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hustle off to his own back door, twice glancing back as if concerned that mean Orville would soon be on his trail.
    “I was out again this morning to get my birdhouse, which I didn’t see got flung into my hedge,” Mrs. Miller said. “That’s when I spied Orville there in the rose bushes.” She told this to Officer Newton and his female partner Officer Nettle, two names starting with
N
on their badges about which she also made comment, to no reply.
    “Did you disturb anything, touch the victim?” Officer Nettle asked.
    “All them TV shows, no ma’am, you can be sure I did not. Except to roll his face out the dirt, which any kindhearted person would do.”
    “Then you did touch the subject,” Officer Nettle said.
    “Not with his hair like it is, greasy on a good day and way bad now. Alls I did was grab my glove off the top of my faucet overthere and turn Orville’s face out of the fertilized soil. He was good about them roses, I’ll say that.”
    And what a face it was, as any bystander gathered on the broken sidewalk could see. Cold storage was the place for Orville Davis now, a man left in peace to fight no more.
    By the wooded lot behind the houses, a boy of about twelve jumped around slaying the ghosts of men, making cartoon noises with his mouth. Abruptly he would stop and flap his hands as if he’d grabbed hold of a burning bush, then go back to fighting again.
    “That’s Cal Wilton’s son,” Mrs. Miller said. “Milton. Orville said don’t call him that, might make him grow up stranger than he already is. Milton Wilton. Orville called him Sarge, said he was artistic, helped him make things. Orville was a stinker, all right, but never to that kid. The boy doesn’t talk. What’s he doing now?” she asked, as though the officers would somehow know.
    A figure lay on a slant in a wheelbarrow that young Sarge pushed to a spot in Orville’s backyard. Officer Newton told the boy to stay back, but Sarge lifted the figure out, which was near his own height, and set it by a boulder, two rocks on either side to steady the feet. There it stood, a plaster butler figure with a monocle, and arms extended. Mrs. Miller said it formerly held a chalkboard menu at a restaurant’s front door in town. “I guess that’s something Orville didn’t want to sell.”
    Out of the wagon the child hoisted an army shovel, short but wicked. He posed before the butler to whack the little servant good, though not hard enough to break him. Ponged and pummeled the little man, then slung a final blow with his fist that knocked the good man forward, face down in the squishy mud. Sarge turned full frontal to the audience then, and uttered the first words anyone ever heard from his spit-shiny lips: “My papa done it.”
    Then he turned and ran with the army shovel into the woods, pinging this skinny tree and that hearty one with the tool until he quickly reversed his path to return and shoot the shovel like a javelin back into the yard. It lodged point first, standing almost at attention in the receptive earth where Officers Newton and Nettle stood by to collect its silent testimony. Sarge marched briskly into the woods, flapping his tender hands.

    N.J. Ayres is the author of three suspense novels featuring a former Las Vegas stripper now working in a crime lab (the TV program
CSI
was developed later with a similar character). Ayres is also the author of a poetry book and numerous short stories and was an editor for environmental-engineering documents and a technical publications manager for military-missile and aircraft manuals for twenty years.

BREAK-IN
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    Eric Beetner
    T he gun was still warm from the stranger’s hand.
    Michael stared at the figure face down in the entryway of his house. His eyes moved from the body to the broken lamp he’d used to coldcock the guy.
    He tried to remember the last thirty seconds, but it was a black hole.
    He could still recall the brief conversation through the door, the stranger