= MAN IN THE DARK
  by Ray Nayler


He shouldn't be out in this. Sam scanned the road ahead for the reported washout, but the entire world looked like a washout--black pavement on black earth, the headlights of his cruiser skating yellow across the water of the road, sparkling on the reflective dots of the centerline. The cruiser's tires hit a puddle, and the wheel shuddered in his hands. Water barked against the undercarriage. He held his breath, as if the pressure of his lungs could keep the tires biting.

The radio squawked--patrolmen calling in washouts, flooding, power lines down all over the county. The sky had opened up on California. The Central Valley was quickly becoming an inland sea.

The rain was more than the wipers could handle. They swiped at it but could not clear the solid coat that pasted the windshield, instantly refilling the semicircle of their track across the glass.

He was thinking of Rachel, seeing her laundry bag stuffed with clothes, catching on the door frame as she left him. She'd left before the storm had started. She would be at her mother's house by now. Safe from the rain and from him.

The road was just a black streak without reference, the crossings he usually guided himself by gone behind the solid curtain of water. Where was the washout?

He hit a set of railroad tracks and tapped the brakes too hard. The wheels came off the pavement, and the cruiser tilted sideways through space. Sam worked the steering wheel desperately. The cruiser hydroplaned sideways. The tires bit into the road, and the world turned itself upside down. He had a sudden, sickening view of the ditch, lit up crazily in the headlights, before the car turned over again and smashed grill-first into the mud.

The radio was crushed under the buckled dashboard. His hip ached, where he had been thrown against the driver's side door. His short wave had broken itself against his bones. He yanked it out of his belt and depressed the talk button. Nothing. Not even static. He was alone.

Sam pushed on the cruiser door. It wouldn't open. The car had ended up on its wheels, down in the ditch, grill sunk in the mud. He smashed the windshield out with his boots and climbed through, stumbling in the slippery earth as he made his way around to the trunk. The trunk lid was crushed shut. The lock would not budge. His raincoat was inside. He smashed a fist down on the metal in frustration. He hadn't seen a car in hours. He would have to walk to the nearest house. This far out in the county, the houses were up to a mile apart.

Wind pushed water across blacktop in inch-deep waves and slapped rain into his eyes. He started to walk, swinging the thin beam of his flashlight ahead of him like a cane. After twenty minutes, he came to a gravel road, posted "private".

Just as he set his foot on the gravel, a truck roared past him, so close it set him off balance, knocking him to his knees in the drainage ditch. The truck stopped, a hundred yards ahead, blurred by the rain, its red taillights two bloody streaks. He raised the flashlight, waved it back and forth. Maybe they had not seen him. The truck's reverse lights came on, then went out. With a spin of its tires it continued, away from him.

The gravel road was slippery under his boots, as if the mud underneath was trying to pull him down into it.

Stupid. A professional driver, a highway patrolman, and he had been going too fast, had let impatience carry him right into a ditch. The other men, who never spoke to him, his "fellow officers" would laugh about this for years coming to pick up the wet black patrolman at a farmhouse. Towing his wrecked cruiser out of the ditch. How dumb was he? He'd put his raincoat in the trunk.

One of them would use that word about him. He knew one of them would. Not around the station, of course. Maybe at home, to his wife or his young jock son. But someone would use it. And someone would laugh.

Thinking about it made him hate the water that dropped from the trees and the air onto him.

A square of warm orange light, the shadowy triangle of a roof. He broke into a trot, boots slipping on the gravel, anger like a hand at his back, shoving him forward. He climbed the slick porch step and hammered on the farmhouse door.

The door had a four-pane window in its center, covered by blinds. No light showed behind the blinds. They shifted, split, came back together. More waiting. Finally the door swung open.

A woman stood in the doorway, in a beat-up Pendleton jacket and jeans, blonde hair pulled back and knotted. She shook her head at him.

"Don't you cops wear raincoats?"

"I'm sorry to disturb you this late, ma'am. But I wrecked my car up the road...."

She ushered him in with a wave of her hand.

"I'm not surprised, on a night like this. Nobody should be out in this. Just the sound of it is keeping me up."

"I was wondering if I could use your phone."

The house was dark, except for a pale filter of light from the top of the staircase. Despite the darkness, the house seemed full of energy. He quickly placed it as nervousness, radiating from the woman.

"The name is Alice." She put a warm, dry hand in his.

"Sam."

"The phone is dead. But the least I can do is get you some dry clothes. You'll catch your death. Listen to me -- I sound like your mother."

He realized that he was shivering. It was all he could do to keep his teeth from rattling together.

"That would be good, I think. The clothes, I mean."

She went up the stairs, leaving him in the dark with the impression that he had walked in on something some uncomfortable situation.

"Are you alone?" he called after her.

She answered from around a shadowy corner. "Yes. Now that my husband died."

She came down the stairs, turned a light switch on.

Under the light, he could see the work lines on her face and hands, the careless frizz of her blonde hair. Her eyes were hard.

She's remembering him, Sam thought.

"I laid the clothes out on the bed. The room is up to the left. You aren't hurt from the accident?"

"No." He wished that he was. It would have been something to show for it.

The bedroom was small and tidy in that "Country Cottage" style that Sam had seen before when arresting stolen car dealers. There were at least a dozen quilts layered on the bed, a half-dozen more draped over a Shaker chair. His wet boots were leaving a spreading gray stain on the immaculate white carpet. The clothes she had picked out for him were folded at the foot of the bed. He disrobed carefully, peeling away the layers of his uniform, wet by wet, balling them up and looking for a place to set them that would cause the least damage. There was nowhere. His gun belt was soaked, his bootlaces tight with water. Trying to take his boots off while standing, he stumbled. Finally he had to sit on the edge of the bed, pressing water into patchwork, heaving the boots off, sliding his pants down. Even his underwear was soaked.

Taking his uniform off always made him feel more naked, as if he was shedding armor. He balled up the pieces and went into the bathroom. Bowls of seashell soaps and the alien scent of potpourri. He stumbled in the dark and found the light switch. Paintings of farmland in flat patchwork, like the quilts. American primitive. His mother had loved the style, had collected it the way white mothers collect smiling Negro salt-and-pepper shakers. She had kept piles of fat coffee-table books full of the two-dimensional paintings in their apartment in Chicago.

Power, but no phone, Alice had said. The rain hammered on the windowpanes, a shower of pebbles against the glass. Power, but no phone. How had she known the phone was out? He put his wet boots in the bathtub, mopped the puddles off the floor with the towel. He avoided his brown nakedness in the mirror.

In the bedroom, he dressed in the other man's clothes. The dead man's clothes. They were cut for shoulders broader than his, a waist that sagged. He belted his gun around the loose waist of the work-jeans. The shoes--beaten sneakers--fit perfectly.

Back in the bathroom, he looked at himself in the mirror, clad in baggy flannel and denim, and smoothed his short-cropped hair.

They would joke about it at the station for months, when they found him like this.

"I should be dead," he said aloud.

She was sitting in the kitchen, unconsciously drumming her feet on the yellow linoleum, bent over a cup of coffee. She looked up at him and covered her mouth with her hand.

He ignored the look, sat down. She took her hand away from her mouth, and smiled.

"You look different."

"How's that?"

"Smaller."

That was how he felt. Smaller.

"Coffee?"

"No, thanks. When exactly did your phone go out?"

"Two hours ago."

"How did you know? Were you on the phone at the time?" It would have been one A.M.

"No." The tendons in her wrist stood out hard as she lifted the coffee to her mouth, brought the cup to her compact lips.

"Then...."

"The calls stopped." She snapped mug to table. "I've been getting these calls."

"What kind?"

"Threats."

"And you reported them?"

"What good would it do?"

"How long has this gone on?"

"A month. Maybe more."

"Recognize the voice?"

The lines around her eyes sharpened, bird-stamps in sand. "He talks through a handkerchief. But yes. It's Glen. My husband's--my dead husband's brother. He used to help me with the horses."

"You breed?"

"I keep studs. I sell their services."

He liked the scrubbed, burned circle of her face, the freckles across her cheekbones, like Rachel's. Rachel's darkest freckles were the exact color of his skin.

"He wanted to take my husband's place, and I didn't want him to. He was forward about it. Too forward. I had to fight him off. So I let him go. Fired him. And then, the phone calls started. And...."

"And he's been out here, hasn't he." The truck on the road, forcing him into the ditch.

"Tonight."

"Yes."

"Besides the horses, he took care of other things, didn't he? Fences. The roof of the barn, wiring...."

"Yes." He'd cut the phone lines himself. She knew it.

"You have protection?"

"I gave my husband's shotgun to Glen. It belonged in their family. It was their father's."

But she kept the clothes, he thought.

Wind machine-gunned droplets against the window.

He snapped the kitchen light off and waited for his eyes to adjust. A sound, hidden in the roar of rain, had reached him. Soon he was able to make out the lumpen line of earth and trees against the sky. And behind the trees, a broken streak of light. He almost did not catch it, the first time. It came again, closer, slicing through the trunks.

Alice sat perfectly still, not even breathing. The light cut through again, very close, sweeping the windowpane, its glow catching in the sheeting water.

"I think the man you've been expecting is here."

Light leapt across the windowpane, slid away. The truck went past the house, slow, the sound drowned by rain. A cough as the engine was snapped off. Silence.

"He's gone past the house. At least a few hundred yards past."

He could feel her fear in the dark, like warm breath on his neck. The chair squealed against the linoleum as she stood up.

"Oh god... of course. The horses."

"What?"

"He's at the barn. He's going to shoot the horses."

Sam went down the front steps, gun in hand. The rain sheeted down, harder now if anything, slapping wet into his face with each gust of wind. He kept his flashlight in his pocket. Ahead was the truck, lights on, driver's side door open, empty white cab lit up like a ghost-white box, taillights comet-smears in the rain. The headlights pasted a hazy spotlight to the side of the barn, sliced by black where the door had been forced open. The remains of the heavy chain that had guarded the door, and the bolt-cutter that had cut it, lay in the mud.

A shot thundered from inside. The muzzle flashed, illuminating for a second Glen's face above the shotgun, the glossy eyes of the horse, the terrified square of its teeth as the buckshot ended it. In the black that followed the flash he heard the horse collapse against the boards of its stall, the other horses crying out in a terror that sounded almost human.

The interior of the barn was ink-black, except for the dim wash of the truck's headlights, scattered a dozen feet across dirt. The nervous shuffling and nickering of the horses concealed any sound of Glen's movements. Sam could shout at the man to stop, but knew it would only bring the shotgun around. Glen might fire on him without thinking. Or with thinking.

He found himself remembering a time when, in the locker room at the station, he had walked in on a rookie patrolman, scratching his name off his locker with a quarter. Sam had said nothing to the man. He had simply replaced his name later. Samuel Wilson. But at that moment he had realized the answer to his greatest question: When will the other men accept me?

Never.

He set his back foot, felt his muscles coil. He cocked the slide of his gun. Never. Not even if he made himself a hero by stopping this man. To some of the other patrolmen there could be nothing worse than a man shooting horses. Rape and murder were second and third. They had been raised in this county. They had more pictures of their horses than they had of their picket-fence wives.

The snap of the shotgun's slide. The thunder. He was inside with the flash, registering the distance to the leering yellow-washed face, the hard-corded hands around the stock. He collided with Glen in the darkness that swept down after the flash, like a bull goring a matador. The air in Glen's lungs coughed out. He crashed against the boards of one of the stall. The shotgun clattered to the ground. Sam's hands scrambled up the fabric of his shirt, rain-wet, found his collar, closed around his throat. A fist slammed into his face, and the world went flashbulb-white.

Glen was on top of him. The fist came down again, whiting the world. Sam felt his grip on Glen's throat loosen, and brought the gun butt up against the invisible face above him. There was a pop as the automatic went off. The body on top of him jerked, and was still.

A flicker of unconsciousness. He came to and scrambled out from under Glen's limp body. The world was silent. The rain had decreased to a soundless drizzle. He tore the flashlight from his belt and snapped it on.

Glen lay belly-up on the haystrewn dirt. He was bleeding from a gash in his head where the misfired bullet had creased him.

"Looks like you missed him."

She was faceless in the doorway, a silhouette in the truck's headlights, light catching in the blonde hairs sticking carelessly up around her head, making them glow like filaments. For just a moment, she was Rachel, knees up, blanket wrapped, skin flushed from before, freckles standing out like drops of chocolate: "You're a cop because you hate us. You're just waiting for the opportunity to kill one of us. I can see it in your eyes when we're making love. You hate me too."

"NO," Sam said, too loudly, to Alice and to Rachel. "The gun went off when we were struggling."

Alice slid a hand across the wall, and the naked hanging bulbs of the barn came on. Sam handcuffed the bleeding man. He ripped cloth from Glen's shirt, tied it around the wounded head.

Alice was looking into the stalls. The wide-eyed horses watched her.

"He killed my two best studs."

He looked up at her, taking the woman in completely now for the first time. Her fingers traced the wash of black horse blood along a plank. A woman stilted by hurt, turned to stone. The man on the floor shifted and twitched like a dreamer.

"It could have been worse, Alice. He could have come in the house...."

"It couldn't have been worse if he had raped me. He knew what he was doing. Men like him always know how to hit you where it hurts the most."

He thought of the rookie trooper, scratching Samuel Wilson off the locker with a quarter.

Alice was right.


Ray Nayler was born in Quebec and raised in California. His fiction has appeared in many magazines, from Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine to Crimewave. He recently completed a suspense novel set in Toronto. He can be contacted at like_the_rabbit@hotmail.com. Ray wrote "Coming out of Nothing" in Issue Seven, "A Night at the Western" in Issue Nine, and "Man in the Dark" in Issue Eleven.

Copyright (c) 2001