Open Windows

Glancing across the street, I see something that makes me stop for a moment: the nice house, the two-story home with the new roof of black slate tiles, has all of the windows standing open; it’s ninety-some degrees outside, the warmest day this week and all of the windows are open on the west side. The sun passed the zenith a couple of hours ago, that home will soon be hotter than you-know-what. Are they nuts?

Then I stop to wonder what kind of stink must have occurred to make folks leave their house wide open to the August heat. Did a kid drop a bottle of that doe urine that hunters use to attract deer during the hunting season? Happened to us out at the warehouses where I used to work back in the day. Stuff could evacuate a place faster than tear gas, and it’s perfectly legal to use too! Maybe someone left the fresh fish out on the counter overnight? Truth is I don’t know, but it is my business to look into the strange and unusual in the neighborhood; the community association pays us to do just that.

From the list on the wall, I look up the numbers for the family. Contact numbers the boss calls ‘em, phone and cell numbers for me to pester the folks at their workplaces. The boss don’ never call, he has that phone-phobia, same as a lot of folks have, especially men. I have it too, but must put it aside on the job when the boss tells me to call folks. It isn’t like there is anyone else in the guard shack for me to delegate a phone call.

The numbers produce no response. The family is out of town or out of touch, but now I have to leave my air-conditioned office, get in the scorching hot security vehicle and go check. I realize that it sounds stupid to drive across the street. By the time I get the Jeep started and well before the a/c kicks in, I’ll be there. The startup is a waste of fuel too at a time when this country needs me to waste gas about as much as Hitler needed a bar mitzvah back in his day. That ain’t a very good simile of course, a good bar mitzvah might have done little Adolph a world of good in his growing years, you never know.

I check the Weather Channel web site, and yup, the town shows 95° with a dew point of 44° and humidity at 17%, comfortable actually. The boss won’t likely get out of his cool house on a day like this, so I take the chance and save the country a few cups of gasoline for future generations. The gated community I work for is dead quiet in the afternoon. The children are inside playing their video games as the final days of their summer break tick away right underneath them.

Their parents, both wife and husband in most cases, are at work. Making good salaries that will be eaten up by deductions and payment plans. The toys purchased by the payment plans line the alley parking stalls all over the community. I get to see them each night on patrols. Bass boats, ski boats, luxury campers, ATV’s, snowmobiles on trailers, and Harley’s for the annual trip to Sturgis, all add up to several millions of dollars’ worth of stuff that gets used maybe once or twice a year. Yet they all go to work in Corporameia, that dreadful village of corporate minions out to destroy each other and squeeze every last drop of blood and sweat from the employees. I know because I used to be there with them.

As I walk around the house, I see that every window on all sides of the house is open, though all of the blinds and curtains are pulled down allowing me no way to look inside. I also think back to those ten years of moving up the ladder after starting at the very bottom.

I don’t have to worry about that in my current position. The boss isn’t going anywhere as the Community Association hires the lowest bidder for the security job and no bid will get lower than the boss’s. The big national firms like Pinkerton’s and Wackenhut can’t match our costs because the boss provides no benefits, no retirement plan, and not very much of himself. Markus, Frenny, and I trade off working afternoons and nights. The boss takes the position each weekday morning for two or three hours until everyone he needs to wave at has gone to work. The weekend mornings are left open because no one in this very self-righteous and hypocritically-proper community wants us to see the results of the Friday and Saturday night Bacchanalias that take place without fail at one house or another. That takes away the only interesting shifts; we get to work the others.

I get to read a lot on my shifts because the boss doesn’t want us to be anywhere without the security vehicle and keeps a tight lid on the fuel budget, which means the vehicle doesn’t move much and therefore neither do we. I have taken to hiding a bicycle behind the security office and making patrols around the neighborhood that way. They have a very nice trail that winds through the woods behind all of the homes for some 8 miles. They all paid for it when they bought the homes, but no one uses it. They have exercise toys inside the homes for that kind of thing. The maids keep the equipment dusted so that claims of workouts can be made. I’m not sure why that is important, but it seems to be. In spite of this, the people of this neighborhood are in good shape; probably from all the ‘running around’ they do on each other. Sorry, bad pun there. Along with the dust-free exercise equipment, the families all maintain gym and golf club memberships. No one can see and visualize your naked body when you work out at home, you see, and of course you don’t get to do the same to the other guy’s wife from a home gym in the basement. Of course, in the summer that all changes as the backyard pools are cleaned and filled.

In the summer time we are not allowed to patrol behind the homes. As I have mentioned, I take the bike trail anyway, and I know why they don’t want us going behind the homes while the pools are in use. Swimming seems to be the last thing on these people’s minds. I could make a fortune with a digital camera and a few contacts in the blackmail trade, but unlike the people I guard for a living, I’m not that given to courting Mammon, or money as we call that old demon. After that first trip, I learned to keep my eyeballs in the boat as they say at the Academy.

Years ago, I gained acceptance to the Naval Academy in Annapolis. The plebes there all learn to eat while staring down at the plates only. This is a form of eye discipline that comes in handy when living in officer country on the bases later in life, just as it does in this community. That way a junior officer doesn’t have to worry about which back door the captain of the vessel in port is visiting while his wife is at work. Keep your eyes in the boat and you avoid seeing a lot of sin. Not that playing the blind monkey part makes the sin go away of course. Keeping the eyeballs in the boat does help when meeting Frenny though.

Frenny is a college kid and only works one night a week; we have never heard his real name. Markus and I each work three nights. Fortunately, Frenny is a lazy kid as most of us were at that age and does not violate the behind the homes rule. He also has the advantage of being homely enough that none of the rich-kid daughters have any fantasies about the young security guard. Markus and I could both serve, but to carry out such a thing would involve long jail terms and sex offender registration should we be caught. The ‘child’ would not be harmed emotionally, the children raised in this neighborhood passed that point years ago with what they have grown up with.

Like me, Markus served his country, he for somewhat longer than I. Markus retired as a chief warrant officer after 22 years in the Army. At just over 40, he has a lot of life left in him and is too wise to mess it up with one of the kids in this neighborhood. I served 8 years and left as a captain from the Marine Corps after an IED in Iraq gave me a few extra scars and a medical discharge. Both of us get payments from the government for our service, but a man has to do something with his time. I would like to think that I too am wise enough to stay away from the physically attractive gals around these parts. Since that first bike ride on that first summer evening last June, I can swear on a Bible that I haven’t looked in the backyards. A man just doesn’t want those images playing in his mind if he wants to keep his heart pure, that much I can tell you.

I completed my first partial circuit of the house and did notice a smell wafting out the leeward side of the home, but not one that I could identify. (The inevitable privacy fence kept me from going the whole circle around the house.) Freshly killed human bodies have a distinctive smell that I could recall from my days in Fallujah, but this was not that smell, thank God. The smell could come from something like a dead rat, and in this neighborhood I could see why the family would want no trace of it to linger. However, that same reason would prompt the family to call the very plain white vans from ServiceMaster’s division that no one talks about around here. The division that discreetly cleans up the bodily fluids from the fights that didn’t happen in this neighborhood; or cleans up the mess from the orgies that the local religious leaders are sure wouldn’t take place in ‘that’ gated community.

Markus and I have seen the vans a lot; we even know a few of the drivers by their first names and can talk about their family members by name too. The vans service the neighborhood for a stiff fee (Sorry, another bad pun there.) and the drivers and crew keep their mouths shut, at least until their kids are through college. Nope, Markus and I never see those vans either. If the mess is particularly bad and the vans leave late, as one did this evening from that city councilman’s house up yonder way, we mark it down as a delivery from Ollie’s Overnight Freight and leave it at that. The boss knows about Ollie and his overnight deliveries, and will tag on an extra charge of his own.

I’ll say this for the boss; though he may not lead by example of long hours and hard work he does share the bonus money equally. Some months the vans are here so much that we make more in bonus money than we do in our regular paychecks. In spite of my bad pun, I have always assumed that the vans take away no bodies from these little clean-ups. The police are never called to these things, but for all I know they receive something extra as well. The house is quiet; the neighborhood is still, and the boss has stayed away just like I thought. I am about to knock on the door when another plain white van honks to be let out of the gate. A quick jog, the day is quite comfortable even at 95°, the dry days of August have arrived at last, and I sign for another delivery from Ollie. Busy fellow that Ollie; this summer must be some kind of record for him.

I checked the office real quick to make sure that no one has called, but all is quiet just as it usually is in this neck of the woods. Still, something is creeping me out about this house. I strap on my Beretta M9 and a magazine pouch. Not standard issue for the job, the boss won’t spring for the bonding and insurance that goes with firearms. If the balloon ever went up in this neighborhood we could go into any of the homes and find all manner of fine rifles and shotguns to defend the walls with; some of them even get taken out and used once each fall. A fellow down at the end of Palisade Avenue even showed Markus and I his collection of legal machine guns and told us how to get at them should we need to. I surely do hope we never need that much firepower around here.

Markus and I have become good friends on this job and often work the nights together even though we don’t have to and don’t get paid extra for doing it. Come to think of it that is a fine idea. I go back to the office and call Markus as the first of the ‘working’ folk start coming home. I don’t have to let them in or out, a sensor under the road is tripped by a sender on their vehicles and the gates open automatically. I do keep an eye out for duress situations, but these folks are not quite up to that level of wealth.

“Hey bud! What’s going on out in the land of modest wealth and immoderate sin?” Markus has picked up the shop number from his Caller ID display.

“Funny you should ask, I just signed ‘Ollie’ out again. Mark, you see anything odd about that house across the road here last night?” I ask him.

“Yeah, all the windows were open all night, even though it got down to the low 50’s, and I didn’t see any cars leave in the morning,” Markus reports. “I asked Frenny, but you know him, he didn’t see anything. For all I know the house has been that way since your last day.”

This was Tuesday, Markus had Monday, Frenny Sunday, and my last day had been Saturday, and I didn’t notice anything odd on that day, but then again Saturday had been pleasant both day and night.

“You would ask about it though, because that house gave me the heebie-jeebies for some reason yesterday, Joe,” Markus continued.

“Yes, I got that same feeling right now,” I said. “You want to come up while I go knock on the door?”

“Sure, be right there!”

I knew that ‘right there’ meant at least an hour, Markus and the rest of us too for that matter, couldn’t afford to live in the neighborhoods close to this one. But I also knew that he would drop whatever he was doing, probably working on those infernal RC airplanes of his, and be here as quickly as his 2011 Dodge Challenger 392 SRT8 in Green with Envy (the actual color choice on the order form!) could make it without getting yet another speeding ticket. Markus had a weakness for a fast car, and this car was his latest fling.

My passion is my Hummer, kind of a thing from my Marine days. They wouldn’t let me drive them back then; the company commander always had a driver from the enlisted ranks. Rank may have its privileges in the military, but getting to drive the Humvees wasn’t one of them. I have one of the diesel H1s, not those wimpy H2’s or H3’s. I realize that it’s a terrible guzzler of precious fossil fuel so I try to make up for that by driving it as much as possible.

Captain Joseph Fellowman is my official handle on the medical papers at the VA, and yes the last name of my birth did cause the first classmen at the Academy to exercise their humor a bit. Markus would be Chief Warrant Officer Markus DeLapage, pronounced mostly in the French way though his New Orleans forbears had managed to mangle it a bit like the old commandant’s name, LeJeune, had been. I guess we are supposed to call my old base Luh-jern now instead of Leh-june as we said it back in the day. I have an hour or so to think of ridiculous issues like that before Markus arrives.

I kept an eye on the house as the residents returned from their day jobs to start their summer evenings by the pool, or in the pool, or in each other… sorry about that, got carried away there.

As the incoming traffic slows, and right about 50 minutes later Markus rumbles in and parks next to my Hummer. As I look at the two vehicles, I kind of realize why the boss might be reluctant to give us a raise. How many security guard shacks have two vehicles like these parked outside?

“Evening there, Joe!” Markus is cheerful as usual, and armed for bear, which ain’t.

“Got one for me?” I ask. He reaches back into his car and hands over one of his Winchester Marine model shotguns, fully loaded with buckshot and slugs if I know Markus. The model is not named for my former service branch, but for use in a saltwater environment. The guns gleam with stainless steel set off by the black polyurethane stock. Markus also carries a Beretta M9; old habits die hard it seems.

I look up and down the road, the houses look dark and curtains are still drawn to block out the late evening sun. The temperature will drop quite a bit soon. Tolan City isn’t in the desert, but the area is dry enough that the day and night temps can differ by as much as 50 degrees in late August. I look because I don’t want the residents to see us both armed for bear and going over to one of ‘their’ houses, and then leap to the conclusion that those two crazy vets are going to knock over their little community. Like everyone else, they watch the latest Hollywood fair and sure as Osama bin Laden is gone from this earth; some studio has put out a movie with a PTSD suffering vet going postal at some point in the recent past.

Markus has finished his survey as well; Army or Marines, we sooner or later learn to think alike in the ground forces. Not that ‘Flyboy Jones’ as I call Markus when he is being ornery had to spend much time walking the sands of Iraq. He flew the Apache for the Army, blowing up stuff from the air in a heavily armed and armored warhorse. Wonder if he could get ahold of one for tonight? This house is still creeping me out.

Markus nods his head as though understanding my feeling. Most likely he does at that.

I jack a round into the chamber just before Markus does the same. We watch the movies too, but we know that it doesn’t do any good to chamber a round when the enemy is already shooting. Across the street, I go to the door and wait while Markus makes another quick check of the backside of the house. Markus is tall enough to look over the six-foot privacy fence, the height limit according to the 40-page covenant the owners all sign. The privacy fence limit is absurd in any case; they all stare over at the neighbors from their second and third story rear balconies. Nothing has changed out back, so I knock on the door which to my surprise swings open. I move off to the side and bring out a flashlight. The evening sun shines in enough that we can see nothing to either side of the entryway that it illuminates. Markus shines his light to the right across me, and I do the opposite. I see a body lying on the floor, but it has too many matching legs to be a human. The family dog has passed.

Markus looks at me and we trade sides with our flashlight beams. There is a dead dog on his side too. From what I can see, the dog on his side looks almost desiccated. The weekend didn’t do that. What is going on here? Against my better judgment, I don’t call the cops right now, but go inside with Markus backing me up. We both turn off our cell phones and security radios. Inside, I break to the right and begin searching with my light; Markus I know will be doing the same to the left.

Dust is what I see the most; this house has not been used as a home for some time. How could we have missed that? The answer is that we didn’t. Vehicles have been coming and going at regular hours for months, perhaps years, or at least as far back as I can recall. We meet on the back side of the first floor in the kitchen. Normal appliances, normal furniture, but all covered in dust. Footprints in the dust go downstairs, but none go up. I cover those stairs while I signal to Markus to take a quick swing around the second floor.

He whispers to me when he returns, “the same as this floor,” by which I take it that I would find normal bedrooms and baths all covered in dust.

We descend the stairs.

The basement is different. There is no dust. We can see the entire basement from the bottom of the stair. My first guess would be that someone has turned the place into a game processing station. Stainless steel counters, grinders, walk-in freezers, but no ranges, ovens, or deep fryers. They didn’t cook down here, but they did process meat. Markus turns and covers me while I look in the freezers, or he turns so that he doesn’t have to see what we fear. I don’t know which. Ah, well, rank has its privileges I guess.

No corpses stare at me from the freezers, human or otherwise. The shelves are bare, but the freezers are running. This makes some sense as the hunting seasons will be getting underway shortly. Perhaps the meat has been consumed. Later I will desperately wish this thought had not crossed my brain.

We return to the ground floor and head out back to the garage/shop building the houses are allowed to have behind the pool and below the wooded hills surrounding the community.

We do the same procedure as we did at the front door of the house, but this time there are no dead mutts. The garage has an unusual inner door though. Once again those fears creep up on me. Markus reaches over and pats me on the back. This time we go in touching so that we don’t startle each other and fire off a round. The sense of creepiness comes from this place. I cannot tell what is making my hair stand on end. In a movie this would be the moment the scary music would start.

“Would you please stop humming that music!” I bark at Markus in a whisper.

“Sorry, it seemed kind of appropriate,” Markus whispers back.

I throw open the door.

The room is divided into two. A cool room separated by plastic see-through strips to keep the cool air in, and a loading dock with a van parked in the bay. Pallets of canned goods are ready to be shipped. I see the labels of several popular canned meats and entrées. We walk in a crouch over to the cool room.

Dog carcasses, skinned and hanging from the racks, hundreds of them, greet our eyes as we scan the room. Markus steps back and makes a mess all over the clean floor. I feel a strong urge to do the same. No one is here. It’s a good thing. Markus and I might have dropped the muzzles and lit ‘em up at that moment.

Outside I pause to do to an innocent bush what Markus just did to the floor. We make no jokes at each other’s expense; this doesn’t seem the moment for it. I begin to wonder where the bonuses are coming from, and suspect why there have been so many plain white vans this summer.

“Guess you better call in the cops, Joe,” Markus tells me. “I’m not sure I can speak straight to ‘em right now.”

“I know what you mean,” I say. “Do you suppose the boss is in on this?”

“Nah, he’s dumb, but not that dumb,” Markus looks around the neighborhood. “Like you and me, he probably figured this bunch was just behaving worse than usual. I know it’s easy to think that about the folks in this neighborhood.”

I agreed with his assessment and I dialed the number for the local cop shop. Didn’t look like an emergency. The vans that left earlier in the day, when no guard was on duty, were probably making their deliveries now and would be back in the morning as usual. The vans we saw leave late this evening were probably the service vans, the real ones. The boss would see vans coming in and would make his little notes for charges by which house they went to; the night guard would see only some of them going out, but since the boss didn’t talk to us much, we had never compared the numbers. Someone had set up one foul operation just across the street from us.

After the cops arrived to bust the place, performed their forensic NCIS thing, and then set up a little meeting for the owners, I walked back to the office and quietly removed all the cans from one of the cupboards. Better that the kid didn’t know what we had been eating.