Three

Dan

Three days after Pam got out of the hospital Billy shot the director of the “Good Hands” daycare center. Put a bullet right through the meat of her neck.

Pam had just started taking him there so she could concentrate on all the pre-registration reading for the criminal science correspondence courses she’d signed on for right after we got home from the hospital. That’s straight too. Day after the emergency room, she was eyeball glued to some study-by-mail catalog she’d picked up from the public library. One hand by her side, itching at the stitches, the other jotting down notes about courses I didn’t even think she knew existed a day ago.

OK, sure, she’d been a big fan of Hill Street Blues since day zero. She especially liked that Lieutenant Buntz, the one who had his own spin-off afterwards and then went on to be on NYPD Blue—which I don’t know if she watches or not, but if she don’t it’s a damn shame, cause it kicks Hill Street right in the teeth, you ask me.

But anyway, point being, she might have liked to watch a cop show on TV, but this was new territory. And I ain’t just whining about having to schlep out my own TV dinners when I say it was like a stranger had moved into the house. Cause that’s the only way I can explain it. That quick. It was like she was a different person. Like the way that Lieutenant Buntz guy plays on NYPD Blue now, and he’s the same guy who was on Hill Street but not the same guy.

So I go to pick Billy up after finishing at the plant, cause Pam was too wrapped up in evidence one-o-whatever to leave the library, and I can’t even get near the front door. There’s three cop cars, an ambulance, and all that yellow tape stretched across the sidewalk, holding back a crowd of parents and bringing out a mess of gawkers.

Something about a gunshot just turns everyone into yokel.

You could barely see a thing from all the cop sirens lighting up the street like a gay disco, but even from where they were holding all of us back I could make out a long female body lying on the sidewalk a few feet from the ambulance. It was Bridget—the day care director. Three EMTs were crouched around her trying to keep her from standing up while another who looked like he was in charge asked everyone where all the blood was.

“You say we got a GSW 9 here, but where’s all the fluid?” he shouted.
One of the EMTs pointed to a spot on the sidewalk, but I couldn’t see so much as a wad of spit.

“Come on, Henderson,” the one in charge shouted. “This ain’t your first drive. How the hell . . .”

“The call was a GSW 9,” the other one—Henderson, I guess—said.

“M’am,” said EMT boss as he helped Bridget to her feet. “Can you tell me the nature of your injury?”

“I was shot,” she answered. “One of the children shot me in the neck.”

He stared at her neck, putting his hands on her cheeks and turning her this way and that. “Impossible,” he said. Then he looked back at the other EMT. “All right, treat it as a GSW 9,” he said, and they all made her lie down again so they could cut off her shirt, tie her to the board, and then load her into the ambulance.

It took me a half an hour before I could even talk to a cop to try to find out where Billy was. They kept trying to shove me off to the drugstore across the street. This is where they were keeping all the other kids until their parents came for them, but I knew Billy wasn’t there.

“I’ve been to the drugstore, and my kid ain’t there,” I told the cop standing on the other side of the yellow tape.

He asked me my name, and when I told him he scrunched up his face and started grunting into that little walkie talkie they all carry on their hip.

“Sir,” he said, finally turning back to me. “I’m going to ask you to step through and head on up to officer Donaldson up there.” He pointed to a girl cop who was standing right in front of the day care center.

When I got up to her, I could see Billy through the glass. A big window long as the wall with cartoon paintings of kids on it flying kites or throwing a baseball or something. Billy’s face hung right between one of the kids legs. He was just staring straight ahead, two cops talking at him from either side, though I could only see parts of their bodies though the cartoon kids painted on the window—slices of a hand on a hip, bits legs crossed as one leaned back on the heater, pieces of an arm crossed over a chest..

“Your son’s been through a very traumatic experience,” The girl cop was saying. “It’s best that you just wait until we’ve had a chance to talk to him.”
Between the painted kid’s legs I could see Billy’s eyes, dead as stone, not looking at either of the cops.

“So can you tell me what happened?” I asked the girl cop. “Can you tell me what this traumatic experience was?” I wanted to know how much they knew, so I could tell how far I’d need to stretch the tarp to cover my own ass. After all, the gun Billy used was the same one he’d used on Pam, and it was registered in my name.

That’s right. I never took the gun away from Billy after he shot Pam. I told her I locked it back in the drawer. But to tell you the truth, she wasn’t even interested enough to lift her nose out of that learn-by mail catalog to check on it, so if you want to play the blame game on this one, I guess you’d have to blame us both.

“Sir, there was an accident with a handgun involving your son and one of the staff here,” the girl cop said, her thick caterpillar eyebrows curling into little frowns. “The staff member was injured, but your son is unharmed physically.”

“A gun!” I yelped, shocked as a virgin in a men’s room. “What the hell is a gun doing at a daycare center?”

“Sir, we still don’t know where the gun came from. That’s one of the things the officers are trying to ascertain.”

“OK then, what’s the plan here? You got an ETA on when the officers expect to ascertain everything they need to ascertain. Any chance I’ll be able to take my son home before midnight?”

She was telling me that the officers were working as quickly as they could, but I knew enough now to make my move.

When I burst through the door the cops lurched back and forth between Billy and me like they didn’t know what to do. The girl cop was right behind me, and they were already nailing her to the wall with their stares, so I knew they couldn’t touch me. I kicked over some Leggo houses and a couple of Star Wars figures as I made a bee-line to Billy.

“Unless my son is being charged with some sort of crime,” I said as I latched onto Billy’s arm, “I’ll be taking him home.”

The girl cop shrugged as the other two chucked their hands over their half bald heads.

“Sir,” one of them said picking my magnum up off of a Betty Crocker Home Bake Oven. “Can I ask you if you know where this gun game from?”

I was a little surprised to see him just holding it—not keeping it inside a little zip-lock bag or anything. “I have no idea,” I said. “But I sure would be interested to know. It’s not the type of thing you’d expect to find in a day-care center. Now if that’s the only question you got, I can’t see what’s taking you so long with my boy in here.”

“We haven’s exactly gotten a straight answer out of your boy yet,” the other one put in.

So I squatted down, put my hands on the sides of Billy’s shoulders, and turned him so we could eyeball each other straight on. “Billy,” I said. “Now I need to you be straight, and tell these me where this gun came from. You got it? You hold out on them or you fib, and you’re in for a licking. We clear?”

Billy sniffed softly and then exhaled in a wheeze. “Yes sir.”

I looked back at the cops like I was saying OK, here goes. I’m laying my balls right on the chopping block, Where yours at? Then we all looked back at Billy.

“I found it in the closet,” he said pointing to the wall length closet with them doors that looked like an accordion.

“That straight enough for you,” I said to the cops, “or would you like I grabbed him a couple of crayons so that he could draw you a picture?”

They were pissed, but you could tell in the way they just leaned against the radiator that there wasn’t a shit lot they could do about it. Tracing even a registered gun still took up to 48 hours back then, and with Billy telling him he found the gun there, they were still only wrestling with an accident, not a crime. I knew there’d be an investigation, and I knew the coon trail would soon lead them sniffing back to my nest. But for now, they couldn’t keep Billy any longer without risking a hefty lawsuit even from a Podunk like me.

“Very well Mr. Cullers,” they said. “You can go on and take your son home. But you can trust we’ll need to speak with you and your wife sometime in the near future, if we’re going to get all this sorted out. If you’re interested, we could even help your son find counseling for this traumatic event—”

We were out the door and half way to the car before the cop even finished his sentence. Billy kept his mouth shut as I drove, and I did the same. There was a lot kicking around in my skull, but none of it was fit to leave my mouth yet. So we just drove through a soft drizzle the sky was just starting to spit, listening to someone on the radio singing about a girl that didn’t or shouldn’t love him.

“Do you know what you did?” I asked him finally.

“Yes sir,” he answered without looking at me.

“You shot that woman in the throat, but I saw her stand up.”

“Yes sir,” he said again.

“Hell, she could have driven herself to the hospital if the EMTs had let her.”

“Yes sir.”

We hit a red light and I looked at Billy for a long hard second. “You ain’t got a clue what you did, do you?” I said.

“No sir.”

When the light turned green I jerked the wheel all the way to the left and floored the truck into a U-turn in the middle of the other direction. “What say we find out,” I said once we got headed back in the other direction. “What say we pay a little visit to that hospital?”

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