by Matthew Iden
The house was like a hundred others in this part of rural Maryland. White siding gone dingy gray. A black shingle roof, swaybacked and sagging. On the side nearest her, a garage had been converted into an interior room then converted back again, although the work was all for naught, as the right-most face of the renovation slumped towards the ground, its windows broken and a section of the wall simply missing. On the far left side of the house—to call it a wing would be stretching things—feeble yellow light spilled from a window. In the front yard, a rusting blue Ford pickup sat close to the house at a haphazard angle, as if the driver hadn’t felt like parking on the street and instead had driven directly to the door and hopped out. The house was silent. There was no movement other than the softly falling snow.
Sarah sighed. That door isn’t going to knock on itself, girl. She either had to leave or investigate… she hadn’t driven here to check out the real estate. And, if she was going to investigate, she needed to get her butt in gear—whoever was inside would have to be blind not to have seen her cruiser’s lights.
Get out or leave.
That pretty much said it all. Moving decisively, she zipped her regulation parka up to the chin and planted her hat firmly on her head. She stepped out of the car, squinting as icy air hit her face. She reached back inside the car and turned off the reds and blues, although she left the head lights on. The light might stop after only twenty feet—it was arrested by the snow tumbling in thick, fat flakes through the beams—but it was the only outside illumination. Streetlamps were a luxury that had stopped three miles back.
The ground crunched underfoot, not only from the snow, but from the road itself, made of cinder, gravel, and ground pieces of coke residue brought in from the steel mills and coke plants just over the border in Pennsylvania. It was what many of the roads in this end of the state were made of once you got away from the highways, though she hadn’t seen the ugly, reddish rocks since she was a little girl. Poor counties, left to their own devices, used whatever they could get their hands on to pave the roads.
She shut the car door and resisted the urge to lean against it, to keep steel and glass between her and the house. At five feet four and one hundred fifteen pounds, she was fully covered by the vehicle’s bulk and it made her feel secure, like she was in a tank. But hiding behind her car wasn’t going to give her any more answers than sitting in it.
Moving cautiously, she circled the cruiser and followed a broken slate walkway to the front of the house, sweeping her eyes left and right in continuous motion, taking in details, making assessments. Despite the winter temperatures, the screen door was still in place, the material ripped and hanging away like a dog’s ear. For safety’s sake, she took a half step to the right of the doorway to get herself out of the most common line of fire as she reached the door. She pushed a small doorbell, then rapped firmly on the metal frame of the screen. The sound was shockingly loud in the stillness of the winter night. She tipped her head, listening carefully for noises or movement. Her hand squeezed and resqueezed the butt of her pistol. If she wasn’t careful, she’d get a cramp in her hand and she made a conscious effort to relax her arm and shoulder. She’d taken her gloves off when she’d climbed out of the car and the butt of the gun was cold in her hand.
When there was no answer, she knocked again using the fat of her fist and shouted, “Maryland State Police!”
She cocked her head. A muffled thump had made its way to her from inside. A chair tipping over and caught a second too late? She unsnapped the holster’s safety strap on her sidearm.
A distant bang, now, farther away than the thump. Not like a gun or a backfire. Like…like an old-fashioned screen door, the kind that didn’t have the piston to keep it from slamming shut after it had been opened too far. The ones they used to put on the back door leading from the kitchen to the yard.
She took off running around the side of the house, pulling both her Maglite and her gun as she went. The flashlight lit the night in a twenty-foot circle and she played it left to right, trying to cover as large an area as she could while sprinting for the back of the house. Her breath plumed in the night air.
Sarah rounded the corner at a jog. Fifty feet away, a pale form was hunched over a pile of something, dragging it to the back of the property. A wide trench in the snow led in a straight line from the house’s back door to the deep mountain woods that edged the yard.
“State police,” she hollered, training both her flashlight and her gun on the form. “Hold it!”
Without a sound, the figure dropped what it was doing and ran straight into the woods. An arrest, not a fatality, was the goal, so Sarah took up the chase, cursing at the gear on her belt that jangled and swung as she moved. She tried keeping the man pinned in the beam of the Maglite, but her own movement jerked her aim back and forth off her target. The man was a stark white blur and she realized with a start that he was shirtless. And a quick glance at the footprints in front of her told her a shirt wasn’t the only all-weather gear he was missing—he wasn’t wearing any shoes.
She stopped when she reached the thing the man had been dragging. The pile had arms and legs, long blond hair, a glassy stare. Sarah knelt, checking the neck and wrist. Cold, no pulse. Gone. She got to her feet and sprinted after the form, slipping in the foot-high drifts. The blur dashed into the woods and out of view. Sarah reached the tree line a second later, ducking her head under a low-hanging pine bough loaded with snow. Tears streamed from her eyes from the cold and she had to continually wipe her running nose as she peered at the ground. Deer trails—some faint, some pounded flat—snaked away in all directions, but the man’s tracks pointed the way dead ahead.
She flicked the flashlight back and forth, searching for the ghost-white form, but the Maglite’s beam splashed against the trees closest to her, ruining her night vision. Playing it along the ground instead, she followed the barefoot trail, alternating the cone of light from a middle distance to directly in front of her every few seconds. Underfoot, the forest floor swelled and dipped from the gnarled pine roots hiding beneath the drifts and she had to fight to keep her balance as the hillside dipped into a gully.
The tracks chased the line of the hillside down. Snow was thinner here in the thick of the woods, lying in patches on the ground rather than blankets thanks to the shelter of the trees, but slick Piedmont granite and inch-thick ice made running even more hazardous. She scrambled down the trail awkwardly, using one hand to aim the Maglite, the other to keep her service pistol at the ready. At several points, though, the pitch was too steep, and she had to use her gun hand to hold on to saplings and branches for support, violating every commandment she’d ever been taught in books or classes.
Slow down, girl. This is a marathon, now, not a sprint. Time was on her side. Barefoot and shirtless? In January? This guy wasn’t going to make it ten more minutes. She slowed and placed her feet self-consciously. All she had to do was stay alert, keep herself safe, and follow the tracks.
But halfway down the slope, the beam showed her the prints simply…vanished.
She whipped the flashlight from left to right, but the ground revealed only virgin snow. She pointed the beam overhead, above where the tracks disappeared, but saw only thin, horizontal pine branches going across the deer trail, too fragile to support a climber. She slowed, shuffling in a circle to pan the area to the left and right of the path—then cried out as her ankle caught on a raised tree root, snagged as firmly as a noose.
Her feet went out from under her and she landed belly-first on a slab of granite, with her head pointing down the slope. Both the Maglite and her gun flew from her hand like she’d thrown them. She could only watch as the gun hit a patch of bare rock and skittered away while her flashlight tumbled to the bottom of the gully, the beam spinning crazily in the darkness as it fell.
Moving painfully, Sarah struggled to her hands and knees. The skin of her palms was on fire from where she’d scraped them on the ice. The impact knocke
d the wind from her and she gulped and hiccupped, trying to keep calm as her body convulsed in the effort to breathe. It was hard to remember that having the wind knocked out of you was medically harmless when it felt as if you were being suffocated. With an effort, she rose to one knee, her eyes pinned on the Maglite below, and was getting ready to make the push to get to her feet when a dark form passed in front of the beam.
Then the light went out.
Sarah froze. Adrenaline shot through her system and she fought to keep the panic down, but without the flashlight, the night instantly closed in around her, cold and vicious. No moon lit the sky. Stars were hidden by the pine boughs overhead. Complete blindness was held at bay only by the high contrast of the snowbanks against the darker tree boles, but the shapes were indistinct and threatening, as likely to be a man as a tree.
Everything she had went into the act of listening. To reduce the noise, she breathed through her mouth. Her pulse sounded heavy and loud in her ears. She was painfully aware that her blue uniform was a dark blob against the snow and that the rough synthetic material sounded like two pieces of sandpaper rubbing together when she moved. The night was deadly quiet…then her head snapped around at the sound of a dull thump on her left. Just a raft of snow, too heavy for a bough, falling to the ground.
She moved to a large tree on her right, trying to melt into the darkness of its bulky shadow. Slowly, she lifted the wide-brimmed campaign hat off her head and set it on the ground beside her. It hindered her vision at the best of times and right now it was making her positively claustrophobic. Ice crystals she hadn’t felt before tickled her cheeks and ears and a wider range of sounds came to her. A barred owl hooted in the distance and there was a light ticking noise nearby—a frozen branch rubbing against a neighbor, maybe, or a single beech leaf fluttering in the wind. Otherwise, the night had the crystal depths of deep winter, marred only by the crunching of the snow.
Crunching?
Sarah spun in place at the sound of footsteps to her right, then a figure sprang at her. She saw the silhouette of a raised arm and threw her own up instinctively to block the blow, but it was desperate and late and most of the force from her own Maglite slammed into her shoulder. The blow landed on the meaty part of her upper arm and not bone, but she yelled out at the pain. The man came at her, breathing in ragged gasps as he swung the flashlight in wide, wild arcs. She ducked and dodged blindly, guessing as much as sensing where to go to keep from having her head caved in. He raised the flashlight overhead for a colossal swing and she backed away desperately, only to trip over another tree root.
The swing was close enough that she felt the air move as it passed her face, then she was tumbling backwards, landing painfully on her back. The man’s complete miss threw him off balance too, however, and his momentum carried him forward to trip over the same root that had dumped Sarah. He landed with a gasp next to her, near enough that she could feel his breath on her neck. Rather than get to her feet, she reached out to grab a wrist or an elbow, but the instant he felt her touch, he hollered and threw a wild punch.
Their struggle became a wrestling match in the snow, a grunting tangle of twigs, arms, and dirt. Academy training had given her a good ground game—something she’d needed since she was routinely a foot shorter than everyone else—but the man had hung on to the Maglite and rained blows on her back and neck. With no shirt, he was harder to grab than any opponent she’d had to collar on the mat before and as she clutched at him, a lucky kick caught her in the stomach, stunning her. The man scrambled away, trying to get the necessary distance to swing the flashlight for a knockout blow.
Desperately, Sarah clawed at her belt with her good hand. The man shouted and whipped the flashlight over his head once more. But she ripped the stun gun from its holster, lunged forward, and stabbed it into the man’s ribs. His shriek drowned out the sound of the flat, electric zap. A second later he was down on the ground, writhing and flopping like a fish on a hook.
She stayed on her hands and knees for a minute, her chest heaving as she tried to catch her breath. Her belly and back ached and her hands burned with scrapes and the onset of frostbite. She kept an eye on the man as she sucked in great lungfuls of air, trying to recover. The stun gun was in one hand, and she was ready to apply the business end to the man’s body all night long if she had to.
After a long minute, she felt good enough to stand. She wiped her nose on the back of her hand and looked down at her prize. The man was flapping his arms like a bat in slow motion, desperate to run but unable to make the motion translate into effective movement.
Relying on her sense of touch in the darkness, Sarah patted down the parts of him that were actually clothed, then flipped him over in the snow and cuffed him. Leaving him facedown where he was, she began a crawling search for the Maglite. Blind, she moved in small arcs away from the spot of their fight, sweeping her arms back and forth until eventually she found it under an inkberry bush. She flipped it on with a sigh. It felt like the first break she’d gotten all night. With the help of the flashlight she found her gun under a rock shelf and breathed a second sigh of relief—more of the administrative sort, this time. Lose your sidearm, no matter what the reason, and you could expect an ass-chewing to remember from Lieutenant Kline.
“H-h-hey,” the man said, finally recovered enough to speak. “I’m-m-m freezing to d-d-death over here.”
She ignored him, busy looking for her hat, which she found at the base of the tree where she’d left it. When she had it safely on her head, with the brim squared just so, she walked over to the man and pulled him to his feet. Despite an odd, jutting potbelly, overall he was a scrawny thirtysomething, with his ribs showing prominently through the pink, nearly frozen skin of his chest. As she thought, he was shoeless and shirtless and if she hadn’t caught him, he would’ve been lucky to make it through the next hour alive.
“Are you Kevin Handley?”
“G-g-go f-f-fuck yourself,” he said. “Nig-g-ger.”
She hooked a foot around one ankle, pushed him in the opposite direction, and pitched him face-first into the nearest snowbank. Her boot kept him in that position as he squirmed and shouted muffled obscenities into the snow. She counted off twenty seconds, then grabbed his hair and pulled his head back.
“No one’s going to know the difference between you running naked into the woods in the middle of the night in January and me holding you down in a snowbank for the next half hour,” she said. “You want to lose your nose to frostbite, it’s okay by me.”
He stuttered another curse and she pushed him back into the snow. She counted to twenty-two this time and pulled him out. “Kevin Handley, yes or no?”
“Y-y-y-yes,” he gasped.
“Is that Tiffany Chilton in your yard?”
His mouth worked in a funny way and Sarah moved to push him back down. “Yes! Y-y-yes. Tiffany something. That’s all I know.”
Sarah smiled for the first time that night. “Thank you for your cooperation, Mr. Handley. Now let’s get you somewhere warm and secure. I think I know a place.”
Please visit www.matthew-iden.com to find out more about The Wicked Flee and the other books in the Marty Singer Mystery series.
About the Author
Matthew Iden writes hard boiled detective fiction, fantasy, science fiction, horror, thrillers, and contemporary literary fiction with a psychological twist. He is the author of the Marty Singer detective series:
A Reason to Live
Blueblood
One Right Thing
The Spike
The Wicked Flee
Visit www.matthew-iden.com for information on upcoming appearances, new releases, and to receive a free copy of The Guardian: A Marty Singer Short Story—not available anywhere else.
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Acknowledgements
The Spike began with an idle question while driving through Washington DC: how can we be tearing down ten year-old buildings to build new ones when there are so many empty lots, depressed neighborhoods, and undeveloped potential in other parts of the city?
My path to answering those questions led me to some amazing people and gave me an education on just how convoluted and consequential simple “real estate” really is. Aaron Herman was the first to give me an inkling of corporate real estate’s breadth and depth—in the time it took to drink a beer with him, I realized I’d peeled back a layer of life in DC that I had no idea existed.
Following my nose, it didn’t take long to discover a wonderful, and incredibly timely, multi-part exposé by investigative journalists Patrick Madden and Julie Patel, “Deals for Developers” (http://apps.npr.org/deals-for-developers-wamu/). This revelatory piece of journalism formed the basis for much of the research for the book and is worth a close read no matter where you live. Over several cups of coffee, Patrick helped me tie it all together and I’m indebted to him for connecting the dots for me.
I am inspired by the stories of the survivors, the displaced, and the abused who have refused to submit. I hope The Spike represents your struggle accurately and with integrity.
My editors Bryon Quertermous and Michael Mandarano helped whip into shape a rough bunch of thoughts into a comprehensive, flowing story. Gentlemen, thank you.
