Day 2
My word count is now 3,593. Chapter Two of my story introduces a character that was not in the original Mack the Knife but who will be playing a major role in this story.



Lawrence Bryce’s car sputtered to a stop a hundred feet away from the lines of yellow police tape. The old door of the brown sedan creaked open, and out stepped a driver who looked as disheveled and disgruntled as the rusty car itself. Bryce kept his head down as he walked, unconsciously fumbling with the metal lighter in the pocket of his windbreaker. He didn’t look at the other officers on the scene. That didn’t matter, though, because they saw him anyway.

“Oh the shark has pretty teeth, dear
And he shows those pearly whites…”

A group of three uniformed policemen had apparently finished their part on the scene and had nothing better to do than mock Bryce. They garbled away in their snide chorus of “Mack the Knife” until they forgot the lyrics midway into the second verse. Bryce kept his eyes forward, staring at the circular red lights of the ambulance ahead of him.

“Assholes,” he muttered to himself as the singing broke off and became a collective snickering. He put the indignation out of his mind as quickly as possible. People got stupid when they saw death – even those who had seen it before. The officers needed something to tell them that things were still okay, and calling Detective Lawrence Bryce crazy was as good as anything.

A woman sat on the back fender of the ambulance. She looked to be about forty – a few years younger than Bryce himself and with half the gray hairs. Too old to be the mother of a newborn, he mused. The woman nodded as a paramedic gave her instructions, but she didn’t look like she was really paying attention. Her eyes and her mind were locked onto the baby in her arms. Bryce hovered a few feet away until the paramedic had given up talking and gone in to deal with the real victims – not that any of them could use medical attention anyway. Bryce already knew from past experience that the ambulance would only end up taking cold corpses to the morgue.

“What’s your first memory?” asked Shelley Cassotto as Bryce finally approached her. She didn’t look at him. Chris had begun to stir, and she shifted him gently as he gave a gurgling coo. His eyes opened halfway, then slid shut again as he returned to dreamland.

“Excuse me?”

“What the first thing you remember, if you don’t mind my asking?”

“I don’t know…a family Christmas, maybe?” He had gotten a train set and spent all afternoon putting it together. The old man broke the tracks two nights later, stumbling around drunk while shouting at the referees on Monday Night Football.

“How old were you then?”

“About three, I guess.”

Shelley’s eyes finally moved away from her son. She looked at Bryce, then her baby again, then back to the detective. “Chris won’t be six months old for another ten days yet. He won’t remember what he saw, will he? I mean, his brain can’t form memories yet. I think I remember reading that.”

Bryce shifted uncomfortably. He usually dealt with autopsies and grainy security photos. It wasn’t very often that the killer actually left a witness behind, and he wasn’t sure how to deal with a traumatized mother.

“What did he see, Miss Cassotto?” No sense in playing diplomat. He didn’t have the finesse to hold people’s hands and fake sympathy.

“Nothing, I think. Not the killing, at least. I shielded his eyes. But I think he was watching me. He looked at how I reacted, and I think that might come back to haunt him when he’s older.”

“No one remembers anything from this age.”

“Maybe not consciously. Who knows what he might see in his dreams? I don’t want my baby to end up haunted, especially not because of me.”

“Because of you?”

“I should have done something different. I should have just grabbed Chris and run out the door. I was stupid to think we could hide, no matter how big that damned house seems.”

“You wouldn’t have made it very far. From what I’ve been told, the people who broke in were being pretty careful. One was positioned near the bottom of the staircase and the other was on the back porch before she got lured into the kitchen. They were guarding the exits, making sure you couldn’t get out.”

“Then how did some complete stranger get in – through the front door, no less?”

“They had to have known you were in the house. Once they locked the place up from the inside, they must have figured they could find you quickly. They knew the average response time out here – how much time they had. They just didn’t figure on someone hunting them while they were hunting you.”

Bryce stared at the front door. They had started carting the bodies out now. Two responders wheeled a stretcher out the door. A sheet covered the corpse. More would follow, just like always.

When the shark bites with his teeth, dear
Scarlet billows start to spread…

“If you don’t mind, Miss Cassotto, could you tell me about the killer?”

“The who?”

“The killer you saw – the man with the knife.”

“Oh.” Shelley idly twirled a curl of thin brown hair near Chris’s ear. The baby twitched but remained slumbering. “I don’t know if I’d call him a killer.”

“What would you call him?”

“I don’t know, but ‘killer’ seems too harsh. It makes it sound like he did something wrong.”

“Technically, he did.”

“What? Breaking and entering? I’m not about to press charges. Killing the people who tried to kill me? Does murdering a murderer count as a crime?”

“There’s a history – one that I thought you might be familiar with, seeing that you’re a Cassotto and all.”

Bryce winced as soon as he had said those words. He had overplayed his hand. Shelley looked away from Chris, giving the detective a hard, cold glare. Her eyes were like tiny black darts – Bryce hadn’t noticed before that the Cassottos seemed to have a dose American Indian in their blood.

“My father died in jail. I haven’t so much as broken the speed limit since. Whatever bad business my family used to be involved with was buried long ago, sir.”

“I didn’t mean to imply otherwise. But this man – the one dressed in black that you mentioned to the officers. He used to be associated with your family. He matches the description, at least.”

“What description? All I saw was a tall guy dressed in old black clothes. Any white guy with a trench coat and hat might match that.”

“I wasn’t talking about the description you gave, ma’am.” Bryce stuck his chin in the direction of the front door, where the second corpse had just been wheeled out. “I was thinking more about the results.”

“Do you think I hired him to kill these people? After the trouble my father caused? I nearly got shot twice as a kid because my father couldn’t control his little gun running business. I wouldn’t willingly put myself within a hundred yards of someone who could be a danger to my son.”

“I don’t think you hired him, Miss Cassotto. I don’t think anyone hires him.”

“But you said he used to be involved with my father.”

“I never said it was as an employee.”

The conversation ground to a halt. Shelley stared at Bryce, and he stared back at her. The squeaky wheels of the stretcher rolling across the front lawn’s wet grass provided the only distraction.

“Are you here to help me, or are you interrogating me?” asked Shelley at last.

Bryce cleared his throat and shifted his weight from one foot to the other. “The officers assigned to this case are here to help you, ma’am. You’ll probably be assigned to a safe house until their investigation has concluded and they’re sure no one else will be coming after you.”

“Then what are you here for?”

“I’m part of another investigation.”

“An investigation about the man who saved my son and I.”

Bryce nodded. “Did he say anything to you before he left?”

“He said, ‘Tell them everything.’ So I did. To the people who are here to help me.”

“Would you mind going over what you saw with me, then?”

“Actually, yes I would. To tell you the truth officer, I don’t care what he’s done. All I know is that he was a hero last night. If you’re looking to do anything but give him a medal for keeping my son from getting shot, then I’m not about to help you.”

Bryce’s mouth turned into a thin line across his face. He touched his tongue to a tooth, distracting himself for a moment by probing one of his fillings. “I’m sorry to have bothered you, Miss Cassotto.”

“Me too.”

The corners of Bryce’s mouth stretched across his cheeks into a grim smile that was really a frown on the inside. He put his hands into his pockets and walked back toward his car, head down. A few steps away from Shelley, he paused and said one more thing.

“He saved your son. There are a lot of others he didn’t.”

Bryce got into his car and pulled away without so much as looking at the other officers. He could read the reports when they came in. No need to waste more time at a scene that had already gone cold.

Ten minutes later, he stopped at a red light not far from the Cassotto home. The car rumbled impatiently as it waited for the signal to change.

On a sidewalk one Sunday morning
Lies a body oozing life
Someone’s sneaking around the corner
Could that someone be Mack the Knife?

Bryce’s eyes wandered across the street and resting on a sign that read, “Darren’s Bottle Deposit and Liquor Store.” His mouth felt dry, and he had started sweating. He didn’t notice that the light had turned green until the driver behind him honked his horn. Lawrence Bryce shook his head and stepped on the gas, speeding past the liquor store. The more he thought about the killings at the Cassotto home, though, the more he noticed that his mouth was still dry.