Felonious Jazz

by Bryan Gilmer

  No one answered the door. Jeff stood on tiptoe and peered through the semicircular glass window at the top of the door. It seemed pretty obvious that no one was home.

  “Huh,” Cooperton said through the phone. “I’ll get some deputies out there.”

  * * *

  EmmaJane’s tennis shoe stretched the little cut in the inner skin of the door upward and downward. “Yeah!” she shouted, and kept kicking, excited about maybe escaping, but still feeling bad that the noise was making Dylin cry.

  Once she got a big hole, she was able to peel away the door’s skin in big pieces. There were some squiggly pieces of, like, cardboard honeycomb stuff in the middle, and she just kicked at them, and they flaked away, and pretty soon, the outer surface of the door peeled outward from a bottom corner. With three more kicks, enough of the outer surface of the door was loose so that she could bend it out to make a little flap they could fit through.

  “Dylin, honey, we’re outta here!” EmmaJane picked him up, pushed the flap out, being careful to hold it so it wouldn’t spring back and hit him, and set the baby on the tan carpet on the other side, where he suddenly started bawling louder. Then she burrowed her own way through, laughing and whooping a little as the flimsy material dragged across her back. She stood up.

  The creeper was sitting cross legged on the floor, five feet away. He set down his cordless drill and picked up a violin he had sitting there.

  “You’re slick.”

  EmmaJane squealed. The creeper stood and stuck his hand into his front pants pocket.

  She grabbed Dylin and balled herself up in the corner, curling her body across the baby to protect him.

  EmmaJane knew from watching TV that the clicks meant the man was getting a gun ready to shoot. She peeked up at the silver pistol pointing toward them again. She tried to think what to do.

  The gun fired.

  EmmaJane’s mind leapt. A warning shot, she realized, off to the side of them a couple of feet, but enough to let her see he was serious. She didn’t want to, but she stood up, totally shaking, and Dylin was screaming his head off, still, on the carpet.

  “Come here.”

  She walked as slow as she could toward him, and he was holding out his hand with a hundred-dollar bill.

  “Thank you for babysitting. I’m sorry if you were uncomfortable. You can go now.”

  EmmaJane just stared at him. Was he like, planning to shoot her in the back as she left? But he looked serious. Now she looked down at Dylin, and she stepped over and knelt to pick him up.

  Bam! The pistol fired again, and EmmaJane was crying and her ears were ringing even worse, but she didn’t think he shot her or anything, but maybe he was about to.

  Now the creeper said, totally calm, “Just you leave. I’ll take care of him.”

  He had her by the collar now, half dragging her toward the door that led to the little hallway and the front door where they had come in. She was sniffling; Dylin was still crying, and now the guy was prying open her fist and sticking something into it. Through her blurry tears, EmmaJane saw she was holding the violin now, which looked real old. He stuffed the money into her front jeans pocket real slow, and she thought she would vomit.

  “Be careful with this,” the creeper said, almost, like, flirting with the violin the way he ran his finger across the strings of it. “It’s the only thing of true value I’ve come across while working on this album.”

  Now his gross hand was finally out of her pocket, and he was pushing her toward the open front door and onto the steps and still talking:

  “About the album – I friended you on MySpace, so if you click Accept, you can listen and hear what you’ve been a part of.”

  Now EmmaJane was standing on the townhouse’s little brick stoop, and the sun was so bright that she was squinting back against it, and all she could think about was how Dylin was still in there.

  “Two more things,” the creeper said. “Be careful. The neighborhood’s on fire. And could you try to find my wife? She should be here in a minute or two. She’s a redheaded bitch named Sarah. An asshole named J. Davis Swaine will probably be with her. Tell them where to find their son. Tell them I’ll be here waiting to talk to them.

  EmmaJane ran down the steps and up the sidewalk, thinking the guy was mental and that there was no wife or David Swaine around here, but determined to find somebody who could help before he had time to hurt Dylin.

  * * *

  Jeff stuck the phone back into his pocket. A loud crack sounded like a gunshot.

  “Oh dear God,” Sarah said, and grabbed his sleeve.

  “Where’d that sound come from?” Jeff asked.

  “I don’t know!”

  “Well, it wasn’t inside this house. It was somewhere else. Behind us, sounded like.” Jeff noticed the smoke smell again, and as he scanned the buildings across the street. Smoke in two places: Leaking from under the eves of an end townhouse a block over, and erupting out of the construction site two buildings from there.

  Another shot. Jeff and Sarah hastened down the steps to the sidewalk and took a few steps toward their cars.

  An SUV sped past as they were looking around trying to figure out what to do. Then a teenage girl ran up to them, unkempt, upset, wildly waving her arms. Holding a violin.

  “Are you Sarah?” and when Sarah nodded, went on, “There’s a creepy man. He has your baby in a house back there.” She pointed to the next block. “He, like, kidnapped me from my house and made me take care of the baby for the last few days,” and the girl pushed back a couple of sobs and said, “He wants me to take you where he is. He says he wants to talk to you.”

  Jeff grabbed the violin. It was definitely Margaret’s, and a shot of adrenaline poured into his blood. “Wait one second.” Jeff jogged back and opened the door of the Corolla and set the violin on the passenger floorboard. He grabbed the briefcase with the Glock. He was about to see the man who had done all this.

  Meanwhile, Sarah had gone the other direction after the girl, inexorably pulled toward her child, and Jeff sprinted to catch them and told them both, “We have to be really careful. He might want to kill all of us.” He turned to the girl: “Stay here, by the cars.”

  She nodded and backed away, looking lost.

  Jeff handed Sarah his phone and said, “Call 9-1-1,” and she did it as they jogged down the block, beseeching the dispatcher for the police and the fire department, trying to describe where they were. Now her own phone rang, too. She told the dispatcher to hold on. She stopped running, and Jeff stopped too, and she opened her phone and told it, “Leonard, damn you, where are you? … He says put him on speaker.”

  She pressed the button. A man’s voice whispered, “Hi there, Mr. Swaine. I have your son here, the little bastard you put in my wife’s belly, and I can either shoot him now, or I can give him a little shot with this needle. But either way, I’d sure like to talk to you.”

  “Sarah’s my boss. I didn’t give her a baby!”

  “I see you met the babysitter,” Leonard’s electronic voice continued, as if he hadn’t heard. “I already paid her. She did an excellent job. I’m right across the street from where you are. You can see me standing by the window with the baby.”

  Jeff found the silhouette in a window. Flames chewed a hole through the roof of the building next door. And the unfinished building on the other end roiled with flames now, which licked at the end of the building where Leonard was.

  “Sarah, honey, drop your phone onto the sidewalk,” Leonard whispered. “The girl can stay where she is. She’s done with her job. But I’d like to speak with the two of you. It’s number 318. Hurry. Not much time now.” Then he shouted, “Come on up. He’s ready for his shot.”

  Sarah dropped the phone, and they ran around the block to the front of the building, found the right door, which led into an end unit and was standing open a crack. The vinyl siding was melting off the end of the structure from the intense heat from the fire next door. The heat made it difficu
lt to stand there.

  They dashed into the house, and the place was empty, never lived in. They stumbled up the stairs toward the second story, the main living area where the baby was crying, hearing the fire roaring next door, Jeff certain the building they were in was catching on fire by now, too. He stuck his right hand into the briefcase and drew the gun. Just as Sarah registered the gun, Jeff spotted a second pistol lying on the landing, a little chrome automatic that Leonard must have dropped.

  Sarah reached down and picked it up, so Jeff beat her up the stairs and was the first to spot Leonard Noblac in the dining nook, his back to them, facing out the window. Jeff trained the sights of the Glock on him. A small, portable CD player spouted jazz, and he was holding the crying, writhing baby down on his lap, and Jeff’s vision was a tiny circle, as if he were looking at the son of a bitch through a drinking straw. The man seemed oblivious to Jeff’s presence behind him, was squeezing an air bubble out of the syringe, and when Jeff told him to stop, the man said, “He needs this,” and Jeff was within five feet now; the point of the syringe stuck in the child’s chubby thigh with the plunger extended and the son of a bitch’s thumb reaching for it.

  And Jeff was kneeling with Leonard’s neck and back framed in the sights, and the split second seemed to last a minute, and he told himself, Careful of the baby; just one shot. And he squeezed it off, concentrating on not letting his trigger finger’s movement spoil his aim.

  And blood soaked his strawhole of vision.

  Before Jeff could lower the pistol, Sarah appeared in the sights, taking the baby in her hands, wailing and wiping away blood and trying to see whether he was wounded, and what was left of Leonard Noblac was lying crookedly against the baseboard, gurgling. Lumber creaked in the structure above them, and he screamed at Sarah that they had to get out before the fire trapped them.

  They sprinted downstairs and across the street, away from the fires, and knelt on a tiny, green front lawn to tend to the baby, and the syringe still dangled from the thigh by its needle. Jeff snatched it out and saw liquid still inside the barrel, the plunger depressed about halfway. How much sodium phenobarbital did it take to kill a baby? Or worse, damage his brain?

  The child screamed shrilly and Sarah was saying something about baby CPR, and Jeff stripped off his dress shirt and began wiping the child down to try to see whether he was hurt any other way. He couldn’t find any wounds, and he cracked open the phone with slippery fingers and called 911 for an ambulance and screamed that you didn’t do CPR while someone was breathing. How long did they have before the drug started shutting down the baby’s body?

  And now the teenager was here again, clutching Sarah’s phone, kneeling next to them and bawling and for some reason screaming over and over, “Dylin!”

  All the help seemed to arrive at once, an ambulance, more fire engines than Jeff could count, police cars. Jeff quickly explained and pointed to the townhouse where they’d been, but it was totally engulfed in flame now and no one was going in there, especially when Jeff told them he was pretty sure the only person in there was dead. Paramedics listened to the baby’s chest and said something about good vitals, and Jeff gave them the syringe and explained what he thought was in it, and then their relief turned to full professional alert, and he and Sarah and the child were in an ambulance headed to Wake Med, and a paramedic was on the radio demand4ing to talk to a doc to find out what dose of the stuff was fatal and what countermeasures they should take.

  AFTERMATH

  Fifty-seven

  Jacob was fine.

  The syringe contained no sodium phenobarbital. There was a trace of insulin that probably meant it was a used syringe, but Noblac had filled it with a harmless liquid, injectable sterile saline. The son of a bitch had made Jeff the instrument of his suicide.

  It was a brilliant misdirection to give him or Sarah absolute justification for shooting Noblac dead on the spot. He had even left his pistol – which had been stolen in the Hegwood burglary – on the landing in case Jeff or Sarah hadn’t thought to bring one.

  Trinity turned out to be right about the Glock’s knockdown power. Jeff’s single shot had entered the base of Noblac’s skull and pureed the lower half of his face on the way out. A clean shot.

  Because the fire had instantly cremated the body, the medical examiner was pissed that he couldn’t use dental records to confirm the ID. Instead, he had Jeff and Sarah swear out affidavits that the deceased was “personally known to them.”

  * * *

  Jeff could have saved the child and put Leonard Noblac in jail for the rest of his life simply by pocketing the gun, walking over and taking the kid out of Noblac’s hands.

  Jeff had killed a man. That changed him somehow, made him someone he’d never wanted or expected to be.

  Cooperton sat with Jeff in the hospital waiting room as Jeff doubled over with the realization of it, Cooperton telling him, “You didn’t know, beau. You had to figure he was fixing to kill that baby. Me and every other cop in the state of North Carolina would have pulled that trigger. You did right. We needed to be rid of him.”

  That was true, Jeff knew. It was good that Noblac was gone.

  Yet even killing for a noble cause infected Jeff with a heartsickness he knew would always stay with him. He would have liked to discuss it with his grandfather, who had never talked to Jeff about the horrors he had seen and inflicted in the South Pacific. Pa-Paw, a jovial, good-looking storekeeper from a tiny town, had military discharge papers that read, “MACHINE GUNNER.” He had come back to Albany, Georgia, with that experience weighing on his shoulders heavier than the ammunition belts that had draped them in combat.

  And the man had found a way to delight in the next 60-some years, singing in the church choir and teasing with his children, grandchildren and then great-grandchildren. He never drank. He never abused his family. But even in the few years before the funeral, asking any question about The War stretched away the smile, silenced the baritone, glassed over the eyes.

  Lots of fellows in Pa-paw’s generation, the ones who made it back to America, shared that heaviness, understood it with him, Jeff knew. And Jeff thought maybe his grandfather would have discussed this with him now.

  * * *

  Jacob was so young that he would never remember his abduction, of being in his father’s arms when his father died.

  But people would tell him.

  * * *

  No one besides Leonard Noblac died in the fire at American Estates. A chocolate Labrador broke a window of his unit to escape, then barked at the door of the neighbor’s unit, a night-shift cop, waking him so he could get out, too.

  The blaze destroyed 16 townhouses – four buildings with four townhomes each. That configuration had been chosen to avoid building code requirements for firewalls and sprinklers when more than four units shared a building. Six fire departments needed 10 hours to control the blaze, and afterward, all that was left of three of the buildings was brick veneer and naked concrete slabs. Firefighters counted it a miracle that they contained damage to four additional townhouse buildings to melted vinyl siding.

  Public officials made noises about changing the fire code, but with the money that developers contributed to campaigns, Jeff knew it would ultimately go nowhere.

  Families had been living in seven of the destroyed homes. Six didn’t want to move back, but neighborhood covenants required them to use their insurance proceeds to rebuild on the spot. If they wanted to sell after that, they could.

  The same company that built the townhomes the first time said it would be happy to rebuild them.

  * * *

  Trinity called the day after the fire to remind Jeff he’d never turned in his handgun permit. He picked it up at Cooperton’s office and took it to Protection Armaments.

  Trinity gave Jeff his grandfather’s watch back and told him the sheriff’s investigator had already come by that morning to do his pro-forma investigation of Jeff’s shooting of Noblac. She’d told the guy she had tak
en home some documents to file and that the permit was among them. She’d told the guy to check with Cooperton that it had been issued.

  “I asked him if you was in trouble,” Trinity told Jeff. “He told me, ‘Naw, we don’t prosecute the good guys.’”

  Trinity said she was off work in half an hour and would love to hear the story of what had happened over a drink at a bar she knew.

  Jeff told her no thanks.

  * * *

  Caroline’s series, “Inside story of the Rocky Falls Jazz Murderer,” with an icon superimposing a bass fiddle, a forklift and a musical note, led the front page of the Triangle Progress Leader for a week. It started with “E-mails from ‘reader’ were actually messages from killer,” and worked up to a climax on Friday with a vividly drawn scene of her “exclusive interview” with Noblac’s mother and “the moment all the pieces suddenly came together during a quicksilver private-plane flight from Philadelphia back to Raleigh.”

  Though many of the trailer park residents had complained about being displaced, they certainly hadn’t killed Mickey’s dog in protest, it was now obvious. Yet The Triangle Progress-Leader dropped that thread of the story without explanation.

  Jeff no longer worried about how to apologize or explain to her. The way she’d handled the story, he didn’t feel he owed her any more. He wasn’t sure she hadn’t been using him all along for access and inside information anyway. Plus, she wouldn’t be living in Raleigh much longer, he figured. She could pretty much write her own ticket.