I was exhausted. I’d been awake for over 24 hours without so much as a nap, and it was time to report to the office for the nightshift at the paper. I was running on fumes and sore from getting run off the road earlier in the night. I should have gone to the ER to get checked out, but I didn’t have the money for the co-pay.
There was still no word on who ran me off the road, and when I told the Sheriff that my camera’d been stolen, he just grunted, turned around and walked off. Johnny pulled me out of the ditch for free, and my vehicle was still drivable despite a few fresh dents.
I pulled a caffeine pill out of my pants pocket, pushed it into my mouth and let it dissolve on my tongue. It was way faster than a cup of coffee, and I felt better a few minutes later when my desk phone rang. It was Sheriff Abberline on the other end.
“McMorn, I need you over at the jail,” he said. “Bring your camera. The locksmith’s on his way. I need you to get shots of the safe’s interior as it’s opened to document what we find inside.”
I had work to do and couldn’t spend all night at the jail. “I can’t, Sheriff,” I began. “I’m tied up now at the office. I’ve got a mountain of stuff on my desk that I need to tend to before deadline.”
“Tend to me first,” he said. “Or I’ll give the story to one of the dayshift boys. It’s up to you. It don’t matter to me.” With that, he hung up the phone.
I considered the situation for a moment then walked to my editor’s office. He was behind his desk, his face a pale blue in the light of his computer screen. I rapped on his door to get his attention.
“What up?” he said, not looking away from his computer.
“The Sheriff just called,” I said. “He’s got something for me over at the jail, something he thinks we’ll be interested in. I think they busted somebody for drugs.”
“Sounds good,” he said. “Let me know when you get more details. The front section goes to press in three hours.”
I glanced at my wristwatch. It was a few minutes after midnight. I walked downstairs and out the front door. I hooked a left, set off down the sidewalk and then made another left onto Jackson Street. From there, it was two blocks to Claiborne City Jail. A yellow security light illuminated one side of the jail, and, even at this hour, a few inmates stood at their cell windows, soaking in the striped moonlight. Aside from myself, the street was deserted, and they saw me from a mile way.
“Hey, reportermaaaaaaan…” one of them called, his voice carrying longer than it should have over the quiet city streets. “Ain’t no story for you here tonight, reporterman. You just gonna get hurt you come in here tonight.”
I was closer now, and I could tell that the voice came from a faceless shadow at a third-story window. I had no idea who this guy was and chances were better than even that I’d written about whatever crime had landed him behind bars. I made out like I hadn’t heard what he’d had to say.
I passed through the jail’s main entrance and walked to the front desk. A uniformed female deputy sat there behind about four inches of bulletproof glass. I’d never seen her before, so I pulled out my press ID and pressed it against the glass for her to examine.
She leaned forward, squinted her eyes at the ID and then pressed the transmit button of the intercom that sat in front of her on the counter. “What do you want?” her voice said through a round speaker set in the thick glass.
“The Sheriff asked me to come around and meet with a locksmith.”
She picked up a clipboard, made a quick note with a pen and pressed a button that released the electric lock on a thick steel door to my right. Taped at eye level on the door, just below a large “No Smoking” sign was another sign – “Crime Doesn’t Pay, Hard Work Does.”
I pulled the heavy door open and stepped into the jail proper. A large deputy – his badge said his last name was Poe – stepped out of a side office. “You McMorn?” he asked.
I nodded.
“Then you no the drill, right?”
“Yep.”
“You ain’t got no contraband on you, do you?”
“Nothing but whiskey and cigarettes,” I said with a grin.
Poe didn’t smile, but pointed to a door at the far end of the hall. “Locksmith’s in there,” he said.
I walked down the hall and was surprised to see that the door actually led into the Sheriff’s personal office. I knocked on the door and the muffled voice of a man answered from inside. “Come in.”
I stepped inside and saw a short, fat man examining the safe that had been pulled from the creek only hours before. It looked at home in the office, which was full of all manner of items that were obviously connected with numerous ongoing cases being worked by Sheriff’s investigators. Beneath a large poster of a young Clint Eastwood, there was a stack of shotguns and rifles, which wasn’t far from a mound of brown paper sacks labeled with yellow sticky notes.
On the other side of the room, there was an impressive, hanging display of law enforcement uniform patches, which were affixed to a pair of large, felt-covered pieces of plywood. In another corner, there was a table littered with a car battery, a gas-powered chain saw and a desktop computer. In the middle of all this sat the Sheriff’s work desk, which was piled high with papers, folders and envelopes of all shapes and sizes.
The locksmith was hunched over the safe and turned around when I closed the door. “You the photographer?” he asked.
“Name’s McMorn,” I answered. “From The Herald.”
His expression changed at the mention of the newspaper. “Oh, really?” he said. “Did the Sheriff talk with you about keeping this hush, hush until they figure out what was going one with this stuff?”
I nodded. “Don’t sweat it,” I said. “What’s the deal with the safe?”
“Crazy thing,” he said. “I’d already have it open, but I ran into some difficulties. Look here on the back.”
We stepped around to the rear of the safe, and he pointed at the bottom. “Safe design and manufacturing practices haven’t changed much over the years. Normally, with a safe of this type and age, there would have been a manufacturer’s code and serial number on the lower back side of the safe.”
He pointed to where this should have been, and I could see that someone had taken the time to scratch all of this off. “As you can see,” he continued. “In this case, that information’s not available. Looks like they scratched it off with a screwdriver and a hammer. If I’d had that number, I would have been able to call up the manufacturer. They’re still in business, and with the serial number, they would have either been able to give me the combination or tell me where to drill in order to open the safe. They only give this information about to licensed and registered locksmiths, by the way."
“So what now?”
“What now is that I’m going to have to do it the hard way,” he said.
“How long do you think that’ll take?”
“About an hour, if I’m lucky,” he said.
What that said, he went to work on the safe. I helped as much as I could, which didn’t extend much beyond handing a tool every once in a while. Forty-five minutes later, while drilling a fifth hole through the safe’s thick steel door, he hit pay dirt. He switched off the drill and removed his earphones.
“Alright, that should do it,” he said, more to himself than to me. He reached into his bag and grabbed a crowbar. “Stand back,” he said. I did and watched as he put the business end of the crowbar to the edge of the safe’s combination dial. He then produced a hammer and struck the crowbar hard. The dial fell away and clattered to the floor, exposing the inner workings of the safe. The locksmith smiled, grabbed the handle and gave it a turn.
To say that I was surprised by what happened next would be an understatement. As the locksmith pulled the door open just a few inches, something rushed out of the decades old darkness and into the light. I only caught a glimpse of what looked like a large rat as it bolted out of the safe’s interior. The locksmith, who stood much closer to the thing, let out a yelp.
I instinctively raised my camera and snapped a picture. At the same time, I
backpedaled a step only to trip against a pile of old case files, which caused me to stagger into the display of uniform badges on the wall. I crashed hard to the floor as the large plywood display detached from the wall and fell on top of me, pinning me to the floor.
The locksmith’s bloodcurdling screams filled the room.
(All rights reserved. This story is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are products of the author's imagination or are used fictiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons living or dead is entirely coincidental.)
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