Andrew Klavan - The last thing I remember

“Mrs. Simmons?” I called.

There was no answer. It was odd. The house had an empty feel to it suddenly. I waited a second. Then I started down the hall, calling as I went.

“Mrs. Simmons? I’m done with my shower. Are the deputies here yet?”

I came out into the living room. It was a big room, two stories tall with a cathedral ceiling. There was a fireplace against one wall. Chairs: a rocking chair, a couple of armchairs. Another sofa. A wide-screen TV.

But it was empty here too. There was no one around.

I was about to call out again-about to head into the kitchen-when I noticed something. There was this large picture window on one wall. It looked out at the front of the house, out at the quiet street and the forest across the way and the first dark of evening coming into the sky above the trees. The carport was around the side of the house out of sight, but you could see part of the driveway leading up to it. There were cars there now. Cars that hadn’t been there before. I moved closer to the window and looked out. There was a blue Cadillac and a red-and-white sheriff ’s department cruiser and another car in front of those that I couldn’t make out, and two more cruisers parked at the curb down the street.

Good, they’re here, I thought. But where? Where was Mrs. Simmons? Where were all the deputies from those cars? Where was everyone?

I turned around, starting to call, “Mrs. Simmons…!”

And suddenly I was looking down the barrel of a large handgun, pressed close to my forehead.

“Freeze, West!” a man shouted in my face. “You move and I’ll blow your head off!”

I froze. I gaped into the black bore of the gun barrel.

“Put your hands up! Put ’em up! Now! Now!”

I swallowed. I raised my hands. I was scared-of course: someone points a gun at you and you get scared, that’s just the way it is. But I wasn’t as scared as you might think. I was really just startled mostly. I could see now that the man holding the gun was wearing a brown khaki uniform. He was a sheriff’s deputy, a lawman, one of the good guys. I realized there must be some mistake.

“It’s okay,” I said, holding my hands in the air. “It’s just me. I gave the gun to Mrs…”

“Shut up! Put your hands behind your head!”

This was another voice. I turned to it. Another deputy was standing by the kitchen door. He had a gun, too, and it was also leveled at me.

“Do it! Do it now!”

Yet a third voice. A third deputy was coming out of the hall-where I’d just come from. Another gun was aimed my way.

“Okay, okay,” I said. “Don’t shoot. I’m the good guys.” I put my hands behind my head.

And with breathtaking speed, the three deputies leapt at me.

“Hey!” I shouted.

They spun me around. One of them hit me in the back of the legs so that I dropped to my knees. Another one wrestled my hands down from my head and twisted them painfully behind my back. I felt a cold pinch of metal as he snapped handcuffs on my wrists.

“Ow! What’re you doing?” I said.

“Shut up! On your feet, West!”

Even as he was shouting in my ear, he was dragging me up off my knees, onto my feet. It was hard to maneuver with my hands cuffed behind me.

One of the deputies was murmuring into the microphone clipped to his shoulder.

“All clear. We got him!”

Through the window, I could see more deputies coming into view, coming out from where they’d been hiding behind trees and against the wall of the house. They were all wearing bulletproof vests. A couple of them were carrying assault rifles. Who’d they think I was? Osama bin Laden?

Everything was happening fast-so fast I couldn’t think, couldn’t figure out what was going on. The deputies were shoving me toward the door, shouting at me.

“Move! Come on! Move it! Go!”

They shoved me to the front door of the house. One of the deputies outside opened it. The others half shoved and half carried me through, outside into the evening.

There were deputies on every side of me. My eyes went from one to another, looking for someone who would explain, some friendly face.

“What’re you doing?” I said. “What’s the matter?”

“Shut up,” someone answered.

Then I heard someone growl angrily, “You lousy punk…”

And suddenly a man was in front of me. Not a deputy. A broad-shouldered man about my height wearing a suit and tie. He had a square head like a cement block. He had little eyes and they were black with anger. He grabbed the front of my shirt, taking a handful of flesh with it.

“If I find out you laid one hand on my wife or my kid, you little punk, not even the cops’ll be able to protect you.” He was so close, I could feel his spit on my face as he talked. “I’ll find you wherever you are, I’ll…!”

“Harmon!” I heard a woman shout. She sounded as if she was crying. I tried to turn to her. It was hard with this guy grabbing me. But I caught a glimpse of some red hair off to my right. It was Mrs. Simmons.

The guy grabbing me shouted again. “You hear what I’m telling you, punk?”

“I didn’t-” I started to say.

But before I could finish, a deputy took hold of the guy and pulled him off me. He had to work at it. The guy didn’t want to let go. The deputy had to wrap one arm around his neck and use the other hand to pry the guy’s fingers out of the fabric of my shirt. Finally, the guy released me and the deputy dragged him away.

I stumbled backward, but another deputy held me up.

And now, before I could think, yet another man was approaching me. This was a great big guy. He seemed almost to be bursting out of his khaki uniform. He towered over me. He had a huge belly that came on before him like a prow goes before a ship.

It was the sheriff himself. His badge said so. He was older-I figured about sixty or so-with sparse gray hair swept back over the dome of his egg-shaped head. He had a large, wrinkled face that looked like it smiled a lot. But it wasn’t smiling now.

“Easy does it, Harmon,” he said calmly. He was looking down at me, but he was talking to the other guy, the guy who’d grabbed me. “Your girls are fine. The boy didn’t hurt them any.”

“I didn’t!” I said.

Wild-eyed, I looked to my right. The guy-Harmon-was standing there next to Mrs. Simmons. He had his arm wrapped protectively around her. She in turn had her arm around the little girl, Angeline, and was leaning her face against Harmon’s jacket and crying. I guessed Harmon was her husband, the assistant district attorney. He was glaring at me with those small, furious black eyes. Sneering at me with his lips working as if he still had a lot he wanted to say.

I looked up at the sheriff. “What’s going on?” I said. “I didn’t do anything. What’s going on?”

The sheriff had a calm, quiet voice. He sounded like a man who didn’t get upset much. “I think you know what’s going on, son, don’t you?”

I shook my head. “I don’t, I swear.”

“You are Charlie West, right?” he asked me.

I nodded.

“Charlie West from Spring Hill.”

“That’s right.”

He sort of cocked his head to one side as if to say: That settles it then.

“Well, Charlie,” he said slowly. “I’m Sheriff James. And you’re done, that’s all. You’re going back to prison where you belong.”

“Prison?” I said. My voice cracked as I said it. A million thoughts were racing through my mind. Was that where I’d escaped from? Had I been in prison when I woke up this morning? No! They don’t strap you down to chairs and torture you in prison-not in an American prison, anyway. These people around me weren’t the same people who had chased me through the forest earlier. These were deputies. This was the law, the good guys. They were supposed to be on my side. “Why should I go to prison?” I asked him.