Vanished

Murder

"What does this mean for us?" I asked my brother. We sat together in the dark in our quiet living room. The sun had set and neither one of us had bothered to turn on the lights. Bear slept on the carpet by my feet and the only thing that could be heard was his light snoring. My brother sipped slowly from a beer and I twisted a water bottle back and forth in my hands.

I felt hollow and exhausted. Just utterly worn out. Like I could sleep for a hundred years, yet I wasn't relaxed enough to fall asleep.

"I have no idea," my brother responded gloomily.

"I can't believe he's dead," I said with a sigh.

"Murdered," my brother corrected like it mattered. He was dead regardless of how it happened and we'd probably never know why. Or who did it?

Lloyd had told us he'd been shot. Six times.

There were no suspects, but I was convinced it was the man from Boston. Or whoever he was working for.

"Do you think whoever it was did it for the money?" I asked.

"Probably." He shrugged his shoulders like it didn't matter, and maybe it didn't. But I was still curious.

"Do you think they got it?" I asked.

"Got what? The money?"

"Yeah."

I watched as he took a slow drink from his beer and put it back down on the coffee table in front of him.

"At this point, I kind of hope they did."

"Why?" I asked, surprised.

He looked over at me and his expression showed just how exhausted he was.

"Because if they got what they wanted, this whole thing should be over and they'll leave us alone."

"Oh." Yeah, that was a good point. If that was what they'd been after all this time, then this nightmare could finally, finally be over.

"Yeah..."

We were quiet for a few minutes while we both considered what that could mean for us. As shocking as the news had been, the possibility that everything could be over was overwhelming. I was almost afraid to hope that it could be true.

"Did you check to see if the man was still in Vegas?" I asked my brother once I finished my water.

"The man from outside BioloGen?"

I nodded.

"The car is still there. It hasn't moved. I don't know about him."

"Do you think it was him?"

"That shot and killed our dad?"

I nodded again.

"It would be my guess."

I was mine too.

"I wonder who he is and why? What he was after."

"The money," my brother said with an eye roll.

I couldn't help but chuckle. This fucking money. How much freaking money could it have been? Our dad always had cash lying around, but how much is worth killing for?

"How did he know about it?" I asked with my own eye roll.

"Uh..." My brother's eyes snapped up and met mine. "That is an excellent question. Who did actually know about it?"

I shook my head slowly as I thought about it, but I had no idea. "I don't know," I admitted.

"Do you think dad would've told anyone about it?"

I shrugged my shoulders.

"Nobody?"

"Sport," I deadpanned, "he didn't even tell us. He handed us a notebook with lame ass clues."

My brother chuckled despite the seriousness of the topic and our dreary mood.

"That's true."

Our father had been absent from our lives since we left Portland. The only communication we had with him was an occasional message. It was possible that he met someone during that time that he trusted. Someone he could have told the truth. And I realized the last message we got was about being careful and then it was the one message he sent someone else that Sport saw, about meeting up in Las Vegas.

I looked up and met my brother's eyes. It looked like he'd been thinking along the same lines as me.

"Bro," I said. "He did sent that text message to someone about meeting up again."

"Yeah." My brother nodded. "He trusted someone enough to spill the secret that got him killed."

"Wow."

That actually hurt. He didn't trust us enough to tell us the truth, and we were his sons, but he trusted some stranger?

"How foolish was he?" I asked out loud.

"Apparently foolish enough that he paid the ultimate price."

"Yeah."

And now we'd never find out what it was all about.