A Dead Issue Read online

  “He’s got a gun,” Dusty whispered. “What if he’s waiting?” His eyes were locked on the house beyond the bridge.

  “We call to him. Let him know it’s us.”

  “Didn’t we try that?”

  I gave him a nod and headed toward the house anyway. Dusty held back a moment and then caught up to me.

  “It’s getting darker by the minute,” he said, “He can’t hardly see in the daylight. What if he starts blasting away?”

  My chest tightened and I swallowed. Somewhere in the distant night a dog barked.

  “Come on,” I urged. “Let’s get this over with.”

  We walked cautiously, slowed by uncertainty and the uneven path. The roof of the house was outlined against the last remnants of light left in the sky. As we neared the porch, details took dim shape and we could see the three wooden steps. We paused before going farther, listening—straining for any sound from within.

  We heard nothing. Jonah was either dead or dying. I didn’t think he’d be waiting for us with his gun. I took a deep breath and started to tiptoe up to the porch, Dusty at my side. My foot landed noiselessly on the porch, and from somewhere deep in the house, a light went on.

  CHAPTER 3

  We dropped to a crouch as if the light had been a pistol shot. Scrambling off the steps, we ducked around the corner and squatted. For an absurd moment, I felt like it was Halloween and I had been caught soaping windows. The illusion quickly faded to reality as Dusty blew out his breath. “Well, he’s alive.”

  “And moving about,” I added. “That’s good—I guess.”

  I paused for a moment and then stood up. Dusty stayed low, almost behind me. My nerves had settled down to a steady flutter. I came out from our hiding place and marched to Jonah’s back porch, positioning myself about four feet from the first step.

  “Jonah . . . ?”

  I waited again, this time long enough for Dusty to join me. When I felt him next to me, I called again. “Jonah?”

  “He’s not sure it’s us,” Dusty offered and then lifted his voice, “Hey, Jonah! It’s me—Dusty. We came back for Mark’s wallet.”

  “I left it here this afternoon!” I added. We listened for a response but heard nothing but the whisper of wind.

  “Let’s try the front,” Dusty suggested.

  We felt our way along the side of Jonah’s house, skirting shrubbery and looking for light in a window, but Jonah’s house was heavily curtained. We rounded the corner and approached the front door. It was made of sturdy wood and had in the upper panels identical cut-glass designs, elegant in their simplicity, glowing orange with the light from within.

  We watched the light for a moment to see if there was any movement, and when it was apparent that all was still in the house, we inched forward and pressed our eyes against the glass. The interior of the house came into sharp focus. The foreground, the parlor, was dark with occasional patches of light revealing the arm of a chair, the corner of a rug, and the polished wooden floor. At the far end of the parlor, the doorway to the den framed a softly lit room with a small table next to a padded chair, which I knew faced the fireplace. The only feature that marred the charm and warmth of the scene was Jonah’s outstretched hand in the rectangle of pine floor beyond the doorway. As we watched, the hand slowly closed and flexed like it was squeezing an invisible tennis ball.

  “Jesus!” Dusty said. “Let’s go!”

  Dusty streaked into the lawn. I tugged and rattled at the door. Locked. Dusty stood in the lane ready to run back to the car and called after me when I raced around the side of the house.

  “Mark!” he called in a whisper. “What are you doing?”

  “Come on,” I shouted and ran toward the back door.

  He caught up to me as I climbed the stairs and grabbed me by the belt.

  “Are you nuts?” he asked in a tone that sounded like he thought I was about to leap into a volcano.

  “We’ve got to get help—call 911.”

  “Stop,” he commanded. “Just stop.”

  I paused and turned back to him.

  “Before you rush in there—think.” He allowed time for me to settle down. “Who turned the light on?”

  I didn’t have an answer.

  “You don’t think he jumped up, turned the light on and then got back on the floor at the bottom of the steps do you? Somebody’s in there!”

  “There can’t be,” I argued. “We’d have heard them.” I paused.

  “But somebody turned the light on!” he persisted. “A burglar. Maybe he’s the one Jonah was shooting at. Maybe he’s in there now with the gun!”

  I stared at Dusty for a moment, weighing his words. What he said might have been possible, but it didn’t feel right.

  “Timer!” I said and Dusty gaped at me blankly. “He has a light on a timer!”

  I pushed open the door and ran through the mudroom with my hands sliding down the walls of the hallway. The light from the den filtered into the kitchen with enough intensity that I managed to get across the room without plowing through his table and chairs. Dusty thumped after me, whispering, “Mark! Mark!” He caught up to me at the archway to the den. I was frozen to the spot, mouth open in shock and disbelief. Jonah was gone.

  CHAPTER 4

  Dusty bumped up behind me and peered over my shoulder. “Where is he?” he whispered into my ear.

  I stood listening to my heart thumping against my chest as I tried to figure out what had just happened. Jonah had regained consciousness. We watched his hand come to life through the front door. While we argued about what to do, he had risen—and was gone. I scanned the floor, picturing his pistol spinning to a stop inches from his hand—the hand that had flexed. The gun was missing, too.

  “Jonah!” I shouted toward the stairway. For some inexplicable reason I felt that he had gone back upstairs, seeking the high ground to fend off home invaders.

  “Shh!” Dusty whispered through clenched teeth. “What the fuck’s the matter with you? He has a gun!”

  “I know,” I said, taking a few steps into the den toward the stairway, “and I want him to know it’s me before he uses it.”

  “Jesus Christ,” Dusty muttered. Nevertheless, he came with me, step-by-step, deeper into the den.

  “Jonah? It’s us. We just . . .”

  A sound floated from the parlor—the slow and deliberate scraping of furniture being moved across a wooden floor. It startled us and we froze in the silence that followed.

  “Jonah?”

  There was another scrape and we stared into the cave-like arched doorway of the parlor. With the third scrape, a chair appeared out of the shadows and paused in a pool of light. We stared at it, waiting for it to move again. Ten seconds passed and the chair inched forward again, revealing a meaty hand on the oak backrest. Jonah slid into view, using the chair as a crutch, the gun held limply at his side. He shuffled forward a few steps into the den, pigeon-toed and unsteady. His glasses were gone—eyes squinted as if sand had been thrown into his face. He lifted the chair and tossed it effortlessly aside where it tumbled into the corner. Dusty and I flinched and stepped backward. Jonah lurched forward like a drunk on the verge of collapse, taking baby steps, swaying and rocking—barely able to keep upright. He raised the gun and held it out in front of him, swinging it back and forth like a man watering his lawn.

  “Holy shit,” Dusty whispered. The gun sought the source of the voice. Dusty dove to the floor and a roaring explosion filled the room, drowning out Dusty’s scream. I crouched behind one of the padded chairs and Jonah fired again, blowing a gigantic hole in the padding next to my ear. As a shield, the chair was no better than a party balloon. I dropped to the floor as another explosion rocked the room and puffs of stuffing filled the air like snowflakes. Another blast followed. Jonah swung the pistol back and forth, squeezing off shots at regular intervals, each shot filling the room as the previous explosion faded. Shattering glass, falling plaster, and splintering wood added to the din, and he kep
t shooting, and shooting. It didn’t seem possible for a gun to hold that many bullets—and then it stopped.

  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.r />
  “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.