Deception

by Randy Alcorn

  “You’re on a fishing expedition,” Doyle said. “Outrageous speculations are your style.”

  “Is it just me, Chris, or did you have a second bowl of stupid for breakfast?”

  He glared.

  “Really, what’s your theory?” I asked. “Why’d Hedstrom get killed?”

  “Robbery that went south. Doubt they meant to kill him.”

  “A shot to the head wasn’t meant to kill? Somebody could’ve watched and studied, then laid in wait. Is taking his dog out for a late walk a habit? After a nine o’clock program’s over?”

  “Oh, is that how detectives do it? We talked with Hedstrom’s secretary. She said you picked a fight with him. The guy who picks a fight shortly before someone’s murdered is a suspect.”

  “Hedstrom was arrogant and irritating, but I can handle that. I haven’t killed you yet, have I?”

  “One other question, Chandler,” Doyle said. “Where were you between 9:30 and 10:00 last night?”

  “You’re wearin’ cheese underwear, Doyle.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean, goofball?”

  I turned my back on him. I needed to create distance between my fists and his face.

  I came home early and found the television on. I pulled my gun, but I wasn’t that concerned since when I leave the remote on the couch Mulch sometimes sits on the power button. Sure enough, he was watching the Fighting Irish at Nebraska.

  Mulch had raided the garbage can under the kitchen sink. I’d forgotten to stretch the little bungee cord across the knobs. I gave him a stern look and threatened to reduce his bacon ration, but when I saw his face pucker up, I took it back.

  I hadn’t fixed Mulch a home-cooked meal for a while, so I took out the George Foreman grill and treated us to Hillshire Farm sausages. I had Koch’s horseradish and Sweet Baby Ray’s barbecue sauce and a pan of Brussels sprouts for Mulch. He loves those puppies when the butter’s meltin’ all over them. It’s one of the few health foods Sharon introduced us to that stuck.

  The kitchen phone rang. While I was looking at the phone waiting for the message, Mulch, seeing I was distracted, went for the plate. Sausages fell to the ground. I quickly crouched to put my body between Mulch and the sausages. Just then the room exploded.

  Glass flew everywhere, and I didn’t know what hit my left shoulder, buckshot or window pieces. It sounded like a shotgun at close range. I wasn’t aware of feeling anything until I looked at my gray Mariners sweatshirt, with three holes in it, inches apart. My right hand reached above me to the King Cobra revolver, duct-taped beneath the kitchen table. I yanked it off, slowly opened the back door, and peeked out. Mulch rushed out, growled ferociously, and raced the intruder to the swinging gate. I heard him yelp when it slammed into his face.

  Our neighbor, Mr. Obrist, looked over his fence.

  “What’s going on now? A bomb?”

  “Uh, no, it was just an … incident. Somebody paid me a visit.”

  “Who?”

  “My wife’s sister, maybe? Not much damage. Some glass to sweep up.”

  “You’re bleeding.”

  “No big deal … I just.” I looked at my sweatshirt. I could swear it had been gray. I didn’t remember having a red sweatshirt. It’s the last thing I recall, except my gun slipping from my fingers.

  This time no wrangling with the EMTs about whether to go to the hospital. Unconscious men who’ve lost a quart of blood aren’t in a position to wrangle.

  Next thing I knew I was hearing electronic noises and looking up at Jake and Clarence. Jake handed me a cup of ice.

  “You guys keep showing up when I have an incident.”

  “Incident?” Clarence said. “You were nearly killed.”

  “Mulch okay?”

  “He wasn’t hit,” Jake said, “but he’s concerned about you. Janet’s with him.”

  “Mulch saved my life.”

  “How’s that?”

  “My left shoulder was where my chest had been a quarter of a second earlier. If Mulch hadn’t gone for the sausage right then, I wouldn’t have ducked.”

  “Sounds like the providence of God,” Clarence said.

  “I’m thinking it was Mulch liking sausage.”

  “They’re not mutually exclusive,” Jake said. “You think God couldn’t use the instincts He put in Mulch to save you?”

  “That phone call? I wonder if I wasn’t supposed to stand and answer it to give the shooter a clearer look.”

  “This is getting way too dangerous,” Clarence said.

  I nodded. “Good thing I’ve usually got a bodyguard the size of a buffalo to take a bullet for me.”

  SUNDAY, DECEMBER 8

  I escaped the hospital the next day, leaving the other inmates behind. After being face-licked by my bullie, I entered the old brownstone and found my big Glock still on the coffee table in the living room, where I’d left him before heading to the kitchen and almost getting my head blown off while eating sausage. I held Daddy Glock close because it’d been years since we’d spent a night apart. He seemed okay.

  Thanks to Jake, my kitchen now featured a four-by-five-foot piece of plywood where a window had been. I walked the house, checking my other guns. At the back of the closet was my original pellet gun, the one I shot out streetlights with forty-five years ago. Mom had threatened to confiscate it, even though I warned her that if she wanted to take my gun, she’d have to pry it from my cold dead fingers. She said she was glad to oblige and cracked me over the head with a broom handle, then hid my gun for thirty days. That was the last time I messed with Mom.

  I like my guns spread around the house, like drink coasters. But I’d rather have to put all of them away someplace safe because grandchildren are visiting. Would Kendra let her kid come over? Did I dare hope? She’d visited me in the hospital, and though she’d scolded me for not being more careful, it was a Sharon sort of scolding.

  Mr. Obrist had retrieved the King Cobra from the deck after I fell. I duct taped it back under the kitchen table, a three-foot portion of which was battle-scarred by buckshot. I considered replacing it, but now it was wartime memorabilia. Better than anything I could buy on eBay. Maybe someday my grandchild could point to it and say, “Tell me that story, Gramps!”

  You can’t blame a guy for hoping.

  The table would also remind me that life is short … and I’d once more teetered on its edge.

  I thought about all those close calls, the times in Vietnam and on the streets as a patrol cop and a couple of car accidents and the situations I’d faced hunting down killers. The more I thought about it, the more I came to a realization.

  I was one lucky guy.

  “How blind we were to Your presence there,” Finney said to the Carpenter, shaking his head. “Looking back, with my memory so clear now, I’ve begun to see how You were with us, guiding, protecting, providing, hundreds of times each day.”

  “Ten thousand times a day,” Obadiah Abernathy said. “We couldna got single breath widout You, my sweet Lord. Every heartbeat was a gift. Yet we was fools enough to wonder if You cared. We was so impatient. And ungrateful.”

  “But you know better now, My friends,” the Carpenter said, smiling. “And even there, you’d begun to realize and to say thanks. For that I commend you both.

  Well done.”

  “It was so cloudy then,” Finney said. “Now it’s so clear.”

  “It will become clearer still,” the Carpenter said, stretching out His right arm. “You have much more to learn. When you look back at your lives on earth, you’ll see much I was doing that you never guessed. What you called luck was My providence. I was there even in what you considered disaster. In the new world you’ll experience new joys daily. But you’ll also discover, as I peel back the layers, what I did for you in the old world. This is what My Father promised you: that in the coming ages He might show you the incomparable riches of His grace, expressed in His kindness to you … the kindness He demonstrated in Me.”

  SUNDAY EVE
NING, DECEMBER 8

  That night my tender shoulder, which was in far better shape than it could have been, was talking to me. Other aches and pains joined in. I sat back in the recliner and sipped a cream soda while Mulch chewed a soup bone.

  When you make a living related to dying, it puts a curious spin on your life. I suppose morticians feel it and medical examiners and oncologists. I know homicide detectives do. On the one hand you feel sorry for the victim and his family. On the other hand, you’re excited, because there’s a problem to be solved. Mathematicians and scientists and accountants enjoy solving problems. I doubt they feel any guilt about it.

  You’d think anyone who deals constantly with death would be forced to come to grips with his own mortality. But it’s possible to see your death as inevitable, as I do, yet never as imminent. Sure, I’ll die, but not this minute or hour or day or week or month or year. Always death seems decades away, years at least.

  But when you take metal and glass in your flesh and realize how close it came to your head, it makes you stop and think. And yet, I found myself denying it even then. I’ve cheated death before, and I’ll do it again. Will I tell myself that until the moment I die?

  I looked at my left hand and imagined it was the hand of a corpse, then a skeleton. The destruction of the flesh, accelerated in the Indiana Jones movies, seems fiction. Yet what is more certain than death?

  When Sharon was dying, I wished her doctors were as good at finding out reasons for death as I am. I wished the problem could be solved with one more night’s work. And I wished that her Christian friends would just shut up. When I heard several of them say, “I know God’s going to heal her,” I almost believed it. When He didn’t, I wanted to hunt them down and smack ’em.

  I’m not sure how I went from pondering my mortality to being ticked off at Christians, but it happened. See, in my thinking, Christians tend to be either idiots or hypocrites. I’m not fond of either. I’m not saying there aren’t good Christians—Jake and Clarence are, and Obadiah Abernathy certainly was. What I’m saying is that, to me, looking for honest Christians is like searching to find clams in a bowl of cheap chowder.

  These people who think they can beat the devil with a big toothy smile ought to work homicide or vice or sex crimes for a week. Reality will put a sag on the corners of your mouth.

  I hear this stuff about Jesus taking away people’s sickness and financial woes. Yet Christians are poor and get sick and die like everybody else, don’t they? I mean, do you know any two-hundred-year-old Christians? Sharon prayed to be healed. Her Christian friends prayed for her healing. Didn’t happen.

  All that health-and-wealth mumbo jumbo on the Big-Hair Channel? It’s just pretense, isn’t it? And all those “Jesus wants you well” televangelists that collect offerings from people trying to buy their way out of suffering and death—don’t those preachers just quietly grow old and die of cancer and strokes like everybody else?

  I can’t stand these holier-than-thous, with their swaggering self-righteousness, their spiritual one-upmanship.

  Buddy Darson was my partner for two years when I wore a uniform. Buddy’s a deacon or a trustee or a grand pooh-bah in some church. But he lied on his reports, cheated the clock, stole supplies from the department, and looked down the barmaids’ blouses.

  Some of the most racist cops I’ve ever known say they’re Christians. If that’s what it means to be a Christian, I’m better off a pagan. At least I’m not a hypocrite. That counts for something.

  I hope.

  I don’t live in the sweet by-and-by. I live in the nasty here and now. And if I can take down perps and save kids’ lives and keep women from being raped, it may not make me Saint Francis of Assisi, but hey, it’s better than turning my cheek while scumbags rule the city.

  These are thoughts that go through my mind when it dawns on me that at any moment someone in the shadows could put a bullet through my head.

  MONDAY, DECEMBER 9

  Jake told me it doesn’t make sense to be at work two days after you’re shot through your back window, but I wanted to make a statement to someone who likely would see me at work: “You missed me, bozo.” Well, not missed, but the damage wasn’t that serious. I practiced not wincing in front of the mirror, but sometimes, after a quick movement, I felt the tears in my eyes. Since my doctor wasn’t watching, I doubled my pain meds.

  When Manny came to my desk and asked me if I was okay, I assured him it was nothing. I no longer point to my extra chair because neither of us wants him there. Apparently I convinced him not to feel sorry for me, since within five minutes he was waving a handful of papers in my face.

  “I got to the professor’s house late, remember?” Manny said. “So this morning I asked for their report.”

  “Whose report?”

  “Patrol’s. Dorsey and Guerino. Obviously you didn’t read it.”

  “Why should I? They filled me in when I got there.”

  “They tell you they left the scene?”

  “They what?”

  “It’s right there.” He tossed the report on my desk. “A guy across the street grabs another guy, takes something and runs. So they run after him.”

  “Dorsey and Guerino? Both of them?”

  I looked over the report. I felt the heat rising off my forehead.

  I called patrol. “Sergeant Parfitt? Did you know Dorsey and Guerino abandoned the Palatine crime scene?”

  “I knew. There was good reason. Didn’t you read the report?”

  “Just did. But there’s no such thing as a good reason. I need to meet with those guys pronto. The scene may have been compromised.”

  “Day off for both. You really need me to call them in?”

  “Absolutely.”

  Time passes slowly when I’m mad. An hour later Dorsey and Guerino, in plainclothes, walked in. I know the look of two guys trying to get their stories straight.

  “What’s he doing here?” Guerino asked, pointing at Clarence.

  “He’s my bodyguard. And he’s been assigned to this case.”

  “I’m not talking in front of him.”

  “Chief says he stays. This meeting’s off the record, right Clarence?”

  He nodded.

  I held up their report. “You left the crime scene.”

  “We were only gone three minutes,” Dorsey said. “Five at most.”

  “Your job was to protect the scene.”

  “The professor was dead,” Dorsey said. “Somebody pulled a knife on a living person.”

  “One of you should have stayed.”

  “Pursue a criminal without backup? The same manual that says we stay at the crime scene also says we can’t ignore a crime against a person. And we shouldn’t pursue without backup if a partner’s available.”

  “He wasn’t available. He was confined to the scene.” I sighed. “Tell me exactly what happened.”

  “The guy with the knife yelled at the other guy to give him his wallet,” Dorsey said.

  I turned to Guerino. “Describe the men,” I said, holding up my hand to silence Dorsey.

  “I can’t.”

  “Why not?”

  “They were wearing ski masks.”

  “You mean the assailant was wearing a ski mask?”

  “Both were.”

  Words escaped me.

  “Look, one of them pulled a knife on the other one,” Dorsey said, through my hand.

  “You’re saying the victim was wearing a ski mask?”

  “It was cold,” Guerino said.

  “Yeah, all kinds of innocent citizens wear ski masks in Portland.”

  “We didn’t dress him,” Dorsey said.

  “Victims don’t wear ski masks. People who don’t want to be identified wear ski masks. Criminals wear ski masks. Who else wears a ski mask?”

  “Skiers?” Guerino said.

  “Was there snow on the ground?” I asked. “Did they have skis and poles and goggles and an SUV and mugs of hot chocolate? Was there a Sai
nt Bernard?”

  “You’re a jerk,” Dorsey said.

  “Why didn’t you tell me you’d left the scene?”

  “We knew you’d be mad, and—” Guerino stopped when he saw Dorsey’s eyes.

  “You and Abernathy here were having a tizzy fit,” Dorsey said. “You never asked us for a report, and we had no chance to tell you. You wanted us to stay out of your precious crime scene. We put it all in our report. Not our fault if you didn’t read it. Speaking of which, if we hadn’t gone after a guy running around threatening people with a knife, you realize the liability?”

  “But two guys in ski masks?”

  “Okay, looking back at it … but at the time we saw a knife pulled and somebody accosted. We can’t ignore that. Maybe it looks different from behind a desk, but that’s how it works on the streets.”

  “Don’t tell me how it works on the streets. I wore a uniform for ten years.”

  “Bet you couldn’t fit into it now,” Guerino said.

  “Bet your brain could fit in a walnut shell.” I started pacing. “Once you chased them, did you keep them in sight?”

  “The guy on the ground said, ‘I’m okay—get him.’ ”

  “So you took orders from a man wearing a ski mask?”

  “Stop with the ski mask, would you? We chased the guy. He went over a fence, into a backyard. Guerino went over after him, and I ran on the sidewalk hoping to head him off.”

  “And?”

  “He disappeared.”

  “Like you disappeared from the crime scene?”

  Dorsey stood, leaning forward on the table. “Look, as soon as we lost the guy, we ran back to the scene.”

  “Let me guess. The victim was gone.”

  “Yeah.”

  “No way anybody bothered the scene,” Guerino said. “It was just a few minutes.”

  “You think they would have left you a note saying they’d been there? You know what can be taken from or left at a crime scene in three to five minutes? They say intelligence skips a generation. The good news is, your kids will be brilliant.”

  “Word is,” Dorsey said, “you’re blaming detectives for the murder. So—now you can blame patrol for something else. That seems to be your way. Blame cops. Me, I blame criminals.”