Dying to Play

by Mark Zubro

  The part of the door that could be unlatched and opened was halfway ajar.

  One pool of blood began just above his belt. The black hole in his forehead showed where the other entered.

  “Is he dead?” Murray rasped from the darkest corner where he’d sunk to his knees.

  I said, “Yes.” I was frightened and dismayed. I’d seen death before, and despite the comments of the office help, I was not used to corpses of those I’d made love to. He’d been vibrant in my arms not that many hours ago. Now he was dead, and there had been the hostile and menacing message on the machine.

  Murray was drawing ragged breaths. He said, “I may be sick.”

  “Puke in the bathroom.”

  He stumbled from shadow to shadow to the door and scrambled inside. While Murray heaved, I checked Czobel’s pockets. Nothing unusual.

  I heard the toilet flush. A few seconds later when Murray crawled out, even the little light that existed exaggerated his paleness.

  I said, “We should call the cops and wait for them.”

  “We can’t. We’re not supposed to be in here. Besides, Rotella, the police chief, hates me. He’d arrest me and you.”

  I hadn’t been much impressed with Rotella. I’d rather not have to deal with him.

  We stole to the half-open sliding screen door. Seconds later we crept outside. We huddled in the shadowed side of the balcony from which we could peer over the railing to the ground. The bit of the parking lot we could see was silent.

  Large trees grew on either side of the balcony. They were a long leap away from a possible climb down. So large and thick-limbed, they must have predated the building.

  “Less light than out any other door,” I whispered.

  “Can we climb down those trees?” Murray’s voice was hushed.

  I muttered, “We may have no choice.”

  My clothes clung at every fold and crease that came in contact with flesh. The puffs of breeze that reached us seemed to rearrange the humidity rather than bring relief. Clouds obscured the moon. Distant light glinted off the glass of several doors to our left and on a few of the tenants’ vehicles in the lot below.

  Murray’s voice trembled. “There’s no better way out?”

  “I didn’t see one.”

  I saw a distant flash. The other plate glass window shattered.

  “Holy shit,” Murray gasped.

  We dove to the floor. Another flash and a hole appeared in the wall six inches to my left. I thought I caught the sound of popcorn being popped at a far distance. The shooter had to be quite far away with a very powerful rifle.

  It was too dangerous to stay put. All other exits would be even more exposed. I pushed Murray deeper into the shadowed end of the balcony nearest the thickest tree limb. Darkness and the leaves of the tree would have to supply sufficient cover.

  Murray eyed the distance from balcony to tree. He said, “We’re going to jump that?”

  “We can’t go back.”

  “I can’t jump that.”

  “I’ll go first. I can give you a hand. Keep the trunk between you and the gunfire.” I figured Murray might know that, but I was reminding myself of it and felt the need to repeat it out loud.

  The line from the W.H. Auden poem flashed in my mind, “Look if you like, but you will have to leap.” No time for doubts when gunfire could resume at any second. I placed a hand on the nearest wall, put one foot over the railing, pulled the other after, teetered on the lip of the balcony for an instant and then leapt.

  The limb I clung to was at least a foot thick and held. I scrambled for a good hold then reached my hand back for Murray. He scuttled to the top of the railing and swayed there. He made as great a target as I must have. I heard shots. I couldn’t see their point of origin, but I heard several thunks into the limb between me and Murray. Splinters of wood shot by my left ear.

  I saw Murray’s right foot and hand begin to slide. Seconds later he began to fall. I grabbed for him. A bullet ripped into where my head was seconds before. The asshole shooting must have a night scope or a lot of dumb luck. I caught Murray’s wrist and stopped his fall, but my reach pulled me several inches lower and loosened my grip on the tree. Murray swung closer to the trunk and got another hold on the far side away from the shooter. I twisted to a small branch. Safe. I moved five inches to my left so as much of the limb as possible was between me and where I best judged the point of origin of the shots to be.

  After several moments of catching our breaths and tense waiting, Murray asked, “Now what?”

  “We can’t stay here. The killer could move closer or simply change his angle. We’ve got to try and get to the pavement and back to the car.”

  We scrambled the rest of the way down the tree as fast as we could. Murray slipped again. I caught him, but I lost his wrist when we were about ten feet from the ground. He landed with a thump and a yelp in the last inches of shadow cast by the condo. I clambered after him. “Hush,” I urged him. I put out a hand. He huffed and panted, but didn’t say anything.

  I listened for a few moments, then put my lips next to his ear and whispered, “You okay?”

  “I think I’m shot.”

  “Where?”

  He patted his left thigh. I leaned close. His pants were ripped from hem to crotch. A tree branch a thumb width’s wide protruded two inches out of his upper leg. I couldn’t see how much was inside.

  “I can’t move.”

  I took off my T-shirt, wadded it into a ball, and held it toward his mouth and said, “Bite on that.”

  “What?”

  “Do it!”

  He bit.

  I left the splinter in. I wedged my shirt around the splinter, his leg, and his jeans to keep the wound from being exacerbated. Blood oozed, but didn’t fountain. Nothing vital hit. Probably. I grabbed my T-shirt back, wrapped it around my hand, and applied pressure. His head lolled for a moment, but he rallied. Moments later, I removed my hand. I saw only small trails of blood. I tied the T-shirt around his leg, more as a bandage than a tourniquet. “Can you stand?”

  He tried to get up and fell back with a cry.

  I said, “We’re too exposed here.” I half dragged, half carried him behind the tree trunk. We hunched down in the relative safety of the two foot wide bole and a mild declivity in the ground.

  “What the fuck?” he asked.

  “I agree,” I said. We were both breathing hard.

  He said, “We’re outside. Now we can call the police.”

  I pulled out my cell phone. It was fully charged. I tried calling Duncan. I got the annoying beep that indicated I was out of the service region. I’d gotten the most wide coverage of any calling plan I could find. Even in the Rocky Mountains driving west it usually worked. But there were exceptions. This was one of them. I tried pressing buttons. The damn thing wasn’t about to work. Technology is not always our friend.

  “My phone won’t get service.”

  “Lots of them don’t,” he said. He reached in his pocket. His hand came back empty. “I must have dropped my cell phone in the condo.”

  WEDNESDAY 12:24 A.M.

  That’s why I work alone.

  Not much choice. I climbed the tree with caution that would have made my Navy SEAL instructor proud. Through the heavy humidity, over the rail, past the dead body, into the bedroom. Nothing shone in the moonlight.

  I realized that I should erase the answering machine message. So maybe it was good that Murray dropped his phone. I eased through the condo, found the offending technology, and pressed delete.

  I retraced our steps. Back in the third floor bedroom, I crawled along the shadowed floor and used my hands to brush the strands of carpet. Nothing. I eased into the bathroom. I tried the flashlight. Next to the toilet I saw a gleam of plastic. His phone was in shards covered in puke. I used a quarter of a roll of toilet paper to encase the mess then retraced my steps. I’d be tempted to throttle the reporter myself, if he was even still alive when I got back down, or hadn’t b
een captured, or passed out from his wound, or crawled away, or given us away. After observing everything outside and in, I swung off the balcony and clambered back down the tree trunk. I saw no flashes of light. I heard no thunks of bullets striking.

  “What took you so long?” he asked.

  I dumped the dampened shards of his phone in Murray’s lap.

  He caught the whiff and began to toss it away.

  I said, “It’s evidence of where we were. Just hang on to it.”

  Luckily, he was all puked out.

  WEDNESDAY 12:39 A.M.

  I checked all angles and directions. Nothing.

  “How come we can’t hear the shots being fired?” Murray asked.

  “You heard the faint noise in the distance like popping corn?”

  “Sort of.” He paused. “That was it?”

  “Most likely. My guess is somebody’s using a rifle with a night scope. I can’t tell if we’re lucky he or she missed, or if the shooter was simply trying to scare us.”

  “If they were trying to scare us, it worked. I don’t know why I didn’t piss my pants.”

  I said, “Please don’t.”

  We were now on the far side of the complex from his car. Up against the building, if we tried to move left, we would be in light for at least ten or fifteen feet before we got to the next shadows. A car length away to our right a six foot high fence ran from the building toward the woods beyond the edge of the complex. The light between us and the fence in that direction was less. Deep shadows clustered under the fence.

  I said, “I don’t want to stay here and wait for a killer to sneak up on us. We can’t move fast, and I don’t want to be a target, but a moving target is better than a sitting duck target.”

  He nodded, tried to stand, gasped and fell to the ground.

  I said, “I’m going to carry you.”

  “Okay.”

  I hefted him onto my shoulder in a fireman’s carry, and hustled to the right. We managed the distance to the fence without getting shot. Above the fence we could see the glow from the lights in front of the condo. The lights might be fairly feeble, but they were positioned just wrong for an attempt to climb the fence. While going that way, if we tried going over the top, we would be perfect targets in full view of whoever was firing. With Murray’s leg it would be a further risk getting him over fast enough to come out of this unharmed. The far end of the fence stopped about forty feet from the woods where the shots had originated. A couple cars dotted the parking lot between the end of the fence and the woods.

  I said, “I think we should head for those woods.”

  “Isn’t that where the shots were coming from?”

  “Yes, but any other way we go is going to lead us into brighter light or away from cover. If we go there, we equalize things. We’re closer to the woods here than from the spot I thought the shots came from in the woods.”

  “What if he’s moving?”

  “You can stay if you want.”

  “Unless he’s waiting at the end of the fence.”

  “That’s not where the shots came from originally. We need to keep moving.”

  “Don’t you have a gun?”

  “Yes.” I’m always armed. I don’t make a big deal about it.

  “Why don’t you shoot back?”

  “There isn’t much point when we’re this far away. The flash of light from my gun would give away our position. At this distance, I’m unlikely to hit anything. He can aim at the flash and very possibly hit something.”

  “Can’t you do the same thing with him?”

  “I’ve got a hand gun. It doesn’t have the range of a rifle. I don’t have a night scope. It’s quite a distance to where he is. The shots are coming too close for them to be simple random attempts to scare us, or maybe he’s an excellent shot who is doing an excellent job of scaring the hell out of us.”

  Murray gulped and turned from pale to ghostly white. For a few seconds I thought he might be sick again, but he rallied.

  I said, “If we were at the end of the fence nearest the woods, I would be more likely to be effective if I needed to start shooting.”

  Murray said, “We’ve got to get from here to the woods? I’m not sure I can make it.”

  “We can get to the end of the fence until we’re close to those cars, then dash for their cover, then run behind and between them until we get to the woods.”

  “Why don’t we knock on one of the doors of the complex and get somebody to call the cops?”

  “Every doorway is in the brightest light around here and being there would make us excellent targets. Do you really want to debate this now or do you want to try to get the hell away?”

  “You might be used to this, I’m not. I’m scared. Aren’t you?”

  I stood up. “Let’s go.”

  “Hey, wait.” He grabbed my arm. He hesitated a second or two then stood up. I braced his arm. He tested his leg, winced, gasped, and said, “Let’s do it.”

  We did a three-and-a-half-legged race. At the end of the fence, we paused a moment. “Ready?” I asked.

  “As I’ll ever be.”

  We ran, hopped, reached the first car, and crouched behind the back fender. He panted hard. His teeth were gritted tight shut. A few times I thought he pushed the contact a little more than was necessary for propping him up. Then again, he didn’t try to grab my crotch or pinch my ass or ask for my underwear.

  Murray unclenched his teeth enough to ask, “Is he gone?”

  I suspected it was a nervous question rather than a request for definitive knowledge.

  I said, “We’ve got twenty feet of space between the last car and the start of the woods. Under the trees we’ll be in shadows. We can make it.” We dashed between the cars until we got to the last one, a purple Lexus.

  “You ready?”

  “Yes.”

  “Go.” Arms linked, we dashed-hopped over the last bits of open ground. The pavement ended, and we entered the welcome darkness. Once we were off the pavement, I slowed us down. When we were three strides inside the trees, a tremendous boom split the night followed about fifteen seconds later by another.

  WEDNESDAY 1:05 A.M.

  “Are they shooting?” Murray asked.

  I wasn’t sure what it was. I’d seen no flash, and it didn’t sound like gunfire. “Keep moving,” I said.

  Fifteen more feet into the woods, I stopped behind a tree and listened. Murray leaned close enough to me so that I could smell his breath. Coffee mixed with faint whiffs of garlic.

  “Now what?” he whispered.

  “Hush.”

  It was an old forest with thick-trunked trees excellent for hiding behind or being snuck up on from. I made sure we were not silhouetted against any of the lights, no matter how dim, from the complex we’d run from.

  Right after the boom the night went silent, but now an owl felt a need to comment, a few crickets annoyed the night, a raven complained, mosquitoes whined. The symphony of insects of a summer night in the woods surrounded us. I stood frozen until I was sure I hadn’t heard anything out of place. I inched my head around the tree first left then right peering into the darkness both ways. I felt a few mosquitoes begin to land. I squashed them without making noise.

  The shooter could be as likely as we were to be using the forest for cover. I heard tree limbs rustling and fits of a breeze interrupting the repose of summer leaves. The lights of the complex illumined bits of condo walls. I neither saw nor sensed any human movement.

  Murray whispered, “Somebody must have heard those booms. What were they?”

  “I don’t know. They came from the front of the complex. If someone heard them and called the cops, it’ll help. We need to circle around through the woods.”

  “What if we run into the shooter circling around the other way?”

  “If he doesn’t kill us, we’ll know who it is.”

  “That’s not comforting.”

  “I have a gun.”

  “It hasn�
�t done a lot of good so far.”

  “We’re not dead yet.”

  Flitting, listening, and limping from tree trunk to tree trunk, we described a quarter circle around the vast complex. Sometimes for yards the ground squished under our feet, the leftovers of the swamp that had been mentioned. We stumbled on occasional rocks left over from when the last glacier visited. When we could see Murray’s car, the front and rear windshields looked like a thousand stars glinted off them. All four tires were flat.

  “What the hell?” Murray asked.

  I shrugged. I didn’t need to detail the obvious. There was no one in sight. I stopped to let my breathing ease back to normal. As near as I could tell, we were about where the shots had come from. It was a small rise and this vantage point gave the killer a view of the front and back parking lots. If he’d climbed a tree to shoot, his view might have been unobstructed for miles. Skeen’s condo had been at the near end of the complex with other condos beyond it. Since the booms, I’d heard nothing but the sounds of nature.

  Murray spoke up. “You may be used to this kind of thing, but I’m not.” His voice had an unpleasant whine in it. “What are we waiting for?”

  I said, “I’m trying to decide if it’s safe. This is the spot where the shooter most likely fired from. I didn’t hear or see anything human all the way around to here. Did you?”

  “No.”

  “But I’m not sure we’re safe yet.”

  “Why don’t we just walk through the woods the other way?”

  “How many miles is it to safety that way?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “The shooter would have complete cover. We could be stalked for miles.”

  “How much longer do we wait?”

  I said, “You don’t have to wait at all. You can leave any time you want.”

  “You don’t have to get sarcastic,” Murray said.

  “You don’t have to ask impossible questions.”

  A Butterfield cop car pulled into the parking lot and began making a reconnaissance. It stopped next to Murray’s car. The cop flicked on his spotlight and shone it on Murray’s damaged windows. When another police car drove up and stopped. Both cops got out. They walked around Murray’s car. I put my gun away. “Let’s go,” I said.