"Seven": Escalation

Writer's note: This installment is not a direct follow-up to the previous story. This takes place sometime after that, but you'll notice that it does not directly follow. --C.A.

The phone rings in darkness, and my heart blasts adrenaline. I am fully awake. The red read out on the clock says 5:30. I get it on the second ring. My heart in my throat, fearing it’s the doctors about Kelly; I barely manage hello.

“Spearsy,” Rocky says. “Sorry to bother you, man, but I thought you’d want to know.”

How can he pause before continuing? My heart can out pace a hummingbird’s.

“Know fucking what?” My voice cracks.

“Shit, sorry man. I forgot about Kelly with the scene here. This ain’t about her.”

My heart seems to sigh and pump two more big blasts, like a lumpy cam in a big block car. I can breathe deeply.

“It ain’t good though,” he says with a sigh. “Jerry Gold got killed.”

“Aw…shit.” Jerry Gold and I had been buddies since high school. In the summers, we had a business cutting lawns together. Not the usual half-assed “Hey Mister, need your lawn cut?” deal, but an honest-to-God business that bought me a nice used car and Jerry two years of undergrad at Albany State. His brother, father and mother had been wiped out in a car accident his senior year. Most guys would have been truly messed up by that, and he was for a while. Somehow, though, he’d gotten by it and made a life for himself. We never lost touch, even after I had moved to Schenectady.

“What happened?” I say as the shock ebbs.

“Looks like wrong place, wrong time,” Rocky says. “Must have been coming home late from work and walked into a hold-up at the Stewart’s shop on Turin Road.”

“You catch the guy?”

“Not yet, but the security camera was running. Detectives looking at the tape now.”

I swear again, because it seems appropriate and I don’t know what else to do.

“Yeah,” Rocky replies in solemn agreement. “You still got a key to his place?”

I nod, but he can’t see me. “Sure.”

“I’m headed over there now. He’s got a dog needs feeding. Lois is allergic, or I’d take him. Maybe you could.”

“No problem. Be there in half and hour.”

I rinse my body in hot water and soap up the stinky bits, but quickly. I won’t feel right without a proper ten-minute shower, but I’m wired anyway and just want to get there. I want to do something, and getting to Jerry’s house and taking care of his dog seems to be of the highest priority, though I know it is of minor consequence. Lately, I have done a lot of not feeling right.

I throw on clean shorts and socks, yesterday’s jeans and a random T-shirt from a drawer. I grab the gear off the dresser and stow it in my pocket, slip on my sneakers, and lock the door behind me. When I reach for my keys, I’m surprise to find that I’ve brought my pistol with me. Not wanting to be bothered with walking back to the front door and locking it up, I pull a windbreaker on from the backseat to hide it. I have my permit, anyway, but this is the first time I’ve not made a conscious decision to carry it. I almost never do.

My house is former farmland and largely remote. It’s private enough where Rocky and I have felt comfortable enough plinking cans in the backyard, but not so far away from civilization that I can’t grab dinner and a movie with Kelly. Still, it will take me a while to get to Jerry’s place. He has, had, a nice place in the Utica suburbs that he built with the profits from his Internet and Gaming Cafes. Jerry was a natural for business and had opened up three, with plans for more. Most new businesses lost money the first year, but Jerry didn’t. He wasn’t married, thank God, so we wouldn’t have to deal with a grieving widow. For that matter, I didn’t even know if he was dating. Rocky suspected he might be gay, but I don’t think so. Jerry wanted a family more than anything, but he was determined to be a good provider first. I dragged him out to the bars at least once a month just so he could remember for what he was busting his hump.

The last time we talked was about three weeks before Kelly had gone into the hospital. He had called me to take me out for a change, but I had been too busy. I hadn’t. I just needed some down time, or so I had thought. Now, we’d never go out again, and I have to swallow the lump in my throat as I think about it.

Rocky’s cruiser is already at Jerry’s house when I pull up. We don’t say anything as we enter the garage. Jerry keeps his dog in there on the rare occasion that he doesn’t bring him to work with him. It’s not a bad deal for the dog, as the garage has a TV left on for him and heat in the winter, but still kind of lonely. Jerry only left the dog this way when he thought he was going to be gone a short time, and even that was rare. The dog used to go everywhere with him.

His black and white long-hair border collie growls at us and barks, but I call his name and he carefully sniffs me. His tail half-wags as he remembers me and I scratch him behind the ears. I always liked Jerry’s dog, even though he had named him Spots. I mean, the dog clearly has black and white patches, but it was still a silly name. I had told him he’d have to change his name to Dick and marry a girl named Jane.

Spots seems to sense something wrong, and looks behind us, like he’s waiting for Jerry. I walk him around to the back yard to let him out, and change his water while Rocky enters the house. With Spots preoccupied with the smell of a tree, I follow.

The place is a mess, which is unusual for Jerry, a neat nick. Papers litter the ground and drawers sit open. There’s no food left out in the kitchen, but some of the cabinet doors are open. It doesn’t look exactly like someone tossed the place, but somebody was looking for something in a desperate hurry.

“Detectives will be here in a bit,” he says, “but I’d thought I take a look around first, make sure there’s nothing too embarrassing here.”

“Why are the detectives looking here?” I ask.

“Routine. I mean, looks completely like he walked in on a robbery and got shot by accident, but they still want to check the place over, make sure it ain’t anything but what it seems.”

“Plus, sort of looks like somebody was looking for something in there.”

“Yeah,” Rocky says, frowning.

“I’ll help, then.” Jerry is a single guy and I didn’t want some flatfoot laughing at his stack of porn, if he had any. Especially since Rocky could be right about the gay thing. I’m also a little curious to know why the place looks like an F5 touched down. I let Spots back in and he goes for his water, and I start looking around. Jerry’s PC is password protected, so I have no luck there.

In a drawer next to the desk I find two check books, one for business and one for his personal account. Thumbing through his personal register, I don’t see anything but the usual expenses for heat, electricity and cable, plus others purchases I can easily figure out. Jerry was one of the old holdouts against using the computer to pay his bills. He didn’t trust the thing to not crash and lose all his info. His business register takes me a bit longer to decipher, but I eventually figure out what’s for rent on the cafes and the other expenses. The only odd thing is a relatively large amount every week made out to cash. All totaled, he had checks for about two-grand a month in cash. There are smaller entries for cash, too, but these seem more like normal expenses. As with computers, Jerry didn’t trust the ATM machine. He was the guy who still wrote checks in the grocery line, holding you up. Everybody has a fault.

Even for Jerry, two grand was a good chunk of change that would have had an impact on his lifestyle. He did well, but I doubt he could afford to spend twenty-four thousand dollars a year on something. Maybe it was easily explainable. Maybe the cops will figure it out. Maybe I will.

Looking around some more, I can clearly see that Jerry’s place needs a woman’s touch, though I suppose that isn’t very politically correct of me. Everything is neat enough, but most of the decorations are sports related. Jerry was into memorabilia big time, including life-size cut-outs of Joe Montana and Peyton Manning. There’s a thin layer of dust all over the place, except in some of the higher traffic areas, but then Jerry probably didn’t have enough time away from work to take care of that sort of thing. He’d probably planned to retire early so he could enjoy the rest of his life. I notice that there is a bare spot on the wall, and I remember seeing a Peyton Manning picture there once, autographed right over the blue number eighteen on the white jersey.

Rocky comes back in, his brow furrowed in distress. “It’s weird,” he says. “Found a strong box under Jerry’s bed. It was ripped open, like someone took a crowbar to it.”

“Anything inside?”

“Not much. Couple of nine millimeter rounds, but no gun. I didn’t know Jerry kept a pistol.”

“Yeah, went shooting with him a couple of times. Did they find it on his—him?” I say, not quite able to complete the thought.

“No. No holster, either.”

“Jerry had a nylon holster, but I didn’t know him to carry.”

“Shame,” Rocky says, then bites his lip. “Maybe if he’d had it on him…”

“Yeah.”

“Anyways, we’d better clear out of here. Crime scene guys might want to take a look.”

I nod and we go back into the garage. I put a leash on Spot, find his dog food and load it and him into my truck with the windows half open.

When the detectives show up, I leave Rocky to talk to them, but keep my ear open.

“Video shows one assailant, holding up the store when the victim walks in,” says a pot-bellied cop in a poor fitting tweed sports coat and an even worse comb-over. He probably had the coat twenty pounds ago and the comb-over twenty years ago. There’s powdered sugar on the tips of his bristly black mustache, and his white shirt shows the faint traces of a not-quite-removed mustard stain. Apparently, clichés come from somewhere, after all.

His partner, a slimmer, young guy with a buzz cut is better dressed, though the balding partner may have more hair. He’s in a neatly tailored navy blue suit with brightly patterned tie. He’s still thinking he’s going to move up in the world, whereas Comb-over has clearly resigned himself. Young Guy says, “The shooter looks to be white, five foot eight or nine, about one hundred and sixty pounds.”

“This fucking guys is stylish, too,” Comb-over continues. “He’s wearing a black eye-mask, like he’s fucking Zoro, with a big shiny grill on him. He turns on the victim right away and blasts him three times.”

“What kind of gun?” Rocko asks

Young guy taps his teeth thoughtfully with his pen. “Looks like a nine-mil, but can’t be sure from the video. The M.E. will confirm later.”

“So, looks like he caught the guy by surprise?” Rocky asks.

Comb-over shrugs. “Mostly, though it’s a little odd that the perp shot three times. Most panic shots are double-taps and spread out over the victim. These were nice and neat, center of mass and deadly.”

“You saying he might have been shot intentionally?” Rocky’s face shows his distress and confusion. I know what he’s thinking. We can’t think of a person in the world who would want to harm Jerry.

“Not saying, shit,” Comb-over continues. “Still could be that your friend just surprised a good shooter.”

“Why would a good shooter panic and fire three bullets?” I say. Comb-over gives me a hard cop-look. He didn’t realize that I was close enough to overhear.

“That’s off the record, pal. You didn’t hear shit, understand?” Comb-over is stern and commanding and a bit ridiculous looking when he says “pal” because powdered sugar sprays off his mustache when he pops the “p”. “Who is this guy, Rocky?”

“Friend of mine, of the victim, Al.”

“What the hell’s he doing here?” Comb-over Al says, his face reddening.

“He came to get Jerry’s dog.”

“You two been inside?” Al says, his face a dark red. “You dumbasses better not have fucking touched anything in there. Jesus shit! Rocky, how you think you’re going to make detective if you don’t follow procedure? I’m only telling you this shit cause you’re trying to pass the freaking exam next month.”

The younger guy inserts himself between Rocky and Al and says something quietly. Comb-over Al shoots me a dirty look, then walks inside with his partner.

“Sorry about that, Rock,” I say.

“It’s okay. Al’s an asshole like that all the time. Guess you better bolt on out of here, though.”

I agree, so I do.