Growth

by Jeff Jacobson

  Sandy tried to open the passenger door. It was locked. “Sir, it would be much easier if you would just step out of the vehicle and we can all discuss this.”

  “You know what they threatened to do to me? Do you have any idea of the kind of filth that comes out of their mouth?”

  “We don’t put up with trespassers on my property,” Purcell said. “You’re awful damn fortunate we didn’t just shoot you first, then call the chief.”

  Sandy asked Purcell, “You say Charlie found him? Whereabouts?”

  “Up in the north field.”

  “We have to take samples if you want to be certified,” the USDA guy yelled. “What is wrong with you?”

  Sandy and Purcell ignored him. She asked, “Any chance Charlie’s around? Like to talk to him.”

  “He’s busy. He can talk later, if need be.”

  “I’d like to talk to him now.”

  Purcell hesitated. Sandy stepped closer, lowered her voice so the USDA guy in the pickup couldn’t hear. “You and your boys are in some awfully deep hot water here. You want my help, you get Charlie out here now.”

  Purcell put two fingers to his lips and gave a whistle that scared crows into the air at two hundred yards. Sandy figured her ears would be ringing until evening. It wasn’t so much that she needed to interview Charlie immediately, but she wanted him in her sights so he wasn’t sneaking up behind her again.

  A few moments later, the barn doors creaked open and Charlie stepped out. He dragged a large chain across the door handles and snapped a padlock through the links. Sandy felt Purcell stiffen up beside her, and knew that Charlie had made a mistake. He shouldn’t have made a big deal about locking the barn.

  Now she was curious. She figured it probably was something that might compromise their chances of being certified organic, and filed the question away for later. Right now she had to deal with getting the USDA man off the farm without too much of a battle.

  As Charlie sauntered over, shielding his eyes against the sun, Sandy’s radio erupted. “Attention, all units. Attention, all units. Multiple reports of shots fired, Pleasant Prairie Trailer Haven. Repeat, multiple reports of gunfire. Please respond.”

  Sandy froze. She knew she was at least fifteen, maybe twenty minutes away; all the officers covering the Morton service were much, much closer. As she reached for her radio, she heard Sheriff Hoyt’s voice, “Ten-four. On our way.”

  A flurry of other voices echoed Sheriff Hoyt. Sandy knew she should finish here first, then head into town to assist in any way possible. Still, she wanted to get there as soon as she could. She fixed Charlie with a cold stare and didn’t waste any time. “Did you assault this man in any way?”

  “Fuck no. He say that?”

  “Did you threaten him with physical violence?”

  Charlie scratched his head, shrugged. “Not that I remember exactly. All I did is stay between him and his truck until Axe got there with the tow truck. I might have mentioned a few things that could go wrong, him trespassing and all.”

  She turned back to Purcell. “I’m doing my best to help you out, but you need to listen. This shouldn’t be a surprise. You know damn well you cannot take this man and his vehicle hostage. Best you can do for yourself is turn him loose immediately. Longer you keep him up in the air like that, the worse he’s gonna sue.”

  That got Purcell’s attention. “He can’t sue me. He’s the trespasser here. This is my property. Thought that would be clear as daylight.”

  Sandy shook her head. “He’s doing his job. You might as well have invited him over yourself.”

  Purcell stuck his hands in his jeans and thought about it a moment. “What a pisser. Hard to get ahead when the game is rigged against you right from the start. Boys, you pay attention. There’s a lesson to be learned here.”

  Voices burst over Sandy’s radio. “Shots fired! Officer down. Officer down.”

  Sandy could not have cared any less about the argument between the idiots out at Purcell’s farm, but it was her responsibility. It sounded like all kinds of hell was breaking loose in town, and she tried not to let the urgency show on her face. “Look, gentlemen. We need to wrap this up.”

  Purcell nodded. “Axel. Let him down. Now. See if we can’t work something out with the man.”

  Axel didn’t like it, but he flipped a lever and released the pickup all at once. The rear wheels crashed down, and the whole back end of the pickup bounced twice. Sandy knocked impatiently on the window. “Sir, you need to step out here now.”

  “The hell I do,” the USDA guy said. “You people are crazy.”

  Sandy said, “Next time, I’d research my clients a little closer. Might not be a bad idea to find out if they’re liable to shoot trespassers on sight.”

  Purcell leaned on the hood and waved through the windshield. “Sorry about this little mix-up. Hope this doesn’t screw up our certification chances.”

  “Fuck you!” the USDA man yelled and cranked the engine over.

  Sandy’s radio crackled. “Suspect is a young male. Thirteen to fifteen years of age. Armed and dangerous.”

  A cold, spiky feeling grew in the center of Sandy’s chest. She pulled out her cell phone and quickly found the contact number for Kevin’s school.

  The USDA man hit the gas and tore out of the driveway, spraying gravel in his wake. He barely missed Sandy’s cruiser and was gone in a cloud of dust that hung in the air like a brown fog.

  Sandy heard the prerecorded message and hit the button to speak with the office.

  “District seventy-nine, how can I help you?”

  “Hi, this is Sandy Chisel. I would like to speak with my son Kevin, please. He is in Mr. Humpher’s math class.”

  “One moment.”

  Sandy turned to find Purcell and his sons watching her. At that moment, she had no idea what to say to the Fitzgimmon men.

  The office secretary got back on the phone and said, “I’m sorry. Kevin is not at school today. His teacher reported him absent.”

  Jerm could have sworn he’d already shot the little shit. Several times. That wasn’t the only thing he was confused about. He had no memory of coming home last night. The last thing he remembered was that police cruiser whispering out of the darkness and scaring the shit out of him. There was something after that, something about hiding out in a big pipe, but then . . . nothing.

  He couldn’t tell if he’d been to school already. Wasn’t sure if he’d taken the gun. Vague images of floating down the hallway, shooting a bunch of people, especially all those cocksucking teachers, drifted through his head. Something about putting the barrel of his new handgun between Kevin’s teeth and pulling the trigger, watching the prick’s brains splatter all over the lockers.

  Was it real? Was it a dream? It was all getting kind of slippery.

  Dream or not, the little fucker was dead now. At least, as best as he could tell. Jerm’s eyes weren’t working so well. Everything was sort of stretched from side to side. Nothing lined up like it used to. He’d felt and heard the gun going off, no question about that. But it wasn’t like the memory of when he shot Kevin back in the school. There was no clear moment this time where he saw the back of Kevin’s head explode.

  He crawled forward. There. There was the punk-ass bitch. Sprawled out across the front sidewalk. Wasn’t moving. Looked dead enough. Jerm shrank back. The light bothered his eyes. Daylight made everything—the headache, the weird shit going on with his vision, his memory—made it all worse.

  He heard thumping in the trailer above. Heard his mom yell, “What the fuck was that?” She stomped over and kicked open the screen door. He heard her give a girlish little shriek when she saw Kevin’s body. She came thundering down the front steps, yelling, “What happened? What the fuck happened?” She caught her breath and managed to bend over and peer into the darkness under the trailer. Jerm was surprised she’d gotten off the couch in the first place. She yelled at him, “What the fuck are you doing?”

  Jerm didn’t th
ink. It was all a dream anyway. He felt curiously outside himself, as he was merely a casual observer, peering in through some dim windows at someone else’s fantasies. Saw himself raise the handgun and squeeze off a round. His mom’s face jerked, crinkled somehow, as if she’d just taken a big bite of a sour lemon, and her nose disappeared in a burst of red.

  Blue gun smoke swirled hypnotically in the space between the light and shadow. He liked that. Took a breath, pursed his lips, and blew a stream of heat out into the smoke, creating a roiling vortex.

  He’d be lying if he said that shooting his mom didn’t feel awful damn good. He liked the weight of the gun. Liked how he could simply point the barrel, pull the trigger, and shit in his life went away. It made him feel so good that he crawled out of the darkness and out into the daylight. He didn’t like how the light and heat had a sharp edge that peeled him open, but he wanted to feel that sensation again, to feel the gun jerk in his hands, watch the blue smoke circle his head, as he basked in the knowledge that he’d just erased more goddamn useless pain and bullshit from his life.

  Jerm walked to the front of the Pleasant Prairie Trailer Haven. Saw that asshole Raleigh standing on his deck, yelling something. Jerm drifted closer, raised the Smith & Wesson. Watched the man’s expression change from hatred to fear. Squeezed the trigger before the asshole could run back inside.

  Raleigh spun, a sudden red flower blooming on his chest, and went crashing through his lawn chair before toppling off the deck into the pond. The wide-open blue sky came down and wrapped Jerm in a soft blanket and he sighed, perfectly content.

  He wanted more.

  He kept walking, straight down the street.

  The blast of someone’s horn shook him out of his reverie. He blinked and tried to look around. The world still wasn’t falling into place like he hoped, but he could manage to make sense of the images his eyes fed his brain, however nonsensical they might look.

  That was a dream for you.

  There was a car behind him. The driver hit the horn again. Jerm eased around the front of the car, guiding himself along the hood and up the windshield with his left hand. The cranky fat broad inside was squawking something at him, but he shut her down with the handgun. This time, he distinctly saw blood, bone, and brains, explode across the front seat.

  It made him feel even better.

  He kept walking. And when the first cop car came screeching to a stop, siren wailing, lights spinning, Jerm just smiled and raised his gun. The first time he squeezed the trigger, the driver’s door window exploded and the cop inside fell back against the seat. Jerm walked right up through the broken glass and pointed the barrel at the cop’s head and squeezed the trigger a second time.

  Another burst of bone and blood. All over the steering wheel.

  More sirens. Coming from all directions. Fucking pigs. His hands popped open the cylinder, moving all on their own, and plucked out the empty shells. He dug into his pockets and pulled out a handful of loose cartridges, all from the boxes his daddy had left. Most of the shells were either too loose or didn’t fit at all. He found five that fit well enough to slide into the chambers, snug and secure, as if they were destined to be fired from the gun. Jerm waited until he could see at least three county troopers roaring up the street right at him before he stepped forward and blasted away.

  The cop cars scattered, breaking away from the street and plowing into front lawns. Jerm kept right on tracking the cruisers, squeezing off empties, lost in a series of dry clicks. The effort of standing out in the full sunlight eventually took its toll, and he let his head and the gun drop. He bent over, breathing deeply, as if he’d just sprinted down a football field. He noticed the shadows inside the dead trooper’s vehicle and crawled over the corpse, shutting the door behind him.

  He slid headfirst into the shadow of the floor of the passenger seat, curling up into a ball, knees up around his ears, arms wrapped tight around his shins, locked around each elbow. Once in tight under the dashboard, head wedged between the seat and the door, feet jammed against the upright .12 gauge, he did not move again.

  Jerm exhaled one last time, and his already dim consciousness faded and blinked out.

  His flesh did not relinquish the hold on itself.

  Sheriff Hoyt signaled to his men to run forward and surround Bryan’s cruiser. Poor bastard. Twenty-one years on the force. Three, four years until a solid pension. Then shot in the head by some underage punk. It was a goddamn waste.

  He waited until they got closer before he took off in a crouch from his own vehicle and slid behind the passenger rear panel on his knees. He took a second to gather himself and said, “Go. Unload on that fucker.”

  Three other county troopers rose and squeezed off a dozen shots apiece, blasting out the windows and unleashing a firestorm of lead tornados inside the car.

  Two bullets caught Jerm in the chest. One went through his head.

  A soft summer breeze gently dissipated the blue smoke.

  Somebody shouted, “Clear!” and everybody crowded around and got their first good look at Jerm. They saw the blood and bullet holes and Sheriff Hoyt called the time of death. He pulled the nearest trooper over and told the man to get Mike Castle on the phone. Castle was the only doctor in Parker’s Mill, and served as the town coroner and pathologist if Chirchirillo was busy.

  “Tell him I want him here immediately.” Dr. Castle was a little too friendly with Chief Chisel for Sheriff’s Hoyt’s liking, but he didn’t have a choice. “We got ourselves a boatload of national press in town for the goddamn funeral or whatever it is, and they’re gonna be on this like flies on shit. You make sure Mike understands we need this fucker in the freezer. They figure out a kid did the shooting, and they’re gonna start asking questions.” Sheriff Hoyt pitched his voice higher, pretending to be a reporter. “‘Why’s he so young? What went wrong? Oh, it’s such a tragedy.’ That bullshit never helps anybody. Let’s get his ass out of the equation. Let ’em speculate.”

  The trooper nodded and went off to call Castle.

  Sheriff Hoyt pulled two more troopers over. The street was starting to get crowded with more cruisers, an ambulance, and even that dipshit Deputy Hendricks. At least the goddamn bitch chief wasn’t here yet. “You,” he pointed at a young trooper. “Get in touch with Chirchirillo. He’s in court today, but you get him on the horn. We need somebody on our side to take care of the victims, and the Church is a good man. He’ll listen to reason, make sure things get painted the way we want ’em.”

  Sheriff Hoyt told the second trooper to round up anybody that was left, including that dumbass Hendricks, and seal off the area. “This is a goddamn crime scene. The last thing we need is the press running wild through here, waving their cameras and microphones at anything that moves.”

  Sheriff Hoyt stuck his head through one of the shattered windows into the sweltering heat of the county police car and shook his head. He spotted the shooter’s handgun, a nickel-plated Model 686 Smith & Wesson, down along Trooper Bryan’s feet. Something about it seemed awfully familiar, like he should know the gun for some reason. The connection held promise, but he couldn’t grasp it, and the image was gone. He filed it away to think about later and focused on the immediate problem. His men were busy with their own assignments, on the phone, or waving off reporters and a few curious townspeople.

  And that left Sheriff Hoyt to follow the trail of bodies.

  He had a gut feeling where the kid had come from, and started heading south. A block away, he found what was left of Mrs. Perkins. She had been a cranky old bitch, and probably would have been dead in a year or so of a heart attack because of her weight, but it was still a damn shame to go out with your blood dripping from the dashboard. From her car, Sheriff Hoyt could see the body of the trailer park landlord floating facedown in the retention pond, and it didn’t take Sherlock Holmes to figure out where the kid lived.

  He headed down the narrow center street, passing empty trailer after empty trailer. When he saw the bod
y of the large woman sprawled out next to the warped wooden stairs, he wasn’t surprised. He should have known that this particular trailer had someone living there, because it looked so much worse than the rest of the trailers. He stopped, tilted his head like an old dog, and recognized the woman from her bleached blond hair.

  Miss Ellie May Higgins. Again, it wasn’t a surprise.

  Back in the nineties Ellie May was the hottest thing in the county and had the time of her life raising hell. Now she was in her mid thirties, mother of two, maybe three, creeping up on two hundred pounds, and living on frozen cheeseburgers, pot, and TV. She was just one of these people that, for whatever reason, you knew damn well they wouldn’t be collecting Social Security and watching the grandkids run around. The bullet had punched through the dead center of her skull, wiping out her nose and popping her brain stem, leaving nothing but a ragged hole in the middle of her face, an astonished lower jaw, and instant death.

  Sheriff Hoyt got closer and saw a kid wriggling out from underneath her body.

  Now that, that was a surprise.

  His right hand flew to the special rubber grips of his Ruger Blackhawk. Ever since those two assholes shot up the high school in Colorado and those two sniper spooks crept around Washington, D.C., he drilled his men that whenever they encountered a crime, they always had to be aware of the possibility of two or more suspects.

  The kid struggled; Ellie May had let herself go, that much you couldn’t argue with. She had always been curvaceous, no bullshit there, but in the years since her glory days had faded, she had become a hell of a heavy woman. It took the kid a while to slide out from underneath a corpse that wasn’t in the mood to cooperate.

  From a distance, he was maybe nine, ten. Sheriff Hoyt got a look at the kid’s eyes. Up close, the kid seemed older than he looked. Maybe twelve or thirteen.

  The kid rolled away and stood up, wavering a little when he straightened. Blood ran from a trail of burned scalp that traveled up the back of his neck, skimming off the skull, leaving a straight, shallow gash. Sheriff Hoyt was impressed; the kid had come within an eyelash of a bullet in the brainpan.