Black Cat Weekly #36

RUN DON’T RUN, by Mary Saums-1

RUN DON’T RUN,

by Mary SaumsThe Barb Goffman Presents series showcases

the best in modern mystery and crime stories,

personally selected by one of the most acclaimed

short stories authors and editors in the mystery

field, Barb Goffman, for Black Cat Weekly.

The replay’s always the same. An old man, skinny dude, hugs the corner of a building ahead. He steps from darkness into the low light of a closed store’s window. He carries a brown bag. His tweed hat and suit jacket shine from wear. His stiff shuffle does not hurry, does not lag.

His eyes lie. They’re good at it. At his age, it comes natural. They stare straight ahead, do not blink. They pretend not to see me, that everything is fine, that there’s no hurry, that he sees nothing. I understood this part but not the whole lie, hidden well by a master but so obvious to me now.

Traffic stills in my memory as his soft footsteps fade in the distance behind me. A long beat of thicker quiet hangs in the night, a hesitation, just before a click, ahead and to my left. I see an arm in slow motion coming out straight from behind a car, swiveling to point and squeeze, the barrel flash, the hit like a grizzly knocking me down and sitting on my chest, suffocating, pressing me into the asphalt like it was water, great claws ripping into my heart, drowning me, pushing a lost memory to the surface. Then cold, then darkness. I thought I was gone.

I came back gradually to lights and sounds. Not the light of heaven or songs of angels welcoming me to my reward. Painful fluorescents overhead stung my eyes. Sirens and ambulance shrieks. Yelling, car horns, garbage trucks. Chicago.

Louder and closer was the fool yammering of my partner, Detective George Ehrman, talking about the good food in the cafeteria, for Christ sakes, about how he’d been at the hospital every minute he wasn’t on duty. At this, my eyes adjusted enough to see that the nurse standing on the other side of my bed was white. She came into focus as she leaned closer. Young and pretty. Her expression, eyes widening, lips tightening with patience, confirmed what George said, that he’d been a constant annoyance.

My mouth must have twitched. She smiled back at me and said, “You’re at Saint Joseph, Mr. Crosby. You’re going to be fine. Rest.”

Even then, as early as that, the plan was in my head. Every word George spoke, going on about how lucky I was, how the bullet grazed a rib, nothing else, about the time he got shot and his life passed before his eyes. All of it made things clearer, more sure in my mind.

“Like a reel of film,” he said. “Everybody I ever knew, special days, days when nothing happened, all three-D and in color, the whole thing. You know the weird part? This feeling, like God was telling me everything was all right. No fire and brimstone over not going to confession. I’d had a good life. No regrets. I was ready to go. Anything like that happen to you?”

I managed to croak out a few words. “No, man. Nothing like that.”

He talked nonstop. I pushed my thoughts away for later. I persuaded him to go home, that I was fine.

The hospital noises in the hall became more familiar and more hushed. I slept hard and woke up in the dark. The nurse came in to change the IV bag. Then I was left alone in the quiet to consider.

When I’d thought I was about to die, there’d been no movie. No feeling that it was all good, that I could go into the great beyond happy. George said he’d had no regrets. Regrets were about all I had. They hit me as I lay in that hospital bed like a second bullet. The force slapped my insides awake, like my soul had been in hibernation. I saw the whole of my life in one strange scene from thirteen years earlier.

I was eighteen, just out of high school, with a bus ticket out of Mississippi in my pocket. I had cousins living in Chicago who said they could get me a job and I could stay with them until I was on my feet. I told my father the night before I was going to leave. He didn’t have much to say.

The next morning before I went to the station, I walked down to the riverbank to tell him goodbye. He hung out there every day with a bunch of other old sots who pretended to fish. I stood next to him a while, neither of us saying anything, just watching the corks bob in the water, before he told his buddies.

“My boy here is leaving.” He put his hand on my shoulder. A couple of the fishermen turned and said, “That right?” and “Whereabouts you going?”

I said, “Chicago,” and while some made friendly comments, one old man turned toward me in his ratty lawn chair and fixed me with a hard stare.

“Lots of dust up there. Lots of wind. And a whole lotta concrete.” He moved his fishing pole to his left hand and reached down with his right. His fingers dug into the ground and came up with a ball of red-and-black soil. “It’s a cold, cold place.” He looked up and held his hand out toward me. “This is who you are, young son. Don’t forget.”

Crazy old drunk, I thought. And I did forget. The city’s excitement pulled me in from the first minute I stepped off the bus.

Five years later, I was a rookie in the police department. Got married but it didn’t last. I loved my job. Thought it would be enough. It wasn’t. Earlier brushes with death in the line of duty had not deterred me. This time, I realized I was not immortal. Even my love of the city was about gone. As I lay in the hospital, that bony fist of dirt, the pungent smell of fish and the river and the past kept rising up before me.

The day I was released from the hospital, George waited outside the exit doors when the attendant rolled my wheelchair to the curb. A good breeze from the lake pushed us along to his car. Jackhammers in the parking lot make it hard to hear each other. We drove past a construction site where the high keen of cutting metal sliced through the air. I looked up to rusted trestles. The el screeched by me one last time.

* * * *

A different metal-on-metal scratching twanged in the breeze and blew into my car on the way to the river. It was the healing kind, a sweet sound that made me grin as I drove through the countryside. It moved and slid around, sorrowful and jubilant, went through my chest and wrapped around me like it was part of the sunlight, or maybe the midday heat was making it wave up out of the fields before it floated down and out over the Pearl River.

I’d settled into small-town life again. I took a sandwich every day for lunch and drove out to a picnic spot past Jester Dupree’s land, hearing him playing slide on one of his guitars he’d made from scraps. Neither he nor his house could be seen from the main road. It made no difference. His improvisations carried for miles here, where the terrain was flat. The locals could picture him easily. Didn’t need to see him to know he was sitting under his tree. Didn’t need to see his big hands, gnarled from old age and six or seven decades of farm work, somehow became young again when he played.

This particular day, six years after I left Chicago, he wasn’t in top form. He kept starting and stopping and missing notes. The tunes sounded like he was aggravated with himself or that his mind was on something else. Didn’t matter to me. His playing eased the job I had to do. After I had my lunch, I’d be on my way down the road to serve a warrant.

I’d joined the sheriff’s department when I came back to Mississippi, still in Allmon County, where I was raised. Now I lived in Solley, the county seat. A few years after I moved home, when the old sheriff died, I filled in and then got the job in the next election.

When the music stopped, I sat a little longer at the picnic table in the shade. Then I gathered my trash, got into the patrol car, and drove east about a mile to a rental house on the water.

I wasn’t looking forward to confronting the man I came to see. As much as I hated the thought, Terrell Long was probably here in Mississippi because of me.

I knew Terrell in Chicago. Not friends. I busted him for peddling dope a dozen or more times from a juvie on up. He was the kind of kid who lied every time he opened his mouth. Was known to cheat people who helped him. Fought and argued for no reason.

In spite of these things, Terrell had a certain charm that made me want to believe he had potential. He was still a screwup, still had a mean streak when he got drunk, but he was one who might make something of himself one day, legally, if he could just get his s**t together and grow up.

I hadn’t given him a thought in years when he showed up a few days earlier in Solley at my office. There he was, in the middle of August, wearing a yellow polyester shirt and yellow plaid pants and sweating like a hog. I watched him through the window, stretching out of the car, looking as out of place as an alien from Mars. He appraised the surrounding buildings with a disapproving eye before doing a city strut down the sidewalk and into the building.

He leaned into the frame of my office door, fanned himself with a thin-brimmed summer hat, smiling like he’d hit the lottery.

“Well, well. Sheriff. How ’bout that.” He was a man now, probably twenty-seven if I figured right, but still looked like an undernourished kid.

“Terrell. You’re a long way from home.”

“On vacation. Actually, I’m on my way to New Orleans. Got a new place down there. Thought I’d take a side trip to see your domain.” He looked around the walls, nodding. “Nice. Looks like you’re staying. Hard to believe.”

“How did you know I was here?”

“Oh, you know me. I always keep up with people.”

We walked outside together. He wiped a handkerchief across his brow and put his hat on. He said he had gone straight. I didn’t ask for specifics. I tried to ignore the hint of worry in the back of my mind. I wished him luck.

When I saw him walking downtown two days later, I knew he hadn’t changed. Can’t say I was altogether surprised. He said he liked it here, enough to maybe buy a place nearby. Said he decided to stay in town a while to check things out.

The next day, I got a phone call from my ex-partner, George, in Chicago.

“Let me guess,” I said before he told me his reason for calling. “Terrell Long is in trouble, and you think he might be headed my way.”

A pause. “You’ve seen him.”

“Yep.”

“It’s worse than that. He’s playing Little Eddie.”

I spun my chair around, put my legs up on the desk, leaned back, and rubbed my eyes. Little Eddie Burton, son of Big Eddie and heir to his drug numbers and prostitution empire, got his MBA and joined the family business, one that grew considerably as Little Eddie was given more control. This wasn’t totally due to his business skills. He showed early talent in areas usually reserved for the old man’s lieutenants. He got a quick reputation for being as ruthless and intimidating as the best of them. He was linked to a dozen or more murders in the Chicago area. We never got a conviction on him. Too slick.

I had a hard time believing George. “How is this possible? Terrell’s never been anything but small-time.”

“All I know for sure,” George said, “is Little Eddie’s pissed enough to come for Terrell himself. The word inside is that he and two of his goons left this morning. They know he’s there. So be careful, my friend.”

“Yeah. Thanks, George.”

After I hung up, I wished I had asked how they knew he was in town. Had Terrell called Little Eddie from here? More likely, Terrell got drunk and talked too much, as usual, about his plans before he left.

I tried to warn him. I drove on out to the rental house where he was staying. He wasn’t there. I went back after work, and again around nine that night. I stopped in at the local clubs and asked around.

When he wasn’t at Brace’s, the last one, I thought, hoped, he’d left town already. He might be in New Orleans by now. With any luck, Little Eddie and his boys had skipped on out of Solley altogether. I sat at the bar and ordered a beer.