A-Sides

by Victor Allen

  **********

  When Jim rolled through the gates of the cemetery, the last honest light had gone to bed, leaving only a layer of neon pink on the western horizon. At the edge of the cemetery, he saw slight movement in the grounds-keeper’s shed, Heebie finishing up for the day. Next to him, Charlie was still alive, but hanging on by the most frayed of threads. He pulled the car almost up to the shed, the lights off, the vehicle creeping like a stalking cat. The tires crunched softly on the gravel outside the shed and the brakes squealed lightly as the car came to a stop. Inside the shed, Heebie turned his head on his carrot neck and looked out, not recognizing the car, curious as to who would be coming to the cemetery so late. He grabbed a rag and wiped his hands of the grime of the day, seeing the glow of a cell phone screen as the driver made one final call.

  The driver stayed in the car until Heebie had come out of the shed and locked the door. When he turned around from this detail, he saw that the driver had exited the car, standing tall and thin in scarecrow silhouette against the evening sky.

  “Hello, Heebie.”

  Heebie’s skin crawled. It was the same cold voice that had taunted him two days ago. The figure came forward a step and Heebie saw blue twilight shine on the oiled barrel of a pistol.

  “Is that you, boy?” Heebie’s quavering voice gave away his fear. His lips quivered and he struggled to keep from crying. “You come to do me harm with that derringer ‘cause I know what you did?”

  The figure took another step forward.

  “You keep away from me,” Heebie said, his voice petulant and whiny. “I got friends. They won’t let you mess with me. Stay back, boy, or I’ll call them.”

  “Where are they, Heebie? You’re in a graveyard.” Jim stopped and spread his hands. “No-one here will help you. They’re all dead.”

  Monroe was not a large town and Jim heard the sirens start at the same time he saw the flashing of the revolving police beacons spin into red and blue life just beyond the screening buildings across the street from the cemetery.

  “My friends will help me,” Heebie said, though he didn’t sound quite so sure. Feeble or not, he knew what a firearm could do. “They’ll come right up out of the ground and get you. You don’t want to trouble me, boy.”

  It was stupid to even think of it. Just the ramblings of a dotty old man. But it didn’t take much for Jim to almost believe he could see the ground beneath the headstones splitting open, the huge, dark brown clods of earth falling inwards on vaultless caskets, smashing them to rotted splinters. He smelled rot and embalming fluid, heard a faraway sound like moaning and screaming.

  The wail of the approaching sirens had now reached the gates of the cemetery. The psychotropic strobing of the lights whirled around in the cemetery like a drug induced, chopped and screwed nightmare. Tires screeched as one cruiser pulled into the cemetery and the other stayed at the gate as a plug vehicle, blocking escape. Officers spilled from the cars and began walking in.

  “Heebie,” yelled Reese. “Is Jim Thompson in there?”

  “Here I am,” Jim screamed. He stood straight up behind the front fender of the Saturn, the red and blue flashing beacons wildly trading places on his face. With a jerky, almost frantic gesture, he pointed the Luger at an advancing deputy and fired. The deputy, not yet in defensive mode, took the slug in the neck, just above the collarbone where his Kevlar didn’t protect him. A glurt of blood, black as an exclamation point in the darkness, squirted from the wound before the deputy pitched forward like a stringless marionette.

  Like a well oiled machine, the remaining three officers dropped behind their cruisers, took aim, and opened fire. Booms and flashes thundered through the night as the slugs stitched James Thompson from head to belly button. The fusillade was like an artillery barrage as twenty-one times firing pins struck and retracted, each spent round adding its own smoke and fire and noise to the moonstruck mix of throbbing red and blue lights.

  Bullets slammed into the cast iron block of the Saturn’s engine with shattering clanks and punched through plastic fenders and sheet metal with splintering cracks. Stone and marble chips became flying shrapnel as errant bullets cracked and caromed off of headstones with zings! Jim Thompson’s body bucked like a rag doll on a raging bull before he lurched forward over the Saturn’s hood, dead after the second bullet found home in his left eye, punching a neat, eerily star-shaped hole through his ubiquitous sunglasses.

  The ringing echoes of the last gunshot died out and the officers crept cautiously forward, one of them going first to his fallen comrade. By habit and procedure, he radioed for an ambulance, but he had felt not even the stirrings of a pulse. Most of the back of the fallen officer’s neck was missing.

  Reese carefully approached the very dead Jim Thompson, sprawled in a bloody heap across the hood of the bullet riddled vehicle. He still had the pistol clasped loosely in his hand and Reese raked it quickly onto the ground. He perfunctorily tried to get a pulse from the outstretched arm sprawled across the hood, but didn’t really need it. The arm was already cold after only seconds. He quickly turned his attention to the figure in the passenger seat, leveling his sidearm and ordering the passenger to put his hands out the window. There was no response and Reese yanked the driver’s side door open. The dome light came on, its telling light refracting off of the shattered glass of the windshield and showing Reese more than he really wanted to see.

  Charlie Loflin sat upright in the passenger seat. His head was thrown back and his open eyes bugged. His mouth was stretched open in a chalk white face and a strand of thick saliva connected his upper and lower jaws. The light was too dim to make out the dark blood staining his blue jeans and pooling in the floorboard, but Reese smelled the hot, iron and copper trace of hemoglobin, a telltale of massive blood loss. He wouldn’t know it until the next day, but the only bullet that had touched Charlie Loflin was the one fired from Jim Thompson’s Luger. He had simply bled out.

  Taking deep breaths in an effort to slow his pounding heart, Reese coughed and sputtered as he inhaled the caustic smoke. His partner had made it up to the car by now and stared in for just a couple of seconds before turning away.

  The deputy turned away, white-faced. “I can’t look at that anymore,” he said shakily. Reese, bent over and trembling, nodded silently. That was when he heard the frightened sobbing.

  Instantly alert, he crept around the car with his gun at the ready, finally thinking to switch on his flashlight. There, huddled in a sobbing mass against the shed door, Heebie lay in a fetal position. Broken glass from the demolished windshield covered him and four bullet holes pockmarked the shed door just above him, but none had even grazed him.

  Reese let out his pent up breath in an explosive sigh. He holstered his pistol and sagged against the Saturn.

  “God,” he mumbled to himself, “protects drunks, children, and fuckin’ Heebie.”