Макс Коллинз - You Can’t Stop Me

What the hell was going on?

Where was David? If something was wrong with Ellen, if she’d gotten sick or been injured, why hadn’t David called his dad’s cell? Nearing the garage, Harrow kicked the brake and threw the truck into park, the sudden stop almost hurling him into the wheel.

He hopped out, pulled his pistol, and circled around the back of the truck. Anxiety gripped him and his cop senses were tingling; but he hadn’t defaulted to cop objectivity — this was his home .

Resisting the impulse to run, but still using the vehicle as cover, he crept around the truck, checked the windows in the house, saw no movement in the dark, then crossed the short distance to the back door.

You’re being a dumb, over-reacting shit , he told himself.

Still, he had the pistol ready as he opened the screen door...

Then, his hip holding it open, he reached for the knob of the inside door with his left hand.

The knob didn’t turn.

The door was locked, yet another bad sign. They never locked the doors when they were home. Acid poured into Harrow’s stomach, his chest tightened, and his eyes burned. This afternoon had been about instantaneous action — leaping to stop an assassin a nearly instinctive move.

This was different.

Entering his own house had become about caution and danger, his mind flooded with possible outcomes, none good.

In his gut, he already knew that tragedy was waiting. That didn’t stop him from praying that he was wrong as he unlocked the door. Entering the landing, he looked straight ahead at a family photo on the wall, Ellen, David, and himself smiling at the lens. His mother had snapped the photo at a family picnic a year before she died.

He glanced left, down into the darkened basement, then turned right and went up two steps into the kitchen.

Normally a bright room, with its yellow walls and white trim, now an inky threat, with no lights on, every shadow a trap. In the half-light that filtered in through the open curtains of the corner window over a small breakfast nook, knives in their wooden block on the counter to his right took on malevolence. Harrow glimpsed the moon through the window, a full fat moon, a butcher’s moon.

Fitting then that he also noticed that the butcher knife was gone from its slot in the block.

He moved past the stove on his left, the sink on the right, the big side-by-side refrigerator/freezer straight ahead. His rubber-soled shoes padded silently across the floor. Every nerve in his body strained, on alert for the slightest movement, the smallest sound. At the doorway, he could go right down a short hall to a bathroom and a downstairs bedroom that now served as a home office. Straight ahead lay the dining room.

He wasn’t going to turn on the light, just in case. On TV, the criminalist would have used a mini-flashlight to find his way around. Never mind that said criminalist made himself a target by using the flash, giving away his position to any potential attacker. Television never showed the real use of the flashlight, which was to find the goddamned light switch...

Not that he needed light getting around his own home. Still, this was not city dark, which wasn’t darkness at all, really — this was country dark.

The house remained eerily silent except for the ticking of an old-time mantel clock atop the wood sideboard. As his eyes struggled to find clues in the darkness, he slowly slid forward past the formal oak dining set. The only illumination came from the tiny amount of moonlight and rays from the garage light that sneaked in through cracks in the curtains in the dining room windows.

Gun up now, moving toward the living room, Harrow heard the thundering rush of his own blood and felt sweat streaking down his forehead; and, too, he heard his heart’s sledgehammer pounding. Just short of the living room, his foot touched something, and he looked down to see one of the chairs on its side under the table, a spindly wooden leg sticking out.

He wanted to scream for Ellen and David, but something was wrong here, and if there was an intruder, Harrow couldn’t know if the bastard was still around.

That meant doing things by the book.

Finally, cop objectivity settled in. Moving slowly, his eyes well adjusted to the dim light, he eased into the living room.

Moonlight spilled through the half-open curtains of the picture window and played like a grim spotlight on the face of Ellen on her back on the floor beside the coffee table, a dark pool on the rug around her body, her lifeless eyes staring at Harrow, begging to know where he had been when this terrible thing happened to her. She wore a cardinal-red ISU T-shirt and blue jeans, her dark hair framing her face. Two holes darkened the shirt like a huge snake bite near her left breast.

Kneeling beside her, only vaguely aware of the tears running down his cheeks, he checked for a pulse, knowing already he would find none. Her skin felt cool and slightly rubbery — like meat left out to thaw on the counter.

No pulse.

Also, no wedding ring. It wasn’t like her diamond was anywhere near big enough to inspire a robbery.

He swallowed and rose. Moving, Harrow looked through the entryway and saw David crumpled on the floor in front of the stairs to the second floor, a dark puddle around him too, the butcher knife on the floor nearby.

David was on his back, eyes closed peacefully, two black holes piercing the first A and the D in the Nevada T-shirt that he wore over knee-length denim shorts.

Looking at the knife on the floor, as clean as it had been in the block, Harrow knew instantly that David had been in the kitchen when he heard the first shot and had grabbed the knife in a vain attempt to protect his mother.

Harrow checked for a pulse, found none, paused long enough to run a finger through his son’s fine brown hair, then rose and checked the rest of the house.

Assured that he was alone, he punched 9-1-1 into his cell phone.

Then he found a chair and positioned it between his dead wife and son. This was a crime scene, and even that small act was out of bounds, but he did not care. He was not about to leave them alone.

Harrow felt empty inside, hollow, but the emptiness, the hollowness, was Grand Canyon vast; echoes of screams and gunshots he’d never heard filled the abyss within him.

Cops were crawling all over the house now, every light turned on, the windows bright in the darkness. The first uniforms to arrive, in a blur of flashing red and blue were Johnson and Stanowski, the deputies who had worked under Harrow when he had been sheriff. Johnson confiscated his gun and walked him outside to take his initial statement in the yard.

Under the garage light, Lon Johnson, a rail-thin twenty-year vet with light green eyes and sandy hair, shook his head as he looked toward the house, his skin pale and a sickly yellow under the mercury vapor light.

“J.C., I’m sorry. Christ, I’m sorry. Do you have any idea what the hell happened in there?”

Harrow shook his head.

Night-shift sergeant Stanowski, another longtime vet, was heavyset, his crewcut tinged with silver. “No questions, Lon. Not till the detectives get here.”

“Jesus, Stan,” Johnson said to the sergeant, “this is family.”

Stanowski gave Johnson a sharp look that said, Family or not, he’s still a suspect. In the sergeant’s place, Harrow would have done the same.

Johnson seemed about to say something to his sergeant, and Harrow held up a hand. “Lon, take it easy. Stan’s just doing his job. Wants his ducks in a row.”

“I know, J.C., but...”

“No buts,” Harrow interrupted. “You want to do me a favor? Do this by the book.”

The sergeant tried to hide his embarrassed smile at the show of support from the man who, if you went by the book, was their prime suspect.