by Ed Gorman
OUT THERE IN THE DARKNESS
By Ed Gorman
Digital Edition published by Crossroad Press
© 2012 Ed Gorman
Copy-edited by: Cover Design By: David Dodd
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Murder in the Wings
The Autumn Dead
A Cry of Shadows
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The End of It All
Survival
Cast in Dark Waters (with Tom Piccirilli)
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Chapter 1
The night it all started, the whole strange spiral, we were having our usual midweek poker game—four fortyish men who work in the financial business getting together for beer and bawdy jokes and straight poker. No wild card games. We hate them.
This was summer, and vacation time, and so it happened that the game was held two weeks in a row at my house. Jan had taken the kids to see her Aunt Wendy and Uncle Verne at their fishing cabin, and so I offered to have the game at my house this week, too. With nobody there to supervise, the beer could be laced with a little bourbon, and the jokes could get even bawdier. With the wife and kids in the house, you’re always at least a little bit intimidated.
Mike and Bob came together, bearing gifts, which in this case meant the kind of sexy magazines our wives did not want in the house in case the kids might stumble across them. At least that’s what they say. I think they sense, and rightly, that the magazines might give their spouses bad ideas about taking the secretary out for a few after-work drinks, or stopping by a singles bar some night.
We got the chips and cards set up at the table, we got the first beers open (Mike chasing a shot of bourbon with his beer), and we started passing the dirty magazines around with tenth-grade glee. The magazines compensated, I suppose, for the balding head, the bloating belly, the stooping shoulders. Deep in the heart of every hundred-year-old man is a horny fourteen-year-old boy.
All this, by the way, took place up in the attic. The four of us got to know each other when we all moved into what city planners called a “transitional neighborhood.” There were some grand old houses that could be renovated with enough money and real care. The city designated a ten-square-block area as one it wanted to restore to shiny new luster. Jan and I chose a crumbling Victorian. You wouldn’t recognize it today. And that includes the attic, which I’ve turned into a very nice den.
“Pisses me off,” Mike O’Brien said. “He’s always late.”
And that was true. Neil Solomon was always late. Never by that much but always late nonetheless.
“At least tonight he has a good excuse,” Bob Genter said.
“He does?” Mike said. “He’s probably swimming in his pool.” Neil recently got a bonus that made him the first owner of a full-size outdoor pool in our neighborhood.
“No, he’s got Patrol. But he’s stopping at nine. He’s got somebody trading with him for next week.”
“Oh, hell,” Mike said, obviously sorry that he’d complained. “I didn’t know that.”
Bob Genter’s handsome black head nodded solemnly.
Patrol is something we all take very seriously in this newly restored “transitional neighborhood.” Eight months ago, the burglaries started, and they’d gotten pretty bad. My house had been burglarized once and vandalized once. Bob and Mike had had curb-sitting cars stolen. Neil’s wife, Sheila, was surprised in her own kitchen by a burglar. And then there was the killing four months ago, man and wife who’d just moved into the neighborhood, savagely stabbed to death in their own bed. The police caught the guy a few days later trying to cash some of the traveler’s checks he’d stolen after killing his prey. He was typical of the kind of man who infested this neighborhood after sundown: a twentyish junkie stoned to the point of psychosis on various street drugs, and not at all averse to murdering people he envied and despised. He also knew a whole hell of a lot about fooling burglar alarms.
After the murders there was a neighborhood meeting and that’s when we came up with the Patrol, something somebody’d read about being popular back East. People think that a nice middle-sized Midwestern city like ours doesn’t have major crime problems. I invite them to walk many of these streets after dark. They’ll quickly be disabused of that notion. Anyway, the Patrol worked this way: each night, two neighborhood people got in the family van and patrolled the ten-block area that had been restored. If they saw anything suspicious, they used their cellular phones and called the police. We jokingly called it the Baby Boomer Brigade. The Patrol had one strict rule: you were never to take direct action unless somebody’s life was at stake. Always, always use the cellular phone and call the police.
Neil had Patrol tonight. He’d be rolling in here in another half hour. The Patrol had two shifts: early, 8:00-10:00; late, 10:00-12:00.
Bob said, “You hear what Evans suggested?”
“About guns?” I said.
“Yeah.”
“Makes me a little nervous,” I said.
“Me, too,” Bob said. For somebody who’d grown up in the worst area of the city, Bob Genter was a very polished guy. Whenever he joked that he was the token black, Neil always countered with the fact that he was the token Jew, just as Mike was the token Catholic, and I was the token Methodist. We were friends of convenience, I suppose, but we all really did like each other, something that was demonstrated when Neil had a cancer scare a few years back. Bob, Mike and I were in his hospital room twice a day, all eight days running.
“I think it’s time,” Mike said. “The bad guys have guns, so the good guys should have guns.”
“The good guys are the cops,” I said. “Not us.”
“People start bringing guns on Patrol,” Bob said, “somebody innocent is going to get shot.”
“So some night one of us here is on Patrol and we see a bad guy and he sees us and before the cops get there, the bad guy shoots us? You don’t think that’s going to happen?”
“It could happen, Mike,” I said. “But I just don’t think that justifies carrying guns.”
The argument gave us something to do while we waited for Neil.
“Sorry I’m late,” Neil Solomon said after he followed me up to the attic and came inside.
“We already drank all the beer,” Mike O’Brien said loudly.
Neil smiled. “That gut you’re carrying lately, I can believe that you drank all the beer.”
Mike always enjoyed being put down by Neil, possibly because most people were a bit intimidated by him—he had that angry Irish edge—and he seemed to enjoy Neil’s skilled and fearless handling of him. He laughed with real
pleasure.
Neil sat down, I got him a beer from the tiny fridge I keep up here, cards were dealt, seven card stud was played.
Bob said, “How’d Patrol go tonight?”
Neil shrugged. “No problems.”
“I still say we should carry guns,” Mike said.
“You’re not going to believe this but I agree with you,” Neil said.
“Seriously?” Mike said.
“Oh, great,” I said to Bob Genter, “another beer-commercial cowboy.”
Bob smiled. “Where I come from we didn’t have cowboys, we had ‘muthas.’” He laughed. “Mean muthas, let me tell you. And practically all of them carried guns.”
“That mean you’re siding with them?” I said.
Bob looked at his cards again then shrugged. “Haven’t decided yet, I guess.”
I didn’t think the antigun people were going to lose this round. But I worried about the round after it, a few months down the line when the subject of carrying guns came up again. All the TV coverage violence gets in this city, people are more and more developing a siege mentality.
“Play cards,” Mike said, “and leave the debate society crap till later.”
Good idea.
We played cards.
In forty-five minutes, I lost $63.82. Mike and Neil always played as if their lives were at stake. All you had to do was watch their faces. Gunfighters couldn’t have looked more serious or determined.
The first pit stop came just after ten o’clock and Neil took it. There was a john on the second floor between the bedrooms, and another john on the first floor.
Neil said, “The good Doctor Gottesfeld had to give me a finger-wave this afternoon, gents, so this may take a while.”
“You should trade that prostate of yours in for a new one,” Mike said.
“Believe me, I’d like to.”
While Neil was gone, the three of us started talking about the Patrol again, and whether we should go armed.
We made the same old arguments. The passion was gone. We were just marking time waiting for Neil and we knew it.
Finally, Mike said, “Let me see some of those magazines again.”
“You got some identification?” I said.
“I’ll show you some identification,” Mike said.
“Spare me,” I said, “I’ll just give you the magazines.”
“You mind if I use the john on the first floor?” Bob said.
“Yeah, it would really piss me off,” I said.
“Really?”
That was one thing about Bob. He always fell for deadpan humor.
“No, not ‘really,’” I said. “Why would I care if you used the john on the first floor?”
He grinned. “Thought maybe they were segregated facilities or something.”
He left.
Mike said, “We’re lucky, you know that?”
“You mean me and you?”
“Yeah.”
“Lucky how?”
“Those two guys. They’re great guys. I wish I had them at work.” He shook his head. “Treacherous bastards. That’s all I’m around all day long.”
“No offense, but I’ll bet you can be pretty treacherous yourself.”
He smiled. “Look who’s talking.”
The first time I heard it, I thought it was some kind of animal noise from outside, a dog or a cat in some kind of discomfort maybe. Mike, who was dealing himself a hand of solitaire, didn’t even look up from his cards.
But the second time I heard the sound, Mike and I both looked up. And then we heard the exploding sound of breaking glass.
“What the hell is that?” Mike said.
“Let’s go find out.”
Just about the time we reached the bottom of the attic steps, we saw Neil coming out of the second-floor john. “You hear that?”
“Sure as hell did,” I said.
We reached the staircase leading to the first floor. Everything was dark. Mike reached for the light switch but I brushed his hand away.
I put a ssshing finger to my lips and then showed him that Louisville Slugger I’d grabbed from Tim’s room. He’s my nine-year-old and his most devout wish is to be a good baseball player. His mother has convinced him that just because I went to college on a baseball scholarship, I was a good player. I wasn’t. I was a lucky player.
I led the way downstairs, keeping the bat ready at all times.
“You sonofabitch!”
The voice belonged to Bob.
More smashing glass.
I listened to the passage of the sound. Kitchen. Had to be the kitchen.
In the shadowy light from the street, I saw their faces, Mike and Neil’s. They looked scared.
I hefted the bat some more and then started moving fast to the kitchen.
Just as we passed through the dining room, I heard something heavy hit the kitchen floor. Something human and heavy.
I got the kitchen light on.
He was at the back door. White. Tall. Blond shoulder-length hair. Filthy tan T-shirt. Greasy jeans. He had grabbed one of Jan’s carving knives from the huge iron rack that sits atop the butcher-block island. The one curious thing about him was the eyes: there was a malevolent iridescence to the blue pupils, an angry but somehow alien intelligence, a silver glow.
Bob was sprawled face down on the tile floor. His arms were spread wide on either side of him. He didn’t seem to be moving. Chunks and fragments of glass were strewn everywhere across the floor. My uninvited guest had smashed two or three of the colorful pitchers we’d bought the winter before in Mexico.
“Run!” the burglar cried to somebody on the back porch.
He turned, waving the butcher knife back and forth to keep us at bay.
Footsteps out the back door.
The burglar held us off a few more moments but then I gave him a little bit of tempered Louisville Slugger wood right across the wrist. The knife went clattering.
By this time, Mike and Neil were pretty crazed. They jumped him, hurled him back against the door, and then started putting in punches wherever they’d fit.
“Hey!” I said, and tossed Neil the bat. “Just hold this. If he makes a move, open up his head. Otherwise leave him alone.”
They really were crazed, like pit bulls who’d been pulled back just as a fight was starting to get good.
“Mike, call the cops and tell them to send a car.”
I got Bob up and walking. I took him into the bathroom and sat him down on the toilet lid. I found a lump the size of an egg on the back of his head. I soaked a clean washcloth with cold water and pressed it against the lump. Bob took it from there.
“You want an ambulance?” I said.
“An ambulance? Are you kidding? You must think I’m a ballet dancer or something.”
I shook my head. “No, I know better than that. I’ve got a male cousin who’s a ballet dancer and he’s one tough sonofabitch, believe me. You—” I smiled. “You aren’t that tough, Bob.”
“I don’t need an ambulance. I’m fine.”
He winced and tamped the rag tighter against his head. “Just a little headache is all.” He looked young suddenly, the aftershock of fear in his brown eyes. “Scared the hell out of me. Heard something when I was leaving the john. Went out to the kitchen to check it out. He jumped me.”
“What’d he hit you with?”
“No idea.”
“I’ll go get you some whiskey. Just sit tight.”
“I love sitting in bathrooms, man.”
I laughed. “I don’t blame you.”
When I got back to the kitchen, they were gone. All three of them. Then I saw the basement door. It stood open a few inches. I could see dusty light in the space between door and frame. The basement was our wilderness. We hadn’t had the time or money to really fix it up yet. We were counting on this year’s Christmas bonus from the Windsor Financial Group to help us set it right.
I went down the stairs. The basement is one big, mostly unused roo
m except for the washer and drier in the corner. All the boxes and odds and ends that should have gone to the attic instead went down here. It smells damp most of the time. The idea is to turn it into a family room for when the boys are older. These days it’s mostly inhabited by stray water bugs.
When I reached the bottom step, I saw them. There are four metal support poles in the basement, near each corner. They had him lashed to a pole in the east quadrant, lashed his wrists behind him with rope found in the tool room. They also had him gagged with what looked like a pillowcase. His eyes were big and wide. He looked scared and I didn’t blame him. I was scared, too.
“What the hell are you guys doing?”
“Just calm down, Papa Bear,” Mike said. That’s his name for me whenever he wants to convey to people that I’m kind of this old fuddy-duddy. It so happens that Mike is two years older than I am and it also happens that I’m not a fuddy-duddy. Jan has assured me of that, and she’s completely impartial.
“Knock off the Papa Bear bullshit. Did you call the cops?”
“Not yet,” Neil said. “Just calm down a little, all right?”
“You haven’t called the cops. You’ve got some guy tied up and gagged in my basement. You haven’t even asked how Bob is. And you want me to calm down.”
Mike came up to me, then. He still had that air of pit-bull craziness about him, frantic, uncontrollable, alien.
“We’re going to do what the cops can’t do, man,” he said. “We’re going to sweat this son of a bitch. We’re going to make him tell us who he was with tonight, and then we’re going to make him give us every single name of every single bad guy who works this neighborhood. And then we’ll turn all the names over to the cops.”
“It’s just an extension of the Patrol,” Neil said. “Just keeping our neighborhood safe is all.”
“You guys are nuts,” I said, and turned back toward the steps. “I’m going up and calling the cops.”
