***
Elson awoke with a snort. He’d fallen asleep. He glanced out the window. The rain had slackened off to a steady drizzle. He was not crazy about playing golf in the rain, but knew it would take a monsoon to cancel opening day.
Elson frowned. On wet grass, he would probably be allowed to “lift, clean and place” his ball on the fairway. That would negate his main advantage and strategy. Which was to cheat. He always improved his lie when no one was looking. Now everybody could do it!
He turned back to the TV screen. The images were now very blurry but he could still see that the Germans were still on the move. They seemed to have a hell of a lot more tanks. Elson laughed. Probably my double vision. The Krauts would have won the war with that much armor. But they were raising a lot of dust and the huts the Wehrmacht soldiers were torching seemed too dilapidated for France. The Nazis were apparently invading Russia. Elson looked at his watch. He had to bring it almost to his nose to read it. It was after midnight. He’d been out for almost an hour. I should go to bed, he thought. We tee off at 8 AM. Clyde is picking me up at 7:30.
But he wanted a nightcap julep. He lifted the lid off the ice bucket. There was just enough ice for another drink. His hand swept the tray for the ice pick. Where the hell was it? Must have dropped it.
Elson began pulling himself up so he could lean down to see where it had fallen when he noticed that he couldn’t see the TV screen anymore. He looked up and was startled to see two figures, dressed all in white, standing between him and the screen. He almost screamed in fright at the ghostly apparition. For a moment he believed he might be dreaming, or hallucinating. But the sounds of gunfire and martial music emanating from the TV behind the two spectral figures convinced him he wasn’t.
“Who are you? What do you want?”
He closed his right eye and squinted. It was a trick he used on the highway. What he lost in depth perception he made up in missed trees.
The two specters merged into one and moved toward him. He sat up and leaned forward and emitted a harsh laugh.
“What the hell are you doing here? Jesus, you scared the hell out of me.”
He was no longer afraid, and despite his inebriation Colver Elson felt an erotic stirring. The feeling was more intense for the forbidden memories it recalled. He stretched out his arms.
“Come here,” he said huskily.
The eight-inch ice pick entered his open eye and only stopped traveling when its hilt jammed into the bone that surrounded the socket. The solid steel shaft pierced his eyeball and then plunged five more inches into his brain. The first inch blinded the eye and caused excruciating pain. Now he did scream, and then was silent, as the damage caused by the next two inches of steel paralyzed him, although his other eyelid reflexively popped open. He slumped back in the chair as the ice pick severed more billions of neurons and insured that he would never leave the chair alive. Blood shot out of the ravaged eye and sprayed over the ice pick handle, as well as the hand that wielded it. The hand let go of the hilt, almost reluctantly.
The gruesome wound was not necessarily fatal. The human brain needs more oxygen to function than any other organ and is thus well supplied with blood, much of which now traveled down the shaft and ran off the end in a steady, crimson stream. Elson might have survived had quick and expert medical attention been available. In 1940 an assassin sent by Stalin to Mexico plunged an ice pick into Leon Trotsky’s head. Trotsky was lucid enough to tell his bodyguards to keep the assassin alive for questioning, but died the next day in the hospital from brain injuries and blood loss. Modern medicine might have saved Trotsky, although he probably no longer would have been a rival that Stalin feared.
But nothing would save Colver Elson. With its nerve pathways to his damaged brain severed, his diaphragm was now only working spasmodically. He would suffocate or bleed out, whichever came first.
Ironically, the ice pick had cured his double vision. With his one operative eye he could see quite clearly now.
Unable to move, speak or even blink, Elson watched his life drip off the end of the ice pick in living, or, rather, dying color.
***
If you would like to read all of THE ELSON LEGACY, you can use this link:
THE ELSON LEGACY
And we hope you will try all the author’s thrillers and mysteries available on Amazon or his website, www.lawrencedemaria.com. He can be contacted at [email protected], and welcomes your comments.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Lawrence De Maria began his career as a general interest reporter (winning an Associated Press award for his crime reporting) and eventually became a Pulitzer-nominated senior editor and financial writer The New York Times, where he wrote hundreds of stories and features, often on Page 1. After he left the Times, De Maria became an Executive Director at Forbes. Following a stint in corporate America – during which he helped uncover the $7 billion Allen Stanford Ponzi scheme and was widely quoted in the national media – he returned to journalism as Managing Editor of the Naples Sun Times, a Florida weekly, until its sale to the Scripps chain in 2007. Since then, he has been a full-time fiction writer. De Maria is on the board of directors of the Washington Independent Review of Books, where, when he’s not killing people in his novels, he writes features, reviews and a column.
***
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GUNNER (ALTON RHODE MYSTERIES Book 5) Page 19