by Brad Cooper
Silence.
Lisa was left with lonesome panic of her thoughts.
Returning to the back door of the house, Lisa peered through the thin curtain covering the window that faced the parking lot where she had just witnessed the scene that replayed relentlessly in her mind’s eye. The officers were gone, as was the body of the slain officer, but the helicopter remained. There was not a soul in sight. The eerie sounds of the crickets echoed in the darkness that encompassed the surrounding world. Her first instinct was to ensure her own safety. The sound of the camera breaking as she fell surely drew attention to her, albeit momentarily, as did the sound of her closing the door as she fled into her home. They had to know someone was there but did they know who, or where? Of that she could not be certain. Lisa knew only that she had to get to a safer location as quickly as she could, whenever that was, before those involved could have a chance to get to her.
Ryan and Adam were asleep when the loud and persistent knocks came at the front door. Because Adam’s bedroom door was always kept open, was of the closest proximity to the front of the house, and because he was also a light sleeper, he was the one to answer door. His latest significant other stood on the other side of the same door, sweat across her forehead, her breathing short but accelerated, as if she was a victim in a horror movie and a knife-wielding masked murderer was just steps behind her.
“Adam! Adam, thank God!” Lisa said, throwing her arms around Adam’s neck, as Clark entered the room, tying his dark blue plush bathrobe.
“Lisa, it’s one in the morning. What are you doing here?” Adam asked. He squinted as his eyes adjusted to the light from the lamp on the table that Clark had turned on.
“Something happened and I… I saw it… he’s dead. He’s dead! They just shot him and…” she said hysterically, pacing around the room and bumping into furniture with every turn.
Adam ran a hand through his disheveled blonde hair and said, “Wait, wait, wait. Slow down! Who got shot? What’s going on?”
“Over… at… the… police station…” she said, trying to catch her breath. “I saw it! There was an argument and a fight, and they shot him! He just slumped down!”
“Who slumped down? Who shot him? You still haven’t told me anything.”
“It was one of the officers!”
Adam’s head was clearing quickly. “A cop got shot? One of ours? Who shot him?” he asked.
“Another policeman! There were like three of them there but I don’t know if they were all policemen and that helicopter was over there too! That’s where it went.”
“This is giving me a headache,” Clark said, rubbing his eyes then his temples. “What’s with the grass stains on your PJ’s?”
Lisa’s breathing was finally close to normal when she continued. “I was in the backyard and that’s where I saw it.”
“You told me you were tired, so I take you home and you spend your time in the backyard watching cops argue and fight? I’m not following you,” Adam said curiously.
“I couldn’t sleep. Those guys were yelling and arguing so I went outside to see what was going on and saw them yelling and starting to fight each other. It was getting bad so I got my camera and…”
“You what?” Adam asked.
“I got my camera and…”
“Why?” Adam asked. “You’re not making any sense!”
“I don’t know! I just did it. It looked like it was getting out of control and I thought something might happen. So they started arguing and fighting, and after a couple of minutes a gun went off or something and one of them just fell down. I tried to get back into the house but I fell and my camera broke and I don’t know if they heard me so…”
“Wait. Was it your video camera?” Ryan asked.
“Yeah. Anyway, I grabbed the tape and my camera and ran back in the house. They had to have heard me or something. I mean I fell and broke the camera then I closed the door in a hurry. I didn’t know what to do and I didn’t want to stay there so I came over here. I just…”
“Alright. Did you bring the tape with you?”
Lisa reached into her handbag and pulled out the video cassette, a piece of wet soil on top of the plastic shell. “Here… here it is. I grabbed the adapter before I left. I don’t know what to do with it or…” Her hand shook as she handed it to Clark.
“Don’t worry about it. Adam, take her downstairs and get her cleaned up a little. Make her something to eat, or get her a drink, whatever she needs. Just calm her down. I’ll figure out what’s on this tape and what we need to do next. This is a mess.”
“I’m sorry, Ryan. I just didn’t know where to go. I thought they might have heard me and came over and…” Lisa said, sniffling as she sat on the couch.
Clark sat beside her with his arm rested across her shoulders. “Don’t think anything of it. It’s fine. We’re just glad you came here. We’ll figure it out. Go with Adam, alright? I’ll handle this.”
Adam helped Lisa to her feet as Ryan placed the small cassette into the VHS adapter and pushed it into the VCR. He rewound the tape several minutes, according to the counter, and pressed the play button. The snowy picture became dark and flickered as the tracking cleared the picture before the darkness emphasized the image in the center of the picture. The sound was faint, and the picture slightly blurred, but the figures were unmistakable. They were the same peace officers that Clark had seen around his hometown his entire life and in the middle was the distinctive figure of Chief Darrell Sparks.
“Wait a little bit and call an ambulance. Tell them we got an officer down and they need to get over here quick. Nothing else. We’ll figure everything else out tomorrow, get our stories straight. Go on, get outta here.” Sparks watched Lilly turn and walk out of the office before sitting down in the chair behind his desk. It had been five minutes since he had walked to the sink and washed the blood from his hands, the blood of a fellow officer that was alive only a couple of hours earlier. He felt his heart sink as he’d done so. For the moment, Ray Kessler’s lifeless body lay outside of the building and out of view. It would be moved back after the ambulance was called.
“Darrell, we got a problem,” Amick said as he entered the office.
Exasperated, Sparks said, “Great. Whatta we got now, Frank?”
“You know that girl that lives in the house over there?”
“Oh, sweet Moses, Frank, I don’t have time to play games with you. There are a lot of girls in a lot of houses around here. Which one?”
“The one we thought might have seen something.”
Sparks sat up in his chair and leaned forward. “Yeah? What about her?”
“She just jumped in her car and tore out of here like her ass was on fire. I don’t know where she’s headed but I bet she seen something. She had to have, or she wouldn’t be cuttin’ out of here at this time of night.”
“I bet she’s over at the Clark boy’s house. The Walton kid’s staying over there now too and I’ve seen them all over there before. You better go over there and check. In fact, I saw the Walton kid’s 4-Runner drop her off earlier. Get over there, Frank.”
“What do you want me to take?”
“Take your car. They see a cruiser and they’ll know that we know and I’m too tired for this foolishness tonight. Just go see what’s going on but don’t go up to the door or nothing.”
“You got it, Chief. Back in a few.”
The sound on the video cassette was not quite that of a digitally remastered compact disc from the latest musical act that had gone platinum. Most of the speech in the opening minutes was barely audible. Bits and pieces of sentences made their way to the camera’s microphone but all of them seemed more like incidental background noise rather than the intended focus of the imagery. Then the camera shook as Lisa slowly rose to a crouch to move closer. The seemingly short distance made all the difference as the words became clearer and the picture sharper.
Clark watched as the scene that Lisa described minutes before play
ed out before his eyes. The shouting became a scuffle, which became a full-scale brawl, before everything stopped with a single gunshot. Even Lisa’s startled gasp could be heard as the picture once again trembled when she rose to her feet to run into her home.
Then the images stopped.
Clark’s heart pounded as his mind tried to gain a foothold on what it had just been subjected to viewing. Ryan Clark had just watched the murder of a police officer by three other police officers. This was not something that happened in real life. It was something rarely seen on television or in a movie. Children are taught to respect officers of the law and told that they are good people who work to protect and serve civilians. Where did this belong in that concept? Cops killing cops was not the norm in a metropolitan area, much less a town like Spring Creek where police officers were, by and large, there until retirement and a part of the community for much longer, before and after their service.
Clark rose from his seat on the couch and walked to the top of the stairs leading to the basement. “Adam, get up here,” he shouted.
Adam walked up the stairs, paused long enough to offer Clark a quizzical look, and sat on the couch. “What’s going on?”
“We’ve got a problem, brother. A big problem.”
“Which is?”
“She’s telling the truth. One hundred percent.”
“Yeah, I figured that much. She doesn’t lie to me, at least not yet anyway. We’re not serious enough for the lies to start.”
“I don’t think you’re getting this,” Clark said with raised eyebrows. He sat beside Adam and pressed rewind on the VCR’s remote control.
After several seconds Clark played the tape for a second time, giving Walton his first glimpse of the scenes on the tape. Adam jumped at the sound of the gunshot. Clark closed his eyes and scratched his head, void of any desire to try to understand the scene for a second time.
Adam took a deep breath and closed his eyes momentarily before looking up at Clark. “Man, what the hell? Cops don’t kill cops. What’d that guy do?” he said. “This is insane.”
“That’s an understatement. Something else has to be going on here, too. So far we’ve got a dead cop, a helicopter that keeps showing up, no explanation for either, and a witness to it all sitting downstairs. What’s going to happen with this? Think about it. If a cop kills a cop, who do they call? Who is going to tell? I feel like I’m going to wake up to my alarm in a minute.”
“No kidding.”
Clark exhaled slowly before standing. “Rewind the tape for me. I’ll be right back.”
“Where are you going?”
“I’m getting a blank,” Clark said as he walked down the hall.
“A blank? What for?”
“Just rewind it. I’ll be right back,” he said from the hallway.
Clark walked back into the room thirty seconds later, holding a blank VHS cassette in his hand, the cellophane wrap only half removed. He removed the remainder of the packaging and placed the blank into the right side of the dual-deck VCR.
“Is it rewound?” Clark asked, looking at Adam.
“Yeah, but why are you…”
“Look we don’t know what’s going on. Lisa said she fell, right? And she made noise shutting the door?”
“Right.”
“Well, for one, they easily could have heard her out in the yard. She’s right to be worried about that. Maybe not, but maybe they did. They could have seen her with the camera and not let on. We don’t know what’s happening right now and I’m pretty glad we don’t to be perfectly honest. So I’m copying this thing and putting it somewhere else. Maybe I’ll take it to Kara’s and stash it or something. I don’t know.”
“I understand that much but what are we supposed to do now? As in right now.”
“First, we keep an eye out for anything and everything tonight, and we read the paper tomorrow and watch the news in the morning. We see if anything is mentioned and, if it is, we think about where to go from here.” Clark turned toward the front door when he heard the sound of a siren in the distance. It was the distinct siren of an ambulance. “Sounds like somebody already knows about it.”
Adam ran his hand through his hair and then flattened it with his hand. “You’re right. We’ll figure things out in the morning. I’ll go sit with Lisa or something, get her settled down, and tell her she needs to stay here tonight. I doubt she’d want to go back anyway.”
Clark again turned his head to the front door toward the sound of loose gravel scraping against asphalt at a slow rate. No headlights were visible but only automobiles made such a distinctive noise. Footsteps could not cover the same amount of space in the same amount of time. “Go tell Lisa to stay in the basement and lock the door when you come back up. Hurry,” Ryan whispered.
“What the…”
“Go. Now!” Clark whispered again emphatically.
Adam rushed downstairs and returned in a span of fifteen seconds, only to see that Clark had not moved. It seemed that he had not even breathed although Adam knew that could not possibly be true. “Okay what’s going on here, man?”
“Somebody’s out there. I heard gravel moving out there.”
Disbelievingly, Adam said, “Gravel? You heard gravel moving? I think you need to settle down. You’re getting paranoid, bud.”
“No, I’m not. Look outside.”
“Outside?”
“Yeah.”
Clark slowly moved toward the curtain-covered windows with Adam a step behind him. The world outside was completely dark, the light of the streetlight not bright enough to reach the area around the house. The front of the house had two small windows on the front. Clark stood at the window closest to the front door, while Adam stood at the window to his left. They slowly pulled the edge of the curtain back almost simultaneously and saw the exact same thing at the edge of the road.
Clark had not just been paranoid. He had not been hearing things. What he’d seen and heard was all too real.
At the edge of the road was a 1968 Ford Mustang GT California Special, a classic muscle car from nearly forty years ago. It was fully restored and was the pride and joy of its owner, who had spent five years of his life restoring it. Many of his summer weekends were spent winning trophies at car shows within several states in a three-hundred-mile radius. It was unmistakable.
The car was the personal automobile of Frank Amick.
CHAPTER
8
Ryan and Adam watched Amick’s car roll to a stop before the figure in the driver’s seat stepped outside to look around the immediate vicinity. Unseen, Lisa slowly opened the door behind them and approached, touching Clark’s shoulder as he kept an eye on the activity outside.
“Get in the basement. Now!” Clark said quietly but sternly, hurrying Adam and Lisa toward the stairs.
“Why? What’s going on? Is there somebody…” Lisa asked as Clark guided her toward the doorway.
“Come on. Everything’s fine. Just go downstairs. All three of us. Let’s go.”
Adam and Lisa rushed down the stairs with Ryan only a few steps behind after closing and locking the door. The day had been long and the two hours of sleep he had enjoyed before being awakened was hardly enough to rejuvenate him. Clark was wearing a white t-shirt and black basketball shorts, proper apparel for sleeping but not for the current events of the early morning. Adam was dressed in a similar fashion since his circumstances were nearly identical.
Adam sat in an old office chair with Lisa on his lap, her head resting against his, her arms around his neck and shoulders. Ryan paced the floor, trying to make sense of the last hour of his life and thinking of a solution to their current problem. Why was a police officer sitting outside his house, he asked himself, and in his personal car, no less? What had he just watched on the tape that Lisa brought with her? How much do they think she knows? They must think she knows something or else they wouldn’t be outside of his house at three o’clock in the morning.
“Tell us what’s
going on out there, Ryan. You sure got us down here in a hurry,” Lisa said.
“It’s Frank Amick. I’d know that car anywhere. He lives for that car.”
“He babies that thing year-round. It’s probably why his wife left him,” Adam said. “He loves the car more than he loved her.”
“Wait!” Lisa interjected. “Who’s Frank Amick?” She looked at Adam and waited for an answer.
“Local cop. He’s been here for years. As long as I can remember and I’ve been here all my life.”
Ryan took in a deep breath and exhaled. “He’s also one of the nice men you saw on that tape,” he said, running his hand over his buzz cut hair.
“The tape? You mean he’s the one who…”
“I don’t know. It could have been any of them,” Adam said. “We saw three of them on there. It may not have been him that fired the shot but he was there and that’s bad enough by itself.”
“The tape,” Ryan said under his breath, his eyes closed momentarily. “I left it upstairs. Lisa, was there anything else on that tape?”
“Yes. Everything else from tonight is at the beginning. You guys playing chess, messing around with Kara, everything. It was still in the camera so I just grabbed it and starting recording.”
“How long is the tape?” Adam asked.
“An hour. It should be about full.”
“Okay, we’ll stay down here a while. We have to let that tape finish copying anyway. They don’t know you even have a tape or anything. They don’t really know what you saw, or if you saw anything.”
“They think she knows something. There wouldn’t be a morally bankrupt pig sitting out there if they didn’t,” Adam said.
“No joke. We’re staying down here a while regardless.”
Darrell Sparks hated unnecessary drama. It was something he avoided at all costs. The events of the last several hours had been, to say the least, unforeseen. The Tochigis would not appreciate the attention that was surely going to be focused on the town and there was no telling how long it would remain. The shooting of a police officer was big news regardless of where it happened. The media feasted on these events. Thankfully, the inevitable blitz of reporters and cameras was still several hours away.