by Chris Capps
There.
It was on the hill overlooking them all, something white and dancing. Smoke billowed in a long single trail upward, snaking lazily up into the sky. Cherry was looking at the radio, suddenly very still.
"I guess he hasn't noticed that the record is skipping," she said.
"My grandfather's binoculars," Jack said, "Are they still on the mantle over the fireplace?"
"They should be," Cherry said, sitting and sipping her coffee.
"Would you go get them?" he said, eyes drawn once again back to that dancing figure on the hill, "Cherry, please."
Seconds later she returned with the binoculars and sat back down looking over the newspaper, holding them out to Jack. With the lenses weighing heavily in his hand, Jack Thorn paused, looked back up into that crystal blue sky bisected by a trail of black smoke. He thought about it, feeling the texture of the old binoculars in his hand. He couldn't raise them. Instead, he turned back to the table and picked up his pack of cigarettes.
"Outside, babe," Cherry said as his shaking fingers pulled one of the unfiltered smokes from the pack. She leveled her eyes at him, paper in one hand and coffee in the other as he picked up his lighter, "You promised."
Jack let the cigarette hang from his lips, and glanced out the window again. With the binoculars in one hand and a lighter in the other, he slowly raised them, fastened them to his eyes and looked up into the hill through his kitchen window on the perfect morning.
"What do you see, anyway?" Cherry asked, tearing a corner from the toast he had left behind. She didn't notice it, but when Jack responded the cigarette in his mouth hung slack, held in place by his tacky dry lips before dropping onto the windowsill in silence, "Some kind of accident?"
"I don't know," Jack said as his arms grew weak and he lowered the binoculars. There he saw it again, from a safe distance. The dancing white flames and black smoke got caught in a sudden gust of wind.
The siren of an emergency vehicle closed in on their house, passed it, and was followed by two more, squealing frantically toward the column, the flickering light. They rushed by, their wails quickly becoming like ghosts as they tore off the road onto the manicured grass leading up the hill, leaving thick brown treads across the dew covered trail. Jack set his binoculars on the windowsill and sat back down at the table, staring at the toast and the sausage.
"What was it?" Cherry asked after a long silence.
"Nothing," Jack said staring at his breakfast.
It was a man. A man on fire.
***
From the passenger seat of the police cruiser, Officer Jessica Myers sat watching the spectacle in front of her slowly grow as the cruiser raced up the hill to follow the fire truck. The driver, a rookie who preferred to go by his nickname "Frankie," was coughing while driving, still recovering from a respiratory infection that would ordinarily have left him bedridden, but he had chosen to come in anyway.
"Ease in," Jessica said, "Just stay behind the fire truck."
"You got it, ma'am," Frankie said gasping and coughing again, before following it with an embarrassed, "Sorry."
Jessica ignored him, counting the patrol cars making the journey up the hill and picking up the police radio. Realizing that everyone in the area who was likely to respond would already be either here or on their way, Jessica reconsidered calling for more help, and replaced it. As soon as the Sherriff got up here, he would likely want the area cordoned off. She looked around at the dazzling display of police lights around her, wondering if he had gotten a ride in one of the other vehicles.
"I'm getting out," she said, "Stay here and listen to the radio. If the Sherriff says anything at all, come get me immediately."
"Right," Frankie said, "Right, ma'am."
She exited the patrol car just as a massive cloud of steam filled the vicinity of the arranged vehicles. The fire crew had already opened up with the hose, trying as desperately as they could to douse the flames quickly. Unfortunately for this poor soul, relief would come entirely too late. She looked down the hill at the rows of houses that now had perfect visibility on what was the clearest day she had seen in years. There was a thick smell of gasoline in the air, and something else that reminded her of long lazy summer evenings on the fourth of July.
Whatever protest this guy had mounted, he had certainly picked the right day. His head was shrouded, wrapped in a blackened canvas bag no doubt carefully picked out just for this event. His hands were behind him, possibly bound or -
The jet of water turned off, and she walked in thick steaming mud around the charred prone figure. Behind him there were handcuffs.
"Not a suicide," she said, turning back to Frankie sitting in the driver's seat of her patrol car, "Call Sherriff Rind right now. I want him on the horn immediately!"
The fire brigade had backed off with the fire contained. One of the men had jumped back in the vehicle and was starting up the engine. Realizing where the truck stood in relationship to the man on the hill, Jessica called out to him,
"Hey!"
"What?" the man called back, rolling down his window, "We're moving out of the way!"
"That's alright," Jessica said, "You're just fine where you are. Do me a favor and keep your truck right there. You're blocking the view between us and the school. I don't want any kids out there to be able to look up here and see this."
The fire marshal immediately nodded and killed the engine of his truck. The burly man opened his door and got out, looking down at the corpse with his hands on his hips and a sickened grimace on his face. He wasn't unused to seeing victims of fire. Every other year some structure or another would catch fire resulting in the unavoidable, but nonetheless tragic casualty.
"Good thinking," the other fireman said rounding the truck, and taking off his helmet with no small reverence, "Poor guy. What happened? Accident? Suicide?"
"Murder?" the first broke in. With the body cooled now, the EMS crews were surrounding him with one of Jessica's officers helping them get the mask off. As they turned the stiffened and charred body over, onto its left side, Jessica looked the hands. They were handcuffs, alright. Wrapped around charred flesh and bone.
Jessica figured the hood wasn't put over this man's face to hide it. He was wearing it because someone wanted to make it easier to identify him. As the EMS crews peeled the hood back, Jessica suddenly realized that the fourth of July smell she remembered was a grill loaded with meat. She didn't lose it, though, as she strained her lungs to expel every bit of that foul air out of her. She didn't lose it when she realized that she would never be able to look at another charbroiled burger the same way.
"Sherriff Rind," one of the officers said. That's when she lost it. It was the exact moment when she saw Sherriff Rind's still perfectly intact face twisted in agony, sitting on that monstrosity of a body the fire had left behind.
On shaky legs she stepped back. Expressionless, she rounded behind the EMS truck and for just a moment started sobbing violently. It wasn't a natural reaction for her, feeling more disgust than despair at the moment, but it was the one that left no evidence behind. In the thick smell of gasoline and smoke, she leaned heavily on the truck and waited for the moment to pass.
Sherriff's dead, Jessica. Get a hold of yourself.
Frankie's voice finally closed the door on that moment as he rounded the back of the vehicle. He was holding something in a towel,
"No doubt about it, Jessica. He's dead. I guess this isn't how we pictured this would happen. Not much ceremony given we need you now."
He picked up her hand and placed the Sherriff's star in it.
The town of Cairo, when the tunnel back to the mainland was shut off had 71,200 light bulbs in storage, 3,168 firearms, a fully stocked hospital designed for a small metropolis, tens of thousands of gallons of shelf stable gasoline, three times as many houses as people, and at least three decades worth of freeze dried and canned foods. What it didn't have was more than one Sherriff's star. From this moment on, Jessica would have t
o be wearing the trinket of a dead man. It was burning her hand as she closed her fingers around it.
Whatever she had lost in that previous moment, she knew she had to get it back.
"Mayor Sugarhill should know about this," she said, "I'll tell him myself."
***
Bob Wills' Steel Guitar Rag was a hit with the Texas Playboys in 1936, still widely played in dive bars and diners throughout the American southwest long after Wills died in Fort Worth Texas at the age of 70. He was just the sort of icon that had been cemented in time for this ship-in-a-bottle town.
The colorful jukebox in Scratchy's diner slid out the old long-play and lowered its needle down between the first grooves of the record. It started to skip.
And skip.
Tabitha Berliner looked into the black void of her coffee, watching the thin bubbling foam at the corners slowly disappear. Soon the bubbles would be gone, leaving nothing but the tempered stillness of a cold cup of coffee. She hadn't heard that back on Earth the country star legend had already died in 1975. For her, Wills would survive much longer. And then on this warm and bright November morning in '82, as she heard the song she had sacrificed so many dimes to -skip- she knew it would be taken out of the juke box. Never to be heard again.
"Record's broken, Leon. Kick it off," the burly namesake of the diner, Scratchy said snapping his fingers from behind the counter, "If my customers wanted to hear ruined records they'd listen to the radio."
Leon leapt over the counter, dish rag still in his hand. He opened the glass case to lift the record from the juke box just when the double doors in front of the diner jingled. The McCarthy brothers walked through. They chose the table at the front, seating themselves across from one another and letting their eyes drink in the rare sight of an outside without fog.
Not bothering to take their orders, since it never changed, Tabitha stood up from the booth at the other end of the austere diner and swayed hips over to them, coffee pot in hand along with two empty mugs. Felix would want black coffee, no cream and no honey. Mike would want more honey than most people would consider reasonable.
"Hello boys," she said setting the mugs down and pouring the coffee, "I wasn't expecting to see anyone in here until sunset. I mean except for old Daffy, of course."
Daffy was a middle aged rancher that owned twenty acres of prime grazing land. The perpetually overall wearing bald man was nearly one and a half times the size of Scratchy - which was quite the accomplishment. The brothers had gleaned over the years that Daffy ate all of his meals at Scratchy's every day. All four of them. As Daffy was one of the prime cattle men in town, it seemed appropriate. He was sitting now, having finished his second meal of the day, slowly tearing his paper napkin into strips and laying it across his cleaned plate. After this he would likely read - and then tear up - the diner's copy of the Daily Sentinel.
Felix picked up his coffee, watching the corpulent man bellow quietly in his own bizarre language, talking inaudibly to himself as he read the paper. Mike was busying himself with the honey dispenser.
The front door to Scratchy's diner jingled as two officers stepped through. With hands on their belts, both men scanned the nearly empty diner, finally letting their eyes rest on Mike and Felix. The two boys looked up and exchanged the kind of glance that some brothers often share. It's the look all brothers have exchanged at one point or another.
We're in trouble.
"Mike and Felix, Deputy Frankie," the younger of the two men said coughing and extending a hand, "You mind coming with us, boys?"
"What trouble have you gotten into this time?" Scratchy called out from the kitchen over a steaming griddle, "knock over one of Daffy's cows?"
"Better not have," Daffy said stifling a belch and pulling a tin of pills from his pocket, "I'll kick their teeth in."
"Nothin' like that, Scratchy," Frankie said as the boys started rising from their table, "Sherriff Jessica Myers just wants to talk to them."
Scratchy ducked his head over the Christmas light framed order shelf, his bulging face straining to see as much as it was straining to hear. He called out after them,
"Sherriff Jessica Myers? What do you mean Sherriff Jessica Myers?" He called once again as they started to shuffle the McCarthy boys out the door, "Hey deputy! Something happen to Sherriff Rind?"
"Mayor Sugarhill's gonna address the town soon. There's gonna be a meeting to cover all this," the other cop, a man Scratchy knew as Deputy Spiff called back, "Just stay cool until then. Everything's under control."
Followed by Scratchy's shouts for explanation, the four men stepped out onto the cracked sidewalk, each haunted by unanswered questions. Spiff shot Frankie a stern look as they closed in on the police cruiser parked illegally in front of the diner. Finally, as Frankie rounded to the driver's side door of their vehicle, he could no longer keep it in. He shrugged and muttered to himself,
"At least I didn't tell him we couldn't find the mayor."
***
Mayor Sugarhill stopped periodically, strained his ears catlike from moment to moment as he tiptoed through the small sparsely furnished duplex at 720 Flamingo Road. The hideout had served him well in the past, allowing him a level of discretion and comfort that would have ordinarily been impossible when meeting campaign contributors and the occasional scandalous admirer.
Crawling over the tussled sheets from the living room's fold-out bed, Sugarhill spied his old typewriter sitting alone on the desk with light from an unsullied sky beating down on it. With shaking fingers, he picked up a small bottle of One Winged Fly and poured a glass of the craft whiskey out.
"To steady the nerves," he said aloud, "Just a nip."
Armed with the whiskey, Sugarhill managed to type out four words.
Who ever finds this...
It didn't look right. Draining the glass of whiskey he immediately pulled the paper out and crumpled it up, scanning the bookshelf next to him for the Dictionary. If his suicide note was ever found, those vultures at the Daily Sentinel would inevitably publish it in its entirety the following day, carefully scanning every line to ensure all typing errors and misspellings were preserved forever. Those hacks had to make everything in his life difficult, even now. He tore the dictionary from the shelf and let the heavy book thud on his desk, cracking it open at W.
Whoever.
That single word typed now, his eyes were summoned to the window. He could hear the familiar squeak of brakes on Sherriff Rind's patrol car. It was enough to make him stand, enough to make him walk to the window.
Outside, Jessica spotted a shape moving in Mayor Sugarhill's secret hideout. Of course a number of people on the force had always known it both existed and was being utilized by the mayor. It had been Sherriff Rind who had helped him move furniture into the building. He had mentioned the poker games and the booze binges. What he hadn't mentioned was that the mayor also kept a number of loaded weapons in the house. As she exited the vehicle, the left window next to the front door smashed, revealing Sugarhill standing in the living-room holding a hunting rifle butt-end out.
With the window splintering into a thousand pieces, glass cascading in a sheet to the ground, Sugarhill stared. He was eyeing Jessica with the butt of the rifle resting on the windowsill. And then, after only the briefest moment, he lowered the rifle. He looked rough, and at least a little embarrassed, as he said,
"Jessica?"
"There's a problem," Jessica said, "Why are you in hiding? How much do you know?"
Sugarhill appeared at the front door moments later, swinging it open with a fresh brand of terror she hadn't seen in him in years - if ever. His eyes darted up and down the street before he grabbed her arm and quietly shuffled her into the house,
"Jessica, have you seen Paul? Paul Rind?"
She hesitated.
"Yes," she started, the image of the Sheriff's perfectly intact face on a charred body still resonating in her mind, "He's dead."
"Dead," Sugarhill said, "Thank God."
He smiled. It wasn't the smile of a man who had abandoned over two decades of friendship. It wasn't the kind of smile that made him a suspect. There was a look on his face, a look of relief. It unnerved her to a degree that Jessica couldn't quite grasp.
"Excuse me, mayor?"
The mayor was wandering slowly across the floor of his living room, picking up a small trophy that had been set over the fireplace mantle. He picked it up, running his finger along one of the seams on its base, leaving a long oily fingerprint across it. He looked up at Jessica,
"Second place. Clayton and I won this back in '78 I think. Rind was a real hard-ass, I know. He ran you ragged. Lots of people hated him, feared him. I have to say, I knew him for a long time and he scared me sometimes. The man was a soldier, a trooper. But he was also an animal."
"This isn't going to be easy for you," Jessica said, "But I know it's always been Rind's intention to appoint me as interim Sherriff if anything should happen to him. With your permission, I am prepared to begin as soon as you need. We can hold an election as soon as next month for the next Sherriff."
The mayor smirked, tossing the trophy up and catching it,
"It's plastic. Pretty soon it's going to be more valuable than gold. We'll be mining the junk yard looking for stuff like this. Where did you find him?"
"Paul?" Jessica asked, studying the mayor's peculiar mood. He seemed somehow unhinged. Of course, one thing Jessica had learned from years of delivering bad news was you could never quite predict how people were going to react, "He was set on fire up on a hill. No suspects yet, but we'll have whoever did this brought to justice."
"Jessica," Mayor Sugarhill said, "Sherriff Myers, I need you to take me to the radio station. I should address the town, let them know what's going on. We've been running this administration under cloaks long enough. And it's not going to be easy to keep anything secret for very long. Not anymore."
