The Lights at Crawford Hills

by Brendan DuBois

  They reached the stream, and Jay’s boots sank into a stretch of mud, making a squishing noise as they forded the shallow stream. The lights were now above them, up near the peak of the slope. They were white and wavering, and occasionally one would dart out, like a thin searchlight beam. He tried hard to swallow, to clear his throat, but his mouth was very dry and his tongue seemed to stick to the roof of his mouth. All he could hear was his own harsh breathing and the snap and crunch of branches being broken and leaves being stepped on as he and the chief made their way up the hill. He reached down to his weapon more than once, but each time his hand touched the cool metal of his pistol he would draw back. This was no time to draw out his weapon, not here, where a trip or a fall could fire off an accidental shot.

  The chief stopped, an arm out at his side. Jay came up to him, smelling the stench of sweat. He wondered what was going on in the chief’s mind.

  “Jay, what do you think?” the chief whispered.

  “Not sure, it might be-”

  The world seemed to explode.

  A line of three or four lights suddenly blazed forth in an orange flare above the other lights, and the ravine echoed and reechoed with hollow booms. The chief grabbed at him and Jay fell to the ground with him, scratching his face and hands in the process, and he thought, We’re being shot at, first time ever in our job, we’re being shot at. Someone is trying to kill us both, and a rational part of him listened to a whiz-scrape-scrape as a bullet flew over them, passing through the tree branches.

  Everything seemed to move too fast. He got up on his hands and knees, trying to decipher what in hell was going on, and there was another barrage of gunfire. The chief tugged at his holster belt.

  “Down, you idiot!” the chief whispered. “We’re way outgunned.”

  He went back on his stomach, the cold ground seeming to suck away the warmth from his body. He held his right arm out straight, the pistol grasped tight in his fist, and his heart was pounding so hard it was like a muted hum in his chest. He was breathing so fast he was scared he couldn’t hear anything coming closer to him, so he tried to hold his breath every few moments, but that didn’t work. All he could see were the lights, way up on the slope of the hill, and a twisted tangle of shadows and shapes on all sides. He was trying hard to make out what was in front of him when the chief slid over.

  “Look,” he said. “The lights are gone.”

  So they were. Jay stood up with the chief and they resumed their fast walk up the hill, and after a while, the chief switched on a small flashlight. He cupped the end of the flashlight with his fist, so only a little light leaked out. Jay was clambering over a large branch that had cracked off an evergreen when part of it snagged on his holster and he fell, scratching his hands yet again. It was wet where he had fallen, as if he had tripped into a muddy spot. The chief flashed his light at him.

  “All right?”

  “Yeah,” he said, sitting up. “But it’s wet over here. Looks like I fell in some mud.”

  The chief knelt down and pointed the flashlight to the ground, his hand still blocking most of the beam, and Jay felt his stomach tense up. His hands were smeared with rust-brown stains.

  “Blood,” was all the chief said.

  Jay got up, rubbing his hands furiously on his pants. Blood. The chief moved his flashlight and Jay saw a pool of blood as wide as a bathtub on the ground.

  He said, “Chief, the old lady’s right.”

  “Yeah, looks that way, don’t it. I’ve seen enough. Come on, we’ve got some ground to cover.”

  “Where? The top of the hill?”

  “Nope.” The chief took his free hand away from the flashlight, and Jay blinked hard against the bright glare. “Back to the cruiser.”

  ***

  As the chief sped the cruiser down the dirt road, the flashing from the light bar on the cruiser’s roof lit up the surrounding woods with a bright blue glare. The chief said, “Look at it this way, Jay. If whoever was up there wants to get out, the only place they can use is Mast Road. We’re gonna get there first and cut those suckers off.”

  The cruiser roared by Agatha Tate’s house and Jay nodded a greeting as they went by. Well, lady, he thought, we found your lights and we found your blood, but we didn’t find your aliens. But what in hell did we find?

  “Execution,” he said aloud.

  “What?” the chief asked.

  “You know, she was almost right, people were being killed up there. Not aliens. Hell, not that. But I bet there’s pot being grown up there, Chief, and I bet you a breakfast at Dino’s that if we look hard enough, maybe get the DEA involved, you find some serious crops up there. And you know what they do out in California if you trespass on those pot fields? Bang. Taken care of.”

  The chief just nodded. Jay spoke up again, reaching down to the radio microphone. “Should I put a call in to county for backup?”

  The cruiser made a sharp corner and he could hear gravel being kicked up by the tires.

  “No,” the chief finally said. “It’ll take them too long to get here, and I think we can take care of it by ourselves. Honest.”

  Jay drew his hand back and bit his lip in frustration. A few minutes ago he had been playing George the Groundhog, burrowing in the dirt, trying to get his head blown off while World War III nearly broke out, and now the chief wanted to play small-town hero. He looked down at his hands. From the dashboard lights he saw the brown flecks of dried blood still sticking to his skin, and he rubbed his hands again on his pants legs.

  But the blood remained.

  He said, “Chief, look, there are at least four or five guys up there, all with guns, and you want to take care of it by ourselves?”

  They came to the Mast Road intersection and the chief slid the cruiser to a stop, and then made a hard left turn. The blue strobe lights lit up the intersection.

  “Chief? Don’t we need backup?”

  The chief gave him a quick look, his face tight, as they roared up the narrow country road. “Jay, look, I’m trying to drive the goddamn cruiser, so will you please shut up?”

  Jay grabbed the armrest as the cruiser made another tight curve and he thought, That’s it, I’m going back to bad dreams in a big department. Better than being held hostage to a small department with a chief who has a hero complex. This night’s probably the most excitement he’s had all year, and he has to make the most of it by playing Super Chief. No doubt the old geezer imagined his picture and an approving story on the front page of next week’s Crawford Chronicle.

  The road was narrow blacktop, with no yellow line down the middle, not much of a shoulder on either side. There were no streetlights, few houses, and every now and then, the cruiser’s headlights would catch the quick gleam of an animal’s eyes glowing by the side of the road.

  The chief switched on the side spotlight, and Jay wondered what he was looking for. He was going to ask, but no, screw it, this was the chief’s show.

  They passed a car on a straight portion of the road, a late-model Ford Taurus with New York plates. Jay turned in his seat to look at the car as the cruiser flew by.

  “Chief, we just passed that car. It had New York plates.”

  “Yeah,” the chief said.

  “Well, don’t you want to check it?”

  “Nope.”

  Fine, he thought.

  Another car was pulled to the side, a Volkswagen with Vermont plates. Nothing. Jay squirmed in his seat. What in hell was going on?

  Then, a pickup truck, coming from the opposite direction. The chief swore under his breath and slammed on the brakes. The cruiser skidded to a stop and the chief swung the steering wheel about and made a sloppy U-turn, almost losing the cruiser’s rear wheels in a drainage ditch. The chief slapped a switch on the console and the siren screamed into life, and they bore up fast on the pickup truck, which quickly pulled over to the side. There seemed to be three men sitting in the cab.

  The chief snapped open his holster, took out his flashlight, a
nd turned to Jay. “Just play along, Jay, you’ll see what’s up soon enough.”

  Jay nodded and joined the chief outside. The air was dramatically cooler. He had his hand on his service pistol-a Glock 10mm-and found himself drawing it out and keeping it close to his leg as he walked up to the truck. In the rear window of the cab was a gun rack, with three hunting rifles stretched across. So that’s why the chief stopped them, he thought, walking up to the right side of the truck and switching on his own flashlight. But how could the chief have known the truck had a gun rack when it was heading towards us?

  The chief walked up to the driver’s side of the cab and started talking to the guys inside. He played his flashlight across the interior of the cab. Jay stayed at the rear, towards the right, keeping an eye on the two passengers. All three looked to be in their late twenties, early thirties. The truck was a black Ford, dented and dirty, with oversized tires and a tarpaulin pulled over the truck bed. He stepped closer to the rear of the truck to check the license plate, and he-

  Froze.

  Blood was dripping from the truck bed, through the bottom of the tailgate.

  “Chief!” he yelled, stepping back, pistol held up high, and pulling the tarpaulin off with his other hand, looked down in shock at the jumble of bodies, the brown eyes, their limbs stiff and protruding.

  When the arrest and the bookings were completed, Jay and the chief went to Dino’s Diner, where the chief had his usual four-scrambled-eggs-and-sausage breakfast, but where Jay made do with a cup of coffee and a couple of slices of toast. The memory of what he had seen a few hours ago was still fresh in his mind, like an open wound.

  Deer.

  Dead deer.

  All those shots, all those lights, all this fuss, over dead deer…

  The chief looked over, chewing, and said, “You see, Jay, those guys from Albion were up there every Saturday night, jacking deer.” The chief swallowed, sawed off another piece of sausage. It was five-thirty in the morning and the diner was crowded with mill workers, farmers, and lumber truckers. The only women were the two waitresses, a mother-and-daughter team who both had tattoos on their arms.

  “Jacking?” he asked.

  “Yeah. Fish and Game are going to have a talk with them soon, just you wait and see. It’s illegal as hell, and besides, they were doing it out of season. They get in the woods at night, at a place where they know deer tend to congregate, and then they hit ‘em with lights. A strong flashlight is good enough, and the deer freeze and stand still, every time the light hits ‘em. They’ll stand there long enough so even a grandpa with palsy in his hands can shoot ‘em, which is why it’s against the law.”

  Jay took a bite from his toast and picked up his coffee cup, and then quickly put it down.

  “Hold it,” he said. “You knew right then, back at the house, you knew what was going on, didn’t you?”

  “Hunh?”

  “When you asked Mrs. Tate if the deer were still coming to her apple orchard, you were checking to see if deer were around, right? And no wonder she didn’t hear any shooting. She was stone deaf. You knew right then we were dealing with illegal hunters.”

  The chief winked at him and ate another piece of sausage. “Let’s just say I had a suspicion… a pretty good one.”

  “So why didn’t you tell me anything?”

  “Well…” The chief chewed some more, swallowed. “Jay, something you should learn is to try to keep your feet on the ground a bit, especially around here. I mean, look at you and Mrs. Tate. You both take a little blood, some lights, and one of you has aliens landing up there and the other has drug dealers involved in ritual executions. I just took the same info, kept my feet on the ground, and worked with it.”

  “How come you didn’t stop that first car, the one with the New York license plates?”

  The chief shrugged. “Only one person in it. We saw more than one light. And the rear of the car was riding too high. If there were two or three deer in the trunk, it’d be riding low. You’re talking a few hundred pounds. No, I knew I was looking for a pickup truck or an SUV, and I just stopped the first truck we saw.”

  Jay finished his coffee and the chief mopped up the last of his eggs with a piece of toast. After their waitress-the daughter-dropped off their check, Jay said, “That simple, then. It was that simple. But those lights, Chief, you must admit they were scary at first.”

  The chief was silent for a bit, and then he said slowly, “Funny thing about those lights. How many did you see?”

  “About ten or eleven.”

  “Yeah, that’s about right. And those three boys were by themselves. That’s it. Even if they were carrying a flashlight in each hand, that only adds up to six. Where do you think those extra lights came from?”

  Jay rubbed at his tired eyes, feeling the weariness sinking into his bones. The inside of the diner was getting lighter as the sun crawled its way up from the horizon.

  “I give up, Chief. Where did those extra lights come from?”

  The chief winked again, his face worn but happy-looking. “I don’t know. One of the older boys, he said that those lights flew right over their heads as they were coming over the crest of the ridge, and then disappeared. They didn’t make any sound. They weren’t in any particular shape. They were just there.”

  Jay looked at the chief, to see if there was any humor in those eyes, and there wasn’t. Just a straight-on look. He said, “What are you saying? That there really were flying saucers out in Mrs. Tate’s backyard?”

  “I’m not saying anything. All I know is that I saw those lights, and that’s enough for one night. Except for one thing.”

  “Which is?”

  The chief reached over, picked up the check, and dropped it in front of Jay. “Which is the bill, which is yours. Or don’t you remember the bet you made?”

  Jay picked it up, reached for his wallet. “How the hell could I forget?”

  Brendan DuBois

  Brendan DuBois is an award-winning author of short stories and novels. His short fiction has appeared in various publications including Playboy and Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, as well as numerous anthologies. He has twice received a Shamus Award for his short fiction and has been nominated for three Edgar Awards. DuBois lives in New Hampshire with his wife Mona.

  ***

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