The Putt at the End of the World

by Lee K. Abbott

  The door hissed behind him. He spun quickly around.

  “Any luck?” Thomas Franklin asked softly, taking a moment to edge by him.

  Gorman tried to push him out of the way in order to see past, his head swiveling from between this passenger car and the adjacent dining car. “Had him. Lost him,” he said.

  “Our boy?”

  “A possible,” Gorman answered. “Dark hair, average height, black nylon — ”

  “The same man you saw — ”

  “We picked up an E-nine positive in car six or seven. Edna’s making another pass.”

  “Edna is it?”

  “Zuckerman,” Gorman corrected, still frantically look-ing one way then the other. “I’m brain dead. Too tired. Not thinking clearly.”

  “I’ll take the forward cars,” Franklin whispered. “Calm down. We’re all right, you know. It’s a train. He’s not going anywhere.”

  “Could be a courier. Doesn’t mean it’s our boy.”

  “Calm down,” Franklin repeated.

  “That’s him!” Gorman crowed.

  The two men looked through the void of space that separated the two cars. The suspect was heading right for them.

  “Him?” Franklin whined. “Are you kidding me? That’s Fernando Gaspara. Won at Winged Foot in ninety-six. You do know something about golf, don’t you?”

  “A golf pro?” Gorman replied, disappointed. “But I thought . . . I know the game, not the players.”

  “You thought wrong. Let’s find Zuckerman. We want those explosives in custody before we reach Edinburgh. If they make it off this train . . . Well, it’s your ass, not mine.”

  Chapter Three

  HUNG UP ON THE LIP

  by Tami Hoag

  Rathgarve Castle, Scotland

  “I hate bloody golf!” Angus MacLout declared in a burr as thick as a Highland mutton stew.

  He peered through the shrubbery at the course that rolled over some of the most beautiful countryside in all of Scotland. Rathgarve, the gray granite castle that stood on the crest of the hill, had occupied that ground for so many hundreds of years that it had taken on the look of something natural to the earth, as if it were but a strange outcropping or a cairn of the giants of Gaelic lore.

  Great swaths had been cut through the ancient forest, making way for fairways. Hillocks had become flag-studded greens. Banks had become bunkers. Water hazards had been added, the largest one being christened “Nessie” by the blathering idiots from ESPN.

  “Daft, boring game. I’d sooner watch people sleep.”

  “Aye, you always were a bit queer that way, Angus,” Sheena Cameron said. “I recall you being sent to the pastor for a talking-to after you got caught watching your grandmother sleep in her brassiere and garters. Remember that, Ox?”

  Sheena was as petite and pretty as Ox Ferguson was stout and ugly. Black hair cropped short and stylish. Eyes as big and blue as a Scottish loch. A face like a pixie with porcelain skin. She was dressed in black from head to toe: tight slacks, turtleneck, and black leather biker jacket. She had slipped past security at a weak spot — a guard overly susceptible to a wink and a grin and an empty promise of something more. Men were such fools. Most of them, anyway.

  Unable to rely on such charms, Angus and Ox had come in the honest way: as employees assigned to groundskeeping duties.

  Ox replied with the same grunt he used for all questions, whether his answer was intended to be affirmative or negative. His head was wreathed and swathed in red hair that obscured his every facial feature. It was the hair as much as his physique that had earned him his nickname. That and a tendency to drool when he’d had too much ale.

  Angus sent Sheena a ferocious scowl. “How many times do I have to tell you? I feared her dead. It was all a great misunderstanding, is all.”

  “Uh-huh.” Sheena dismissed the topic and snatched the binoculars away from him. Binoculars: a grand name for what Angus had brought. “Opera glasses,” she grumbled. “What all the great criminal masterminds use.”

  “They serve the purpose now, don’t they? And saved the hundred pounds or better you’d have had me spend.”

  “I can’t see a bloody thing.”

  “Blinded by obstinateness, you are.”

  “And you’ll be forever constrained by the limits of your stingy, tiny mind, Angus MacLout. Dried and shriveled it is. Like a prune, like a raisin — no, like a currant.” She turned to Ox. “What’s smaller than a currant?”

  His expression never altered. “The seed of a currant.”

  “Siding with her now, are you?” Angus accused, eyes wild, his long, raw-boned face contorted with outrage.

  Ox went back to the grunt.

  “Siding with Miss World Traveler. Miss I’ve-Been-to-the-Continent. Miss I-Know-It-All,” he went on, posing and posturing, sticking his butt out and arching his back, prancing around and rolling his eyes.

  Sheena turned away and squinted through the opera glasses. The lawns of the great castle were swarming with an army of people, a commotion the likes of which the place hadn’t seen since the uprising of 1745. Tele-vision people and tournament officials, caterers and groundskeepers and God knew who-all. Plenty of security agents, to be sure, she noted. They were conspicuous in dark sunglasses, talking into the sleeves of their golf sweaters. They represented a variety of nationalities and agencies from all over the globe. Staking out the territory. Sniffing out potential trouble spots around the castle and over the course.

  Helicopters had swept over the grounds and the surrounding countryside for two solid days, scanning a perimeter of a mile in every direction. She’d gathered that bit of news from an RAF lad with too many hormones and too much beer on his brain. The helicopters would be up again as soon as the wind dropped.

  Even as she thought it, a gust swept beneath one of the huge green-striped tents that had been staked out on the lawn, attempting to turn it into a giant balloon. Papers blew across the lawn like a flock of white birds, chased by half a dozen frantic people.

  “I love the wind,” she said, grinning. “Nature’s full of chaos, she is. Chaos and temper. And vengeance.”

  Being from a long line of bitter, vindictive women, Sheena had a special warm spot in her heart for the notion of vengeance. It glowed red now as she let her gaze sweep over the acres, seeing devastation in the manicured beauty. Four hundred acres of ancient trees gone, replaced by grass cooked up in a laboratory by some mad scientist just waiting for his chance to clone a new race of humans. Evil. And Phillip Bates was the devil’s right hand.

  She looked at Angus over her shoulder. “You’re still committed to this nonsense?”

  “Aye. How many times do I have to tell you, woman?”

  “You ought to be committed,” she grumbled.

  “And it’s not nonsense!” he insisted, a little slow on the uptake. “I’m in the right and no one will hear me!” he ranted.

  Sheena shushed him, frantically glancing around. “Everyone will hear you, you bloody great oaf! Lower your voice!”

  “Two hundred years of injustice!” he raged on in a hoarse whisper, spittle frothing at the corners of his mouth. “That land was not the MacGregors’ to sell to Phillip Bates! It should have been mine! I am the last of the MacLouts, and the rightful heir to Rathgarve! The world will know it!”

  He grabbed hold of her by the upper arms, hauling her up onto her toes, his white-rimmed eyes bugging out from under the wriggling brows. “Are you with me or agin’ me, lass?”

  “Don’t be daft, man. I’m here, aren’t I? As harebrained as this is, I’m with you, Angus. You know I have a soft spot for you,” she cooed, batting her lashes. Then she made a little face. “It happens to be in my head.”

  “You’re as good as a MacLout, girl!” he declared and kissed her full on the mouth, a wet, rubbery slobber of a kiss.

  Sheena booted him one in the shin and wiggled away. “Don’t insult the Camerons,” she ordered, a wicked little smile playing at her lips. The li
ght in her blue eyes danced. “I’ve got to go now. I’ll call you tonight then, Angus. See if you can’t keep Ox out of the phone box.”

  No one had ever seen Ox Ferguson use a telephone.

  “Why you won’t get a phone in your own house is beyond me,” she muttered.

  “Why pay all the time for a thing I use too little?” Angus said.

  “Watch you don’t ask him to buy you a pint, Ox,” Sheena said, walking away. “He’s liable to trade you in for a pet stone.”

  Ox grunted.

  Rita Shaughnessy poked her head around the corner and looked both ways down the hall of the resplendent, clubby Brown’s Hotel. Founded in 1837 by Lord Byron’s valet, the place was like a grand country house smack in the heart of London. Wood paneling, grandfather clocks, antiques everywhere.

  All was quiet on the fifth floor. The tourists had either taken themselves off for a full day of double-decker buses and taunting the guards at Buckingham Palace, or they had yet to rouse after a night of theater. Shushing herself, Rita rolled the rattling room service cart around the corner and down the hall, toward room 512. Anticipation and champagne bubbled in her bloodstream, and she resisted the urge to laugh out loud. Hot damn, this was fun.

  Thank you, Phillip Bates, God of the Geek Boys. You know not what you do.

  “And all the better that you don’t, darling,” she murmured.

  She took a swig from one of two bottles in the silver ice bucket, dabbed delicately at her freshly painted lips with a linen napkin, and took a deep breath. She hadn’t felt this good in God knew how long. And she wasn’t even on anything. A paycheck, a tournament, and a guy all in one week. High on life.

  “It’s just great being me,” she said under her breath, grinning.

  Still, she wasn’t content to just let things happen. Seize the day. Sprague was liable to overthink her invitation and give himself an iceberg-size case of cold feet. Time for a full frontal Rita offensive.

  She knocked at the door and stepped to the side. “Room service!”

  There was a beat of silence. She stayed back against the door, out of peephole range.

  “There must be some mistake. I haven’t ordered anything.”

  “Compliments of Mr. Bates,” she said, affecting a British accent that wasn’t half bad.

  “Oh. Oh . . . okay. Just a minute. I’m not dressed.”

  Rita felt herself light up like a slot machine hitting the jackpot. If her luck held this well through the weekend, she’d be acing every hole on the course. “That’s perfectly all right, sir,” she said. “If you would be so kind as to just open the door, I’ll slip the tray in and leave you to your privacy.”

  Damn I’m good. She’d even remembered to pronounce it the way the Brits did: privacy with a short i. You might have thought the people who invented the damned language would have more respect for phonics.

  The lock rattled in the door, and it opened an inch. Rita eased the cart back with her foot and pulled the door open, staying behind it.

  “Thank you, sir. I’ll have it in in a jiff.”

  Sprague disappeared into the suite, just a glimpse of a thick terrycloth robe and a pair of bare, hairy legs with the well-developed calves of a man who spent a lot of time walking up and down the hills of a golf course.

  “And so will you, if I’m lucky.”

  Sprague wheeled around at the sultry change of voice, knowing he probably looked like a cartoon character with his eyes bugging out and his jaw dropping to the floor. Rita Shaughnessy stood dead center in the sitting room of his suite, wearing a waiter’s jacket, an apron, and a pair of stiletto heels. The smile that curled up the corners of her mouth was pure trouble, outdone only by the devilish light in her eyes.

  She slipped the jacket back off her shoulders and dropped it.

  “I believe you were going to have me for lunch, Mr. Sprague. And damned if it isn’t high noon.”

  Alfonzo Zamora took the key out of his pants pocket and looked at the number engraved at the top. It was nothing but a blur. If it turned out that that bellman had slipped him the wrong key, he was going to find the guy and beat him to death with a nine-iron. For what he’d bribed the little Limey, he should have gotten Rita Shaughnessy naked on a silver platter.

  Rita. Now there was something he didn’t have any trouble seeing. Best piece of tail in golf spikes, and he didn’t even mind so much that half the guys on the PGA Tour could vouch for the truth of the statement. He’d only had her once, and he’d had a marriage or two since, but he remembered that night with more clarity than a pint of tequila should have allowed. Hot, hot, habañero hot.

  Zamora hitched up his pants and tried to smooth the travel wrinkles out of his lucky yellow shirt. He hadn’t taken time to shower after checking in, the need to find a bribable bellman a higher priority. But he had helped himself to the aftershave on the silver tray in the bathroom of the suite, slapping his face with it and rubbing a little under his arms. He sniffed the air now like a bull scenting for a cow, pleased with himself and his prospects.

  Now, if he could just rekindle the flame with ol’ Rita before she decided to have her way with the rube from East Buttcrack . . . How the hell had that guy gotten an invitation from Bates?

  The door to 522 had been left slightly ajar. Could have saved himself three hundred bucks. Oh well. He pocketed the key. If things went well, he’d be needing it again.

  Music was playing in the background as Zamora slipped into the room. Some kind of classical shit. Soothing — if you could stand it. The kind of music a woman might listen to while taking a bubble bath in the fancy tub of a swank hotel.

  The fantasy spun itself fast-forward in his head: Rita up to her ears in bubbles; blond hair pinned up but messy; sticking one long, tanned leg up out of the foam to run a fat sponge along her shin; a bottle of champagne in a cooler at her elbow. That was enough to make his putter shudder.

  But he could hear her rummaging around in the bedroom, and the fantasy bubble burst. Maybe later . . .

  “Eh, querida,” he called in his most sexy voice. “What do you say we play a little hole in one? I remember just how you like it.”

  She had her back to him as he entered the room. Digging around in her suitcase. Or maybe it was her golf bag. Either way, she was ass-end to him, which would have been a fine view if his eyes hadn’t been so fucked up.

  Then she came around, swinging something that connected with the side of his head like Tiger Woods spanking a tee shot three hundred yards, and he didn’t see anything at all anymore.

  “Well, let me tell you, honey,” Rita said, collapsing back against the mountain of feather pillows. “I don’t know about you saving the world, but you sure as hell rocked mine. You been saving up or what?”

  Sprague thought he might have blushed, if his circulatory system had still been capable of pushing blood to his face. He lay flat on his back, one arm hanging off the bed. He was pretty sure he was paralyzed. He’d never thought of sex as an Olympic gymnastics event.

  “Wow,” was the only thing he could think to say.

  Rita tilted over onto one elbow and looked down at him. “That’s the third wow you’ve given me, country boy. Not that I don’t appreciate it, but you’re sounding like a broken record.”

  “I think I may have had a stroke.”

  She chuckled wickedly, leaned down, and bit his earlobe then traced the tip of her tongue around the shell of his ear. “You’ve got a stroke all right. If you golf like you fuck, honey, the PGA needs to clear the decks and make way for a star.”

  Memories of his brief, excruciating tour experience flashed across Sprague’s mind like a dying comet. A cold fist tightened in the pit of his stomach. “I don’t know what the hell I’m doing here.”

  “You seemed to know a few minutes ago.”

  “No. I mean at this tournament. Why would Phillip Bates invite me?”

  “He admired you as an amateur. He had a vision about you. He drew your name out of a hat. What’s the d
ifference? You’re here.” She snuggled into him and nipped his shoulder. “And I’m here. That’s the important thing.”

  Sprague paid her no mind, except to flinch when she bit. “I see Doc’s hand in all of this. He’s manipulating my life from beyond the grave.”

  “Doc? A people doc? Did he happen to leave you any ’script paper? Because I happen to know a pharmacist . . .”

  “It’s like a hero journey,” Sprague said, staring at the ceiling. “Like in mythology. Like Obi-Wan Kenobi and Luke Skywalker in Star Wars.”

  “Star Wars.” Rita sat up, pulling up the sheet with her to wipe the sweat from her brow. She raked her hair back out of her face and contemplated a shower as she glanced at the clock. “You know what was wrong with that movie? Luke was a wimp. Harrison Ford should have been the star of that movie. He can pilot my starship anytime he wants.”

  She could tell Sprague wasn’t listening. He had apparently gone into some kind of catatonic trance where he was seeing himself singlehandedly taking on the forces of evil. Rita bent over and softly kissed his cheek. He was a sweet boy, even if he was one dot short of Yahtzee.

  “Maybe ol’ Doc forgot to tell you you’re Superman,” she said, slipping from the bed. “Time for me to go, Clark Kent. Cinderella has a date with the dressmaker.”

  “Nothing,” Edna Zuckerman said on a stiff little sigh. She smiled for the benefit of the other travelers in the dining car, bent over with her hand on Gorman’s shoulder, and kissed his cheek. “I went through cars six and seven both, and I’ve nothing to show for it but a pinched bottom. Can you believe the nerve of some people?”

  Gorman’s focus was on the nerve of Le Tour. Given his record, the man had to suspect he was being followed. And yet he had supposedly taken one of the most public forms of transportation available. Why not slip into the country via backroads? Or by boat?