzed, and the lock mechanism clicked. I opened the door and stepped inside the house, which was a clean, open-air kind of place, with brilliant white carpet and soothing blue walls.

In a living room, two guys were playing ping pong, paying no attention to me. I think maybe I’d expected the residents to be wearing straight jackets and carting around IV bags, but these guys were in jeans and hoodies. They didn’t look at me as I walked by them.

The TV was on in the next, smaller living room, some daytime talk show. I watched for a few seconds as the host was about to reveal whether or not one guest was the real father of the other guest’s child.

In a recliner, wrapped in a blanket, I spotted the man who had to be Kareem Haddadi’s brother. Same high cheekbones. Same dark skin. Omar Qureshi.

“Omar?” I said as I knelt beside the recliner.

He didn’t look at me, instead kept his eyes glued to the television, stroking his beard. “I knew he was the father. It is obvious. The baby looks like him.”

“Omar, I’ve come a long way to see you. You don’t know me, but I want to help you.”

He eyed me without moving his head. I saw his chest rise and fall, a little faster. He swung his head to make the recliner rock back and forth.

“Your brother Kareem sent me.”

Now he finally turned his head to look at me. His eyes were dark and full of fear. Breath smelled of mushrooms. His lips parted, and he wheezed as the recliner came to a stop. “Kareem?”

“Yes, he wanted me to come find you because there’s been some trouble.”

“What trouble do you mean?”

I hesitated, with no idea how to come out and say this. “Maybe you don’t know. Your brother, he… he passed away last week.”

Omar turned back to the television, blinking several times in succession. “The man does not seem happy that he is revealed as the father of the child. I would think he should be happy.”

“Did you hear what I said?”

“Yes, I heard you. So, that snake Heath Candle finally got his wish and killed my brother, did he?”

CHAPTER EIGHT

Omar’s deep black eyes bored into me as the television droned on in the living room. “It was him, was it not?”

My mouth didn’t want to work. Omar had just accused my father of murdering this man’s brother. “I, uh, no, it wasn’t him. I was there when it happened, in Colorado.”

“Colorado? My brother has a house there. One of his smaller ones. He tells me he spends little time there.”

I knew that, and I’d been to that house. “The two men who murdered your brother were named Darren and Shelton. On the orders of a man named Wyatt Green. They shot him, and tried to get me to finish him, but they’re all dead now. All the people directly involved are dead.” Except for Glenning, of course, who was in Texas. And, all the people who were directly or indirectly involved that I didn’t know about.

Omar turned his head back to the television, nodding solemnly as a commercial for the US Navy showed men and women in camouflage gear operating high-tech equipment on a submarine.

I couldn’t tell if he was absorbing the info, or if he’d already forgotten, or what. I couldn’t read this man.

“Green,” he said. “One of the other snakes.”

“You knew Wyatt Green?”

Omar scoffed. “Of course I did. He is from IntelliCraft, the source of all evil in this world. But how do I know who you are?”

I unfolded Kareem’s letter from my pocket and showed it to him. He mouthed the words to himself as he read. I thought I detected a little bit of wetness in the corners of Omar’s eyes, but he shed no tears.

“If all this is true, then we must move before they put more people in danger. We must finish what my brother started and expose them.”

He bounced up from his seat and raced up the stairs to the second floor. With no time to question, I followed him up the carpeted stairs, past the ping pong players, who still acted as if I didn’t exist. My head buzzed. So much didn’t make sense.

I caught a flash of him entering a bedroom at the end of the hall and chased after him. When I entered the room, he was dragging a metal suitcase from the closet. He threw open his dresser drawers and piled clothes into the suitcase.

“Omar, wait. What do you think is going to happen here?”

He stopped packing, his chest heaving. “We are going to go to Dallas and confront them for what they have done. We must seek out justice while there is still yet time.”