A Reasonable Doubt, Susan Sloan [books for 7th graders .txt] 📗

A Reasonable Doubt

Susan R. Sloan

One

There’s an old saying in the Pacific Northwest that if you can make it through winter, the rest of the year’s a piece of cake.  The only problem is that winter in the Pacific Northwest too often begins in October and lasts into May, bringing with it months of raw winds and pelting rain, hail, snow, and flash floods.  It’s especially hard on the homeless, many of whom have no choice but to huddle in doorways and alleys, trying, if not to keep warm, at least to keep dry.

On a typical early morning in the middle of February, a stone’s throw from the docks of Port Hancock, Washington, Jason Lightfoot was asleep in the alley behind The Last Call Bar and Grill, in the tarpaulin-draped box wedged into a thick stone wall that he called home, snoring loudly and dreaming that he was really in a front row seat at the fights, close enough that he could grasp the metal guard rail, feel the spray of sweat from the boxers’ bodies across his face, see the concentration in the sparring duo’s eyes, and hear the shouting of the crowd and the sound of the bell -- so loud that it made him jump.  He was close enough that it felt almost as though he were right there in the ring with the fighters, and the punches being thrown were coming right at him.

Jason awoke with a start to realize that this was no dream -- someone really was, if not punching him, certainly kicking him.  He opened his eyes into the glare of a flashlight.  It had been a long time since anyone had rousted him like this.  His head was throbbing, as was his bum right leg, and, with the light shining directly in his eyes, it hurt to look up.

He had no idea what time it was, but he could tell it was still more or less dark, which meant it wasn’t anywhere near time yet for him to be awake.  He didn’t have to be at the dry dock until mid-morning.  He wondered if he might have drunk a bit more last night than he usually did, or maybe taken more of his medication than his doctor recommended.   But, fuzzyheaded though he might have been, it didn’t keep him from realizing that it was two uniforms that were standing in front of his box.

“What the. . .?” he muttered, blinking.  Having become more or less a permanent fixture in the alley after fifteen years, the cops had pretty much stopped hassling him.  Or to be more precise, the one mean son-of-a-bitch cop who used to get off on making his life miserable had got himself promoted and was no longer on the hassling detail.  He squinted up at these two.

“What’s the matter, officers?” he asked.

“That’s what we’re looking to find out,” the taller of the two replied.

“Come on out of there,” the shorter one said.

Under the circumstances, Jason decided there wasn’t really much point in arguing.  He was already crawling out of his box, slowly because of his bum leg, which ached all the more in damp weather, when his knee knocked against something hard.  It skittered out from under him and onto the pavement.  Even the pre-dawn darkness, compounded as it was by a thick fog, didn’t stop him from seeing it was a gun.

The two officers saw it, too.  They jumped back, caught off guard, and quickly reached for their own weapons.

“Don’t touch it,” Paul Cady, the shorter one, barked, pointing his Sig Sauer P250 directly at Jason’s head.

“Don’t even look at it,” Arnie Stiversen, the taller one, ordered.

Jason didn’t intend to.  It wasn’t his gun.  He didn’t even know what it was doing in his box.  He moved away from the weapon.  It lay on the ground until Stiversen inched forward and snatched it up.

“Now I want to see you flat on your face, mister,” Cady instructed, “arms straight out to the side.”

The lanky Indian’s brain might have been a bit soggy, and he might not have been thinking too clearly, but he wasn’t dumb enough to argue with two men with guns.  He lowered himself to the damp pavement, turned his face down, and stretched his arms out.  There was nothing to see, so he closed his eyes.  He could sense the two policemen hovering over him, checking him out.  Then he could feel them searching through his shapeless jacket and frayed shirt, running their hands around his waistband, and patting up and down his baggy trousers.  When they were satisfied he had no other weapon, they told him he could get up.

It was as he was scrambling to his feet that he spotted something, maybe fifteen feet down the alley.  He couldn’t make out much, but it sure did look like someone was lying there where no one should have been.

“Uh-oh,” he said.  “Is somebody hurt?  Does he need help?”

“No, he’s not hurt,” Cady snapped.  “He’s dead, you son-of-a-bitch!”

Jason Lightfoot blinked.  “Dead?” he echoed.  “Well now, I’m right sorry about that.  But I sure hope you ain’t thinkin’ I had anythin’ to do with that.  Because if you are, I can tell you, right out, I ain’t had nothin’ to do with that.  I been in my box, mindin’ my own business.”

The two police officers had rousted the Indian thinking he could be a witness to the crime they had just discovered.  It didn’t occur to them that he might be involved until they spotted the gun, and the oversight made the shorter one angry.

“And what exactly is your business?” he asked with a sneer in his voice.

“I clean up over at the bar,” Lightfoot told him, gesturing across the alley at the back door of The Last Call.  “And I do odd jobs.  I got no reason to kill no one.”  He squinted in the direction of the body.  “Besides, I don’t even know who that is.”

“Well, I’d say it’s a little late for introductions,” Stiversen said, “but