Healing The Broken-Hearted Night

By Tyson Blue

Auburn, New York, holds a dark secret as a man follows a recently released prisoner through the shadowed streets. What begins as a quiet pursuit takes a dangerous turn when a stranger with his own agenda steps in. With a private investigator now in tow, a tense game of cat-and-mouse unfolds as they trail the ex-convict, hoping to uncover the whereabouts of a long-hidden stash from an old heist. But in the dead of night, alliances blur, and danger looms. Who will make it out alive, and who is hiding the biggest secret of all?

I was walking along a street in Auburn, New York. To my left was a row of modest residences, a little run-down but not too bad. To my right was a high, featureless wall. Ahead of me, where the street intersected with another, was a guard tower. I couldn’t see the armed guard or guards manning it, but I knew they were there.

Auburn Correctional Facility is one of the oldest functional prisons in the country, and was one of New York’s maximum-security facilities. It wasn’t someplace I wanted to be, not even this close. I reached the corner, stood there for a moment, then turned left and headed down the street away from the prison. I found a dark spot and turned to look back down the street.

About halfway down the next block was the main entrance to the prison. It was a small, blockhouse-looking building which projected out from the administrative building. This was topped with a tower, atop which was perched a statue of a Revolutionary War soldier, facing into the prison. He was known as “Copper John,” and had watched over the massive old pile for most of its existence. 

I checked the clock on my phone. It was 11:57 p.m. Not long to wait. The night air was cool, and I turned up the collar of the denim jacket I was wearing.

Right at the stroke of midnight—a literal stroke, from a clock tower somewhere nearby—The front door creaked open and a man stepped out. He was dressed in a cheap suit made of coarse cloth, and it was dark—I couldn’t tell the color for sure under the glare of the streetlights.

He stepped out to the street and paused to light a cigarette. The glare for the match underlie his face for a moment. He puffed a cloud of smoke, glanced left, then right, and crossed the street. Reaching the other side, he turned right and strode briskly away. I hung back to give him a good lead, then fell in behind him, keeping to the shadows as much as I could.

My crepe-soled shoes made minimal noise as I walked, and there was enough ambient sound to mask what little sound there was. The man I was following didn’t look back, but kept going straight ahead, southbound toward downtown Auburn.

Before reaching town, he turned left at an intersection and made his way to group of homes about two blocks east of the prison. As I followed him down a residential street, I noticed a man wearing a leather jacket trailing behind me about three hundred feet back. When he didn’t turn to follow me down the street, I turned and took up the trail again.

About halfway down the block, the man turned to the right and walked down a short walk, climbed a set of steps onto the front porch of a two-story house and stopped at its front door, raised his right hand and knocked loudly. I blended into the bulk of a tree-trunk down the street and watched. 

There was the sound of a lock rattling, then the door opened. I couldn’t see the person who opened the door, not hear what they said, but the man stepped inside and the door closed and the lock clicked shut. I leaned away from the tree, preparing to move in closer and see if I could hear anything that might be said inside, when a voice spoke quietly from behind me.

“Hold it right there,” It was a gruff voice, not that of a young man. I turned to look over my shoulder. It was the man in the leather jacket I’d seen a few minutes ago. He had crept up behind me, and now stood just outside my reach. I didn’t see a weapon, but that didn’t mean there wasn’t one. I started to turn to face him.

“I didn’t say you could turn around,” he said.

“You didn’t tell me I couldn’t,” I answered.

I took a second to look him over. He was between five-five and six feet, with gray hair, a mustache and a few days’ stubble.

“So what’s your business with Bart Streeter?” he asked, cutting his eyes toward the house behind me.

“Who says I’ve got business with him?” I asked. 

“You following him from the prison over to here says,” he answered back.

“Why do you want to know?” I asked.

“Because I have business with him, and I want to make sure I don’t have to deal with you, too.”

I gave a thoughtful nod or two.

I was actually there to kill Streeter, but I wasn’t about to tell him that.

“Before he got sent up, he took part in an armored car job, “ I said. He interrupted me.

“The job he was sent up for.”

I nodded.

“Right,” I told him. “He stashed the loot somewhere, and my employer wants to know where. Since he’s out now, I’m hoping he’ll head right for it and lead me to it.” 

That wasn’t entirely true. I’d been hired by one of the other robbers, but only to take him out for stiffing the rest of the gang. If I found out anything about what happened to the loot—or what was left of it—that would just be icing on the cake.

The man in the leather jacket winced and shook his head.

“Well, that’s what I’m after too,” he said. “Insurance covered the bank’s losses, but they hired me to see if any of it can be recovered. I’m a private investigator.”

“You got a name?”

He reached into his jacket pocket and handed over a business card. I took it, then glanced up at him.

“Dennis McMurtry?” I asked. He nodded.

“And you are…?” he asked.

“Tim Foster,” I told him, giving him the name of a deputy I’d had a couple of run-ins with down south a few years back. I didn’t think the name 

”Ray Vincent” would mean anything to him, but why tempt fate?

McMurtry held out a hand.

“Pleased to meet ya,” he said, and we shook briefly. 

“So,” I said, “You want to work together on this?”

McMurtry mulled it over for a moment, then nodded.

“For now, why not?” he said. “That way, we outnumber him.”

“Okay,” said, “What do we do if he goes somewhere from here by car? We’re on foot, so how do we track him then?”

“My office is a couple of blocks away from here, and my car is there, “ he said. “You stay here and try to listen in on what they’re saying, get an idea of what’s going on, then text me to let me know where you are and I’ll pick you up and we can go wherever we need to. Sound like a plan?”

“It does,” I answered. I gave him my cell number—it was a burner, and would be discarded before I left town—and with that, he turned and headed back up the street the way he’d come. 

I edged myself closer to the house Streeter had entered, and spotted a single lit window in the back of the building. Trying to be as quiet as possible, I stepped as close to the house as I could, making sure not to step on anything that might make a noise. 

I stood as straight as I could beneath the lighted window, straining to hear anything that might be said. My head was still about two feet below the sill, and all I could hear was a faint conversational buzz from the room. I tried to hold my balance so as not to knock up against the side of the house and tip them off to my presence. 

As I stood there, I felt my cell phone begin to buzz in my shirt pocket. I crept quietly down the driveway and up the sidewalk a way before pulling it out and answering it.

“Yeah?” I said quietly.

“It’s me, McMurtry,” the detective said. “I’ve got my car,” he said. “What’s going on?”

“He’s still in the house,” I told him. “Why don’t you come on down here and park up the street a ways. That way, if he borrows a car to go somewhere, we can follow him.”

“Sit tight,” he replied. “I’ll be right there.”

After about ten minutes, a black mid-size car pulled over near the tree I was standing beneath. McMurtry shut off the lights and motor. I walked over to the passenger side and slid into the seat, easing the door shut. 

I looked over at McMurtry.

“And now we wait,” I said.

“Yup.”

“So how long you been doing this?” I asked him.

“I started in the early ’80’s as a welfare fraud investigator,” he said. “Then I went private, worked in New York City for a few years, then things got a little hot for me down there, so I moved back here. After a few years living hand-to-mouth, I lucked out and solved a cold-case murder that made headlines all over and boosted my business a whole lot.”

“I think I remember hearing about that,” I said. “Girl got raped and murdered by a cop, wasn’t it?”

“Yeah,” he said, his eyes looking off into the distance, or maybe the past. He was quiet for a few minutes, then shook himself slightly and went on.

“I was able to open a more respectable-looking office, and business picked up, and stayed pretty steady. This isn’t exactly a hotbed of crime, so there wasn’t a whole lot of gunplay and stuff, so the retirement age came and went, and I saw no reason to stop doing it.”

He fell silent for the time it took to turn a corner and drive two blocks.

“But then the aches and pains started, and the joints began making little squeaks and pops that they didn’t make a few years ago, and getting out of it seemed to get a little more attractive.”

“Do you have a time frame in mind yet?” I asked.

He thought a minute.

“Maybe in the fall,” he said. “maybe begin to taper off a little, take on a few less cases, then just do one every once in a while, and then, one day near the end of the year, just not do it anymore.”

There seemed to be an air of melancholy about him as he talked about this.

After a short pause, he asked, “What about you? How much longer will you do whatever it is you do?”

I hadn’t ever really thought about it. I live in a cabin in the woods out in the middle of nowhere in New Hampshire, and just take on jobs as they come to me. The pay is really good to the point that I don’t need it, and that’s not mentioning the proceeds from the sale of a stash of Confederate gold that I lucked into awhile back, which was nestled safely in an overseas account.

“I don’t know,” I finally told him. “I’m an independent contractor, and I can pretty much pick and choose what I do. Haven’t really thought about stopping it anytime soon.”

McMurtry thought this over, then nodded.

“Must be nice,” he finally said.

We had left the city behind and were driving through countryside. Houses were few and far between.

A turn signal flashed on Streeter’s car, and he turned right into a storage  lot. We pulled over and turned out the lights, and watched as he drove down a road between two sets of storage units. When he got out of sight, we slid out of the car, the dome light turned off, and eased the doors shut quietly. I bumped mine once with a hip to make sure it was snug, then the two of us walked to the entrance and eased around the gate. 

We were both wearing crepe-soled shoes, which made hardly any noise on the gravel. We came up to the end of the left-hand row of storage units and peered around the corner. 

There was no sign of Streeter or his car along this row. Beyond it was another identical row of units on each side, and there was no sign of him along that row either. Keeping closer to the side of the building, we headed down along the row of sliding metal doors.

Outside the storage area, the soft sounds of night traffic could be dimly heard, but inside the surrounding fence, there was no sound. Reaching the end of the building, I stuck my head around the corner, motioning for McMurtry to hold back. Seeing no one, I loped quickly across the intervening roadway to the next building. I eased along the end wall and peered around the left-hand corner. I saw nothing. 

Listening, I didn’t hear any sounds that would tell me where Streeter had gone.

I crossed back the way I had come and trotted over to the building on the right-hand side, and moved to the far end. As McMurtry moved quietly up beside me, I eased my head out to where I could look down the side of the building with my right eye. 

About halfway down the row of storage units, I saw Streeter’s car. I saw him standing between the car and the door of the storage unit, reaching out toward the lock. His right hand was touching the lock, which appeared to be a combination lock.

I turned to McMurtry.

“Are you carrying?” I asked him.

He patted his left side .

“Nine-mil,” he breathed. “You?”

“Glock,” I said.

“I usually carry a Colt Python,” he said. “But that’s a little noisy for this kind of work.”

I nodded. 

“We should head down the other side and come up on him from the other end,” I suggested. “Less likely for him to see us coming.” I suited my actions to the word, went to the other side and started down the opposite side of the building from where Streeter was working. McMurtry followed. As we neared the end of the building, I could hear the metallic rattle as the door went up on the other side.

I reached the end and turned right, going along the wall as quietly as I could. Reaching the other end, I eased my head around and looked toward Streeter. I saw the car, but not the man. A dim light shone out onto the car. He must be inside, I thought, and eased around the corner, easing the Glock out of its holster under my jacket as I moved toward the open door. McMurtry was behind me. 

Reaching the door, I eased my head around and looked inside the unit. Streeter was there, busily moved plastic storage bins from a stack of them, setting some beside him and forming a new stack. His objective looked to be a metal strongbox about two-thirds of the way down. As he lifted the last bin off the box, I moved out until I was standing in the door directly behind him.

I leveled the Glock and shot him in the back of the head. He gave a twitch, then toppled over on the floor of the unit.

“What the fuck?!” McMurtry exclaimed. “What the hell did you do that for?”

“It’s what I was hired to do,” I told him calmly. “His partners wanted him taken out for stiffing them on the armored car job. If I ran across the loot, that was nice, but they really wanted him punished for running out on them.”

“You-you’re a….a hitman?” McMurtry gasped.

“I prefer the term ‘contractor’”, I told him.

He hesitated, his empty hands twitching.

“Don’t try it,” I told him. “I don’t want to hurt you. I’ve done what I came here to do. I can leave you here with the strongbox.”

“Strongboxes,” he said, nodding his head in the direction of the storage unit.

I moved to continue covering him while I turned to glance into the unit. When Streeter had fallen to the floor, he had dislodged a stack of bins next to the one he’d been working on. Two more strongboxes, identical to the first,  were visible behind them. I turned back to McMurtry.

“Well, I don’t know how many boxes were taken in the robbery, but it seems to me you can turn these in, along with any more that might be squirreled away in there, and complete your job in high style. I’ll even help load them in your car.”

McMurtry hesitated.

“I don’t know,” he finally said. “You’re right as far as it goes, but I’m an eyewitness to a murder, and if I don’t tell the cops what I know, that makes me an accessory, and I’d lose my license and probably draw a nice long prison bid.”

“But you’d never turn me in,” I said.

“You don’t know that.” he said, indignation written on his face. “You’ve only known me a few minutes!”

“That’s not what I mean,” I said.

I watched his expression change as understanding set in.

“Oh,” he said.

We were at a standoff position, not sure where we were going. But before we could get much further, the decision was taken out of our hands.

As if they were synchronized, headlights blazed on from either end of the building, as car engines revved. McMurtry and I were hemmed in from both sides, with only Streeter’s car or the storage unit for shelter. That was not much. They advanced together and stopped about ten feet from us on either side. Behind the blaze of the lights, I heard doors open and windows humming down.

“I think my employers decided to check up on me,” I said to McMurtry. “maybe they wanted the money more than they let on.”

I reached over and opened the driver’s side door of Streeter’s car, then stepped behind it, putting it between me and the car in front of me. McMurtry opened the back door, and stood beside me, facing the other car. He had drawn his nine-mil.

A rough voice came from the car facing me.

“Hey, Ray!” he called. McMurtry threw a glance my way.

“Ray?” he said. “I thought you said your name was Tim!”

“I lied,” I explained. 

“Looks like Streeter led you to the money,” the voice growled.

“Kinda looks that way,” I agreed.

“What you planning on doing with it?”

‘It wasn’t part of the deal we made,” I said. “You just wanted me to get Streeter for you. He’s in there,” I pointed into the storage unit. “And he’s got. My friend has an interest in the money for his employer, so you can take that up with him and let us leave. I just need the rest of my fee.”

“The way I see it,” the voice rasped, “if we just take care of you and your friend, we get the money and we save money on the deal.”

“Sorry you see it that way,” I said, and leaned over to flick on the headlights of Streeter’s car, flicking them to bright as I did so. At the same time, I shot out the lights of the car in front of me.

Two men stood in the blaze of light, temporarily dazzled by the high-beams. I shot both of them in the head, not sure if they were wearing armor or not. Beside me, McMurtry took out the lights on his car, then fired at the men facing him. He didn’t have lights on them, and so he had to guess where they were. A yelp came from one of them, so it seemed as though he had at least grazed one. Still, a volley of return fire came at him out of the darkness.

There were a couple of shots from the car in front of me, one from each side; there had been two more men in the back. The door in front of me took one shot. The second shot took out the passenger side headlight. I fired at the muzzle flash. There was a grunt and the sound of someone falling.

I glanced to my right. McMurtry was standing, looking behind us toward the other car.

“Anybody left?” I asked him.

“ Not sure,” he said. “Not sure how many there are, or what damage I did to the one who made the noise. Mighta just scared him, you know?”

About then, a shot rang out from the darkness by the car he was covering. I heard the bullet whiz as it passed between us, then went on to strike someone standing by the car I was covering. A man took two steps forward and fell over the open passenger-side door, hanging through the open window. The remaining headlight showed a gaping exit wound in the back of his head. 

There was no sound from either car. We were relatively safe as long as we stood between the open car doors, but we couldn’t stay there forever. About five minutes passed.

“I’ll be right back,” I said, easing around McMurtry.

“Where are you going?”

“I’m going to check back there, see if anyone’s left.”

Before he could say anything, I eased around the door and padded toward the other car, looking from left to right for any sign of movement. I didn’t see anything. Reaching the car, I eased around the driver’s side door and looked down, using my phone’s flashlight. The man draped over the door was obviously dead, as was the second man laid out behind him. A third man was draped in the back seat, leaning out the rear passenger door. I stepped gingerly over the dead man on the ground and around the back of the car.

A fourth man was lying there, trying to get up and dealing with a chest wound. I knelt down beside him, covered his mouth with one hand and pinching his nostrils shut with the other. His eyes widened as he struggled to breathe, but he was too far gone to put up much resistance. After about forty seconds, his struggles weakened and stopped. I held on until his sphincters let go, then gave him a few more seconds before I released him . I got up and carefully made my way back to Streeter’s car and rejoined McMurtry.

“I’m pretty sure everybody’s accounted for back there,” I told him. 

“‘Pretty sure’?” he asked.

“Well, if there was a fifth person in there, they may have sneaked away, but there’s no one alive around or in the car.”

McMurtry nodded.

“Okay,” he said. He pointed with his gun toward the other car. “Shall we go check that one out together?”

I nodded.

“Makes sense to me.” 

We started walking toward the car, checking both sides for any signs of activity. As we neared the driver’s side door, there was a sudden rush of movement from inside the car. An arm holding a gun thrust out the front door, between the body of the car and the door itself. 

“Gun!” McMurtry shouted, jumping over to shove me to my left. The gun fired. I heard McMurtry grunt beside me as I fired three shots in quick succession into the car, kicking the door shut to pin the arm in place. Then I walked up and opened the door, moving aside as I did.

There was a man in the driver’s seat, with three bullet holes in his chest. Reaching out, I took the gun from his limp hand and pitched it behind me. His dead eyes stared at me, but I gave him a fourth shot to the head to make sure. Then I walked quickly around the car to make sure no one else was alive. There were three others on the ground, all dead.

I turned back to McMurtry. He was still standing, but he was deathly white, and as I came up to him, his knees began to wobble, then gave out. I caught him as he fell and eased him to the ground. He looked up at me, trying to focus. There was a bullet hole in his jacket, somewhere in his center mass. There were any number of organs in that area, any of which being injured was not a good thing.

“Did —,” he coughed, and a thin rivulet of blood ran out of the corner of his mouth. “Did you get him?”

“I did,” I told him. It looks like you took care of the rest of them.”

“I guess,” he paused and coughed weakly, “this takes care of the problem of what to do with the money.” 

He smiled weakly. 

“Not gonna make it, am I?” he asked.

I shook my head.

“Sorry,” I told him.

He shook his head.

“’S’allright,” he said. “It was bound to happen sooner or later.” His speech began to slur toward the end.

“Is there anyone I need to call for you?’

“No,” he said, with some effort. He was breathing more heavily now.

“Just stay with me ’til it’s over,” he said.

“Sure,” I said.

He looked around for me, his eyes looking bleary and unfocused. I wasn’t sure he could see me at this point. I wasn’t sure how long I could stay. We were out in the country, it’s true, but all that gunfire would have made quite a racket, and I didn’t know how long it would be before a cop or two showed up.

McMurtry’s head had fallen forward on his chest, but suddenly he perked up. He raised his head and looked at a spot over my left shoulder. His eyes came back into sharp focus. I turned my head and took a quick glimpse in the same direction. There was nothing there.

“ Lynn?” he said, and a smile of unbridled happiness spread across his face. He looked positively joyous. Then, as quickly as it had come, it went. The light and the life went out of his eyes as a soft sighing exhalation left his mouth. His breathing stopped and he slumped lifelessly. 

McMurtry was dead. 

I lowered him gently to the ground. I closed his eyes. Even in death, there was a faint trace of his final smile. 

Getting to my feet, I quickly rummaged through McMurtry’s pockets and found his car keys. Then I went through Streeter’s pockets until I found a piece of paper with the four-digit code for the entrance gate. I trotted as fast as I could up to the road, pulling on a pair of nitrile gloves from my jacket pocket. I started his car and drove it down to the storage unit, taking a moment enter the code into the keypad for the entrance gate. Popping the trunk, I got out and began loading the strongboxes into the trunk. There were four of them altogether. I had no idea how much they contained, but there was plenty of time for that when I got to someplace safe. 

Getting back in the car, I checked the fuel gauge. I could get quite a ways. I glanced over at McMurtry’s body. I thought about moving him into the storage unit to keep it out of the elements, but decided not to. I put the car in drive and drove away. I got to the entrance, opened it again, then drove out to the road and turned left, headed away from Auburn and toward the New York State Thruway. I had notice that McMurtry had an EZ-Pass transponder on his windshield. I could use the car to get the money back to my cabin in New Hampshire, then figure out a way to dispose of it without leaving any footprint. 

Along the way, I thought about McMurtry and my brief encounter with him. I wondered what it was he saw, there at the end. I wondered who “Lynn” was. Maybe she was someone he’d loved and lost long ago. And maybe there at the end, he thought he’d found her. I hoped he had.

It’s funny, the things you find yourself thinking about while driving in the middle of the night, with nothing but a turnpike full of long-haul trucks and scattered night travelers for company. 

This story is for Dennis McCarthy (1952-2024), the real Dennis McMurtry, who was always one of Ray’s first readers, and one of his biggest fans. I wish I’d gotten the idea for this one in time for him to read it.