Rick Chambers, 45, was a winner in the 2007 Community Literary Awards competition, sponsored by the Kalamazoo Gazette, Kalamazoo Public Library, Portage District Library and area independent book sellers. Rick is director of worldwide communications for Pfizer. He is married to Terri and lives in Portage.
Click below to read his winning mystery.
The beast's scream ripped the raw night air.
Josh whirled, completely surprised by the attack. The predator's flame-white eyes bore down on him. Josh grasped the merest splinter of time to fling his body out of the way.
Then, with sudden indifference, the beast withdrew, heaving a long, indignant howl.
Josh rolled out of the snowbank where he'd thrown himself. Adrenaline still tingled through his skin. It took the edge off the deep chill, but Josh knew the warmth wouldn't last. It would fade, just as the falling snow gradually obscured the shrinking taillights of the "beast" that, in fact, had only been a passing car.
Josh climbed to his feet slowly, painfully. Wedges of bitter cold lodged in his joints, and his coat was heavy with snow. He trudged on, shuffling through the piles of white lining the roadway. With the snowplows idled by the blizzard, the streets were nearly impassable, so almost no one dared venture into the storm.
He had never felt so alone.
In truth, his loneliness had little to do with the nasty weather and lifeless streets. The ache had troubled his soul for a week, ever since Mara threw him out of the house.
Even now, Josh hadn't figured out why. He'd merely accepted his exile as temporary. Later, when he returned home, no one was there. The door stood locked, the house empty. It was clear his adopted mother had left for good.
The wind picked up momentum, stirring snowflakes in tiny white zephyrs around Josh. He hardly felt its bite anymore. He was too hungry to notice, too numb to feel and too despondent to care.
The only sound was the breeze that sometimes wailed as it bent itself around the stacked buildings nearby.
The arctic air finally drove Josh into an alley between two buildings. Sheltered from the storm, Josh caught a whiff of old motor oil and garbage. The latter was most intriguing. Josh hurried down the alley, his eyes alert. At last he discovered a dumpster, its heavy lid open to the night.
Salvation! Josh rushed to the trash container and vaulted over its lip, plunging into an ocean of frozen, half-eaten food. Notions of dignity were far from his mind; ravenous hunger had destroyed all that.
Josh's feast came to an abrupt end. An enormous man, dressed in a white shirt and an apron that strained to cover his considerable girth, appeared at the dumpster's edge. Furious, he reached in and grabbed Josh by the throat.
"Get out of here, you tramp!"
He lifted Josh clear of the dumpster and tossed him onto the cold asphalt. Before Josh could scramble to his feet, the man began kicking him viciously.
"Worthless vagrant! Go dig in someone else's garbage! We're a respectable restaurant!"
Josh didn't defend himself. He simply leaped up between kicks and bolted. In a moment, Josh was back in the street, his blond hair dancing in the frosty gale. The wheezing, cursing cook never made it out of the alley.
Josh didn't slow down until he reached a snow-blanketed plain. There he stopped, drawn by its empty serenity. At the far end of the unbroken snowscape squatted a steel structure. Its sharply pitched roof had sloughed most of the snow to form tall white bunkers. Neatly bisecting one bunker was a short ramp that led to a small alcove.
Josh saw the opportunity for shelter and forced his weary body toward it. Unfortunately, he discovered the shelter was already occupied.
The man looked incredibly old. His face was the color of a scaled fish, his eyes red-rimmed and swollen. Even here, protected from the wind, his shabby clothing -- a tattered sport coat and pants, a pair of cotton work gloves and a Detroit Tigers baseball cap -- was grossly inadequate to the task of keeping him warm. He huddled in one corner of the doorway, his knees pressed against his chest, as if to make himself a smaller target for the cold.
The man's first reaction to Josh's presence was to defend his territory.
"This place is mine!" he snapped in a steel-wool voice, feebly waving his baseball cap in Josh's direction.
Josh remained silent. An argument wasn't worth the energy. But neither was another painful excursion into the night, Josh's odyssey must end here.
Eventually, the man seemed to recognize this. His expression softened. He stared at Josh, a tiny smile playing on his stiffened lips.
"Looks like we're both in the same boat, eh?" the man said as he carefully pulled the hat over his thin, gray hair.
Josh made no reply. Perhaps, if he was patient, the man would let him stay.
And there was another reason for Josh to wait, though he didn't quite understand it. A feeling, both old and new, emerged from within his chilled body. Something from deep in his past, from when Mara first held him in her arms, threatened to burst forth, to transcend his own loneliness and fear and cold.
"Ya gotta forgive the ol' Roamer," said the man, spitting a bit as he spoke. Josh realized he had no teeth. "I don't have many things I call mine. And even this place is mine just till the cops run me off." The man chuckled, a painful sound.
"But hey, seein' what night it is 'n' all, don't seem right to kick ya out. I guess I can let ya stay."
Relieved, if still a bit wary, Josh edged a little closer to the man called Roamer. He wasn't yet comfortable with this stranger, and the incident in the alley was fresh in his mind.
Roamer saw Josh's timidity and honored it.
"Don't blame ya. Can't trust no one these days. But me, I never did nothin' to nobody. A little employment trouble, that's all. Nothin' bad."
He coughed, deep and startling.
"And yeah, there's the horses. A little bad luck, that's all. Then there's the whiskey. But it helps. Let's ya take another look at life, eh?" He fixed Josh with a pleading stare. "I never hurt no one. Never did."
His head slowly fell back against the steel wall of the alcove. They shared a moment of silence.
Roamer sat up again and locked his blood-shot eyes on Josh.
"I got nobody, ya know." He sobbed from sorrow and cold. "No one cares. But I never did nothin.' No one...."
The eyes closed.
Josh studied Roamer for a long time. Roamer's troubles clearly went beyond the physical. Josh could hear it, feel it.
Like Roamer, Josh had been cast aside, rejected by everyone in his life. The two were not so different. Their lives had followed parallel courses, their hearts both burdened with the emptiness of being unwanted and unloved. And it appeared that, on this night that Roamer called special, they would also share a similar death.
The thought was abhorrent, unacceptable. Yet it fed that strange feeling inside Josh, causing it to burn in his heart and whisper to his cold-fogged mind. The voice was compelling, giving direction where none had existed, shining a beacon for two lives cast adrift, bringing an overwhelming sense that, somehow, death was not the only option for them both.
Josh heeded that still, small voice. He crept closer to the old man.
A citrus sun broke through the flat, blue clouds clinging to the eastern horizon. Chased from the sky, stars of newfallen snow glittered in the morning light, untouched by any significant heat.
Officer Peter West was not so lucky.
"Ouch!" he cried, as his police cruiser thumped through a snowbank, jostling the foam cup of steaming coffee in his left hand. Near-boiling liquid instantly raised two painful blisters at the base of West's thumb. Cursing, West steered the cruiser into the empty parking lot of Shepherd Industries, a small plastics plant near downtown. West stopped the car, set aside his coffee and began nursing his wound.
A cop's sixth sense prompted a glance toward the building, then a double take.
There was a body sprawled near the front door.
West grabbed his microphone and called for an ambulance. He doubted the call would do any good. The previous night's blizzard had plunged wind chills near zero, driving the chances of survival just as low. West approached the body quickly but reluctantly.
He was startled by what he found.
The doorway contained not one but two figures, one on top of the other. The man underneath was severely frostbitten, but his shallow breathing and thready pulse bore proof that he'd survived the night. West pulled back the man's baseball cap to get a better look at his face.
"Roamer!" he gasped. The vagrant was a frequent guest at the city jail.
The figure atop Roamer had no pulse that West could find, and his limbs were cold and stiff. He'd died hours before -- probably not long after he had placed his body across Roamer's, sheltering him from the storm.
A distant siren tickled the frigid air, but Officer West didn't notice it. His attention was fully drawn to the mystery of Roamer's savior. Why would he do it? Why would he sacrifice his life to save a worthless old man?
It reminded West of an ancient maxim he'd heard in his youth. "Greater love has no one than this," Peter quietly recited, "that one lay down his life for his friends." He paused, then added, "I guess that's true for more than people."
West carefully removed the body of the golden retriever from atop Roamer and cradled it as the paramedics waded through the snow.
Cradled it, and tried not to cry.
Then he looked into the old man's face once again.
"Merry Christmas, Roamer," he whispered.