High Strung Read online

  “JESUS! MY HOUSE!” Cafton grabbed his keys from the ignition, tossed his driving glasses onto the passenger seat, shoved open the heavy door, using two hands and his left foot, and jumped out, slamming it behind him, not bothering to lock it. My house! He sprinted down the middle of the street toward home. Sprinting was not in his customary repertoire of behaviors. Cafton never sprinted. Nor ran. Nor jogged. Nor trotted. He didn’t even canter. Cafton walked. Strolled. Ambled. Meandered. Some even said he sashayed. But he didn’t sprint—unless, of course, he saw a parade of emergency vehicles in front of his flaming home. Then Cafton sprinted.

  “Whoa! Hold yer horses. Where ya think you’re going?” A uniformed police officer arm-blocked him as he cut across the street to the sidewalk a door up from his house. The officer firmly planted his catcher’s-mitt-sized paw on Cafton’s chest, covering most of it, and unquestionably impeded any forward progress Cafton had intended to make.

  “That’s MY house!” gasped Cafton, pointing at it like a four-year-old seeing the ice cream truck bypassing his home.

  “Well, you gotta stay outta the way in case whatever ’sploded goes off again. But hang around so we can talk with ya when the fire boys get this under control.” His five-finger steel barrier was still in the middle of Cafton’s chest. Cafton reflexively leaned into it.

  “Exploded?” Cafton teetered back a little, softening some of the pressure on his chest from the five-digit blockade. That’s going to be an odd-looking bruise.

  “Yeah, boom! Now just move it back, buddy. You’ll need to chit-chat with the detective later. Until then, just stay put!” Officer Big Paw gave Cafton a convincing nudge to emphasize he meant business. Cafton flexed backwards a bit but did not back away. Confident he had convinced Cafton to stay put, the officer swaggered back to his buddies congregated around their squad cars.

  “Exploded? How? The gas stove? The furnace?” Cafton inaudibly asked the heavens, searching for answers. “We use natural gas. I can’t think of anything else that could have triggered an explosion in the house.” He was stunned, frozen in place, stupefied, like a referee should be giving him a standing eight-count. “That house is my life. It’s my life’s work. It’s, it’s home,” he whispered to himself.

  He reflexively cupped his glistening face in his sweaty palms and felt a familiar wetness come to his eyes and roll down his cheeks. Cafton’s emotions were always right beneath the surface of control and quite frequently erupted.

  He cared deeply. He hurt deeply. He grieved deeply. He hoped deeply. He enjoyed deeply. He appreciated deeply. He loved deeply. And when someone hurt someone he loved—human or animal—he angered deeply.

  He was what his psychologist friend deemed an empath. Maybe it was because he was a redhead. Redheads were said to feel physical pain more acutely than non-redheads. Maybe it was the same with emotional pain. Maybe not. If he looked back at his ancestors on his mama’s side and how they engaged people and their world, he was probably at least a fourth-generation empath. It might simply have been genetic.

  His tears flowed easily and sometimes inconveniently. Sure, when he worked with the animal rescues, the tears naturally flowed. Or when he heard on the news about violence or hatred against an innocent person or animal. He even teared up when he saw a tractor-trailer load of cows or pigs or chickens taking their death ride to the slaughterhouse.

  And when he thought about his mom. They always flowed then. Every time.

  His tears sometimes flowed in public, like at movies, or when he was moved by music, or witnessed the kindness of others, or was given an award. Some people mistook his tears and sensitivity for weakness, but Cafton didn’t care. Let them. He’d rather be sensitive to the world around him than be emotionally blunted, callous, self-serving. His sensitivity was not a weakness. On the contrary, it took strength to allow himself to feel so deeply. He wanted to feel life, not just observe it from a distance, not just be a bystander in the world. It was 1980, by damn. The world needs to get comfortable with sensitive guys like me, he thought.

  Yes, his thoughtfulness took its toll on him, but like his psychologist friend reassured him, “Once a neurotic, never a psychotic. Some minor neuroses, some gentle eccentricities are coping mechanisms that keep you from going off the deep end.” If that was true, Cafton was utterly immune from psychoses, but he carried a fresh hanky with him at all times.

  Wiping away his tears with his handkerchief so he could see, he stood on the sidewalk beholding his smoldering home. “Oh, crap! Dagwood!” Cafton’s chest suddenly seized, constricted like the snap of a noose. For half a second, he thought his head would pop right off and fly down the street, leaving a bottle rocket blaze trail. Dagwood, his beloved cat, was upstairs in his personal quarters of the club. Besides Bynum, Dagwood was his best and oldest friend.

  “Stay put, my ass!” he growled. There was not a chance in hell he would passively obey commands and wait it out on the sidewalk any longer. He had to rescue his Dagwood. The house can burn to the ground, but not with my little buddy in it.

  Little by little, step by step, like a slo-mo reverse of a cat stalking a bird, he backed down the sidewalk away from the scene and into the darkness. In a few seconds, Cafton had crept out of Officer Big Paw’s sight. He sneaked across into the shadows and slipped up the monkey-grass-lined walkway of the neighbor’s bungalow two doors down. From there, he slinked alongside the front porches and leafless hydrangea hedges and evergreen hollies of two neighbors’ Sears Craftsman houses to get closer to his home. “Shush,” Cafton silently gave the “be quiet” finger on his lips to the neighbors who gawked from their porches as he skulked by them. Focused, clear-eyed and steady now, he was on a mission. No uniform would stop him.

  The pungent evergreen aroma of the next door neighbor’s juniper bushes mercifully cut through the bitter smoke smell as he forced his way behind them to get parallel to his front porch. As best he could tell from the strobing red and blue lights, his home’s vintage front porch furniture was smoldering. At least one front window on the left of the house was now jagged pieces of sooty shards, with smoke slowly rolling out of it like lazy specters of evicted tenants. The thick oak front door had been bludgeoned repeatedly with a fire axe to open it. The classic lion’s head door knocker was teetering like a tightrope walker on a piece of dislodged wood. The wrought iron speakeasy door grill was intact but surrounded by through-and-through gashes made by the firemen’s massive axes. His home’s vintage brick walls and porch columns were covered in smut, with rivulets of water making trails like tears ruining a country music starlet’s mascara. There was no visible fire now, but there sure had been one just minutes earlier as he crept closer and closer. Now most of the flame was gone, but the smoke and water were ravaging the front part of his home.

  “Thank God it looks like it was confined to the front downstairs. Dagwood may be safe in his favorite spot upstairs in the back of the house,” Cafton reassured himself as his stomach rolled and tumbled while he made his way closer.

  The emergency vehicle strobes still illuminated the street. If he had not known what was going on, he could have mistaken the lights for a carnival. “Oh, sweet mercy, the deafening noise has stopped,” Cafton muttered, realizing he had been wincing from the cacophony. He relaxed his face a bit as he slanted toward the back of his house. Several emergency vehicle spotlights were trained on what was left of the front door. A menacing person in a soot-black suit covering him head to toe like a Michelin Man at a funeral robotically clambered up the front porch’s four concrete stairs. Other emergency personnel on the street to Cafton’s right were hunkered down behind their respective service vehicles.

  “Well, that looks ominous,” Cafton grunted, trying again in vain to take a deep breath. The bank of choking haze discouraged a deep breath, so a short gasp was all he could take in without risking a coughing jag that would give his position away. He pulled up his turtleneck over his nose and deeply inhaled filtered oxygen. Sweet. Then he muffled an abrupt co
ugh.

  The burly man in black cautiously waddled his way up the wide stairs and then from one side of the porch to the other, squatting down occasionally to inspect debris. No one was talking now. The triple alert tones and chatter from the emergency vehicle radios sporadically interrupted the hush with monotone, dispassionate female voices calling out codes to instruct someone to do something somewhere.

  For nearly three minutes, everyone stood still, holding their collective breath, watching the dreamlike inspection. No conversations. No cigarettes being lit. No meandering around. Just pulsating red and blue lights and a few stifled, dry coughs from the authorities and the meddlesome neighbor audience. Performance art.

  Chapter 3—Bombastic

  The exaggerated, suited-up guy emerged from the porch, tugged off his headgear and face shield, and faced his spectators. “All clear!” he declared authoritatively. As he shuffled back to his matte-black vehicle, Cafton noticed it was marked Bomb Squad.

  The bomb squad is at my home? Why? Is this connected with those threatening phone messages that seem to happen only when I am out of the house? Did the bomber think I was in the house? Cafton’s thoughts stumbled over each other as he tried to ask himself questions and answer them simultaneously while he impatiently waited for the authorities to draw the spotlights away from the house.

  Enough lurking around. That cop can just kiss my left hind foot, thought Cafton. I’ve gotta save Dag. He tiptoed down his driveway, slid up next to the house, flattened his back to it, and made his way to his back porch.

  “Cafton. Cafton Merriepennie,” he whispered to himself in his best James Bond accent.

  He unlocked his back door and headed up the dark hallway to the front stairwell. As best he could tell in the dimness, it looked like the fire hadn’t reached the inside of the house, but the smoke and stench of some sort of fuel that irritated his lungs filled the ground floor. He stretched his turtleneck collar over his nose again and raced upstairs, gliding his hand on the banister to ensure his balance in the dark.

  He rushed directly to Dagwood’s default hiding space in Cafton’s leather briefcase, kept between the bed and the nightstand. Sure enough, a very frightened Dagwood was crouched down in there and in no mood to exit voluntarily. Cafton snapped the briefcase closed with Dagwood in it and felt his way back through the darkness downstairs, down the hall, and outside to somewhat fresher air. The curtain of acrid, sooty smoke sent him into a full-blown coughing spasm, causing him to momentarily double over. Dagwood was sneezing inside the case, his fuzzy head knocking against the leather with each eruption. “Hang on, buddy. We’ll be out of this hell in just a minute,” Cafton reassured Dagwood when he got his breath and started to retrace his path back to his car.

  When Cafton opened the briefcase inside the car, they took a few moments to clear their lungs. Cafton shivered like a mobster in a tax collector’s office, but running the air conditioner pumped filtered, clean, crisp, breathable air into the car’s cabin. Dagwood’s okay, and that’s the most important thing. Cafton was getting his wits under him again. Now that he is safely tucked away, I’ve got to figure what the hell happened to my home and why. “I’m putting the devil on notice that whoever did this will pay,” he vowed.

  Cafton looked around at the chaos behind him. “There’s the chief. We need to talk. I’ll be right back, Dag,” he promised. He locked the car behind him as he headed toward the heart of the action.

  Police Chief Heckle passively, vacantly observed the scene, his usual level of policing involvement, leaning on the roof of his squad car, sort of draped like he was too exhausted to support his own considerable weight, while working on an old tobacco chaw. “Moses?” Cafton tapped him on the shoulder, surprised at the resistance of a bulletproof vest under his fingers. Heckle peered over his shoulder at Cafton, gradually unfolded his upper body from atop the car roof, and turned around, teetering back against the car again.

  His leathery, wrinkle-etched face was a study in weariness and boredom. Not just weary from tonight, but weary from three decades of soul-sucking law enforcement. Weary from going through the motions of a job that no longer held the thrill of the chase, the pride of the badge, or the respect of the populace.

  He was tired and beaten down from carrying fifteen pounds of cop gear around his waist forever. His sciatica, earned by sitting in a squad car, wrapped around his duty belt for hour after hour over the decades, prevented him from relaxing even when he wasn’t in a car. Sharp, sizzling pain ripped in rhythmic cycles up his legs from his puffy ankles to just underneath his sagging ass, even in his sleep. He had become accustomed to the pain, but it took its toll nonetheless.

  He was definitely ROD: retired on duty. He had already surpassed his twenty-five-year retirement mark, but he’d decided he had a pretty good gig, and the extra money paid for Mrs. Chief’s pricy jewelry and imported wine addictions. Heckle was simply a figurehead, for the most part. He had a nice office (as offices in cop shops go), delegated the lion’s share of his work, just signed off on what was put in front of him by his assistant chief, and came and went when he chose. To the public, though, he was the face of Nashville’s police department, and in the thick of it. He pulled off the charade by showing up for ceremonial and high-profile situations that were likely to draw significant media attention. Like this one.

  Heckle eyeballed the ground and bent over slightly. He took his pointer finger, poked it in his mouth, and deliberately and thoroughly swiped it around between his chapped lips and spongy gums. He scooped out a dripping wad of chewing terbackky and slung it on the ground just to the left of Cafton. He wiped his brown, dripping finger on a handkerchief pulled from his back pocket. Cafton looked away, preferring not to start their conversation by retching.

  “Hey, Cafton.” Heckle’s East Tennessee, molasses-slow, baritone drawl was in full throat. Cafton remembered Heckle was the only person he knew who got four distinct syllables out of “Cafton” and three from “hey.” He sounded like he was singing a funeral dirge when he spoke a full sentence.

  Heckle hung his thumbs in his duty belt, sucked the remaining tobacco juice from between his sepia-colored teeth, and swallowed. Apparently he was too fatigued to even support his arms. “Who’d you piss off this time, boy?”

  “Wish I knew. It would make life a lot less stressful if I did.” Cafton mentally thumbed through his memory for any antagonistic encounters he had had with anyone lately, but he couldn’t come up with any immediate suspects. “I sure don’t want to further antagonize some nut case whose response is to bomb my home.”

  “Well, now, don’t get ahead of yerseff, cowboy. Who told you it was a bumb?” Heckle craned his head forward and lifted an eyebrow, indicating suspicion, the default filter through which every cop considers every interaction.

  Oh, please, Cafton thought, having to stop himself from rolling his eyes. Like I’m going to bomb my own home. “The bomb squad. They are here. Was there a…”

  “Oh, yeah. Well, naw. It wudden exactly a bumb,” interrupted Heckle. “But they was bored and don’t get to come out and show off their gear and toys and sitch very often, so when we put out the call, they come a-runnin’ to check it out.” Heckle’s all-knowing smirk was accented by a small dollop of tobacco juice oozing from the edge of his mouth. “It counts toward their annual training quota. Checking off boxes and jumping through hoops, ya know.”

  My tax dollars at work, thought Cafton. Boys and their expensive toys.

  “Best the arson boys can tell, it was four Molotov cocktails pitched by some dummy who’s a piss-poor shot. They say amateur firebugs use Molotov cocktails ’cause they don’t know a better way and are too damn lazy to learn to make a real bumb.” Heckle grinned, gathered the escaping tobacco juice from the corner of his mouth with his tongue, and spat the harvest on the ground right beside Cafton’s right foot. After wiping his mouth with the back of his hairy wrist, he continued, “Lookie he-uh. They mostly hit right on the bricks, twixt and under all the win
ders. Just one got through a winder.” Heckle again freed his tobacco-juice wiping hand from his duty belt, pointed it toward Cafton’s porch, and wagged it up and down like he was chopping lettuce. “Some nancy didn’t have enough arm to get most of them through the winders and into the house.” He snorgled. “So they didn’t do any real damage ’cept to your swang and all that fancy twig furniture you got up there. The boys say the front room is just smoke damage. Nuttin’ serious.”

  “The ‘twig’ furniture is, was, an antique wicker porch settee,” Cafton snarled, annoyed at Heckle’s tone on several counts, as well as his proclivity toward spitting all around Cafton’s feet. Is spitting some sort of deliberate hillbilly show of disrespect or just boorish rudeness?

  “Oh, ’scuuuuuse me. Your settee. Uh-huh. Anyways, that’s where all the flame came from, all that fancy painted wood went up like a box of pine kin’lin’. But these good ole bricks and concrete porch don’t catch a-fahr too good, so it was mostly a lotta smoke after the initial fahrball.” Heckle re-hooked his thumb in his belt and rigidly bobbed his head up and down, nailing his confident assessment down for posterity.

  “So if all the damage is on the front porch, if it’s nothing serious, why is my front door beaten to splinters, Chief?” Cafton was pissed and not inclined to hide his irritation at Heckle like he usually did. The man could start an argument in an empty house.

  “Well, you weren’t home, and the fire department didn’t happen to have a key to just go in and inspect, so they used their universal key.” Heckle couldn’t keep himself from chuckling at his own sharp wit.

  “Very funny, Moses,” Cafton snapped, in no mood to tolerate the juvenile humor.

  “But iffin I was you, I’d be a mite concerned about somebody who’s got a mad on at you enough to pull this kind of shit. It takes a special kind of crazy to plan and then carry out something this ballsy.”