The Raven Gang (Noble Animals Book 1)

by Brendan Walsh

  7

  “Should Have Slept In”

  The earth rotated enough for two hours to go by when the gang awoke from their hiding. It was now a little over eleven o’clock. Patrick sluggishly opened his eyes, fighting to keep them open as the sober light aced his retinas. On the chair by the wardrobe Johnny was awkwardly positioned with his eyes still shut, and Slate was leaning against the wall. He was miserably awake.

  He and Patrick carelessly made eye contact before Slate’s eyes wondered over to the closet door. Browsing through the descent selection of jackets, sweaters, and coats, was Gary. His bloody shirt was still on the floor inside the closet. It was clear he did not intend to pick it up. What felt like a couple fuzzy minutes silently went by before Gary unhooked a tan colored trench coat from the closet. He flung it around himself and began his exit.

  Before tuning the nob, Gary arrogantly eyed the three. Patrick was finally awake, and Johnny was stirring with minimal awareness, as if struggling against a tiny earthquake.

  “Well, it looks like the three musketeers have finally woken up.” Gary cackled. He was almost smiling.

  Patrick and the gang found themselves with enough waking energy to form a retort.

  “How much did you guys drink anyway?”

  “We had about three shots. Each.” Slate shamefully rubbed his eyes, not wishing to make eye contact. “Three was about when we lost count.”

  Gary smirked privately. “Lightweights. If you guys want to help the community, don’t ever drink again.”

  With that, he opened the door and headed down the stairs, leaving everyone else behind.

  “Patrick, he’s getting away.” Slate warned as Gary was making a three mile an hour escape. “The watch!”

  “He doesn’t have it, Slate.” he moaned. “He may not be the nicest guy but this definitely wouldn’t have happened if he had it. I can see that now.”

  Johnny seemed to have given up on waking up and had begun snoring loudly. Slate glanced at him with annoyance.

  “Hey, Johnny, we’re out of whiskey!”

  At that line, Johnny leaped like a frog off a tree branch. “Wuh, whiskey. Where?” he managed to sober up before getting to the door. Meanwhile Patrick was in a mode of regretful reflection.

  “I can’t believe I was that angry.”

  “Relax, man. It wasn’t you. We just had too much to drink. That would happen to anyone.” Johnny held the door open for them as they emerged to the public areas.

  Slate and Patrick solemnly made their way to the stairs, Johnny nonchalantly tagging behind. Even in a soberer mode they used the stair rails for support. They would never take sober coordination for granted again. Everyone just wanted to pretend the night never happened and sleep off the rest of the whiskey on his dorm beds.

  “I should probably call Lindsey and tell her that our night is done.” Slate said, breaking the silence.

  The couch that had blocked the staircase earlier was put back in its regular place. To the left in the living room, where the party had just been raging on, was now empty. The group made their way to the garage door, hoping to leave without anybody seeing them and having to deal with anyone. The first thing they saw was Gary standing frozen at the doorway. He had his back to them, with hardly a breath filtering out of his lungs. As the three of them softly approached, Gary turned around wearing a wide-eyed expression of horror.

  The three of them stopped dead in their tracks.

  “What’s up, Gary?” Johnny quickly inquired.

  In the midst of his shock Gary kept his lips still enough to make a short sentence. “It’s Dr. Black…He’s dead.”

  Gary moved out of the way so Patrick, Slate and Johnny could get by. With astonishment and suspended belief they bulldozed themselves to the garage entryway. A long stream of fresh blood seeped down the cool concrete ground, leading to the brutally battered body of Dr. Jefferson Black, laying lifelessly near the garage door. His mouth was open wide as if he was stuck in a scream, and his midsection was burst with red, evidently the wound from which all the blood in the room came.

  On the spot the four exchanged looks of bewilderment as thousands of thoughts raced through their unbelieving minds. Their jaws were nearly on the ground.

  “How the.... how did this happen?” exclaimed Slate, his eyes nearly watering.

  “Did you see his body? What the hell could have done that?” Patrick added with disgust riddled on his face. He covered his mouth, feeling like he was about to throw up all his organs.

  Their panic was stunted by an approaching shadow being reflected from the interior garage lights. They weren’t alone.

  “Someone’s coming. Let’s go!” Johnny tugged Gary away from view.

  They crossed back through the kitchen to the abandoned living room. Gary crouched slightly forward and looked through one of the front windows. A parade of law enforcement had stopped on the street.

  “There are cops completely surrounding the house.” Gary reported. “They probably got the backyard too.”

  “The blood! The blood that was on your shirt. It was Dr. Black’s!” Patrick realized.

  “Must have been.” Johnny kept away from the window, out of sight. “In our drunk state we didn’t even see the damn body!”

  The night was way worse than any scenario could have fathomed. Not only were they faced with the fact that someone had just been killed, but the fact they were hiding in the house for two hours would make them look guilty.

  “We can’t just walk out, can we?” Slate asked. “The police have already gotten everybody out of the house.”

  “Yeah, it would be pretty suspicious if we just walked out like nothing happened.” Johnny said, running his nervous hands along his leather jacket.

  “It would make us look totally guilty of something!”

  Gary stopped his cop-spying to face the other three. “That’s what we’ll do. We didn’t do anything. They don’t even have evidence.”

  Johnny, Slate and Patrick were anxious as high hell about what their secrecy indoors would look to the cops. Patrick paced around pensively in a small circle. He was thinking over the scene in his mind as rationally as fear would allow. It was true no damning evidence could be used against them for anything.

  “I agree.” Patrick breathed. “Let’s just explain we got too much to drink and got stupidly startled and ran. They’ll understand.”

  The four wearily made it to the front door, where they were prepared to be greeted by the authorities. It was a very bad move.

  In the many years that detective John Hunter had been working the job, this was by far the most interesting case. He had finished scheduled work around eight o’clock and planned to have a hearty, albeit a slightly late, thanksgiving dinner with his family, which he did. He had to bail on the pumpkin pie because they suddenly needed him for an urgent case. He warned them it had better be a good one. And it definitely was.

  The call was placed at about ten o’clock. The voice of a distressed young woman eventually got through and told 911 that the host of a party had been murdered. Apparently, there was supposed to be some kind of academic presentation a half hour before. When partyers noticed that the man was nowhere to be seen, some went and looked for where he was scheduled to be. And there he was, now a lifeless body pouring thick red like an angry fountain.

  The detective rolled up to the curve and exited the car with mild skepticism. His partner for the case, a Hispanic woman about fifteen years his junior, got out on the passenger side. Photographers and law enforcement crowded the whole street. The two were engaged in their usual pre-case dialogue.

  “So when are you going to let me drive?” asked Rita Guajardo. She was walked noticeably ahead of her senior partner.

  “What do you mean? You drove yesterday.”

  “That was to get you a burger, and you weren’t even in the
car!”

  “But you did drive. That speeding ticket speaks for itself.” Hunter blinked discontentedly as cameramen took their photos.

  “All I’m saying is that you could try to cut down on that whole chauvinistic vibe you’re giving off.” Rita said, swatting her hand at him as if there was an invisible bug.

  “Fair enough.” Hunter concluded.

  The garage in front of them was teeming with police officers. Half of them were interviewing potential witnesses. From their expressions, the detective assumed none of them was particularly helpful. Before they were in immediate range, they noticed a river of blood had almost poured all the way out to the driveway. A young officer was standing by the scene. He handed the Hunter what had so far been recorded, and he handed it over to Rita.

  She gave him a displeased glance at the increased workload. He replied, “I’ll get to that. I want to look at the scene first.”

  The last people he passed were the annoying photographers taking last minute photos of the scene. They could hardly be blamed though. The murder scene was a gold mine for everything a reporter would love. There was a whole lot of everything.

  The detective struggled not to recoil at the sight. Even his almost twenty years as a detective could not have prepared him for such a grisly crime. In front of him, laying on the red-soaked floor of the garage was a dead man whose eyes were stuck open in timeless shock. That was one of the least unsettling features. It was even hard to tell what he had been wearing when he died. It could have been some suit and tie or just some sweater vest, it was hard to tell. From his right shoulder, just about where the jugular vein is located all the way down to the side of his right leg was a perfect linear slash. It was a thick diagonal line that had scorched through his clothes, tearing them apart and allowing pints of blood to spurt out. The unfortunate victim’s back was settled against a tumbled wooden podium, laying on his gnashed up right side.

  Hunter and Guajardo shuffled forward for a closer look. The man’s ribcage was visible. A couple of them visibly shattered, tiny white chucks formed a tiny cluster near his collar. They both circled the body, making sure to not mess up the crime scene. Though they were pretty sure the surreal horror had messed them up. Guajardo refocused on the crime report in her hand and narrated.

  “The poor guy’s name was Jefferson Black.” she started after a respectful pause. It was hard to quickly forget the macabre presence. “He was the host of the party here. He’s married to a Laura Black who was out of town for the night. She is on her way over here as we speak. No children. No pets.”

  “What was his job?”

  “He was a geneticist. Apparently pretty high up in the field for a guy his age. Most of his work focused on finding cures for genetic diseases. Sounds like he had a great life. Who would have done this?”

  “Not the slightest idea. It must have taken one hell of a blade. Any chance of a suicide?”

  His partner simply responded with a disappointed bat of her eyelashes.

  “Just asking the routine questions.”

  She flipped the crime report closed and joined her partner in front of the body, watching her steps around the blood. “With injuries this deep he would have been dead before the slicing finished.”

  “Any leads on a weapon?”

  “None. If it were a sword, there would at least be some blood trail that the weapon left behind as it was being carried away. It’s like it was made out of ice and melted.”

  The male detective bent over and carefully squinted at the torn skin. “Other than his wife, is there anyone else we could contact who could know something? A boss maybe?”

  “He was his own boss. All his labs and stuff were only his jurisdiction. Although, not too long ago he teamed up with some head of a corporation. Elder Incorporated. The man himself, Dr. Samuel Elder. They seemed like they were pretty close.”

  Over by where the interior door opened, the drying blood came to a sloppy halt. It looked as if someone tried to mop it up. John made a mental note to add that to the report.

  “Let’s contact the guy tomorrow. Anything else here that could give us a clue as to who did this?”

  Rita eerily gestured to the back wall. “Well there’s the disturbing writing over there.”

  He followed her hand turning a semicircle to his right. The detective wasn’t much of a literary man, and this could have just ruined any possible reading. Written in the dead man’s blood, still freshly oozing down was one word, NEVERMORE. Hunter skillfully kept a straight face.

  “Nevermore? That’s from a poem right?”

  “Yeah. It’s what the raven says in Edgar Allan Poe’s poem, The Raven. Seems the killer’s got a sick sense of humor.” Her tone had calmed. Clearly she acclimated to gruesome things quicker than her partner did. “If you ask me I’d say it was a group of young rich whites. You never see anything so psychopathic come from the underprivileged.”

  The older detective seemed to forget his fright. Anger had replaced it. “I would love to catch the sick bastard who did this. Makes me wish this state hadn’t gone soft with the death penalty.”

  John scooped up a camera a photographer left behind and pointed it at the red writing on the wall. He took a couple shots.

  After taking note of the message, the two detectives returned to the usual routine and looked over the scene a couple more times. They interviewed some kids who were blatantly still drunk. Their time was wasted with them. An excited shout from a young officer across the scene took them away.

  “Detectives! We have a witness here!”

  A small frightened party-er was nervously tucked at the officer’s side. She claimed to have been of legal age but the detectives weren’t going to pry. There was something more important after all.

  “Hello, miss, we’re detectives Hunter and Guajardo.” they professionally flashed their badges. “Can you tell us your name?”

  “Hailey...Hailey Carter.” she was visibly shaken up.

  “Can you tell us anything that may help us in our investigation?” asked Rita.

  “Um... yeah.... there were four guys. I was going into the kitchen to get another.... soda.... and they were running away. I think they were trying not to get caught!”

  “Do you remember what they looked like. Any distinctive features?”

  A hinging sound from behind caused the witness to look away from the detectives. The stunned look on her face reached a higher magnitude. She was terrified.

  “There they are! The murderers!” she accusingly pointed to the front door.

  The detectives peered halfway around. Four people with their heads shamefully down were exiting the crime scene.

  The first thing Patrick noticed as he walked out the door was the tsunami of officers running over from the garage. He heard someone shouting hysterically right when they got into view. The gang paused at the startled screech. They stood obediently on the porch as the first splash of police were forming together several yards in front of them, like some grim rehearsal.

  “Great. We’re in trouble.” Slate noted sarcastically.

  The first group of authorities slid their hands from their holsters. An older one was the first to unsheathe his gun. Moments after, weapons were in all their hands. The confused four had no idea how to react. They kept still like statues, hands stuck nervously at their sides.

  “We didn’t do anything!”

  The older detective was the first to speak. “The four of you, hands in the air! Now!”

  Not wanting to make themselves look any guiltier, they obeyed. “Are we actually getting arrested?” Patrick asked to no one in particular.

  “Relax, it’s not that bad.” Gary motioned away from the gang, to show he had no weapon.

  “All of you, shut up!” shouted the same detective. He nodded to a younger officer at his side. “Cuff em’ and read ‘em their rights.”r />
  The younger officer methodically approached the group, gesturing for other officers to follow and provide additional handcuffs. Before any officer could get close to them a bang like a firework echoed through the occupied street. Patrick felt an instantaneous bang singe by the side of his ear, colliding with the hinge of the front door. Small lumps of the house were erupted from the side, grazing by their heads. Gary grabbed the back of his neck, flinging him away from the bullet now safely embedded in the old concrete.

  The world seemed as if it were moving in slow motion. Patrick’s perception of time increased with rising levels of adrenaline. The group of four, shaken up by the unexpected attack, stepped back inside the house. Gary managed to shuffle the frightened and stiff bodies of the other three deeper into cover, and they formed into a terrified sprint to the back, but not before slamming the door shut and securing all the locks. The officers outside were just as taken back as the four. Amidst the chaos they didn’t realize the suspects were no longer standing outside the house which gave them a head start for an escape.

  “Jesus Christ!” Johnny cried, leading the charge through the vacant home. “Why the hell did they shoot at us?”

  They could make out through the walls that the older officer calling for people to go after them. Patrick heard shouts coming from outside like ‘who fired?’ and ‘where they armed?’. Gary raced in front to lead the group and everyone followed him, since there were no better plans on the horizon. They raced to the backyard, hoping that there was a way to get out from there. Lagging far behind them, a large clan of officers struggled to break down the front door.

  “What do we do now? We can’t just run!” Patrick anxiously fondled with his pockets.

  “We get the hell out of here.” Gary said. “Follow me out the back.”

  The backyard looked much different now that it had been cleared of people. It looked much bigger that way, leaving all the more options to find a hiding spot. But they didn’t want to spend an extra second around the scene. They sprinted by the pool and a supply shed to the northeast corner of the yard where they stopped in front of a tall metal gate. It was locked.