Out There in the Darkness by Ed Gorman

Author:Ed Gorman [Gorman, Ed]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Mystery & Crime
Publisher: SUBTERRANEAN Press
Published: 1995-10-01T04:00:00+00:00

Mike and Neil were at my place within twenty minutes. We sat in the kitchen again, where we were last night.

I said, “Either of you get any weird phone calls tonight?”

“You mean just silence?” Neil said.

“Right.”

“I did,” Mike said. “Carrie was afraid it was that pervert who called all last winter.”

“I did, too,” Neil said. “Three of them.”

“Then a little while ago, Bob dies out in his garage,” I said. “Some coincidence.”

“Hey, Aaron,” Mike said. “Is that why you got us over here? Because you don’t think it was an accident?”

“I’m sure it wasn’t an accident,” I said. “Bob knew what he was doing with his tools. He didn’t notice a plug that had fallen into a bowl of water?”

“He’s coming after us,” Neil said.

“Oh, God,” Mike said. “Not you, too.”

“He calls us, gets us on edge,” I said. “And then he kills Bob. Making it look like an accident.”

“These are pretty bright people,” Mike said sarcastically.

“You notice the burglar’s eyes?” Neil said.

“I did,” I said. “He looked very bright.”

“And spooky,” Neil said. “Never saw eyes like that before.”

“I can shoot your theory right in the butt,” Mike said.

“How?” I said.

He leaned forward, sipped his beer. I’d thought about putting out some munchies but somehow that seemed wrong given poor Bob’s death and the phone calls. The beers we had to have. The munchies were too festive.

“Here’s how. There are two burglars, right? One gets caught, the other runs. And given the nature of burglars, keeps on running. He wouldn’t even know who was in the house last night, except for Aaron, and that’s only because he’s the owner and his name would be in the phone book. But he wouldn’t know anything about Bob or Neil or me. No way he’d have been able to track down Bob.”

I shook my head. “You’re overlooking the obvious.”

“Like what?”

“Like he runs off last night, gets his car and then parks in the alley to see what’s going to happen.”

“Right,” Neil said. “Then he sees us bringing his friend out wrapped in a blanket. He follows us to the dam and watches us throw his friend in.”

“And,” I said, “everybody had his car here last night. Very easy for him to write down all the license numbers.”

“So he kills Bob,” Neil said. “And starts making the phone calls to shake us up.”

“Why Bob?”

“Maybe he hates black people,” I said.

Mike looked first at me and then at Neil. “You know what this is?”

“Here he goes,” Neil said.

“No; no, I’m serious here. This is Catholic guilt.”

“How can it be Catholic guilt when I’m Jewish?” Neil said.

“In a culture like ours, everybody is a little bit Jewish and a little bit Catholic, anyway,” Mike said. “So you guys are in the throes of Catholic guilt. You feel bad about what we had to do last night—and we did have to do it, we really didn’t have any choice—and the guilt starts to play on your mind. So poor Bob electrocutes himself accidentally and you immediately think it’s the second burglar.

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