by D R Lowrey
Annie had an ally, though not necessarily a helpful one. While Mother might draw the shooter’s fire, she might also endanger Annie with errant shots. Furthermore, she might be resupplying the shooter with fresh ammo.
Having closed the range to an uncomfortable degree, Annie shifted the wheelchair into forward mode to increase the distance. After giving the shooter a chance to run for it, she’d make another charge if needed. That was the plan, but a beep from somewhere on the wheelchair implied the plan might need an adjustment. A red light flashing on the tiny control panel indicated the battery had fallen to recharge level.
Annie’s worst nightmare was to become an unarmed, stationary target in the open field. She piloted the chair forward with the hope of making it out of potshot range. As the chair whirred forward at a glacial pace, golf balls sailed past in both directions, two striking her chair without inflicting damage. The battery became her least critical problem when the chair bottomed on a small rise. One powered wheel rotated uselessly in the air while the other threatened to spin her into a dangerous position.
If this were not bad enough, Annie glanced houseward to see Mother hopping awkwardly in a failed attempt to avoid a ball strike to her hip. Annie put her head on a swivel, alternating views of the shooter in one direction and her mother in the other. Her mother was down, but seemingly from nowhere, a small padded figure shuffled out to administer aid. Perhaps the first responders had finally arrived.
Annie’s attention returned to her own predicament when a ball clanked hard off the right wheel of the chair. The arrival direction indicated the shooter was on the move. She tried to realign the chair for a proper blocking angle but could not. The worst-case scenario had arrived. Left unarmed and immobile in an open field, her situation hovered between serious and grave.
She abandoned the chair as a sitting device and prepared to use it as a shield for the expected barrage. Behind it she cowered. Annie hated cowering. Cowering felt like helplessness, and helplessness made Annie want to destroy things.
Annie, the former marine, couldn’t live with the idea of her last check being cashed by a golf ball while cowering behind a wheelchair. If she had to go down, she would go down standing and swinging. Maybe when the others saw her at full gonzo, they’d be inspired to join the fun. Otherwise, she’d likely go down in a hailstorm of golf balls.
However, before she stood to make her final stand, a warbly voice arose from the gravesite. “Cam. Cam. Over here, Cam.”
While Annie was not the one being paged, she nevertheless turned to see who was doing the paging. Rising from the grave was a droopy-headed figure in a chartreuse pinstriped suit. Across the way, the shooter lowered her weapon and trotted toward the limply resurrected figure.
“Eel?” yelled out Cam. “Is that you?”
The dead man rose to a full “standing” position, albeit with an extra set of arms coming out from below the armpits. One of the extra arms wrapped around the dead man’s waist while the other held the head upright via the chin.
“Don’t shoot, Cam. It’s me.”
Annie recognized Stanley’s voice. A standing dead man needs its support system, and this one had Stanley.
Cam also recognized the voice, judging by her transition from a jog to a plod. “What do you think you’re doing, Stanley?” she asked, as if he’d been caught pilfering the foot-wine.
“Let’s go home, Cam. Take me back to Cam-A-Lot. I know you came to save me, but violence is not the way. It would be best for everyone if we just gave ourselves up and let justice run its course. I might get some jail time, you might get probation, but all this mayhem will just make it worse. Eventually, I’ll get out, and then we’ll have the life we’ve always dreamed of.”
“Waiting for Prince Charmless to get out of prison is not the life I dreamed of, Stanley. If you hadn’t noticed, I’m not the waiting type. Now, where’s the map? I want that map.”
Before Stanley could reply, a clatter commenced from the direction of the garage. The clatter was soon joined by an unholy choir of rattles, sputters, and clangs. The source of the racket soon revealed itself. But revealing oneself is not the same as explaining oneself.
All the various players in what had been a pitched battle halted their desperate activities to gawk at what they saw. Even the cadaver in the chartreuse pinstripes appeared to be stroking his chin, albeit with someone else’s arm.
****
The little excavator had no on-board sound system, leaving Nigel to improvise. “Da-ta-da-da-dum, Da-ta-da-da-DUM,” and so on and so forth, he sang in a strong voice. That’s Wagner’s “Ride of the Valkyries” for those who don’t read music. He could barely hear himself over the noise of the clanky contraption, but he imagined his adversaries cowering in shock and awe.
Not that he’d be able see their reactions or much of anything else. The excavator, in its native state, had sadly lacked protection from would-be assassins not named the sun. The original cockpit infrastructure, composed of four metal poles supporting a tiny roof, needed stout reinforcement to stand against a team of determined golf-ball riflemen. In a brief few minutes, he had transformed the skeletal vehicle into an armored fighting machine by enclosing the cockpit with a motley collection of signs, boards, and scrap metal. The trade-off for this increased pilot protection was a near-total reduction in his field of vision. The supposed advantage of sight as a battlefield attribute was about to be tested.
With his view of the world reduced to a single knothole in a piece of scrap fencing, Nigel went into battle with a distinct lack of situational awareness. Vital information, like where the hell the enemy was, eluded him in the opening moments and improved only sporadically thereafter. Nevertheless, he pushed the machine forward at maximum speed, pursuing a zigzag pattern in hopes of catching a glimpse of the enemy through his knothole.
To an outside observer, the mobile scrapheap appeared to be driven by a blind drunkard, a notion reinforced when the excavator plowed into the only object in the whole field, Abuelita’s wheelchair. In a race of straight-line speed, the excavator and wheelchair would have been well matched. In a contest of brawn, the excavator held a slight advantage. Nigel brought the scoop down on the chair several times, crumpling it to a degree, before discovering wide-open territory to the obstacle’s left. Or right if he’d chosen to go that way. After overcoming this inconvenience, the search for something to confront continued.
Had one observed the movements of Nigel’s excavator from the air, it would have resembled that of a cockroach after being sprayed with dollar store bug killer. Energetic but aimless about describes it. Nevertheless, he eventually located the shooter through his knothole. He had hoped the shooters, once confronted with the futility of war against a mechanized opponent, would cast aside their weapons and reach for the stars. Should they refuse, he would have no choice but to run them down. How to make them stand still while he did so was an issue he’d not yet addressed.
This very point became more than a hypothetical when the sniper demonstrated an unfortunate tendency to move. Every move by the assassin required Nigel to resume a scattershot ramble across the field until he’d once again realigned his knothole with the peppy killer. Exasperating hardly described the situation. Of course, in his makeshift cocoon, Nigel could play this game all day as long as his fuel held out. Suddenly, fuel level was something he wished he’d checked before leaving the garage.
It was during one of these recalibrating rambles that Nigel heard a loud pop, sending him two feet into the vertical.
****
The first appearance of Nigel’s improvised tank had been met with, for lack of a better word, befuddlement. Of course, impressions were more nuanced than that. Annie was also concerned, the Killer was also dismissive, Stanley was also annoyed, and on and on. But all were befuddled.
Annie had abandoned her wheelchair shield to avoid being crushed by Nigel’s tankette. She’d had little choice but to adopt the moving excavator as cover though his erratic driv
ing meant she’d also had to walk around like a drunk person following a lost snake.
The negotiations between Cam and Stanley had immediately ceased so Cam could assess the threat level of a creeping junkpile. After a few watchful moments, Cam regarded the junkyard curiosity not as a threat, but as a nuisance. Mostly because of the noise. With occasional sidesteps to confuse the mechanical monstrosity, she resumed the discussion with Stanley.
“I want the map.”
“What?” replied Stanley, struggling to hear above the clattering din.
Annoyed and impatient, Cam lifted the rifle to her shoulder and fired at the excavator’s makeshift shack. The golf ball struck center-panel of what had once been a wooden sign proclaiming, “Golf Shop.”
****
Nigel’s work in the construction field prior to his latest creation had primarily involved building structures out of playing cards. It was this experience that he had applied to his most recent tank project. The weakness of such a background became nakedly obvious when that “Golf Shop” sign split down its long axis. As it turned out, the sign had served as a kind of supporting structure. Once split, the sign folded, relaxing its obligation to support its neighbors. The neighbors, in turn, relaxed their obligations to support their neighbors, and so forth and so on, until no board, plank, or panel supported any other. Gravity took care of the rest.
Nigel had seen the concept play out many times, but never from the inside. The work of ten minutes had disintegrated in seconds. A discomforting breeze wafted across his neck.
Before the slats had even hit the ground, Cam had reloaded and retargeted her weapon at what appeared to be a spot right between Nigel’s eyes. “Turn that damn thing off,” she said, while looking down the barrel of her weapon. “We’re having a discussion here.”
With the uprising quelled, Cam turned back toward the grave and yelled, “The map, Stanley. Where is it?”
“What map? I don’t know what you’re talking about,” said Stanley from behind Eel. “Whatever is mine is yours, but please stop going on about this map. I’ve already confessed. They know I killed this guy,” he said, thumbing the chest of his human shield. “They know it was an accident and that I acted in a jealous rage.”
“You confessed? To who?”
“The police.”
“When did you go to the police?”
“The police are here.”
“Here?! Where?”
“In the ditch.”
“The police have been in the ditch this whole time? While I’ve been shooting up the place? What kind of police are they? This town deserves better than that.”
“I’ll take that up with the city council when I get out of prison,” said Stanley. “But for now, you need to lay down that gun. As things stand, given your celebrity status, I’m sure you’d get off with community service and a stint in rehab. Also, your music sales would spike, and you’d get a lucrative book deal.”
Stanley looked exhausted. He wasn’t used to holding up a dead man by the armpits, nor speaking in paragraphs. After a breath he continued, “But none of that can happen if you keep going on about this silly map. No one knows what the devil you’re talking about.”
“If you don’t know,” said Cam, “then you better send out that Mr. Sandoval. He knows. Send him out, or I’m going to start plugging people.”
“If I knew about a map, I’d tell you,” said a muffled voice from deep within the grave. “I don’t know about any map.”
“In that case, the only question is who gets it first,” said Cam.
Nigel found the conversation frightfully confusing. He’d left the house this morning as the prime murder suspect and the possessor of the map. Now Stanley was confessing to the murder, and Cam wanted the map. It was all double Dutch to him. Double Dutch, yes, but double Dutch that worked in his favor. Not having a monopoly on murder charges had to be a good thing. And he had already recovered the treasure.
The most immediate problem at hand was the gun aimed at his forehead. Nigel’s frontal lobes, averse to high-velocity golf balls entering their space, made a persuasive argument that if Cam wanted a used-up treasure map, then she should have it.
“I have the map,” yelled Nigel. “I’m the one you want.”
All eyes turned to Nigel sitting in the tiny excavator surrounded by golf course-related debris.
“And just where did you get the map?” asked a skeptical Cam.
“Off a body,” said Nigel.
“So, you got it off of Eel, did you? How long have you had it?”
“Since yesterday,” said Nigel, which was not a stretch since he’d drawn the Sandoval map yesterday from memory. If Cam wanted to believe it came from Eel, so be it.
“Put the map here,” she said, indicating a spot a few yards in front of her. “Lay it right there on the ground and then get back into your little Tonka toy. And don’t nobody else move,” she said, swinging her gun around.
Slithering off the excavator with hands in air, Nigel duckwalked toward Cam and kneeled, as one does in the presence of a golden-haired goddess. He slowly pulled the map out of his trouser pocket and laid down the offering a safe distance from her manicured toes before crab-walking his way back to the security of his excavator.
She picked up the map. “Okay, everybody, I’m going to ease on out of here. Try to follow, and it’ll be the last thing you do. I suggest saving your stupidity for something important.”
“Cam,” yelled out Stanley, “don’t you want me to come along?”
“No, Stanley. Forget about Cam Logan. She’s a figment of your imagination. If you’re lonely, get yourself a dog.”
Cam Logan backed away into the woods.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
Grumps Gets His Chance
Now that the danger was over and the shooter had left the scene, law enforcement arrived in great numbers, spreading themselves about the place like a horde of beetles. Nigel found their effectiveness questionable, but they did a fair job of not bumping into each other while telling the residents they could rest easy.
“We’ll have the perpetrator apprehended in no time,” said each and every cop to each and every non-cop.
If nothing else, the non-cops had to be heartened by the sheer multitude. How many it took to apprehend a woman in the woods, who knew? More than three, obviously.
The home’s exhausted occupants and guests, nursing their physical aches and emotional wounds, arranged themselves haphazardly in the atrium. The detective paced the room like a cat whose mouse has disappeared into a wall. Mr. Sandoval stared into space; perhaps, after the morning’s revelations, reworking the puzzle of his lost years. His rediscovered colleague, Jack Watt, appeared surprisingly placid, even pleased. Had he been a pipe smoker, he’d have been smoking one now. Grumps sat compacted into his seat like a man trying to boil his own blood. Stefanie rubbed her forehead while her husband, across the room, glowered as if a chunk of smelly cheese had lodged in his nostril. Mrs. Sandoval needed a drink because she didn’t have one.
Annie held an ice bag on her mother’s bruised thigh, marveling at how fast the ice melted. Had she lifted the veil from her mother’s face, she’d have seen a woman feverishly plotting to get uneven. Her rescue of the wretched Abuelita had placed her in a splendidly exploitable position over her rival hellmate. But then, Abuelita, evil sorceress that she was, had turned the tables with her act of craven selflessness. Taking advantage of a moment of weakness, the old crone had perpetrated a blatant act of vindictive goodwill. The veiled one could not let this cruel act of kindness go unchallenged.
Abuelita, wrapped in a suit of comforters and memory foam, must have been feeling a sense of relief. Her “deliverance” by that loathsome veiled creature would have led to repugnant expectations of gratitude, which, fortunately, she had neutralized by her own “rescue” of the hooded hellhound. How the invalid Abuelita had found the energy to cushion herself up and pull that lizard queen to safety was anybody’s guess.
The person that might venture more than a guess was Esmerelda, who had experience in the black arts. Essie, however, was strangely subdued. Probably because she was reading people’s auras and disturbed by what she read.
Lumbering into this muted assemblage were two tired cops to see the pacing detective.
“You got her?” asked the detective.
“Afraid not. We’ve combed the entire area. Not a sign of her.”
“She must be around. Female country singers don’t just vanish into thin air. If you’ve secured the perimeter, then she must be hiding on the premises. Look high and low. I want her found, understand?” said the detective, pointing to a spot on the ground where he wanted her placed.
The two sweaty cops did not offer the detective a salute or a “Yes, sir.” Rather, they exchanged knowing looks. The same knowing looks Nigel had seen aunts exchange on various occasions, usually accompanied by a pat on the head.
“Well, listen to you,” said cop one, while scouring the detective with an abrasive eye. “Haven’t we gone and gotten ourselves all high and mighty now that you’re Mr. Detective? Funny how I don’t recall you scaring up that many lost country singers in your patrolling days.”
“Okay, okay, enough of that,” said the detective.
“Perhaps Your Lordship would like me to perform a jig in his honor,” said the cop, adopting the role of silly manservant to his Royal Highness, the Detective. “And when I have completed my jig, may I have the honor of delivering Your Lordship a fresh crumpet?”
“That’s enough.”
“Let me assure His Majesty, the royal crumpet shall be delivered with the utmost care, in a manner befitting food destined for thine royal mouth with nary a single instance of contamination from yon scallywag’s nasty bits.”
