Kwik Krimes (5 page)

“I was going to help her,” Desmond said.

“Help her how?”

“With my pickup truck. We planned to haul everything out to the city dump. Peg wanted a clean basement. She hated to come down here.”

Stewart shoved aside a metal bed in the front room. “What’s the sense of keeping this junk?”

Desmond shrugged. “Beats me.”

The really old stuff was located at the front of the cellar, and Stewart saw someone had been in there recently.

Whoever it was had pushed aside a Schwinn bicycle and a Flexible Flyer sled in order to get behind an old wooden chest where an ancient mattress was lying on top of some cardboard cartons.

Pushing aside the mattress, Stewart saw yellow newspapers and
National Geographics
from the 1930s.

And underneath the papers and magazines Stewart saw something else: the cartons contained hundreds of Depression-era comic books, all in seemingly fine condition.

What clinched it for Stewart was the sight of Batman on the cover of
Detective Comics
and Superman on the cover of
Action Comics
. Stewart remembered the collector in Swanson’s shop shouting about “detectives” and “actions”—and he was undoubtedly referring to these comics. Swanson had said comic books were valued at very big bucks.

The name of Swanson’s shop was One Person’s Clutter. Stewart recalled a TV show on which people brought in stuff like comic books from junk-filled basements and attics, and an expert had declared, “One person’s clutter is another’s bread and butter!”

“The stuff here is worth a damned fortune!” Stewart announced.

“You kiddin’ me?” Desmond said.

Swanson had already concealed the comics, which Peg didn’t know were valuable, beneath the mattress. But after their breakup, Swanson was desperate. He’d killed Peg, thinking he could later break into the empty house and retrieve the rare comic books.

By the next morning they had Swanson’s confession.

After serving in the army overseas, Albert Ashforth worked for two newspapers. He is the author of three books and numerous stories and articles. His recently published espionage thriller,
The Rendition,
was described by one reviewer as “smoothly written, fast moving and suspenseful.” He is a professor at SUNY and lives in New York City.

N.J. Ayres

O
rville Davis was a fightin’ man. He’d fight a bug off a bush, a crow from a tree, a shoeshine man for the finishing rag. He’d word-war with a woman pushing a stroller who merely wanted to cross the street in front of him.

Men, now, he’d fight for real—with fists, tire irons, or, once, a Maori club embedded with abalone shell, which still carried the rusty sheen of someone’s long-ago blood. The man he clobbered did not die, but the poor thing could be seen months afterward in any of the three taverns in town hoisting drinks with a hand that trembled of its own heartless accord.

Then one day when Orville Davis was holding a garage sale outside his home, the one with the roof fallen in on the back side, he had a vision. It came to him uninvited—cruelly, you might say—when a roof joist leapt out from its rightful place and aimed itself directly at a point behind Orville’s right ear while Orville was bent over, laying a flat of blue tarp on the muddy patch of lawn in order to display the boat gear he wanted to sell.

At least that’s what the neighbor on his south side said when police came to interview him. Cal Wilton told how he and Orville had been having a discussion over the rightful ownership of the push-type lawn mower rusting between his and Orville’s shed
and which on this day Orville had sought three dollars for from a passerby. The would-be buyer drove off without a thing after Cal caught a fist heaved by Orville, Orville being such a sour-tempered man. It was as if, Cal said, the heavens had enough of Orville’s antics and hurled a punch of hard wind through the neighborhood; just have a look at his own tree branches down and trash cans scattered. Cal believed Orville to be dead, the way his eyes showed fish-belly white in his head when he rolled his neighbor over.

But then Orville rose up with a dopey grin, looked beyond as if into a land of golden poppies gently nodding in the breeze, and said, “Love is the only answer.”

All this time his neighbor on the north side, Mrs. Miller, hastened around in her own yard, setting right articles rearranged by gusts. She observed Orville lift a hand to Cal for assistance in rising and saw Cal smack the hand away and then hustle off to his own back door, twice glancing back as if concerned that mean Orville would soon be on his trail.

“I was out again this morning to get my birdhouse, which I didn’t see got flung into my hedge,” Mrs. Miller said. “That’s when I spied Orville there in the rose bushes.” She told this to Officer Newton and his female partner Officer Nettle, two names starting with
N
on their badges about which she also made comment, to no reply.

“Did you disturb anything, touch the victim?” Officer Nettle asked.

“All them TV shows, no ma’am, you can be sure I did not. Except to roll his face out the dirt, which any kindhearted person would do.”

“Then you did touch the subject,” Officer Nettle said.

“Not with his hair like it is, greasy on a good day and way bad now. Alls I did was grab my glove off the top of my faucet over
there and turn Orville’s face out of the fertilized soil. He was good about them roses, I’ll say that.”

And what a face it was, as any bystander gathered on the broken sidewalk could see. Cold storage was the place for Orville Davis now, a man left in peace to fight no more.

By the wooded lot behind the houses, a boy of about twelve jumped around slaying the ghosts of men, making cartoon noises with his mouth. Abruptly he would stop and flap his hands as if he’d grabbed hold of a burning bush, then go back to fighting again.

“That’s Cal Wilton’s son,” Mrs. Miller said. “Milton. Orville said don’t call him that, might make him grow up stranger than he already is. Milton Wilton. Orville called him Sarge, said he was artistic, helped him make things. Orville was a stinker, all right, but never to that kid. The boy doesn’t talk. What’s he doing now?” she asked, as though the officers would somehow know.

A figure lay on a slant in a wheelbarrow that young Sarge pushed to a spot in Orville’s backyard. Officer Newton told the boy to stay back, but Sarge lifted the figure out, which was near his own height, and set it by a boulder, two rocks on either side to steady the feet. There it stood, a plaster butler figure with a monocle, and arms extended. Mrs. Miller said it formerly held a chalkboard menu at a restaurant’s front door in town. “I guess that’s something Orville didn’t want to sell.”

Out of the wagon the child hoisted an army shovel, short but wicked. He posed before the butler to whack the little servant good, though not hard enough to break him. Ponged and pummeled the little man, then slung a final blow with his fist that knocked the good man forward, face down in the squishy mud. Sarge turned full frontal to the audience then, and uttered the first words anyone ever heard from his spit-shiny lips: “My papa done it.”

Then he turned and ran with the army shovel into the woods, pinging this skinny tree and that hearty one with the tool until he quickly reversed his path to return and shoot the shovel like a javelin back into the yard. It lodged point first, standing almost at attention in the receptive earth where Officers Newton and Nettle stood by to collect its silent testimony. Sarge marched briskly into the woods, flapping his tender hands.

N.J. Ayres is the author of three suspense novels featuring a former Las Vegas stripper now working in a crime lab (the TV program
CSI
was developed later with a similar character). Ayres is also the author of a poetry book and numerous short stories and was an editor for environmental-engineering documents and a technical publications manager for military-missile and aircraft manuals for twenty years.

Eric Beetner

T
he gun was still warm from the stranger’s hand.

Michael stared at the figure face down in the entryway of his house. His eyes moved from the body to the broken lamp he’d used to coldcock the guy.

He tried to remember the last thirty seconds, but it was a black hole.

He could still recall the brief conversation through the door, the stranger knocking after midnight and pretending to have car trouble. Even before he opened the door, Michael thought it strange that someone would wander so far off the highway to make it to his front porch. The pleasure and peril of living far away from town: seclusion.

Michael remembered seeing the gun, the man commanding him to step back, stay quiet. The memory ran out a second before the moment he smashed the man over the head with a marble-based lamp.

Michael set the gun down on the small table by the door where he normally tossed his keys. The man on the floor continued to breathe, and the pool of blood around his head continued to grow.

It was no life-threatening blow. Michael knew the stranger would come around soon.

“Michael?” Amy called from upstairs.

“Stay there.” He could hear the whining nighttime cries of Dylan, his two-year-old, and that was sure to wake Kaitie, his four-year-old. “Amy, listen,” he said. “Call the police. Tell them someone tried to break in.”

“Oh my God.” Michael heard her footsteps reach the top of the stairs. She gasped. “Michael!”

“It’s okay. Just call them. See how fast they can make it out here.”

“Is he…?”

“No, he’s not dead. Now, go.”

Amy padded away to make the call.

Michael thought about how it might be better if the stranger was dead. The intruder would wake up any second, angry. He was obviously capable of violence whereas Michael had just drawn his first blood on another human. Applied physics professors don’t have a reputation for bloodletting.

His eyes drifted to the gun. If the man stood up and attacked, could Michael use deadly force? The lamp had been beyond what he thought himself capable of already, so he didn’t know the answer himself.

Dylan’s cries intensified. The man on the floor stirred. Michael heard Amy’s feet move quickly down the hall to Dylan’s room, and the crying soon stopped.

The old farmhouse was easily twenty minutes from town. If the police were anywhere but sitting right by the phone, it could be as much as a half hour before help arrived.

A decision would have to be made before then.

Michael stepped around the body to close the front door. The invader had dropped a small bag, now blocking the threshold. Michael kicked it aside to make room for the door to swing shut. Inside the pack, metal clanked together. Curious, Michael opened the worn black gym satchel.

Duct tape, wire, a hammer, a hunting knife. These were not the supplies of a stick-up, a simple “give me all your money and jewelry” home invasion. This man was prepared to stay.

Michael thought of the children. He felt sick to his stomach. Bikes, a sandbox, a rope swing all decorated the front yard. Advertising that young kids lived here. The house was far enough away from everything, a man could stay for weeks without anyone noticing. Fall semester at the university didn’t start for another month.

A chill ran through Michael. The stranger on the floor groaned.

“Amy? Did you talk to the police?”

Her feet padded urgently down the hall. He turned to her. She cradled Dylan in her arms, his head lolling slack, asleep. She whispered. “They said they’d send someone.”

He whispered back. “How long?”

“They didn’t say.”

There was movement from the carpet in the entryway. “Go back to the room. Get Kaitie. Lock the door.”

There was panic in Amy’s whisper now. “Michael—”

“Just go.”

Michael turned back to the stranger, Amy’s feet shuffled away above him.

The man rolled, brought a hand to his head and felt the blood, opened his eyes.

Michael reached out. This time, the gun was cold.