Leave the Living (9 page)

The line was dead; no sound came from the earpiece.

He hung it up and stepped away again, rubbing his palm against his thigh. Blinking, he turned and made his way to the kitchen sink, turning the light on directly above it. The old thermometer still hung outside the window, tilted inward so that its face could be read by anyone doing dishes. The red line of mercury hovered at five below, and almost to accentuate the point, the wind picked up once more, peppering the window with frozen crystals.

He leaned away from the sink and turned to face the rest of the house. It was ten miles to the nearest residence, probably a three-hour walk through the wind and blowing snow. It was freezing and dangerous, foolish to even consider it. Mick’s eyes roamed around the room and came to rest on the phone again. Without pausing to flip off the lights, he walked to the entry and began to gather the clothes he would need. His father’s boots, jacket, gloves, hat. An extra sweatshirt would be smart, but that would mean going back up to the bedroom and—

His thoughts were cut off by the creak of the stairs.

He waited, his body thrumming as adrenaline flooded his system once again. The silence roared in his ears, and he knew that if he heard footsteps coming across the kitchen toward him, he would flee into the storm, adequate clothing or not. The quiet stretched out, punctuated only by the wind, and the teetering within him finally tipped one way fully.

Mick set the jacket down and made his way back into the kitchen, stopping to peer around the corner. Everything was in its place. The vase still lay broken on its side; the phone hung from its cradle. As he walked toward the stairs, his eyes kept flicking to the basement and dining room, searching the shadowed corners for movement. At the base of the stairs, he paused, staring up their length before climbing them, each step an effort to make his legs propel him upward, his mutinous feet attempting to stop the progress. His hand grazed the wall and found the light switch there, the split second it took to turn it on stretching into millennia. The fixture lit up the loft, pouring light across the landing to its far end, and Mick stiffened, goose bumps rolling over his flesh in a prickling wave.

His father’s bedroom door was open again.

“Hello?” he said, his voice dying in the air.

A shushing came from the bedroom followed by a short squeak like a mouse being crushed beneath a heavy boot. There was someone in the room. A sudden anger blossomed in his chest, driven by the knowledge that he was in his childhood home, his father’s dominion, being immobilized with fear of the unknown. The words came back to him again from the letter, and he shoved them aside as doubt, both from whatever waited in the room as well as who his father truly was, tried to unhinge his resolve. He stalked forward, each step draining the fear to replace it with rage.

Mick shoved the bedroom door all the way open and flipped the light on.

The bedroom was the same. Nothing had been moved. No chairs sat on the ceiling. And no words written in blood coated the walls.

“If someone’s in here, come out, and I won’t beat the shit out of you,” he said, his voice stronger than he’d expected.

He waited and then moved forward, ready to search the bathroom and under the bed, but halted when he saw the closet door was open again, wider than it had been on his first visit to the room. Jerking it all the way open, he stepped in and snapped the switch up, lighting the interior of the long closet. Unmoving racks of clothes hung from one side along with several stacks of jeans that sat amongst shoes and boots on the floor. The space held the odor of his father’s aftershave, more condensed and powerful, and he wondered if he’d ever be able to smell it again without being buried by the avalanche of sadness that accompanied it.

Mick swept through the hanging clothes, pushing them aside to reveal the wall behind them. He traveled methodically sideways, pausing to part each article of clothing. Memories of times past when his father had worn different shirts assaulted him, but he continued until he reached the back wall, which was mostly bare save for a higher shelf above his head. Pushed to the very back was the edge of what appeared to be a mottled green steel box with two clasps that he had never seen before. Above it was an inset square of wood partition large enough for a man to crawl through that led to the attic. Leaning against the wall was a short stepladder, which he unfolded and climbed up.

The top of the shelf was dusty, as was the container, which wasn’t very deep, but wide, like that of a mechanic’s toolbox. Mick slid it toward him, balancing on top of the ladder. There was a small lock set between two hasps but no key visible upon the shelf. Flipping up the clasps, he waited a beat, listening to the house below. There had been a sound, there and gone, but now nothing but the wind, a distant moan within the confines of the closet. Returning his attention to the box, he raised the lid and looked inside.

A shining revolver rested atop a layer of aged newspaper articles, its snubbed nose and black grip familiar the moment he saw it. It was his father’s Ruger .357, what the older man had dubbed “the wrist breaker” because it kicked so hard when fired. He’d shot the weapon himself multiple times over the years when they’d gone targeting. Mick drew the gun out of the box and inspected its cylinder. Dark, sunken heads of hollow-point rounds occupied the five holes. He hefted the pistol once and then set it aside on the shelf. Tipping the box forward, he reached in to draw the articles out, their touch dry and brittle between his fingers. As he lifted them free, the closet light sputtered like a candle flame in a breeze, withering then brightening before winking out.

Darkness flooded the closet. It flowed over everything, and the temperature seemed to drop ten degrees. Mick wavered on top of the ladder, blind as a fish at the bottom of a moonless sea. The utter detachment from his surroundings was unlike anything he’d ever felt before, and when he reached out to touch the wall for balance, he was certain it wouldn’t be there anymore.

His hand met the drywall, and he steadied himself, his heart thundering as he clutched the newspapers in his other palm. By touch alone, he climbed down from the ladder without falling and walked forward, waiting to encounter something in the dark, something unyielding that might touch him back. He emerged into the bedroom and welcomed even the sick glow from the windows. It was enough light to make his way into the hall and then down the stairs.

In the kitchen, he set the papers on the table and sidled down the cupboards, counting the drawers in his head until he came to the correct one. Inside, his fingers found the round barrel of the flashlight his father had always kept there. He flicked it on and sagged with relief as the lens shot a cool white beam of light onto the floor. Returning to the table he saw that he’d set one of the papers in the spilled water of the vase and picked it up, shaking it free of moisture. Only one corner had soaked up any water, and he blotted it the best he could on his shirt.

Standing at the table, he shone the light around the room. The breaker panel was downstairs behind his father’s chair. There was a possibility that the main had tripped somehow, but likely?

“Not very,” he said to the empty room. The wind answered in a gust that rattled something against the side of the house before quieting.

Mick sat in one of the chairs and twisted the adjustable head of the flashlight so that it expanded into a wide beam. He stood it on end and let the light wash the ceiling so that it gave an ambient glow to the room. When he finally looked down at the newspapers, the headline of the uppermost stood out in dark, narrow letters that he read twice before continuing on to the article below.

A
RMORED
T
RUCK
R
OBBERY
R
EMAINS
U
NSOLVED

Authorities are still mired waist-deep in the investigation surrounding a shocking robbery that rocked the small town of Felling, Minnesota, two days ago. At approximately 2 p.m. on Thursday, an armored truck owned by Lockheed Security, based out of Minneapolis, was run off the road outside the city limits of Felling by two armed men driving a 1968 Dodge pickup. The two men were able to gain access to the interior of the truck as one of the Lockheed guards attempted to fire his sidearm at the robbers.

“I climbed out of the truck to engage the assailants and try to scare them off,” Martin Taylor, a ten-year employee of Lockheed, said in his statement yesterday. “I fired two shots at one of the men and missed before my gun jammed. They then approached the vehicle and held me and my partner at gunpoint before demanding we open the truck. They were both wearing masks and gloves, and they were jittery, like they were nervous or real young, but I couldn’t tell for sure.”

The robbers then proceeded to force the security guards to open the armored truck, taking several containers filled with cash that was being transported from four separate banks in the area. The assailants then drove away in their pickup, leaving the Lockheed employees tied up in the armored truck’s cab. A state patrol came upon the scene a half hour later and released the two bound men.

“I was really scared,” Daniel Pell, Taylor’s partner, said when asked about the experience. “They were both carrying shotguns, and I thought Marty and I were dead for sure.”

Police have no suspects in custody, and the Dodge pickup was found abandoned in a stand of brush near a Mississippi River public water access three miles from the scene of the crime. Local authorities have employed law enforcement assistance from the neighboring towns of Enfield and Warren to aid in the investigation. Andrew Klous, CEO of Lockheed Security, made a statement condemning the act and vowed to “take measures to assure nothing like this ever happens again.” Klous went on to state that this is the first successful robbery of an armored vehicle in Lockheed’s twenty-six years in operation. He did not comment on the amount of money that was taken in the robbery.

Mick stared at the article before flipping through the other papers below it. All of the headlines were about the theft, chronicling the case’s progress, or lack thereof, over a month’s time. The last article stated at its end that the authorities had still not located the missing money or the assailants.

Mick let the papers drop into place and sat back from the table. His mind was a cautious octopus, extending tendrils toward the ideas that floated just outside the light of his thoughts. It began to pull them toward him, revealing a broken mosaic that he refused to look at, to even consider. His breath started to hitch in his chest, and the light glancing off the ceiling was dimming at the edges as if the night was encroaching into the kitchen, closer and closer like a predator stalking its prey. His eyes fell upon the corner of the newspaper that had gotten wet, and he blinked, seeing how the moisture had seeped into the dry fibers, how it had veined downward like poison flowing through a circulatory system. The curled lines of water formed something where they bled through the paper, something familiar. Mick twisted the article counter-clockwise and saw that they were letters—
r-u-n.

“Your dad had just turned nineteen, and I was seventeen when we robbed that truck.”

Mick leapt from his chair, knocking the flashlight over as he stood. It rolled in a swiveling flare, illuminating the far side of the room along with his Uncle Gary who stood in the doorway.

13

“What the hell are you doing here?” Mick said in a strangled voice, as he put a hand on the counter behind him to keep from falling. The shock of hearing his uncle’s words come out of nowhere was almost debilitating.

“Stopped by to see how you were doing, kiddo. I see you found your dad’s articles. Never knew why he wanted to keep them around, kind of an admission of guilt, I’d say.”

Mick studied his uncle’s lined face, now stranger-looking in the odd light, alien somehow, his eyes hidden in shadow.

“You…you’re the ones who robbed the truck?” Mick felt his head shake before he realized he was doing it. “No, I don’t believe it. You’re fucking with me. Dad would never have done something like that.”

Gary laughed. It was a hoarse, sick sound.

“Come on, Mickey. You’re all grown up now. You know as well as I do every man keeps his secrets. Secrets from his wife, his friends, even his kids.”

Mick stared at Gary through the darkness that separated them, watching for a tell, something that would assure him his uncle was joking. The other man didn’t move.

“You’re serious, aren’t you?” he said at last.

“Afraid so. Like I said, we were young, dumb, and full of come at the time, balls like brass bells on us. We were poor, Mickey. I’m sure your dad told you we never had much growing up.”

Mick nodded and stepped forward to grab the flashlight from the table before aiming it at the ground.

“Well, that didn’t sit well with your dad. He wanted more, hated going without. And when it looked like our father was going to enlist us both as workers in his sawmill, he thought of a plan.”

Gary moved closer to the table, his wet boots squeaking on the floor as he walked. His pants were sodden with melting snow. Mick stepped to the side, keeping the table between them.