by Tammy Walsh
No shortcuts for me.
Did she think just any asshole could do that?
Did she think I was a loser?
Well, fuck her!
There was more going on here than anyone realized.
And I was the one to get to the bottom of it.
I didn’t care what it took.
I was going to discover the truth.
I released the man’s collar and eased him back down to his feet.
He kept his eyes on the floor and turned to slip away with his tail between his legs.
But he couldn’t get off with it that easy.
Unable to let the guy off, I hammered him in the jaw once, twice, three times.
I hit hard and fast.
He didn’t even see the blows coming.
He fell to the floor in a heap and seemed unsure where he was.
His buddies that’d slunk in with him considered leaping to his friend’s aid but they took one look at my uniform and backed away.
Yeah, being sheriff still meant something.
Even now.
“Get him out of here,” I said, waving at the crumpled figure on the floor.
I climbed back on the stool and threw back the spilled shot.
My radio crackled.
“Sheriff Posiek. Come in, over.”
Fuck’s sake.
Can’t a man have a single moment to himself?
“Yeah?” I snapped.
“There’s a disturbance at Yale farm, over.”
“So, why are you bothering me with it? Send one of the plods.”
“The farmer said it was something you might want to deal with personally.”
“Personally? What does that mean?”
“I don’t know. He said he’s an old pal of yours and that it might be of some interest to you.”
“Who did you say it was? Yale?”
“Martin Yale.”
“I barely even knew the asshole. I haven’t spoken to him since the third grade.”
“He requested you specifically. He was insistent it should be you and sounded very frantic.”
I sighed.
It was probably a good thing to get me out of the bar for a few hours, not that I much looked forward to brushing up on a friendship that’d died years ago.
“Fine, I’ll go see what the trouble is.”
I left a twenty-dollar bill on the bar and put my shot glass on top of it, not that anyone was likely to steal it after a cop put it there.
Especially after the can of whoop-ass I’d just opened.
I stood up and, a little unsteady on my feet, noticed the patrons gawping at me.
I brushed off my hat and put it on.
I turned to Bill.
“Sorry for the… disruption. I’ve got a few… problems to work on.”
“Aight,” Bill said in a tone that suggested he didn’t accept my apology and believed my excuse even less.
To hell with him.
As I approached the exit, the clack of billiard balls nipped at my heels.
I stopped at the door and turned back to Bill, who was in the process of extracting the bill from under the shot glass.
“Hey, Bill,” I said.
Bill leaped a foot in the air before turning to me.
“Yeah?”
“I’ve been drinking in your bar.”
Bill nodded, unsure where I was going with this.
“And I must have downed half a dozen shots or more.”
He just stared at me.
“So, aren’t you going to warn me not to drive?” I said. “That would be what a responsible barkeep and friend would do. Unless you don’t think we’re friends anymore?”
I looked at him levelly.
His goateed mouth opened and shut before he looked at something to one side, unsure quite what to say.
“I, uh, guess you’re right.”
“So? Aren’t you going to say it? If you don’t, and I end up having an accident, there might be a lot of questions later about how much of it was your fault for not taking the proper precautions. And there’s plenty of witnesses in here who would testify to you having not carried out your duty.”
Bill glanced at the rest of the bar, who didn’t pay him any attention.
He cleared his throat.
“Sheriff, are you sure you should be driving after drinking? I’d hate for you to have an accident.”
I pushed up the brim of my hat with a thumb.
“Well, that’s very kind of you, Bill. Thanks for asking, but I think I’ll be fine.”
Bill just stared at me.
So did the rest of the bar.
“I’ll let you off this one time, Bill,” I said. “But if you pull this sort of shit again, I’m going to shut you down. You hear me?”
Bill nodded and daren’t say another word.
Good.
It was better to be feared than irrelevant.
And I’d been made to feel irrelevant too damn much recently.
I turned toward the door and marched out.
Yale Farm was a two-bit dust hole on the other side of town.
Giving things a nice name didn’t make them nicer places to live.
It belonged to a section of town that hadn’t seen a whole lot of investment in the past forty years or more.
I considered calling in and turning the job over to someone else.
I didn’t do a lot of house calls anymore—and for good reason.
They’d been the bane of my existence as a beat cop.
It was the biggest draw in being the sheriff.
I’d always had my eye on the top job and as my predecessor was getting on in years, I knew it wouldn’t be long before they found someone to fill his snakeskin boots.
I did a good job as a beat cop, cutting deals with criminals so they handed me the name of others higher up in the organization.
Everyone won.
Except the grasses.
Once I got promoted, they were the first ones I booked, sent to the same jails that housed those they’d dobbed in.
The thought of them locked inside with them never failed to make me chuckle.
In six months, I cleaned up the streets.
And the best part?
None of the snitches squealed on me because they knew I had the power to make their situation a whole lot worse if I wanted to.
They kept their mouths shut and did their time.
Meanwhile, I moved up the ladder of success, dusting off the entrails of those I’d known as a kid.
One of those friendships was a fellow named Martin Yale, a buddy I used to knock around with at elementary school.
We used to hide out in the library and read comic books.
When we graduated to high school, we lost touch instantly, each of us finding our own cliques.
Mine was sports, his drugs.
He did five years in the slammer while I was still coming up through the ranks.
There was little I could do to help him now, not that I ever would have lifted so much as a finger.
Criminals were criminals, cops were cops.
Once you crossed that line, you never stepped back across it.
I pulled up to the squat house with metal grilles over the windows.
Broken supermarket trollies were parked on either side of me as if it was a private spot reserved for me.
I might have fallen a long way today with the loss of Isabella but I sure had a lot further to fall before I reached these depths.
I checked my sidearm and reloaded it.
Yale Farm was the kind of place you wiped your feet on the way out.
I didn’t want to head in this place without the proper protection.
It was unlikely Martin was dumb enough to attack the sheriff after asking for me specifically, but you never knew what someone would do if they were desperate enough.
I climbed from my cruiser and walked around to the front door.
I knocked with a single rap and decid
ed that if no one answered within the next minute, I would be out of there.
Forty-seven seconds later, a shadow moved inside and unlocked the door.
I expected it to be Martin but it turned out to be his wife.
I didn’t know her name and made a mental note to learn of it soon.
I removed my hat and smiled amiably.
She was rough around the edges, with fiery red hair and a very short skirt.
She had many bruises up her legs and carried a baby on one cocked hip.
“You the cop Martin wanted?” she said in her lilting voice.
“Sheriff Posiek,” I said.
“Martin’s in the kitchen.”
And with that, she left the door open and sauntered into the front room.
She had a nice ass, despite having popped out the sprog recently.
She sat on a sofa with the stuffing coming out.
She didn’t bother to keep her legs shut and was completely unconcerned she flashed her growler at me.
No panties…
Maybe she did it on purpose, maybe not.
Either way, I promised myself to stop by some point in the near future while Martin was out.
I knew an easy lay when I saw one.
I headed through the hallway, the wallpaper brown and curling with damp.
What a shithole.
It didn’t surprise me Martin would end up in a place like this.
It was about as good as he could hope for, given his prospects.
Martin stood at the kitchen sink, his back to me, and stared out the window at something that held him in thrall.
“Martin?”
He spun around fast and accidentally knocked a saucepan off the stove.
It crashed to the floor, spilling a handful of baked beans across the faded linoleum.
Martin was not concerned.
His eyes were wide orbs and it took him a full ten seconds to recognize me.
It was an uncomfortable amount of time with someone staring openly at you.
Immense relief washed over him unlike anything I’d ever seen.
Even criminals who’d narrowly escaped a life term prison sentence didn’t show the same level of relief he did right then.
“It’s you,” he said. “Thank God it’s you! For a moment there I thought…”
He raised a hand to his forehead and shook his head.
I might have paid more attention to his mood if it wasn’t for the kitchen knife he held clenched in a strained fist.
My training took over and I immediately reached for the baton at my waist.
He noticed my reaction and only then noticed the knife.
He tossed it in the sink and it clattered loudly.
Then he stumbled forward and fell into my arms.
He sobbed like a baby.
“I’m so glad you’re here.”
To say I was taken aback was an understatement.
Martin was one of the toughest kids on the block growing up.
A five-year stretch could only have hardened him.
He was covered head to foot in tattoos and holes where he’d once been pierced.
And now here he was, a broken man.
If he suddenly had a breakdown and realized his entire life had been a waste, I knew for certain I didn’t want to have to be the one to have to comfort him.
“Martin, calm down. Martin?”
He sniveled as he straightened up.
He ran a finger under his snotty nose and couldn’t bring himself to look me in the eye.
“Tell me what’s going on,” I said. “Why are you acting like this?”
“It happened last night. I was watching TV when I heard a loud roar and then a big thud outside. I waited for the cops to come, for someone to come take it away… But no one did. Not until I called you.”
It was the gibbering of a lunatic.
“I need you to be clearer,” I said. “What are you talking about?”
“The rock,” he wailed. “The rock at the bottom of the garden!”
Why a rock should cause a full-grown man to lose it the way Martin had, I had no idea.
After another ten minutes of trying to piece the story together, I began to understand.
He’d been watching TV last night with his family when there was a tremendous roaring sound.
The baby screamed and he wrapped his arms around both the baby and his wife—whose name turned out to be Cheryl—and told them everything was going to be all right.
The noise grew louder and he thought World War III had finally kicked off.
Then there was a tremendous thud that pulsed through the house and knocked out most of the lights.
After he got the kids to quieten down, he looked out the window and saw a glowing light at the foot of his garden.
“I knew what it was right away,” Martin said. “I thought someone would haul it away but no one did. That’s why I had to call you.”
“Wait. What was it?”
“Do you remember those comic books we used to read in the basement of the school library? The ones someone hid between the pages of the encyclopedia? About aliens and superheroes from outer space? This is how every episode started. With a rock crash landing in someone’s backyard.”
He’d bored me long before he reached the end of his theory.
I was busy thinking about his tasty wife in the front room, her pussy on full show, ready to be pummeled by the first guy that showed up.
Instead, I was stuck in here talking to her loser husband about a close encounter of the loser kind.
“So what happened when you checked it out?” I said.
“What? I didn’t go check it out.”
“Back up. You’re telling me this thing crashed in your backyard and you never went to check it out?”
Martin looked at me like I was the crazy one.
“Don’t you remember those comic strips?” he snapped. “The rock falls and then the alien zaps the human or tears his skin from his bones or—”
I waved a hand.
“I get the picture.”
“You don’t remember any of it? They used to give me nightmares. After I have a little taste, I see them again. They haunted me.”
What did he expect?
Taking drugs rewired your brain.
“It was probably a car backfiring or something,” I said. “I hate to tell you this, but you don’t exactly live in the best neighborhood. It could have been gunshots.”
“Naw, man. I know a gunshot when I hear it and that roar and thud last night was no gunshot.”
I raised my hands in surrender.
“All right. So we’ll go take a look and make sure nothing’s there.”
“We? I’m not going out there!”
“It’s your backyard.”
“It’s your responsibility as sheriff.”
Martin folded his arms.
It was no use.
He wasn’t going to budge.
“Fine,” I snapped. “I’ll check it out. But if there’s nothing there, I expect you to give me something in exchange.”
“Anything, man. You just name it, and it’s yours.”
Your wife whenever I want her.
I wouldn’t tell him my demands now in case he refused, but getting what you wanted from a user was never very hard.
“You owe me,” I said, waving a finger at him.
I shoved the kitchen door open and stepped into the large but poorly-manicured backyard.
I shoved the kids’ pedal-powered kart aside and continued down the patches of dust.
I glanced back at the kitchen window and saw Martin’s face pressed against the glass.
What an asshole…
He was going to pay for this.
Or his wife would.
I’d ride her so hard she’d be limping for a week.
I rounded the kids’ broken swing, little remaining of it save four chains hanging without saddles.
What a shithole.
>
Why would an alien choose to land here of all places?
They could have chosen a five-star resort.
I turned to head back and take Martin’s tasty wife with me when I noticed a wisp of smoke emitting from behind a short rise.
No cause for alarm.
Someone might have set up a barbeque.
I wandered over and crested the rise.
My jaw hit the floor at what I saw.
A twisted hunk of metal spewed luminous green liquid into the base of a crater.
Sparks hissed from hunks of machinery I’d never laid eyes on before.
I doubted if anyone had seen something like this before.
Martin was right.
Something had crashed in his backyard.
And he was right to be afraid.
I shouldn’t be handling this alone…
I reached up for my radio to request backup when a panel from the ship’s underside fell open.
I took the torch from my belt and aimed it at the hole.
“Hello?” I said. “Is anyone there?”
Silence answered me.
A low groan moaned, both deep and long and pained.
It shook me to my core.
It wasn’t the kind of sound someone made at the peak of health.
It was made by someone at death’s door.
Or something.
“I’m going to call an ambulance,” I said. “They’ll be here soon.”
“Heeeeeellp…” a voice said.
Its pronunciation was strangely twisted around the word.
I drifted a little closer, keeping a wide berth between me and the opening’s darkness.
I shone my light inside it.
“Hello—?”
I barely managed to get the word out when a hand flopped from the pitch blackness.
On the very fringes of daylight, I made out a thick thatch of hair that had to be the body of a man.
I breathed a sigh of relief.
At least it wasn’t a little green man, I told myself.
That’s something, at least.
I approached and felt at the man’s wrist.
He still had a heartbeat but it was weak.
“Don’t worry,” I said. “We’ll get you out of here. We just need to—”
Then I saw his face.
“No… That’s impossible…”
The words were out before I could process them.
I dropped the torch and fell on my ass.
I scooted back a yard before I came to a stop.
I turned my head to one side to peer closer at the figure’s face.