“Very observant, Mr. Hacker,” he said in his stentorian tones. “You should consider joining me in my next venture. I could use a quick-witted person who’s an excellent judge of character like yourself.”
“So Jocko sought you out and tried to make a deal?” I pressed.
“Of course,” Durkee nodded. “I told him I couldn’t be totally sure of his, umm, character until he fulfilled a certain request I had. I called it his quest.”
I stared at him for a long moment. “So his test was to knock me off ?”
“Yes,” Durkee said. “I am sorry about that. But I had heard that you were becoming quite inquisitive. I suppose it’s the nature of your business. But I believe in nipping problems in the bud.”
“You had heard?” I said. I thought a moment. “Oh, wait. Ricky Hamilton, the agent. He told you about my call. He must be part of your scam.”
“Indeed,” Durkee said.
“And then Jocko tried to run me off the road, which he did, but I didn’t get killed.”
“No,” Durkee said, sounding a bit sad. “Young Mr. Moore failed. Which meant I was forced to negate the arrangement we had worked out.”
“I’ll bet Jocko didn’t like that,” I said.
“No,” Durkee said nodding. “He was rather upset. Threatened me with bodily harm, if I recall. Said he had some connected friends.”
“Scared the hell out of you, right?”
“Not exactly,” he smiled at me. “Irritated me briefly. But I dealt with my irritation.”
“Guess you did,” I said. “But that was probably a mistake. It got the cops off Bert Lewis’ ass and made them start thinking about other possibilities. And there you were.”
“I know,” he said, shrugging his shoulders. “But it couldn’t be helped, now, could it? Just goes to show, there are problems and stresses in all walks of life.”
“Which is why we turn to the Lord,” I said. He looked at me with flat, emotionless eyes.
“So true,” he said. “So true.”
Chapter 26
THERE WAS NOT MUCH else to say and so we sat in silence for a long time. Durkee was apparently content to wait until dark to try and make his escape. After first killing me. Of that, I had no doubt. I knew too much. I was strangely calm, for a man about to meet his doom. Oh, I tried various escape scenarios out in my mind while I sat there, and abandoned them all. Durkee’s little .38, always held at the ready, left me little room for action.
Perhaps Bobby Jones was right. Maybe Providence has pre- written the ending in that big ledger in the sky, and we mortals are just playing out the string, coming eventually to our predetermined finale. Perhaps that is why I felt so calm, so uncaring, so levelheaded. Whether it was Providence or Ed Durkee’s .38 muzzle, there wasn’t much I could do, anyway.
Outside, the golf tournament proceeded in crescendo and diminution of sound, a symphony of cheers and moans, silences and great masses of noise. I listened for a while, trying to guess who was doing what. And as I realized that I was missing the ending of this golf tournament, being stopped from doing my job... that fact began to irritate me more than the impending loss of my life. I suddenly cared not a whit about somehow escaping Ed Durkee’s clutches and bringing him to justice. All I wanted was to be out in that crowd, in God’s own hot sunshine, watching young men battle wind and grass and sand and their own nerves in a simple yet ridiculous game. I needed to be out there, and the fact that I couldn’t be made me angry.
The telephone rang abruptly, the shrill sound breaking the silence in the room and causing my heart, at least, to jump up. I started to move to answer it, but Durkee’s sudden movement with his gun stopped me.
“Let it ring,” he said calmly.
We listened to the sound of the ringing. Twelve times. Then the phone went dead.
“Probably Lieutenant Ravenel,” I said, feigning calm. “We were supposed to meet in the press room at two.”
“He’ll figure you’re out on the golf course watching the action,” he said. “We’ll wait.”
“Well,” I said, thinking quickly. “I did tell Suzy Williams that I wasn’t feeling well and was going to come home to rest a bit. So he might come out to check on me.”
Durkee pursed his lips in thought. I could see that this in- vented information had him thinking. What if ? Worst case? Is it true? All the angles were passing through his head.
“Well,” he said, making his decision. “Just to be on the safe side, I suppose I must move up my departure a bit. Let’s go.” He stood up and motioned me to my feet with a wave of the gun. I kept a poker face while inside I was exulting. Finally some action! And a chance.
“Where to, boss?” I asked dully.
“I have a car over on the far side of the course,” he said. He pulled off his black preacher’s sport coat and draped it over the arm holding his gun. “We shall walk quietly to it,” he said. “We shall nod nicely to any people we happen to encounter. We shall not say a word, nor make any rash moves. I would really hate to put a hole into this jacket. It’s practically brand new and you know how penurious we clergy can be.”
I laughed. “Bullshit,” I said. “How much have you actually scammed so far? A million? Two?”
“Oh, not as much as two million,” he said somewhat sadly. “But it was going quite nicely. Of course, as John D. Rockefeller once said, ‘enough money is just a bit more than I have.’”
“Too bad it’s all down the toilet,” I said as we walked down to the patio door which opened onto the golf course side.
“Yes,” he said. “It is a shame. However, I have enough salted away to tide me over for a while. And I think I deserve a nice rest, perhaps in the Caribbean.”
I tried to decide if he was telling me this to leave a false trail or if he didn’t care if I knew where he was going, since he planned to plant a bullet in my head. We walked out of my villa, into a wall of humidity, stepped through a grove of pines and out into the sunshine next to the twelfth fairway.
The tournament was almost at an end. There was an elec- tronic scoreboard behind the twelfth green which showed a dogfight was going on. Kite, Wadkins and Paul Azinger were tied for the lead at twelve under. Azinger was playing the last hole, with Kite and Wadkins right behind.
But here on twelve, the course was now deserted. All the fans had followed the last groups in toward the clubhouse, vy- ing for a good viewing position on the heaped-up mounds that surrounded the last two greens. Or they had headed off for the bars in the air-conditioned tents clustered around the clubhouse, where they could watch the tournament’s end from the perfect vantage point of a television screen.
We walked down the fairway towards the tee. Durkee kept a step behind me, his coat draped casually over his arm. We were just two stragglers, heading home after a day of watching golf. Ho-hum.
We crossed over the tee and cut through a narrow wood, bypassing the tenth and thirteenth holes, which ran side by side. We walked behind the thirteenth and headed for fourteen. The hole where John Turnbull had died. The hole that crossed the marsh and the tidal creek.
Behind the thirteenth green there was a TV tower. Up on the platform high above the green, the cameraman was wrapping up for the day. He was winding some wires around his arm in a coil. He had put a tarpaulin on the railing, and was getting ready to drape it over the camera. Durkee coughed a soft warning at me as we strolled past the tower. I tried to send some mental signals to the guy as we walked past, but he just fiddled with the controls on his monitor and totally ignored us.
Once away from the tower, I stopped and turned. “Where to?” I asked.
“Across the bridge,” Durkee said, pointing with his free hand. “My car’s in the woods over there.” He was pointing at a dark glade away to the left, across the graceful, sweeping wooden bridge.
A loud cheer suddenly split the air, a sound like a thunderclap coming from the last hole. Somebody had rolled in a birdie and taken the lead. There is no mistaking the sound of a late-round birdie at a golf
tournament. I noticed another electronic score- board facing slightly away from us, and I started to swerve over to the left so I could get a glimpse of it, see who had made the putt. I felt a warning nudge from Durkee at my back.
“I need to know who’s winning,” I said. “Gotta write my story later.”
“No you don’t,” he said ominously. Now I knew. Durkee had plans for me, and they didn’t include living to learn the final results. I was just another loose end he had to clear up.
“Fuck you,” I said.
“And also with you,” he intoned.
We walked up the path past the long, elevated tee and approached the bridge. The wind off the ocean was beginning to freshen and the flag on the pin across the marsh was blowing straight out. The long fronds of marsh grass moved in graceful waves. The tide was coming in, and I could hear the burbling of the tidal stream running over the rocks and riprap below the bridge. I suddenly realized, with a cold, hard certainty, that I would never make it across the bridge. Once over the incoming stream of the rising tide, a muffled shot or even a sharp blow to the head would send me tumbling into the dark and turgid waters. I would sink quickly out of sight and be carried off into the labyrinth of the marsh where the stream curved and split and disappeared into hundreds of deadends. My body would be hidden from sight by the chest-high sawgrass. Eventually, after the crabs and sand sharks and other scavengers had done with me, there might be a few bones left to bleach away in the harsh and unrelenting Carolina sun. Neat, clean and deadly efficient.
While some might call it kismet or karma, fate or the humor of the Gods, I later felt it was good old American capitalism and the Rainbird Corporation that saved my life. Bohicket Country Club is a resort course, and tomorrow was just another business day. A full slate of tee times had undoubtedly been booked and the grounds crew, having just spent the previous six months working hard to get the course into pristine condition for the PGA Tour, was now working hard to get the course ready for resort play. There were paying guests coming.
And one of the most important things they needed to do was to get some water onto the golf course. For the tournament, they had tried to keep the fairways and greens hard and fast. In the hot and humid conditions, some parts of the course had turned dangerously brown. The course was thirsty. Normally, they water at night when nobody’s around to get wet. But with the danger of losing all the grass on the greens, the superintendent had decided to crank up the irrigation system a few hours early. Thanks to his computerized controls, he was able to turn on the sprinklers on those parts of the course that couldn’t be seen from the clubhouse. Like out on fourteen.
Durkee and I were about to step onto the wooden planks of the bridge when there was a sudden loud whooshing sound. The black plastic sprinkler heads popped out of their buried holes and began to rain cold water on us both.
With an instinct for survival I didn’t know I had, I whirled on Durkee as he flinched at the spray of water. I kicked hard at his gun hand. The weapon went flying across the tee box.
He was quick in recovery. He straightened, gave me a half-shove, half-punch that sent me stumbling backwards, and dashed for the gun. I jumped after him. He got there first and was bringing the pistol up when I closed my hands on his arm and pushed down. There was a loud report as the gun fired and the bullet plowed harmlessly into the earth. Continuing to struggle, the two of us danced a deadly duet in the cold mist of the tee.
The gun fired once more before I heard a dull thud and felt Ed Durkee go stone cold lifeless. His hand let go of the gun as he flopped down hard onto the soggy grass, face down. I looked up into the hard, smiling face of Bart Ravenel, holding his own gun by the barrel end, and looking for all the world like he had just dropped a forty-footer on the seventy-second hole of the U.S. Open to win the title.
“Took you long enough,” I gasped.
Chapter 27
TOM KITE WON. HE WAS the one who had made the last-hole birdie to nip both Wadkins and Azinger by one shot. He had made three excellent shots on the par-five last, leaving his approach some eleven feet below the hole. He told us later in the interview room that those are the easiest ones to make. He had been putting well all day, all week in fact. And while the tournament was riding on that birdie putt, a miss wouldn’t have been a tragedy on the scale of King Lear, he said. A miss would only have meant a playoff, another chance at the next hole.
Standing over that putt, Kite told us, he felt calm and sure and confident. “I played very well all week,” he had said. “I was proud of myself for getting into position to win. That’s what it’s all about. You work hard, you keep after it, don’t give up ... and on the last hole, you’ve got the chance to win. That’s what it’s all about.”
He never mentioned money. Or his agent. Or the long-term ramifications of his win. Cynics would say that’s because Tom Kite wins enough every year not to have to worry about all that other stuff. I disagree. I think it’s because he plays the game not for the money, but for the opportunity to stand on the eighteenth green with a putt for all the marbles. For the satisfaction of perseverance. For the pride of accomplishment. Those are the right reasons to play the game.
In any case, Kite made his putt and won. I didn’t see it, of course, but Woody Johnson told me later it was one of those strokes that leaves the face of the putter and never deviates a centimeter from the line to the middle of the cup. Kite raised his arms in triumph, Woody told me, long before the ball disappeared from view.
Ravenel told me, once they had packed Ed Durkee off to jail, that they had found Durkee’s getaway car early in the afternoon, tracing it back to him. Ravenel said he figured Durkee was hiding out somewhere nearby waiting to make his break, so he put the car under surveillance.
Earlier in the day, he had run Durkee through his crime computer network. It had spit out a long list of priors and wanted-fors and aliases, and Ravenel had suddenly put a few things together.
So after assigning men to cover all the exits in and out of the resort and the golf course, and with the car buttoned down, Ravenel had spent the afternoon in the TV trailer, watching the pictures from all thirteen cameras. He informed the director of what was going on and asked that when they weren’t being used to follow the action, the cameras sweep the crowd, looking for Durkee.
The guy on the tower at thirteen had seen us walking down the twelfth fairway. Scared the hell out of him when we came right past his tower. He told us later he was sure Durkee was going to shoot him, and there’s no place to hide on a TV tower.
Ravenel had quickly called in his gendarmes to close in, and he himself made a mad dash across the golf course. It was the humor of the Gods, or the Rainbird Corp., which had set off the sprinklers at an opportune time, and that gave Ravenel time to get to us.
My editor back in Boston, that one-testicled bastard, grudgingly gave me that hole back on the front page once I called in the story, although it was still below the fold. But he also made me write an entirely different piece for the sports pages. Just about the golf tournament.
“The sports page is for games,” he lectured me. “There’s enough death and murder elsewhere in the newspaper. Tell ‘em who won, how they did it. Paint a picture full of drama and heroics and the bold strokes of fortune. It’s the drama the readers like...those tests of manhood where somebody wins and somebody loses and nobody dies. It’s only a game, a game of make-believe. That’s what they want from us...serious examination of stuff that isn’t serious at all.”
He was right, of course. After the dual buzz of excitement over Tom Kite’s last-hole victory and the defrocking of Brother Ed, the eternal road show that is the PGA Tour packed up its tents in the lengthening shades of a Carolina afternoon and prepared to move on to the next stop. Jean MacGarrity decided to take Becky Turnbull up on her offer and headed for California, promising to call and maybe meet me in Dallas when the Tour landed there in another month. Bert Lewis left town quietly to try and pull his life together again. Tom Kite left
town proud of himself and a couple hundred thousand dollars richer. Wadkins and Azinger and the other 70 golfers who didn’t win made polite comments about getting lucky next time, packed up their clubs and headed off. Next week: another city, another tournament, another serious exercise in non-serious matters. Winners and losers. High drama. All make-believe. And nobody dies.
And I went with them. Gladly and willingly. Because, God help me, I love it.
Don't miss out!
Click the button below and you can sign up to receive emails whenever James Y. Bartlett publishes a new book. There's no charge and no obligation.
https://books2read.com/r/B-A-TZVG-RUUU
Connecting independent readers to independent writers.
About the Author
JAMES Y. BARTLETT is an award-winning writer, editor and author. A former editor at Golfweek and other publications, his work has appeared in dozens of magazines, including Esquire, Bon Appetit, Forbes FYI, and Hemispheres. He has published six nonfiction books about golf and is the author of the Hacker Golf Mystery series, published by Yeoman House Books. He lives in Rhode Island.
Death is a Two-Stroke Penalty Page 17