Death at Dawn

by Arthur Day

  He also knew that sooner or later his liver would go on strike and that would be the end of a wasted life. For that reason, he avoided going to the doctor for a check-up just as he avoided the mirror in his bathroom.

  “Fuck,” he said to the empty room. His tongue felt thick and coated. He took a sip of his coffee and made a face. He had been drunk all the time since Pam’s body had turned up and Buckmaster had come calling. Her death had mocked his feeble effort to become friends with her and rehabilitate himself at the same time. His memory filled with the picture of her standing outside her house loosing up her muscles, her face and body reflecting radiant health and wellbeing. She had never reproached him for taking the opposite course but had only smiled and started down the road with him trailing behind, almost jogging just to keep up.

  He had known since that time that seemed forever but was only a few days before that he probably was in love with her or maybe had been in love since they had first met months before that. Maybe he had loved her since they had been children. He found it had to think back to that time and even harder to analyze his feelings. He supposed that he had a cousin’s kind of love for Pam but maybe these past few weeks he had fallen in love with her as a woman as well. He could not decide and, in the end, supposed that it made little difference. His father would be happy, and the money would flow so why did he feel like shit? Certainly not because of her but the line between love and hate is thin and vague at best but it should not make a difference to him. If Pam came walking in right now and saw him she would be appalled. He was appalled if he cared to be honest about it. He had been on his way up and now here he was at the bottom of the shit pit again. Doug knew the signs. He would vow to do better, to cut back on the booze, to start exercising again, to make something of his life besides a pile of empty bottles. That resolve would weaken and die within days and he would be right where he was now.

  He needed a change for sure. A different scene than the bottom of his toilet bowl or the little table looking out on children playing in the quad. Maybe it would work. Maybe not. What he was doing now was definitely not working. That much was clear even to his addled senses.

  Doug levered himself up from the table and turned somewhat unsteadily towards the stairs and his bedroom. He would pack now while the idea was still fresh and hot within his mind. He would go up to Lake Compton and try again to honor Pam’s memory. If he couldn’t get it done there it would never happen.

  Standing on his front porch the following evening, Douglas Worth felt much better. He had drunk only a couple of ounces after arriving at the cabin and had slept like a log for the next ten hours. The sun was sinking over the hills on the far side of the lake which was so still it reflected the shore to the smallest detail. Not even the suggestion of a breeze whispered on the water. He had on his navy-blue Nike exercise shorts, his cross trainers and a t-shirt with the picture of a whale and then the words Blow Me. He decided he would start by walking a mile and then increase it as he felt able to. Pam had taught him the wisdom of baby steps when it came to exercise to avoid ending up in bed or worse in the Urgent Care Center.

  He walked up through the field past Pam’s house (it didn’t matter who owned it now: he would always think of it that way) and then onto the dirt road that led to the main road to Compton. By the time he got to the main road he was slowing down and running out of breath, but he was dammed if he was going to turn around so soon. He would go left towards the lake road and turn around at the top of a small hill about a half mile away. Determined, he started off. Ahead he imagined Pam striding ahead, her pig tail waving left and right and her arms pumping up and down so that she seemed to actually levitate. He followed her mirage as far as his body would take him. He had to admit it was not far, maybe not even the mile he had promised himself. He stopped and bent over trying to regain his wind as he had so many years before and probably as it had always been even when he and Bitsy had been kids.

  “You’re a loser Dougie. Loser, loser, loser.” Bitsy shouted as she danced around sticking out her tongue and shaking a finger at her younger brother. “and I’m going to tell Dad on you and he’ll whip you for sure you little loser.”

  “You dared me so it’s your fault,” he retorted flush with embarrassment and anger as he stared at the broken window in the garage. “Anyway, Nelson will fix it and Dad won’t ever know.” His sister wasn’t smart like most kids he knew but she was beautiful, and he knew it and she knew it and the whole world knew it. Once she got a thought in her mind, though, it never changed, and she would repeat it endlessly until she arrived at a blank space in her thoughts and then she would simply stop talking in the middle of a word and just stand or sit staring out at nothing.

  “I’m going to tell Dad. I’m going to tell Dad,” Bitsy chanted and took off running towards the house. Her betrayal pissed him off more than even the broken window. She was always doing this, getting him into trouble and then laughing when his parents punished him. He screamed in anger and chased after her but even back then he had been overweight and out of shape and so never stood a chance at catching his skinny older sister. Sobbing with frustration, he found himself still fifty yards from the main house as Penney disappeared inside. “I’ll get you Bitsy. Just wait and see.” He screamed and then his father appeared on the porch and signaled Doug to come inside.

  “Bitsy tells me you broke a window in the garage.”

  “Yes sir.”

  “Why did you do that?”

  “I didn’t mean to.” But if Bitsy dies screaming in agony when I get out of here THEN I will mean to.

  “How can you throw a ball at a window and not mean to break it?” It was as if Zeus had looked down from Olympus and thrown a thunderbolt.

  “I…”

  “Well”

  “The bottom half was open, and she dared me to throw the ball through it.” It sounded lame even to Doug. He tried to think of a good way to get back at his sister. Drawing and quartering perhaps. Maybe the rack. He had read about that in history class. People did that because they were religious. Doug didn’t think he was religious but maybe he could do that anyway. When she screamed he could turn the wheel some more.

  “Five whacks and no allowance until the broken window is paid for. Assume the position.”

  Doug unbuckled his belt, pushed his pant and underwear down around his knees and bent over a table in one corner of his father’s study. He knew every mark and every variation in the grain on its top.

  WHACK

  His father’s hand came down on his buttocks. He tried to relax because it seemed to hurt less that way, but tears sprang into his eyes and his whole body clenched up, but he uttered not a sound. It was a point of pride. Not a peep. He closed his eyes and endured the following four strokes. The rack was definitely too good for a cunt like Bitsy. He thought this but did not say it. The kids at school knew words and so he knew them, but he wasn’t too sure what the word ‘cunt’ meant and he didn’t want to get into trouble again. He rubbed his rear end as he left his father’s study.

  Doug walked slowly up the dirt road towards his cabin. It was owned by his father, but Dad was too sick to come up any more

  By now, Pam’s will, if she had one, would be read and the lawyers would be in the process of disposing of her estate. Doug doubted that she would have left him anything. They had been friends only a few months and furthermore she had been much more a friend to him than Doug had been to her. Granted he had not been able to do anything for her and she had probably not intended to do anything for him but had accomplished that by simply including him in her daily exercise. She had probably never known how much he appreciated her. Doug trudged past a couple of the houses nearest the Compton road still deep in thought.

  The road forked, and he kept to the right and decided to cut through the woods behind his cousin’s house to get to his. Sun rays slanted through the tall pines sending shafts of light and shadow
that shown through that patch of woods highlighting some ground and making others almost invisible.

  Before he knew what was happening Doug stepped into an almost invisible hole and collapsed into a small pit. Jesus H. Christ. What the hell is this? He got to his knees thankful that he had not broken an ankle or worse and found himself in a shallow depression scooped out behind a large pine that had died and fallen. On his knees Doug could see through a crack between the log and the ground directly into Pam’s living room. Holy shit. Mother fuckin’ nature couldn’t have done this. Around him the leaves had been packed down as if someone had been lying here and small pine branches lay over part of the hole so that was almost totally invisible. A chill ran down his back. Doug slowly stepped out of the man-made pit and stood looking down into it. Some sicko voyeur was apparently spying on people in the house.

  He stood there wondering what he should do. Tell whoever was in the house obviously but there did not appear to be anyone there at the moment. Call someone but who? Something was definitely wrong here. Buckmaster had been after him about that hadn’t he? Doug turned and headed towards his house being careful to look down at his feet in case there were other surprises in an otherwise simple little patch of woods.

  He would call the sheriff’s department. He would let Buckmaster know what he found. Let the sheriff decide if it was important. If not, he could stop by the J-Ville police department and tell them about a peeping tom.

  BUCKMASTER

  There is no official ending for a day. It ends when it ends and that does not always coincide with sunset even in summer when daylight lasts until nine at night at least in this part of the country. Buckmaster could not believe how tired he felt. He had slept well the night before as far as he could remember but he felt totally devoid of energy and intelligence as if he had not slept in days. He had received a call from one of his deputies, Calvin Minister, who was dealing with what he thought was a family altercation. Zeke Abrams was a cantankerous son of a bitch who was always fighting with his neighbors and calling to complain about everything. His children were, if anything, worse than their dad.

  “Yes Cal. What’s up?”

  “Sheriff this has become a hostage situation. The Abrams girl has a boyfriend who has locked himself and the family in the house and threatened to kill them all if he and the daughter can’t get in his car and drive away.”

  “So let him. We can keep track of the car through GPS.”

  “He also wants one hundred thousand dollars so they can go sit on the beach somewhere. I’ve called the State Police and their hostage negotiator, and a SWAT team is on their way, but I thought you would want to know.”

  “Good call, Cal. Keep him talking if you can. If you can get another tracker on his car go ahead and do so. Is the area taped off?”

  “Yes. Dave and Ed are on crowd control.”

  “Good. I’ll be there in twenty minutes.”

  By the time he got there, the crowd had grown to around fifty people and a channel 6 news truck was parked as close to the taped area as it could get. He found Cal standing by his cruiser and trying to talk whoever was in the house to come out and talk. He was a good man, solid, quiet with five years on the department. “At least let the wife out,” he was speaking into the loud speaker. “You don’t need her in there. What do you say?”

  There was no answer from the house, a middle class split level painted a light cream with dark green shutters and a big picture window in the living room. There was a two-car garage under the second floor bedrooms. Both garage doors were closed and there was an older maroon Honda civic parked in the driveway.

  “What started all this?” Buckmaster asked as he stood beside Cal and looked across the street at the house.

  “The usual,” Cal replied laconically. “Old Zeke hates anyone who comes within a mile of Dotty, his daughter. He came out of the house with a shotgun when the boyfriend showed up. Dotty ran out and pushed him. The boyfriend grabbed the shotgun and forced both of them inside the house. A neighbor called that he had heard a gunshot. That’s when I was dispatched. By the time I got here the circus had started and a bunch of clowns were offering useless advice to each other and trying for prize-winning photographs on their phones. I called for backup and then called you.”

  “What’s the boyfriend’s name?”

  “Neighbor thinks she heard Dotty call him Jason.”

  “Give me the bullhorn.”

  “Shouldn’t we wait for the hostage negotiator?”

  “Probably but maybe we can at least determine the situation in there. He lifted the bullhorn to his face and pressed the button. “Hi Jason. This is Sheriff Buckmaster. Is everyone okay in the house? If so just open the curtain in the living room and then close it again. We can work all this out. I doubt you want to hurt anyone, particularly Dotty.” Buckmaster lowered the machine and stood there watching the house. For long seconds that seemed longer nothing happened but then the curtain was pulled back slightly and then pulled close again. Good. He hoped that meant the family was in good health and there was not someone in there that had been shot.

  “Well, well. If it isn’t the great Buckmaster hard at work screwing things up again.”

  Buckmaster didn’t need to turn around to know who was behind him but he turned anyway to face a new annoyance. “Hi Ed. They kick you out of your office because they couldn’t stand listening to you anymore?”

  Ed Bruckner was the hostage negotiator for the Connecticut State Police. He was a small, bitter whip of a man who looked as if he had spent his life sucking on lemons and running his fingernails across blackboards. He had a high-pitched nasally voice that grated on Buckmaster who couldn’t understand how the man could talk anyone out of anything, but he did. Behind him SWAT team members in full TAC gear were pouring out of their command vehicle.

  Their commander, a huge bull of a black man with multiple decorations in Afghanistan and Iraq, walked up to where they were standing. “Hi John,” he held out a huge hand that enveloped Buckmaster’s as if the sheriff had been a child.

  Buckmaster smiled, greatly relieved that Gordon Macky would be handling this. He and Buckmaster had been friends since their time in the ‘stan and knew almost instantly what the other was thinking. “Yo Gordo. You order this mess up as a training exercise?”

  “Absolutely John. I need to keep my team as sharp as steak knives. So, what’s the situation? That the house in question? Do we have a blueprint available yet?”

  “I need to talk with Jason,” Ed interrupted. “I’ll use the phone in the command van.” He turned and headed towards that immense vehicle.

  “I don’t know how that man does it, but he has talked people out of situations like this for years.”

  “Still don’t like him,” Buckmaster replied, “but he does his job. I’ll give him that. Is SWAT really necessary for something like this?”

  “Amen brother. Better overprepared than caught with our pants down and somebody hurt. I’d better get my team set up and see if we can get some plans for this place. Looks like a basic box to me but you never know, especially with the older homes.” Macky lumbered off signaling his men as he did so.

  Buckmaster turned back to watch the house with Minister. Were it not for the small crowd of people milling about beyond the yellow crime-scene tape and the multiple vehicles parked along each side of the street, the house looked almost somnolent in the late afternoon light. It was hard to believe that there was a young man in it who could explode at any minute and kill an entire family.

  Buckmaster’s phone went off shocking him out of his reverie. He put it to his ear. “Buckmaster.”

  “Hi sheriff. It’s Doug Worth. I found something this afternoon that you might be interested in.”

  McCAAL

  I brought two Beefeater and tonics into the living room and handed one to Dianne who smiled her thanks and took a sip.

 
“Mmmm. That hits the spot. So where did you get that nasty looking scar on your side if you don’t mind a personal question?”

  “Knife fight long ago. He was small and very quick. I wasn’t.”

  “Glad you survived,” Dianne said softly.

  “Me too,” I replied and took a pull from my drink. I had thought those times to be well behind me now. All the war and violence. Killing people and breaking things. I didn’t even want to remember the past though I couldn’t blame Dianne for asking about the scar. Simple human curiosity. I probably would have done the same in her place. I had all kinds of questions for her but thought this was not the time for asking them. “I saw no sign of Jacob in the surrounding area but that doesn’t mean much. He could be out there right now, and we would never know.”

  “I know. This whole scene is so weird. I feel like we’re sitting here with big fat targets painted on us. Maybe we should just go back to Mays Corners. He might have second thoughts about trying anything there. Lots of people around and we could stay at my house in Rockmarsh. Even more people and police on patrol. It would be much more difficult to get a good shot if that’s what he’s planning.”

  “He used a knife before,” I reminded her.

  “We don’t know if that’s the only weapon in his bag. Your ex was unarmed. Makes a difference. I found out that he trained in demolition in the army.” She got to her feet. “What’s in the fridge? We better eat something if we’re going to have another one of these excellent cocktails.”