Autumn was closing in; the nights were getting cooler although the days were still warm.
I had come into town to meet with a new client, a farm supply business that had been in the same family for three generations. The current owner had told me that the business was a mess. That was severely understating the problem.
As I came out of the business's doorway onto the sidewalk, my arms full of boxes and bundles of paperwork; I felt good anticipating the work ahead of him. It was going to be like solving a puzzle; the books were in such a tangle.
I didn't even feel someone barreling into me but the next thing I knew, I was laying on the sidewalk with a snow of paperwork swirling around me.
"Hah, hah, sorry sucker. I must not have been looking where I was going." a voice said.
I looked up and saw that it was one of the Satans standing over me, the one who'd been burned in the fire. He had red patches on his face and neck and his once long hair was short fuzz now.
He spit on the sidewalk beside me, then turned and walked across the street. I sat up and looked after him.
The Satan reached the other side and as I watched, he walked a half block and turned down into an alleyway. At the same time, I noticed a young man standing directly across, staring at me. The owner of the farm supply business came outside and when I glanced back across the street, the young man was gone.
"Are you alright, Andy?" he asked as he helped me to my feet.
"Just my dignity bruised." I replied. I looked around myself at the scattered paperwork, knowing it would take several hours of sorting to get it back in order. The breeze was scattering sheets further down the sidewalk, too.
"You pick up what's here." the owner said. "I'll chase down the ones blowing away."
We worked away at picking up the mess for a few minutes when there was a sudden blood curdling scream.
I glanced across the street. There was a middle aged woman standing at the mouth of the alleyway, her hands clutching at her hair. She let out another piercing shriek.
"I thought that only happened in amateur stories." the business owner said, coming to stand beside me.
The next few minutes were a blur of activity. All up and down the street, people came out of the businesses and converged on the screaming woman. Moments later, the sheriff pulled up in his cruiser.
"Let's go see what's going on." the business owner said, his records forgotten. I weighted down my pile of papers and followed across the street.
We pushed our way through the crowd so that we could see what everyone was gawking at. Halfway down the alley, the biker lay face down in a pool of bright red blood. The sheriff was standing over him, speaking into his phone.
"Is there anything we can do to help?" I called.
The sheriff turned and beckoned me and my client forward.
When we were next to the sheriff, he said, "This is one of those Satan assholes, isn't it?"
"Yeah," I said. "He's the one who had all of the burns from their fire."
"He just knocked Andy down across the street." the business owner said. "I saw the whole thing and he did it on purpose."
The sheriff turned and looked at me, his eyes unreadable.
"Is that so?" he said.
"I hurried outside and helped him up." the business man said. "We were trying to gather up all of my paperwork when that woman screamed."
I could see the sheriff visibly relax.
"So you didn't see anything?"
"Just about the last twenty years of my business history blowing through town. I'm not sure we even managed to save them all."
While the two had been talking, I had been looking at the biker. He was lying on his stomach and poking out of his leather clad back there was a long thin piece of metal, almost like a thick wire.
"Is he dead?" I asked the sheriff.
"No pulse, I checked first thing. Looks like that thing went right through his back and out the front, directly through his heart."
"Is that some kind of spike in his back?" the business man said.
"I don't think so. I think..." the sheriff said, glancing around. He walked over to a dilapidated fence that screened off a loading area behind one of the stores, and then waved us over.
"See where this piece of fencing is broken? Someone just wrenched it off and ran up behind the guy and pushed it through his back. He probably never knew what hit him."
"Jeeze, that's cold blooded." the business man said.
An ambulance had come screeching up while we spoke and we all three got out of the way so that the medical people could do their job. While they were doing so, the sheriff went to his car and blocked off both ends of the alleyway with crime tape.
Photos were taken, the corpse was rolled onto a stretcher and everyone dispersed. The business owner and I went back across the street to see if we could find any more stray documents and then loaded the piles into my car trunk. When everything was safely stowed away, the business owner went back inside and I walked around to the driver's side. The sheriff was casually leaning against the door, smirking.
"Why were you looking at me like that a few minutes ago?" I asked him.
"Everyone with a reason is a suspect until I rule them out." he replied. "You're my first rule out, thanks to your witnesses."
"Yeah, like I'd go around stabbing people to death in broad daylight."
"Stranger things have happened in this town." the sheriff said. "Feel like coming over to my place tonight?"
* * * * * *
A week later, I had basically forgotten all about the stabbing. My new client's business records, in addition to being impossibly jumbled, were a total disaster. How he had never been audited and thrown into jail was a miracle. Untangling the gigantic mess had taken the better part of the week. When I told the poor guy what I'd found, he almost had a heart attack. I had already scheduled a meeting with IRS to save the business from being shuttered.
I walked into the town library, steeling myself for what I knew was coming.
Miss Brown, who'd been town librarian probably since the Mayflower, glared at me from behind her desk. She'd been known to reduce grown men to tears when they broke one of her rules. Lose one of her books and she'd probably rip your guts out.
She glared up at me as I approached and silently took the books from my hands. She opened the first one to the check out card, and then shuffled through the rest.
When she looked up again, her eyes looked like the gates of Hell.
"Almost a month overdue. Again." she said.
"I've been so busy, things got away from me." I replied.
She gave me a cold, serpentine stare and said, "So everyone in town who might want to read these books is supposed to wait for you?"
I broke into a cold sweat and glanced around the library, searching for an escape. Sitting at one of the tables was the same young man I'd seen the day of the stabbing. Again, he was staring at me with a blank stare.
"Do you have your card?" Mrs. Brown asked, bringing me back to focus.
