Nothing Good Happens After Midnight: A Suspense Magazine Anthology

Easy Peasey John Lescroart

Carrie McKay’s cellphone alarm went off at midnight and after taking a moment trying to figure out where she was and what she’d set the darn thing for, she rolled over and killed the noise, which sounded far louder than it had ever sounded before in the daytime.

She lay back down, holding the now blessedly silent phone and listening for any other sounds it might have roused in the house. Her mom and dad were just across the hall in their bedroom, hopefully still deep in slumber. Her brother Kyle’s room was adjacent to hers, with just the one wall separating them. But she knew that he usually slept like a rock and probably wouldn’t have heard the alarm. Probably.

Still, she waited, listening, making sure.

After a minute that seemed like a half hour, she finally decided that the alarm hadn’t awakened anyone. She threw back her covers, turned and sat up. Her stomach growled as though she was hungry; she put her hand flat on her belly and tried to breathe out the tension. But she knew that it wasn’t lack of food roiling her insides.

It was nerves.

She was starting to realize, because she really wasn’t cut out for it, that she never should have told Dawn and Emily that she’d be part of the raid to TP Jason Trent’s house tonight. After all, he was Dawn’s boyfriend. Carrie didn’t think she’d ever even said hi to him. But you didn’t say no to Dawn if she wanted you to do something with her. She was definitely the leader of the cool kids at school, and Carrie had been aching to be one of them herself, always just not quite making it.

She was afraid that she wasn’t really a natural for something like this, actually sneaking out in the middle of the night. It had been bad enough when she went into Target two days ago to buy the Super-Size pack of twenty-four rolls of Charmin’, waiting in the checkout line, hoping and praying that she wouldn’t run into somebody she knew, especially one of her friend’s mothers. But no big deal, she’d told herself. Everybody had to buy toilet paper. She could always say she was just running some errands for her mother. Nothing sinister going on. She was one of the good kids, after all, and nobody would think anything about it.

And in the end, nobody had seen her.

Hiding the actual package of rolls was another issue altogether. Carrie had to keep them out of sight somewhere for two days. Why had she gone down and bought it so early? What if her mother checked the car’s trunk in the next two days and wanted to know what this cache of toilet paper was all about? There would be no guarantee that her mother wouldn’t open the trunk, and no fooling her if she did. So Carrie couldn’t put them there where her mom could find them.

Or, really, anywhere in her own house.

In a panic she’d called Emily from the Target parking lot, which she hated to do because she knew from TV that it would leave a telephonic record of when they’d talked. If anybody, like the police for example, did some kind of real investigation for this crime of trespass — or was it vandalism? Or both? ...Whatever, they’d be able to put it together that she and Emily were planning something.

But what else could she do?

She had not planned on this degree of subterfuge holding onto the TP. She hadn’t even thought of it as an issue. Before Emily picked up her own phone, Carrie actually considered throwing the evidence away in one of the dumpsters behind the Target. But if she couldn’t even score and hold onto a few rolls of TP, that would surely betray her pathetic personality flaw.

Gutless and fearful, that’s what they’d say about her.

There was a really thin line between being one of the good kids and one of the cool kids, and so far Carrie had managed to fool most everybody as fitting into both camps.

But Emily, like Dawn, was all the way cool. She actually thought that Carrie’s worries about where to hide the toilet paper were legitimate. And Carrie’s suggestion that they stow the TP in Emily’s Tuff Shed in her backyard (which Emily’s dad almost never used anymore) was actually a great hiding place and a pretty brilliant idea.

Sucking in a breath, pushing with the flat of her hand on the continual churning of her belly, Carrie stood up. She was still mostly dressed. She’d left her socks on and worn her jeans and her black high school logo sweatshirt to bed. It wasn’t like her mom and dad came in every night to tuck her into bed anymore. The unspoken personal space barrier for the past year or so was her door: if closed, everything was fine and there was no need to come in and check on her. So tonight she had left it closed. Her parents trusted her and she was, here at home at least, definitely one of the good kids.

Using the flashlight from her phone, she found her tennis shoes and put them on. Then, with the flashlight still on, she crossed the room to the windows that faced out at the front of the house. Pulling open the plantation shutters, she unlocked and then raised the right-hand window, and stepped out into the night.

If the quiet in her room had been comforting, the quiet outside was all but terrifying. Standing on the dewy grass, she listened to nothing.

Then suddenly she realized that she still held the lit-up phone and that the window was open. She tip-toed back to the house, closed the window and turned off her light. Now it was pure dark. None of their neighbors even seemed to be watching television. There was no moon. She checked her phone; it was 12:08. She was seven minutes early. Squatting behind one of the low bushes that grew in the front of her house, she settled down to wait.

Seven minutes... yikes!

At last, at long last, car lights up at the corner turned onto her street. She checked her phone, exactly 12:15. Standing up from where she was hiding behind the bushes, she ran across the lawn and out to where Dawn’s car was pulling over to the curb.

Dawn, driving, let her window down. “Hey,” she whispered. “Way to go. Perfect. Hop in the back seat but don’t close the door all the way. Just hold it. No noise.”

Carrie, her heart beating so hard she was surprised that they couldn’t hear it, followed these instructions to the letter. As soon as she was in, Dawn got the car rolling again and caught Carrie’s eyes in the rearview mirror.

“Is this awesome, or what?” Dawn asked.

“Totally,” Emily said from the front passenger seat.

Carrie wracked her brain searching for the right answer. “Easy peasey,” she finally said in the calmest voice she should muster.

“Easy peasey, so cool. We knew you’d be down with us, Car,” Dawn said, then giggled and added, “Jason’s going to just shit.”

For a while, Chris Duke believed that he was friends with Jason Trent. After all, they’d played on the same football teams for eight years, Pop Warner on up, with Trent always the quarterback and Chris usually a linebacker on the D-squad, although he’d had some luck last year transitioning to fullback and had even taken a few snaps at that position last Spring. Things had been looking up. Chris was large, strong and fast. Maybe he could become an impact player.

He and Jason had always gotten along well enough, not that they talked much or anything like that. But they were teammates and that’s all that needed to be said. Then they became a little more than that after grades came out at the end of Chris’s junior year and he hadn’t made the academic cutoff with his 2.0 GPA, when he needed a 2.5 to stay on the team; he’d gotten a damn C-minus in geometry, like he was ever going to use geometry in real life.

But Jason — though himself not the sharpest tool in the shed — was in the summer school tutoring program and the two of them spent a couple of days a week at Jason’s fancy house on the golf course trying to make sense out of triangles and circles, proofs and space, and the areas of figures. Total waste of time, Chris thought, since what was that stuff ever going to do with him? And ultimately he didn’t understand it anyway.

But he and Jason had broken up the tedium and failure of the geometry lessons with computer games and working on Jason’s passing and handoffs and Chris’s receiving. They had laughed a lot. Jason was rich — well, his parents were — but basically he seemed like an okay guy. When they checked in back at summer camp, Chris knew that Jason put in a word to Coach to let him try out in the backfield again.

But then his final summer school grade, another C-minus, came in and the coach told him he had no choice. It wasn’t his decision to make. Chris didn’t make the academic cut and therefore he couldn’t be on the team.

Jason, who went off to football practice after school every day like he always did, simply dropped out of Chris’s universe. He obviously couldn’t have cared less about whether or not Chris was still on the team. He’d given it his best shot to help him, sure, but now that was over. It hadn’t worked, and the two guys had nothing left to say or to do with each other.

A couple of times, Chris had nodded to Jason passing in the hall and though he’d nodded back, it was obvious that his former tutor did not know for sure exactly who he was.

Jason probably meant no offense, of course, but life was life, fair was fair, and he was still the quarterback after all, while Chris was nothing.

Oh, except a loser.

He only accidentally heard about Jason’s parents’ vacation to Cabo when he’d been sitting at the next table in the cafeteria and heard Jason telling his current babe girlfriend Dawn that he’d be alone in the house starting Thursday and through the weekend, so she could come over any time and...

...and she’d stopped him there, although there had been a lot of laughing.

Now it was Friday morning, about twenty-five minutes after midnight, and Chris had made his way past the backs of four houses down the Sixth fairway, to Jason’s place. Two houses in, there’d been some dim lights on inside, and across the fairway, a few more, but otherwise generally it was dark, dark, dark.

Chris was wearing jeans and a black t-shirt. The September night was warm. He hadn’t figured out exactly what he was going to do or how he was going to do it, but the general idea was that he was going to even out the playing field of their lives, at least a little. The way it was now, Jason had everything and Chris had nothing. That just wasn’t right.

Several times over the summer, Chris and Jason had taken the shortcut through the parent’s bedroom on their way out to the pool, which was just a few steps outside the floor-to ceiling glass French doors. The room was about half the size of Chris’s whole house, with a king-sized bed and a dresser on the top of which Cheryl Trent kept an enormous array of her jewelry, taking up almost the whole top of the dresser, neatly laid out or hanging on display — bracelets, necklaces, rings and earrings. Everything appeared to be made out of gold, diamonds, and other gemstones in every color and shape.

Chris didn’t know the actual price of any of that stuff, but he couldn’t imagine it would be less than fifteen or twenty thousand dollars. Maybe way more. As if that kind of money had any real meaning for him.

The plan to even things up was coming together.

How about if all that jewelry went missing when the Trents were on vacation down in Baja? First off, the parents were going to have to consider the possibility that their own dear son Jason was the thief. And even if they didn’t go far down that road, their trust in him would have to be shaken, and they’d still be out all of that jewelry, stolen while Jason was supposed to be watching the house.

Nice job, kid. We thought you were responsible and could take care of things while we went away for a few days, but we guess not now. It’s sad but there it is: we just can’t trust you completely anymore.

But even without that, even if they bought Jason’s story about his complete innocence, the house wouldn’t feel safe and impregnable any longer. And that alone would be a huge payback.

Okay, Jason, Chris thought, welcome to my world. This is what it feels like when you get cut and your parents don’t have money to bail you out and you’re not important to anybody anymore. Get used to it. The rest of your life starts tonight.

Thunk.

Jason Trent woke with a start and sat up, fully awake.

What the hell was that?

His heart pounding, he swung his feet over and down and crossed his room in the dark to his closet where his jeans hung off the peg on the back of the door. Pulling them down and putting them on, stepping into his topsiders, he crossed back to the bed, moving as quietly as he could, the lights still off.

Feeling around, he opened the door to the bedside table where he’d stashed the gun he’d taken from his father’s office after his parents had driven off to the airport.

He probably should have told them, or asked them about wanting to have the gun in his own room next to his bed, just in case something weird happened — which it never did, not in this Neighborhood Watch community — but he didn’t want them to know that he was even a little tiny bit uncomfortable about staying alone in the house for the weekend.

Not terrified, really, just nervous.

But if he told them that he felt he needed the gun, they might — no, they would — start to curtail their traveling. And the two of them getting away alone, like with this trip to Baja, had only recently become something his parents were doing with regularity, leaving him alone at the house, often having Dawn over (and Shelley before her), or his teammates, or even just hanging out in his house alone, when he could sneak some alcohol — not so much that they would notice when they got back, but enough to get a little buzz.

So, bottom line, he’d waited until they’d driven away before he got the gun out and stored it next to his bed.

And now he had it in his hand, loaded, with the safety off, a round racked in the chamber. Ready for action.

Something had made that noise. He told himself that it was probably just an animal — raccoon, opossum, skunk — messing with the garbage cans, but he wanted to be sure.

His bedroom was on the second floor and he walked out into the hallway to the top of the stairs. Next, as quietly as possible, he started descending, slowly, a step at a time, listening.

And there it was, the unmistakable sound of a car door slamming out in the street. And then voices. Could it be laughter?

On the ground floor now, crossing the foyer in only a couple of steps, he got his hand on the knob and flung open the door. At least two figures were moving out on his front lawn, shadows in the dark. “Hey!” Turning on the light over the front door, he yelled, “Who’s there? What’s happening out here?”

But at the exact same moment, before there could be any response from the people on the lawn, came the unmistakable sound of glass breaking somewhere in the house, back toward his parents’ bedroom.

Whatever was going on, they had him all but surrounded.

Chris realized, maybe a little too late, that he hadn’t thought it through enough.

Of course the doors were going to be locked. Did he think he was just going to be able to stroll in and clear the jewelry off the dresser and then leave the way he’d come?

But he was already here at the goddamn back door to the bedroom. He’d crossed the whole backyard and come up around the pool, and when he realized that the door was locked, he slammed at the mullioned windows as hard as he could with his whole body. They were just windows. He couldn’t believe they could be that tough to break.

But they didn’t. And also the good deadbolt lock didn’t give. Not an inch.

Still standing just outside the door, he considered that he should just give up and come back another night with a better plan, maybe bring some tools to help him break in. But abandoning the idea when he was this close just didn’t sing for him. He could still get it done. He was right here, right now. He had to make it happen.

The house was dark and empty and silent. Slamming against the door didn’t appear to have woken up Jason. Peering through the glass, he saw that there were no lights on inside.

He’d just have to blast his way in, then be fast and efficient. He knew exactly where the jewelry was. Just get in, he thought, and get out.

The Trents had large and decorative river stones that Chris remembered up by their house and now he grabbed one and slammed it against the window; it broke with a deafening crash next to the doorknob. Reaching through the opening, he found the deadbolt and gave it a turn, and when he pushed it, the door opened.

As he stepped in over the broken glass, a light in the hallway came on under the bedroom door. Jason was definitely up now. Chris heard him calling out to someone way down the hallway by the front door.

And then, clearly not out by the front door any longer, now coming Chris’s way, Jason yelled again. “Hey! Whoever you are, get the hell out of here! I’ve got a gun and I’ll shoot your fucking ass!”

There wasn’t time for any reaction except for Chris to lunge at the hallway door to the bedroom, which had its own deadbolt. That door was already closed, but he had to make sure it was locked, so he flicked on the lights. He then tried the lock, and a good thing he did, because it turned and the bolt shot home.

It was just in time, as Jason threw himself up against the door. “God damn it. God damn it. Open up!”

Jason slammed his gun hand against the wood of the door, but it didn’t budge. Not learning much from the experience, he tried doing the same thing again.

But this time, the damn gun went off with a resounding boom.

When Jason had first opened the front door and called out, turning on the light over the front door, Dawn went into ballistic mode and kept ordering her two companions to keep on with the job, to get as much TP as they could draped over the shrubs and hedges that bordered the yard and walkway.

Meanwhile, though she wasn’t sure exactly how she was going to do it, she’d deal with Jason. Getting him under her control had never been a problem before. She’d figure something out. She knew she could distract him enough for Carrie and Emily to cover some more of the shrubbery with the TP rolls, and that pretty much directly related to how important her and Jason’s relationship was to her. The more she trashed the front of his house, the more she loved him.

He’d get that. He was cool. He totally got the code and would understand the risk she was taking to proclaim her love and devotion.

But then, all of a sudden, just as the front porch light came on overhead, Jason turned and went off somewhere, out of sight, into the house.

And now a shot! It had to be a shot. What else could it be?

“Holy shit!” she screamed, rushing up to the front door. “Jason! Jason!”

There he was, off to her left, standing in the hallway (looking pretty darned awesome with no shirt on) with a gun in his hand by the door to his parents’ room. Turning, he spread his hands. “Dawn! What the hell? What are you doing here? What’s happening?”

She moved a couple of steps into the house toward him.

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, what are you doing? Who’s in my parents’ room?”

“I don’t know. What are you talking about?”

“I’m talking about somebody’s in there right now.”

“You’re kidding me?”

“Yeah, I’m fucking kidding you.” He flat-handed his free hand at the door again, screaming at the closed door. “Get the fuck out!”

Dawn took another step toward him. “I heard a shot. Did somebody shoot at you? Are you okay?”

“Yeah.” He held his gun out so she could see it. “This thing is my dad’s and it just went off when I slammed it up against the door. I’m all right.”

“You’re sure?”

“I’m God damn sure, Dawn. What? I wouldn’t know if I’m fucking shot?”

Dawn drew on a quick pout and spoke in her most authoritative voice. “You don’t have to talk to me that way, Jason. You’ve got no reason to be mad at me. I’m only here to help you because I heard a shot from out there. Jesus.”

“Well, help me by telling me who is in this room.”

“I don’t know. Some bad person. I don’t know anything about that. How would I know that?” Another step toward him. “Whoever it is, Jason, we’ve got to get out of here. We can call the police from outside. Let them take care of it.”

Jason threw a glance at his girlfriend, then slapped at his parents’ door one last time. “Whoever you are... fuck you! Get out of my house!”

Dawn reached out, took his hand and began to pull him back down the hallway to the front door. “Come on, Jason. Come on.”

Sheriff Deputies Greg Trudeaux and Paul Walker were almost terminally worn down from their shift so far tonight, which like so many other nights had entailed breaking up couples who were making out on the levee a couple of miles south of town. Typically, there was underage alcohol involved, to say nothing of underage girls, and most of the time Greg and Paul just gave everybody the relevant warnings, took and poured out their drinks, and told them to get on home.

Usually nobody was really drunk, but even when they were, the way it got handled was one of the deputies would drive the kids’ car back to one of their parents’ houses, where the parents could then deal with the problem. It was the kind of town that liked to pretend, against all evidence to the contrary, that it didn’t have a teenage drinking problem, so the word from on high was at all costs to avoid writing anybody up so the DUI would not appear on the record of any of these good kids.

Both of the deputies thought this was a stupid policy, but what could they do? Still, it left them both perpetually on edge, frustrated about what lessons were being taught. Some of these so-called “good kids,” they knew, were capable of some bad stuff. Nothing tonight, true, but every time they approached a parked and dark car down an abandoned levee road, there was a chance of something unexpected happening. And, in fact, these were not always “kids,” good or otherwise. Some were a couple of years out of high school, unable to cut it in college or even in the minimum wage job market, and they were now unemployed and angry.

Every car a possible threat. And tonight they’d pulled up behind seven of them.

Wound up tight as a spring? You could say that.

In any event, when they got the call from dispatch about some kind of disturbance from one of the Troon Estates Neighborhood Watch people, they were ready to switch gears and roll. Even though it was probably as mundane as some girls TPing some guy’s house — with school just starting, it was high season! — nevertheless, some other of the lower-rent parts of town had recently come under the apparent influence of wannabe gang members from the capitol just down the freeway. There had been an alarming rise in residential burglaries in the last year or two, especially in some of these seedier areas, although “seedy,” like DUI, was a term best left unspoken.

Except for their black and white police car, the county road back was completely deserted. To recalibrate his and his partner’s own respective equilibriums, Paul Walker was having some fun on the drive into town, pushing eighty miles an hour without his red and blue lights flashing and keeping his siren mute.

They just hit the city limit, maybe half a mile more before they’d get to their turn into the Estates proper, when dispatch came on again. “Car sixteen, do you copy?”

Greg picked up the dashboard microphone. “Car sixteen, copy.”

The dispatcher, Davon White, was normally the soul of calm, but now there was a palpable sense of urgency in her pinched and no-nonsense voice. “We’ve got a ten seventy-one on the call to Country Club Court. Repeat, ten seventy-one. Other units will be responding.”

“Ten seventy-one,” Greg said. “Shots fired.”

Paul threw a quick glance over to his partner. “I know what it means.”

“You want to pull over? Wait for backup?”

“When something real is finally happening? In your dreams, Greg.” He reached out and punched up his emergency lights and siren. Then, with his tires screeching, he took the right hand turn onto Country Club Drive.

Not even a minute after Carrie heard the shot, the siren’s wail froze her where she stood in the middle of the lawn. Relatively close to the house, she was caught in the lights over the front porch. Dropping the last couple of rolls of toilet paper, her hands went to her mouth and, unable to control her reaction, she let out a scream.

From behind her, Emily yelled, “What is it? What is it?”

“Where’s Dawn?”

“Inside. Still inside.”

“Oh my God! We’ve got to get out of here.”

“We can’t just leave her. Anyway, she’s got the keys. Jesus Christ. What are we going to do? We can’t just...”

Emily turned away from Carrie as the police car skidded around the corner into the Court, catching her in its brights as it lurched to a stop, deputies coming out of both sides, their weapons out. Emily put her hands up over her head.

“Down,” the driver said. “On the ground. Hands where I can see them. Down, I said!”

Carrie followed the movements of the other cop, who’d come out the passenger door, his gun also drawn. She didn’t know how it happened, but her reactions did not seem to be under control and suddenly she had her own hands spread apart in the air over her head. “Don’t shoot, don’t shoot, don’t shoot!” she wailed. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.” Then she was on her knees, sobbing.

Both of their guns extended out before them, the deputies kept advancing toward the open front door, toward the light.

Then Carrie became suddenly aware of another movement around to her side, toward the house. She turned her head and saw Dawn come out through the doorway.

A couple of steps behind her, Jason followed, shading his eyes from the light above him, the gun in his other hand.

The deputy down by Emily called out. “Gun! Gun!”

And both cops opened fire.

The standard investigation into the officer-involved shootings came to an end in the week before Christmas vacation, with both deputies completely cleared of any misconduct. After all, they’d come in the middle of the night to the scene of what looked to be a burglary in progress. The apparent perpetrator, armed with a handgun, was a couple of steps behind a young woman who appeared to be involved in some kind of a possible hostage situation.

The deputies really had no other option. The investigation concluded that they had acted reasonably under the circumstances and undoubtedly had prevented further injury to the other young women who had been involved in what had started out as a TP hazing event and then somehow gotten out of control under many still-unexplained circumstances.

In the intervening months since the incident, Greg and Paul took a lot of grief among their law enforcement colleagues for their poor marksmanship, but the fact that they hadn’t killed anyone had probably played some role in their exoneration.

Which is not to say that they hadn’t done some damage. Jason Trent took four bullets, one in each extremity, and the injuries had made him miss the entire football season, although the prognosis was that he would probably be able to play in college if he so chose.

Dawn Halley was hit in the face by ricocheting marble from one of the columns by the Trent’s front door and was looking at a further array of plastic surgery procedures to restore as much as possible to what had once been her angelic face.

The mystery of the person who had originally broken into the Trents’ bedroom through the back door and dead bolted the door to the hallway remained just that. Whoever it had been — the prevailing theory favored one of the wannabe gangsters — he or she, probably scared off by the gunshots, took nothing and left no trace of evidence. (There were fingerprints from some of Jason’s football teammates, but since the Trents’ bedroom was a well-trod shortcut on the way to the swimming pool, these were discounted as easily explained and irrelevant.)

For a couple of weeks after the incident, Chris was consumed with guilt and fear: the former at what he’d actually done, the latter that someone would find out and charge him with something. Gradually, though, he settled on feeling most responsible for the injuries to Jason. After all, if Chris hadn’t broken in, little or none of the events would have happened. And it wasn’t the girls TPing the house that had made Jason break out his father’s gun.

In any event, Chris came to the conclusion that, even if he wasn’t going to do something stupid like confessing, he should at least try to do something to somehow make things better. Even if it was only symbolic, it seemed that it might be worth a try. After all, because of Chris’s break-in at the Trents, the football team was also short one very important guy. If Chris could somehow make it back to the team and contribute...

So against all reason — and he’d already learned from geometry that logic was not his forte — he signed up for the tutorial workshop again. If he could get a C or better in geometry before the first quarter was over, he could still get some playing time and even make some small difference. Anyway, he thought, it was worth a try, maybe undo a little of the harm he’d done.

And the great bonus turned out to be his new tutor, Carrie McKay, one of the good kids and also one of the cool kids, maybe now the coolest since Dawn Halley was no longer in the running. In any event, Chris had always thought that Carrie was way out of his league. He couldn’t believe how obvious and easy geometry turned out to be when the person tutoring him actually got it herself. Things made sense. A-squared plus B-squared equals C-squared.

Cake.

He wound up with a B+ and the week after Thanksgiving, he started at defensive safety — six tackles and two interceptions, thank you.

Also, Carrie was an amazing kisser.