Max Collins - Midnight Haul

Neighbors on either side heard the shots. They called the police, but Ray Turner, who was one-fourth of Greenwood, New Jersey’s P.D., had heard the shots too and was running across the grade-school playground, barren in the moonlight, his gun drawn.

It was just after midnight. Turner, tall, thin, twenty-six, was walking around the school, checking doors, poking in windows with his long-beam flash. He was moving a little slow tonight; the day had been hot and humid and the night was no better: moving through air like this was like walking underwater.

So he was a little behind schedule tonight, not that it mattered. Things in Greenwood didn’t move fast. No pressure, here. That’s what he liked about it. That’s why he’d come home to Greenwood, after an unpleasant few years as a Newark cop.

Only now he was running across the playground, the thick air grabbing at his lungs, goddamn cigarettes, gun in one hand, flash in the other, and what the fuck was that? Another shot?

He slowed as he reached the wire mesh fence separating the playground from the row of tract homes; the one directly in front of him, the one he was heading for, belonged to Jack Brock, a man Turner knew, to speak to. A truck driver out at the Kemco plant.

The fence was only waist high, but it seemed to take forever to scale. He was sweating. Drenched in it. Ahead of him the Brock house was dark. Not a light on in the place. Of course the neighbors’ lights were on, but nobody was standing around outside: gunshots make people curious, not crazy. Their lights, and the moonlight, helped him dodge the toys littered around the Brocks’ backyard: a wagon, a trike, a wading pool.

Two shots, there’d been. Spaced perhaps thirty seconds apart. Then, maybe a minute later, a minute Turner had spent making his way here, there’d been another. Three shots.

The foundation was built up from the ground, with a back door entering onto a lower, basement floor. He flattened himself to the cement wall, the door to his left. He was shaking. Breathing hard.

His back to the foundation, he reached over, flash tucked in his armpit, and tried the screen door. Unlocked. He opened it a hair, slid his foot in to keep it open. Then, using his foot, he eased it all the way open until he was facing the inside door, which he tried.

Locked.

“Shit,” he said, very softly, and kicked it in.

He went in low, fanning the gun around like goddamn Clint Eastwood, and the flashlight, too, revealing nothing but a damp basement with washer and dryer and, in one dry area, some more scattered toys. The air smelled sickly sweet, from a room deodorizer, probably. An open wooden stairway was right across from him, waiting for him. Daring him to come up.

He stood and listened for a minute, then, hearing nothing, took the dare.

He made very little noise, going up; the hum of the air-conditioning upstairs covered him. But he felt uneasy following the beam of light up the steps. He was starting to wish he’d stayed in Newark.

There was a landing, and a jog to the left, then five more steps and a door. He opened it, quickly, and only the bottom half opened — a damn Dutch door — the upper half catching him and he fell backwards, tumbling down the steps.

The landing saved him. He wasn’t hurt, but he was disoriented; after a few seconds, he pushed up and went back up the five steps, in a crouch, looking up through the open bottom half of the door, probing with the flash. He ducked under the closed upper door and was in the kitchen, modest, modern, empty.

It was cold in here, air-conditioner doing overtime, but that didn’t make it any easier to breathe: fear had hold of Turner’s chest, and as he moved into the living room, the beam of the flash betrayed his shaking hand. He tried to guide the light steadily, quickly around the room, but the effect was more like a strobe. The strobe effect picked up early American furniture, a family portrait over a spinet, a shape on the floor by the front door.

Turner pointed the gun and the light at the shape and saw blood.

He choked back vomit. Moved closer, but did so keeping his back to the shape, in case whoever had done this was still in the house: the flash lit up a hallway, off to the left, an empty hallway, and he saw no one.

No one except the dead woman on the floor, on her side. A woman about thirty, in curlers and a pink robe. Her face was all there, and rather pretty, turned as if to look at him, one empty eye looking across blood at him; it was a face he’d glimpsed in that family portrait. Most of the back of her head was gone. Some of it was on the door.

He turned back toward that hallway, wishing to Christ he’d stayed in Newark. Wishing it wasn’t so cold, so fucking cold in here. He walked down the hallway. Slow.

On the right, an open door: bathroom. Stool, sink, tub with shower curtain open; nobody in there.

Another open door: sewing room. Small. Empty.

And another: a kid’s room; Star Wars wallpaper. He pointed gun and flash in there.

And quickly pulled the flash away, hoping he would be able someday to forget what he’d seen: a boy, about ten, with a bloody face, head spilled open like a broken melon on the red-sodden pillow. Bloody matter on the wall behind him, on Luke Skywalker and Chewbacca, and Christ, it took a big gun to do that. Jesus.

Across the hall, in a room wallpapered with blue flowers, a girl, perhaps seven, dead.

He stood in the hall, gun and flash pointed down, and felt anger rise in him like heat, pushing the nausea out. He could feel himself breathing hard. His teeth were clenched so tight they hurt. But he couldn’t unclench them. He didn’t want to.

At the end of the hall, one last door.

Closed.

He kicked it open.

The gun and the flash pointed right at the man sitting on the edge of the double bed. About thirty-five, balding, a little heavy. He was wearing boxer shorts. There was a gun in his lap. A .357 Magnum.

The man was Jack Brock. There was some blood spattered on him.

“Did you do this, Jack?” Turner heard himself say.

Brock didn’t say anything; his face looked slack, flesh hanging like dough.

“Why, Jack?”

Brock put his hand on the gun in his lap.

“Don’t, Jack!”

Brock left his hand on the gun. He looked up at Turner and said, “They killed my wife.”

“What?”

“They killed my wife. My kids. I tried to save my kids.”

“Take your hand off the gun, Jack.”

“They’d kill me next, if I let them.”

“Put it down, Jack. Down!”

Brock raised the gun.

“Jack. I don’t want to shoot you, Jack. Jack!”

Brock looked down the barrel of the gun and squeezed the trigger and there was a red explosion.

It didn’t make any sense to Crane. He was the serious one; he was the one who got occasionally depressed. Mary Beth had always kidded him out of his moods. “Hey asshole,” she’d say. “Don’t take life so serious.” And now, suicide? Mary Beth? Didn’t make sense.

His friend Roger Beatty had driven him from Iowa City to Cedar Rapids, where he could catch the plane that would take him to New Jersey; he’d have to take a bus from there to Greenwood, Mary Beth’s hometown, the East Coast equivalent of his own small hometown in Iowa, Wilton Junction. Or at least that’s how Mary Beth had described it to him: “That’s why we have so much in common, Crane: we grew up in the same town — only where you come from they sound like Henry Fonda, and where I come from it’s strictly Rodney Dangerfield.”