Jonathan Kellerman - Time Bomb

“Unloaded,” said Dinwiddie, handing the shotgun to Milo as if it were something unclean. To Ike: “I took out the shells last time I was here.”

Ike gaped at him. “Where? Where’d you put them?”

“They’re not here, Ike. I took them with me.”

Ike said, “Why, Ted?” Talking loud to be heard over the old woman’s invectives, his tall body canopied over her tiny sweatered frame. Trying to contain her with his spidery arms while fixing his attention on Dinwiddie.

Dinwiddie held out his hands and said, “I had to, Ike. The way she is- how she’s gotten. You just saw that.”

“She didn’t even know how to use it, Ted! You just saw that!”

“I couldn’t take a chance, Ike. She was so much worse the last time, so… you know that’s true. We talked about it- your worries. I didn’t want anything to happen. It’s obvious I was right.”

The boy’s face was a battlefield. Comforting calm for the old woman warring with the pain and rage of betrayal. “What about our protection, Ted! Our arrangement? Where did that leave us? Tell me that, Ted!”

“It was a judgment call,” said Dinwiddie. “What could I do? I couldn’t take a chance she’d-”

Ike stamped his foot and began shouting. “We need pro-tection! Shotgun protection! I know what a shotgun can do- I saw what a shotgun can do. That’s why I asked you for a shotgun, Ted, not some stupid metal tube that clicks and blows air! You got me a shotgun because that’s what I needed , Ted! Now you pull it out from under me without- How could you do that, Ted!”

The words rushing out, followed by short, harsh breaths. Fugitive panting. Fugitive eyes.

His passion had silenced the old woman; she’d stopped struggling, was looking up at him with the innocence and bafflement of an infant on a first outing.

Dinwiddie shook his head, turned away, and rested his elbows on the counter. One of his hands brushed against a package of pasta. He picked it up, looked at it absently.

Milo inspected the shotgun. “This thing’s right out of the box, never been fired.”

Silence filled the kitchen, choking it, draining the air of oxygen.

“Such a good boy,” said the old woman, reaching up and touching Ike’s cheek. “The cossacks come, you protect your bubbe .”

“Yes, Grandma.”

“Yes, Bubbe.”

“Yes, Bubbe. How are you feeling?”

The old woman shrugged. “A little tired, maybe.”

“How about a nap, Bubbe?”

Another shrug. She took one of his hands in both of hers and kissed it.

He escorted her through the doorway.

Milo began to follow.

Ike turned around sharply. “Don’t worry, Mr. Detective. I’m not going anywhere. Can’t handle going anywhere. Just let me take care of her. Then I’ll come back and you can do whatever it is you want with me.”

We waited for him in the living room. Knotty-pine panels, working fireplace under a fieldstone mantel, brick-a-brac that had once been meaningful to someone, hooked rug, overstuffed chairs, tree-stump end tables, a couple of trophy fish on plaques over the mantel. Next to them, a snapshot of a beaming white-haired boy holding an enormous trout. It brought to mind the shot of the two children I’d seen in Dinwiddie’s office. But this one was black-and-white, the boy’s clothes two or three decades out of fashion.

Below that, a shot of a heavyset man in wading boots, his arm around the same boy. A string of fish hanging from the other arm.

Dinwiddie saw me looking, “We used to come up here a lot. Dad owned lots of the land around here. Bought it up after the war, thinking he’d combine growing with selling, avoid the middleman, become serious-rich. A couple of cold years killed off the profit margin in citrus but the mortgage stayed the same. The big outfits could wait it out but it dampened Dad’s enthusiasm, so he sold a lot of his acreage to the Sunkist co-op. We continued to come up for a couple of weeks each year and fish, just the two of us. Lake Piru used to be jumping with rainbows and bass. Last few years the rains have been weak and everything’s dried up- they’re not releasing anything out of the Fillmore hatchery until they can be sure the survival rate’ll be high. I’m sure you saw that, coming over the Santa Clara. The dry beds.”

Milo and I nodded.

“Can I get you coffee or something?” said Dinwiddie.

We shook our heads.

He said, “In the early sixties Dad got into another cash-flow problem and sold off most of the land he still owned in town- like the bungalows in front of us, the plot where the school is now. All of it gone, fast and cheap. He kept only this house- guess he was more sentimental than he’d ever have admitted. When he died I inherited it, started bringing my own boys up here. Until the drought. I figured it would be a good place- who bothers to come out here except truckers? Lots of Mexicans and old people- the two of them wouldn’t stand out.”

I said, “Makes sense.”

“I did it because I had to. There was no choice. Not after Ike raised my consciousness.”

He stopped, waited for a challenge, and when none came, said, “He’d talk about the Holocaust, how so few people had hidden Jews. How only the Danes had stood up as a country. How the whole thing could have been prevented if more people had stood up, done the right thing. You hear that, you start to wonder. What you would have done. The depth of your own principles. It’s like this psych experiment they did years ago- I’m sure you know it. Telling people to shock other people. For no good reason. And most people did it. Just to obey. Shocked total strangers, even though they knew it was wrong, didn’t want to. I’d always told myself I’d be different, one of the noble few. But I was never really sure. How can you be when it’s all theoretical? The way my life had gone, everything was theoretical. So when Ike called me, middle of the night, so scared, told me what they’d tried to do to him, I knew what I had to do. And I know I did the right thing. I’m sorry if it caused you-”

Milo said, “You pick up the old lady too?”

Dinwiddie nodded. “Both of us did that. She wouldn’t have gone with me alone. Ike was taking a chance, coming back to town, knowing they were after him. But he loved her, was worried about what might happen to her- especially worried because of the way she’d become.”

“What is it, Alzheimer’s?”

Dinwiddie said, “Who knows? She won’t go to a doctor.” To me: “Her age, it could be anything, right? Hardening of the arteries, whatever.”

I said, “How long has it been going on?”

“Ike said just a few months. Said she was such a bright woman- before the change- that most people didn’t notice anything different. Because when she talked she still made sense. And she’d always gone on about conspiracies- cossacks, whatever. So if she did it a little more, who’d notice? The way she is now, of course, you’d notice, but that’s just been the last few weeks. Maybe it’s the stress. Of hiding. I don’t know.”

He lowered his head, rested his forehead in his hands.

“So the two of you came back to town and got her,” Milo said.

“Yeah,” said Dinwiddie, talking to the hooked rug. “When she wasn’t home, Ike figured she’d either be at the synagogue or walking around. She’d always loved to walk, had started doing it even more- since the change. In the dark, when it wasn’t safe. We drove to the synagogue, saw there was some kind of party inside, and waited until she left. Then we picked her up and brought her here. She didn’t want to come, was yelling at us a lot, but Ike managed to calm her down. He’s the only one who seems to be able to calm her down.”