Darla rushed after him as fast as she could, given the spotty light. Surely Curt was simply unconscious, she frantically told herself. No doubt he had tripped on the steps and hit his head when he landed. A tumble could explain why his phone had been lying on the stairway rather than in his pocket. Frankly, she was surprised that neither of the men had injured themselves before today. The brownstone was nothing short of a disaster site.
By now, Barry was already kneeling beside his friend. Darla could see by the flashlight’s yellow beam that Curt was lying on his belly a few feet away and to one side of the bottom step. What looked like a crowbar lay across his back, reminding Darla of Curt’s previous threats to lay in wait for the salvage thieves in case they made a return visit.
A chilling thought came to her: had Curt tried to wield the bar against an intruder only to come out on the losing side of the encounter?
She barely had time to consider that possibility before Barry grabbed the crowbar and tossed it aside, and then leaned over his friend’s prone form.
“Curt, can you hear me?” he demanded as Darla breathlessly knelt beside him on the dusty concrete floor.
For the space of a heartbeat, she held out hope that Curt would groan and then begin to move. That optimism lasted only until the flashlight beam illuminated both the bloody gash across the back of his skull and his wide-open, sightless eyes. Darla bit back another gasp. Curt couldn’t hear them . . . wasn’t ever going to hear anything ever again.
“Son of a bitch,” Barry choked out, and made as if to turn his friend over. Hastily, Darla grabbed his arm.
“Leave him alone, Barry . . . there’s nothing we can do. Besides, the police won’t want us touching anything.”
“The police?” He rose and rubbed a frantic hand over his thinning hair. “Yeah, you’re right. Call 9-1-1, while I get some more light in here.”
It took her two tries to punch in the right sequence of numbers, for her hands were shaking. Barry, meanwhile, had rushed back up the steps and plugged in a pair of the clamp lights so that they shone like faint headlights down the wooden stairway. The additional illumination made Darla blink and gave Curt’s unnaturally still form an even more unreal appearance. She promptly scooted several feet away from the corpse, preferring the relative darkness of the rest of the basement to being right next to the dead man as she made her call.
Why couldn’t this have happened upstairs? She already had something of an aversion to dark basements. She suspected she would end up with a full-blown basement phobia now that she’d managed to find a dead body lying in one.
After what seemed an interminable wait, though surely it had been but a matter of seconds, the emergency operator came on the line. In a strained voice she barely recognized as her own, Darla gave her name and explained the situation.
“It could have been an accident, but we don’t really know. An ambulance?” she answered the dispatcher’s question. “You can send one, but I’m pretty sure he’s been dead awhile. Address? Barry,” she called to the man, who now sat silently beside his friend, “what’s the street number of the building?”
Barry stirred from his reverie long enough to give her the address, which she hurriedly repeated into the phone, along with a few more details about the body’s location in the building. The dispatcher instructed her to remain on scene and not touch anything in the vicinity of the dead man . . . too late, as Darla recalled how Barry had moved the crowbar off Curt’s body.
“They’re sending the police and an ambulance right out,” Darla told him once she’d hung up. Then, carefully avoiding looking at Curt again, she suggested, “Maybe we should wait upstairs until they get here.”
“But I don’t want to just leave him here like this,” Barry countered with a miserable shake of his head. “I should find a blanket or something to put over him.”
“The dispatcher said not to touch anything,” she reminded him. “We don’t know what actually happened to him, so we don’t want to accidentally destroy any evidence.” Like picking up the pry bar, she told herself, though she probably would have reflexively done the same thing had she been first to reach Curt.