Empty Promises

night didn’t seem to stop any of his new neighbors. They were partying, as they always did. Didn’t they know that some folks needed their sleep? It was no use going to bed early. Cars were backfiring, tires screeching, and somebody was still shouting. He rolled over and looked at the clock beside his bed. It was nearly 2:00 A.M. The taverns would be closing in a few minutes. It was Sunday morning now.
    Sitting on the side of his bed with his bare feet on the cold floor, the old man realized that a car had pulled up just below his window. He could hear someone talking loudly, and he figured it was some teenagers whooping it up when they should have been sleeping. But then something caught his attention and he listened more closely as the shouts outside grew sharper. There was a frightening hostility in the voice that carried up through his open window, an anger that seemed to swell and then recede. Holding his breath instinctively, he got out of bed and walked across his dark bedroom to a window that looked out on Bitter Place North.
    Below, he could see a shiny reddish sports car. A very tall man stood next to the car, shouting at someone inside. The old man could tell that the occupant of the car was a female by the sound of her voice, although he couldn’t see her. Her voice was loud too, high-pitched and full of stress, or maybe fear; the pair seemed to be engaged in a violent argument. Unaware that he was being observed, the man walked around to the driver’s side of the car and grabbed the door handle. But the woman had apparently triggered the locks and the door didn’t budge. Suddenly the big man’s foot rose and crashed against the door with a crunching sound. He kicked the window until it smashed.
    Later, it would be hard for the old man to remember if what he was watching had happened rapidly or if it was really being played out as it seemed—in slow motion. The driver’s door was flung open and the woman emerged, running almost gracefully at first as she crossed the street, heading away from the lake shore. Then she scrambled up a terraced slope. The silent witness observed this from his bedroom window, shocked to see that the woman was half naked; she wore only a bra and a light skirt, or maybe a half-slip. The man was dressed, and as he whirled beneath the streetlight, the old man saw that he had a thick head of hair and a beard.
    The woman had apparently surprised him by running away, and she labored up the grassy bank, through a dark patch of ivy and was almost to the giant fir trees at the edge of a lawn when she began to scream. “Help! Help me!” she cried, although she surely couldn’t see the old man standing there in the window.
    He realized now that what he was witnessing was more than a quarrel. This woman was in trouble. “This isn’t the usual little thing,” he told himself. “I’d better call the police.” But before he could move to the phone, the man reached out an improbably long and muscular arm and grabbed the fleeing woman around the waist. He dragged her back down the embankment as if she was weightless. She was very slender and small. Next to her, the man looked huge.
    There was no phone in his bedroom, so the old man had to leave the window to get to the phone in the kitchen to call the police. That was probably just as well. If only he were younger, he berated himself, he could go out to help the woman, but he knew that at his age, he would be no match for the bearded man. Where were all the rowdy young guys now, when they were needed? The street was deserted, save for the frightened woman and the man who had caught her in her flight.
    The old man’s call for help was recorded at Central Communications on the 911 line just before 2:00 A.M. The Seattle Police Department dispatcher immediately alerted Officers J. R. Sleeth and R. T. Mochizuki in patrol car 3N12. At this time of night, most calls were about drunks weaving along the roadways between the taverns and their homes.
    “We’ve got an assault that’s taking place now in the 13300 block of Bitter Place North, the dispatcher announced.” Sleeth and Mochizuki weren’t far away; they reached the address in minutes. Nothing could have prepared them for what they found.
    The cries for help had stopped, the street was deserted, and the red car was gone. All that was left was a pitiful and tragic sight. After one look, Sleeth picked up his radio mike and said tightly, “We’ve got an assault here. Bad one.