Monday, April 8, 2019

Par for the Corpse, fiction by Steve Liskow

Normally, Sasha can spot Winifred three strokes on each nine and still beat her, but today, everything seems to have gone to hell. Winifred, petite, dark and five strokes ahead after twelve holes, wades through grass that reaches her shins.

“Nothing over here.” She pushes stalks aside with her driver and looks deeper into the trees. If Sasha’s drive did land in here, they may not find it until they both have grandchildren in grad school.

Sasha, tall and blonde, unzips her golf bag and pulls out a new ball. “I’ll drop another one.”

According to the rules, a lost ball means she should go back to the tee and hit her drive again, but four men in carts are practically in their hip pockets, so she’ll call it her third shot to save time. It’s not like they’re in a tournament.

  It’s Thursday, which most doctors take off to play here at the Slippery Ridge Country Club, but these guys play so quickly Freddi wonders if they have cocktails waiting, maybe wives or girlfriends and dinner, too. If she and Sasha hold them up, they’ll stay close and make snarky comments the rest of the round.

“Yeah, OK.” Winifred returns to her own ball, fifteen yards ahead of Sasha’s and in the middle of the fairway. In the two years they’ve played together, she can count the times that’s happened—except for today—on one hand.

The men crowd around the markers on the tee. One leans on his club. When he sees Freddi look back at him, he brings up his arm and seems to study his watch. If he were a little more subtle, he could be in opera. Or ballet.

Sasha faces the green and drops another ball over her shoulder. Her legs look long as Freddi’s driver and their tan makes her white golf shoes resemble an albino Dumpster. When she steps away, Freddi can see her ball nestled in a patch of crabgrass with the texture of a scouring pad. From that lie, no way she can reach the green.

“Par for the course today, is it not?” Sasha pulls out a six iron. It will still leave her a long shot to the green, but from that lie, her best bet is to hack her way back to the fairway. She might do even better with a machete, but she’s only allowed fourteen clubs.

She takes her grip, plants the club behind the ball and takes a slow backswing, careful not to snag her club in that tall grass.

“Fore on the right!”

The voice sounds like it’s right behind them and Sasha’s head jerks up. She tops the ball, which bounces into the fairway only a few yards beyond Freddi’s tee shot. Freddi can already see the cut in it, bigger than the smiles on the faces of the jerks behind them.

“Shi-shoot.” Freddi promised herself she was going to clean up her language. “Going to need a new ball when you get to the green.”

“Those assholes…” Sasha didn’t make any such promise. She glares back at the two carts bearing down on them like chariots in full battle mode.

“You want a mulligan?” Freddi asks. “They distracted you.”

The men come closer, crisp golf shirts and razor-cut hair. Freddi wonders how much money they’ve put on this match. She and Sasha bet a fruit cup. With five holes to go, she’s about half an orchard ahead.

“They’ll just get even more obnoxious if I keep holding them up,” Sasha says. “Let’s let them play through.”

“Might as well.” Freddi pulls her cart up next to her ball. One of the men is about thirty yards beyond her, but on the same line. The carts slow down and one comes to a stop inches from Freddi’s cart. If they weren’t on grass, she’d hear tires screech and smell rubber burn.

“Hi, sorry we hit so close.” The guy’s voice almost drips off Freddi’s face. “We thought you were farther along.”

“We’re just girls.” Sasha’s voice makes Freddi think of a snake waiting for the rodent to get closer. “We’re not big and strong like you.”

“Yeah, there’s that.” The guy in the royal blue shirt eases out of the cart and frowns toward the green. His shoulders are square as a storm door, but his shirt strains across his stomach. Freddi would need a four-wood, but he takes a five-iron. Testosterone adds lots of yardage.

“Would you like to play through?” Sasha asks. The guy’s already taking his stance, but he stops and turns.

“Oh, thanks, we’d appreciate that.” Freddi’s afraid Sasha’s going to flip them off, but she doesn’t.

The guy bends over his ball again and waggles his club so often Freddi knows it must be a ritual he goes through every time he swings. Which one of the pros does that? Whoever it is, it looks stupid. The guy takes a divot the size of a snow shovel and contorts his body while he watches the ball flutter into the sand trap to the left front of the green.

“That is one of the most annoying traps on this course,” Sasha says. Freddi can almost see Sasha’s raised middle finger.

  The guy glares at her before he strides back to his cart and shoves his club into his bag. He and his buddy take off without another word.

“And your mouth is another,” Sasha finishes.

The other cart is on the far side of the fairway, where a man nearly as thin as his
clubs hits a beautiful shot that arches high and settles gently on the green just the way it’s supposed to. Freddi hates him.

The carts pull up between the green and the next tee and all four men get out. Blue shirt hits a decent shot out of the sand and returns to the cart for his putter.

“Jerks,” Sasha says. Her voice barely carries to Freddi.

“You OK?”

“Par for the course today,” Sasha answers.

Freddi waits until the men have replaced the flag, then hits her shot to the front edge of the green. Her putt will be long, but straight uphill.

“No, really. Are you OK?”

Sasha shrugs and fiddles with her clubs. “I’m a little tired,” she admits.

“Not sleeping?”

“Something like that.” Sasha pulls out a nine iron. Her eyes stay focused on the flag on the green. She hits her best shot of the entire round so far, settling on the middle of the green, no more than twenty feet from the flag. She slides the club back into her bag and walks to the green with a decisive strut that suggests she’s just found her rhythm and stroke again. If she has, Freddi’s five-stroke lead could melt like a snowball on the Sahara.

The men hit their drives on the next hole and their carts move down the next fairway.

Sasha’s first putt rolls around the rim twice before staying out. Freddi two-putts, too. They move to the next tee and pull out their drivers while the men hit their second shots toward a green that looks smaller than an emerald in a patch of trees four hundred yards away. On a good day, Sasha can reach it in two. Freddi needs three.

Freddi tees up her ball and hits down the left side of the fairway.

“Are you and Chuck making any headway?” she asks. Sasha and Chuck have been going to a marriage counselor, but Sasha told Freddi two weeks ago that she doesn’t think it’s helping at all. He still misses dinner one or two nights a week and she’s not sure he’s always at the office.

“We’re fine,” Sasha says. She tees up her ball, then changes her mind. She picks up the ball and tee and moves two steps to her right to tee it up again. She stands behind it and sights toward the green, then hits her drive at least forty yards beyond Freddi, and smack in the center of the fairway. If her second shot is as good, she’ll reach the green.

While they pull their carts up to their drives, the men scatter across the green with putters in their hands.

Sasha clears her throat.

“Actually,” she says, “he didn’t come home last night.”

“What?” Freddi almost trips over her own feet. “Did he call or anything?”

Sasha stares straight ahead so Freddi can’t see her face. But she strides more quickly until they reach Freddi’s ball. The men move to the next tee. The fairway runs parallel to the one the women stand on.

“I hope they hit the water on sixteen,” Freddi says. Sasha and Chuck live just across the fence from the sixteenth green. The pond in front of it turns an easy hole into a potential nightmare.

“I wish there were alligators,” Sasha replies.

Freddi’s second shot is well short of the green, but in the fairway where she has a straight shot at the flag. Sasha’s stroke slices off to the right, bounces once and rolls into a sand trap. She stabs her club back into her bag.

“Did you try to call him?” Freddi asks. “Or text him?”
“I only hit his voicemail. He never answered.”

“Not even a text?” Freddi feels her mouth sag open. It’s about two in the afternoon now. Chuck should have been home, had breakfast, and gone off to work hours ago.

“Not even a text.” Sasha shrugs but Freddi can see the anger in her shoulders. “Like I keep saying, par for the course.”

“Shit.” So much for cleaning up her language. “Did you call the police?”

“This morning. They told me they can’t do anything until he’s been missing twenty-four hours.”

“That’s stupid,” Freddi says.

“Tell me about it.” Sasha’s voice feels brittle.

They reach the green and Sasha shuffles through her clubs. She frowns and looks through them again, then looks back at the fourteen holes they’ve played.

“Can I borrow your sand wedge? I can’t find mine.”

Freddi hands it to her. “You haven’t been in a trap today. Were you practicing before we started? Maybe left it by the practice green?”

“I don’t think so. Maybe.”

She takes a few practice swings with the strange club.

“A bit lighter than mine.” She digs her feet into the sand and waggles the club above the ball a few times, then takes an easy swing.

The ball flies out of the trap in a splash of sand and stops about twelve feet short of the flag.

“Nice shot,” Freddi says. “Especially with a strange club.”

“Thank you.” Sasha hands it back and returns to her own bag for her putter. Freddi wishes she’d lost her putter instead of her sand wedge. When the pressure is on, Sasha can roll putts in as if the cup is the size of a bath tub. Sure enough, her putt looks good as soon as she hits it. It disappears into the cup. Freddi takes two putts and her lead drops by one stroke.

On the next hole, Sasha hits her best drive of the day, and Freddi concentrates on keeping her own shot in the fairway. The men pull their carts to the left of the green, near the seventeenth tee, and one of them starts back toward the pond. He has what looks like a ball retriever with an expanding handle in his hand.

“Ha,” Freddi says. “One of them caught the water. My prayer has been answered.”
From where she is, she can’t reach the green. With the flag on the upper left corner, she decides to aim to the right. That way she can hit her third shot past the corner of the pond instead of risking dumping her shot into the water like the guy ahead of them has apparently done.

Sasha watches the men intently. Her own shot is a long way from the green, but she might be able to reach it if the pond didn’t block her direct line.

Through the split rail fence that signifies out of bounds, Freddi sees Sasha and Chuck’s Dutch colonial. The patio facing the green has a table with a big red umbrella above it, and a Weber grille nestles in the corner near the garage.

Blue shirt moves to his right and stops. He stands up straight and says something to the others. They all hustle to the edge of the pond and look where he’s pointing. The skinny guy takes off his shoes and socks and rolls up his pants before he wades into the water, waving his arms to keep his balance. He bends over and disappears from sight.

When he stands again, Freddi can hear his voice halfway down the fairway.

“Holy shit!”

One of the other men extends a golf club for him to grab and they pull him back to
dry land. They toss him a towel and he wipes off his feet while one of the other men dashes back to the cart.

“Something’s going on,” Freddi says. She takes a few steps toward the men, the four-iron forgotten in her hand.

“You think?” Sasha doesn’t move. The man at the golf cart picks up his phone and dials so quickly Freddi knows he must have called 911. He looks around the course and at the houses beyond the fence, then back at the pond, where the other men still squat and stare into the water.

“Um…” Freddi looks at her ball, then at the men. “What do you think we should do?
We can’t very well hit our next shots with those guys right there.”

“They almost hit me half an hour ago,” Sasha points out. But she leaves her cart next to her ball and joins Freddi. The caller tucks his phone back into his pocket and joins his friends. They remind Freddi of little kids who’ve found a dead mouse in a field.

“Let’s see what’s going on.” Freddi slides her club back into her cart and walks toward the men. Sasha speeds up until they’re walking together. The men’s voices carry toward them, but they can’t make out words yet.

When they’re almost at the edge of the pond, the man in the blue shirt holds up his hand.

“I don’t think you want to come over here, ladies.”

“What’s wrong?” Freddi asks. The men look even more like kids, eyes wide and tongues moving across their lips.

“There’s a dead body in the pond.” The man’s bare feet look white and wrinkled and his rolled-up pants legs drip water all around them. “I found it when I was looking for Irv’s ball.”

“You mean a person?” Sasha says. “Not a squirrel or a bird or something? A skunk?”

“It’s a man. His face is all smashed to hell. It’s pretty gross.”

“A man.” Freddi feels her knees weakening.

“Yeah. We called the police. They can trace where we are with the GPS in my phone. I don’t know if they’ll follow the holes to get here or stop on the streets outside. I don’t know the streets around here so I couldn’t give them an address.”
Sasha opens her mouth, then closes it again. The longer grass between the green and the fence is packed down from golf carts, but Freddi sees two parallel grooves leading from the fence. She walks over and sights across it at Sasha’s and Chuck’s grille. She takes a deep breath before rejoining the crowd.

Another foursome has teed off and approaches the women’s carts in the middle of the fairway.

“I don’t think we’re gonna be playing any more golf today,” Blue shirt says. “Why don’t you ladies play through.”

“Actually,” the man with the phone says, “you shouldn’t stay around here. We’ve probably already trampled any prints the police might have found, but you’d just make it worse. Why don’t you just pick up and go on to the next hole.”

Sasha looks at the pond. “I suppose that is a good idea. There are already people coming up behind us.”

“Right, that’s what I’m thinking.”

Sasha starts down the fairway to her cart and Freddi hurries to catch up. They pick up their balls and pull their carts to the left of the fairway, passing the men’s cart and stopping at the seventeenth tee. Freddi sinks to the bench and takes deep breaths until her stomach settles.

Sasha points to the fairway. “You won the last hole. It’s your shot.”

Even with her hands shaking, Freddi manages to balance a ball on the tee. She grips her driver and takes a hard practice swing. That’s better. Holding onto the club steadies her. She forces her eyes to look down the fairway at the red flag fluttering three hundred seventy yards away.

She hits into the rough on the right. Not long, but farther away from that pond and that dead man. Sasha swings and Freddi hears the sharp crack. The ball might still be rising as it sails beyond her own shot, hooking slightly at the end and bounding down the left center of the fairway. It stops almost eighty yards beyond Freddi’s.

Freddi finds her ball in the rough, nowhere near as thick as where Sasha lost hers on the twelfth. She hits into the middle of the fairway where she has an easy shot to the green. She looks back at the sixteenth and sees two uniformed police climb through the split rail fence in Sasha’s and Chuck’s back yard. Blue shirt trots over to them, pointing back at the pond where the other men still huddle together and look into the water. The group behind them has caught up, so now eight men and four carts crowd the site.

Sasha’s second shot hits a few feet short of the green and rolls onto the putting surface. Freddi forces her mind back to the game, but it’s hard. She almost flubs her shot, but it rolls onto the very front of the green. She’s still farther from the hole than Sasha is.

They line up their putts. Freddi’s club feels heavy and clumsy in her hands and she can’t see the path to the hole clearly. She steps back, then addresses the ball again and taps it toward the hole. It’s a foot short. She looks toward Sasha.

“Gimme?”

“Of course.”

Freddi tucks the ball into her pocket. Sasha squints at the hole. There’s something different in her face now. She steps up to her ball and plants her feet, then lays the head of the putter behind the ball and looks toward the hole.

Freddi can’t stop herself from speaking.

“Is your sand wedge in the water, too?”

Sasha strokes her ball and it rolls gently toward the hole. It slows down gradually and disappears into the cup. They both hear it rattle like bones.

Sasha picks her ball out of the cup and looks at Freddi.

“Please do not talk when I’m putting.”


Steve Liskow’s stories have earned an Edgar nomination, Honorable Mention for the Al Blanchard Award (3 times), and the Black Orchid Novella Award (twice). Those stories appear in Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine, Sherlock Holmes Mystery Magazine, Black Cat Mystery Magazine, and several anthologies. He has published 14 novels, and The Kids Are All Right was a finalist for the Shamus Award in 2015. He lives in Connecticut. Visit his website at www.steveliskow.com.



Monday, March 25, 2019

Paybak, fiction by Richard Prosch

Tommy wasn’t sure what irritated him more, the old guy’s oily confidence, or the direction their conversation was taking.

"I’m talking about the joy of killing," said Marv with the hairy eyebrows and expensive black jacket. “Surely you’ve imagined it more than once.”

Tommy tried to laugh, glanced around the coffee shop to see if anybody had overheard.

"It’s the ultimate rush," said Marv. "Taking another person's life away from them."

Shit.

Marv snapped his fingers.

Tommy tried to laugh it off.

"Look, you said on the phone this was a business opportunity. A way to make some good money. Like one of them pyramid deals.”

“Multi-level marketing.” Marv corrected him. V “Yeah, well. I’m not interested in anything that’s illegal.”

"Nothing I'm telling you about today is against the law."

"Dude,” said Tommy. “Killing people is against the law."

"Not if they don't remember it later,” Marv said, all sorta snotty-like.

"Here’s the thing,” said Tommy. “I been. . . away for a while. Now that I’m back, starting over again, I need something legit."

He thought about the friends he’d left behind.

Louie the Snake. Big Dale. Sammy Lamb. Somewhere, they were all snickering at him.

Tommy Barrows, going legit.

It was to laugh.

Tommy swallowed hard.

"We all got needs,” said Marv. “Me? I need another cup of coffee," Marv picked up his empty paper cup, careful to keep hold of the knobby cardboard sleeve.

“Maybe this job ain’t for me.”

"Run up to the counter and get me a refill,” said Marv. “You do, and I promise you won’t regret it.”

“I don’t know.” Tommy hesitated.

Marv’s dead gray eyes didn't move.

“I thought you were a winner, son,” said Marv. “Thought you were the kind of guy who knew what he wanted in life and went after it.”

“Don’t talk down to me, man.”

Marv held out the cup. “I take it black.”

Tommy stood up, awkwardly pushing the chair back from the table as his knees straightened, making a loud scraping sound against the coffee shop floor.

  “Okay. Okay, I’ll listen. But I’m not promising anything.”

A lady at the corner table, earbuds in and typing on a portable, looked up with annoyance. She wrinkled her nose.

Bitch.

Tommy shot her his best hard look and moved to the polished walnut and chrome counter, pushing past a skinny geek wearing a bike helmet.

Man, he wanted to explode.

He'd been on a dozen job interviews in less than a month.

Now this prick, Marv, with the expensive jacket and gorilla eyebrows was promising big money, but all it was going to do was lead Tommy right back to the slam.

He could feel it. Something about the guy wasn’t right.

Tommy knew when shit was going south.

He closed his eyes, felt sweat roll from under his arms, down his sides. His short sleeve cotton shirt, doing its job to conceal the 9mm he carried inside his waistband, wasn't tucked in. His khaki shorts hung loose at his knees.

He asked for Marv’s refill, took in the smell of warm bagels, the sweet scents of Italian syrups.

Maybe he should tell the old guy where to get off and apply for a job here?

He tried to imagine himself wearing the goofy, milk-stained apron, sucking up to pretty boys who dressed in ties and tasseled loafers and liked whipped cream on their drinks.

Tommy’s stomach turned over.

No way.

He glanced over his shoulder at the back of Marv's balding head, just visible over the half-wall between them.

On the phone.

Two laughing girls walked through the shop's door: hair, teeth, jewelry all sparkling in the sun.

Tommy sighed and carried the coffee back to Marv's table.

Then Marv surprised him.

Crazy old Marv with the gorilla eyebrows reached out—like he'd done it a hundred times before—brushed aside Tommy's shirt and pulled the Nine from Tommy’s waistband.

"Hey, what the--"

Before Tommy could move, Marv stood up, casually turned around, and blasted the lady in the corner right through the earbuds. A side step, and Marv's next shot cracked apart the geeky biker's helmet, sending gooey shards of skull across the serving counter.

Each of the girls, laughing-no-more, managed a single scream before Marv emptied the clip into them.

With the shop's patrons twitching at his feet, Marv smiled and sat back down.

For a split-second, Tommy felt like puking. Then he realized he still held Marv’s cup.

He let it go and watched the steaming contents splatter across the floor.

Marv tossed the gun to the table where it landed with a metallic thud.

Then everything melted into a green haze and there was a rushing sound, like water through Tommy’s ears, washing away the ringing echo of gunfire.

He closed his eyes.

When he opened them, everything was the way it had been before the shooting.

The lady in the corner adjusted an earbud as she typed on her portable computer.

At the counter the geek paid for his drink, then nodded at the two laughing girls.

The gun was back in Tommy’s waistband.

Marv’s coffee cup was full and steaming on the table.

"Let's start again, Mr. Barrows," said Marv.

Tommy caught the back of his own chair as his knees gave out.

  "What just happened?"

"Here you go."

Tommy opened the folded sheet of slick paper Marv offered.

One side of the colorful ad showed stock photos of smiling people. Bold fonts posed a series of questions.

Sick of your boss?

Had enough of your spouse?

Looking for justice? Looking for RETRIBUTION?

Bold fonts offered an answer: You’re looking for PayBak

. "This is the job? Your company? I mean it’s a great looking brochure. . . "

Tommy kept talking about the print job, but his attention was on the ephemeral square of lightly glowing, nearly transparent film hovering over the surface of the paper.

"What's this?" he said.

"Hold it between your fingers," said Marv, and Tommy peeled the square up, away from the brochure.

"Squeeze it once," Marv said, “and you open an alternate future timeline around yourself. Like a bubble between the seconds. While you're there, you can do anything you want. Without anyone knowing. Without any consequences."

"An alternate future?"

"I opened an alternate timeline just now. You saw it. In that future, now past, I enjoyed killing everyone in this shop. Then I gave the film a second squeeze and it closed that future down in favor of the prime reality."

"So it never happened?"

"Oh it happened. But then I closed the switch and it didn't happen."

"And nobody remembers it?"

"Nobody but you and me. I made a call while you were up getting coffee and our techs made an allowance just for the sake of demonstration. Normally it's a solo experience."

Tommy sat back in his chair, trying to take everything in at once.

"I honestly can't believe it's possible."

"Possible," nodded Marv. "And profitable."

"So you sell these? These switches? So that people can live out their fantasies?"

"Violent fantasies," said Marv. "Something about the matrix responds best to the most violent emotions."

"So you can kill somebody. . . "

"And nobody's the wiser. Best of all, the victim doesn't remember. Unless of course, you want them to."

"And there’s no way to get caught. No way to end up. . ."

“Back inside?” Marv shook his head. “There’s no punishment for something that never happened.”

“Tell me more,” said Tommy.

Marv's left hand covered his mouth, moved down red cheeks to stroke his fleshy chin. "You understand the basics of an MLM?"

"Multi-level marketing. Yeah, like Shopway or that cosmetics company." Marv nodded. "Imagine the market for what we’re talking about. In this day and age? With all the anger and rage fomented by social media? I’ll bet you have a few friends that would jump at a chance like this?"

Tommy thought about Louie the Snake. Big Dale. Sammy Lamb.

“Some righteous anger fermenting there,” he said aloud.

Tommy looked over his shoulder at the lady in the corner.

This time she met his gaze with an outright sneer.

Tommy smiled.

“A guy could make a killing,” he said.

Then he pulled the gun back out of his waistband.

He put his finger on the trigger.

"Before we talk business, you mind if I give it a try?"

Marv held up the green film and gave it a squeeze.

"Be my guest," he said.


After growing up on a Nebraska farm, Richard Prosch worked as a professional writer and artist in Wyoming and South Carolina. Answer Death was the first novel in his acclaimed Dan Spalding mystery-thriller series, and Richard has since added three sequels. He lives in Missouri with his family. Visit him--and Dan Spalding--online at RichardProsch.com.

Monday, March 18, 2019

In the Morning Hour She Calls Me, fiction by Russell W. Johnson

Most days Mary Beth Cain enjoyed being Jasper Creek’s first female sheriff. The job certainly had its perks: free breakfast at the Waffle House, guest of honor speeches at the local lady luncheons, and one hell of a company car—a Camaro with a V8 and party lights that gave her a license to open it up any time she wanted.

But then there were days like when she got the call for an assist out of McCray County and the raspy lady working dispatch insisted it was something Mary Beth needed to handle personally.

“Call came in nearly 30 minutes ago, Sheriff. Shots fired on McCray deputies responding to a domestic. Some old coot has ‘em pinned down, but they can’t give us an address. All we know is it’s some shack a few miles off Rural Route 4 near Cottonmouth Ridge. That’s all we got to go on. We’ve had two cars circling around who can’t find it. You know what it’s like in McCray. All those hollers and mountain roads are like a maze.”

Mary Beth’s chief deputy and best friend, Isaiah “Izzy” Baker, was riding shotgun and told dispatch to, “Just get the GPS coordinates.” But Mary Beth shook her head, knowing that wouldn’t work. You could never pick up a consistent satellite signal in McCray. Her Sirius XM cut off every time she drove through there--maybe the last place on the east coast where you could still get off the grid.

Dispatch confirmed that GPS had been tried and was a no-go and added, “They said, you’d know how to find it, Sheriff. The old coot who’s raising hell out there is supposed to be some relation of yours. James Logan.”

“Oh, shit,” Mary Beth said, looking at Izzy. She told dispatch they were en route and flipped on the party lights, pulling a 180 in the middle of College Avenue and gunning it up past 70 before fishtailing onto Sycamore. From there she got on Highway 123, which would have taken her all the way into McCray but she veered onto Rural Route 6, down toward Crawdad Holler.

“What are you doing?” Izzy asked.

“If we’re going to see my Uncle Jimmy, I want to take him a present.”

***


Mary Beth brought the Camaro to a hard stop where the pavement gave way to a dirt road that led up onto Cottonmouth Ridge, knowing the path was way too rough for her low-riding car and they’d have to walk it from there. She and Izzie made it to about a hundred yards from the clearing before Uncle Jimmy’s cabin, when Mary Beth felt a whoosh pass by her left ear, then a rotted-out birch tree exploded, sending wooden shrapnel flying everywhere, followed by the crack of a high-powered rifle.

“Get down!” a man’s voice called out from somewhere up ahead on their left.

Mary Beth and Izzy both dropped to the ground just as another bullet took down a large branch from a sycamore. It fell to the ground in front of them, providing enough cover for them to slither off the road into the thick stuff.

Mary Beth heard the same man’s voice yell, “Keep your head down! The old bastard’s crazy!” Her eyes tracked left until she spotted them. A gray McCray County Ford Explorer pulled off-road behind a semi-circle of shrub pine and evergreens that made a nice screen between them and the madman on the hill.

“This is Sheriff Cain and Deputy Baker from Jasper County,” she called out to them. “Who all’s over there?”

“Deputies Hawlings and Jenkins,” the man yelled back. “And one of the old man’s daughters is with us too.”

Mary Beth raised an eyebrow. “Which daughter? Janice or Raelynn?”

She could hear some whispering like the men weren’t sure, then the same man called back, “It’s Raelynn.”

“No shit? How you doin’ Rae?”

A woman’s voice responded, sounding scared and shaky, “Okay, Mae B. How you?”

“Well, I just got shot at a couple of times but other than that, I’m doing fine.”

“I know, right?”

Mary Beth hadn’t seen Raelynn in a few years but had heard she was back home with her daddy, rebounding from a nasty divorce.

“Hang on,” Mary Beth said, “I’m coming over there.”

She ordered Izzy to hold his position then cradled the brown paper bag by her stomach and made a hunched-over dash across the dirt road. Mary Beth ducked behind a shrub pine just as a bullet struck a rock behind her, making a sound like a church bell. She was crouched near the Explorer’s tailgate and scooted around to the side where the two deputies and her cousin Raelynn were cowering.

“That was close,” said the first deputy. His name tag identified him as Hawlings. He was the older of the two, mid-40s and leading man material, with a strong square jaw. Hair was more salt than pepper and he had a dark little mid-life crisis soul patch on his bottom lip that was shaped like a triangle. Mary Beth noticed Raelyn was sitting awfully close to him, rubbing shoulders as she did her damsel-in-distress routine.

“He’s had us pinned down here for over an hour,” Jenkins, the second, younger, more scared-looking deputy said. “You know this guy?”

“Sure, Uncle Jimmy’s a peach,” Mary Beth said, staring at her cousin. Mary Beth hated to admit it, but Raelynn looked good, like she’d gone on a revenge diet to let her ex-husband know what he was missing, and she’d cut her blonde hair, into a stylish little bob. Raelynn had Hawlings coat wrapped around her shoulders and when she shivered it separated revealing a skimpy little outfit underneath, like a waitress for one of those breasteraunts.

“He’s off the deep end,” Raelynn said. “Won’t take his medicine. Totally paranoid. Was plannin’ to go into town shooting the people who he thinks are out to get ‘em. I tried to hide his keys but when he heard the police pulling up he went off in a rage. I ran down here to try and warn these guys not to come no farther and he started firing on us.”

“Are his keys still in the house?” Mary Beth asked.

“Yeah, his are. I got mines.”

“How well hid are they?”

Raelynn frowned. “I did my best but I’s movin’ quick. It’s just a matter of time ‘til he finds ‘em.”

Mary Beth pushed her hat back on her head as she thought. She heard some branches break and peered around the back of the Explorer. She saw Izzy. He was still on the opposite side of the dirt road but had advanced his position to where he was even with the others, finding a good spot to hide behind a hickory stump.

“Izzy?” she called to him.

“I’m here, Sheriff.”

“We got a wild one up there, threatening to head into town, guns blazing. I’m gonna go up there and distract him.”

“How?” Izzy asked.

“Don’t worry about that. I’ve got a plan. But while I’m distracting him, I need you to creep around back to the barn where he keeps his truck and do something to disable it.”

In addition to being the only black member of the Jasper Creek Sheriff’s Department, Izzie was also, by far, the shortest—not quite five feet even with his boots on. He made up for his lack of height though with a big personality and an even bigger gun, a .44 magnum with an extended barrel as long as his forearm that he pulled in a flash. “You want I should shoot out his tires, Sheriff?”

Mary Beth shook her head. “I was thinking of something a little more subtle. Like maybe pull out the distributor cap.”

“Oh.” Izzy holstered his gun. “Roger that, Sheriff. I’ll take care of it.” “Good. Oh, and Izzy…”

“Yeah, Sheriff?”

“Stay low.” She winked at Izzy who saluted her with his middle finger.

Mary Beth crawled back to the side of the Explorer. “You got a loudspeaker in there?” she asked Hawlings, gesturing toward the SUV.

“Sure,” he responded. “What are you gonna do?”

“Just talk some sense into him.”

Mary Beth opened the driver-side door and crawled inside. She switched on the loudspeaker and stood on the door jamb. She could just make out her uncle’s cabin through the evergreens, listening to the echo of her amplified voice reverberating off the mountainside: “Uncle Jimmy. This is your favorite niece. Your sister Mamie’s girl, Mary Beth—”

A shot fired, tearing through the evergreens, clipping pine cones just above Mary Beth’s head. She fell, landing flat on her back, all the air leaving her lungs.

Mary Beth was dazed. The world was spinning. Izzy was yelling, asking was she okay, sounding like a grunt in a war movie who just saw his platoon leader get shot.

“I’m okay,” she said when she was able to breathe again. She got to a seated position and shook her head to clear out the cobwebs.

“Where’s my hat?”

Raelynn handed it to her. Mary Beth snatched it jealously and examined it carefully, thankful to find it uninjured.

“His memory ain’t good, Mae B,” Raelynn said. “He’d probably know you by your nickname.”

Mary Beth groaned. She found the CB mic hanging out the door. Crouching down, staying safely behind the shield of the Explorer this time, Mary Beth said, “Uncle Jimmy, I’m the one you used to call Strawberry Shortcake.”

She heard a chuckle from the opposite side of the dirt road. Mary Beth picked up a small rock and whipped it, side-arm, in Izzy’s general direction.

“Now listen, Uncle Jimmy,” she said, slipping into her McCray slang, “I done brought you some of your favorite blueberry moonshine.” As Mary Beth spoke she pulled a mason jar of clear liquid from the brown bag she’d been carrying. “I’m gonna walk it down this here dirt road and bring it to ya. But first, I’m gonna take the lid off.”

Mary Beth screwed off the gold lid and tossed it aside, catching a whiff of ethanol so strong she felt a contact buzz just off the smell. “So, you be a good ole boy and don’t shoot me, cause if you do, I’m gonna spill all this good ‘shine—and that’d be a tragedy.”

***


Izzy watched Mary Beth in disbelief. “You’re gonna get your head blown off!” he yelled.

Mary Beth waved for him to be quiet. “I swear she won’t be happy until she gives me a heart attack,” Izzy muttered. Mary Beth was brave. There was no doubt about that. Some said she was fearless. But reckless, was the word that more often came to Izzy’s mind when he thought of his best friend.

“You’re not gonna shoot are ya, Uncle Jimmy?” he heard her say. “Cause this here shine sure smells good.”

Izzy peered through the trees up toward the cabin, trying to get a fix on the old man, but all he could make out was a shadowy form up on the porch. A few seconds went by. No shots.

“Okay, I’m comin’ up now,” Mary Beth said. “Just me, Uncle Jimmy. ” As Mary Beth said this she looked over at Izzy and nodded for him to get moving.

“Shit. Here we go.” Izzy hated the woods. If he came within a country mile of poison ivy he’d have a rash for weeks. He crawled out from behind the hickory stump and crouched as low as he could, making a wide sweeping maneuver to his right so he could safely flank the house without alerting the old man. But staying quiet wasn’t easy, there were so many damned twigs and pine cones hidden on the leaf-covered ground that kept cracking and snapping no matter how delicately he stepped.

Izzy was a good distance from Mary Beth now, watching her slowly walking down the dirt path but he caught her glaring in his direction, mouthing for him to, “shut the hell up.” Izzy stepped on another branch that made a loud crack. He closed his eyes and held his breath, waiting for the sound of a gunshot. None came. Instead, he heard Mary Beth start singing at the top of her lungs.

Country Roads—West Virginia’s unofficial state song, singing it loud enough to cover up the noise Izzy was making trying to trek through the woods and he swept farther and farther to his right, little twigs popping with nearly every step. He lost sight of Mary Beth just as she was hitting the line about the misty taste of moonshine.

As Izzy drew closer, he realized the cabin was a lot bigger than it looked from a distance, and it was no shack. Built from light brown logs with thick white mortar like vanilla frosting, he could tell it had been recently stained and was well maintained. Looked almost like a gingerbread house. Two stories. Had a brick, wrap-around porch on three sides and a large detached garage, separated from the house by about 20 yards. Izzy was coming up on the back of the house, making a beeline for the garage past an antique tractor on display, surrounded by fountain grass and planters full of posies.

The garage must be what Mary Beth had referred to as Uncle Jimmy’s barn. It was built of the same wood as the house and had double barn-style doors that swung out.

Izzy found it unlocked but a rusty hinge squeaked as he pulled on the heavy door. Izzy froze, training his ears on the front of the house to see if he’d been detected. He could hear Mary Beth still singing, the old man actually singing with her now, really getting into it.

Izzy opened the door just enough to wriggle inside. There he found not one truck but two. A little white Chevy S-10, the hood at Izzy’s eye-level, and a big black Ford F-150 that he’d need a good-sized step-stool to reach. Izzy wasn’t sure how much time there’d be to accomplish this little mission and took a guess that the big truck belonged to the old man. The little one was probably Raelynn’s.

Fortunately, the F-150 was unlocked, so popping the hood was no problem. Reaching it would be. Uncle Jimmy had a large, red, Craftsman tool chest in the corner that looked big enough. Izzy unlocked the wheels and rolled it close to the black truck, locked it in place, and after several failed tries, eventually climbed on top of it, using it as a step ladder to sprawl under the hood of the F-150. He located the blue distributor cap that housed the spark plugs but found it pretty well protected by some type of exhaust tube.

Izzy made a half-hearted effort to remove the tube, before he decided to change to a more expedient course. He fished a pair of snippers out of the tool chest and simply cut the wires leading into the distributor cap. It would be a lot harder to restore power to the truck that way, but it wasn’t going anywhere any time soon.

After climbing down from the truck, Izzy rolled the tool box to the rear of the garage and noticed for the first time the two stickers on the rear bumper of the F-150. One read, REDNECK PRINCESS. The other, WARNING: MY BOOBS ARE BIGGER THAN MY BRAINS. Using his highly-trained powers of detection, Izzy guessed that the vehicle he’d just disabled belonged to Raelynn.

“Son of a bitch.”

Izzy went back to the door to see if he could hear Mary Beth. He couldn’t. The singing had stopped. He wasn’t sure what was going on out there or how much time he’d have. For all he knew, the old man could be headed this way

Izzy moved quick. He fished the snippers back out of the tool box and went to work on the S-10. It was a lot lower and easier to reach but he wasn’t going to waste time trying to neatly remove its distributor cap. Izzy found the wires leading into it and started cutting away.

He ‘d just closed the hood when he heard Mary Beth scream, “Uncle Jimmy! No!”

Then there was a gunshot. After that, Izzy heard what sounded like a woman in the distance, howling in pain. It was an awful, primal sound. Then there was another shot and the howling stopped.

***


Mary Beth was doing John Denver proud, singing Country Roads with all the gusto she could muster. The old man actually started singing with her as she got close, closing his eyes as he belted out the chorus, sawing back and forth in his white wooden rocking chair. She’d made it to within ten yards of the porch without getting shot by the time the song was over.

Mary Beth had remembered how much Uncle Jimmy loved Country Roads—used to line the kids up and make them sing it right before the head-standing competition at the family reunions. Piping it out, loud and proud, was the only thing she could think of to distract Uncle Jimmy from all the damn racket Izzy was making trying to creep through the woods. She’d lost sight of Izzy some time ago and didn’t know if he’d made it to the garage yet or not. Unless Uncle Jimmy asked for an encore, Izzy’d have to move a lot quieter or else he was likely to get shot.

“You got a good voice, Strawberry.” Uncle Jimmy was a wiry little thing, shorter than Mary Beth and probably didn’t weigh 140 pounds dripping wet. Had snow white hair slicked back like a greaser with too much pomade and wore black-framed, sixties style glasses, coke-bottle thick, that looked like they should come with a pocket protector.

“Thanks,” Mary Beth said. “You know you ought not shoot at people who are tryin’ to come visit ya, Uncle Jimmy.”

Uncle Jimmy shrugged. He had an old M40 rifle with a high-powered scope laid across his lap. “Those were just warning shots, Strawberry. If’ I’d wanted to hit ya, I’d a hit ya.”

“Well what a ya want a go scaring me for?” Mary Beth was turning on the little girl charm, syrupy sweet.

“I thought you’s with them.” Uncle Jimmy pointed his rifle toward the stand of evergreens in the distance.

The pit bull jerked at his chain, violently yanking his head around trying desperately to pull free of his collar.

“Say, Uncle Jimmy, does your dog bite?” she asked. Jimmy looked down at the mastiff as though just realizing he was there. “Nah, Two Dogs don’t bite,” he said. “Sit down Two Dogs! And shut up!” The dog complied, sitting next to Uncle Jimmy like a stone gargoyle.

Mary Beth looked around to see if there was another dog on the porch that she’d missed somehow. There wasn’t.

“Why do you call him Two Dogs?”

Uncle Jimmy looked at her like she was stupid. “Cause it’s his name, I reckon.” “Yeah, but why’d you name him that—seeing as there’s only one of him?”

“Cause there used to be two, but one got kilt, tusslin’ with black bear. After that I kept hollerin’ ‘Two Dogs’ and this one kept a comin’. So no need to change it. Your name’s whatever you answer to.”

Mary Beth, who was used to being called all manner of names and nicknames—Mary, Mary Elizabeth, Mary Beth, Mae B., MB, Sheriff, even Strawberry Shortcake—had to admit that made some sense. Uncle Jimmy had always been full of little nuggets of hillbilly wisdom like that. He could have gotten a job writing fortunes that they stuck inside something unique to West Virginia—pepperoni rolls, maybe, or the bottom of a moonshine jar—if there was such a thing.

“So how ‘bout that bottle of blue?”

“Right.” Mary Beth stepped timidly up on the porch, staying as far as she could from the dog and gave her uncle the jar. He wasted no time getting into it. Mary Beth let him. She took a seat in the empty rocking chair that backed up to the mountain side of the porch and gave Uncle Jimmy a few minutes of quiet sipping as they both enjoyed the view.

The whole time she was thinking about Izzy. How much time would he need to get the truck disabled? Quite a bit, she feared. Izzy wasn’t exactly mechanically inclined. Once in high school she’d had to show him how to check the oil in his grandmother’s El Camino. She’d better keep Uncle Jimmy talking.

A strong gust of wind came off the mountain and whipped around the porch. Mary Beth buttoned the top button of her coat, shivering from the cold and noticed Uncle Jimmy was just wearing a flannel shirt, no coat, but didn’t seem bothered by the elements. “Sweet Jesus, Uncle Jimmy, it’s colder than a mother-in-law’s love up here. Don’t you wanta put on a coat?””

Uncle Jimmy held the mason jar out to her. “Have a hoot. That’ll warm you up.” Mary Beth wanted to keep her wits about her and knew from long experience just how strong Colby’s shine could be. “I’ll pass,” she said.

Uncle Jimmy gave her a dead stare. “I said, have a hoot.”

Mary Beth took the jar tentatively, eyeing the fermented blueberries floating inside like dead bodies.

“Well what should we drink to?” she asked.

“Let’s drink to the Flash.”

The Flash, was a reference to Elwood Gray, a local folk hero. One of the first black men to ever play for McCray County High School after integration who led the team to back-to-back championships in ‘64 and ’65. But, unfortunately, the Flash had recently gone down in flames—literally. Wasn’t more than a fortnight ago he’d got drunk in his Mapelton apartment and fell asleep with a lit cigarette in his hand, setting his easy chair on fire.

“To the late, great, Elwood Gray,” Mary Beth said, and took a healthy sip from the jar. The liquor hit her instantly, burning down her chest and turning her cheeks red. She hacked a little from the overpowering taste.

Uncle Jimmy cackled. “God damn. That’s good ain’t it?” His teeth were yellow and sharp, much like the dog’s. Probably needed dentures if you could ever get him to a dentist.

“Sure is,” Mary Beth said in a hoarse voice, handing back the jar. Uncle Jimmy helped himself to a few more sips.

Her goal was just to keep talking, give Izzy all the time he needed to disable the truck, and keep Uncle Jimmy drinking for as long as she could. She figured if she could get him halfway through that jar, he’d have to go take a long alcohol-induced nap, and Raelynn could handle him from there. Just start mixing his meds in with his mashed potatoes and he should be fine.

“Raelynn, says you don’t want to take your medicine,” Mary Beth said.

“Raelynn,” he said with disgust. “She’s in it with ‘em.”

“With who?””

“All of ‘em. Them prospectors wanting to buy up everybody’s land for nothing, keep mining around, looking for clean coal. Clean coal. Dumbest damn thing I ever heard. Coal ain’t s’posed to be clean. If it’s clean, it ain’t coal!”

“Well, you need your medicine, Uncle Jimmy. Every time you stop taking it you get yourself in trouble. Remember a few years back I had to come up here and smooth things out for ya?”

Uncle Jimmy seemed to be grasping for the memory but not quite reaching it. “I don’t recollect,” he said.

“Remember Buck Davis?”

Uncle Jimmy scowled and ran his gnarled hands through his hair, fluffing out the feathers of his duck-ass hairdo. Mary Beth could see it coming back to him. It was then that he took note of the star on her hat. “That’s right. You’re the law ain’t ya? Over there in Jasper Creek?”

“That’s right,” Mary Beth said.

Uncle Jimmy had a plug chew crammed inside his lip and spat, leaving a trail of it running down his chin, clinging to his beard stubble. Mary Beth didn’t know how in the hell he could chew that stuff and drink at the same time.

“Can’t trust the law ‘round here,” he said. “They’re all in on it too.”

“In on what?”

“They work for the coal companies. Always have.”

Jimmy took another sip. He breathed real deep, enjoying the burn of that one. “They want me to take my medicine to numb me out. Keep me from takin’ care of my business.”

“What business is that, Uncle Jimmy?”

He gave her a hard stare. “Revenge, little girl. Revenge for the Flash. I know they kilt ‘em.”

Mary Beth didn’t like the mean look on Uncle Jimmy’s face. Not while he was gripping that rifle he’d kept from his Marine days. She tried to sound extra calm. “Now why would somebody wanta do that?”

Uncle Jimmy took a long drink and leaned back in his chair, looking at places far away. His eyes were already a little glassy and Mary Beth could tell the wheels of his damaged brain were starting to turn slower and slower.

“‘Cause Gray took a stand against ‘em see. Against big coal. Telling it like it is. Tried to block the strip mining and get some new businesses in here. Made all kinds of enemies. You say something bad against coal and folks around here are on you like stink on shit. They think coal is mother’s milk. But what they don’t realize is, the milk is poison.”

Mary Beth had heard a little about Elwood Gray’s opposition to a new strip mine in McCray. He had some pie in the sky idea about attracting green energy companies to come in and revitalize the area. Mary Beth had her doubts about that but didn’t think it was fair how some folks had labelled Gray a job killer.

“So, who is it you’re seeking revenge against? Who’s the bad guy?”

Uncle Jimmy wasn’t in a mood to let relevant questions like that get in the way of the delusion he was swimming in. “They!” he shouted. “Them!” He shook his head angrily. “I don’t know exactly who, but I’m gonna find out.”

Mary Beth knew she probably shouldn’t provoke Uncle Jimmy but she had some small hope she might be able to reason with him a bit. Get him to talk through what he was thinking and realize it wasn’t rational.

“The way I hear it, the Flash killed his self,” Mary Beth said.

Uncle Jimmy didn’t like that. “Uh, uh. Ain’t no way.”

“That’s what the paper said. They say he got drunk and fell asleep with a cigarette in his hand and got burnt up.”

Uncle Jimmy slapped the arm of his rocking chair. “The man didn’t drink!” “How do you know that?”

“Cause I just saw him this past April. We was both ridin’ a car in the Easter parade and got to talkin’. He told me he gave up the drinkin’.”

“So, suppose he lied?”

“The Flash don’t lie.”

“Okay, so, suppose he was tellin’ the truth at the time, that he’d quit drinkin’ but then later he started up again.”

Uncle Jimmy squinted hard at her. A frightening expression formed on his face. She’d seen it once before. Back when she had to smooth things over for him after his incident with Buck Davis. It was his war face. In one quick motion, Uncle Jimmy raised up his rifle, pointing it in her direction.

Mary Beth barely had time to yell, “Uncle Jimmy! No!” before he pulled the trigger.

***


The sound was deafening from such close range. Mary Beth’s ears were ringing as she started to register the fact she was still alive. She heard some kind of terrible shrill howling noise that grew louder as her hearing recovered. Then Uncle Jimmy squeezed off another shot and Mary Beth turned her attention up on the ridge behind her, where she saw a dying bear curled around the base of a tree.

“We’re in the revenge business today, Two Dogs.” The dog looked up at Jimmy licking its lips, asking permission. “Go on Two Dogs,” he said, as he undid the leash. “Go and get you some revenge for what they did to your brother.”

***


“I thought the old man had shot you,” Izzy said, when Mary Beth finally returned to the clearing, thirty minutes after watching Two Dogs drag the big cat back to the house. “I came around the corner ready to fire and I see a crazy dog tearing that bear to pieces and you and your uncle up on the porch sipping moonshine like you were just watching TV or something.”

Mary Beth smiled. “Had to wait around until he finally fell asleep.” She turned to Raelynn. “Just slip his meds into his coffee whenever he gets up.”

She was thinking about what her Uncle Jimmy had said, wondering if the old coot might be onto something about the Flash. What if his death wasn’t what it appeared? What if the law in McCray was crooked? And Lord of Mercy what a mess that would be.

Mary Beth brushed past them, eyeing what was left of the shine, swirling it around the mason jar.

“Where are you going?” Izzy asked.

“After all that,” Mary Beth said, “I need a drink.”

Izzy looked down at his watch. “It’s 10 am.”

Mary Beth hollered back. “I know. It’s fixin’ to be one hell of a day.”


Russell W. Johnson is a North Carolina attorney who got so sick of billable hours he began writing crime fiction. His debut story, "Chung Ling Soo's Greatest Trick," won the Edgar Award's Robert L. Fish Memorial prize for best short story by a new author. Since then he’s been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and was a finalist for the Claymore Award. More information at www.russellwjohnson.com .

Monday, March 11, 2019

The Heat, fiction by Shannon Hollinger

The smell of damp earth mingles with the sharp tang of oil, tickling her nose, and for a moment, Police Officer Penelope Holden wonders what she’s doing in the basement of her grandfather’s old farm house. She rises reluctantly from the memory, pulled by the nagging feeling that there is something important that she’s supposed to be doing. Then, in the blink of an eye, her eye, she’s back in the present, one quick instant of awareness before she moves and a sharp pain knifes through her head, clouding her thoughts and vision.

Holding still, breathing deeply, she looks around, taking in the hard dirt floor beneath her, dark stains of dampness spreading across the soil like hungry vines searching for prey, looping tendrils creeping from the edges of roughly cemented cinderblock. In the dim light she can just make out the exposed beams that cross overhead, the rickety staircase with no railing that leads up to the house above, the huge oil tank hunched in the corner. She might not be under her grandfather’s farmhouse, but she is in someone’s basement. Struggling to sit up, she finds her wrists and ankles are zip-tied. Duct tape stretches tightly over her mouth, pulling at her skin. Penelope rolls onto her back and rocks her torso up. Her body pulses with pain, an uncomfortably intense pressure threatening her bladder.

***


It was late afternoon when Penelope knocked on the door. She’d been canvasing the neighborhood all day, one house after another, hoping for any lead that might prove useful in furthering the investigation into the disappearance of Sammy Kohlner, a six-year-old boy who had gone missing from his family’s backyard that morning. The lead investigator thought the boy had probably wandered off and focused his efforts on organizing search teams to explore the nearby woods for any sign of the boy. The boy’s mother, though, had been adamant that he wouldn’t have left the yard by himself, and that he couldn’t possibly had gotten farther than she could see in the time the child was left alone.

They say that a second is all it takes, and it’s true. In the time it took Sammy’s mother to run inside and answer the phone, her son disappeared. “I wasn’t even gone a minute,” Penelope heard as she watched his mother sob. “I would have been back even sooner, but a motorcycle was driving by, and I couldn’t hear who was on the other end of the line until it passed.” By then it was too late. The boy was gone. And though her superior officer thought the child had wandered off, Penelope was struck by the conviction in the mother’s voice.

Perhaps someone had taken Sammy, snatching him from the yard the very second his mother went inside, the sounds of the abduction concealed by the din of a passing noisy motor. That tiny seed of what if had been enough to make Penelope volunteer for the door to door inquiry. She had no idea that doing so would lead to this, her bound and gagged, and from the feel of the tender bruises covering her body, tossed down the stairs to end up on the dirt floor of someone’s basement.

***


The door opened like the others before it. Penelope smiled at the woman, and though something inside her whispered danger as she took in the weathered face framed by gray hair, the stout, matronly body squeezed into a pair of too tight jeans, she kept her guard down, suspecting nothing. Her instincts cried wolf all the time, after all. When she went out on a rainy night to pick up some take out, or when the good-looking guy with the great smile standing behind her in line at the grocery store made eye contact. But, even as a police officer, Penelope had encountered little real danger in her life.

Perhaps, if she had considered how a less prepared driver may have responded when her wheels hydroplaned on the slick road, of if had she ever gotten the cute guy’s name and ran his record, discovered that he had a long history of domestic abuse, she would have realized that it was her instinct that kept her safe. Maybe she would have trusted her gut when it spoke to her, sweat pooling on her upper lip, beading at her temples as the red door swung open, revealing the husky woman.

Penelope introduced herself to the woman who opened the door. “Good afternoon, ma’am, I’m Officer Holden with the Waverly Police Department. I’m sorry to bother you today, but a little boy went missing down the street, and I’m checking with all of the neighbors, seeing if anyone saw anything, maybe a child walking alone, something that struck you as suspicious, anything out of the ordinary at all.”

Noticing a piece of mail that had fallen across the threshold onto the toe of her boot, dislodged from the mail slot when the door opened, Penelope bent to pick it up. Handing the letter over, her eyes darted from the name printed on the envelope, Dr. Lee Chin, to the picture of the Asian family on the hall table, finally meeting the gaze of the late middle-aged white woman standing before her. The woman tracked the path Penelope’s eyes had taken. Turning to look at the photograph behind her, a smile spread across her face as she turned back towards Penelope.

“I’m the nanny,” she said. “One of the children is actually in the bath right now, so . . .” she gestured with her head over her shoulder.

“Oh, of course, I’m sorry. I can stop back later,” Penelope said, taking a step back, unable to shake the feeling of unease that had settled over her shoulders like a heavy coat.

“Oh, no, I wouldn’t want you to have to do that. No reason to go through all that trouble. Please, come in. I just need to keep an ear open. I can do that and talk at the same time.”

She stepped back, making a sweeping motion with her arm, indicating that Penelope should enter. Penelope snuck another glance at the photo as she passed, anxiety building with each step that carried her further into the house, worrying that she was wasting too much time, that each moment that passed allowed the missing boy to slip further from her grasp, but also something else, a worry whose source she couldn’t quite pinpoint.

Leaving the foyer, walking down the hall, it struck her, not like lightning, but as a subtle thought that slowly rose up, breaching the surface of her consciousness like a bubble. Both of the kids in that picture looked like teenagers. Why would they need a nanny? Or a bath?

The synapses in her brain fired, making connections, sorting through the jumble swirling inside her head, the daily juggle of what needed to be done that day, whether she had turned the coffee pot off, hope that the little boy would be found quickly and safely, wondering when would be the right time to approach her superior officer about entering the detective program and taking the exam, the discomfort of her pants’ button digging deeply into the soft flesh of her belly from the weight she’d recently gained. Reaching the living room, one thought broke through, and she had a single, glorious moment of clarity. Then a wave of pain crashed against her head, bringing with it a dark blanket that dropped, blocking from her vision the motorcycle parked incongruously on the living room rug and the little boy sitting in front of the TV.

***
A bead of sweat traces its way down Penelope’s cheek. Raising a shoulder to wipe at her face, she thinks she smells something burning. She draws a deep breath. She does smells smoke.

Penelope tilts her head to look up at the door. It looks hazy at the top of the stairs, but that could be from the lack of lighting. Is it her imagination, or is that a finger of smoke reaching out from beneath the door, beckoning to her like a waving hand?

A smoke alarm sounds from the house above, the high-pitched beeping echoing off the walls around her. Penelope tugs at her bonds, knowing that struggling against the zip ties is futile. Bending in half, she brings her wrists to her ankles, tugging her right shoelace out of the eyelets of her boot. When it’s half free, she pulls the lace through the zip tie between her wrists and puts the end in her mouth. Gripping the aglet firmly between her teeth, she saws the zip tie against the lace, the hard plastic biting deeply into the flesh of her wrists, her skin raw and burning. She pauses, inspecting the tiny trench eroded into her plastic bonds, then resumes her efforts, drawing her wrists up and down, back and forth, until the tie breaks, her arms flying wide with freedom.

She rips the tape from her mouth and undoes the lace the rest of the way from her boot, threading the cord between the zip tie and her ankles, grabbing the ends in each fist. A crash upstairs makes her flinch. Faintly, above the pounding of her heart, she thinks she can hear the crackling of fire. Her eyes water and burn. Sawing through the last of her bonds, Penelope rolls onto her knees and pushes herself to her feet, eying the door at the top of the stairs. Amber shadows flicker against the wall, like candlelight from a jack-o-lantern.

An engine thunders to life, the noise pitching to a roar then quickly fading. Late afternoon light seeps in around the edges of a bulkhead. The promise of fresh air propels Penelope forward. She moves unsteadily towards the bulkhead, her limbs stiff, back sore. Standing on the bottom step, she pushes against the heavy pressed-wood doors. They give a foot but do not open. Penelope peers through the gap, eyes studying the thick chain that prevents the doors from opening completely. Crouching, she climbs higher on the stairs until she is curled under the doors. Raising only one side up, she contorts herself, pushing her head through the gap. Squirming, she fights to get her shoulders through, her legs bracing hard against the wall, her torso squeezed and scraped, breath forced from her lungs as she slowly inches her way through the narrow space until she flops clumsily onto the ground, completely birthed from the basement.

She lies flat on her back, panting, inhaling greedily. Staring up at the sky, squinting against the still visible sun, Penelope realizes not much time has passed since she had knocked on the front door. She must not have been unconscious long.

Pushing into a sitting position, her vision clouds, each beat of her heart throbbing through her skull. She pauses, letting the pain subside. As the grey haze recedes to the edges of her sight, her eyes focus on the tire tracks etched into the soft soil of the yard beside her. She studies the ruts which lead across the yard, to the house, then back over the yard through the back gate, unable to determine which set was made when the bike arrived, and which when it left. Does it matter? She feels like it does.

Penelope struggles to her feet, stumbles, wary eyes watching the roils of black smoke swarming angrily behind the windows of the house. She needs to call this in. She needs to report the fire. Yet she finds herself drawn to the tire tracks, approaching the design that repeats back and forth across the yard, a pattern not unlike like a set of fingerprints. The deep, pristine impression of a freshly inked finger, the first finger pressed against the FD-258 card when she books a perp at the station, then a lighter imprint, like when she presses the entire hand all at once without re-inking. Only the difference in these markings aren’t due to ink transfer. The tracks were made by a motorcycle’s tires. They were formed by the weight pressing the bike down against the earth.

Penelope’s head snaps towards the house, adrenalin flushing hot beneath her skin. There’d been less weight on the back of the bike when one set of the tracks were made. The kidnapped boy was brought to the house on the bike. If his weight wasn’t on the bike when it left, then that meant . . .

Running to the house, Penelope peers through the window, but the dark smoke, like low-hanging storm clouds, blocks her view. She tries the handle on the back door, the knob twisting under her grasp. Shoving the door open, she’s smacked in the face by a wall of acrid smoke. Penelope drops to her hands and knees, eyes stinging, lungs burning as she coughs. “Sammy?” she chokes out, crawling forward into the inferno-like heat of the house. Her sweat-drenched skin prickles. The low growl of flames rustles in her ears, the noise grower louder as she continues forward, blinking rapidly against the heat and smoke, struggling for each breath. She feels herself weakening.

Panic wells inside her, every instinct in her body shouting for her to retreat. She can barely think above the noise–crackling flames, rasping gasps, gnashing teeth, frenzied thoughts. When she rounds the couch, and sees the shoe, she thinks she’s hallucinating. She is too late, has pressed too far, has sealed the fate for both herself and the boy by making the wrong decision. She should have called for help.

Sprawling on her belly across the carpet, she musters a small burst of energy and reaches for the tiny tennis shoe, an image of scuffed, dirty white leather with a red cartoon car across the side filling her brain as her eyes close. It must have been part of the description she had taken from the mother. Funny how your brain fills in details like that. Her fingers stretch to wrap around the phantom image. Penelope expects a fistful of air. When her hand clenches around something solid, she forces her eyes open, lids peeling back from the dried orbs with the resistance of Velcro. She squeezes. The shoe weakly tries to pull from her grasp.

“Sammy.” She feels the name leave her lips but can’t hear the sound. She strengthens her grip on the tiny foot, pushing herself forward with every ounce of strength she has. The panel on the bottom of the couch brushes across her cheek, rough material that smells like feet and dust. Penelope squeezes her face into the space under the couch, her lungs greedily drinking in the cooler, cleaner air. Her thoughts clear. Giving the small shoe clenched in her hand another squeeze, she’s shocked to feel a hot, damp hand wrap around her fingers. Releasing the foot, she takes the hand in hers. Drawing one last breath from under the couch, she reenters hell, smoke swirling, flames spitting, licking at the fabric of an armchair only feet away.

Her gaze settles on Sammy’s soot-stained face, sweat and tears streaking paths through the grime. She draws him towards her, pulling him under her, guiding him towards safety. Penelope feels like she’s being boiled alive as they slowly inch toward the door, Sammy crawling under her with his hands and feet bound. Something grazes her back and she yelps, fire searing through her uniform, the flame dying against her flesh. The skin on her back scalds and tingles, itching as it flares into blisters. She wants to give in, to collapse, but she can’t. They’re so close; she can smell the drafts of fresh air mingling with the smoke, feeding the fire.

Wrapping one arm under Sammy’s stomach, she crawls forward on three limbs until she feels the soft forgiveness of earth under her knees. She presses on, getting Sammy as far from the burning house as she can before flopping onto her back, letting the heat from her skin leech into the cool soil beneath her.

***


A weeping sound tunnels through the darkness, into Penelope’s head. The world beneath her jolts and she panics, tries to throw her arms out for balance, but she can’t. They are bound to her sides. Forcing the heavy drapery of her eyelids apart, she struggles to focus her vision.

“Ssh, Officer Holden, it’s all right.”

Following the sound of the voice, she finds herself looking into a pair of concerned blue eyes above her. “You have some second degree burns on your back, and we’re treating you for smoke inhalation. We’re going to take you to the hospital for further treatment.”

Eyes flying wide, Penelope searches the crowd of officials and curious neighbors gathered on the streets around her. “The boy?” Muffled words bounce off the oxygen mask strapped to her face.

“He’s just fine. In fact,” the eyes disappear from view and she feels the brake on the stretcher beneath her click down.

The back of Sammy’s head appears. He and his mother cling to each other. His mother holds an oxygen mask to his face with one hand, cradling him against her with the other. Penelope smiles towards the mother’s grateful face but is unable to take her eyes off Sammy. His arms wrapped tightly around his mother’s neck, his little black Nikes tucked snugly against her hips.

“His shoes,” Penelope croaks.

Sammy’s mom stops gushing gratitude at Penelope and glances down at her son’s feet.

“I thought they were white. With red cars.”

“I must have described the wrong shoes earlier,” she says, her head tilting to the side. “I’m sorry. I forgot he had these on. I forgot he even owned them I was so panicked, but you found him, Officer Holden, and I’m so truly grateful for everything you’ve done. Thank you.” Her voice breaks. The woman buries her face into her son’s neck, muffling a sob.

Stepping forward, the paramedic releases the brake on the stretcher and loads Penelope onto the ambulance. No one hears her say, “But I saw the shoes you described.”

The ambulance door slams shut and a familiar face looms into view. Detective Shaw takes a seat next to the gurney and gives Penelope a smile. “That was some good work today, Officer Holden.”

Penelope opens her mouth to speak, then stops herself. Had she really seen Sammy’s shoe in that burning house, or had she imagined it? Had she even found him? Or had he found her? Could she allow herself to take credit where it wasn’t due?

“Sir, I . . .” her voice trails off, not knowing how to describe what may or may not have happened inside the burning house.

Detective Shaw glances at the paramedic, busy inserting an IV into her arm. Lowering his head closer to Penelope’s, his voice low, Shaw asks, “Did something happen back there, in the fire? Something you can’t explain?”

Penelope blinks. Her eyes feel like they’re tearing up but are still beyond dry. She whispers, “Yes, sir.”

Leaning back, Detective Shaw clears his throat and says, “You’re a good cop, Holden. But what happened back there, whatever it was? That’s what’s going to make you a great cop. There’s no way to explain it. You’ve just got to go with it. That innate instinct, that gut feeling? Never doubt it.”

Thinking back over the events of the day, Penelope knows he is right. She nods, a small smile curving the edges of her chapped lips. Detective Shaw’s words don’t just allay her fears; they infuse her with an inner calm she’s never felt before. A feeling that comes from knowing that she’s on the right path. This is what she is meant to do. Officer Holden is who she is meant to be.


With degrees in Crime Scene Technology and Physical Anthropology, Shannon Hollinger hasn’t just seen the dark side of humanity–she’s been elbow deep inside of it! Her short fiction has appeared in a number of magazines and anthologies. To see where you can find more of her work, check out www.ShannonHollinger.com.