The reporter didn't need to know that. It'd make him look bad. The reporter, from Pittsburgh, wouldn't understand how a cop could have the time to surf the net at work. In the city, someone was always doing something. Here, in Maspeth, population three hundred, no one did anything, expect farm and go to church. Of all the rural villages dotting the northern Pennsylvania highlands, Maspeth was probably the smallest and the most isolated; surrounded by densely forested hills, it was accessible by one highway and one highway only: US26. The interstate was only ten miles to the south, but there were no signs for Maspeth along its length; unless you knew where Maspeth was and meant to get there, you'd never find it.Bill's job, then, was more sitting than running, and the only shots he'd ever made in his three years as sheriff involved a wad of paper and a wastebasket. That was fine by him, though. He was a patrolman in Philadelphia for almost twenty years, and had had more than his fair share of excitement."It was...eight or nine, I think. I was just about to get up and go on patrol when I got a call from Old Man Jamison out on Deer Ridge Road."Bill shifted in his chair.The reporter looked at him.Old Man Jamison, in his late eighties, was a World War II vet who survived the Nazis unscathed, but kept going up against the basement stairs and getting his ass kicked. He was a sweet old man. Used to own the Texaco south of town."He was all in an uproar. Said he heard gunshots next door and saw a big black Lincoln peeling off."Next door was the Raymond residence, an old dairy farm gone to seed; most of the land belonged to the county now, except for the house and a few achers back. At one time, it produced all the milk in the county.The Maspeth Creamery, as it was called, closed down in the fifties, and went through a couple owners before James Raymond, a short, bulldoggish man who wore big sun glasses, bought it in '91. Bill didn't know much about Raymond. Unlike the other residents of Maspeth, he was cool and standoffish, something of a hermit, even. There wasn't much to do in Maspeth, admittedly, but there was a diner, a tavern, and a church.Raymond was a stranger to them all. In fact, thinking about it, Bill was almost certain he'd only seen the man a handful of times in the ten years he'd lived in Maspeth.To each his own, he figured."Old Man Jamison's property abuts the Raymond place, but there's a hill and trees in the way, so he didn't see anything but the car tearing by on the road."Old Man Jamison said it was pistol fire. "Small arms" is the word he actually used. And Bill trusted the old man's judgment; he was weak and frail, but as sharp as ever. If he said he heard pistol fire, by God, he heard pistol fire.Dreading what he might find, Bill stuffed his two-hundred-and-fifty pound frame into his squad car and drove the six miles to Deer Ridge Road.
