A Stranger Lies There by Stephen Santogrossi

if the shooter would have been scared off so easily if not for those lights.
    There were three of them. One was holding a flashlight, a full-moon circle of light bobbing up and down in the darkness. Tall, wearing a red baseball cap stained dark with grease, a tanktop and dungarees. The other two both wore T-shirts and one had a tattoo on his forearm.
    They stopped on the other side of the ditch in front of my crippled vehicle. The leader pointed the flashlight at me, running the light up and down before settling on my face. The glare obscured my view of them.
    â€œWhat are you doing here?” he asked warily.
    I thought quickly, came up with something about a drunk driver running me off the road. “Didn’t you see him?” I asked. No response. “Could you get that light out of my eyes?”
    The light dropped to my feet. They were probably migrant workers, leery of dealing with the police. That was fine with me. “He was driving the opposite way and he came right toward me,” I continued, pointing back along the road.
    â€œWhat about your windows?” one of the others asked, as the flashlight played over the car.
    Shit. I hadn’t thought of that. Kept my mouth shut, hoping they’d just want me off the property. I could see them thinking, obviously suspicious of my story. One of them circled around to the opposite side of the car, looking at the damage. The gun was right on the front seat, another question I couldn’t answer. So far, they hadn’t seen it.
    â€œYou need help with your car?” the first one finally asked.
    Twenty minutes later, after a lot of grunting and heaving, we managed to get the car out, first by digging the driveshaft out of the dirt, then starting it up and pushing.
    Back on level ground again, I shook their hands and said I owed them a cold one, but we all knew that would never happen. I backed out the way I’d come, so as not to further damage their crop by turning around. Slow going, the car sluggishly negotiating the dips and ruts and raising clouds of dust. Eventually, I reached the edge of the field and stopped on the shoulder of the road. The headlights, undamaged when they hit the soft dirt bank of the canal, threw twin rivers of light that shifted and swelled in the swirling dust.
    The men watched me leave. Just before I turned into the road, I gave them the high-beams as a farewell, but they had already turned back toward the house.

CHAPTER TEN
    My car seemed to guide itself back toward Indio and the Blue Bird Motel as I tried to make sense of everything that had happened. It wasn’t easy with the headache pounding in my skull. I drove slowly to give myself time to think.
    If not for my bruises and the sprinkles of glass all around me, I would hardly have believed that the last few hours weren’t some half-remembered episode of a TV cop show. In fact, the whole night seemed like one of those hallucinations you get just before falling asleep, your imagination running wild while the rest of the world goes on normally.
    Tonight had been as far from routine as you could get without ending up dead, and I thought about what I should do next. I was lucky those men had helped me with the car. And glad that my car was old enough to not have airbags. Without a tow-truck driver to report the accident, I didn’t have to tell the police about anything other than discovering that matchbook. Leaving out the rest of it, though, meant they wouldn’t get my description of the motel room intruder, and more important, the gun that was now sitting in my back seat.
    The gun. My prints were on that gun.
    I could wipe it clean, but that would remove the shooter’s as well. Out of the question. I wanted to give the police every chance of solving the crime. I’d take my chances and play it straight.
    Pulling into the motel parking lot a few minutes later, the second thoughts began to take over. There was no chance I wouldn’t spend