by D R Lowrey
As if to punctuate his point, a shot rang out and a golf ball buried itself in the dirt a few inches from Annie’s head. The shooter had repositioned, forcing Annie to do likewise on the opposite side of the pile. Everyone else scrunched a little lower.
“Protect us, Lord,” said Breadbox, “’cause I don’t wanna die by no golf ball in no grave hole. Is that irony? Are you being ironic, Lord? If so, please stop. Amen.”
****
Through the garage’s clouded window, Nigel had watched the procession to the gravesite. The funeral had done well enough without his services, so he dampened the urge to sally forth. Easy to do since his urges were nicely saturated to begin with. Besides, the march to the gravesite looked to be a sullen affair that did not comport with his current ebullient state of mind. Better to keep the sunshine contained within its vessel for now. Post-burial, after the lamenters had absorbed their full allotment of gloom, he would stroll in with the radiant glow and proclaim treasure for one and all. Perhaps he should have hidden in the fireplace.
Nigel sat himself down on his immovable treasure pot to wait for the funeral to expire. Before long he drifted into a familiar dream—familiar but with variations. Nigel returning as the conquering hero by way of lion-drawn chariot was the usual stuff, but this time, a black pot rested near his sandaled feet. Assorted laurels, rose petals, and celestial virgins were tossed in his direction by the adoring crowd. In return, he flung droplets of olive oil and sweat he’d collected along the way. Nothing was too good for his fans. When his lions stopped to replenish themselves with roadkill they’d killed on the road, the multitudes parted as if combed on either side. From the furrow emerged the empress, Annie, a vision in white mini-toga, rose petals in her hair, rose petals in her teeth, and scabs on her knees. She slunk toward the chariot to a chorus of whistles—“Sweet Georgia Brown.” She placed a delicate, porcelain hand on Nigel’s scabbard—
The proceedings went poof with a bang.
Nigel jolted awake. Strange sound for a funeral, he thought. Perhaps they’d dropped the casket from a great height. Doubtful. Maybe they’d saluted the man’s passing with the discharge of a firearm—well within Breadbox’s wheelhouse. A second bang got him to the window.
He watched his swath-headed mother-in-law hoofing it to the house with what appeared to be a huge, hideous insect on her back. One could only hope. He thought he heard a horse but didn’t see one. In the other direction, Abuelita’s wheelchair lay on its side, and some distance beyond was the gravesite, now abandoned. The only sign of life was a shoe peeking out from behind the mound of dirt. Another shot rang out. Nigel saw a streak over the grave accompanied by a puff of dust from the pile. The shoe disappeared for a second to be replaced by Annie scrambling around the corner of the dirt pile. She was under attack.
****
The octogenarian Abuelita weighed a scant ninety-eight pounds, mostly hide, bones, and rancor. Carrying the old viper around on one’s back must have been like lugging around a leather sack full of petrified elbows.
If anyone was suited to this task, it was Annie’s mother. She, of unknowable age, had the back hide of a triceratops thanks to a skin regimen of topically applied stiffeners and a nightly bed of nails. She was also strapping and fit, as vinegar drinkers tend to be. If she consumed extra calories, they didn’t stick around. Sizzled away, most likely, by the continual need to produce fresh supplies of venom.
These two spirited ladies were much alike and, as one might imagine, had hated each other from the outset. Mother plopped Abuelita onto the sofa and huffed like a hippo after a pearl dive. Underneath the swaddling, her straining nostrils flapped on the exhale and ballooned on the inhale.
“You sound like a damn horse,” said Abuelita.
“This horse just saved your life,” huffed Mother.
“I didn’t need savin’,” said Abuelita.
Though many would have agreed with Abuelita, Mother had indeed saved her life—the kind of compassionate act Abuelita could never forgive. To make matters worse, Abuelita had been focused on taking down an enemy, which she lived for. The interruption was inexcusable.
“You stay here and rest up. I’ll be down soon,” said Mother.
Abuelita sat and listened to the occasional golf shot. Frustrated and angry she was—in that respect, a day like any other—but she was also sleep-deprived, owing to last night’s pizza revolt. Her eye, the functional one, soon closed as she drifted into dreamtime.
Abuelita found herself in a vast stadium filled to capacity with cheering fans. Her box seat, next to the handsome, shirtless young emperor, provided prime, unobstructed views of the stadium floor. A gate opened, and a lion-drawn chariot entered. The driver, an imbecile, smiled with rose petals in his hair and a laurel around the neck. He waved to the crowd. Spectators burst into hysterical applause, anticipating the show to follow. He was a fool, this chariot driver. He had no idea. He flicked his whip to move his lions. They moved all right. They bound out of their harnesses and began searching for someone with a whip. Abuelita jumped out of her seat and dumped her entire basket of rose petals on the hungry lions. The crowd erupted in a chorus of whistles—“Sweet Georgia Brown.”
A sound jolted Abuelita from her reverie. The shrouded sphinx was on her way out the door with a golf club over her shoulder and a bucket of balls in her hand. “Where do you think you’re going?” she said to Mother.
“To play a little golf.”
“Break a leg,” said Abuelita. She meant it.
****
At the gravesite turned foxhole, Stefanie’s husband prattled on. “We’ve got to do something even if it means someone has to sacrifice for the good of the whole. Someone needs to confront the killer face-to-face while the rest of us escape.”
“You volunteering?” asked Breadbox.
Any of Breadbox’s fellow foxholers would have known he was wasting valuable breath.
“I think it’s pretty obvious who should act as the decoy. This brave man here,” said Stefanie’s husband, rubbing Grump’s bony shoulder. “A member of the dwindling Greatest Generation, an heroic war veteran who’s already demonstrated the intestinal fortitude required to stand in the face of enemy fire, a man who has already led a full and happy—”
“Not happy,” corrected Grumps.
“…a full and complete life, and he has his own helmet. He’s the perfect volunteer. We are so lucky to have counted him as our brave and loyal friend, courageous to the very end.”
“Who are you?” said Grumps.
Another shot rang out as a ball whistled over the hole at supersonic speed.
“Time for great men to stand up and be counted,” said Stefanie’s husband, scrunching down while giving a thumbs-up sign under Grump’s helmet.
“He can’t go out there,” said Stefanie.
“Why not?” said her husband.
“Grumps can barely walk. He’d be taken down in a minute. What kind of decoy would that be?”
“Not as spry as I used to be,” said Grumps. “Now, if that were an Englishman…”
“I’ll go,” said Stanley.
“You?” asked Stefanie, beating everyone else to the punch.
“Excellent,” said Stefanie’s husband.
“It’s me she wants,” said Stanley. “I’m the cause of all this. I see no choice but to confess. I’m the killer.”
“You? You’re the murderer?” said the detective. “That can’t be. I don’t have a warrant for you.”
“It was more an accident than a murder,” said Stanley. “You must believe me. I never intended to kill him, not in a million years.”
Another shot sent a ball bouncing off the dirt pile a foot from Annie’s head. The shooter had once more repositioned, forcing her to scramble around the dirt pile again.
“What was your motive?” asked the detective.
“The two of them, this Eel person and Cam, were having some kind of relationship. I saw the text messages. I confronted Cam with the evidence. She didn’t deny
it, but insisted she wanted it to end. But she was afraid of Eel, afraid of what he might do to her. A person named Eel cannot be trusted, too slippery. Cam cried on my shoulder, right here,” he said, pointing to his chest. “She begged me to do it, to end her affair. She convinced me that Eel was the type who would never hit a man, only a woman. He’d listen to me, she said. It was the only way, she said. So, she arranged to meet Eel here at the estate. Only I would show up in her place. She said he was in for one eel of a surprise. Cam’s clever like that.”
“But why here?” asked Mrs. Sandoval.
“I supposed he was staying here.”
“He was not,” said Mrs. Sandoval.
“Be that as it may, Cam arranged for the meeting to take place here. Eel was waiting on this very spot. I engaged him in small talk to assess his character. He struck me as taciturn and abrupt, seemed to have no interest in the weather. Not the type you can trust. He then implied I should leave because he was there to meet someone and three would be a crowd.”
“He implied it? How did he imply it?” asked the detective.
“He said, ‘I’m about to meet someone, and three would be a crowd. You need to scram.’”
The detective looked satisfied with that answer.
“I then informed him,” continued Stanley, “that Cam would not be coming. I told him she considered him nothing but a terrible, awful, horrible mistake. I told him that between seeing his face again and having ptomaine poisoning, she’d choose ptomaine, but he didn’t know what that was. So I told him she thought he was on par with a foot fungus.”
“And this infuriated him?” asked the detective.
“Not all that much, but when I told him that she chose me over him, he became agitated.”
The burial party looked at Stanley, then looked at the dead man spilling out of his casket, and then looked at Stanley again. Even in the silly suit and having been dead for a week, Eel held a decisive advantage in the looks department. Personality-wise, it would have been a close call if they had both been dead, but with Stanley doing all the talking, the edge would have gone to Eel.
“He seemed at first disbelieving,” said Stanley. “Then he laughed, hysterically so. It was super annoying. He stomped his feet and took a frog out of his pocket, a pretty yellow frog. He said to me, ‘This frog is deadly poisonous, and you, my friend, will eat it.’ I said, ‘Will not.’ He said, ‘Will.’ I said, ‘Will not,’ and I pushed him. Surprised by my assertiveness, he stumbled backward and fell. His mouth was open. It was always open. I think he was a mouth breather. The frog went right in.”
“Into his mouth?” asked the detective.
“As if it owned the place. But after a moment, he got up—”
“The frog?”
“The man. The man got up, brushed himself off, stood up like he was about to burp out a frog, and then collapsed. Dead, it appeared. Poisoned, I assumed.”
“Stanley,” asked Annie, “by any chance, when this guy dropped was there also a sound?” Another shot rang out as a projectile buried itself at the base of the dirt pile. “Like that?”
“Now that you mention it,” said Stanley, “there could have been. But after having just killed a man, I didn’t think much of it. I was flustered.”
Annie looked up to relocate the shooter. The attacker was at the edge of the woods, but not in the commanding offensive position she expected. She saw the gunman, rifle in hand, dive and crouch as a white object zoomed past and ricocheted off a tree. The assailant was being assailed. The gunman, using a tree as cover, raised the rifle from a sitting position and fired toward her rival sharpshooter. Annie saw an opportunity.
“Guys,” said Annie, addressing the ladies and gentlemen of the ditch, “I have an idea. Everyone needs to sit tight and not do anything stupid. Are we clear on that?”
“That’s a good idea,” said Mrs. Sandoval. “I’m glad you thought of it.”
Annie took off running in the direction of the shooter.
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
Nigel Makes His Move
The shrouded dragoness anchored herself at the northeast corner of the house and teed up a ball. She adjusted her sunglasses and scanned the distant woods for signs of a golf-ball sharpshooter. A creeping figure of decidedly assassin-like nature provided her a target. At 150 yards, she’d have been better off with a five wood, but she’d make do with her three.
Golfing had been her thing in high school, and she’d played it through most of her adult life. It was only after marrying Stanley, the lout, that she had put away her clubs. Stanley and golf had never got on. He wanted a game that looked hard but played easy, not the other way around. All the romantic blithering in the world couldn’t save a game that mocked its own players at each and every hole with that contemptable contrivance known as par. Stanley’s problem was that he’d made the game too complex. His wife understood that true enjoyment came, not from holing the ball in X number of shots, but rather from knocking the crap out of something with a club.
Mother addressed the ball. “Goodbye, Stanley.”
Whoosh. She let loose with a furious swing and watched the distant figure cower as the ball sailed overhead and bounced off a tree.
Too much Stanley, she thought.
She teed up another ball as a gun sounded and a ball screamed past her, ricocheting off the brick house. The shooter may have had a marked advantage in power, but at 150 yards, her incoming could almost certainly be avoided. Such was not the case for those at the gravesite, a mere 50-yard range.
Bring it on. Mother was plenty game for a bout of golf dodgeball. She stood straight to address her second ball before noticing movement at the gravesite.
Annie was making a run toward the shooter.
Brave, but not smart, thought her mother. Hoping to draw attention away from her girl, she laid into the ball but spun off a worm-burner. That’s what happens when you slack off the practice sessions for a few years. She refocused on the battlefield to find her girl.
Annie, hiding behind the abandoned wheelchair in a prone position, righted the chair and spun it around so the back faced the shooter.
Mother teed up another ball while Annie, hunkering in the chair, moved in reverse toward the shooter. Mother swung true, launching the projectile on a perfect arc toward the edge of the woods.
The ball had eyes, as they say, curving directly onto the target’s head. The crouching figure flopped.
Mother whooped like a hooded banshee. She still had it.
****
Nigel jumped back as the deflected golf ball banged against the door’s small window. He grimaced, not at the ball’s impact on the window but at its impact before it struck the window.
From the safety of the garage, he had watched a policeman meticulously prowling his way through the woods, tree by tree, toward the gunman. The officer’s mission, Nigel reckoned, was to put a definitive stop to the golf ball gunman’s havoc-wreaking. To this end, he had secured a position behind a nicely placed tree almost within leaping distance of the shooter. The officer had made the sign of the cross before rising to make his final charge. He took no more than two strides before dropping like a uniformed sack of potatoes, the unfortunate result of a golf ball strike to the cranium. The golf ball shooter, it seemed, had an accomplice.
Nigel looked across the way and saw Annie had moved from the pile of dirt to the abandoned wheelchair. He watched as she positioned the wheelchair’s back toward the shooter before placing herself in it. The gunman fired at her, but the ball bounced off the back of the chair.
Smart, he thought. As long as she keeps her back to the shooter and her head ducked down, she can zoom right out of range.
The wheelchair kicked into motion but not away, as Nigel had supposed. Instead, she rocketed three miles per hour in reverse toward the gunman. What is she doing? After considering, he concluded she must be playing the part of a diversion in a coordinated dual-pronged assault. Annie was to provide a distracting frontal offensive, allow
ing the officer to attack undetected from the rear. A brilliant plan, if not for a second golf ball shooter. Brilliant or not, Annie was now seriously exposed from two sides and totally unaware that her partner had gone tits up, so to speak.
When plan A fails, it’s obviously time to pull plan B from wherever one keeps a plan B. He guessed Annie didn’t have one because she wasn’t a plan B type of gal. He recognized, as he had so many times in his life, that he was Plan B. His mission could not have been simpler: Save Annie from a pair of golf ball assassins. Nigel’s brain went to work, as it did in times of crisis, like an under-lubricated steam-era machine.
****
Annie bounced and jiggled in the wheelchair as it plowed forward in reverse. The back of the chair had taken some hits, but the padded seat dulled the impact to a sharp thud. She’d counted ten golf balls launched so far. She would have traded her left arm to know how many were left.
Annie knew something about these active shooters. If they intended to survive their assaults, an alarm clock in their head triggered a switch from attack mode to survival mode. Annie wanted to speed that clock. By challenging the shooter, she would feed a growing paranoia that opposition forces were closing in. At some point, the shooter would opt for survival and make a run for it.
If the assailant was Cam Logan as she suspected, Annie felt confident she could run her down. While Cam was physically fit, owing to her cadre of personal trainers, there was little chance she’d have worn appropriate footwear. Tackling her would be an honor and a pleasure. If she put up a fight, a black dirt facial could be in her future.
Of course, all this presupposed a sane and rational gunman who preferred living to dying. With criminal profiles of AR-15 golf ball assailants in short supply, sane and rational might be giving credit where credit wasn’t due. This, however, was something Annie scarcely considered as a golf ball whizzed past her head at 130 mph.
As long as she could maintain a safe distance and a back-facing orientation, Annie felt protected. That is, until a ball sailed past from the opposite direction. The shot missed her by a mile, but she was alarmed. A second attacker from the opposite direction put her in grave danger. She looked toward the house, eventually finding the unmistakable visage of her swaddle-headed mother. A reflecting glint exposed the swinging of a golf club as a turf scorcher skipped past toward the shooter.