by Ed Gorman
That’s when I realized just how crazed Mike was. “You aren’t going anywhere, man. You’re going to stay here and help us break this bastard down. You’re going to do your goddamned neighborhood duty.”
He’d grabbed my sleeve so hard that he’d torn it at the shoulder. We both discovered this at the same time.
I expected him to look sorry. He didn’t. In fact, he was smirking at me. “Don’t be such a wimp, Aaron,” he said.
Chapter 2
Mike led the charge getting the kitchen cleaned up. I think he was feeling guilty about calling me a wimp with such angry exuberance. Now I understood how lynch mobs got formed. One guy like Mike stirring people up by alternately insulting them and urging them on.
After the kitchen was put back in order, and after I’d taken inventory to find that nothing had been stolen, I went to the refrigerator and got beers for everybody. Bob had drifted back to the kitchen, too.
“All right,” I said, “now that we’ve all calmed down, I want to walk over to that yellow kitchen wall phone there and call the police. Any objections?”
“I think blue would look better in here than yellow,” Neil said.
“Funny,” I said.
They looked themselves now, no feral madness on the faces of Mike or Neil, no winces on Bob’s.
I started across the floor to the phone.
Neil grabbed my arm. Not with the same insulting force Mike had used on me. But enough to get the job done.
“I think Mike’s right,” Neil said. “I think we should grill that bastard a little bit.”
I shook my head, politely removed his hand from my forearm, and proceeded to the phone.
“This isn’t just your decision alone,” Mike said.
He’d finally had his way. He’d succeeded in making me angry. I turned around and looked at him. “This is my house, Mike. If you don’t like my decisions, then I’d suggest you leave.”
We both took steps toward each other. Mike would no doubt win any battle we had but I’d at least be able to inflict a little damage and right now that’s all I was thinking about.
Neil got between us.
“Hey,” he said. “For God’s sake you two, c’mon. We’re friends, remember?”
“This is my house,” I said, my words childish in my ears.
“Yeah, but we live in the same neighborhood, Aaron,” Mike said, “which makes this ‘our’ problem.”
“He’s right, Aaron,” Bob said from the breakfast nook. There’s a window there where I sometimes sit to watch all the animals on sunny days. I saw a mother raccoon and four baby raccoons one day, marching single file across the grass. My grandparents were the last generation to live on the farm. My father came to town here and ended up working at a ball bearing company. Raccoons are a lot more pleasant to gaze upon than people.
“He’s not right,” I said to Bob. “He’s wrong. We’re not cops, we’re not bounty hunters, we’re not trackers. We’re a bunch of goddamned guys who peddle stocks and bonds. Mike and Neil shouldn’t have tied him up downstairs—that happens to be illegal, at least the way they went about it—and now I’m going to call the cops.”
“Yes, that poor thing,” Mike said, “aren’t we just picking on him, though? Tell you what, why don’t we make him something to eat?”
“Just make sure we have the right wine to go with it,” Neil said. “Properly chilled, of course.”
“Maybe we could get him a chick,” Bob said.
“With bombers out to here,” Mike said, indicating with his hands where “here” was.
I couldn’t help it. I smiled. They were all being ridiculous. A kind of fever had caught them.
“You really want to go down there and question him?” I said to Neil.
“Yes. We can ask him things the cops can’t.”
“Scare the bastard a little,” Mike said. “So he’ll tell us who was with him tonight, and who else works this neighborhood.” He came over and put his hand out. “God, man, you’re one of my best friends. I don’t want you mad at me.”
Then he hugged me, which is something I’ve never been comfortable with men doing, but to the extent I could, I hugged him back.
“Friends?” he said.
“Friends,” I said. “But I still want to call the cops.”
“And spoil our fun?” Neil said.
“And spoil your fun.”
“I say we take it to a vote,” Bob said.
“This isn’t a democracy,” I said. “It’s my house and I’m the king, I don’t want to have a vote.”
“Can we ask him one question?” Bob said.
I sighed. They weren’t going to let go. “One question?”
“The name of the guy he was with tonight.”
“And that’s it?”
“That’s it. That way we get him and one other guy off the street.”
“And then I call the cops?”
“Then,” Mike said, “you call the cops.”
“One question,” Neil said.
While we finished our beers, we argued a little more, but they had a lot more spirit left than I did. I was tired now and missing Jan and the kids and feeling lonely. These three guys had become strangers to me tonight. Very old boys eager to play at boy games once again.
“One question,” I said. “Then I call the cops.”
I led the way down, sneezing as I did so.
There’s always enough dust floating around in the basement to play hell with my sinuses.
The guy was his same sullen self, glaring at us as we descended the stairs and then walked over to him. He smelled of heat and sweat and city grime. The long bare arms sticking out of his filthy T-shirt told tattoo tales of writhing snakes and leaping panthers. The arms were joined in the back with rope. His jaw still flexed, trying to accommodate the intrusion of the gag.
“Maybe we should castrate him,” Mike said, walking up close to the guy. “You like that, scumbag? If we castrated you?”
If the guy felt any fear, it wasn’t evident in his eyes. All you could see there was the usual contempt.
“I’ll bet this is the jerk who broke into the Donaldsons’ house a couple weeks ago,” Neil said.
Now he walked up to the guy. But he was more ambitious than Mike had been. Neil spat in the guy’s face.
“Hey,” I said, “cool it.”
Neil glared at me. “Yeah, I wouldn’t want to hurt his feelings, would I?”
Then he suddenly turned back on the guy, raised his fist and started to swing. All I could do was shove him. That sent his punch angling off to the right, missing our burglar by about half a foot.
“You asshole,” Neil said, turning back on me now.
But Mike was there, between us.
“You know what we’re doing? We’re making this jerk happy. He’s gonna have some nice stories to tell all his criminal friends.”
He was right. The burglar was the one who got to look all cool and composed. We looked like squabbling brats. As if to confirm this, a hint of amusement played in the burglar’s blue eyes.
“Oh, hell, Aaron, I’m sorry,” Neil said, putting his hand out. This was like a political convention, all the handshaking going on.
“So am I, Neil,” I said. “That’s why I want to call the cops and get this over with.”
And that’s when he chose to make his move, the burglar. As soon as I mentioned the cops, he probably realized that this was going to be his last opportunity.
He waited until we were just finishing up with the handshake, when we were all focused on each other. Then he took off running. We could see that he’d slipped the rope. He went straight for the stairs, angling out around us like a running back seeing daylight. He even stuck his long, tattooed arm out as if he was trying to repel a tackle.
“Hey,” Bob shouted. “He’s getting away.”
He was at the stairs by the time we could gather ourselves enough to go after him. But when we moved, we moved fast, and in virtual unison.
By the time I got my hand on the cuff of his left jean, he was close enough to the basement door to open it.
I yanked hard and ducked out of the way of his kicking foot. By now I was as crazy as Mike and Neil had been earlier. There was adrenaline and great anger. He wasn’t just a burglar, he was all burglars, intent not merely on stealing things from me, but hurting my family, too. He hadn’t had time to take the gag from his mouth.
This time, I grabbed booted foot and leg and started hauling him back down the stairs. At first he was able to hold on to the door but when I wrenched his foot rightward, he tried to scream behind the gag. He let go of the doorknob.
The next half minute is still unclear in my mind. I started running down the stairs, dragging him with me. All I wanted to do was get him on the basement floor again, turn him over to the others to watch, and then go call the cops.
But somewhere in those few seconds when I was hauling him back down the steps, I heard edge of stair meeting back of skull. The others heard it, too, because their shouts and curses died in their throats.
When I turned around, I saw the blood running fast and red from his nose. The blue eyes no longer held contempt. They were starting to roll up white in the back of his head.
“God,” I said. “He’s hurt.”
“I think he’s a lot more than hurt,” Mike said.
“Help me carry him upstairs.”
We got him on the kitchen floor. Mike and Neil rushed around soaking paper towels. We tried to revive him. Bob, who kept wincing from his headache, tried the guy’s wrist, ankle and throat for a pulse. None. His nose and mouth were bloody. Very bloody.
“No way you could die from hitting your head like that,” Neil said.
“Sure you could,” Mike said. “You hit it just the right way.”
“He can’t be dead,” Neil said. “I’m going to try his pulse again.”
Bob, who obviously took Neil’s second opinion personally, frowned and rolled his eyes. “He’s dead, man. He really is.”
“Bullshit.”
“You a doctor or something?” Bob said.
Neil smiled nervously. “No, but I play one on TV.”
So Neil tried the pulse points. His reading was exactly what Bob’s reading had been.
“See,” Bob said.
I guess none of us were destined to ever quite be adults.
“Man,” Neil said, looking down at the long, cold unmoving form of the burglar. “He’s really dead.”
“What the hell’re we gonna do?” Mike said.
“We’re going to call the police,” I said, and started for the phone.
“The hell we are,” Mike said. “The hell we are.”
Chapter 3
Maybe half an hour after we laid him on the kitchen floor, he started to smell. We’d looked for identification and found none. He was just the Burglar.
We sat at the kitchen table, sharing a fifth of Old Grandad and innumerable beers.
We’d taken two votes and they’d come up ties. Two for calling the police, Bob and I; two for not calling the police, Mike and Neil.
“All we have to tell them,” I said, “is that we tied him up so he wouldn’t get away.”
“And then they say,” Mike said, “so why didn’t you call us before now?”
“We just lie about the time a little,” I said. “Tell them we called them within twenty minutes.”
“Won’t work,” Neil said.
“Why not?” Bob said.
“Medical examiner can fix the time of death,” Neil said.
“Not that close.”
“Close enough so that the cops might question our story,” Neil said. “By the time they get here, he’ll have been dead at least an hour, hour and a half.”
“And then we get our names in the paper for not reporting the burglary or the death right away,” Mike said. “Brokerages just love publicity like that.”
“I’m calling the cops right now,” I said, and started up from the table.
“Think about Tomlinson a minute,” Neil said.
Tomlinson was my boss at the brokerage. “What about him?”
“Remember how he canned Dennis Bryce when Bryce’s ex-wife took out a restraining order on him?”
“This is different,” I said.
“The hell it is,” Mike said. “Neil’s right, none of our bosses will like publicity like this. We’ll all sound a little—crazy—you know, keeping him tied up in the basement. And then killing him when he tried to get away.”
They all looked at me.
“You bastards,” I said. “I was the one who wanted to call the police in the first place. And I sure as hell didn’t try to kill him on purpose.”
“Looking back on it,” Neil said, “I guess you were right, Aaron. We should’ve called the cops right away.”
“Now’s a great time to realize that,” I said.
“Maybe they’ve got a point,” Bob said softly, glancing at me, then glancing nervously away.
“Oh, great. You, too?” I said.
“They just might kick my black ass out of there if I had any publicity that involved somebody getting killed,” Bob said.
“He was a frigging burglar,” I said.
“But he’s dead,” Neil said.
“And we killed him,” Mike said.
“I appreciate you saying ‘we’,” I said.
“I know a good place,” Bob said.
I looked at him carefully, afraid of what he was going to say next.
“Forget it,” I said.
“A good place for what?” Neil said.
“Dumping the body,” Bob said.
“No way,” I said.
This time when I got up, nobody tried to stop me. I walked over to the yellow wall telephone.
I wondered if the cozy kitchen would ever feel the same to me now that a dead body had been laid upon its floor.
I had to step over him to reach the phone. The smell was even more sour now.
“You know how many bodies get dumped in the river that never wash up?” Bob said.
“No,” I said, “and you don’t, either.”
“Lots,” he said.
“There’s a scientific appraisal for you. ‘Lots.’”
“Lots and lots, probably,” Neil said, taking up Bob’s argument.
Mike grinned. “Lots and lots and lots.”
“Thank you, Professor,” I said.
I lifted the receiver and dialed 0.
“Operator.”
“The police department, please.”
“Is this an emergency?” asked the young woman. Usually I would have spent more time wondering if the sweetness of her voice was matched by the sweetness of her face and body. I’m still a face man. I suppose it’s my romantic side. “Is this an emergency?” she repeated.
“No; no, it isn’t.”
“I’ll connect you,” she said.
“You think your kids’ll be able to handle it?” Neil said.
“No mind games,” I said.
“No mind games at all,” he said. “I’m asking you a very realistic question. The police have some doubts about our story and then the press gets ahold of it and bam. We’re the lead story on all three channels. ‘Did four middle-class men murder the burglar they captured?’ The press even goes after the kids these days. ‘Do you think your daddy murdered that burglar, son?’”
“Good evening. Police Department.”
I started to speak but I couldn’t somehow. My voice wouldn’t work. That’s the only way I can explain it.
“The six o’clock news five nights running,” Neil said softly behind me. “And the DA can’t endorse any kind of vigilante activity so he nails us on involuntary manslaughter.”
“Hello? This is the Police Department,” said the black female voice on the phone.
Neil was there then, reaching me as if by magic.
He took the receiver gently from my hand and hung it back up on the phone again.
/> “Let’s go have another drink and see what Bob’s got in mind, all right?”
He led me, as if I were a hospital patient, slowly and carefully back to the table where Bob, over more whiskey, slowly and gently laid out his plan.
The next morning, three of us phoned in sick. Bob went to work because he had an important meeting.
Around noon—a sunny day when a softball game and a cold six-pack of beer sounded good—Neil and Mike came over. They looked as bad as I felt, and no doubt looked myself.
We sat out on the patio eating the Hardee’s lunch they’d bought. I’d need to play softball to work off some of the calories I was eating.
Birdsong and soft breezes and the smell of fresh cut grass should have made our patio time enjoyable. But I had to wonder if we’d ever enjoy anything again. I just kept seeing the body momentarily arced above the roaring waters of the dam; and dropping into white churning turbulence.
“You think we did the right thing?” Neil said.
“Now’s a hell of a time to ask that,” I said.
“Of course we did the right thing,” Mike said. “What choice did we have? It was either that or get our asses arrested.”
“So you don’t have any regrets?” Neil said.
Mike sighed. “I didn’t say that. I mean, I wish it hadn’t happened in the first place.”
“Maybe Aaron was right all along,” Neil said.
“About what?”
“About going to the cops.”
“Goddamn,” Mike said, sitting up from his slouch. We all wore button-down shirts without ties and with the sleeves rolled up. Somehow there was something profane about wearing shorts and T-shirts on a workday. We even wore pretty good slacks. We were that kind of people. “Goddamn.”
“Here he goes,” Neil said.
“I can’t believe you two,” Mike said. “We should be happy that everything went so well last night—and what are we doing? Sitting around here pissing and moaning.”
“That doesn’t mean it’s over,” I said.
“Why the hell not?” Mike said.
“Because there’s still one left.”
“One what?”
“One burglar.”
“So?”
“So you don’t think he’s going to get curious about what the hell happened to his partner?”
