A Dead Issue (3 page)

The room was thick with the smell of gun smoke. A thin whisp of smoke floated in a gently undulating layer two feet below the ceiling. Dust and fluff rained down silently as my ears rang. Dusty was on the floor, head buried in the crook of an elbow, his hand covering the back of his neck. The thud of something hitting the floor jerked my head toward Jonah. He tottered on the brink of falling, catching himself with that peculiar pigeon-toed step, the gun at his feet.

He seemed focused on remaining upright, oblivious to all else—and then he froze. His eyes grew wide for a second as if he had recognized a great truth. His hands rose to his chest and he clutched at his shirt. Pain pinched his eyes shut and then he fell, his face relaxing as he neared the floor. He made no effort to break his fall and landed heavily on his face with a jarring thud.

Dusty looked up cautiously, saw Jonah stretched out upon the floor, and then met my eyes. “Holy fuckin' shitbird!” he said at last.

I rose to my feet, knees quaking, and stood looking at Jonah. I had never seen a man die, but I knew that Jonah was dead. For a second or two, I thought he had somehow shot himself—got hit by one of his own bullets bouncing around the room, but it was his heart—or a stroke. As I stood there, Dusty pulled himself up and stood next to me. I went over to Jonah, knelt down and, with shaking hands, tried to find a pulse in his neck. But he was dead all right. I knew it somehow—knew it the same way Jonah did when his eyes grew wide.

Dusty leaned down. “Is he . . .?”

“Yes.” I looked over my shoulder at him. “He's dead.”

“Then let's get out of here, OK?”

“We can't just leave him here.”

“Look around, for Christ sake! We're trespassing. Jonah is dead, and there are bullet holes everywhere.”

I had to admit it didn't look good.

Dusty scanned the room, surveying the damage and reinforcing his words. Then he looked down at Jonah. I followed his eyes to Jonah's rear pocket—a tri-fold, thick with bills stuck out.

“Looks like payday,” Dusty said.

He stooped down and his hand reached out.

“Don't you dare!” I shouted and gave him a shove with my foot. He landed hard and yelped as he slid away from Jonah. I was startled by my ferocity—so was Dusty. He looked up, wincing in pain, and his hand slowly reached under him. He pulled out Jonah's gun, holding it like he was going to hammer nails with it. We each looked at the gun for a moment and then Dusty glanced at the wallet again.

“He didn't pay us. Some of that money is ours.”

“We're not touching that wallet.”

He stood and tucked the pistol under his sweatshirt, polishing it like a pair of glasses, getting rid of his prints before letting it fall to the floor next to Jonah.

“Can we get out of here?” he said. “Now! What if he called the cops? You want them to find us here?”

“Maybe he didn't. We'll make the call—like we found him that way.” We moved toward the kitchen, Dusty hanging close. I flipped open my phone and tapped in 911,
but before I hit the call button, something caught my attention outside.

Headlights were coming down the lane.

CHAPTER 5

“Holy shitbird!” Dusty whispered. “Holy fuckin' shitbird! He did call the cops.”

I was stunned as I watched the glow from headlights piercing the trees outside the house. When the light lifted to the sky and bounced back down, flashing against the windows, I knew the car had crossed the bridge. It would be here in less than a minute.

“It can't be the police,” I said. “They'd have their lights flashing.”

“Not if they're trying to sneak up on us.” Dusty's voice was an odd mixture of fear and frustration.

“If they're sneaking up on us, they wouldn't have any lights on.”

“If they didn't have any lights on, they'd be in the fuckin' creek!” Dusty shook his head as if his world had suddenly spun out of control.

Car doors slammed—two of them.
The car was parked where my Saturn had been a little while before. The voices were casual, muffled by distance, indistinct. As the voices became louder, a word or two stood out with unexpected clarity—something about a fenderbender and a yuppie. Whoever it was, they were not cops, and they were not trying to sneak up on us. They were visitors about to stumble onto a horrific scene—a dead man in a room peppered with bullet holes. And they would find us.

Dusty backed deeper into the shadows of the kitchen. I nearly joined him, but I knew what was about to happen. They would knock on the door, wait, then shout. When no one answered, they would try the door, enter, and then the shit would hit the fan—by the truckload. These were not encyclopedia salesmen or Jehovah's Witnesses or Girl Scouts selling cookies. They would not simply leave when no one answered the door. These were friends or relatives—people who drove down Jonah's quarter mile lane expecting him to be home. They would be concerned. They would investigate.

I ducked down on all fours and scampered to the back door. I could see the tops of heads, no more than shadowy outlines, as two men approached the back porch. Soundlessly, I squatted below the doorknob, feeling for a key or a latch, caressing the doorframe lightly with shaking fingertips. Footsteps thumped up the three planks to the porch, and I found a sliding bolt several inches above the doorknob.

They walked across the porch and paused, finishing their conversation. “So this yuppie with a phone growing out of his ear gets out of the car and comes at me like he's going to kick ass—until I get out of my truck and look down at him.” His voice was deep with the texture of gravel, and he chuckled in a self-satisfied way. “He puts his phone in his pocket and now he don't know what to do, so he looks at his Beamer. Hell, we barely touched—knocked a piece of cow shit off my bumper.”

The speaker stopped long enough to rap three times on the door, rattling it under my fingertips.

“Finds this little scratch. Rubs it, but it don't come off. Then he looks at me and says, ‘You have insurance?' I didn't say nothing—just turned to my truck.”

The man knocked again, and I slid the bolt home with the touch of a safe cracker as his fist jarred the door. Then I turned very slowly and planted my back against the door, pulling my knees up so my feet wouldn't be visible.

“But before I could lay hands on my policy, this guy takes off. I was like, ‘What the hell?' and then I saw it—there was my shotgun, big as life, in the gun rack.”

The other man chuckled, and the speaker joined him.

“Jesus Christ, Billy, you should have seen him go!” And they cackled some more.

After a pause, the second man—Billy—called. “Hey, Jonah! Get off the crapper! There's beers waitin' for us!”

They both laughed at the thought of Jonah sitting on the toilet, and one of them pounded on the door heavily with his fist. “Police!” he shouted, “Open up in the name of the law!”

“What law is that?” asked the owner of a shotgun.

“The law that says you can't take a dump without
someone pounding on your door.” And they both laughed again.

“Jonah!”

“Just go on in—get his ass in gear.”

One of the men twisted the doorknob and yanked at it. The man stopped, and a heavy silence fell on the other side of the door.

“It's locked,” one of them said, and from the awed, whispered tone, it was evident that this was something new in their experience—something out of the ordinary and therefore somewhat disturbing—something with the potential for becoming alarming.

“Locked? He never locks his door.” There was a pause and then a series of pounding jarred my back. “Jonah!” both men called, and I could sense them pressing their faces against the glass, shielding their view with cupped hands. I pulled my feet in tighter.

“You don't imagine he took off, do you?” asked Shotgun.

“Not unless someone else picked him up,” Billy offered. Evidently these men knew what I had just figured out—Jonah's truck was in for repairs or something and he needed a ride. That's why it wasn't in its parking space. That's why we figured he was not home. That's why these two men were on the porch—to take him to Miller's where they would laugh at the yuppie with the scratched Beamer who fled at the sight of a shotgun—a shotgun that was probably right outside in a truck with cow shit on the bumper.

There was silence while they listened for noises from within the house.

“Let's check the front,” Shotgun suggested. They tramped down the steps.

I counted to ten and then slid open the bolt. Dusty was on his own. I could not call to him. The window of opportunity for getting out of the house got smaller as the two men rounded the house. One peek through the beveled glass would reveal a very dead Jonah face down in the middle of a pool of light.

I turned, rose to a crouch, and peered out. The men were out of sight, and as I twisted the knob quietly, I heard
scampering behind me like a 160-pound rat making its way toward me. Dusty knew only too well that we had to get out of the house as fast as we could—and do it without making a sound. When the door opened, I slipped through with Dusty at my back. I paused while he carefully closed the door. Resisting the overwhelming urge to leap off the porch and flee, we tiptoed, sliding down to the grass like shadows and melting into the darkness at the side of the house.

The shortest way to my car was back up the lane to the cornfield—a two hundred yard sprint in the dark. Taking the safer, scenic route through the woods was out of the question. It would be dawn by the time we found our way there. The only option was the lane, but first we had to get by the two men who were already on Jonah's front porch tugging at the doorknob.

“Locked,” one of the men muttered. “What the hell?”

Dusty and I crowded against the house, blending into the shadows between two tall shrubs. Just around the corner, the men were probably peering through the beveled glass door like we had when we saw the hand.

“Holy Jesus Christ! He's on the floor!” Shotgun barked.

“Is he . . .” Billy cut himself off. I could picture him with his face to the window as his eyes told him the story.

“Kick it in!”

A resounding thud bounced off the barn across the lawn as a boot hit the door. Another followed it. On the third kick, the door banged open with the sound of splintering wood and shattering glass. We paused for only a second or two, allowing the men to rush into the house, and then we ran. Our feet hit the planks of the bridge and I glanced over my shoulder. Jonah's house stood silently as it had before—a warm glow pouring out of the rectangle of the open doorway. I pictured the men inside, attending to Jonah, calling the police, wondering what he had been shooting at and whether it was still in the house with them.

We ran as fast as we could but slowed as the pitch of the lane increased and fatigue set in. By the time we reached the break in the stone row, we were barely jogging.

“The fucker . . . better . . . start,” Dusty managed to say
between gasps.

I was thinking the same thing, but kept my mouth shut, concentrating on getting there first. There were seven piles of brush in the field, but from the lane their shadowy outlines were lost and they blended in with the trees in the background. As we neared them, they became humps ten feet tall and looked like squat trees growing in the field. My car was parked behind them.

I opened the door, and the interior
lights came on. At least the battery was OK. When we both were seated, I paused and looked at Dusty before inserting the key in the ignition. I gave it a twist. The engine strained and turned over once, twice, and then the starter solenoid clicked. We were dead. I closed my eyes and planted my forehead against the steering wheel.

Dusty opened his door. “Come on. Let's get out of here.” He stepped into the night.

“No!” I shouted. “Get back in here.”

He slid back into his seat, keeping his right foot on the ground.

“Close the door.”

“But . . .”

“Close the fucking door,” I said, and he closed it—if for no other reason than to keep my voice from being heard in the valley.

“We got to get out of here,” he said quietly, almost to himself. “The cops will be here any second.”

He reached for the door handle and I slapped his chest, grabbing a fistful of shirt. I jerked him toward me. “I'm not leaving my car here.” He was propped up on an elbow looking up at me.

“All right. All right,” he pushed himself upright. “What do you want me to do—run into town and buy a battery? Call a tow truck? Listen, the car won't start. We have to leave it.”

“It'll start,” I said firmly. “You push. I'll pop the clutch. It'll start.”

“What if it don't? What if we run into a SWAT team halfway up the lane?”

I paused for a moment.

“We can beat them,” I said. “It will take them at least fifteen minutes to get here. We'll be gone by then.”

I threw off the emergency brake and turned the ignition on. Dusty blew out a breath and got out and pushed, his rear end against the trunk. The car started moving—slowly. Each row of corn stubble became a speed bump to be climbed, followed by a grudging descent. Dusty had to strain to keep the car moving at a lumbering roll. I jumped out and pushed against the doorpost, and with my help and the increasing downward pitch of the field, the car started to accelerate. When we hit a steady five miles per hour, I jumped back into the car and dropped it into second gear. I popped the clutch. The car lurched and jerked and then stopped.

Dusty came around to me. “Jesus H. Christ,” he growled and ran his fingers through his hair. “Now what?”

I stepped out of the car and wind rustled through the cornfield and bit through our clothing. Off in the distance, a siren worked its way through the countryside.