by Alan Mulak
Just outside of Lebanon, Pennsylvania, Alex stopped at The Dutchman’s Diner. This was a nothing special, country dinner like thousands of others scattered about all of North America. The neon sign out front blinked OPEN. A hand-written notice, hung if the front door read, HUNTERS WELCOME. A few trucks were parked in the muddy parking lot, but otherwise, business was slow.
Fortifying himself with a few more deep breaths, Alex opened the door and went in. He was immediately assaulted by the smell of strong coffee and frying bacon, which made his stomach flip a few times. Steadying himself against the coat rack, a matronly white-haired waitress that resembled someone’s portly mother called over to him, “Seat yourself. I’ll be right with you.”
The counter was empty, so he shuffled to the end and plopped onto the last stool. True to her word, the waitress waddled over and between snapping her gum and wiping her hands on a soiled apron, asked, “What can I get you?”
Alex looked at the grease board behind her, where the daily specials were written.
“Ah,” he began, “Let’s see. How about a coffee and the breakfast special.”
She poured a mug of black coffee, took his toast, meat, and egg preferences, and then off she went.
Alex held the mug with both hands, closed his eyes, and inhaled the aroma of coffee that was likely a few hours too old. Nonetheless, the fumes settled his stomach to the point where at the very least, he could eat the toast.
Then he heard it. Someone sat in the adjacent stool. Alex opened his eyes and looked into the mirror on the wall. Seated next to him was a policeman!
Alex turned toward the cop – who was a hulk of a man, at most twenty years old, but sporting a comically incompatible baby face – who smiled, and said, "Hey buddy."
Alex nodded, but inside his head, a voice shouted “A COP! HOLY SHIT!”
The waitress came over, and the officer said, "just coffee today Mildred." She poured and left.
“Glad that storm missed us this time,” he said to Alex. “Looks like you drove through it.”
“Oh?”
The cop pointed over his shoulder. “Is that your truck with the New Jersey plates out there?”
Alex, feeling panic on the rise again, turned in his seat. “Yeah. That’s mine.”
The cop shrugged. “The one covered with road salt?”
Alex forced a chuckle. “Yeah, that’s the one.”
"My job gets really hairy when we get whacked with a nor' easter. We lucked out."
Alex nodded knowingly.
Mildred came back, slid Alex’s breakfast onto the counter, refilled their mugs, and then departed.
“Just passin’ through?” The cop asked.
“Yeah. Going to try to make Ohio by nightfall.”
“Whew! You gotta ways to go.”
Alex nodded weakly.
“Got family out there?”
Alex blinked and tried to say something, but his throat tightened, and he could only make a choking sound. His stomach contracted painfully. He could feel sweat forming on his forehead. In the mirror, Alex caught the cop’s eye, who was frowning curiously.
Then, for a reason Alex never understood, he started talking. It was a well-rehearsed speech, as if someone pulled a string on a talking doll, and it took off on its own. Haltingly, at a hardly more than a whisper, Alex began. “No, no family. I’m headin’ west to start a new life. My father bought me a small place in Colorado. He thinks I can lick this PTSD think if I hang out along a mountain stream for a while.”
In the mirror, Alex watched the cops face. It instantly changed from suspicious to sympathetic. His mouth fell open. “Iraq?”
Alex nodded. “Fifth Armor.”
The cop exhaled and shook his head slowly. "My brother is a marine, and he was there during Desert Storm. He said the desert can really fuck you up at night.”
Alex felt his eyes welling up. He wanted to shout, "It's not true. I'm full of shit and just playing the injured veteran card. I'm just a schmuck who made some bad decisions, and now, I'm on the run!" But he didn't. Instead, he just stared at his coffee.
The cop drained his mug and placed a business card on the counter in front of Alex. “That’s my card. In your travels, if you get pulled over for any reason, hand this to the police officer, and ask him to call me. I’ll put in a good word for you.”
Then he gently patted Alex’s shoulder, and quietly, reverently, said, “Thanks for your service.” And then he turned and left.
In the mirror, Alex watched him get into his cruiser, and then drive off.
His hands were shaking so badly, he couldn’t hold his coffee cup. Mustering his composure, he pocketed the cop’s business card, tossed a few bills on the counter, and left. He had not touched his food.
Numbly, Alex waited five minutes then followed the cop outside, slid into his truck and started the engine.
If he turned left out of the parking lot, he’d be heading back to New England and Boston and all he knew. If he turned right, he’d be heading west toward his new life.
He turned right.
20
If It Quacks Like a Duck…
At roughly nine A.M. on a Tuesday, seven days after the explosion and fire, Lieutenant Brian Hurst of the Carlisle Police Department stood ankle deep in snow, extra-large black coffee in hand - staring at the collapsed and blackened remains of the Santos house. Hurst was not a tall man, about 5'-6", tidy, sporting a clipped goatee and professionally groomed short brown hair. He wore a full-length black tweed coat, collar turned up, and from time to time would switch the coffee cup between his hands in order to fend off the twenty degree cold. It was very quiet; no air was moving. His breath simply hung in front of his face.
Then, shattering the frozen silence of the January morning, a car with a noisy exhaust system and the music of ABBA’s Dancing Queen blaring away, came rumbling down the street and pulled to the curb behind where Hurst stood. Turning off the engine, the operator got out – driver's door badly in need of greasing - and walked across the yard. Hurst listened to the approaching steps crunching in the snow, and when they stopped behind him, without turning, he said, "Thanks for coming, Amanda.”
A woman’s voice said, “My pleasure, and just so you know, my fee is now five bills per site visit. Are you cool with that?”
“The cost of doing business.”
“My thoughts exactly.”
Hurst turned and faced his invited "consultant." She was taller than Hurst, wore high black leather boots, black leggings, a short, tight, black skirt with silver metallic patterns infused in the material, an oversized red leather coat with significant shoulders, and wire-rimmed glasses. Her wild brown hair – liberally marbled with white streaks - looked like she had just received an electric shock.
She handed Hurst an envelope. “My invoice.” The return address on envelope read: Amanda Wolfe, Crime Scene Analyst - Psychic Paranormal Investigator. He put it in his coat pocket.
She stepped back and studied Hurst. “Your aura is pulsing, indicating extreme conflict within.”
Hurst raised his eyebrows. “And that’s after only two cups of coffee.”
“I sense…I sense…part of you is deeply skeptical of my abilities, and in fact, you refer to me as a quack…but the other side of your emanation grudgingly acknowledges my success ratio - an impressive fourteen for sixteen at correctly identifying the paranormal nature of previous crime scenes.”
Hurst cocked his head. “My aura tells you all that?”
“Well, that,” she paused for a beat, then grinned. “Plus those were your exact words last time we worked together.”
Hurst almost smiled. “Yeah, well…”
Amanda buried her hands in her coat pockets and surveyed the scene. “It’s cold out here. Let’s get started.”
It was the same drill as always. While Hurst remained behind, sipping his coffee, trying to stay warm, Amanda strolled all around the property, carefully touching burned timbers, pausing at certain spots –
eyes closed – and then moving on. At one point, she bent over and looked closely at blood-spattered snow, removed her mittens and gently touched the spots. Then she straightened, closed her eyes, and paused for several beats.
As he watched her do her thing, he remembered the first time they worked together. It had to be ten years ago. A young girl, age six, had disappeared. Her parents had just gone through a particularly bitter divorce, and all the authorities were sure her father had snatched her, but when they finally caught up with him in Texas, it was a dead end. He hadn’t even been in Massachusetts when the girl vanished. No evidence whatsoever. So they regrouped, and now believing she had wandered off, searched the area around the house. They scoured the surrounding woods, brought divers to explore the nearby Concord River, and even imported bloodhounds to try to pick up a trail. Nothing. Then one day, Amanda showed up. Figuring what the hell, the chief let her loose. Hurst shook his head. He remembered being furious at his boss for using some whack job. This was a task for professionals. What the hell was he doing? But while he was ranting and raving, Amanda headed straight for a neighbor’s house, wherein an old, eccentric but well-meaning crone was holding the little girl for safekeeping…away from her coked-up, abusive mother. The kid was fine.
Two years later, they again employed Amanda Wolfe to snoop around the scene of a murder in the town's movie theater, this time with Hurst's reluctant blessing. The police had a dozen witnesses that swore Janet somebody, a popular high school cheerleader, was strangled in the girl's room by the star quarterback of the football team, the boyfriend whom she had just broken up with. The enraged boyfriend followed her into the girl's room, caught up with her, whacked her across the face, and then left by the same door. After she didn't re-emerge, witnesses went in and found her dead. What they did not see was the guy who made popcorn and cleaned up the rows of seats after the movie was over - who also made a habit of hiding in the girl’s room custodian’s closet, to sneak a peek from time to time – go out the bathroom window.
It took Amanda less than fifteen minutes to script the entire crime.
Still, Hurst wasn't entirely convinced.
It wasn’t until Amanda showed up at his desk in the police station one day, five years ago, and asked him to come with her for a little ride, that he changed his mind. They headed to the north side of town, and walked out to a collapsed barn, long abandoned, overgrown with a variety of weeds and berries. It was adjacent to the new town bike trail and Amanda, out for a midnight stroll, had sensed a presence in the area. For reasons he could not remember – it was, after all, five years ago – Hurst reluctantly agreed to pull apart the collapsed building to see what might be underneath. The next day they found the remains of a man Hurst had been searching for in connection with a series of unsolved armed robberies. The deceased, a local homeless man with a history of psychotic behavior, had apparently been using the barn as his hideout, and all the stolen loot was buried in the dirt floor. One night during a heavy wet snowstorm, the barn collapsed, and that ended the crimes, but Hurst had doggedly kept searching…in vain. From that moment on, he was a believer in her abilities.
Hurst sipped his coffee. Finally, Amanda Wolfe circled back to where Hurst stood. She said, “Let’s go sit in your car and warm up.”
They sat in the front seat of the black CPD Crown Vic, engine running, heater blasting. Hurst took out his thermos, poured a coffee for Amanda into the metal lid, and refreshed his own cup. “Did you feel anything out there?”
Amanda held the cup with both hands, took a sip, and recoiled. “This is awful. Got any sugar?”
“No.”
She took another sip. “Not feel, sense.”
“All right, did you sense anything out there?”
Amanda stared out the windshield for a long moment, and then said, “No.”
He waited.
She held out her cup, and Hurst poured her more coffee.
Amanda said, “There’s something hovering around the remains of the house, but it’s a different sense than the standard run of the mill crime scene.”
“Who said anything about a crime?”
Amanda looked at Hurst and blinked. “No crime? What was it then, an accident?”
“That’s what we’ve been told by the CFD, insurance jocks, and the state ME.”
Amanda blinked a few times, and then said, “No accident. I’m sure of that. Whatever took place here was no accident. This house,” she nodded in the direction of the wreckage, “did not come down by accident. No way.”
Another silent pause.
Hurst turned in his seat, his broad shoulders in the dark overcoat filling up the space, and looked at Amanda. “Can I ask you something?”
“Of course.”
“What is it you do out there? When you’re walking around the house? You and I both know I’m skeptical as hell, but your record speaks for itself. You do something when you’re on site. What is it? And this can be off the record if you want. I’m just curious.”
Amanda sipped the coffee and made a face. “You like this stuff?” Then she took another sip. “Have you ever been outside, in a meadow on a dark summer night –no clouds, no stars – and bats are flying around?”
Hurst scratched his ear. “I suppose so. Why?”
“The bats are black just like the sky. They make no sound, but you – or at least most people with a modicum of sensitivity to such things – can sense their presence. It’s nothing tangible but you know they’re there just the same, fluttering overhead, catching bugs. Follow?”
“Maybe.”
“Well, that’s what I do. I sense the presence of bats. But the bats I detect are actually the contrails or footprints left by energy…human energy. For some reason, I seem to be really good at picking up shreds of this stuff, and can often identify the emotion that accompanied the energy of the event. Does that make sense to you?”
“Not at all.” He squirmed a little as if the question hit too close to home. This was clearly something he could not even begin to understand.
“I’m not surprised,” Amanda said. "You're like a postage stamp…and have knowledge of width and length, but the concept of depth or thickness is foreign to you. It just isn’t part of your world, which to a degree surprises me because you’re a good cop. No offense of course.”
“None taken.”
“And me, I know all about thickness and depth, but width and length, no way. That’s your world. For example, something as simple as balancing a checkbook is simply impossible for me to comprehend, yet for you, it’s child play. Right?”
“Okay.”
“So now you understand?”
He exhaled, struggling to suppress his frustration. “Not at all.”
Amanda shrugged and smiled. “My point exactly.”
Hurst opened his mouth to say something, and then shut it, shaking his head.
Then Amanda said, “Okay, you’ve heard my assessment of the site out there, now it’s your turn.”
Hurst leaned on the steering wheel and stared at the blackened timbers. “Do you believe in coincidences?”
“No.” Amanda shook her head vigorously, her hair thrashing this way and that. “Absolutely not. There are no coincidences in the universe.”
“Me neither,” Hurst said. “I also don’t believe in the perfect storm.”
“How’s that?”
“Remember the tale about the Perfect Storm of 1991?” Hurst sat back but kept his hands on the steering wheel, drumming his fingers. “That particular storm was a rare combination of factors that individually, were plausible, but occurring all at the same time, resulted in pure disaster for anybody out on the ocean. That’s what we are supposed to believe happened here: a perfect accident storm.”
He turned, looked at Amada, and held up a finger. “First, a gas leak occurred in a relatively new and safe infrastructure, not like the antiquated junk we have under the streets in the city, but modern piping and valves and fittings. Gas leak? Possible but v
ery rare out here in the suburbs. And this leak was so bad, when it blew, it really blew.”
He held up a second finger. “Then, the cover to the gas valve was jammed tight, so the gas company couldn’t get it off to shut off the flow of gas. This resulted in a really hot fire, hot enough to destroy everything…including any evidence that would remain if this whole event was not an accident. Jammed lids? Happens from time to time, mostly caused by snowplow blades, but again, not very often."
He held up a third finger. “The wife and kids were away…Florida for some fun in the sun. Not so unusual I suppose, but why at the same time the leak and fire occurred. Another coincidence? Maybe.”
A fourth finger: “We have a big winter storm making it difficult for the fire trucks to get down this road. If you wanted all the clues to be incinerated, starting your fire on a snow day would be good insurance.”
The thumb. “Hubby decides to work at home that day. Again, happens once each week give or take. So that means there was a one in five chance he’d be here for the big bang. One in five is twenty percent. Those are poor odds. Another coincidence?”
Hurst put down his hand and went back to staring out the window. "And to top it off, the wife lied to my face. She told me she and hubby were lovebirds, and even shed a few tears while we were talking. Yet, everyone else who knew them says they were headed for divorce court. When I spoke with hubby's secretary – I think her name was Manuela - she told me the wife is, and I think this is an exact quote, ‘a wicked bitch that will stop at nothing to get what she wants.’”
Hurst scratched his short hair. "Why did wifey lie? I get really suspicious when people lie to me. There's always a reason." Another pause, then Hurst said, "This whole ‘big bang' scene stinks because everything is perfect, like a well-performed play. What happened here was the perfect storm of accidents."
Amanda shook her head. “I’m not sure what really took place here, but I am certain it was no accident.”