Free Saffire by Sigmund Brouwer

disembark.
    Those two First-Class Policemen on the other side of Harry looked as bored as teenage boys sitting on the wooden shelf in an open jail cell.
    His audience cared so little about events around them that even my appearance didn’t rouse them. They just let Harry enjoy telling the story.
    “That fellow had one slight idiosyncrasy that might in time have grown annoying,” Harry said. “On the night of our first acquaintance, after we had lain there, exchanging random experiences till the evening heat had begun a retreat and before the gentle night breeze arrived, I was awakened from the first doze by my companion sitting suddenly up in his cot across the room. ‘Say, I hope you’re not nervous,’ he remarked. I told him, ‘Not immoderately.’ After all, boys, I have been around the world, and anytime you want, you can read the book about it.”
    “Hurts my head, mon,” one of the First-Class Policemen said. I could not judge whether he meant reading or listening to Harry. Harry took it as encouragement, but I suspected already that Harry took any kind of movement from his audience as encouragement.
    “Well,” Harry said, “he answered by saying he suffers from a nightmare. What he said was that when he gets it, he generally imagines his roommate is a burglar trying to go through his junk. Boys, that’s when he reached under his pillow and brought to light a Colt of .45-caliber and pointed it behind me. I turned my head and saw three large, irregular splintered holes in the wall some three or four inches above me. Those holes were the last three bullets he fired at his former roommate.”
    Against my will, I found myself wanting to know more and was glad when he continued. Some people know how to tell a story.
    “ ‘But I’m trying to break myself of them nightmares’ is what he told me next,” Harry said, “and then he slipped his revolver back under his pillow and turned off the light to go to sleep. For sure that’s a story I’m putting in my book. What do you boys think of it?”
    “We think you have a visitor,” the boy said, pointing over Harry’s shoulder. I’d find out later he was Trinidadian and did custodial work, for which he was provided sleeping quarters in the jail cell—when it was not occupied by prisoners.
    Harry Franck turned, and I had my first full look at him. He was a man of my height but a decade younger and easily fifteen pounds lighter. He had short-cropped hair and a narrow handsome face.
    “Visitor?” Harry asked.
    “T. B. Miskimon said this would be the police station for my new employment tomorrow,” I said. “I thought I’d look in today just to get a lay of the land.”
    “Miskimon? Walks like he has a broom pole going down his throat and coming out the other end?”
    “I’ve learned not to talk badly of those who employ me.”
    “That’s just a statement of fact.” Harry wasn’t put out at all at my implied criticism. “Unless you’re blind, you have to agree with me.” He didn’t wait for me to agree with him. “You here about those men getting knocked out along the tracks?”
    This was a man who, when he had a thought, would straightaway blurt it to the world. I liked him.
    “It’s like some invisible hand reaches down and strikes them upside the head,” Harry said. “Miskimon is supposed to be looking into it for us. Even if no one figures out how that happens, I’ll put that in my book.”
    All the men in his audience of three began to mutter and cross themselves.
    “I’m here to introduce myself as your new enumerator,” I said. “Badge 28.”
    Again, all the men in his audience muttered and crossed themselves.
    “Don’t mind them,” Harry said. “Last man wore that badge died in a bad way, but I’m not superstitious. Are you?”
    Regardless of what we were going to discuss, I wanted it more private than this, although my gut told me that Harry was such a storyteller that anything we spoke about wouldn’t remain private