Dead of Night

[Mike Handley]

The FBI agent and police chief shared the sofa across from me, high beams glaring as I squinted with the effort of recalling exactly what I’d heard a couple of nights earlier: the hollow boom of something colliding with a dumpster, loud enough to pull me out of REM quicker than the tickle of a palmetto bug’s legs across my bare chest. The giant green box flanked the sidewalk across the street, next to the Bumper-to-Bumper store.

A black girl, last seen attending the high school dance two doors down from my 50-year-old two-story, never made it back home to momma. It had been almost 48 hours, and the mostly white law enforcement agencies, already facing heat, were going all out -- the FBI’s invitation, purely on the possibility that the girl had been abducted and taken across the Mississippi state line 10 miles away, was insurance against bedlam.

Her decaying body was found a week later in an abandoned yard behind the auto parts store. I’ve never been able to shake the image of her killer slamming her into that dumpster, which explains why thunderclaps in the dead of night jerk me into sweaty consciousness.

[Peter McNiff]

Gritty, Mike, and tragic and nowhere to go except back to that boom in the night.

[Jared Handley]

this is a queasy read that you can come stomach for multiple rounds. that's tough.

[Sissy Anderson]

Oof, tragic and haunting, no wonder you still have nightmares. We live in a scary world.

[Joe Gensle]

The construct of your writing took me right there with you, Mike, as vivid as the thunderclap reminders that cause you revisits. The telling just doesn't get any better. Top notch.

[Michael Solender]

the undercurrent of race adds an intensity to this that lends to its authenticity. gritty and real.

[Bob Clay]

A sound in the night that conveys more horror than all the traditional horror stories put together....
Really well done.

[Sandra Davies]

Small account of what is nevertheless a tragic tale - you've put that boom of the dumpster and its residual disturbance into our heads, and too often the resolution of such stories are NOT pretty.
Hope that the writing of it helped to ease it from your own head - but I doubt it.

[Mike Handley]

Thanks, everyone. They found the girl's killer, but it was a bittersweet resolution that brought no comfort to the family or the community. The boy (an orphan, if I remember correctly), was -- for lack of a better term -- mildly retarded. The case wasn't pretty, and people were whispering "scapegoat." But outside the courtroom and in the privacy of the sheriff's office, his own lawyer told prosecutors his client was "guilty as sin." The kid didn't get the death penalty. Beyond that, I don't remember how sentencing went, even though I covered the trial. For years, I've felt this was my "In Cold Blood." It might yet be ... one day.

[Angela]

Thank you for writing this.

[Paul de Denus]

Nothing like being interviewed by the FBI either I suppose - well described - to bad it's a horrible memory