The Midnight Hour

by Karen Robards

  “Pranks?” Grace’s voice rose. “Pranks? They’re scaring me to death!”

  “I know they are.” He said nothing more for a moment, his eyes warm with sympathy as he looked down at her. “And I don’t want to say you’re overreacting. But what’s really happened here, after all? You chased someone out of your yard in the middle of the night. You don’t know who it was. It could have been anyone, a neighboring teenager out wandering just like Jessica was doing that night, one of her friends who got separated from the main crowd and was looking for her, a bum, a neighbor, anyone. You don’t have any proof that whoever it was entered your house; there was no sign of forced entry and nothing of value was missing.” He held up his hand to stop her protest before she could even get the words out. “Okay, except a teddy bear that you found down by the road that was a favorite of your daughter’s. But it could have gotten there any number of ways, it seems to me, the least likely of which is that it was dropped by someone who broke into your house and stole it. Also, today, Jessica never saw anyone following her home. She just had a feeling she was being followed. It could have been a friend playing a trick, an admiring boy too shy to approach her, or her own imagination. I grant that there is no doubt that someone wrote Jessica, R.I.P. inside a tombstone drawn on her mirror. We all agree on that. But was it intended as a death threat? I doubt it. It looks like a prank. Everything that’s happened, even conceding that everything you think happened really did, could easily fall under the heading of prank. I’d be more inclined to look at your nephew and niece, or maybe some of Jessica’s friends, than I would a pissed-off drug dealer out for revenge.”

  “You’re not going to take this seriously,” Grace said with disbelief. “Someone is threatening my daughter and you’re not going to take it seriously.”

  “It’s not that—” he began.

  “Leave,” she said, interrupting. “Just leave. If you are not going to treat this incident with the respect it deserves, then you are of no use to me. Leave. Get out of my house. Now.”

  “Look, Your Honor, I know that you’re upset, but we have to look at this realistically,” he tried again.

  Down the hall, Dominick Marino and the two uniformed policemen emerged from Jessica’s room carrying a black case, a camera, and other paraphernalia.

  “All done,” Dominick said as the trio approached. Tony glanced around as they joined them, then looked down at Grace. The look she returned him was stony.

  “Head on out, I’ll be with you in a minute,” Tony said to the other men. When they were on their way downstairs, he spoke to Grace again.

  “If I thought there was any danger for your daughter or for you, I’d tell you, and we would leave no stone unturned until the perpetrator was caught,” he said. “I know you don’t agree, but I am almost one hundred percent certain that whoever did this tonight, and did the other things if they happened, had to be a kid. They’re not meant as serious threats. They’re pranks. The kinds of things a kid would do.”

  “I understand that you think so,” Grace said icily, turning away. “I disagree very strongly. Thank you for coming. Good-bye.”

  “Look, . . .” Sounding tired and faintly exasperated, he followed her down the stairs. “If anything else happens, call me. I don’t care if it’s in the middle of the night, or whenever. I’ll come. If you hear a noise at the window, I’ll come. If you see a shadow on the wall, I’ll come. I know it’s scary for you and your daughter to be living here alone, and I know it’s easy to blow things out of proportion when you’re scared. I’ll check out whatever comes up, and I’m going to thoroughly investigate this thing with the mirror no matter what I think happened. Okay?”

  “Good-bye, Detective.” Reaching the front door, Grace pulled it open and stood waiting for him to leave. He stopped for a moment, looking at her. She met his gaze with stony anger. He started to say something, appeared to think better of it, shook his head, and walked out.

  Grace closed the door behind him with controlled fury. For a moment she stood there gripping the knob, fighting to get her emotions under control so Jessica would not see how upset she was. Then, carefully, she checked to make sure the dead bolt was locked and pulled on the knob to make sure the lock had caught. She walked around the downstairs, checking to see that all the windows and especially the kitchen door were secure. Jessica was in the kitchen, chopping an apple into fine pieces.

  Jessica had to be so careful about eating fruit, and she’d already had an apple that day.

  “You don’t need to eat that,” Grace said, the words out before she could catch them.

  Jessica gave her a withering look. “It’s for Godzilla. He loves apple. I thought if I put some in his cage and set the cage on the floor . . .”

  Her voice trailed off, and she looked down at the apple in her hand as she continued to chop.

  “Oh,” Grace said, “good idea.”

  Opening a cabinet, she got out a couple of saucers and spooned some of the chopped apple onto each. Then she helped Jessica set hamster lures of cage and exercise wheel and red plastic hamster house baited with saucers of chopped apple in hopes that Godzilla would get hungry during the night.

  Though she was careful to give no sign of it to Jessica, Grace was still, in almost equal parts, angry and scared. By bedtime, scared had won out. That night she and Jessica, by mutual agreement, slept together in her big bed. Or at least Jessica slept, curled against her side. Grace lay awake listening to the rumble of thunder and the patter of rain on the roof as the threatened storm finally hit. She was almost afraid to close her eyes even with her bedroom door locked. So far, locks had proved to be no protection against the evil that she was becoming increasingly convinced lurked without.

  Chapter

  20

  IT WAS FUN freaking them out.

  He waited outside in the darkness, crouched in the shadow of the next-door neighbor’s hedge, grinning as the police car and the other car, the blue Camaro, pulled out of the driveway and took off slowly down the street. The Camaro was a police car, too, he was sure. An unmarked one. Little brother had his faults, but he wasn’t stupid. He knew a cop car when he saw one.

  The night the judge lady had chased him, he’d been scared at first, afraid of being caught. What would happen to him if he was caught? he wondered. His mom would piss her pants, his dad would look at him like he had just crawled out from under a rock, and Donny, jr., would act sorrowful and supportive and superior all at the same time, which was a crock. The parents would probably get him some help. Or maybe they’d just leave him to rot in jail, hoping that he would learn his lesson.

  But he hadn’t gotten caught. He’d gotten clean away. A sense of exhilaration had filled him as he’d realized that the judge lady couldn’t catch him. The police couldn’t catch him. He had hung around that night and watched the boys in blue arrive, and it had been cool to know that he’d gotten the judge lady scared enough to call them, cool to know that he had upset their lives just like his had been upset, cool to know that the police were looking for him. The coolest thing of all was knowing that they didn’t have a clue who he was.

  Remembering how the judge lady had looked chasing him, kind of like a psycho scarecrow with her spiky hair standing on end and her arms and legs pumping and her nightgown flapping, made him snicker. Old ladies like that looked nasty in nightgowns. But Jessica had looked nice in hers. He’d liked looking at her that night on the porch, which was why he’d crept closer and closer—so he could get a better view. She’d seen him finally. He felt a quick surge of pleasure as he remembered how she had stared right at him through the darkness, then jumped up off that swing like she’d been shot, and run inside and locked the door. He’d heard the dead bolt slam home even as far out in the yard as he was.

  When were they going to learn that they couldn’t lock him out?

  He’d expected the police to come that night, too, but they hadn’t. He guessed she hadn’t told her mother about him. Probably because she wasn’
t supposed to go outside at night in the first place, in case the bogeyman should get her.

  He snickered again, picturing himself as the bogeyman. He kind of liked the idea.

  Jessica wasn’t as pretty as Caroline, but she was pretty enough to get him excited. He liked being excited, liked the way it felt. Looking at her when she didn’t know he was there got him excited, following her when she didn’t know he was there got him excited, and scaring her when she didn’t have a clue who he was got him more excited than anything else.

  Scaring her was a rush.

  But the show was over for the night, he thought with regret, and he had things to do. Picking up his backpack and heaving it over one shoulder, he turned his back on the house and headed toward his motorcycle, which he had parked two streets over. Each time he’d been inside their house, he’d chosen a memento of his visit, although he’d dropped the teddy bear he’d taken from beside Jessica’s bed. He still regretted the loss of that. Tonight’s memento was small and furry and scrambling around frantically as it tried to escape from the inner zipper compartment of his backpack.

  He couldn’t wait to get it home and play with it.

  Maybe he’d put it in his mom’s bed, right down between the sheets near the foot where her toes would feel it first. That would be a trip. She’d scream the place down. Or he could put it in the refrigerator, in the clear plastic compartment on the door where the butter was kept. She always had toast with butter first thing in the morning.

  Or he could put it in her purse.

  Just considering the possibilities made him laugh out loud. For the first time in a long time, little brother was really having fun.

  Chapter

  21

  “MAN, YOU DON’T THINK you’re taking Judge Ball-Breaker a little too seriously, do you?” Dominick’s question was a soft murmur, barely audible over the various parking lot noises that wafted through the air. Car doors opened and closed, people laughed and talked, engines started, a guy urinated on a nearby tree. They were doing a stakeout, hiding behind a rusty Dumpster at one edge of the parking lot. The air around them smelled of rotting garbage and piss. It was almost one A.M.

  “What kind of cop wouldn’t take a woman calling the police to report a break-in seriously?” Tony was crouched beside Dom, camera at the ready, his gaze focused on the entrance to the seedy tenement opposite. It was a run-down brick building, two-story, composed of a dozen attached town-house apartments. Their mission was to record for evidentiary purposes everyone who entered or exited the target unit. One of the biggest drug dealers in Columbus had rented the apartment, strictly for the purpose of drug distribution (he actually lived in a lavish five bedroom house outside of town), and he was in there now, along with a couple of flunkies and some buyers.

  “The kind of penny-ante stuff she’s been reporting, you know you ought to let the uniforms handle it. Come on, a stolen teddy bear, somebody following her daughter home, some writing with oil on a mirror? It’s got nothing to do with us or this investigation.”

  “She thinks it does.”

  “So?”

  “So give me a break, will you? What does it matter if I go over there and check things out for her? It’s no skin off anybody’s teeth but mine.”

  “You like her, don’t you?”

  “Shut up, Dom.” Tony said this perfectly amiably, one brother to another.

  “You do like her. That’s why you’ve got me running over there every time she whistles.” Dom was grinning.

  “You know where you can go.” Again, this was perfectly amiable.

  “Jesus, Tony, have you thought what you’re lettin’ yourself in for, man? That woman’s used to getting her own way. She’ll be telling you how to do her in bed.”

  “Fuck off, Dom.”

  “Now you’re gettin’ . . .” Dominick broke off as a white Ford Taurus, maybe a ‘93 or ’94 model, pulled up in front of the town house and stopped. “Looks like we got customers.”

  Tony was already leaning into the open, camera clicking away. As the car doors opened, disgorging boisterous teenagers, Dom grabbed his own camera and followed suit. Eight kids—three more than the number the car was designed to hold—headed for the door.

  “Hey, buddy, open up!” one of the kids yelled, pounding on the door with his fist while Tony was still busy counting heads. Five boys, three girls. At least, the smaller ones with long hair looked like girls. Sometimes it was hard to be sure, especially in the dark and at a distance.

  “We wanna buy some smack!” A second boy joined in the pounding, bellowing his business. Still clicking away, Tony shook his head at their sheer stupidity. They were already high as kites on something, from the sound of it. The gentleman in the town house, with his preference for quiet, discreet illegal activity, was more likely to kick their asses for them than sell them anything.

  “Open up!” The first boy bellowed, pounding again. Tony and Dom exchanged alarmed glances. If this didn’t bring uniforms down on the whole operation, they could count themselves damned lucky. “Open up!”

  “We want some smack!” A third kid yelled.

  The town-house door jerked open, spilling light over the supplicants. The tall, rangy body of one of the flunkies was silhouetted in the doorway, legs spread, one hand on the door knob and the other on the jamb, barring any attempt at entry.

  “What be wrong wit’ you all?” he demanded fiercely. “You get away from here now. Go on away.”

  “No, man, we want smack.” The first boy was swaying on his feet. “We got money.”

  “I don’t know what you fools be talkin’ about.” He started to close the door on them. “Get, now.”

  “No! We want smack!” The first boy tried to push his way past the guardian of the door, and the two behind joined in.

  “We want smack! We want smack!” The remaining kids chorused, rushing the door. The guardian fell back, the door fell open, and the kids tumbled over themselves rushing inside.

  The sound of a gunshot, sharp and staccato, brought Tony and Dom to their feet with a single horrified exchange of glances.

  “Haul ass, man!” Tony said. Drawing their pistols, crouching, they ran for the town house, approaching it separately from either side of the door.

  Kids erupted from the door like rocks from an erupting volcano, screaming bloody murder as they ran. Behind them, Tim Fulkerson, the Marinos’ primary target, was firing a .45. Behind him was what looked like a regular forest of bushy marijuana plants, most about five feet tall, under a ceiling of grow lights.

  “Police! Drop your weapons!” Dom shouted.

  “Drop your weapons!” Tony echoed, coming out into the open. He was still moving fast, trying to both dodge and shield the kids while keeping a bead on Fulkerson. Fulkerson turned his weapon in Dom’s direction. . ..

  “Police! Drop your weapon!” Tony screamed, and fired. The bullet thudded into the doorway, Fulkerson jumped back, Tony ran forward, gun drawn—and the flunky who’d answered the door in the first place jumped out with an automatic weapon and began firing.

  Still in a crouching run forward, Tony had barely eyeballed the weapon when someone pushed him hard in the center of his back, sending him sprawling facedown on the concrete parking lot.

  A hair-parting hail of bullets passed not two feet over his head. If he’d still been standing, he would have been cut in two.

  Close call, but now wasn’t the time to dwell on it. Tony rolled, coming up on his feet, and fired a single shot. The flunky ran.

  Three marked cars came roaring into the parking lot, sirens screaming, tires squealing.

  “We’re police officers! We’re police officers!” Tony and Dom both shouted as uniforms piled out of the cars. When in plain clothes, a police officer at the scene of any action involving gun play was most in danger from his own side, as every undercover cop knew.

  “Lay down your weapons! Lay down your weapons!” The uniforms yelled, approaching Tony and Dom with guns drawn.

 
“Jesus Christ, we’re police officers!” Tony bellowed. “Hell, don’t let that guy get away!”

  But the flunky was already hightailing it down the street, picking up his heels so high he almost kicked himself in the butt with every step.

  By the time the mess was sorted out, they had two flunkies under arrest—Tim Fulkerson had escaped, as had the guy who’d come to the door when the kids knocked—one high school kid down, shot in the thigh, another seven under arrest, and a town house full of marijuana, cocaine, and crack for evidence. Ironically, there was no smack anywhere in the house.

  Later, when Tony and Dom were back in their car heading in, Dom looked at his brother.

  “Man, I thought you were a goner when that dude burst out of there with that automatic blazing. You sure picked the right time to fall on your face.”

  “I didn’t fall. Somebody pushed me.”

  Dom shook his head. “Uh-uh. There wasn’t anybody near you to push you. I saw the whole thing.”

  “I’m telling you, somebody pushed me. I felt a hand on my back.”

  “And I’m telling you there was nobody there.”

  This good-natured wrangling continued all the way to the station house.

  In the backseat, the merest shadow of a little girl listened, and smiled.

  Chapter

  22

  THE STORY WAS ALL OVER the local news the next morning. However, Grace didn’t hear about it until she was about to ascend the bench. Franklin County Courthouse, in the middle of downtown Columbus, was a busy place so early in the day. There were lines at the metal detectors set up at every entrance, and uniformed sheriff’s deputies were busy poking through purses and briefcases that didn’t pass the X-ray test. Fortunately, the deputies knew Grace by sight and she was waved on through. Charging along traffic-packed corridors and riding crowded escalators to her courtroom, she did not have time to do more than acknowledge with a called-out word or two and a wave the greetings of her colleagues and acquaintances. It had been a hectic morning: The alarm had failed to go off—in all the excitement she must have forgotten to pull out the little button on the back of the clock—which had made them late to start with. She and Jessica rushed around, getting dressed, eating, doing the hundred and one tasks necessary before they could head out the door. At Jessica’s insistence, they had also taken a few minutes to search without success for Godzilla, who had not, as hoped, been lured from hiding by the sweet smell of chopped apple. Finally, instead of allowing Jessica to walk to school as she usually did, Grace had driven her. The steadily falling rain had provided a convenient excuse, although they both knew the truth that neither cared to put into words: even if the day had been as dry as a bone and they’d had all the time in the world, Grace would not have permitted Jessica to walk. She had already called Linda to make arrangements for Jessica to be picked up after school and driven home.