Blake Byron: Paranormal Investigator

by Andrew Beymer

  I knew the Chief would have conniption fits if he found out I was telling a bunch of underage kids to go have fun underage drinking at house parties rather than arresting them for what amounted to the non-crime of almost walking into a liquor store, but what the Chief didn't know wasn't going to hurt him.

  It's not like it would be the first time I did something the Chief wouldn't exactly approve of, after all.

  Finally, blessedly, the crowd started to disperse. I breathed a silent sigh of relief. I didn't want to ruin their futures, but more than anything I hadn't been looking forward to all that paperwork.

  I hated paperwork. Whether I was in the service or working for civilians it was the one constant in my life I could’ve done without. I figured it was a miracle all the paperwork generated by old Uncle Sam hadn’t collapsed in on itself and created a black hole that destroyed the world.

  “You made the right decision," I said, trying to focus on the task at hand and not a hypothetical end of the world via red tape. "Thanks."

  The guy at the head of the group looked a little dejected that his youthful rebellion had been crushed with a few words. I looked over at the head cheerleader girl next door prom queen he was trying to impress.

  She didn’t look impressed. More annoyed than anything. I’d been on a few dates where I got looks like that. I knew what it meant.

  Nothing good for this poor bastard.

  I’d also seen enough former nerds trying to break out of their shell to know this guy was going to cling to this girl despite all the clear negative signals he was getting. He’d probably even go to bitch online when she finally got blunt with him because of course it’d be her fault the dude couldn’t pick up on the finer social graces of a girl not being interested in him.

  "Yeah, whatever," he said as he put his hands in his pockets and walked away.

  I shook my head. Some people weren't grateful. I did the guy a favor, probably saved his future, and all he could think about was getting his dick wet. Or, more accurately, how much he wasn’t going to get his dick wet as a result of getting the alcohol train shut down before it even left the station.

  Not that I could blame the guy. Not really. I could remember a time when my main concern had been getting my dick wet.

  Though from the looks of things the asshole’s dick was going to be staying as dry as the Sahara for the time being. The head cheerleader gave me a lingering appreciative glance that might’ve caught my interest back before I had a ring on my finger.

  I wiggled that finger now. The neon light from the liquor store caught the gold band. She opened her mouth almost like she was going to try something despite the evidence I wasn’t interested, then her face went into the sort of pout that said she wasn’t used to not getting her way with men and she stalked off after her nerdling.

  Yeah, even all these years later getting my dick wet was still very much a concern for me. It's just that these days I was concerned with dick wettings via keeping my wife happy and not via going out to find some random girl at a party.

  Or taking up an unspoken offer from some college hottie who wasn’t that much younger than me, on balance.

  "Good luck kid," I muttered as I fired up the engine on my squad car and pulled out. “You’re gonna need it.”

  I figured I’d done my good deed for the night. I’d upheld the spirit of the law even if I hadn't exactly done the letter of the law thing by throwing the book at them. Now I could go find a nice quiet spot on the edge of campus and pretend I was working while I played games on my phone.

  The drunk calls would start coming in soon enough, after all. Another night of babysitting freshmen who still hadn’t learned their limits.

  Still, the quiet time between starting my shift and going drunk babysitting was one of the benefits of working the night shift on a low stakes job like campus police which was really mostly glorified campus security with red and blue lights instead of yellow.

  I’d take drunks over people shooting at me any day.

  I ‘d just pulled into my favorite secluded spot on the edge of campus and was pulling my phone up for some quality time when the radio crackled to life. I squeezed my eyes shut and resisted the urge to curse.

  “Dispatch. Blake, you out there?"

  This time I did let loose with a few curses. I could ignore a call if they weren't calling me out by name, but if I ignored Gladys naming names the Chief was bound to chew my ass out.

  That was one thing that had stayed the same between military and civilian life. A good ass chewing was always right around the corner if you didn't do your job right. Sometimes even if you did do your job right.

  Sometimes especially if you did your job right. She probably wasn’t calling Kinsey because the old bat knew the lazy asshole was asleep somewhere and not likely to answer.

  I sighed and pulled up my radio. "This is Blake. Go ahead."

  "Glad I caught you," Gladys said. Her tone said she was anything but glad to catch me.

  "How can I help you tonight Gladys?" I asked.

  I frowned as I imagined Gladys sitting at the same old table she'd sat at for the night shift for time immemorial. There were pictures from when the “new” police station had been built on campus. New being a relative term since it was built forty years ago.

  And there was Gladys in those pictures looking pretty much the same as she did today, with maybe a little less white in her hair. It was difficult to tell for sure since all those pictures were in black and white.

  The woman was an eternal fixture in the campus police department, and she always worked the night shift for some reason. Which made it a hell of a lot more difficult to screw around on the job like the night shift was supposed to.

  How could you screw around when dispatch had more seniority on the department than the Chief? She didn’t give out ass chewings like the Chief, but it was well known that she had the Chief’s ear and displeasing her was a good way to screw over your career.

  What little career you could have working for the Farnsworth University campus police department in beautiful Lee’s Mills Indiana.

  Sure I found ways to screw around, but Gladys made it difficult.

  Word on the street was she’d screwed over the Chief more literally once upon a time. Back when I was in diapers and she was still ancient, just less so. I shivered thinking of the geriatric lovin’ and pushed that unpleasant thought from my mind.

  "We've got a call about some trouble in the student neighborhoods,” she said. "Some girl saying there’s someone in her house."

  "Got it," I said. "What's the address? I'll get over there."

  "Head over to 128 Rex Ct.," Gladys said.

  "On it," I said, growling to myself and wondering why the hell they couldn’t at least try to get Kinsey to do it.

  Because Gladys loved Kinsey. That’s why. And I was still the new guy even though I’d been on the force for two years now.

  “New guy” was a relative term when you worked for a mean old bat of a woman who still thought touchtone phones were a nifty new invention. Sure I didn’t work for her on the org chart, but what that org chart said and how Gladys ran the shop were two very different things.

  I sighed. Low man on the totem pole. Which meant I pulled a home invasion that was probably some college girl jumping at raccoons knocking over trash cans behind her house.

  At least the place wasn’t too far away. Then again campus was small enough that nothing took more than a ten minute drive. And that was factoring in bad traffic, of which there was none at this time of night.

  Minus the stumbling drunks, of course.

  I made sure the radio was good and off before I sighed. Gladys could pick up on that stuff. She had freakishly sensitive hearing. Even over the radio.

  "Motherfucker,” I thought to myself as I drove across campus, not even bothering to flash my reds and blues.

  Home invasions weren’t something that happened on campus, so of course it would be my luck to get called on one. And
it was probably just some kid jumping at shadows, but I would go and check it out.

  After all, my job was to serve and protect. Even if it was protecting some girl who’d had too much to drink and was jumping at the shadows in her drunken stupor.

  Oh well. Those were the breaks when you worked as a campus cop.

  5

  First Responder

  I turned my lights off as I turned onto Rex. I didn't want to alert anyone if there was an accomplice lurking out there waiting to see if the cops were on the way.

  Assuming the accomplice wasn’t another raccoon hanging out on a different trash bin, that is. The last thing I needed was to explain to the Chief why I didn’t bring in a ring-tailed bandit for a drunk and disorderly.

  The Chief was the kind of asshole boss who’d expect me to book the raccoon and not offer to pay for the rabies shot after the fact because that sort of thing wasn’t in the budget.

  I knew guys who’d go in with lights blazing because they liked to look impressive, Kinsey came to mind, but I liked to think of myself as that rarest of rarities: a campus cop without an inflated sense of self-importance.

  There wasn't anyone I was going to impress with the blues and reds and going in lights blazing would only tip off the bad guys.

  If there even were any bad guys, which I was still having trouble believing.

  So I went slow and steady as I crept down the road. I winced as I heard my tires crunching stones. The city took a pretty hands-off approach to road maintenance around these here parts which meant there were more chunks of pavement in the middle of the road than there was actual road.

  Hopefully that wouldn't tip any non-raccoon assailants off. I’d seen the bad guys get tipped off by les.

  That was the thing they never showed in the movies. Halfway competent bad dudes who knew their stuff and were a genuine threat. Not that I thought there was a genuine threat on campus.

  Unless we’re talking the genuine threat that the drunk girl who called this in would hork up whatever she drank tonight all over my shoes. Stomach acid played hell with the finish.

  There were things I’d learned on this job that I’d rather forget.

  I stopped a few houses down from the place in question. Paused to listen to the night. I still had my window rolled down from the encounter at the liquor store, and I always liked to stop and get my bearings before I went in on a call.

  It was eerily quiet in this part of the student ghetto. Sure I heard parties going on a block over, but there was absolutely nothing happening on this stretch of street.

  It was as silent as death. As silent as it had been right before an ambush when I was stuck playing in the sandbox for Uncle Sam.

  I shivered. Those weren’t fun memories. Even less fun than the aforementioned memories of someone puking all over my shoes. At least there wasn’t much chance of a drunk college kid shooting at me. Even in a state like Indiana where the gun to nut ratio was easily more than two to one.

  I thought about breaking out my light and playing it across the house but decided against it. If there were bad guys out there that would alert them, and if they were terrorizing this poor girl I didn't want them to know I was out here until it was too late.

  For them.

  I stepped out and pavement chunks crunched under my boot. I made sure I had all my stuff ready to go. Pepper spray, Taser, flashlight, and of course my gun.

  Though I never expected to have to use that last one. The last time someone on the campus police department fired a shot that wasn’t for target practice was when Nixon was in office.

  And of course Gladys had been in the radio room working as a dispatcher during all the excitement.

  I did a quick walk around the house looking for any sign of forced entry. Listening for any sign there might be something bad going on inside.

  There was none. Quiet as the grave, which was another comparison I could’ve done without.

  I shook my head and wondered if the girl left the door unlocked. It wasn't unheard of despite all the warnings they gave at campus orientations. Stupid college kids thinking they were invincible.

  I’d filled out reports on more than a few laptops that had grown feet and gone for a walk because some idiot left their door unlocked and thought their stuff would be perfectly fine.

  Finally I moved back to the front door. I was thinking more and more that this was either a prank call or a girl who'd freaked out over nothing.

  Probably a drunk girl freaking out over nothing. I hated drunk girls freaking out over nothing because they usually became drunk girls who were endlessly grateful to me for making them feel safe.

  Good problem to have, right? Yeah right.

  If my wife knew how many times I’d been propositioned on this job by pretty young college things I had absolutely no interest in then she’d probably want me to re-enlist and go back to doing something where the people I ran into were a lot uglier and a lot more whiskery and bearded.

  And a lot more trigger happy, for that matter.

  There was something about the silence that unnerved me. Something that tickled the hairs on the back of my neck. The sort of hairs that usually only got tickled when something bad was about to go down.

  Like when I was about to be caught in an ambush back in the bad old days.

  I pulled up my radio. "Gladys are you sure about that address? I'm here and there's nothing going on."

  "I'm sure," Gladys said, her voice sounding slightly testy.

  She didn't like it when people second-guessed her. Especially newbies. It didn’t help that the only people she didn’t consider newbies had retired back in the ‘90s.

  "Got it," I said. "I might be going in. Will let you know if I need back up."

  “Uh-huh,” Gladys said.

  There was something about her tone that said she didn't think I’d need backup. No one on the force had needed backup in decades. It just didn’t happen in this quiet town. At least not in the university portion of town.

  Everything outside the University bubble was meth heads and drug problems as far as the eye could see, about par for the course for a rusted out Midwestern town, but thankfully most of that crap stayed away from campus.

  Usually.

  I knocked on the door, but I didn't expect anyone to answer. I told myself no one was answering because the girl probably passed out after she’d made her call, but there was that voice whispering in the back of my head that something was wrong here.

  Very wrong. And it was a voice that was getting louder.

  I couldn't explain it. It was a feeling that reached down to the baser instincts of humanity, and it was an instinct I'd learned to trust over the years. I’d long ago come to accept that there were times when my body used some special evolutionary trick my ancient ancestors had used to escape predators to tell me shit was about to go down, and I didn’t ignore that voice.

  I knocked again. Still nothing. I was starting to get worried.

  I pulled out my radio. "Gladys I'm not getting a response here. I'm going in to check things out. You might send someone over just in case."

  I knew “someone” would end up being Kinsey which meant he’d be here in an hour if I was lucky, but something was better than nothing.

  There was a pause on the other end. I could imagine Gladys leaning back from her trusty microphone that also looked like it hadn't been updated since Nixon was in office. I’m talking the first time when he was only veep. Finally her voice crackled through.

  “Right,” she said, not sounding happy at all. "I'll send Kinsey over."

  Great. Just fucking great. That meant it would be at least twenty minutes before Kinsey came far enough out of a REM cycle to even understand that the radio was talking to him and not a part of some dream, and it would be even longer before he finally got his ass over here.

  I looked at the door one last time. It was solid wood. Everything in this part of town was solid construction. The phrase "they don't make them like they used
to" applied here in spades. It wasn't nice new cheap building material that broke under a quick shoulder.

  This was going to hurt.

  I was cursing twenty seconds later when the door finally splintered off its hinges. That would leave a mark, but if the girl was in trouble then it would be worth it.

  And if it turned out she wasn't in trouble? That this was all some drunken prank? Well I was going to read her the riot act in that case.

  She’d probably get in touch with the department and I’d get an ass chewing from the Chief for destruction of property after the fact, but whatever.

  I paused to listen. I’d discovered that just listening, whether to a student trying to explain themselves or to your surroundings, could be infinitely helpful on this job.

  I didn't hear anything. The place was still as quiet as a grave.

  I shivered, wondering why the hell it kept occurring to me that it was as quiet as the grave here. Not a pleasant thought, and yet I couldn't help but think of the sight and smell of a freshly dug grave.

  No, not a pleasant thought at all.

  "Hello?"

  I flipped my light on and moved it across the entryway. Then I shook my head. I was acting like one of those idiot fools from a TV cop show.

  Why was I using a flashlight to look around when there was a perfectly good light switch right there? I flipped the switch and the lights came on.

  "Let there be light," I muttered as I looked around.

  My hand went to my gun and I shook my head and forced my hand away. I was acting like a jumpy new recruit who thought everything could be solved with the barrel of a gun. Not like someone with my level of experience.

  Though to be fair I’d found that a lot of the problems I’d run into professionally in my previous life could be solved with the business end of a gun. I didn’t like it, and I didn’t want it to happen here, but I was willing to admit that confidence and a gun went a lot farther with the bad guys than confidence all by its lonesome.

  Not now though. Not here. This wasn’t the bad old days. There was something funky going on here and I wanted to get to the bottom of it, but there was no point running in like Dirty fucking Harry.