“Anybody else get hit besides my new friend over there?”
“Two other young gentlemen, struck in the legs and abdomen. As far as I know, they’ve both forgotten how to speak English.”
Even more lights appeared. It looked like the parking lot up there had been turned into day. “Diane.”
“Yeah.”
“Not that I’m being critical or anything, but why are you here and not … you know, working?”
“I am working,” she said. “I’m being support. See the really bright television lights up there? That’s because Assistant Attorney General Martin has arrived with his state police unit, taking over this awful gangland-type shooting as part of the ongoing opioid crisis. Blah-blah-blah, yadda-yadda-yadda.”
Two bulky men in ill-cut suits were gingerly walking around the dead man, and I knew they were detectives from the state police.
“So besides chatting with me …”
“I’m not chatting with you,” Diane said. “You’re a witness, and I’m conducting a witness interview.”
“Oh,” I said. “My bad. Sorry.”
“You heard the gunshots. You saw the muzzle flashes. You poked your head out and nearly got it blown off. Pretty fair description so far?”
“Very fair.”
“Did you see that bulky guy over there come down your driveway?”
“No, I didn’t.”
“Hear any shouts, any voices? Anything else?”
“Nope.”
“All right,” she said. Over by the deceased Ramon, the state cops were taking photos and making measurements. “Lewis …”
I was hoping she wasn’t going to press me, because I didn’t want to be pressed, and I was relieved at what she said next.
“That hunk of man meat over there, any chance he was your mysterious visitor who’s been coming in at night when you’ve been upstairs in bed?”
Good question, one I was very happy to answer.
“No, not a chance.”
“Why are you so sure?”
“Hard to explain. When I heard the guy come into my place, he moved softly. Like he was barely disturbing anything. That big boy over there”—I pointed for emphasis—“would have sounded like a small tank going across the floorboards. I would have easily heard that.”
Diane nodded. “Yeah. Wonder why, though, he ended up in your driveway. It was almost like he was coming down here for a reason.”
I had been asking myself the same thing. “I don’t know. Maybe he got scared, decided to run away, find a place to hide. Maybe he saw the lights on. Maybe he had already been shot and was looking for help.”
“Maybe,” she said. “But one thing’s for certain. Somewhere out there a woman is sleeping, maybe that guy’s wife, girlfriend, or mother. She’s sleeping deeply, with no idea that the man she loves, the one she’s either coupled with or raised as a little boy, is dead.”
I could hear Diane take a breath. “And I’m not the one who’s going to make the call tonight, to wake her up, to shatter her life. Not me. It’s going to be somebody else, and at my age, and at this hour of the night, that’s all right by me. I have no problem with that.”
“I can see,” I said.
Diane gently nudged me with her shoulder. “Hey, recovering patient, don’t you think it’s time to get back to bed?”
“Going to be hard, with all that noise and lights.”
“Yeah, well, it’s cold out here. Better to be inside and warm. Don’t want you to catch cold. Or worse.”
She gave me a quick embrace and I said, “This one should be relatively quick to get leads on, don’t you think?”
“Maybe,” I said. “The Lafayette House still has surveillance cameras on their front lawn and the parking lot, right? With the streetlights up there, the footage you might get from tollbooth cameras, it might be easy to get a trace.”
“Dear me,” Diane said. “I’ll make sure to pass that along to the big bad state police detectives. Maybe you can get a shiny badge from them when this is over.”
“Only if you put in a good word for me.”
“As if.”
Diane left and I stood for a while on my steps, feeling the coldness of the granite seep into my shoes. The glare from the television cameras had switched off, meaning that Assistant Attorney General Martin had finished his statements and left for the night.
Two men with a wheeled gurney came down the driveway, holding onto its sides as it rattled and shook over the rough ground. They were firefighter/EMTs from the Tyler Fire Department, and with the state police detectives looking on, they went to work. They undid the belts on the gurney, took off a flat object that they unfolded into a very familiar shape: a body bag. They unzipped it and got to work, clumsily maneuvering Ramon into the bag, securing his limbs, and zipping the bag shut.
The detectives took a step back, either out of respect or because they didn’t want the body to fall on their feet when the EMTs picked it up. With a “one-two-heave,” Ramon was picked up, strapped onto the gurney, and wheeled back up my lumpy driveway. I suppose this was the time to think grand philosophical thoughts about Life and Death and The Meaning of it All, but I wasn’t in the mood.
I went for the door. “Sir! Sir! Can you hold on for a moment?” one of the detectives called out.
The two detectives came over and identified themselves, and I promptly forgot their names. “Can we ask you a few questions?”
“I talked to Detective Sergeant Woods just a few minutes ago,” I said. “Doesn’t that count?”
The larger of the detectives crisply said, “No. Now, your name, sir, and how long have you been living here?”
So I stood out there in the cold and gathering darkness—one by one, sets of red and blue lights from the parking lot started to wink out—answering their questions. At one point, one of them knelt down and gently pried the bullet from my door, slipping it into a little clear glassine bag. The questions went on until they didn’t, and when the smaller of the detectives said, “I think we’re through,
