Retro Murder
They say you can’t change the past, but now I’m not so sure. I think I may have done that. Allow me to explain, and then you decide.
It began many years ago, when I was an armed security guard in a warehouse complex. There had been a lot of theft there, involving top-of-the-line electronics. Hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of equipment had gone missing.
Each warehouse was assigned a roving security guard. We each had a radio so that we could call for backup in case we saw nefarious activity. Although we were each given a thirty-eight caliber revolver, we were under strict orders not to use them except in self-defense. If at all possible, we were to report any thefts in progress, and then to retreat to safety until police arrived. Strict orders.
My best friend was a guy named Norman. He and I had been in the Army together, in combat. He had risked his life to save mine. When I say risked, it was more like suicidal. When I had seen him running into the thick of things, I was sure that he was going to be killed right then and there. Somehow, all the enemy fighters who were shooting at him missed, and both Norman and I survived unscathed.
You don’t forget a friend like that. I owe him my life. After the war, we wound up working for the same security agency.
It wasn’t long before on my night shift, I saw a small group of men, about five in all, enter the warehouse through a hole they had created by removing a ventilating fan near the roof, and then from the inside, they opened a side door. As instructed, I immediately called in the sighting, and then proceeded to retreat to the safety of an office near the loading dock.
Norman was working security in a nearby warehouse. He heard my radio report, and asked if I needed backup. I said no, but knowing Norman as I did, I knew that he would soon arrive anyway. Sure enough, he did, so I opened the office door in case he needed to get to safety.
That was when I heard him shout, “Drop the gun, or I’ll shoot.” I drew my own pistol, and ran toward the confrontation. By the time I got there, all the interlopers had fled except for one. That one was hiding from Norman behind a crate, and did not expect me to come up behind him. When I did, he put up his hands and surrendered.
Norman, seeing that I had one perpetrator at gunpoint, quickly stepped around the crate, and with his own gun drawn, ordered the captured man to the ground. The fellow was terrified, and immediately lay face down on the concrete floor.
“Damn,” Norman said. “The others got away, and one of them had a forty-five automatic. I could have shot him, but he ran, and in all the commotion, I hesitated. It all happened so quick. Damn, I should have shot.”
I could see that Norman was very angry, so I tried to calm him down. “It’s okay,” I said. “We got this one, and he’ll rat out the others.”
“Nah,” Norman said. “He won’t. He’ll get released on bail, like always happens, and he’ll never be found. This is what always happens in these cases.”
I tried to ease Norman’s nerves, but he was getting agitated. Finally, Norman said, “Maybe we should just kill him right here.”
“Don’t be crazy,” I said. “Let the cops have him.”
Norman was starting to shake by then, and suddenly a cold chill came over me, as I realized what was happening to him. Mentally, he was back in combat. He had used to joke that I should be glad he was crazy, because it was his craziness that had saved my life. Suddenly, it wasn’t a joke anymore. He lifted his pistol and pointed it at the trembling thief on the floor.
I don’t know what came over me then, but I pointed my pistol at Norman. “Drop your gun,” I said.
Then matters really got crazy. Norman aimed his pistol at me. “What are you going to do?” he said. “Kill me?”
I was too scared to speak. Was one of us actually going to kill the other? Really?
Then Norman lowered his gun again, and again, pointed it at the miscreant, who was beginning to cry. “Don’t do it, Norman,” I said. “Just drop – “
The shot ended all discussion of the matter, as it also ended the life of the burglar.
My gun was still pointed at Norman, as he turned toward me. Slowly, he holstered his weapon. “Okay,” he said. “You can kill me now. You can kill me, or you can put away your gun. I mean it, Steve. Put it away, or kill me. Do it now. Because if I draw my gun again, then I am going to force you to kill me. Make your choice, Steve. I can hear the cops coming. There is no time. Holster your gun, Steve, or else kill me. If I draw my gun, you won’t have a choice.”
I made my choice. I put away my gun. Then, turning my back to Norman, I walked away, and took shelter in the office, just as instructed. Strict orders.
The rest of the episode is all a blur. The police swarmed the warehouse and found me in the office. I said as little as I could, letting them believe that I had seen nothing. I was sure that they would charge Norman with murder, because of the angle of the bullet wound in the man he had killed. The man had had a gun, but it was in a jacket pocket where he could not have gotten to it quickly enough to pose a danger. It turned out that the guy was, ironically, out on bail from a similar crime. Worse yet, while he had been out on bail, he was implicated in a murder. The guy was an incorrigible career criminal and repeat offender, not to mention a danger to the public. All said, Norman’s claim of self-defense was believed without further investigation, and he was not charged with any crime.
It should have ended there, but it didn’t. Norman got fired for having left his assigned post to help me. He had not retreated to safety according to the strict orders. I quit my job with that company, and the two of us, Norman and I, together found another employer.
I can’t say that I felt good about any of this. Norman had killed a defenseless man, a man who had surrendered. Okay, the criminal had expected to get released on bail again, and then to leave the country. At least that was what he probably thought. It certainly was what Norman had thought. Or, had Norman been thinking at all? He had probably been having a flashback, something to do with post-battle syndrome or something like that. Whatever it was, I could not think of Norman as being a cold-blooded killer—and yet, there was no denying what he had done. Had there been a video tape, a jury would almost surely have convicted him of just that, cold-blooded murder. Fortunately for him, the only images of him doing what he had done were those in my mind, and I kept silent.
Another thing I can’t say was that I had any regrets. I never ratted out the man who had saved my life, and who had done so at astounding risk to himself. I could never have betrayed him, and Norman knew it. He took it for granted. He never thanked me for keeping quiet about it, and indeed, never even mentioned it at all. It may sound small of me, but it actually bothered me, a little bit, that he so casually dismissed what he had done, and what I had not done. I knew that my annoyance was petty, but there it was, although I never brought it up.
The years passed by, about twenty of them. Norman and I had both found wives for ourselves, and soon, we both became fathers. I named my daughter, Norma, after him, and he named his son, Steven, after me. Our bond thus further sealed, we became ordinary middle-class citizens. We had found new jobs, myself in an insurance company, and Norman had started his own security and detective agency. We lived near each other, and therefore kept in touch. We vacationed together at a fishing camp in Ontario, a couple hundred miles north of Toronto, two weeks each summer, bringing our families with us.
There is no happy ending to this story.
I was called as a character witness. Norman was on trial for murder. This time, there had been a video-tape. My blood ran cold as I saw it. There was Norman, holding a man at gunpoint during a home invasion to which he had responded from his security agency. I can’t bear to describe it, but it brought to mind what I had seen in the warehouse.
My testimony was that Norman had selflessly saved my life when we had been in the Army, in combat. He had put his own life on the line, and only by the slimmest of chances had he survived. For that, I am eternally grateful to him.
Somehow, Norman was allowed to plead guilty to a lesser charge, and was sentenced to three years in a mental institution to treat his post-combat battle syndrome, or whatever they called it. It was then that I realized how far Norman had fallen. Instead of being grateful for avoiding prison—even for avoiding a possible death penalty—Norman insisted that he was innocent. The video, he said, had been altered to make him look guilty.
I asked to visit him in his hospital, but he refused to see me.
Then, the unthinkable happened. Norman escaped, and to make it horrific, he had murdered a nurse during his escape.
It was then that I realized the full implication of what my silence about the warehouse incident, twenty years earlier, had done. I had unloosed a mentally deranged killer on society. An innocent young nurse was dead because of that. A family was inconsolably grief-stricken. Forever. Nobody knew of my part in this but me. I could not speak of it, and barely was able to think of it.
“If only,” I kept thinking. If only. If only what? I couldn’t change what I had done.
It all came crashing down one night in my own home.
About 2 AM, I was upstairs in bed with my wife, when we were awakened by a gunshot at the front door. I leaped out of bed, grabbed my pistol, and rushed recklessly down the stairs. There, I saw that the front door had been kicked open, the lock having been shattered by a forty-five caliber bullet, the really loud kind. There in the doorway, to my absolute horror, stood Norman.
He was in his dark blue security guard uniform. In his hand, pointed directly at me, as I stood a few feet from him, was that weapon. Against that, I maneuvered my puny thirty-eight, until it was pointed straight at Norman’s chest. It vaguely occurred to me that in that fraction of a second, he could have put at least one bullet through my heart.
I hesitated, a mistake that could easily have cost my life. Norman did not hesitate. He holstered his pistol.
For a few seconds, we stood wordlessly. I could hear my wife on the telephone speaking frantically to the emergency operator, and I knew that Norman could hear her also. In the dim light, I saw him smile. It was a sterile smile, devoid of emotion. He spoke, his voice calm. “The cops are on the way,” he said. His arms were folded, well away from his holstered gun.
I barely controlled my shaking. I tried to speak, but I couldn’t. My neck felt like it was in a strangle-hold, and in any case, I could not think of what I might say if I could speak.
Then, Norman spoke again. “Go ahead and kill me,” he said, his gaze focused on my weapon, still pointed at his chest. “Do it.”
Silently, I begged for the police to arrive, quickly. I knew that when they did, they would not have their sirens on. It was normal practice for them to arrive silently, to gain surprise.
Norman continued. “You have no choice,” he said. “You can’t just leave your wife a widow, your youngest son an orphan.”
“Norman,” I choked forth the words, “don’t do this. Please.”
“Sorry, old friend, but I have to. I’m going to draw my gun. And when I do, there will be no stopping me. It will be just like in the warehouse with that burglar, just like in the hospital with that nurse. Just like in combat. Once I get started, there is no stopping me. You know that.”
Once more, I begged for the police to arrive.
Then, Norman’s hand went for his gun. He was quick about it. I heard my own gun go off, felt the recoil, and stared into Norman’s forty-something year old face. Blood was rapidly spreading from the wound in his chest. The bullet had pierced him there.
For a brief moment, Norman looked me straight in the eye, and as he began to fall backwards, I heard him say, “You should have done this twenty years ago, Steve.” I watched in horror as he died.
To my astonishment, Norman's face was no longer that of a forty-plus-year-old man. He was twenty-two. His uniform was not the dark blue of his detective agency, but the tan and brown of his old security job in the warehouse.
So was mine.
Amazed, I looked around, and saw that I was no longer in my home. I was in the warehouse. I was in my twenties.
My gun had gone off. Norman continued his backward fall, the one he had begun in my house after breaking through the door. He hit the floor, dead.
The burglar jumped up off the concrete floor and bolted for the open doorway. I heard voices say, “Police! Drop the gun!” There were shots. I heard, “Shots fired, suspect down.”
The rest is all a blur, but bottom line, I was acquitted. Bottom line, twenty years passed yet again. Bottom line, that nurse did not get killed. She has the rest of her life to live.
Did any of this really happen? Can we really change the past? You decide.
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