by John Farrow
He held his breath and checked under the bed. No one. No shooter, no second vic.
Ron came back out.
Marc led the way down the hall. A bathroom was nearly opposite the top of the stairs. He crossed to the far side of the door. Ron glanced in. On his second look, he could see more of the room by checking the mirror on the face of the medicine cabinet. Then he went in and confirmed that the space was empty. He mouthed the word, “Secure,” and followed Marc further along. The door to the last room on the floor was also open. Marc’s turn. He glanced in and jerked his head back. He looked at Ron, which was not procedure. He took a breath. Whispered, “Woman on the floor. We got another one.”
“Suicide?”
“How the fuck do I know? Looks like it anyway.”
He risked a longer glance in, not looking at the woman so much but at the far corners, at the edge of the bed, searching for anything that might move. Not even a cat. A farmhouse, and not even a cat. He went in, weapon raised and checked behind the door, in the open closet, over the far side of the bed. He signaled Ron to check under the bed. Ron wanted to puke. He’d been looking at the woman. On his knees, he lifted up the bed ruffle and checked that space. A few small storage items, but no killer.
Ron rose, relieved that his head hadn’t been blown off. Marc entered the room first but left him the scariest task. Now they both looked at the woman. A dismal view, more so because she was naked. The indignity. Legs akimbo. Blood smudged. Marc had seen dead people on the job mangled in their cars. Gruesome enough. He went closer. He touched her. He was not supposed to do that. “Fuck,” he said, but in a way that sounded amazed. “Still breathing.”
“Really? No way.” So much blood, from her head wound and also her hand. Blood from the hand had splashed around.
“Call it in.”
Ron did so. He reported that one victim was alive and requested an ambulance. He was told that one was on the way, that it had been on the way for a while, just in case.
In case of what? he wondered.
Then an impression gnawing at him struck home. “Marc,” he said.
“What?”
“There’s no gun. No weapon.”
They looked around. If this was a suicide then she shot herself through the back of the head without a weapon. The dead man downstairs had his hands tied behind his back. He didn’t do it. And no footprints left the house.
Under his breath, Marc said aloud what Ron already knew. “Still here.”
Yet they’d searched everywhere.
They stuck close to each other near the door, their backs against the wall for additional protection, listening.
“Wait for backup?” Ron suggested. He was afraid he might piss himself. He felt that he was all right overall, he could handle this, but he might piss himself.
“Yeah. We wait for backup.” Marc didn’t know what else to do. He looked at the woman. He was pretty sure that the man downstairs had a finger cut off. That was certainly true for the woman.
Marc glanced out to the hallway, just to check there. When reinforcements arrived he wouldn’t let them see him like this, cowering. He’d tell them that they stayed in the room to protect the woman and because waiting for backup was fucking procedure. Fuck this shit. He wanted to be a detective, he joined to become a detective, not some uniform risking his life in some godforsaken farmhouse in what was not only the middle of nowhere but the worthless center of the middle of nowhere in the freezing fucking cold. But shit it was exciting, too. A double murder! Unless the woman makes it, but still, a double shooting on his watch and the killer might still be around if he hadn’t left by helicopter or by Santa’s bright red sleigh.
Marc glanced out the door again to make sure that no one was creeping up on them. He didn’t see a thing and drew a deeper breath to release his tension and before he got to fully exhale he dropped to the floor, landing awkwardly, and toppled over. Ron saw him fall and the shock of the blast turned his blood to glue. He didn’t think don’t hesitate, although he wanted to think that way, but he couldn’t think anything and yet he hardly hesitated at all and bent his arm around the doorjamb with his pistol ready to fire and his hand shaking and his heart bursting out the top of his head and his eyeballs out his skull and yet he had no one to shoot at. He only had walls in his line of sight and the shooter, he figured, must be behind the wall at the top of the stairs and he aimed at the spot waiting for the shooter to show himself and yet he never did and he yelled into his collar transmitter, breathless, “Officer down! Officer down!” because he couldn’t remember the code, he’d never needed to remember that code, then he yelled like a crazy man, “Police! Come out—” and although no one was there he never discerned that fact as he heard a sound, a small sound, like a shuffling, and then his brain imploded and he fell upon his partner, and as he bled his blood commingled with his partner’s. Nor was he aware that all there was before him now and under him and around him was that silence, that perfect stillness which he experienced initially as an unfathomable dread, but now became the perfect silence of a swift death.
Silence throughout the countryside, interrupted for those moments, ensued for a spell, then broke again. Across the snowy fields, echoing off the hardwoods, came the bark of yet another gunshot, so the quiet that returned, contrasted by the shot, felt immense, sustained, eternal, as brilliant as the sunshine, until there occurred a rising bedlam, a raring noise, distant at first then drawing closer, as sirens raced to that snowbound cottage, police and ambulance and more police, and something in the wailing, something in the plaintiveness over the waves of fresh snow on the serene fields, suggested that their speed was insufficient, that their urgency, both provoked and necessary, was too little and could only arrive too late.
TWO
Retirement was not serving former Sergeant-Detective Émile Cinq-Mars as well as desired. He had much to do, especially with his wife’s horse business, and a variety of interests engaged his attention. So he did not suffer from any lack of activity and contrary to his prior speculations hardly missed the job at all. But he was wickedly unlucky. He fell, not off a horse, which he might have expected and carried with a certain honor—what horseman did not brave more than one nasty fall?—but he tripped over a bucket and tumbled into a horse who, startled, gave a kick, catching him right below the heart. The near-miss might have been his salvation although, for about six seconds, Cinq-Mars thought he was dead, then for the next six hours wished that he was. Notwithstanding the evidence of his survival, the broken ribs took their own sweet time to heal, a painful and lethargic process.
His first stroke of bad luck proved not to be his last.
Amid the fanfare concerning his retirement, during which time he was feted and anointed by colleagues both respected and despised, pumped for knowledge and contacts, equally praised and excoriated in the press so that a public debate ensued over whether citizens ought to be dancing in the streets or wearing sackcloth—somewhere within that repetitive munificence of sentiment and gift-giving he was handed the de rigueur gold watch. Initially, Cinq-Mars felt disrespected that a superior would stoop to such a banal gift when a halfhearted handshake would do, and irritate him less, but then he checked the watch. Hey. A nice watch. He liked it. He had never possessed an object of such obvious value before and grudgingly made peace with the symbolism. Time’s up. Or, All you got left is time now. Or, About time you got the hell out of here. Or even, We couldn’t think of anything else but it’s the thought that counts, right? He was the recipient of retirement cards that humorously underscored such sentiments. But he liked the watch and enjoyed putting it on in the morning, at least until the day that he strapped it onto his wrist and discovered that for all its value and beauty and artful weight it offered back the wrong hour.
Still ticking, but 247 minutes behind.
To effect the repair under warranty required that he return it to the jeweler where the watch was initially purchased. Which is when he discovered that it was worth over two
grand. Police department money wasn’t tapped to purchase the timepiece, not at that price, the cash raised instead among colleagues, from among those both favored and despised. Indeed, from among those who exhorted him to stay and from those who were counting down the minutes, perhaps using the pricy watch, to his departure. Cinq-Mars felt a pang. Of affection. Of loss. For the old camaraderie. Even for the old daily frictions. In returning to retrieve the repaired Rolex he took note that this was only the fourth time in his life that he found himself inside an upscale jewelry boutique as a paying customer rather than as an officer of the law. Once to buy a ring for a girlfriend as a young man, once to choose an engagement ring and wedding bands for himself and his future wife—she went back to pick them up—once to return his broken watch and now, a fourth time, to pick it up. On his first two trips he wasn’t retired, and went in on his lunch break, wearing a regulation pistol. So bringing the watch in, and now to pick it up, constituted his only times in a jewelry store unarmed, which struck him as both ironic and unfortunate given that he was interrupting a robbery-in-progress.
He could try a well-aimed punch to the thief’s prominent jaw, except that his ribs remained sore from the horse kick and the punch undoubtedly would hurt him more. Besides, he’d not swung at anybody in decades and who knew if he could still put much behind the blow. And the guy was showing off his gun, so he might be shot for his trouble, which his wife, for one, would not appreciate. After all, it was only a bloody watch. Albeit a Rolex. So he tried something else. He stood in the doorway and didn’t let the crook out without first having a word.
“Hi, there,” he said.
“You old fuck, get out of my way,” sneered the thief, a belligerent, unwary lad.
Old. Cinq-Mars hoped the guy didn’t recognize him and therefore wasn’t submitting a comment on his retirement. Standing in the doorway of the slightly subterranean shop a step up from the miscreant, his six-foot-three-inch frame towered above the imp who stood at a chubby five-seven. He could stare down the immensity of his impressive nose and assume that that would have an intimidating effect upon the man nervously, if defiantly, gazing up at him.
“How’re you doing?” he asked. From his pocket he withdrew a stick of gum—the miscreant flinched—casually unwrapped it, folded the stick in half to more easily drop it into his mouth, and did so. “My name’s Émile Cinq-Mars. What’s yours?”
Although unwilling to tell him, the jewel thief no longer insisted that he get out of his way. Cinq-Mars noticed that the man’s glance seemed to trip over his nose. His massive honker was always his particular identifier, both because it deserved to be, but also because the city’s cartoonists loved drawing his beak with comic exaggeration. In any case, the thief was undergoing a change of heart and seemed willing to talk.
“Heard you retired, I heard.”
“It’s no secret. Is that why you’re here? You think it’s safe to steal now?”
“No, but—”
“But what?”
“I got a gun. Like you can see. Do you? No, you’re retired. You done your part. So maybe you should get out of my way and go play bocce or something.”
He liked this jewel thief. His argument revealed a certain innate consideration for another person. “Maybe I should. Get out of your way, at least, but maybe you might want to consider a few things first. Such as, friendly advice, if you shoot me with that thing—I mean, how many cops do you know just by their names? I never showed you my shield, because you’re right, I don’t have one, I’m retired. But shoot me? Oh man. Do you have any idea the grief that falls on your head for that? Brought on by cops. By prosecutors and judges. By the man in the street, even. Your own family might not forgive you. With so many cops in jail now, you might not get a break on the inside. Don’t count on it. Cop killer? You want that on your sheet, do you?”
The thief’s posture and expression indicated that he didn’t, not really. But he came up with an idea. “I could just wound you, like. Like maybe in the leg.”
“Are you telling me that I won’t find your mug shot in a stack of jewel-thief portraits? Sure I will. No, if you’re going to shoot me, you want me dead.”
Cinq-Mars won that argument as well.
“So, you know, this is like none of your business,” the thief maintained, as if to appeal to his sense of fairness, if not of justice.
“That’s where you’re wrong. I know it’s unfortunate, this is bad luck for you, but I saw you put my watch in your bag. It’s in for repairs. I’m here to pick it up. I could tell you that it has sentimental value, but that would be a lie. Still. It’s my watch. Not yours.”
Barely into his thirties, the man’s hair was noticeably thinning. As an adolescent he had bad skin and coming of age he did some time, Cinq-Mars could tell, just by the look of his face, the pallor and texture. Twin gold rings graced an earlobe—enough of an identifier to get him back into prison for a future crime, if the guy proved smart enough to abandon this heist.
The owner of the store, bent behind a counter, seemed baffled by the exchange, but acquiesced to allowing it to play out.
“So. Why don’t I just give you back your watch then? We forget about it.”
A relatively generous offer. Cinq-Mars weighed it quickly. “At my age? I’m not going to start taking bribes now. Not after all these years. Just leave everything behind and we’ll let this one pass.”
“All of it? You want me to give back—”
“You might be holding the bag, friend, but the contents don’t belong to you.”
The crook seemed to consider his circumstances. “Then what?”
“Then walk out of here.”
“I get to walk?”
“Run, even. That’s up to you. I don’t have a gun. Or a badge. I can’t arrest you. Put the bag down and none of this ever happened. If you don’t put it down—do you think I don’t have connections? Do you think the whole police department, or any police department anywhere in the world, won’t come down on you like a ton of bricks?” He didn’t like that analogy so took a second stab at it. “Like a stampede of wild horses?” He didn’t like that one either but gave up. “Cops gave me that watch. They won’t be impressed with you. I know you’re not too bright but you can still make a half-assed smart decision, can’t you?”
The man agreed that he could do that. He also wanted to argue the issue of his intelligence, and Cinq-Mars was thinking that that was a low blow, one quite possibly untrue, but in the end the crook let it go and put the bag down.
Cinq-Mars stepped aside.
The thief couldn’t believe it and, not fully believing it, when he got outside, he ran, kicking up his heels with something akin to glee, as if he was stealing the Crown Jewels when really he wasn’t swiping a thing. In terms of his profession he was having a bad day at work, but that perception hadn’t dawned on him as yet.
More joyful still was the jeweler. Five-two, he was barely visible above the countertops. He came out from behind their shelter and embraced the towering ex-cop, his head merely halfway up his midriff. Then he held him by the biceps at arm’s length. Gazing up at him with supreme happiness and an abject adoration, he offered him dinner. Hockey tickets in the reds. Italian wine, but more importantly, the finest olive oils. “Stuff you don’t get in stores.” Cinq-Mars declined. After all, he explained, he didn’t do anything. The jeweler hugged him again, then sneezed, then got up on his tiptoes and the ex-cop politely leaned down to be kissed on both cheeks. Cinq-Mars thanked him and the jeweler kissed both his cheeks again, then coughed, then sneezed once more and apologized for having the flu, which was transmitted to Cinq-Mars as part of his current run of bad luck and developed soon enough into a cocktail of flu, sore ribs, and finally, in a week’s time, pneumonia.
The pneumonia took longer to be gone than the ribs did to heal, although the ribs hurt like hell whenever he sneezed, coughed, blew his nose, or even evacuated his bowels.
At least he was retired. Going to work would have been a k
iller.
If bad things came in threes then one more turn of nasty luck lay ahead of him, yet when it arrived he could scarcely believe his misfortune. His wife, who was much younger than him and the guiding principal behind his retirement because she really didn’t want him getting himself killed on the job, now let him know that she was thinking about leaving. A head’s up. At least she’d not made a definitive decision to decamp.
Thank goodness for small mercies—he was counting on bad luck to come only in threes. He’d swallowed his full dose. He didn’t want the breakup to occur.
To that end he was staying around the house a lot, so that when the phone rang on a mild and cloudy day, a few flurries in the morning, just an inch predicted for later that afternoon, he was home to answer. He put down a crossword puzzle which wasn’t going well either. He’d never attempted one prior to retiring, and had yet to complete one. “I got it,” he called through the house.
Sandra didn’t respond. She was taking it upon herself to scrub every pot in the kitchen. Her husband chose not to question why.
“Cinq-Mars,” he said into the receiver. Sandra frequently admonished him but old habits were difficult to scuttle. She suggested that a simple hello would suffice, but in any case, if he really did feel the need to announce himself, he might include his first name, as only friends were likely to be calling now.
“And telemarketers,” he pointed out.
“Why reveal your identity to them?”
He didn’t see why not but that was another argument not worth the trouble.
“Hi there, Émile, it’s Bill.”
“Bill!” Mathers. His longtime partner, who inherited his rank after Cinq-Mars left the force. “How are you?”
Pot in hand, Sandra wandered through to the living room, curious about the call. Pleasantries went on as the two men caught up on department scuttlebutt, but her intuition kept her nearby. As the small-talk concluded, Cinq-Mars kept listening with the phone to his ear while Bill Mathers prattled on. She heard her husband say, “I don’t know how I can help with that,” and then he listened some more. He was growing impatient with the call, rather than intrigued, which she counted as a good thing. Finally, he conceded, “All right. Sure. Come over.… Actually, I muck out stalls at that hour. Can you make it for three?… Okay. See you then.… Yeah. It’ll be good to see you, too. Bye, now.”