Darkness First

by James Hayman

  ‘Harlan, I know you killed people in the war and maybe you’ve had enough of killing. But you say you love me and I’m telling you I’ve had enough of living poor. Last thing I want is to end up living like my parents. I’d kill myself first. Or take the chance that Riordan’d do it for me. If you won’t help me, I’ll handle it myself.’

  Harlan didn’t agree to it. But he didn’t tell her no right away either. That didn’t come till later. When he finally knew he wanted no part of it. And he never agreed with her idea of hiding the drugs with Tabitha. Which he always thought was nuts.

  That night after Tiff calmed down and came back to bed, they lay together for a while listening to the sound flowing from the expensive speakers she’d bought with money earned from selling drugs. Then they made love for a third time listening to the words. I’ll follow you into the dark.

  After crossing over on to Moose Island, Harlan found himself a hidey-hole. A shallow depression in the earth surrounded by thick vegetation where he couldn’t be seen by anybody unless they practically tripped over him. Since he figured he couldn’t go knocking on Pike Stoddard’s door till morning, he might as well get a few hours’ sleep. He spread his ground cloth on the cool earth and lay down. But sleep wouldn’t come. His mind kept going back to the cop who’d wanted to kill him. Detective Emmett Ganzer. He was sure Ganzer had intended to shoot him. What he couldn’t figure out was why.

  Last night at the Moose, Maggie told him, because he and Tiff were lovers, he’d automatically be considered a suspect. Okay, fair enough. But there had to be more than a little wiggle room between being a suspect and getting yourself shot for no good reason at all.

  Unless, of course, the cop, Ganzer, had something to gain from shooting him.

  Harlan could only think of two possibilities.

  One ugly. The other uglier.

  Ugly was Ganzer killing him, then planting evidence ‘proving’ that Harlan had killed Tiff. Ganzer gets credit for clearing the case. Gets a raise or a promotion or whatever the hell they give you in the state police for being a good cop.

  Uglier was Harlan’s growing suspicion that maybe Ganzer was Conor Riordan. He’d never considered the possibility that Riordan might be a cop. But why not? Wouldn’t be the first cop in history who turned bad. And with what Tiff’d told him was a nearly five million dollar payoff Ganzer/Riordan had a whole lot more to gain from killing Harlan than just a promotion or a pat on the back.

  The more Harlan thought about this scenario the more likely it seemed.

  Which is when a definite ‘oh shit’ thought struck him for the first time. What if Ganzer/Riordan knew Tabitha had the drugs? What if he’d tortured the information out of Tiff before he’d killed her? Harlan got to his feet and got his shit together. He had to get to Stoddard’s house long before morning. If he wasn’t already too late.

  37

  Eastport, Maine

  At a little after two A.M. on a Monday morning, even in the tourist month of August, the city of Eastport was asleep. Its streets lay deserted. Few lights shone from either stores or houses. Even the small police department on Water Street appeared locked up for the night. The only movement Conor Riordan could see as he cruised the streets was a feral cat darting into an alleyway. Another solitary hunter in pursuit of what it no doubt hoped would be easy prey.

  He doused his lights before pulling up in front of the house on Perry Street. He sat for a while in the darkness, watching for visible signs of life from within. There were none.

  He studied the place. The peeling paint. The rotting clapboards. The For Sale by Owner sign. The flags hanging limply atop the aluminum pole. He supposed lowering the flag on this summer night hadn’t been a high priority for the homeowners. Understandable, just hours after learning their second daughter had been murdered. Just minutes before they would decide their own lives were no longer worth living.

  Riordan replayed the last words on the last voicemail on Tiff Stoddard’s cell phone: ‘The one thing I’m wondering about, though, is what the heck you want me to do with the package you gave me.’ He remembered the girl peering through the upstairs window that freezing night back in December. Tabitha. What the heck do you want me to do with the package you gave me? Once he had the package he’d have to kill her. He’d never killed a child before. He wasn’t sure if it would bother him or not. Didn’t see why it should. Children die every day. Why not this one?

  He slipped the car into gear. Drove far enough down the road that no one passing an unattended parked car would connect it with the house or what was about to happen there. He slipped on a pair of surgical gloves. Unzipped a small canvas gym bag and made sure that everything he needed was there. Paper booties and cap. A pair of needle nose pliers and a screwdriver. A single sheet of plain white paper, a note written on one side in clumsy block letters. A penlight. A canvas wallet containing a set of lock picks. And, finally, the Pneu-Dart breech-loading CO2 powered pistol acquired just for this purpose and a 3 cc tranquilizer dart. The vet he’d consulted in Bangor had recommended (and supplied for an exorbitant fee) a drug called Etorphine. Brand name M99. To knock out an eighty-pound Rottweiler the vet warned him to use a minute amount of the stuff. It was 10,000 times more potent than morphine and the 3 cc the dart was capable of delivering was more than enough to take down an elephant. It would take only one one-hundredth of that to knock out the dog in just seconds. It sounded perfect.

  Riordan walked back to the house and cut across the yard to the back. His first stop was the gray box on the rear corner where the phone company connected its line.

  The sound that woke Tabitha Stoddard was neither particularly loud nor particularly menacing. Just the snap of a twig on the grass below. Yet she sat up with a start. Peered out her window, a hollow feeling in the pit of her stomach. Tabbie thought she saw something move in the darkness below but couldn’t tell what it was. Maybe nothing more ominous than a raccoon checking the garbage bins. But she didn’t think so. She looked and listened hard. Neither saw nor heard anything more. Yet somehow she sensed an alien presence. In her heart she was sure the December Man was back.

  The man moved silently to the back door, climbed the three steps to the landing. Knelt on one knee and checked the lock with the penlight. A cheap Kwikset pin and tumbler deadbolt. Easily breached. He removed the lock-pick set from his bag and selected a slender tension wrench and the thinnest of three stainless steel picks.

  Tabitha climbed out of bed. Not seeing anything more from the window, she stared at the bedroom door. Had the December Man brought the long knife she remembered from her dream? If she opened the door and ran to her mother’s room would he catch her by the wrist, turn her around as he had in the dream and cut her open like a hog in a slaughterhouse? A tiny whimper escaped Tabbie’s lips. She wished Tiff was here. Oh please God, she prayed, why can’t you let Tiff come back? But she knew even Tiff couldn’t save her now. Not from the darkness. Not from the December Man. Tiff hadn’t even been able to save herself.

  The man probed the lock with the slender pick. One by one he found each of the pins and eased them up on to the narrow ledge of the cylinder. When all five were clear, he gently turned the wrench. The lock slid open. He turned the knob with a gloved hand and pushed the door open. Just enough to poke the muzzle of the dart gun through to the inside.

  Electra lifted her head at the scent of a stranger. Rose from the pile of old blankets that served as her bed. Curled her upper lip, baring her fangs. A low rumbling rose from the depths of her broad chest. Her nails clicked on the linoleum floor as she trotted back to investigate the invader she could smell just on the other side of the kitchen door.

  Tabitha pulled the blanket off her bed, grabbed Harold from his shelf, took her iPhone and the lady cop’s card from her drawer and scrambled inside her closet. She closed the door, lowered herself to the floor, pulled the blanket over her head. Tried to arrange a pile of dirty laundry over the blanket so anyone looking in the closet might mistake her for not
hing more than that. A pile of dirty laundry. Inside this makeshift hideout she wrapped her arms tightly around Harold and bit down hard on his ear to keep the sound of her crying too soft for anyone to hear. Even if Mrs St Pierre was right about heaven being a better place and Tiff and Terri being safe in the hands of Jesus, Tabitha knew now she really, really didn’t want to go there. She wanted to stay right here. Even if Eastport was, as Tiff so often said, a real shithole.

  The snarling Rottweiler flung herself at the narrow opening in the door. When she was a few inches away, the man fired. The dart struck home, burying itself in the middle of her muscular chest. Electra barked once, then looked down, puzzled by the alien thing sticking out of her. She wanted to pull it out, but couldn’t reach it with either her mouth or paws. She staggered once and then again, trying to maintain her balance, and then toppled over on to her side. Her legs jerked spasmodically. She lay still.

  Donelda Stoddard had always been a light sleeper. But tonight her sleep was especially troubled, both by the death of her second daughter and the terrible nightmares of her third. Startled into alertness by Electra’s single bark, Donelda looked across to the other side of the bed. No sign of Pike. No doubt the so-called man of the house was still downstairs, still dead to the world, the gun he kept by his side as useless as his alcohol-soaked brain. She picked up the phone to call 911. The phone was dead. She closed her eyes. Had Tiff’s killer come to kill the rest of them? She wished they’d gotten themselves a cell phone but it was yet another expense they couldn’t afford.

  The man pulled the spent dart from the Rottweiler’s chest. He kicked the dog once to make sure it was really out. He kicked it a second time, harder, just for the hell of it.

  Upstairs, Tabitha squeezed herself further into the corner of her small closet.

  Dressed only in a long cotton sleepshirt, Donelda opened the bedroom door and went out into the hall. She stood and listened again. She heard nothing but her husband snoring. Perhaps Electra’s bark, the dog’s appearance at the door, had frightened the intruder away. Please God, she prayed, let it be so. She went to the hall window and looked down into the yard. She saw nothing. No cars. No movement. No one running from the house. She hoped against hope that, for the moment at least, what was left of her little family was safe. But then she heard it. An almost imperceptible sound between Pike’s snores. The whisper of a foot moving gently on the floor below. And then another. Whoever this enemy was, whatever he wanted, he was in the house. And she was on her own.

  The man listened to the wet snores coming from the silhouetted figure in the wheelchair. He flicked on the penlight and saw Pike Stoddard sitting slumped on the other end of the room, his legs covered by a lightweight summer blanket. An empty whiskey bottle lay on the floor next to him. Another, half empty, was on his lap. The man started forward, then stopped and listened when he heard a floorboard creak overhead.

  From inside her cocoon of blanket and laundry, Tabitha pressed a button on her iPhone, creating enough light for her to read the number the lady cop had written on the card. She pressed the numbers on her keypad.

  Down in Machias the first four notes of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony sounded in a darkened bedroom. Once. Twice. And then a third time. Maggie Savage, still half asleep, reached an arm across, patted the bedside table with her hand until she found her phone.

  From inside her closet, Tabitha heard her bedroom door open, then softly close again. She poked her head outside the blanket. Saw no band of light at the bottom of the door. Whoever was in her room wasn’t turning on the lights. She pursed her lips tight. Retreated back into her cocoon. Tried not to breathe, knowing she couldn’t make a sound.

  Through the phone she heard the lady cop say, ‘Hello.’

  Tabbie dared not answer. If she spoke, the December Man would hear where she was. The December Man would kill her.

  ‘Hello?’ Tabitha heard the lady cop’s voice again from the phone. ‘Is anyone there?’

  Tabitha heard footsteps walking to her bed. Terrified the December Man would hear the lady cop’s voice, Tabbie broke the connection. She turned off the phone and bit down hard again on Harold’s ear. Her body shivered uncontrollably. Warm pee streamed out from between her legs.

  Hearing no more steps overhead, the man walked to the wheelchair. He shone the penlight on Pike’s face. His head lolled to one side. His mouth hung open. A string of spittle hung suspended from his lower lip in seeming defiance of the laws of gravity. A raspy snore punctuated the rise and fall of his chest.

  The man pressed Pike’s thumb and fingers against a white sheet of paper and then slipped it between two bottles on the shelf where Pike kept his booze. That done, he went behind Pike’s wheelchair. Tiff told him her old man always kept a loaded pistol tucked in the chair where he could reach it fast. He slid one hand under Pike’s blanket on the right. No gun there. He did the same on the left and felt a small-caliber automatic. Pike was a lefty. Good to know. The man checked the load. Chambered a round. Working carefully, he wrapped Pike’s left hand around the grip, placing each of the fingers in the correct position, easing the index finger inside the trigger guard. He painstakingly bent Pike’s left arm up to what seemed a natural position, the barrel of the automatic less than an inch away and pointing directly at Pike’s temple.

  Pike snored on. It looked like the poor sonofabitch was going to sleep through his own suicide.

  Maggie Savage turned on the light: 2:35. Who the hell was calling at 2:35? Whoever it was had hung up. Maggie rubbed the sleep from her eyes and returned the last call received. The phone rang once and went immediately to message. A child’s voice. ‘Hello,’ the child said, ‘you have reached Tabitha Stoddard’s iPhone. If you’d like me to call you back, please leave your number and I will do so as soon as I can.’ Maggie hung up without leaving a message. It would take her the better part of an hour to get from Machias to Eastport, but Frank Boucher was right there. She punched in his home number.

  Tabitha heard footsteps approach the closet. On the other side of the door the intruder paused. Tabbie closed her eyes tighter. Bit down on Harold even harder. She felt the blanket rustle in a sudden stirring of air. The door swung open. Tabitha supressed a violent urge to scream.

  ‘Tabitha?’ a familiar voice whispered.

  Tabbie dropped the blanket and peered up at her mother.

  ‘Sssshhh. Be quiet,’ Donelda whispered. ‘Get dressed. Quickly.’

  ‘Hello,’ Boucher’s voice at the other end of the phone.

  ‘Chief, this is Margaret Savage. Get some people over to Pike Stoddard’s place right away.’

  She must have woken Boucher from a deep sleep, because he sounded barely compos mentis.

  ‘Huh? What? Why? What’s going on?’

  ‘I don’t know. But something’s seriously wrong there. Get whatever assets you have to Stoddard’s now.’

  Donelda helped her youngest daughter strip off her pajamas. Handed her some underwear. Then jeans and a sweatshirt. While Tabitha dressed, Donelda pulled the two sheets off the bed and tied them tightly together. Using one end to form a makeshift sling, she slipped it under her daughter’s arms. This is how they always did it in the movies. She hoped to hell it worked in real life. She pulled the screen from the window. Laid it on the floor.

  ‘Get over here,’ Donelda ordered in a loud whisper.

  Tabitha didn’t move.

  She tried to pull the frightened child toward the window.

  ‘Wait,’ Tabitha said. She ran back to the closet. Emerged with her iPhone and Harold.

  They both froze at the sound of the shot from downstairs.

  Her mother pulled her toward the open window. Tabitha threw Harold out and climbed up on to the sill.

  ‘I’ll lower you down. When you get to the ground, pull the sheet off and run.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘Just run. And don’t come back!’

  Tabbie hesitated. Tears poured from her eyes. Donelda lifted her youngest child,
hugged her tightly, kissed her hard.

  ‘Just remember,’ she whispered, her words barely audible. ‘I love you. More than anyone or anything in the world. And I always will. No matter what.’

  ‘I love you too.’

  She helped Tabitha out the window and lowered her slowly, hand over hand, foot by foot, down to the ground. She watched her daughter pull the sling from over her head, grab the stuffed bear, look up once at her mother, who was leaning out the window.

  ‘Run!’ Donelda called in the loudest whisper she dared.

  Tabitha threw her mother a tentative wave. Then ran.

  Donelda pulled up the sheets, threw them in a heap on the floor, and slipped as quietly as she could out of Tabbie’s room, shutting the door behind her.

  A man stood at the bottom of the stairs. Donelda went out to the landing, determined to give her daughter as much time as she could.

  ‘Where’s the child?’ the man asked, pointing Pike’s gun up at Donelda’s chest.

  Donelda said nothing. To the man’s surprise she started silently down the stairs toward him. She came slowly. Step by step.

  ‘Where’s the child?’ the man repeated.

  ‘What do you want with her?’ asked Donelda, surprised how calm her voice sounded, at least to her, in spite of the fact that her heart was pounding so hard she could almost hear it. The longer she could keep the man talking, she told herself, the better. She descended a few more steps. The man backed off a little. He didn’t want her too close.

  ‘She’s only a child. She can’t hurt you in any way,’ Donelda said. ‘Leave her be.’

  ‘She has something that’s mine,’ the man said. ‘Where is she? Tell me now or I’ll shoot you where you stand.’

  ‘You’ll shoot me anyway. Just like you shot Pike.’ She glanced over at the figure slumped in the chair. ‘Is he dead?’

  ‘Yes. He’s dead. Killed himself. Suicide.’