Witness To Kill (Change Of Life Book 1)
Read Witness To Kill (Change Of Life Book 1) Online
Authors: Kent Keefer
Witness
to Kill
Book 1
Change of Life
series
Copyright © 2015 Kent Keefer, U.S.A
All Rights Reserved. No part of this publication may be
copied, reproduced in any format, by any means, electronic or otherwise,
without prior consent from the copyright owner and publisher of this book.
“Witness”
The house’s only light flickers from behind Luis’ pulled-down
shade. The porch light he leaves on when she works late is off, but as her
bicycle crosses in front of the house she sees his Kawasaki in its usual place
under the eve slanting between the fence and the boxwood hedge. Even with his
window closed, and with the distant drunken cat-calls and music notes competing
from out of the Quarter, she can hear his television blaring all the way out to
the street. She tries to remember what shift he is scheduled to work in the
morning. He fell asleep with the set on again, she supposes, coasting to a stop
between the rows of cars lining both sides of Dauphine, their license plates
from everywhere.
But
this
loud?
Still puzzling at the racket, she dismounts and walks her
bike through the fence gate and around, kneeling to chain it to the steel loop
on the back side of the house. The air from the short ride from
La Maison
has soothed her, washed away a little weariness, rinsed some of the smoke from
her clothes and hair.
She lingers behind the house for a moment of solitude,
gazing up at a depleted night sky, its indigo leeched by the pale yellow domed
over the city, the luster stolen from its stars. A zephyr whispers down the
alley as she pauses, a hint of hyacinth stirred in with the dusty tang it draws
off the paving bricks.
Out of habit, she turns the keys gently so as not to disturb
the boy and the man, carefully pushes open the door. TV racket fills the
stairwell the door opens into, but she still gently pulls the door closed
behind her, still quietly relocks the lock.
She turns to go up, then halts in mid-step at a whiff of
cologne. Not his.
Standing rigid and silent with her face raised, she hears
muffled talking in the gaps of electronic noise; not his either, the unfamiliar
voices are male, male and demanding. She waits, holding her key ring in both
hands for a questioning instant, squinting up the dark stair well as if that
might help her hear. Luis’ infrequent guests usually come while she’s away, and
they never stay this late.
Still listening intently, she peers up the steps thinking of
Brian’s bedroom across from hers on the top floor of the narrow three-story
structure, up the final set of steps past the landing on Luis’ level. There’s
nothing she wants to do with people, probably drunk people, still out this
late. She picks her way up the first flight to Luis’s landing, leaning against
the handrail to lighten her steps and avoid creaks and the need to stop and
talk.
She questions as her other hand covers the keys to keep them
quiet:
Why would he have the TV up so loud with guests?
On Luis’s landing the dull flickering from under his door
lights only her feet. She stops, draws in a breath and leans forward to try to
listen through the door. The sweet cologne scent is stronger here. The TV din
clarifies to the rant of a televangelist, far from Luis’ usual fare. She
listens as the broadcast voice raises to a rabid accusation, then it pauses in
an expectant silence before starting up again.
An angry screech severs the sermon.
“Donde esta? Donde esta?”
She doesn’t know this voice.
“No, no se, no se,”
Luis pleads. “I dunno, I dun—.”
“Callese pendejo!”
Shouts another stranger, it sounds
like they’re grappling. “Shut the fuck up!”
She can speak Spanish, but she can’t follow the slurred
tirade rattling through the door. While the exact meaning of the words is lost,
the emotions are unmistakable: The visitors are irate and threatening, Luis is
terrified.
A starburst of questions fires to her mind, an elevator
plunges to her stomach. She breathes in sharply, raising her eyes to the next
flight of stairs. Her nape-hair prickles with the movement, with the
premonition
.
Her stomach heaves again, her breathing turns quick and shallow, her mouth
turns to sand. Brian is sleeping just a short set of steps away from the
furious men on the other side of the door.
She turns on soft feet to sneak up to him when one of the
men screams something unintelligible.
Then:
SMACK
!
“No . . .
no. Por
favor”
It’s Luis again, his
voice reedy and agitated. “
Por favor
, man. Come on . . . please! Gimme
some time to figure this out . . ..
Tiempo
,
por
favor
,
un poco mas de tiempo . . .
Please,
no
mas
. . . a little more—
The crack of struck flesh splits the house.
“Awww!!” Luis’s words collapse to a panicked moan. “Oh. Maannnn . . .
No se que pasa . . .
I tol’ you, man, I
don’ know—“
SMACK!
“Ohhh!! . .
mi hermano . . . por favor!
. . .let me call . . .
mi herm—
”
Another slap knifes through the door.
She fights the urge to cry out in fear and sympathy, sucks
dry air and pivots to rush up the stairs, determined to not be heard, desperate
for her and her son to be away from this danger.
As she silently climbs the steps and her eyes level with the
top landing, through the open door in the faint light she can see Brian lying
on his back on the bottom bunk. Airplanes fly the white-puffed sky of his
favorite blue pajamas, covers bunched at his knees, the top bunk covered with
toys and stuffed animals, folded clothes stacked at its foot. In the bowl on
his dresser his tandem of goldfish glint dimly in their endless circling.
His face rests peacefully behind long eye-lashes, as solemn
in sleep as it is when he’s awake; in his customary deep slumber he’s oblivious
to the peril just ten feet below. She tiptoes across the room and carefully
sits at the foot of his bed, lays one hand on his ankle and with the other
slips her thick-soled waitress shoes on to the cushion of his
Pokemon
rug. Indulging for a moment in the incongruous sense of security brought by his
familiar smell, she lifts and tugs his sheet to his chest, tucks in the edges,
then finishes by lingering her palm on his hair softly enough not to wake him.
She sits petrified, concentrating on what to do next, her
heart pounding so violently it seems it could wake him. Shouts about the need
for salvation penetrate the floor interspersed with more smacks and more
frantic pleas from Luis in Spanish mixed with English. His funny word for that—
Spanglish
— floats absurdly through her mind.
Clenching her jaws from the effort it takes to leave her son’s
side, she gathers herself, gets up and creeps in socked feet across the hall to
her own darkened room. Her hands feverishly grope around the bed to guide her
to the night stand, toward help, toward hope, toward the phone. Leaning on the
bed with one hand smothering the earpiece, she steadies her finger and
carefully punches in 9-1-1. The light aroused from the keys shines in a milky
checkered pattern on the ceiling, the three short beeps pierce the room like a
klaxon.
“Orleans Parish Emergency Service,” a female voice drawls a
scripted monotone after the second ring. “Your
ad
-
dress is auto-matically
logged on by our system. State the nature of your emergency.”
“Please,” escapes her mouth, the desiccated whisper as
brittle as wind over broken glass. “We need help. There are men here.” Her body
shudders, her whole being split between trying to listen and trying to be
heard. “My son and I—“
”Ma’am,” the bored voice interrupts. “I cain’t hear you. You
gonna have to speak louder.”
She bridges her hand over her cheek and the mouthpiece,
lowers her face and whispers coarsely. “Please . . . we need help . . . now . .
. send the police . . .” Her words trail off, swallowed by fear, by the ominous
dark corners of the room, sucked into the violent maw under her feet.
“Did you say
po-lice, ma’am?” The maddening,
disinterested voice comes through metal and plastic; its scripted bureaucratic
pace is aggravated by the Ebonics; the disembodied deep-south black voice files
panic into a pigeonhole.
“Is this a po-lice emergency?”
Through the floor: SLAP! WHACK! Garbled, threatening Spanish
and more dull thuds. She hears Luis’ voice but can’t understand what he’s
trying to say, his words now dissolved to a torrent of tears and terror.
Leaning against the bed’s headboard in the caliginous room,
she’s terrified and crying too. But her fear must be strangled.
“Yes.” She gasps, her chest cartilage stabbed by the volume
of the tiny word.
“All right, ma’am.” The voice comes through the wire as
indifferent as the face of a dealer. “I’ll dispatch a unit to two-seventeen
Dauphine.” Unhurried keyboard keys click softly, listless seconds mired in
time.
“Is that the correct
ad
-dress?”
”Yes,” she breathes into the plastic clutched in her hands
that has become her life. “Tell them to hurry . . . please!”
Using her flesh as a gasket, she hangs up noiselessly and
the key pad disappears, the only light left in the room is a misshapen
rectangle from the light in the hallway slanting across the floor.
She sits shaking, bent over her knees in the dark, forearms
gripped across her stomach, her throat and arms throbbing with the blood
pounding from her heart. She clenches her teeth to keep from vomiting, a
failing that could kill. Her body jerks with each blow through the floor. She
buries her face in her hands and weeps silently with Luis.
After an eternity of seconds owned by the horror from below,
she summons the resolve to get herself up. She steps to her closet around the
ficus plant that she cannot see but knows is there, searching for some device
of protection, some way to defend herself and her son. Some weapon. Invisible
in the void, her trembling searching hands can find only an umbrella hanging
innocently next to her winter coat. She lifts it off without a sound and steps
into the orange and blue glow of the hallway, grabbing a garment hanging from
the hook as she crosses through her door.
Stepping to the other side of the landing, she manages to
close Brian’s door without its usual scrape against the hardwood floor, lifting
on the cut-glass knob with both hands as she pulls it shut. Then she stoops to
pry the hallway
Nemo
night-light far enough out of its socket for it to
blink off, then lines her robe across the gap under his closed door, the only
other threat of light. Despite her parched mouth and throat, there is no luxury
to cough.
She sits on the top step and waits, still without breath,
still as death.
After a moment her eyes adjust and Luis’ landing begins to
clarify. She focuses her eyes and her mind as her hands and knees tremble
uncontrollably, her nerves peeled raw from knowing that the only barricade
between her son and the danger from the intruders is her frail female body.
Never before has she been more aware, more
apprehensive
of a woman’s
physical disadvantage in the face of brute strength and size . . . the
stupid
strength and size of men. A flash of fury courses through her at that
natural unfairness, a fury squashed quickly by overpowering terror. There’s a
pang of guilt in the flood of streaking, disparate emotions: A
woman’s
strength is all that’s here tonight to protect her son, probably not enough if
the intruders figure out she’s up there. This was not the natural order of
things. Her son deserved more.
That
was her fault, too.
Then she hears the beginnings of an electric howl rising out
of the night like a distant urban wolf.
After a few seconds of the rising wail, three muffled pops
escape from Luis’ room in a quick but regular sequence followed by a brief,
evil silence.
Then the sermon starts up again.
The preacher’s caterwaul suddenly becomes deafening as Luis’
door swings open with a long creak and the landing floods with bouncing colored
light. She tightens her grip on the umbrella, points its tip down the stairs.
Her heart swells like a balloon, her knees draw into her chest like she’s been
wounded. Air is only a memory.
An elongated shadow precedes the tall man stepping into the
flickering light like a villain taking stage. Just feet away, he stares right
at her. Seeing him this close, seeing him as plain and obvious as death, she’s
struck again by the naive pretense of her notion of defending her son. Her eyes
swim, then dim, but she grits her teeth and squints to will them back to
acuity.
A strange, sober peace passes over her as she stills her
knees with fists balled to white knots, corrals her stomach with iron-gripped
jaws. The peace is almost as powerful as the fear, brings with it a pale
serenity that comes from knowing there is only this one choice left to her:
Whatever these men do, she is not leaving this step.
In the jerky glow she sees an angular face ending in a
narrow chin, its eyes only holes sunk in murky shadows, the long hands hanging
from the long-sleeved shirt shimmer white then green. Beginning from a point in
front, his oiled hair is combed straight south until it frizzes into a corona
of black curls over the shirt collar. His raised heels make him seem even
taller. The shirt and pants look black, too, but they sheen sporadically as he
moves in the bouncing light.
Entering with the cool menace of a night predator, the other
one appears now, trailed by a thin blue waft like the evening haze over a
cemetery. Pointed at the floor, a pistol barrel projects from his rigid left
arm. He’s older and turns to look up at her and his whole face is revealed, it’s
a tilted moon cast the color of oatmeal by the timorous juggling light. It’s a
moon cratered by a jagged white line dropping out of the right socket, the eye
itself stays hidden in the scarred crater. A dark slash of mustache crosses
over his mouth.
