Brian Freeman - In the Dark aka The Watcher

It took ten minutes for the entire train to pass. When the caboose wiggled past him, the giant noise diminished, getting farther away. He watched it go. He realized his skin was damp with rain.

“Who’s your friend?”

Stride jumped. He spun around and found Dada behind him. A dead oak tree loomed behind the black man, and its spindly branches seemed to grow out of his head. Dada dwarfed him, and Stride wasn’t small.

“Is he a cop?”

Dada was six inches away, and Stride wanted to back up, but he didn’t. This close, he could see that Dada was young. Maybe twenty. He wasn’t wearing his colorful beret. His ropes of matted hair sprouted off a high forehead and dangled like wriggling worms to his chest. The whites of his eyes were stark against his dark skin. He had arched, devil-like eyebrows.

“I said, is he a cop?”

Dada’s voice was surprisingly smooth, almost hypnotic.

“Yes,” Stride said.

“Is this about that girl?”

“Yes.”

“They think I killed her?”

“They want to talk to you,” Stride said.

Dada swung a dented canteen by the silver chain on its cap, and then he lifted it to his lips and took a swallow. He wiped his scraggly beard.

“Talk? A white girl gets killed, and a black man is seen with her, and all the police want to do is talk?”

Rain fell harder around them. Water beaded on Dada’s head and face. Stride heard the drops slapping on the earth.

“Did you do it?” Stride asked.

“What do you think?”

Stride stared at him. “No, I don’t think you did.”

“Then get out of my way. There’s another train coming. It’s time for me to go somewhere else.”

“I can’t do that,” Stride said.

He felt the ground shake again with the earthquake of a train getting closer. Every minute, another long dragon left the harbor.

“You’re brave to stand there, but you’re a fool if you think you can stop me.”

“Just talk to him,” Stride said. “Tell him what you saw. Without you, they’re never going to solve this case.”

“Did you know the girl?”

“She was my girlfriend’s sister.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Tell me what you saw.”

A train whistle screamed. The rain sheeted down and dripped from Stride’s eyelashes.

“That girl had secrets,” Dada said.

He laid a paw on Stride’s shoulder and shoved him effortlessly aside. A train engine growled by behind them, dragging rusted gray boxcars. The grinding of steel wheels on the track unleashed an awful squeal. Stride had seen baby pigs castrated. It sounded like that.

He threw himself at Dada, but it was like tackling a tree trunk. Dada angled an elbow sharply into Stride’s chest and jabbed once, like a single blow from a hammer. The air fled Stride’s lungs. He was knocked backward onto his ass and sat in the mud, struggling to breathe. Dada was steps away from the shuddering train cars. Stride scrambled to his feet and dived again, aiming low. He launched his upper body against the black man’s ankle. Dada’s foot scraped across the wet ground, and then he toppled and fell. The canteen spilled from his hand and rolled.

“Tell me!” Stride shouted.

Their skin was streaked in mud. The train cars clattered past them only ten feet away, deafening and huge. Stride clawed for a hold on Dada’s wrist, but Dada climbed to his feet, carrying Stride with him. Stride chopped at the man’s neck. The blow did nothing. Dada shooed him away like a fly, pushing him backward, but Stride charged again and hung on, hammering the man’s kidneys with his right fist. Dada’s knotted muscles were like a punching bag, absorbing the blows.

“Stupid boy,” Dada said.

He hit Stride across the mouth. His silver ring sliced Stride’s face. The punch felt like a metal shovel swung into his teeth. Stride staggered two steps and crumpled backward into the weeds. He coughed and tasted blood. When he bit down, his jaw didn’t align, and one of his molars dangled as if held by a thread. He wanted to get up, but his eyes sent his brain jumbled images of what was in front of him. Pain throbbed and beat against his skull.

He heard something. A crack. A sharp metallic ping.

A voice.

“Stop!”

It was Ray. He was shooting.

Stride struggled to all fours. His mouth hung open, blood trailing from both sides of his lips like a vampire. He shook his head, trying to rearrange his blurred vision. When the picture cleared, he saw Dada sprinting for the train as it accelerated. On the highway, near the Camaro, Ray held his revolver in both hands and fired again.

The bullet ricocheted off one of the boxcars.

Dada grabbed the rung of a steel ladder and swung his big leg gracefully onto the bottom step. The last few cars in the huge centipede wriggled past. Stride saw Ray limping, trying to run, failing. The train left them both behind. Dada shrank in his eyes, lost in the growing darkness, vanishing, escaping.

Stride crawled a few inches, felt the world spin again, and then passed out.

“Well, you are just so cool,” Maggie told Stride with a smile.

“It wasn’t my finest moment,” he admitted.

“How did Ray feel about Dada getting away?”

“In retrospect, I think he was relieved. He knew that Dada was long gone once he got on that train. We were never going to see him again. Everyone got what they wanted. Ray. Laura’s dad. Peter Stanhope and his father. They could all believe that we knew who killed Laura, and he had left town for good. It could all go away, go underground. And that’s what happened.”

“But did Dada kill Laura?” Maggie asked.

“Ray had the lab check Dada’s canteen for fingerprints, and they compared them with Peter’s bat. There was a match. Dada had his hands on that bat, which tracked with Peter’s story. There weren’t any other witnesses.”

“That was enough for Ray?”

“That was enough for everyone. Even me. Until now.”

I never believed the story about Dada. I couldn’t say anything, though. My dad needed closure, not an open wound. The police wouldn’t listen. They barely pretended to search for Dada around the country, because no one really wanted to find him. If he came back, questions would be asked, and the answers were better off buried with the body.

It’s easy to believe in evil. Easy to spot it. The black devil came to town, and he picked one girl to sacrifice, and then he rode the dirty train back to the wilderness. That’s the kind of fable they used to tell us in church. People around here like to think that good and evil are as easy as black and white. Good people wear the cross. Bad people don’t. Bad people are strangers. It’s so much harder to accept that evil could be living among you. Your neighbor. Your teacher. Your friend.

The stalker? No one wanted to know about him. Dada wasn’t the one on the school grounds, slipping vile notes into Laura’s locker. He wasn’t mailing threats to her. It didn’t matter. If Dada killed her, why look for a stalker? If Dada killed her, the city was safe again. Parents could stop holding their breath. Kids could make out in the park. That’s what we all wanted.

So I let it go, even though I knew it was a lie. Even though I knew there was a killer among us. I didn’t know his face, but I was sure I knew who he was.