Lawrence Block - Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 129, No. 6. Whole No. 790, June 2007

Sean shook his head. He rarely watched the news programs.

“How ‘bout the papers? You been readin’ what’s goin’ on in this area?”

Again Sean shook his head.

The sergeant studied him in puzzlement. “You ain’t just stayin’ out of the sun, you’re stayin’ out of life altogether. Maybe that’s the real secret.” It was the officer’s turn to shake his large round head. “Anyway,” he resumed heavily, “there’s a gang of some kind been workin’ our end of the state pretty serious. They like stores just like this one — open all night, lone operator in the wee hours, deal largely in cash. Get me? It’s not a snatch-and-run outfit, Sean. They mean business and they’re not leavin’ witnesses. They’ve killed three, so far... and they take the security tapes, the whole damn cassette recorder if they have to.”

Outside the store, a car cruised through the small, littered parking lot. As the headlights swept across the patrol car outside, they appeared to hesitate, then resumed the arc that meant they had continued on to the exit. A fissure of white gleamed through a broken taillight lens. Sergeant Fullerton, his back to the lot, did not notice, and Sean gave no indication of what he had witnessed. During the course of a shift, perhaps half a dozen cars would perform the same maneuver.

“So we don’t have a clue as to what they look like,” Sergeant Fullerton went on. “No vehicle description. Nothin’. But, they do shoot. The state police have recovered three bullets from the skulls of three night clerks... all small caliber. A ladies’ gun, a .25, I believe, and they use it up close and personal, execution style with a mean twist.” He placed an extended forefinger against the soft flesh that sagged beneath his jaws. “Straight up to the brain pan. The last thing those poor bastards got to see was their killer’s grinning face.

“I’m not tryin’ to scare you, Sean, but I can’t help but worry with you sittin’ on the edge of town out here.”

Sean was touched by the officer’s concern. They really hardly knew each other. “Well,” Sean ventured over a rising feeling of excitement, “it wouldn’t do to have Mrs. Fisher or little Megan in here for me.”

“No, I didn’t mean that,” Sergeant Fullerton continued impatiently. “Talk to Mr. Corrado about closing down early for a few weeks, until we catch these thugs. How much money can he make between midnight and eight that would make it worth it?”

Sean pretended to think this over.

Sergeant Fullerton studied his face as if noticing for the first time the vertical creases that ran from cheekbone to chin amidst the salt-and-pepper whiskers of the night clerk’s five o’clock shadow — as if it was occurring to him that, but for Sean’s vague, wistful gaze, a certain hardness might lie at the core of the man.

“I’ll mention it,” Sean lied. “But we make a lot of money up till about two A.M.”

“Not enough,” the policeman assured Sean as he wedged a travel cap onto the cup of coffee and turned for the exit. “I’ll try to get cars out here as often as I can,” he promised over his shoulder.

“Thanks,” Sean said to his own image as the glass door swung closed behind the sergeant.

Sean slept poorly that day. After the kindly policeman’s visit, a growing sense of alertness, a tingling, nervous energy, began to course through his veins. He felt like a person who had just awakened to a cry from another room, startled and uncertain as to its meaning. He was not afraid as a result of the officer’s warning, but excited the way he had been as a child watching a summer storm rolling across the landscape, its belly dark and full of lightning, the hot, humid air charged with menace and hidden meaning. So he was not surprised when he dreamt of Beirut.

The chaotic, crashing images of his dream would not have been recognizable as a geographic locale to anyone else, as they held significance only for the dreamer, but to Sean the very smell and taste of “The Root,” as he and his fellow marines had dubbed it, flooded his senses.

He stood on a third-floor balcony of the battalion landing team’s command post looking back over his shoulder. Somewhere to the front of the building he had heard the revving of an engine, and in the predawn quiet it seemed very loud. He was glancing back to see if the noise had disturbed any of his fellow marines in the room behind him, where most of his squad lay cocooned in their sleeping bags, but besides the usual grunts, snores, and farts of slumberous young men, they appeared unperturbed. This amused Sean and he smiled and turned away. The dreaming Sean smiled also.

As his dream self watched the coming dawn tint the Lebanese sky with blood, a crash came to his ears, and a splintering of wood. The truck, or whatever it was, sounded much closer. He leaned over the wall of the balcony in an attempt to see what was going on, but was rewarded with nothing but the sight of a few heads popping out from the bunkers and makeshift shelters that dotted the edges of the airport tarmac, swiveling this way and that in an attempt to locate the disturbance that had roused them from a Sunday’s slumber. From somewhere below him there was the crashing of glass, and he counted two rifle shots. A moment later, a sergeant he thought he recognized charged out of the building’s lobby and into his field of vision. Sean thought he had never seen someone run so fast before, or perhaps it was just an effect of the acute angle from which he watched. A husky voice from behind him called out groggily, “Dude, what the f — k is goin’—” The sleeping Sean sucked in his breath. This was when it happened.

Suddenly he was flying, or more accurately hurtling through the air, over the very heads that he had just been smiling down on. Though he was enveloped by clouds that billowed grey and soft, he felt no sense of peace, as his breath had been sucked from his lungs and he was choking and on fire; an angel cast down from heaven. Other objects whistled by him in this celestial pollution — body parts and glass; concrete and steel reinforcing rods; boots and vehicle parts; all seeking new converts to their miraculous liberation. The maelstrom around Sean shrieked with the flight of unseen banshees.

Then, with an unceremonious thump, he was thrown to the earth like litter from a speeding car, and left to stare upwards at a heaven obscured by tons of ferroconcrete dust, while all around him objects, some horribly recognizable and others mercifully indescribable, fell from the sky like a hellish plague. He was alive.

This was where Sean would awaken, just as he had awakened in the makeshift Battalion Aid Station a day later, bewildered at the sudden shift in reality, but largely unhurt. He would not believe the corpsmen who insisted the entire battalion command post was simply no more, and grew combative when they told him that two hundred and forty-one of his fellow marines had died in the carnage of the truck bombing. He had known that this could not be true, as he was still living — could not be true. He could not have survived such a catastrophe.

Then a lieutenant with an engineering degree had tried to explain it to him, saying that it was likely the very explosion that had doomed so many within the building had lofted him along on a cushion of hot gases, and set him down with surprising gentleness as those same gases dissipated into the unconfined atmosphere. “A miracle, nonetheless,” the well-meaning officer had assured him. “Bullshit, sir,” Sean had replied courteously.

The following day he had been released for duty. Still angry over the inexplicable pessimism of his normally gung-ho fellow marines, he strode directly to the site of the command post. It wasn’t there.

Sean had stared in incomprehension, turning this way and that in an attempt to get his bearings. Somehow he had become disoriented and had arrived at the wrong location. It’s concussion, he had assured himself. That was the only possible explanation for his sudden loss of direction within the limited confines of his unit’s area of operations. Had he not spent the last five months of his life dodging Shiite sniper bullets, Druze artillery rounds, and the occasional Syrian-made rocket right here in the Corps’ stinking little piece of Beirut?