James Grippando - Afraid of the Dark

“I got it,” said the doctor. “I need an automated external defibrillator. Check the theater.”

The symphony drew an older crowd-apart from the cocaine addicts, they were South Beach’s most likely demographic for cardiac arrest. Good call, Doc.

Jack ran. The doors were open, and Jack burst into the lobby. It took him ten seconds to shout out his needs to the woman at the will-call window. It took her an ungodly long time to bring him the emergency kit. Jack grabbed it and raced back to the mall. Paramedics were finally on the scene. They had already administered the three stacked shocks that Jack had seen a hundred times on television dramas-200, 300, 360-and an IV was in place. One of the EMTs was struggling to intubate, but he couldn’t force the airway.

“Forget it, let’s roll!” he shouted.

The man looked utterly lifeless as the team lifted him onto the gurney. The crowd parted as paramedics whisked him down the mall to the ambulance at the corner. Jack took it as a bad sign that they didn’t even bother to turn on the sirens as the ambulance pulled away.

“He’s not going to make it, is he,” said Jack.

The doctor was standing beside his wife, his shirt soaked with sweat.

“Completely asystolic. Poor guy was at least twelve minutes into cardiac arrest by the time emergency arrived. Almost twenty by the time they pulled away. Once you get beyond six, at most eight minutes

…” His voice trailed away, as if he were too tired to verbalize the obvious. His wife squeezed his hand and assured him he’d done the best he could.

Two police officers were on the scene to secure the area around the fountain with yellow police tape.

“Please, folks, step back,” said the cop.

Jack noticed a third officer near the bench. The man’s suit jacket had been left behind, and the cop was fishing out a wallet, presumably for a driver’s license-something to reveal the identity of this well-dressed man who’d apparently come alone to the mall. Or come to meet someone.

Jack was suddenly thinking again of his scheduled meeting with his informant.

“Is this being treated as a crime scene?” Jack asked him.

“Back away, please. Let us do our job.”

The crowd began to disperse, people returning to their cafe tables to find melted ice cream or cold plates of linguine with clam sauce.

Jack turned his attention back toward the police. The yellow plastic tape was in place, but two men and a woman ducked under it. The crime scene investigation team had its job to do, which was the protocol for an unwitnessed death in a public place. But for an apparent heart attack, it seemed to Jack that they’d arrived in quite the hurry. Jack walked around to the other side of the fountain and approached the doctor again.

“Excuse me, but did anything about this seem suspicious to you?” Jack asked him.

The doctor shrugged. “Not really. Other than the fact that he was in his late twenties, maybe thirty. Pretty young to have a heart attack. I’d be surprised if the toxicology report doesn’t show something.”

Jack thought back to the earlier phone conversation in his grandfather’s bathroom. The voice on the line had definitely not been an older man’s.

“Yeah,” said Jack. “Something.”

Jack checked his watch: 8:10 P.M. The meeting time was to have been eight o’clock. Jack took one more look at the busy crime scene, then walked away and returned to his table at the cafe. The fizz had gone out of his sparkling water, but it couldn’t hurt to sit and wait a little longer. Deep down, however, he knew that his informant would be a no-show.

A quick glance at the napkin confirmed it, and Jack felt chills.

On the white paper napkin beneath his water glass was a handwritten note-and Jack was certain that it hadn’t been there before. With a CSI team nearby, Jack had the presence of mind not to touch the napkin or the glass. Condensation from the melted ice had blurred one of the words, and the penmanship wasn’t that good to begin with, but he was still able to read the entire message:

Are you afraid of The Dark?

“Is everything okay?” asked the waiter.

Jack was still staring at the napkin, absorbing the final two words of warning: Back off.

“Sir? Is everything okay?”

Jack glanced toward the crime scene, then back at the waiter. “Did you see anyone come by this table while I was away?”

“No, but to be honest, I was off watching the paramedics, just like everyone else.”

“Almost everyone else,” said Jack, his gaze returning to the napkin. Part of him wanted to get up and scour the mall for clues, but he would make it his job to protect this message from contamination until it could be properly collected and checked for fingerprints and forensic analysis.

“Do me a favor,” he told the waiter. “Ask one of those cops to come over here. And tell him to bring an evidence bag.”

Vincent Paulo hated Sunday nights. Always had. It was the thought of Monday morning that dragged him down. Tonight, however, the culprit was Saturday night-the fallout from what had happened yesterday evening at Lincoln Road Mall, to be exact.

“Are you coming to bed?” asked Alicia.

It was almost eleven, and he was seated in a rocking chair on the screened-in porch, facing their backyard. Crickets made their music in the bushes. Water gurgled from the fountain in the garden. Vince was on his third beer since the Miami Heat had fallen hopelessly behind in the third quarter of the LeBron James show.

“In a little while,” he said.

His wife waited, and he sensed her concern. Finally, her footsteps trailed away to the kitchen, and Vince returned to his thoughts.

Actually, when Vince was a little boy, it wasn’t just Sunday nights that he’d hated. Bedtime in general was a problem. Vince was afraid of the dark. He would lay awake for the longest time-for hours, it seemed, the covers pulled over his head, too scared to make a move. “Just close your eyes and go to sleep,” his mother would say. But Vince couldn’t do it. The Scooby-Doo night-light was of some comfort. But closing his eyes would have meant total darkness, and it was in that black, empty world that monsters prowled.

Ironic, he thought, that he now lived in that world-and that it was indeed a monster who had put him there.

Over the past three years Vince had tried not to think about the day he’d lost his sight, or at least not to dwell on it. Hindsight could eat you up, even on the small stuff. Going blind was definitely not small stuff. How many people could say, If only I hadn’t opened that door, I would never have lost my eyesight? Of those, how many could actually live with the result-truly live with it, as in live a happy life. Vince was determined to be one of those people.

There had been major adjustments, to be sure. For a time, he’d given up active duty completely to teach hostage negotiation at the police academy. Of all the skills that made a talented negotiator, sight was not chief among them. He was still a good listener, with sharp instincts, common sense, and street smarts. He could still intuit things from a hostage taker’s tone of voice over the phone, or from a mere pause in the conversation. In fact, losing his sight had seemed to strengthen those other, more important skills. Proof of that had come just a few months after his return to work, when, in his first job as a blind negotiator, he’d talked down a homeless guy from a bridge. That feat paled in comparison to the subsequent crisis that had put him in the national spotlight. A delusional and well-armed gunman took four people hostage in a motel and demanded to speak with the mayor’s daughter. One of those hostages was Theo Knight-Jack Swyteck’s best friend. And now Swyteck was returning the favor by defending Jamal Wakefield.