Shielded

A Story by Filowen

Some fucked up s**t Murder/Supernatural Mystery

The stench of stale cigarette smoke wafted into his nostrils as he picked up the yellowed menu just to keep his eyes occupied. Tim Barrows had come in here every night for the last six weeks. Ever since Tina had decided she loved the Greyhound bus more than the minivan he was trying to buy her; he had been wallowing in self-pity and a proportionate amount of alcoholic mixtures. He slightly raised his glass of aged whiskey and mumbled “The whiskey dries the tears and moves away the fears”. He always had considered himself a fool and never understood what she had thought of him in the first place. He considered that perhaps she had realized she was too good for him and moved on. He threw the rest of his weeks’ pay from the farm royalties onto the bar and staggered out the door and towards home.

That was the last time anybody ever saw Tim Barrows. His shocking murder was four months ago and nobody had solved it yet. Sheriff Dawson seems like he has interviewed everyone in town at least twice. Tim was a generally well liked guy. He would attend the small Methodist church in town and would sometimes be the loudest singer in the small church. He was the kind of man that more religious folks would label “a backsliding Christian”. He was a kind and honest man but was easily susceptible to the sinful pleasures of the flesh.

He had been found outside of town, laying in a ditch about a mile away from his house. He had obviously intended to walk home. Tim had been reported to be quite buzzed as he had left the bar. That was most likely a sensitive way to phrase his physical state at the time. No cars had been reported leaving or entering. There was only one set of dusty tracks along the dirt road. The tracks belong to Tim as the strides were uneven and consistently different lengths.

The brains had been collected into a plastic bag. His head had been caved in with a very large blunt instrument. Several buzzards had done a bit of feasting before the body was discovered. His head had been ravaged by the sickening animals. It would have taken several hours to identify the body had there not been the only interesting clue.

His body had a deep cuts in the chest showing a spectacular picture of his former love Tina. Tina Shleck had been the lovely woman to steal his soul. The only thing that he could replace her with could be found at the local bar. The doctor was incompetent to say the least. He had no idea if the deep cuts had been made before or after his death.

This would have all eventually faded and become a small whisper by whomever left the bar late at night but another death occurred.

Trine wove his way through the crowd; trying to get a good view of the body. He had been one of the select few who had been able to see Tim Barrows after his death. This obvious murder was much bolder than the previous one had been. This one had been right at the front steps of the small church. The victim was Becky Wilson.

Becky had been one of the most prominent members of the local P.T.A and was both the most prominent teacher and parent in the town. She managed to teach class and raise 14 children. Wilson was a name that was known by everyone in a 40 mile radius and Becky was surely proud of it.

Trine Silverton pondered it. The multiple possibilities or lack thereof skipping around in his head like rocks along the small creek through town. He had grown up with her son Steven and it was obvious that Becky knew how to raise children with the proper morals instilled in them. This year she began writing a weekly letter to all the residents and was even elected treasurer of the Methodist church. He could still remember the final vote quite clearly in his mind. She had garnered 322 of the 323 votes. He had wrote himself in on the ballot to pleasantly defer from the usual actions of the overwhelmingly predictable church.

Trine Silverton had a unique passion for himself. One that rose above and beyond simple vanity. He was a quiet man yet had the qualities of an extrovert. He liked to think of himself as a genius. He had gotten A’s in high school and even managed two years of community college in Jamestown. That was two more years than anybody else in his graduating class managed to do. He did not realize that perhaps he was a big fish in a small pond. He worked for the tri-county daily farming news. It was a bland paper that had the local obituaries and whatever news the locals could try to create.

Last year was the biggest crime spike that the three counties had seen in decades. 6 crimes altogether were committed last year in the three county area alone. He was on scene for two burglaries and three car thefts. Most of the car thefts turn out to be young boys drunk and wanting to go for a spin. He was always am keen to look at the crime from a civilian point of view. Last year, he had managed to track down two of the three cars lost and had managed to return about three hundred dollars worth a property back to the owner. The thieves (neighbor boys)had thought themselves clever by trying to sell the stolen property on Craigslist rather than giving it to a pawnshop. Sherif Dawson was up to his neck in hot water with the new death. People like to give him slack as he is one of two officers in the entire county. With these deaths though; people will start to panic as if the sun failed to rise one morning.

The people of the town were gathering at the front of the church as fast as their old and ever aging bodies would carry them. About seventy five people were there, all trying to get a slight glimpse at the body. There stood a group of ten young kids that had found the body and they stood around trying to comprehend the idea of death. These kids had seen plenty of death; about three people die every week in this town. Yet the idea that your life could be taken in such a manner was very disturbing. The idea that people do not only die of old age was a difficult thing to comprehend in their small town eyes. Tim Masterson’s son was trying to make jokes about it to push away his fear and shock. Trine started to run toward the crowd to try to see the body before it could be moved anywhere.

Trine managed to burst into the front of the horde of people trying to get a look at the body and almost tripped over it. His clumsy skinny six foot frame would have easily fallen face first onto the bloody body had not the strong hands of Sherif Dawson push him back. “Nothing to see here” Dawson yell at the crowd with a deafening tone of finality. Before those words even slid out of his mouth, Trine was hurriedly snapping shots at the body. The scene near the body was chaotic and smelled of blood and urine. The smell seemed to have been strengthened by the hot summer sun bearing down on the body. The respectable elderly were gently pushing and shoving trying to get a view at the scene.

He blanched slightly when he saw through the lenses that her faced had been caved in with a vicious blow. Her skull was caved on the forehead and it was a deep blow. Becky’s wrists were nowhere to be found. Where her heart had been, there was a bloody gaping hole. She had been working late at the church and must have been attacked after she had left,” he heard someone sympathetically murmur. Trine saw the glint of something green floating in the pool of blood in the hole on her chest. He reached for it. Out came a hundred dollar bill, soaked with blood. The crowd gasped and murmured. Trine carefully handed the dripping bill to the Sheriff. He grabbed it and ran it over to his truck to be used as evidence.

EMT workers burst from the crowd and immediately covered the body in a tarp and hoisted it into the back of an old ambulance that was being pulled up. Sheriff Dawson calmly strode my way and leveled his gaze to my eye level. At six feet, Trine was not a short man yet Dawson hovered around six-six and 260 pounds. Dawson’s hands looked like hands that should belong to the incredible hulk and Trine wondered how he could even squeeze off a round with his fingers.

“25 years ago I would have taken that camera and smashed it deep into the dust and wrote you a check for a new one” Dawson slowly said in his deep southern accent. Dawson was truly being a professional even though he had obviously never seen a crime like this. He pulled his card out of his pocket and gave it to Trine. “I know we have worked together a little in the past and if you have information for me than perhaps I have information for you.” He then turned his back to Trine and started directing the already dispersing crowd to leave.

Trine was slightly disgusted in himself to find he was actually excited. He had personally knew Becky and should be truly sickened and sad about her grisly departure from the small town of Gackle, North Dakota. Yet nothing exciting ever happened in this small town. The town is full of the elderly and soon this area should be a ghost town. It sounds stereotypical yet ever since they sold the saw mill to the local Medonites, the town has no hope. The Medonites quickly tore it down and sold the scrap to turn the profit. The once long standing symbol of success and opportunity was now a wasteland of shards of aluminum and pieces of glass. In town, there was about ten houses that still had children in their school years. The rest of the kids that attended the school traveled from a three county area. Some weeks out of the year, nobody attended school because it was harvest season and it was mutually understood that the kids were needed on the farm. Even throughout all this, the small school managed to reach the students who had the wisdom to want to learn and occasionally sent one off to college.

The rest of the semi elderly helped to run the town. Trine know that twenty years from now, the town will be empty and boarded up. The only money that circulates there now is hard saved money and social security. Most of the money circulates out of the dying town. Jamestown is a half hour away and people have to travel there to get their groceries. There once was a store locally that sold groceries but one old woman accused the store of not giving her proper change and the news swirled among the elderly. The poor businessman lost his entire living over the small town scandal and he left the town and never looked back.

In all his twenty two years of life, Trine had never seen the town more disturbed. The elderly who look incapable of being able to rise in the morning were now strolling the streets looking for information on the events. Their small frail frames impossibly being able to put one foot in front of the other. The scene is becoming fearful and I know many of these people walking around me will be going to sleep tonight with the house locked and a gun under their pillow. I know throughout this scene that their are several people I need to talk to to be able to write my story. The more unknown facts I add to my story the more interesting I will become. Perhaps this will be the story needed to rise up out of this outdoor old folks home and be able to report with a much bigger news network.

He heard his prepaid phone buzzing in his right pocket and answered it between the first and second vibration. “Where are you??” his wife said with a distinct tone of urgency. Her name is Jacie. She is a lady that is seven years older than he. He always thought of her as everything he was not. She is extremely logical and spiritual. He always went to church every Sunday yet struggled to believe the extremely conservative religious opinions of the elderly there. She was an obvious introvert and he was a busy extrovert. He never understood why these two types even existed yet he enjoyed her not texting him every five minutes. She was obviously well aware of the situation and it further shows how far the news has quickly traveled. Trine and his wife reside in Streeter, a town that still holds a tiny speckle of hope for the future. It is of course, more of a farming town out of convenience than any real thriving economy. He quickly explained to her what he had saw. She sat patiently, listening to the whole story patiently and nodded. “I heard that the Sherif had killed Becky himself in plain daylight,” she said slightly sarcastically. Trine slightly chuckled to himself at the thought. Sherif Dawson was one of the most trustworthy men he knows. The man was almost boring in that regard. It is startling what the elderly can create with their minds in this poor excuse of a town. Quickly though to himself that accusation could be a very dangerous thing and not funny at all. Trine had an slightly odd sense of humor and it changed when he put himself in different situations. He hardly could begin to understand it. He had seen simple accusations of incorrect change go very wrong. This accusation could bring further hell to this suffering town and he knew he should be responsible and find the root of it. He could even put it in an editorial.

“Honey, I have to go report on this story,” he calmly reassured her then hung up. He slid the phone into his pants pocket and confidently walked into the town library. The town library was about the size of a bedroom and lined with books. The librarian took much pride in being the city record keeper. He was well aware that she was one of the people that could give me further information. She sat at the desk in the front with a grave expression as he pulled up a chair and sat in front of her desk without a word. “I feel so terribly for Becky” she quietly said with tears brimming her eyes. I reassured her with a gentle pat on the arm. “Has there ever been a murder in this town?” I asked her. “The last murder in this town before this year was by Ed Carson over thirty years ago,” She said emotionally. I jotted this information down to be used in the paper. She further explained that their has never been a killing like these in the state for the last fifty years and cannot comprehend who could be behind it. We are people of many small faults but murder has never been in our repertoire. She went on to speculate the type of person who could have physically carried out these crimes but he dismissed it as solely speculation and would not put that in my paper.

He excused myself from the interview after that and went out and started his 82 Volkswagen bug. It was a brown and ugly thing yet had little rust for a North Dakota vehicle. With a small twist of his wrist the engine started to purr and he shifted into first. The sun was starting to droop on this lovely spring day and he drove home quickly to his small home in the corner of town by the long unused baseball field. Grass had sprung up all over the diamond and it was cut occasionally by the townfolk as to at least give the town a small level of pride. He sped rather quickly along the streets knowing that the law was rather busy doing other things this evening.

The bug whirled effortlessly into the small driveway and he got out and rushed into the small town house. His wife had picked up burgers at the local Tastee Freeze and we obliged ourself to the small patties and discussed the case. “So what do you think about about the recent killing?” she asked with true curiosity. He had thought about it myself and was struggling to find any lead to go on. The death of Tim Barrows had been rather peculiar yet the man was relatively close to the community and was a difficult man to dislike. Tina had come back when the authorities contacting her and she had sobbed at his funeral. Unless she had a serious mental condition unknown to us all; she obviously had nothing to do with his murder. There was even a rumor she ran from him because she had a child out of wedlock and did not want to be the disgrace of the church.

In a small town such as this, rumors and gossip runs amok. About 80 percent of the population attend the church and the entire community watches over one another. If some of the young boys in town are seen with cigarettes or alcohol, you can almost guarantee that their parents will have heard about it come next Sunday. It can be hard to decipher fact from fiction yet it seems that the rumor about Tina was true. It had been a well whispered fact that there had been condoms seen in her purse by several snooping ladies. Rather oddly, some of the gossips were very reputable sources and they gossiped purely out of concern for someone. Although they really gossip for the excitement; these prominent woman knew they could not merely speculate.

“It is hard to know,” he said casually back to Tina. “It seems as if the murders are related,” he tell her. She slightly snorts and chuckles because it seems obvious that if her man does not have a lead then nobody does. Tina had a wonderful opinion of her husband and it was very positively altered as she was in love with him. She would readily help him bury a body if he killed someone. She often asked herself why and decided that he was perfect in his eyes.

After dinner they cuddled rather intimately on the couch in the relative safety of one another’s arms. Trice could tell that she was deeply rattled by her everlasting silence and that the killer will have to be brought to justice until the whole town sleeps well. He had the sudden urge to kiss her gently and did. “I promise that whoever did this will be tracked down,” he whispered gently in her ear. “Just promise me you will be careful,” she responded. The promised was made and without another word they rose in perfect harmony and slipped upstairs.