A Living Grave by Robert E. Dunn Read Free Book Online

I had seen rushing off from assaulting Nelson Solomon. This one was bigger, but lean. Tough and wiry-looking with greasy hair and no helmet. His bike was an old Sportster that looked to be as greasy as the rider. It was now idling up to a stop in the middle of the street. The rider was watching me just as much as I was watching him.
    â€œWho’s this?” I asked the question to myself, expecting no answer, but I got one.
    â€œThat’s him,” Carrie said. Then, louder, she added, “Leech. That’s him.”
    The biker twisted the throttle and turned the bike as soon as I stood and stepped in his direction.
    When I ran for my vehicle, Danny started his engine again. As soon as it caught, he spun his tires in the dirt and bumped the car up onto the road just as a news van showed up from the other direction.
    I didn’t catch the biker.
    * * *
    They say that epileptics feel an aura of impending seizure. I’ve read descriptions of a lightness, both in sensation and vision that surrounds them, or of an embrace that is more known than felt, which signals to them an event is coming. People like me, survivors whose experience of trauma never really leaves, are hung with the diagnosis of PTSD, post-traumatic stress disorder. We can feel an aura too, although it is different and our events are much different.
    An event for me is an actual transportation back to a time and place that I’ve never actually left. Ghosts of a terrible moment continue to live in my mind. Most days I go on with them haunting from the edges of my thoughts. Some days I feel my own aura—a dark sense of impending transition, like a series of small black stones dropped on me until their weight drags me to that other place.
    As I drove, at first chasing the biker—then, once I admitted that I’d lost him, chasing the hope—I felt the weight settling. Anyone that tells you a child’s death doesn’t put a weight on a cop, on every cop, doesn’t know us. I’d called in, asking for assistance from any units in the area. But it’s a big area with lots of twisting roads and crossing dirt tracks to get lost in. Telling yourself, or anyone else, that you did it right, did everything you could, feels as much a failure as the failure itself. Another weight.
    Along with it came the usual craving to drink. There’s a strange illusion in the mind of someone like me—something else you learn in therapy—the belief that being drunk will blunt the pain of that moment you’re running from. Maybe it does in a way, but it’s like digging a grave and crawling inside because the sun is too bright. Nothing is easy about any of it. There is just the unending pain and fear and the whisper of the alcohol, saying it can help. I can’t explain it well enough to find an answer. I’ve never met anyone who could. You just have to know it’s a lie.
    There have been many times I’ve given in to it. But never while working. I can say that with a little pride. But the black pressure makes for a black mood. I was feeling them both and sinking even deeper into it when I pulled up outside the sheriff’s office. News vans were packing the street. Law enforcement and journalists, we’re the carrion eaters cleaning the bad meat of death from the nation. Sanitizing.
    I need a drink .
    Inside, I ended what had turned into a long day by leaving a few messages and checking on my own. Routine and work are the best things to lift the weight. I asked the deputy on the desk to find out for me who had written Danny Barnes a ticket. On a yellow legal pad I wrote a long note filling the sheriff in on my investigation. He would be sure to read a handwritten note on his desk. From experience, I knew an e-mail would just be skimmed and he would come ask questions I’d already answered.
    On my desk was a note telling me Clarence Bolin had come in and identified the man he had seen in the area where