Haunted (Michael Bennett 10)

We hopped out of the car, and I followed her up the stairs to the porch. We stood there and listened for a minute. There was not a sound or vibration coming from the house. I looked across the compound to the dirt road that ran on the other side of the property. It was dark, and I couldn’t see much. It was around one in the morning, and the clouds obscured the moon.

I said, “What do we do if no one answers? Do we kick in the door? How do we justify it?”

Sandy looked at me and said, “For a guy who always flies by the seat of his pants and rarely worries about consequences, you’re starting to sound like an old man.”

This time I stepped up and pounded on the front door. There was no way that sound wasn’t going to wake someone up.

Still, there was no answer and no activity in the compound. I tried looking in the windows, but heavy curtains blocked my view.

Sandy said, “What do you think?”

“I think we can articulate it by saying there was a shooting in town and we had to verify his safety inside the house. Who can argue with a safety check?”

“I like the way you think.”

I lined up on the door. I could either kick it or use my shoulder. I didn’t like either option, but they both looked like they would work on the old wood-frame door.

I braced myself and got ready to ram my shoulder into the upper part of the door. Then I froze when I heard a noise. Someone moved the curtain on the window beside the door, then the door started to open.

Dell Streeter popped his head out and said, “What’s all the commotion about?”

I blurted out, “You didn’t answer the door, you moron. That’s what the commotion is about.”

“Well, excuse me all to hell. But you know it is late at night. I dozed off in the storm cellar. It’s always a cool sixty-eight degrees down there. Are you going to knock on the door

every time you don’t see me for a few minutes?”

Sandy said, “Mickey Bale was shot and killed outside of the Bear and Buffalo Wings sports bar.”

“Looks like you might’ve been protecting the wrong man. Sorry to hear you lost someone on your watch. Not surprised, just sorry.”

At that moment, I wished Dell Streeter had been the one who was shot.

Chapter 76

I pulled up to the scene of the shooting right behind Sandy. We were in the middle of town. Everyone recognized her car as an official police vehicle. My van didn’t warrant a second look from anyone.

There were a lot of people on the street for this time of night. This was not a typical evening in a quaint Maine town. This was a police crime scene involving a shooting, and it looked just like every other shooting scene I had ever been to. It could’ve been a street in the Bronx, except the buildings were smaller and there wasn’t quite the diversity you saw in the city.

Official vehicles were pulled in at odd angles, and a crowd of bystanders was being held back by a young officer. They were looking at nothing. Like bystanders everywhere.

A medical examiner’s investigator was photographing the body.

The dead man was a slightly overweight guy in his late thirties with a scruffy beard. His flannel shirt had two giant bloodstains on the front where the bullets had struck him directly in the chest.

I stepped up behind Sandy and said, “Where are the privacy blinds to block the media’s view?”

Sandy said, “We don’t have any. We’ve never needed any. This isn’t Chicago. This is Linewiler, Maine.”

“That doesn’t change the fact that a body is lying on the street.”

She nodded, irritated at my insistence. Sandy looked at a stocky city worker who wasn’t a cop. She said, “Chuck, can you get into city hall and bring me three cubicle dividers?”

The tall middle-aged man jumped right to it and grabbed two others as he raced into the city hall. In New York, a city worker would’ve told me it wasn’t his job or that I couldn’t tell him what to do. This was impressive.

Sandy had complete command of the scene. She explained to some of the officers why they were doing the tasks assigned to them, such as keeping a list of everyone who entered the crime scene and finding out if any of the nearby buildings had a security camera running.

Sandy turned to one young officer who looked like he had been in the military. He was lanky, with a flattop, and he held himself perfectly straight.