Hard Aground

by Brendan DuBois

  “Hardly,” I said. “The fluid output should be below eight ounces, and then I get the tubes out and I stop looking like a costume contestant at a science-fiction convention.”

  She gently slapped me on the butt. “Especially one with smell-o-gram pajamas.”

  Later I was on the couch, trying to stretch out my dining with some homemade peanut butter and crackers—my never-fail recipe of Jif peanut butter and saltine crackers—when Paula called from Boston. “Last full night of the conference, and I’m ready to come home after tomorrow’s sessions.”

  “I’m ready, too,” I said.

  “Because you miss me or because you miss my nursing talents?”

  “All of the above,” I said. “How’s the state of journalism today?”

  “More like a disease-ridden province than a state,” Paula said. “But you know what? Being here is a lot of fun, hanging out with your peers and guys and gals who’ve been through the same shit you have. Being a reporter or editor, you see the same damn faces all the time, the same town officials, the same ‘concerned citizens’ who come up to you every week with their particular tales of woe. Which reminds me, never trust a man who wears sandals and socks.”

  “Where did you get that little bit of info?”

  Paula giggled. “At lunch earlier. A bunch of us were talking about the ‘concerned citizen’ approach to life, and how they all had their particular cranks to turn, from alleged corruption to fluoride in the water. But there was one thing in common. The male part of the species always wore leather sandals with socks. So always watch out for them, and never trust them.”

  “Duly noted.”

  “Okay, time to head out and—oh, forgot to tell you. Mystery solved.”

  “You mean Pluto really is a planet?”

  “No, silly boy, the mystery of the missing silver sludge at the Tyler Chronicle.”

  I had been pretty close to drifting off to sleep with Paula’s pleasant voice in my ear, but now I was wide awake. “Go on,” I said. “Who’s been arrested?”

  “Nobody,” she said. “But the mystery is no longer a mystery.”

  “What happened, then?”

  “What happened is that Rollie Grandmaison, our increasingly forgetful editor at the Chronicle, suddenly remembered what happened to the sludge. It hadn’t disappeared a few days back, when I heard the break-in the night I was working late. It went out the door a couple of years back, when our sole photographer departed the scene.”

  “Did he leave on his own?”

  “Yeah, if you call a layoff notice stuck in your pay envelope leaving on one’s own,” she said. “Anyway, he was the last of the old-fashioned characters, the guys who could go into a darkroom with a piece of crap film, work some magic, and come out with a stunning page-one shot. That was when our corporate masters decided that with the arrival of digital cameras, anyone could be a photographer.” A little snort. “Like anyone with a portable PC could be a journalist.”

  “So he stole the sludge?”

  “Not really,” Paula said. “When he was leaving, he asked Rollie if he could take some of the old supplies, chemicals, papers, stuff the newspaper wouldn’t be needing anymore. Poor Rollie—probably half in the tank from a Rotary Club lunch—he said sure, not realizing later that the silver sludge was included in the deal.”

  “Did Rollie try to get it back?”

  “Hell no. That would have been too embarrassing. He didn’t want to let corporate know what happened, so he left it at that. Whatever the sludge was worth made up for a lack of severance pay. The end.”

  “So what were the people doing in the basement of the Chronicle if there wasn’t anything valuable down there?”

  “Not my job, dear one. Talk to my rival, Diane Woods.”

  “She’s not your rival.”

  “Glad to know that. Gotta go.”

  She hung up and I disconnected the phone. I ate one more peanut butter cracker, trying to make sense of what I had just heard.

  And instead, I dozed off.

  I woke up gradually, wondering why I had spent the night on the couch when a perfectly good bedroom was just upstairs. I checked the time and saw it wasn’t even midnight yet, so I got up, washed my hands, and switched off the lights in the kitchen and the living room. In the semidarkness I stood there, tired but refreshed, thinking of the two very different women in my life, one my lover and the other a long-term friend, reporter and cop, practically opposites in so many ways. Some women.

  Then the gunfire broke out.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  At first I thought the television was still on. But I saw the flashes of gunfire through my windows and dropped to the floor as best as I could. The shooting went on and on. I crawled across the room, keeping low, until I made it to the counter. I reached up and grabbed the phone. On my back, in the darkness, it was easy enough to see the glow-in-the-dark numerals, and I dialed nine-one-one.

  It was picked up instantly. “Tyler police, what’s your emergency?”

  “There’s gunfire in the parking lot of the Lafayette House, Atlantic Avenue.”

  “Do you know who’s doing the shooting?”

  “No.”

  “When did it start?”

  “About ninety seconds ago.”

  “Is anybody injured?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Who is this, please?”

  “Lewis Cole.”

  The dispatcher must have recognized my name from my constant visits to the police station to see Diane Woods. “You all right?”

  “I’m on the floor.”

  “Good,” he said. “Stay there.”

  I clicked the phone off and rolled over. The gunfire had slowed down but was still going on. Party A and Party B, it seemed like. There had been a sudden outburst—somebody made a move, somebody made an insult or stepped on a shiny pair of shoes?—but now it was only a couple of rounds here and there. It seemed like Party A and Party B had retreated to their respective corners.

  I started crawling to the door, reached up and gave the doorknob a twist, and then propped the door open with my right hand.

  Sirens were sounding off in the distance. A couple more shots.

  It seemed to be slowing down.

  The sound of a thunk came just as the door vibrated against my hand.

  A bullet had come my way.

  I lowered my hand and decided to follow the kind dispatcher’s advice.

  The sirens grew louder and louder, and it seemed that was that for the gunshots. I didn’t hear any more snap, crackle, or pop. I stared up at the dark ceiling, which was quickly illuminated by the flashing blue lights of the police cruisers.

  Stronger lights were eventually set up, and the sound of the sirens drifted away. It seemed safe enough to finally get up and see what was going on in my neighborhood.

  I opened the door again and peered out. Lots of lights up there, lots of movement, lots of shapes carrying flashlights.

  There was a lump of something on my driveway, about thirty feet away. I went deeper into the house, got my flashlight and my borrowed cane, and made my way out into the darkness.

  Flashlights were bobbing up and down as cops started coming down my driveway. I went closer to the lump and switched on the flashlight.

  A dead man was sprawled out on his back.

  I moved the light around. He was in loose black pants, white T-shirt shredded and bloody, and open black leather jacket.

  Unmoving, not breathing, and very dead.

  Ramon.

  The bigger half of the Pepe and Ramon Traveling Enforcement Show, and the man who had punched me in the jaw yesterday.

  I’d like to say I felt sorry for the big guy, but I didn’t. But I was still curious as to how he ended up here.

  Up on the driveway a cop yelled, “Freeze, right there! Show your hands!”

  I switched off the flashlight, dropped the cane, and then the evening got more interesting.

  One and then two Tyler
cops approached me, flashlights and pistols in hand. “Who are you? What are you doing here?”

  “I’m Lewis Cole,” I said. “I live in that house. I heard gunfire, came out to see what’s going on.”

  One cop kept his flashlight on me, and the other flashed it on the ground. “Holy shit,” the second cop said. “What’s going on is a crap show. Do you have ID?”

  “Back in the house.”

  The first cop said, “Hey, I know him. He’s a friend of the detective sergeant. He’s okay.”

  With that, I could feel the tension go away. I could have been standing there with a bloody axe in my hand and one cop saying to a brother cop “He’s okay” meant I was okay.

  Another question came my way. “Do you know this guy?” The first cop knelt down and checked the neck for a pulse. “Christ, this one is gone.”

  I sort of knew Ramon, but not enough to name him or give anything else up for the cops. “No, I don’t.”

  “Mind going back into the house?”

  “No—but would it be all right if I just stand on the steps?”

  “Why?”

  “I’m a magazine writer. I just like to see what’s going on.”

  “All right,” the first cop said. I couldn’t tell anything much about them, except they were young, lean, and had close-cropped hair. “Just stay out of the way.”

  “I’ll do that.”

  With some difficulty, I picked up the flashlight, switched it on. I was going for the cane when the near officer picked it up for me. “What happened to you?”

  “Had a run-in with a couple of surgeons,” I said.

  “Who won?” he asked. “You or the surgeons?”

  “Still don’t know.”

  I ducked back into the house to get a jacket, then stood on the granite steps watching more and more lights show up, flashing so much up at the parking lot of the Lafayette House that it looked like a thunderstorm was coming through. Soon the blue lights were joined by some red lights from the fire department ambulances. More cops traipsed down my driveway and set up high-powered lights on tripods to illuminate Ramon’s body. There were flashes as photographs were taken, and measurements were made, and I could make out voices from the parking lot. The harsh glare of lights from the television crew lit up.

  Television. That meant something big had just happened, right here in Tyler Beach, and right here on my doorstep.

  Cops started moving up and down my rugged driveway, and then one form separated itself from the line and came over.

  “Detective Sergeant Woods,” I said.

  “Mr. Cole.”

  She joined me on the concrete steps. “What a mess,” she said.

  “You mean the dead guy over there?”

  “No, there’s more up at the parking lot.”

  “What happened?” I asked.

  “Why don’t you tell me what you saw or heard, and I’ll try to fill in the blanks.”

  “Okay,” I said. “About thirty-five minutes ago I was getting ready to go to bed—”

  “Pretty late for you,” she said.

  “Certainly is,” I said, “but I dozed some on the couch earlier.”

  “Very well,” she said. “What happened thirty-five minutes ago?”

  “Sounded like the O.K. Corral up there. Shooting broke out, pretty fast and plentiful, and then tapered off.”

  “How many shooters?”

  “Four, maybe five.”

  “Then what?”

  “I went to the door, opened it up, wanted to see what was going on.”

  “Pretty dumb,” she said.

  “Pretty me,” I said.

  More television lights were lit up, harshly illuminating my side of the parking lot.

  “What did you see?”

  “Muzzle flashes from up the way.”

  “Did you see that guy get dropped?”

  “No.”

  “Anything else?”

  I moved and aimed the flashlight to the lower half of my wooden door, noted the fresh scarring of wood.

  “When your folks get around to it,” I said. “There’s a bullet in there. Random shot I guess.”

  “I’ll be damned.” She looked down as well and squatted, put a finger in the hole. “Feels like the slug’s still there.”

  “A couple of feet lower, you’d be digging it out of my skull.”

  She twisted her finger into the door some more, then stood up. “All right, fair’s fair. This is what we got up there, best we figure. Two sets of folks rolled in separate vehicles. One’s a Mercedes, not sure about the other. Some sort of SUV. People got out, started chatting in the middle of the parking lot. The chatting grew louder. Then things got serious.”

  “Anybody else get hit besides my new friend over there?”

  “Two other young gentlemen, struck in the legs and abdomen. As far as I know, they’ve both forgotten how to speak English.”

  Even more lights appeared. It looked like the parking lot up there had been turned into day. “Diane.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Not that I’m being critical or anything, but why are you here and not … you know, working?”

  “I am working,” she said. “I’m being support. See the really bright television lights up there? That’s because Assistant Attorney General Martin has arrived with his state police unit, taking over this awful gangland-type shooting as part of the ongoing opioid crisis. Blah-blah-blah, yadda-yadda-yadda.”

  Two bulky men in ill-cut suits were gingerly walking around the dead man, and I knew they were detectives from the state police.

  “So besides chatting with me …”

  “I’m not chatting with you,” Diane said. “You’re a witness, and I’m conducting a witness interview.”

  “Oh,” I said. “My bad. Sorry.”

  “You heard the gunshots. You saw the muzzle flashes. You poked your head out and nearly got it blown off. Pretty fair description so far?”

  “Very fair.”

  “Did you see that bulky guy over there come down your driveway?”

  “No, I didn’t.”

  “Hear any shouts, any voices? Anything else?”

  “Nope.”

  “All right,” she said. Over by the deceased Ramon, the state cops were taking photos and making measurements. “Lewis …”

  I was hoping she wasn’t going to press me, because I didn’t want to be pressed, and I was relieved at what she said next.

  “That hunk of man meat over there, any chance he was your mysterious visitor who’s been coming in at night when you’ve been upstairs in bed?”

  Good question, one I was very happy to answer.

  “No, not a chance.”

  “Why are you so sure?”

  “Hard to explain. When I heard the guy come into my place, he moved softly. Like he was barely disturbing anything. That big boy over there”—I pointed for emphasis—“would have sounded like a small tank going across the floorboards. I would have easily heard that.”

  Diane nodded. “Yeah. Wonder why, though, he ended up in your driveway. It was almost like he was coming down here for a reason.”

  I had been asking myself the same thing. “I don’t know. Maybe he got scared, decided to run away, find a place to hide. Maybe he saw the lights on. Maybe he had already been shot and was looking for help.”

  “Maybe,” she said. “But one thing’s for certain. Somewhere out there a woman is sleeping, maybe that guy’s wife, girlfriend, or mother. She’s sleeping deeply, with no idea that the man she loves, the one she’s either coupled with or raised as a little boy, is dead.”

  I could hear Diane take a breath. “And I’m not the one who’s going to make the call tonight, to wake her up, to shatter her life. Not me. It’s going to be somebody else, and at my age, and at this hour of the night, that’s all right by me. I have no problem with that.”

  “I can see,” I said.

  Diane gently nudged me with her shoulder. “Hey, recovering patient, don’t
you think it’s time to get back to bed?”

  “Going to be hard, with all that noise and lights.”

  “Yeah, well, it’s cold out here. Better to be inside and warm. Don’t want you to catch cold. Or worse.”

  She gave me a quick embrace and I said, “This one should be relatively quick to get leads on, don’t you think?”

  “Maybe,” I said. “The Lafayette House still has surveillance cameras on their front lawn and the parking lot, right? With the streetlights up there, the footage you might get from tollbooth cameras, it might be easy to get a trace.”

  “Dear me,” Diane said. “I’ll make sure to pass that along to the big bad state police detectives. Maybe you can get a shiny badge from them when this is over.”

  “Only if you put in a good word for me.”

  “As if.”

  Diane left and I stood for a while on my steps, feeling the coldness of the granite seep into my shoes. The glare from the television cameras had switched off, meaning that Assistant Attorney General Martin had finished his statements and left for the night.

  Two men with a wheeled gurney came down the driveway, holding onto its sides as it rattled and shook over the rough ground. They were firefighter/EMTs from the Tyler Fire Department, and with the state police detectives looking on, they went to work. They undid the belts on the gurney, took off a flat object that they unfolded into a very familiar shape: a body bag. They unzipped it and got to work, clumsily maneuvering Ramon into the bag, securing his limbs, and zipping the bag shut.

  The detectives took a step back, either out of respect or because they didn’t want the body to fall on their feet when the EMTs picked it up. With a “one-two-heave,” Ramon was picked up, strapped onto the gurney, and wheeled back up my lumpy driveway. I suppose this was the time to think grand philosophical thoughts about Life and Death and The Meaning of it All, but I wasn’t in the mood.

  I went for the door. “Sir! Sir! Can you hold on for a moment?” one of the detectives called out.

  The two detectives came over and identified themselves, and I promptly forgot their names. “Can we ask you a few questions?”

  “I talked to Detective Sergeant Woods just a few minutes ago,” I said. “Doesn’t that count?”