Free From a Dead Sleep by John A. Daly Page B

disability get to him. Through every fall and collision, he always managed to pick himself right back up. No whining. Sean admired that.
    He moved a finger under Rocco’s coarse, gray beard that years ago had shone with a reddish brown, smooth coat. Rocco always liked having his chin rubbed. It was the one thing that turned the grumpy dog into putty. His tail flopped from side to side against Sean’s chest, and his nose pointed to the ceiling.
    Around nine p.m. came that dreaded call. Lumbergh. Sean sneered at the somber tone in the chief ’s voice that emitted dismally out through the speaker. Lumbergh asked twice for his brother-in-law to pick up, but Sean answered only with a swig of beer. After a sigh, Lumbergh detailed out his findings. No surprises. There was no blood or shells on the bridge, or any other proof of what Sean had seen. A dead end.
    Sean nodded his head, a sour scowl forming on his lips. He slowly cocked his arm back before snapping it forward and sending his half-full bottle of beer sailing at the wall above the kitchen counter where the answering machine resided. The thunderous crash sent glass and liquid spraying in multiple directions, and prompted Rocco to perch up on his front legs with risen ears. The aging dog twisted his head to face his master with eyes as cloudy as Sean’s composure.
    The clear image of the stranger’s body dropping from the bridge before the shot was ever fired reverberated like a scratched record through Sean’s mind. Gravity explained the absence of both blood and the shell.
    Lumbergh offered up some additional, meaningless details before he concluded with, “I don’t know what else to say, Sean.” Click.
    Consciously slowing down his breathing, Sean slid his fingers familiarly to the back of his head, and he found himself once again glancing aimlessly across the room. Rocco rolled back into a ball.
    “Why would he do that?” he abruptly said out loud, with his face twisted in thought. “Why would that guy jump and then shoot?”
    Fighting off exhaustion and humiliation, the gears in Sean’s head began turning. Since that morning, the peculiarity behind what had happened at the river had taken a backseat to the importance of its believability to others. He was the one person who didn’t need convincing. He knew what he saw.
    One thing was undeniably certain: what he’d witnessed was no ordinary suicide. There was a story left to be told. There had to be.
    The deterrent of the others’ skepticism had kept hold of Sean’s spirit like a pair of tight handcuffs, but now those binds were bending. Perhaps all he had needed was Lumbergh’s withdrawal—in a sense, an admission of defeat. Now, it was Sean’s turn.
    No longer distracted with having to defend his claims, he made himself clear his mind and start from the beginning. If no one was going to believe him, it was time to take the matter into his own hands, if only in a defense of his own sanity.
    With a straining grunt, he lowered his arm under the top of the end table to grab a thin spiral notebook from the middle shelf. He normally jotted down grocery lists in it, but he was about to put the pages to much better use.
    He pulled a whittled-down, chewed-up pencil from the center of the metal binding and began tracing back through the timeline, feverishly writing down each image that came to mind. He included everything from the oddest of details to the seemingly most insignificant.
    Sean’s tired eyes steadily moved from item to item. They stopped on Why the bridge? Without even taking into account the man’s preparations as he sat at the edge, on its own it was strange that he would bother jumping into a roaring river if he was going to shoot himself. Sean understood doing one or the other, but both?
    Perhaps the stranger didn’t have confidence that a gunshot was failsafe. Maybe he was afraid of only critically wounding himself and ending up as a vegetable in a hospital bed for the rest of his life.