This is my entry for the Halloween writing contest so please remember to vote when you're finished reading. I hope you enjoy my story!
-------------------------------------------------------------
"Can you speak up, Ted, I can't hear you! You know what, hang on a second..."
Detective Nathan Yost lowered his cellphone, pressing it to his chest to muffle the noise of what sounded like an angry beast in the same room with him. In reality, the almost inhuman sound was coming from the vocal cords of his six-year-old son, Jonah, who was dressed as a werewolf for Halloween.
"Hey, HEY, HEY! Pal...cut me some slack, huh? Daddy is trying to talk to his work friends."
Jonah froze in the midst of a snarling crouch, arms raised over his head, and glanced up into his dad's face.
"Sorry, Dad..."
His voice was slightly muffled by the rubber mask covering his mouth.
"It's alright, just give me peace for five-minutes, and we can go do the trick-or-treating thing to your heart's content."
"Yeah! Trick or treat!" yelled Jonah, dancing in a tight circle.
The noise attracted the attention of Nathan's wife, Cindy, who entered the living room from the kitchen. A tall, willowy, blond-haired woman with a long face and deep-set green eyes, she smiled patiently at her husband and the tiny monster at his feet.
"Jonah, why don't you come with me and get your shoes on?" said Cindy.
Running in a crouch, Jonah wrapped his arms around his mother's legs in a brief hug before darting into the kitchen.
"You promised no work tonight," she said to Nathan, her soft, full lips dropping into a frown.
"This will just take a few minutes. I need to fill Ted in on the progress of the Ryerson investigation. Why don't you and Jonah get started, and I'll catch up?"
Cindy shot a look up at the ceiling. She had heard this, "just a few minutes," talk before, and it usually meant far longer.
"It's Halloween, Nathan. Give it a rest for one night. This is important to Jonah."
It was Nathan's turn to frown.
He thought this was hitting a little below the belt. Cindy was well aware of how sensitive Nathan was about being a good father after the way he had been brought up. His dad had been a raging alcoholic, emphasis on the raging, who had constantly cheated on Nathan's mother, and been very free with his fists when it came to dispensing discipline in his household.
"I promise, five-minutes. Tops."
"Fine..."
Cindy turned to leave the room, and Nathan let out a playful whistle at the sight of her sweet rear end in blue jeans.
"Don't think sucking up is going to get you off the hook, Buster! Five-minutes..."
Nathan laughed as his wife passed out of sight.
"Sorry, Ted. Where was I?"
As his wife had predicted, five minutes turned into ten, and then twenty before Nathan finally broke the connection feeling like he had done his duty for the night. Slipping his cellphone into a back pocket, he stopped to set the alarm system on the house before stepping out into the cool, October air.
The neighborhood was alive with the sounds of children's laughter, and the scampering of tiny feet as costumed monsters, superheroes, and assorted creepy villains went from house to house in pursuit of the ultimate sugar high. Nathan smiled at the neighbors he recognized and nodded at the ones he didn't. It was a big housing project, and no one could be said to know everyone. He and Cindy had moved out here to get away from the hustle and bustle of the big city where Nathan still worked and now commuted. They had both agreed this was a better, safer place to start the family that they both had dreamed of since their wedding day almost nine years prior.
His feet slapped audibly on the cement as he made his way to the end of the block and veered to the left. In all the years they had been taking Jonah trick-or-treating they had always followed the same route, up until the end of the block, then down to the next street over, right turn and work their way back along the houses on both sides, rinse and repeat on the next block until they reached Bedford Park. The park marked the edge of the neighborhood, on the other side was F.M. 19, a farm to market road that Nathan often took to drive into the city. The main road that bisected their neighborhood ran south off of F.M. 19, and here they would cross at the light to work the other side for more candy, assuming their bag wasn't fit to burst by the time they got this far.
"Hey! Yost! Wait up a second."
"Just my luck," thought Nathan.
Art Baker was a nuisance at the best of times. A nosey neighbor who was always trying to get Nathan to fix the plethora of parking tickets he stumbled into regularly. The fact that the man was an attorney made the situation both ironic and even more insufferable.
"You know, Art, I'm kind of in a hurry, Cindy and Jonah got out ahead of me."
"This will just take a second. See, I was trying to find a parking spot at the courthouse, big case I'm working by the way..."
Nathan waited impatiently for Art to finish and promised to look into it, dismissing the idea from his mind as soon as Art had moved off.
The endless flow of kids had not stopped while the two men had been talking, and it served to remind him just how far behind he was falling.
Nathan whistled to himself and picked up his pace a bit. He knew Cindy was going to be pissed when he caught up with them, so the sooner, the better. As much as he loved his wife, her fire in the bedroom, which was considerable, was easily matched by the fire of her temper when she had been crossed.
He decided that maybe they had moved more quickly than he had imagined, and so he gave up crisscrossing the neighborhood streets and stuck to the main boulevard figuring to get ahead of them and be waiting at Bedford Park when they arrived.
The lights in the distance caught his attention immediately. A red glow that faded in and out rapidly, strobing from a turning light atop an emergency vehicle. Without thinking, his footsteps picked up, carrying him more quickly forward.
The closer he came to the intersection by the park, the more lights were revealed. A firetruck was sideways across the road blocking the turn off to the neighborhood, cop cars with strobing lights of their own parked on both sides of the street.
Nathan's pace increased even more now. He was jogging along, a slow, dark, panic welling up inside him.
Less than a hundred feet from the intersection, he could make out a crowd gathering pretend ghosts and ghouls bearing witness to a real horror right in their midst. He pushed his way through, reaching a cordon of police officers who were trying to hold a perimeter.
"You need to stay back, sir!" snapped a uniformed policeman.
Nathan pulled his badge from his back pocket, flashing it in the officers face.
"What's going on here?" he demanded.
"Oh, sorry, Detective. It's pretty bad, I'm afraid. A couple of drunk teens ran the light and plowed into the intersection right when a group of folks was crossing."
"Was anyone hurt?"
"I don't know for sure. I think most of them got lucky and managed to get out of the way, but I just got here."
Nathan brushed past, making his way closer to the intersection. The garish glow of angry red lights lit the accident scene in a macabre fashion that was not at all out of place. As he passed a police cruiser that had been blocking his line of sight, he saw two bodies on the ground covered by dark blankets and surrounded by firemen.
Not everyone had been lucky, after all.
Nathan's eyes passed over the crowd, scanning for the familiar faces of his wife and son. He was sure any minute he would lock eyes with Cindy, and he would sigh with a sense of relief at knowing that everything was alright. He looked from one side of the street to another, his feet still moving forward, bringing him closer to the bodies on the ground. The white line of the crosswalk marked the border between the street and the relative shelter of traffic rules meant to protect the people caught in between. Nathan walked past the line, eyes still on the crowd until his foot slipped on something in the roadway.
He looked down, and in the churning red light, saw the face of a Halloween mask staring back up at him.
A werewolf mask.
With trembling hands, he lifted it from the ground.
"No..." he whispered to himself.
An ambulance turned onto the street. It's headlights illuminating the two unmoving bodies, not twenty feet from where Nathan stood. He realized now that in their haste, the firefighters hadn't completely covered the larger of the two. A hand was sticking out past the edge of the wool covering. A well-manicured hand with long, blood-red nails, and on one finger a diamond ring that Nathan knew all too well. The ring he had placed there in a tiny chapel nine years ago.
"Oh...Oh...God...No...NO!"
It took the combined efforts of half-a-dozen firefighters and police officers to hold back the grief-stricken man. Eventually, they managed to wrestle him to the ground, but no words that any of the assembled emergency personnel could conjure seem to bring him any solace. The paramedics would ultimately have to sedate him before he could be removed from the scene.
The duty officer would report later that in twenty-years on the force, he had never heard such heartbreaking sorrow as the cries that poured from Nathan Yost on that Halloween night.
ONE YEAR LATER - (FOUR DAYS BEFORE HALLOWEEN)
Captain Joe Peters had led the Robbery/Homicide division of the Houston police force for the past fifteen years. He was considered a stern task-master by those who worked under him, but a fair man who believed in the importance of the work that his people accomplished. He generally didn't take to the field much anymore, spending a far more significant percentage of his time behind a desk, but this robbery had occurred near his old neighborhood to a store owner he had known. Though he was supposed to be impartial in his dealings, this case would fall into a more personal arena.
"What's the story, Carson?"
Detective Jack Carson, a balding man in his early forties, turned to face his captain. Peters towered over his subordinate by a good six inches forcing Carson to crane his neck upward to make eye contact.
"Looks like it was supposed to be a simple smash and grab that got out of hand. Three men hit this jewelry store," he explained, pointing at the store behind him, "and while one of them held the owner and customers at gunpoint, the other two started bashing in the cases with hammers and grabbing whatever they could. What they didn't know was that the owner's nephew was in the back, and when he heard the commotion, he grabbed a pistol that his Uncle had in his desk for protection and came out. He ended up exchanging gunfire with the armed assailant, with both of them taking multiple rounds. The bad guy was dead before we got here, but the nephew, uh...Phillip Barton, yeah, he was still hanging in there. Paramedics took him to the hospital."
"What about the other two?"
"They beat feet to their vehicle in the alley behind the store and took off."
