Crime Time

By Dell Sweet

Crime Time is a collection of nine crime stories from author Dell Sweet. From short stories to near novel length...
... When a man tells you he has the moral flexibility to include murder in his life if he deems it necessary this is probably not a man you should be hanging out with.
Jeff Johnson had reminded himself of this fact about Robert Biel more than once, yet every day he found himself hanging around, giving him lifts to do job searches, parole, where ever he needed to go: Even hanging around with him at night...
Nine stories that are hard edged, entertaining and good, fast rides into the darkness that is the criminal's world...
... In the last few days she had decided a few things. First: Dello was a killer. She knew that. It was how he made a living. It wouldn't be hard to kill her, she supposed. She knew that sounded unreasonable, probably was wildly unreasonable, but she couldn't get it out of her head. What if they were over and suppose he needed her gone because she knew too much. Way too much. What would he do, tell her it's over and show her the door? She didn't believe it. What she did believe, what had gotten into her head, was that he would take her somewhere and kill her...
Unforgettable characters and places. A gritty world from Sweet's mind where anything can and usually does happen...
... Too late, I thought as I realized I had left the machine pistol lying on the front seat instead of keeping it in my right hand where it should have been. I could hear the sound of a machine pistol behind me as the Mexican opened up. I did what I could. I aimed the truck at the two men; levered the door-handle and prepared to jump just as the windshield hit by several of the rounds fired by the two men was blown inward: My world faded to black...
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• Language: English
• Publisher: A. L. Norton
• Release date: May 11, 2017
• ISBN: 9781370952816

Dell Sweet

I was raised in Texas and New York. I write short stories, novels, lyrics, poetry. I also enjoy building 3D models in my down time. I have written several series and collections.

Book preview

SANGER ROAD

Friday

Carl Evers came awake all at once: He had been dozing in front of the television. He had come home about two A.M. from work. He'd picked up beer and cigarettes for the weekend, he didn't work Fridays, that was the beginning of his weekend. He'd debated and then decided to stay up a little while, have a few beers and watch TV. The Canadian station was coming in pretty good and there had been some foreign film on. It was in French, or at least he supposed it was in French. He heard enough French living so close to Canada, and he had even been to Canada a few times, so he was pretty sure it was French. He couldn't understand a word of it, but you didn't have to speak French to understand nudity. And there had been a lot of nudity in the film. The film had been about a group of young college girls who kept finding themselves in trouble, or naked, or both. Somewhere along in there he had fallen asleep.

The clock said 7:30 AM. The sun was up. The trailer was cold, a litter of empty beer cans and an overflowing ashtray sat on the coffee table in front of the couch.

He got up, his body stiff. He had run a buffer nearly all of his eight hour shift and his back and shoulders were sore. It would go away, he told himself. It always did. Go to sleep get up tonight and... Well, sit alone and drink beer, watch TV. Whoopee, he told himself. He dropped the beer cans into the bag for empties under the sink: He never bothered to rinse them. He dumped the ashtray and wandered down the hallway to bed.

Friday Night

Carl sat up and scratched his head. It was late, he'd slept pretty good. He'd woke up once when he heard a siren down the road, and that was it. He'd gone right back to sleep and slept straight through. Probably a fight in the trailer park again, he thought.

He got up, walked through to the kitchen and grabbed what turned out to be his last beer. On his way back through the living room he turned the TV on; went back and got dressed. He was on his way back to the living room when the lead in for the evening news started, a pretty blond, probably not much older than he himself was, smiled into the camera and began to talk as he yawned. Six P.M. then, he thought. Her words grabbed him and he snapped to attention.

Coming up on News Fifteen in about ten minutes, your local headlines, sports and weather. Topping our headlines this morning the grisly discovery of the body of a young woman earlier this morning on Sanger road. Police are releasing no details, but a source has told News Fifteen that they do suspect foul play. The body was discovered in a drainage ditch by a passing motorist. All that and more inside of ten minutes. First these messages from our sponsors...

Carl's mouth snapped closed. Well, he thought, it wasn't the first body to be found out here. Just before he had moved here they found the body of a local prostitute whose throat had been cut. She'd been dumped nearly in front of his house. Probably the same thing again, he thought. Welcome to your night off, Carl. He stood in front of the TV, suddenly not so interested in the news.

There were only the local stations that he could get, plus the one from Canada when the weather was right, or what-ever had to be right for an antenna to work. Today it wasn't working: Excuse me, he corrected himself, this evening; whatever needed to be right wasn't. He clicked from channel to channel, stopping to watch the picture snap to perfectly clear, then dissolve into horizontal bars only to snap clear a few seconds later. He finally settled for an old war movie on one of the local stations. He settled back into the couch.

He was nursing the beer. He'd been sure that there was one more left, but he'd been wrong. Somehow he had miscounted and that was unlike him. He always knew how many beers he had to the can: Somehow he'd messed up the count. There were no more. He'd even moved the green loaf of bread which he had hated to do, but he had moved it only to find nothing behind it. He had hoped the one remaining can had rolled behind it, but it had not been behind the moldy bread. He had been wrong.

It hadn't occurred to him to throw out the moldy loaf of bread while he was at it. Instead, he had gotten one of the spatulas from the silverware drawer, levered it under the bread and then pushed it to the side only to find no beer can hiding there. He had then levered the loaf of bread back into the original position it had been in.

So he had been nursing his last beer. Last beer and no money for beer. And it was Friday: That meant the rest of Friday night, and the whole weekend loomed ahead dry. It was too depressing to think about. He tried to focus on the movie instead.

Carl's trailer was located at the end of Sanger road, a dirt road on the outskirts of the city, two miles beyond the county dump. Nobody really wanted to live on Sanger road it seemed, except Carl, and if he were honest with himself he didn't really want to live here either, he simply had no choice. His crappy job only paid him enough for a crappy place to live. This was it. The crappiest of the crappiest. He knew that for a fact because he had gone looking. There were no crappier places. Except maybe the trailer park down the road, he thought, but that was also part of Sanger road, so it didn't count.

He owned neither the trailer nor the lot. He did own the furniture, that had been easy. He had simply cruised every street in the city on garbage days. Each area had different days. The richer side of town seemed to throw away much better stuff, but people in the poorer sections got evicted pretty regularly too, and all of their possessions ended up at the curb: A chair here, another one there. The mattress and box springs he'd gotten from the Salvation Army: Thirty bucks and only pee stained on one side, well mostly only the one side. There was some other stain on the other side, but he wasn't sure what that stain was. It didn't exactly look like a pee stain. Anyway, it was barely noticeable and the guy in the store had sworn that they weren’t really pee stains, but water stains. Carl wasn't too sure about that. His own brother had wet the bed until he was ten and they had slept in the same bed. He knew what a pee stain looked like and this looked like a pee stain. Still, it had been a good deal and stains couldn't hurt him: After all when his brother had been wetting the bed he had probably peed on him a time or two, if he could live with that he could live with a little pee stain; if it was a pee stain; and if they were pee stains, they were on the other side of the mattress, he had added optimistically. Besides, they disinfected those things. The guy said so. Sprayed them down with something that killed everything on them and in them. He had grinned, tipped his beer, nearly took a large swallow, took a small sip instead and then lowered the can, depressed all over again about the long, dry weekend ahead of him.

Five or six garbage runs and one trip to the city dump, where they didn't mind if you took half the dump away with you, and he had been furnished. It was amazing the things people threw away. He sipped carefully at his beer as he reminisced, pulled a crumpled cigarette from his pack and lit it with a long, wooden kitchen match.

There was an old fashioned wood stove store in town and he stopped there once or twice a week for kitchen matches. Not that they gave them away for free, but they used them for the stoves so there was always a box or two lying around that he could help himself to.

Day old bread and doughnuts at the bakery twice a week, those cheap ten pound bags of chicken and what they had called Crack Head soups in Jail, noodle soups to the rest of the world, and there was his weekly food budget. The only other things he needed were gas and of course beer and cigarettes.

The rest of his paycheck went for the rent and utilities. Sometimes it was close, but he always made it somehow. The real bummer this morning was that he had today off and the whole weekend too and he'd have to stay here watching the crappy T.V. … Sober...

His job Monday through Thursday was cleaning for a maintenance company. They only required that you showed up. They ran you all over the city to clean supermarkets; banks, mall shops that were closed. He worked the nights away pretty quickly. Go to work at five P.M. Next thing you knew it was one thirty in the morning and they were through for another night. He kept telling himself that he would have to get a better job if he ever wanted to be better off in the world. A job that paid more than minimum wage had to be in his future. He was sure there were plenty of them out there, he just didn't know where to look. Some day, he told himself, some day.

He took another deep drag off his cigarette and then sipped carefully at his beer. He thought about the girl's body and realized she could have been killed while he had been sleeping. The thought had made him shudder, he hated this place.

He had just set the beer down carefully on the coffee table: It was scared with cigarette burns and missing the tip of one leg, but it had been free and an old paperback novel held up that corner of the table well enough. As he had looked back up from the coffee table, lights had swept across the living room wall, bouncing up and down and back and forth. Because his was the last place on the road, every car that came down the road lit up his living room. These headlights, however seemed a little more frantic, bobbing, darting across the wall and then a second set shot up onto the wall too, jittering and jumping across the cheap wood paneling.

Twice now cars had come down the road, shot right across the bare dirt of his front yard and into the woods before they had been stopped by the trees. Carl had a fear about some car, some day hitting the bedroom wall while he slept. So far it had just been the woods, but you could never tell. He had jumped up quickly and run to the window.

It had been immediately obvious that this was something different from just some drunk not realizing that the road was about to end. The lead car had been flat out. He had heard the whine of the engine as it came. The car behind had been trying to stay close, tapping the back bumper of the lead car, causing it to slew all over the dirt road. Apparently that hadn't been  good enough because a second later the passenger had leaned out of the car's window and opened up on the lead car with what had looked to be some sort of hand held machine pistol. Carl had let out a startled squawk, ducked below the window and then popped right back up. Now he found himself staring out the window, breathing fast, where what seemed like only seconds ago he had been carefully sipping at his beer watching the TV.

The shots had taken out the rear window of the lead car, traveled through the car and taken out part of the front windshield too. And from the large red stain on the spiderwebbed remains of that window Carl guessed it had taken out the driver too. Maybe even the passenger, had there been one. There was a lot of red.

'Shit,' Carl thought. That meant that the lead car was not going to be able to stop and it was nearly on the trailer already as it screamed forward. Carl calculated quickly and realized the car would miss the trailer. At the same time the driver of the rear car locked up his brakes, suddenly realizing that he was on a dead end road, and the car began to slide in the dirt. Carl's eyes shifted back to the front car which hit the end of the road, jumped up over the drainage ditch and roared through the front yard just missing the edge of the trailer, shaking the thin walls; engine screaming. It was out of his eyesight for only a split second before he heard the crash. The big oak in the back yard, he thought.

His eyes came back to the second car long enough to see it slide down into the drainage ditch at full speed, catch its nose on the opposite edge and then flip end over end across an empty lot before it crashed down on the edge of a cement slab that was trailer-less and had been since he, Carl, had moved out here. Carl crouched down quickly to the floor, grabbed his boots and wedged his feet into them. He ran to the kitchen, grabbed a flashlight off the counter and headed out the front door at a run.

In It

The smell of hot metal filled the air. Carl looked first to the car down the road, partway onto the cement pad: The trunk had popped open and all manner of stuff that had been inside now lay scattered across the ground. Hot oil and antifreeze dripped from under the hood onto the concrete. The front roof line was crushed flat to the top of the driver's seats. The backseat area seemed untouched.

He slipped around the end of the trailer and looked at the other car. A newer Ford: He could see the badge on the rear deck. The front end of the car was wrapped around the oak in the backyard just as he had thought and steam was rising up into the air. The Ford first, he decided. The car across the road would have to wait.

The Ford had hit the tree and climbed it a few feet before it came to a complete stop. Carl had to stand on tip toe to peer into it. The driver had no head left, that had been the huge stain on the windshield. There was no passenger. Looking out from the inside it was not just red but gray and black too: Bone, hair and brain matter. His stomach did a quick flip and he began to close his eyes as he turned away.

As he turned, his eyes caught on the floorboard and a blue duffel bag that was jammed into the space with the drivers legs. There was no way that the door was going to open, but the glass was gone from the window. He balanced over the edge of the door trying to stay as far away as he could from the dead man as he did, leaned in and tried to snag the duffel bag. His fingers brushed the two plastic handles, but he could not get a grip on them.

Carl levered himself further over the window sill and nearly came down into the dead man's lap as he lost his balance and his feet left the ground. His hand shot down quickly, bounced off the dead man's thigh and hit the seat, stopping him just a few inches above the man's lap and a small splattering of bone and blood that was there. His hand slipped, but he pressed down harder and held himself.

He could feel the slick blood and splinters of bone under his hand, but he pushed the knowledge out of his mind, took a deep breath, braced himself and then reached down with his free hand and snatched the handles pulling the heavy bag free.

He pulled back, but the bag was so heavy that he had to hold on tight and push off the seat with his other hand. For one alarming second it seemed he would fall forward into the dead man's lap. After a second of indecision his body dropped back down to the ground, the bag in his hand. He thought about the trunk as he started to turn away, reached back in, shut off the dead ignition, pulled the keys free and hurried around the car.

The trunk held nothing but a black suitcase. He debated briefly, then reached in and took it. He went back, put the keys back into the ignition, and turned it back to the ON position. What else! What else! His mind asked.

His heart felt like it was beating a mile a minute, skipping beats, and his breath was tearing in and out of his lungs so quickly that it was painful. He could think of nothing he had forgotten. He told himself there was nothing else and then immediately he thought of the glove compartment. He ran back around the passenger's side of the car, dropped the bags and pushed the button on the glove box. A small paper bag and a dull, black pistol rested inside.

He took a deep breath, thought for a moment and then took both, slammed the glove box shut, picked up the bags and ran for the trailer. He booted the door open, threw the bags inside, slammed the door and then started for the other car down the road at a dead run. He stopped mid stride, bent double and threw up. He caught himself as he stumbled, forced himself to take several slow breaths and stood experimentally. It seemed as though his stomach had decided the remains of the beer could stay for now and so he trotted off down the road to the other car.

This was an older Chevy, not one of the small ones though, one of the ones that seemed almost as big as a Cadillac. He stopped thirty feet away. Two large plastic garbage bags had fallen from the popped trunk. They were both crisscrossed with gray duct tape, bound tightly. Two black duffel bags were jumbled in a heap nearby, along with what looked like a cheap foam ice chest. The ice chest had ruptured, splintered when it hit the ground, spilling beer, soda and packages of lunch meat and cheese out onto the ground. Mixed in, and what had really caught his attention, were large brick sized packages, also bound with duct tape.

His heart was still racing hard. There was no one anywhere yet. No sirens. The nearest neighbors were at Suncrest Trailer Park, nearly a mile back down the road... No car lights... Nothing.

He tried to carry both bales, but they were too heavy. He had to make two trips. The duct taped bricks, which could only mean one thing to his way of thinking, both duffel bags and two six packs of the beer that hadn't ruptured went next. He had debated about the beer but decided he could not leave it. He came back one more time, looked at a few more cans of beer and the packages of bologna and cheese and decided what the hell. He quickly picked them up and took them too. It would be something to put into the 'fridge besides the moldy loaf of bread he told himself.

He walked back down the road once more. He reached the car where it lay flipped onto its roof and had just started around the hood when he heard a soft pop. He stopped as the hood area suddenly burst into flames. The sharp smell of gasoline hit his nose and he jumped backwards just that fast. The car didn't blow, but he stayed clear watching it as it began to burn, allowing his thoughts and breathing to began to slow down. It had seemed like a log jamb of thoughts all trying to be expressed at the same time. He thought back as he watched the flames begin to build from under the hood.

Not long ago a car had plowed into that same oak in his back yard where the other car was now. It was just the way that oak lined up with the road. That driver had not hit as hard. He had jumped from the car and run for the woods that began in back of the trailer. Carl had come out to look over the wreck a little closer. The jimmied ignition told him the story. The car had been stolen. He had heard sirens in the distance and said to hell with it, reached into the car and grabbed a cheap 22. pistol from the front seat, and an unopened and miraculously unbroken bottle of whiskey from the floorboards. He'd had plenty of time to stash them before the cops had shown up.

He had stood on the sidelines and watched as the cops had popped the trunk to expose a large collection of electronic gear. Flat screen televisions, game consoles, DVD players, a shotgun and several more bottles of whiskey too. He had kicked himself over that one and vowed not to let something like that happen again should providence ever grace him with a second chance: Here was that second chance.

He had no phone, but the way the flames were leaping into the air he was sure someone farther down the road would be calling the fire department soon. The heat was already intense.

He squatted down, shaded his eyes against the glare of the flames, and tried to see into the back seat. No one, or if there was anyone else in the car he couldn't see them, but he did see a large suitcase resting on the roof of the car just inside the shattered rear door glass. He debated for a split second and then ran forward and grabbed for the bag, pulling it from inside the wreck. It was heavy and hot to the touch. The imitation brown leather, sticky on one corner and melting. Whatever was in it, he told himself, would not have lasted much longer. He was headed back up the road from the wreck when he spotted a grocery bag spilled into the ditch. It was mainly intact so he picked that up too and ran for the trailer.

Behind him he could hear the sirens now. They were on their way and that meant there would probably be neighbors on the way too... Any minute, he told himself. He got the trailer door opened, jumped inside and closed it. He set the grocery bag on the counter. His heart was beginning to slam in his chest once more. He picked up the suitcases and duffel bags and hurried them back to the bedroom. He came back, threw the grocery bag and the packages of lunch meat and cheese into the refrigerator, debated briefly about the loaf of moldy bread, but decided to leave it. He looked back into the fridge. It looked crowded. Beer, lunch meat, cheese, bread. It was the most he could ever recall seeing in there at one time before.

He stepped back letting the door swing shut and looked around the kitchen-living room area: Nothing looked out of place. He could not imagine that the cops would want to come in here for any reason, but if they did they wouldn't find anything.

He looked down at his hands, grimaced at the blood and specks of bone. A smear of drying blood decorated one shirtsleeve. He looked down at the front of the shirt and saw it was streaked with blood and gore. He turned and ran to the bathroom stripping off the shirt as he went: As he looked down at his jeans he noticed they were gore spattered to. He peeled them off just as quickly, kicking his boots aside. He washed up and then left the bathroom and went to the bedroom where he dug a wrinkled pair of jeans from the basket there, a clean shirt from the dresser, and quickly re-dressed. He sat back on the bed, pulled the jeans up and shoved his left foot into one of his sneakers lying next to the bed where he had left them the night before. He stood, jammed his right foot into the other sneaker, danced around unbalanced for a moment as he tugged the zipper home, buttoned the top and threw himself back down onto the tangle of sheets to work the sneakers on the rest of the way and lace them.

His heart had become a racing engine once again, all high speed and flat out, and he tried to calm down as he smoothed the sheets out flat and then walked down the short hall, opened the door and stepped down the rickety steps and into the bare dirt front yard.

He could not see the fire engines or police cars, whichever it was that were coming. Both eventually, he told himself, but the sirens were loud and a half dozen people were walking down the road toward his place and the car that was burning. They were still a quarter of a mile away. He forced his breathing to slow down for the second time, and sat down on the top step waiting. The smoke from the burning car was thick and black, spiraling up into the air. The smells of cooking meat, hot metal and burning plastic hung in the air, competing with each other, causing his stomach to flip once more. The smoke seemed to catch in the trees, unable to rise further: Pools of it snaked along the ground, drifting slowly.

The lights came into view. They were far down the road, but closing fast. Within a few seconds a city police car skidded to a shuddering stop on the dirt road, followed by two sheriff cars. Two fire engines came next, coasting to a stop behind the sheriff cars, then swinging around them, angling down toward the burning car. Carl Evers rose from the steps and began walking down the road to meet them.

Cops

All the cops were calling on their radios at once it seemed to Carl. He broke into a run and the city cop looked his way.

There's another one in my back yard with a dead guy, he yelled.

The cop looked amazed for a moment and then went back to talking on his radio once more. He finished, threw the radio handset back into his car, and glancing once more at the burning car, he turned and followed Carl into his back yard.

Jesus, the young cop said. That happened when he hit the tree? No way!

The other car was shooting at them, Carl said. He immediately wished he had kept his mouth shut.

You saw that? the cop asked.

Providence again, Carl thought. Well, no, I didn't. I heard shots... I didn't see 'em, he lied.

So there's people in that other car? the cop asked.

I think so, Carl answered. He took a few moments to formulate a lie. He didn't need a complicated lie. Something simple. Something close to the truth so he could remember it, but something that wouldn't make him an eye witness.

When I got out, I seen the car laying on its top. I didn't know about the other one. I had to get dressed. Once I got out of the house and headed down the road the car made this little popping sound and flames shot out of the engine compartment: When I turned away I saw the other one in the back yard. I knew something had crashed, because a few months back another car crashed into that same tree, and this sounded the same to me, Carl said.

The cop nodded. You go near either car? he asked.

The one out back. I leaned through the window to see if the guy was okay... Had to catch my hand on the seat... It was gross... I realized the guy was dead and got away from the car as quick as I could... Waited for you guys, Carl said.

The cop nodded, pulled a small notebook from his shirt pocket and wrote in it. He asked Carl for his name and the address and wrote that down too.

Stupid, stupid, stupid, Carl thought. He hadn't wanted to link himself to anything, but he had been afraid that they would find the hand print on the seat. An area of the seat that had been covered with blood and splatter and he had left noticeably cleaner in the shape of a hand. What else could he do?

You okay? the cop asked.

Not really, Carl admitted.

Go sit down... I'll have somebody talk to you. He looked intently at Carl for a moment. How much you had to drink, Carl?

Uh... About a six pack... It's my night off, Carl explained.

Easy, Carl... I'm not here to bust your balls. They'll want to know... Impairs your judgment. It will determine whether they will take what you say or look for other witnesses, you see? the cop asked.

Yeah, Carl agreed. I do see.

So? The cop asked.

Oh... Right. I had about a twelve pack, Carl said. He shrugged.

Night off, the young cop said.

Night off, Carl agreed.

All right, Carl. Go have a seat and when the detectives get here I'll send them over, he told him.

Carl went and sat down on his front steps and waited for the rest of the cops to show up. He watched the lead fire truck drown the burning car in foam, and in just a few seconds the fire was out, the car sat smoking: Steam rising into the air. The smell of burned meat thick and heavy.

The Detectives

I understand you had quite a lot to drink during the evening, a big, blonde haired cop said to him.

Well, yes, Carl admitted. But it's my day off, he added.

Easy, son, nobody's blaming you. You're home. Day off. No reason why you shouldn't have a few drinks. It's not like you knew a car was going to crash into your back yard. He smiled to put Carl more at ease, and although Carl knew that was why he smiled he felt more at ease anyway.

Did you know? the shorter dark haired cop asked.

What?

Did you know the car was going to crash into your back yard?

No... Of course, I didn't, Carl told him.

You look familiar to me, The dark haired cop continued.

Did a little county time a few years back, Carl admitted.

He looked at him.

Possession with intent, Carl added. Eighteen months.

Out in a year with the good time though, right? the blonde haired cop said.

Still fucking around with pot, Carl? The dark haired one asked.

No... Not no more, Carl told him.

So we could check the house and find nothing, he asked.

Sure... Sure.... Go ahead, Carl said. There's nothing there at all.

But we aren't going to do that, The blonde said. Your past is your past, Carl. I said I ain't here to give you a hard time and I meant that. He turned and looked over at the Chevy which had been lifted into the air. The roof had been cut away and two bodies had been taken out as they talked. They had set the car back down and were now winching it over onto its wheels so they could pull it up onto the flatbed wrecker that waited. He glanced back to the backyard. They were still working to pry the car in the back yard away from the tree. The body was long gone. They were using metal saws to cut the car away. Once enough had been cut away to move the car, it would go on a flat bed too. The cop's eyes came back to Carl.

You think of anything that might help us? he asked.

The gunshots, Carl said and shrugged.

The blonde nodded. We have an eyewitness to that. Says she was walking down the road when she saw the two cars coming, jumped in the woods. She saw the passenger lean out the window and fire at the car ahead... The dude in the car in your back yard, Carl. That's how he got dead.

To Carl, it felt as though his eyes had bugged right out of his head, but he struggled to maintain his composure. She? Who was she? He had seen no one at all, but whoever she was, she had described exactly what he himself had seen, so she must have been there. What else did she see?

You okay? the blonde asked.

Tired... Sickened too, to be honest, Carl said.

Yeah... Pauls, that's the name of the officer that spoke to you, J. Pauls, said you leaned into the car to check on the guy... Found a hand print there.... I assume it's yours. I guess if I had found that I wouldn't be feeling too good either. He sighed. We'll be out of here in a few minutes, he added. But if you think of something.

He closed his own little notebook that he had pulled from his pocket and looked at the other detective. He shook his head.

I guess we have nothing else, Carl. Like I said, if you think of anything, he reached into his pocket and pulled out a business card. He handed the card to Carl. Give me a call, okay?

Carl nodded, looked over the card and then shoved it into his pocket.

They all stood and watched as the Chevy flipped back over onto its wheels: Metal screeching, the car lurching from side to side on its ruined suspension as it slammed down. The men began hooking up the cables to winch the car up onto the flat bed truck. A few seconds later a second flat bed truck drove around the first and then backed down Carl's driveway to the back yard. A steady Beep... Beep... Beep sounding as it backed up. The three, Carl and both cops, watched in silence as two men hooked up the remains of the Ford and then winched it backwards and up onto the flat bed.

A second later the two cops walked away without another word. Carl sat back down on his wooden steps and watched them get into their car and drive away. The trucks followed, and a few seconds later the silence descended once more on Sanger road. Carl sat and watched the dust settle back down to the dirt lane.

There was a little gray seeping into the sky above the tree tops. Dawn was not far away. Carl walked up the steps and into the trailer He took one of the beers from the refrigerator, went back outside and sat down on the steps once more.

She, whoever she was, was on his mind. If there had been someone else there, why hadn't she let him know? Had she been afraid? Most likely, he thought. What had she seen? Had she seen him take the stuff from the Chevy? The Ford?

The Ford he found hard to believe. She would have pretty much had to have been in plain view to have seen the Ford in his back yard, but the Chevy was a different matter. He had been exposed, she could have been anywhere, but if she had seen what he had done why hadn't she told the cops? She couldn't have or they would have confronted him and taken those items back, probably arrested him too.

He sipped at the beer, remembered that he had eleven more: Wished he had, had time to check the one guys wallet, maybe there had been money it, in fact probably there had been money in it; then he tipped the beer and chugged it. Got up, went back inside, got two more beers and then came back out and sat down on the steps once more.

He really wanted nothing more than to go back inside to the bedroom and see what he had gotten, but he was too worried about the witness the cops had told him about. Who could it be? Would she eventually tell the cops? Had she, and they were just playing it cool to see if he would lie? Questions and questions and no answers.

He popped the top on one of the beers and took a deep drink. His mind seemed to clear a little.

The big bags were almost certainly pot. That wasn't cash money, but it could be soon. The bricks that had been hidden in the ice chest were probably cocaine That was scary, but it was also money. And he knew who to go to, to get rid of all of that. That would be a very large sum of money. He sipped at the beer and thought about it, playing it over in his head.

The two bags of pot were huge. Too heavy for him to carry both bags. That was a lot of pot. A lot of money... The guns... And what else was in the other bags? More drugs? Money? Guns?