DROP A HOUSE ON YOU

         I sleep in the glow of my mother's little lamp on my bureau. I hate being roused by a bug in the dark. If that's my only neurosis, I must be doing fine. When the phone rang a little after two, I found it and my writing pad rather easily.

         "Frack, Captain LeDuc. Meneely just called me. Someone's found the debris of a house in the middle of Yellowbrick Avenue. Arouse your sorry partner and get over there."

         "Captain, why don't you ever call him and wake him up when these things come up?"
         "Frack, the last thing I need is to get his answer machine and hear Spike Jones at two in the morning. Get your butt going, Janie."

         I rang Frick. He answered just as "Love In Bloom" reached its first pistol shot. Ignoring his grumbling, I told him to pick me up in ten minutes. He made it in twelve. His first words were "How come the Captain never calls me first?"

         "Can it be the breeze that fills the trees with rare ro.." I clicked off the machine. Two a.m. and Frack’s on the horn. “Pick me up!” She never stops for me. Three years of working together and she's never been in this place, nor I in hers. We laugh, joke and cry, but at the end of the day we go home to "bare ruined choirs." Oh my, I'm getting literary.

         He drove well for being half-asleep. From two blocks away I could see the red lights of the fire trucks swiveling. There was debris all over the place. Little people were dancing around. We were the only ones from the PD. A fire captain, a grizzled veteran, was declaiming, "A wrecked house in the middle of Yellowbrick Street, what can happen next?" Then came a shout.

         "Captain McSween, there's a body under here."

         It was the body of a woman in a black shawl, worn over a greasy black dress. Embroidered on the shawl were the initials WWE. Her age was hard to gauge; the debris had not crushed her, but a brick must have hit her on her head. I saw Frick dragging another old woman and a herd of children over to me. I stepped away from the corpse.

         "This is The Old Woman, Frack. Tell my partner what happened. I want to question that young girl with the dog."

         I looked at the woman imploringly. Before I could put a question to her she started sobbing, but coherently. "I took the kids to Walmart. Sometimes you just have to get out of the house, you know. It's this sort of split level, but so small. I don’t know what to do sometimes. When we got home, the house was gone."

         "We'll check it out, ma'am."
         "What am I going to do with all these kids?"

         I didn't want to tell her that it looked like it would be the poor house, so I pointed to Captain McSween. Frick was returning, leafing through his notepad.

         "What did she say?"
         "She's on her way to the city. She says the little people had something to do with it, but I think she knows more than she's admitting. The dog is in it up to his dewclaws. We ought to follow them."

         Frick established a moving tail a couple of blocks behind her Toyota Tornado. He's good at that, better than me. I like these quiet moments when he's driving; makes me dread when he drops me off after we're done.

         She always looks great, even in the middle of the night. Those sweatpants are so form fitting.

         He must be daydreaming; we’ve lost them. “Look, green smoke, head toward it, Frick!" The car did a hard right and pulled into a vacant lot. There were six people and a dog around a steel barrel with a fire burning in it.

         Five of them looked like they were going to a Halloween party, wearing outfits ranging from a scarecrow to the M-G-M lion. One woman in blonde hair was wearing a white shawl and dress. The initials on her wrap spelled out "GGW." The little girl and dog completed the scene. As we approached I could hear a painful moan, but coming from none of their mouths.

         "I'm melting!"

         Another woman clad in black was on the ground between them, evaporating as we watched. Frick ran but by the time he was at her side, only her shawl and dress remained. I heard him bellow, "Who did this? I bet it's the same person who killed that other woman."

         The little girl pointed to the woman in white; that one snarled that she might have done the first woman, but this was the girl's handiwork. A man dressed in a metal suit kept shouting it was the man dressed as a wizard. I fired my pistol in the air and shouted, ""You're all coming down to the station."

         The girl raised her hand and hissed, "You try and you two flatfoots will end the same as HER," pointing at the ground. She stared me down; I backed off, but Frick, unnoticed, grabbed her dog.

         "You do Missy and you'll never see the dog again."

         She burst into tears and put out her hands for cuffing. So did the rest. I radioed the station, but they couldn't get a van to us. It was only three blocks, so we marched them down Emerald Street to the precinct.

         It was after four. I felt awake and hungry, and not just for food. My brain waves must have been felt. I heard Frick, in a tone of voice I'd never heard before, say, "How about some breakfast; I could make some eggs and you could listen to my Spike Jones collection?" I accepted the eggs but took a rain check on Spike Jones. Maybe we’d have other music to play.

Valatie September 5, 2002