I wanted to give my friends and readers a look at my current work in progress. Just pulling a number out of my ear, I’d say it’s about 25% finished right now. Tentatively, I’m thinking about “Iron’s in the Fire” as a title, with the idea that it could be the first in a series with titles based on common sayings about Iron (Cold as Iron, Ironclad, Iron Maiden, etc.) The hero, as you may have guessed, is named Sherman Iron…
***
“We’ve been out here for an hour. Nobody’s home. Let’s do this.”
I sat in the van, with its tinted windows and uncomfortable bench seats, peering at the house across the street. The woman of the house had left about 74 minutes ago, climbing into her Toyota Camry and motoring away. The lights had been off ever since. The couple’s children had gone away to college years ago.
The husband’s car was gone.
“Are you sure about this? It’s breaking and entering.”
“I know. And no, Sherman, I’m not any more sure than you are. But we talked about this. If it’s true he’s got actual documentation in there, we’ve got the story of the decade. And we’ll be busting a corrupt judge and helping get a drug dealer off the streets. And we might find out who killed my little girl. Any one of those is worth it on its own. Together? Let’s go. Or let’s drive away. If we’re not going to do this, staying here is a waste of time. But either way, we’ve waited long enough.”
The speaker was Everett Talbot, my fellow reporter at the Hunter Post. His shaggy mane of gray hair and his craggy, wrinkled face made him look like an ancient lion who’d lain too long in the Savannah sun. He spit a sunflower seed shell out the window and pressed the resealable bag back together.
And the ‘Sherman’ to whom he referred? That’s me, Sherman Iron. Like Ev, I was a reporter at the Post. Unlike Ev, my hair was blond and short around the sides in a businesslike style. I had a long way to go before I picked up laugh lines and crows’ feet, let alone Ev’s collection of deep furrows. If he was the lion then I, as the ancient reporter terminology went, was the cub.
Fresh out of J school, I took a night shift job at the Hunter post, the daily newspaper in my state’s second-largest city. But the second largest city in Montana would barely qualify for hamlet status compared to the coastal metroplexes, so the town newspaper wasn’t exactly swimming in cash or overflowing at the news desk.
Ev popped open the passenger-side door of the van.
“Coming?”
With a sigh and a silent farewell to my once promising career, I followed my mentor into the black hours of the winter night, questioning my sanity the whole way.
I had wanted to dress in all black, since we were committing our erstwhile crime in the black of night. But Ev said wearing black was actually not that good for nighttime concealment. He proposed a different plan.
We’d ordered a magnet car door sign from a printing company that said “Mitchell Plumbing.” We both wore coveralls with the same logo on them, and bulky tool belts with wrenches and pliers hanging from them. A foreign world to me, but Ev made a good point:
When the toilet backs up, people don’t wait for business hours to call a plumber.
So dressed like we were prepared to wade through a flooding bathroom, the two of us strolled calmly across the street, right up to Judge Harris Whalen’s front door.
Or at least, Ev strolled calmly. My head twitched back and forth like a smellhound on the trail of twenty different deer. I felt like eyes must be watching us from every direction on the street. I kept thinking that, if only I could look quickly enough, I might catch the neighbor’s curtain pulled slightly back, and eyes peeping out from within.
No such luck. Or rather, all the luck. No one looking seemed by far the luckier outcome, and I never saw a single eye on us. That didn’t keep the sweat from popping out of my forehead, or my heart from trying to climb into my throat. But it did keep us from getting arrested.
For now.
Ev had taken a wild, insane chance while we were covering the trial last week. When the court was in recess, Ev happened to see the Judge’s phone sitting on his bench right before we, along with the rest of the crowd, cleared the room. He had time to tap the judge’s birthday into the unlock screen, and it worked! Which was almost as miraculous as the fact that no one caught him doing it.
Armed with that knowledge, we tried putting the Judge’s birthday into his smart car door, and that worked too.
Based on that, we deduced that Judge Whalen, 68, was the kind of man who used the same password for every web site, and the same pin for every device. So as we — “calmly” — walked up to his front door, we were betting that his birthday would open the smart lock, and we’d be able to stroll in just like any plumbers called in for midnight sewage emergency.
“This is an awful big gamble, Ev,” I whispered.
Instead of replying, the older reporter simply knocked on the door. To my ears, each rap of his knuckles sounded like claps of thunder.
“Are you crazy? What if a neighbor hears?”
“Then we just made ourselves look more legitimate. It’s good if someone hears that we knocked.”
“But what if someone answers the knock?”
“Even better. Then we definitely don’t want to break in.”
But after a minute, no one had answered. From within the darkened house, a cloud of silence billowed out, stifling my breath.
Ev reached for the smart lock’s keypad.
“We can still back out,” I whispered, with more than a little hope in my voice.
Instead of replying, he tapped in the Judge’s birthday — 090952.
An electronic click, a heavy series of sliding and thunking noises, and the door was open. Ev turned the handle. Two steps for him, two steps for me, and we were criminals.
I stood inside Judge Whalen’s house, knowing that simply drawing breath there could put me in his courtroom.
“This is insane,” I hissed. I felt like the fact of having committed a felony was clouding out all the rest of my mind. I couldn’t think about anything else except being led away in handcuffs.
“So is staying here any longer than we have to,” the older man replied. “Come on, Sherm! Let’s finish this.”
“Serious, Ev, I’m not sure I can go through with this. This is breaking and entering.”
“Sherman, you know he let Lawson off the hook. You know it was entirely his ruling that kept that evidence inadmissible. You know he was bribed. You know Lawson is going to keep selling meth as long as no one stops him. And you know as long as Judge Harris Whalen is trying all the drug cases in this district, no one is going to stop him.”
We’d been through all that in the newsroom, back when we were still law-abiding citizens. The logic made perfect sense. The cops wouldn’t gamble on accusing a judge unless they had rock solid evidence, because if they ticked him off it could mess up every single prosecution they had moving through the system. We had a reliable source who said that very rock solid evidence could be found in the judge’s home.
We had a plan to get it.
It’s just that now, as the plan reached the stage that we had always known was the most dangerous, Ev Talbot had more courage than me.
Reluctantly, I followed him into the house.
“You take the master bedroom on the second floor. I’ll start in one of the kids rooms. Don’t trash the place like in the movies. But look for hiding places.”
I followed him up the stairs, and over his shoulder my mentor reminded me, “Don’t just skim, Iron. Don’t rush it. If we do a half-assed job, we’re risking our careers and our freedom for nothing. Search hard.”
I walked into the Judge’s master bedroom and just stood there staring for a moment. What was I supposed to do? Search thoroughly but don’t trash the place? The two were not compatible.
A few paintings hung on the walls. I didn’t recognize any of the artists. One by one I eased them away from the wall to check for hidden safes behind them, or whatever a hiding place might look like. I found a briefcase in the closet. I put the same birthday into the combination lock, and it opened. Nothing that looked like evidence of accepting bribes.
Behind the bed’s headboard. Behind the medicine cabinet in the bathroom. In the toilet tank. Nothing.
I emerged from the master, and Everett had already started on the second bedroom. So I went down the stairs and applied the same techniques to the living room. I shifted furniture to look under it, then carefully shifted it back. I checked behind framed artwork and behind the TV.
I froze when I heard a car engine start down the block, and didn’t move again until my heart rate came back down to a manageable level.
While I was standing there envisioning myself being arrested, Ev came down the stairs and started on the kitchen.
“This is futile, Ev. I’m finding nothing except dirty underwear.”
“If it’s here we have to find it, Sherm. Come on. Let’s go check the basement together.” Ev spoke, then held the door open, allowing me the dubious honor of going first.
The Judge and his wife lived in a modest two story home with a door in the kitchen leading down to the basement. As soon as we opened the door and started down the steps, I knew it wasn’t a place they used. The bare wood, uncarpeted staircase signaled an unfinished basement, and at the bottom I heard the distinctive sound of my rubber-soled boot on bare concrete.
I couldn’t find a light switch.
I stumbled into the dark room, feeling along the wall for a switch. Some light came down from the kitchen, but it wasn’t enough, and I experienced that unique kind of straining against nothing that one gets when trying to see in the dark. My hands kept slapping the wall, looking for a way to turn the lights on.
It wasn’t my hands that found something. It was my feet.
My boot kicked something hard, heavy and metallic. With a scraping sound it skidded across the concrete floor. Following the sound, I tiptoed carefully up to it, not wanting to kick it away again, and when my toe barely touched it, I bent over to see if I could identify it.
Hard, pebbled grip. Hard steel. And a warm barrel.
I had found a gun. And one that had recently been fired.
***
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