Out of the Maelstrom Sample

                                                                             Homicide in the Street

                                                                           From Out of the Maelstrom

                                                                                     By Sara Niles

                                                                   Essay length short story: 4558 words

This is a work of Nonfiction

(Names have been changed for the sake of privacy)

All Rights Reserved

Copyright©2011, 2014, Revised and edited edition by Josephine Thompson using Sara Niles as a pen name. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the written permission of the Publisher, except where permitted by law.

Cover & Graphic Design: Josephine Thompson

Web: http://saraniles-josephinethompson.blogspot.com/

                                                                       Chapter 1

                                                             Homicide in the Street

He was dead, alright. The sight of death is an ugly and fearsome thing, I thought, as I absorbed the tragic sight in front of me. It was a man, ‘The man’ , who was lying in the road with blackish--red blood pooled around his head, and as he lay face down with his feet in his own yard, while his head and shoulders were planted in the street, he gave the appearance of a killed animal felled in its tracks by a hunter.

By the time I arrived, yellow crime scene tape was strapped around the trees, while blue and red lights flashed out of sync with each other, providing the warning surges of light emanating from the tops of police cars and through the windshields of undercover detective vehicles; while the ambulance was parked askew with the neat, uniformed workers eerily standing almost idly by, in no apparent rush to ‘save’ the life of the already ‘dead’ man. I had rushed over as soon as I got the phone call, alerting me to what I was seeing with my own eyes. The phone call had been from my oldest son Tommy who had reached me at the local shelter with the news: “He’s dead! Mama-somebody just shot him-right out in the middle of the street.” Tommy had tersely stated, as a matter-of -fact summation of a wasted and dangerous life. The man was killed within fifty feet of my adult son Tommy’s yard, so naturally I felt I had a license to investigate to see if he was indeed ‘really’ dead.

I received the phone call from my son, while only a few blocks away, so it had only taken a few minutes for me to arrive. I could see past the commotion of all the emergency workers, that my son’s hunter green Chevy truck was parked in his driveway. I had dropped my younger teen-aged son, Mikey off earlier that morning so that he could ’hang out’ with his brother and watch sports on television with him, which was what they were doing  during the time of the murder. I parked carefully on the other side of the wide yellow crime tape and about two houses down from Tommy’s, and since there was no way for me to gain access to my son’s house without going under the crime tape, I walked up to the tape, as two detectives nodded at me (I knew them both) and allowed me to cross under the tape in order to walk the few feet over to Tommy’s house. I walked past the man’s bloodied head, taking care to keep moving. I took the time to take a good look at the man, I had to, it was as if some compelling force pulled me in that direction, a force beyond mere curiosity, I needed to see for myself, that he was dead. This body before me was the once loud and brash man, who used to stand out in the street and threaten me as I drove by, and who intimidated and menaced others, now appeared to lie in a permanent state of lifelessness, with not a twitch of movement coming from his body. He was dead. I felt a conflicting wave of relief, that he would not kill the two boys that I knew, nor their mother and I also felt a secondary feeling of reverent sadness, borne out of moral responsibility, simply because the man was a man after-all, a human who would never breathe the breath of life on this earth again. According to Tommy, there was no mystery to the murder since it happened in front of the entire neighborhood, therefore, finding the man who did it, was just a matter of wrapping up a few details. It would be brought to light later, that the task of bringing the killer of the man to justice was as easy as following a trail of crumbs.