Some Like It Shot

by Elise Sax

  “What did you say?”

  “He must have hit the remote control.”

  “So, he could have been anywhere,” I breathed. “You’re right, John. This was planned.”

  John focused on the crossbow, again. “You have to hand it to the killer. This took a lot of planning. He set this up without getting noticed before the contest. He rigged it so it could be controlled from far away. He aimed it exactly at Danny, knowing that he would win.”

  I turned around to face John. “That’s the thing,” I said. “It wasn’t aimed at Danny. Danny and Chris Trist exchanged seats right before the contest started. The crossbow missed its target. The murderer wanted to kill Chris, not Danny.”

  Chapter 9

  “You’re drunk, and I’m drunk, and I’m just exactly drunk enough to tell you anything you want to know… Just ask me. Go ahead, ask me.”

  –Dashiell Hammett

  John called the forensic team to handle the crossbow. After they arrived, John and I walked to the Sea Breeze Inn to talk to Chris, who we now knew was the intended victim.

  The press was no longer hanging around the outside of the inn, and most of the Chris fans had left, leaving only a handful of diehards. Amy was one of them. She was sitting on a trashcan in front of the inn, and she was surprised to see us.

  “What’s happening? I heard you killed a man,” Amy said.

  “That was exaggerated.”

  “Oh. I figured you wouldn’t run over a man with a car. You don’t have a car,” she said.

  “Is Chris still in town?” I asked, changing the subject.

  “Yes. I haven’t gotten the chance to talk to him yet, but I’ve sent him my resume and three letters of recommendation. One is from Jason, the local florist. Did you know that Chris loves flowers? He sends them regularly to his mother. He’s very sweet.”

  “You know a lot about him,” I noted.

  “Everything. Ever since his first commercial for oatmeal eight years ago. I’ve seen every movie he’s made at least three times. He used to make movies more often, but he’s been more discerning the past couple of years.”

  “Maybe we could use your expertise,” I suggested to Amy while catching John’s eye.

  “I’m not sure that’s a good idea,” he said.

  “What’s happening?” Amy asked, interested. “Is it about my Chris?”

  “It looks like he was the real target at the taco-eating contest,” I whispered.

  Amy clutched at her chest, as if I had punched her. “Someone tried to murder my Chris?” she breathed. “Say it isn’t so.”

  “I really don’t think this is a good idea,” John said.

  He was probably right, but I didn’t know anything about movie stars, and John knew even less. “I think it’s a good idea. Amy, would you mind helping us talk to Chris?”

  “Would I…would I…me…Chris?” she sputtered.

  John rolled his eyes. I took Amy’s hand, and we all walked into the inn. Once we were in the elevator, John pushed the button for the penthouse, and Amy giggled and hopped on her heels. When we got to the top floor, we walked to the end of the hall, and just as John was about to knock on the door, another door on the floor opened, and a man stuck his head out.

  “I thought I heard someone out here,” he said.

  Amy sucked in air through her front teeth. “That’s Rick Graves. He’s Chris’s manager,” she said. “He’s been in Chris’s house. He drove Chris to the hospital when he had appendicitis. Chris is his son’s godfather.”

  “See?” I said to John. “Amy’s a valuable source.”

  John showed Rick Graves his badge. “Police, sir. We’re here to ask Mr. Trist some questions.”

  “Again? I don’t like you harassing my client. He needs to focus on other things. He told you what he knows. He already canceled a superhero movie. I don’t want anything disrupting the Kennedy picture.”

  Chris’s door opened, and Chris’s head popped out. “What’s going on?”

  “Chris, it’s me, again. The volunteer captain. Remember me?” Amy asked. Her chest was rising and falling fast, and I worried that she was going to have a heart attack.

  “Sure!” Chris said, smiling. “You’re Judy, right?”

  “Yes!” Amy said. John rolled his eyes.

  “They were just leaving, Chris,” his manager said.

  “No, we’re not,” I said. “We have something important to tell Chris.”

  “Of course. Come on in,” Chris said.

  He opened the door wide for us. Amy grabbed onto my arm and dug her fingers into the flesh. “We’re going into his room,” she whispered to me. “I hear it has an angora couch and a diamond-encrusted phone in the bathroom.”

  Rick Graves and Chris sat on the couch, which wasn’t angora. Amy snooped around the suite, surreptitiously taking pictures with her phone.

  “We have some bad news,” I said. Chris looked from me to John.

  “What she said,” John said.

  “We found the murder weapon that killed Danny Avocado,” I continued.

  “Aren’t you the waitress at the soup restaurant?” Chris asked.

  “She also solves murders,” Amy answered for me. “The police go to her to solve crimes.”

  “That’s true,” John said and winked at me.

  “What does the murder weapon have to do with me?” Chris asked, still addressing John. I guessed he wasn’t convinced that a soup restaurant waitress had any authority.

  John must have caught this slight because his eyes narrowed, and his mouth set in a tight line. “The murder weapon was aimed at you.”

  “What’re you talking about?” Rick asked, concerned.

  “It was aimed at Chris,” I said.

  “What?” Amy screeched from behind the suite’s mirrored bar. “Someone tried to kill my Chris? Who would do that? Why? Why? Oh, Chris!” she cried and ran to him, kneeling on the floor by his side.

  “If it was aimed at me, it missed,” Chris said. “This doesn’t make any sense.”

  John and I stared at him, giving him time for the cogs in his brain to click into place and remind him about his seating arrangement at the contest. I could see the moment the memory flashed through his mind. His face brightened and then quickly fell into dread and fear.

  “What?” he asked. “It was aimed at me? I changed seats with Danny. Oh my God.”

  Chris stood and started to pace the room. “Oh my God. Oh my God,” he repeated over and over.

  “How sure are you about this?” Rick asked me.

  “Sure,” I said.

  Rick stopped Chris’s pacing, clamping his hands on Chris’s arms. “It’ll be all right. We’ll fix this. I won’t let her hurt you.”

  “Her?” I asked. “Who’s her? Do you know who did this?”

  “I’m out of here,” Chris said. “I’m not going to sit around this place and get killed.”

  “Wait a second. You can’t go anywhere until we fix this. Who’s trying to kill, you Mr. Trist?” John asked.

  “Kim Barry,” Rick answered. “Chris’s stalker.”

  Chris took out his cellphone and showed it to John. “I scanned some of her letters,” he said. “Look at this.”

  John showed it to me, and Amy hopped up and came over to look, too. We read the letters together. The handwriting was strangely familiar. Kim Barry was a lunatic. She was obsessed with Chris, and the lack of reciprocity had driven her crazy and driven her to hate him with a passion even greater than her original passion for him.

  “Wow, get a life, Kim,” Amy said, after she finished reading. “How could a woman get like this? I mean, why does she think that Chris needs to love her? He’s an important person. She’s nobody. Geez, talk about delusion.”

  “Now that we know who’s trying to kill you, it’ll be easy to arrest her,” I told Chris.

  “Ditto,” John said.

  “I’m not staying here. I’m not going to be a sitting duck,” Chris insisted.

  �
��There will be a Sea Breeze officer assigned to your safety,” John said.

  “If you stay, we can draw her out and capture her before she tries to kill you again,” I said. Wow, I sounded just like Dashiell Hammett. I could have walked out of a Raymond Chandler novel.

  John and Amy looked at me approvingly. Rick looked convinced. Chris, not so much.

  “Okay,” Chris said, finally, surprising me. “I’ll give you two more days. Then, I’m hiring a bunch of Israelis to take with me on set for the Kennedy movie.”

  “That sounds fair to me,” Rick said.

  Two more days. Could I find the woman in two days? I didn’t even know if she was still in town. She could have run off after her failed murder. She could be in Brazil. She could be in Kazakhstan. It was an impossible situation.

  “No problem. I said. “We’ll take care of it by the time you leave in two days.”

  “And I can stay here with you to help you,” Amy offered Chris.

  “Not necessary,” he said.

  “Your happiness is necessary,” Amy countered. “I can make you happy.”

  Rick and Chris exchanged a look. “Of course you could, honey,” Rick said. “We’ll keep that in mind and call you if we need you.”

  “You will?” Amy asked, her whole body lifting with the optimism of the deluded.

  “Of course!”

  The next day in the middle of the lunch rush, I sent a thank you to the universe for Mouse and Bud because I wouldn’t have been able to handle the amount of business without them. The pothead business was down because of a rash of hair loss that couldn’t be explained by mere sewage. The deliveries were steady. But the normal townspeople traffic was off the charts.

  It wasn’t that the soups had gotten better. It wasn’t that the locals’ kitchens were all being remodeled and they needed to eat out. It was all about Chris, the seagulls, and the snakes.

  Word had spread like wildfire that Chris had been the intended murder victim. Now, the entire town of Sea Breeze felt it needed to get together at the soup shop for lunch in order to satisfy their curiosity with a communal rumination over Chris and his impending doom.

  “I don’t care if he dies,” Irving said. “I don’t trust a man with no body fat. It’s like he’s never had a beer in his life. How am I supposed to trust a man like that?”

  “You don’t have to trust him. You just have to look at him,” Doris said.

  “Don’t you dare say anything bad about my Chris,” Amy admonished Irving. She had been making the rounds, giving detailed descriptions of Chris’s trials and tribulations. She had spilled the beans about his stalker, which was a good thing because now we had hundreds of people looking for the same woman.

  “I don’t care about your stupid movie star,” a man told Amy when she moved on to another table. “I ran in here because a seagull was after me.”

  “I came in because three snakes chased me two blocks,” a man at another table announced.

  “Me too!” a few people echoed.

  “Chris Trist is much more important than a small snake problem,” Amy countered.

  “Small?” Doris asked. “Phoebe Gladwell was cornered by a whole pack of them. She escaped by the skin of her teeth, and now she’s living in a lockdown facility in San Diego.”

  “Today’s soups are sweet & sour cabbage, miso, French onion, and beef & bacon,” I told Eddie Acid. He was sitting at one of the stacks tables, reading The Fountainhead.

  “Normally I’d order the sweet & sour cabbage, but Ayn Rand would disapprove about liking both sweet and sour. So, I’m going to go for the miso. There’s no contradictions in miso.” He held up the book. “And I got this here.”

  “I’ll add it to the bill.”

  “They’re right about the snakes,” Eddie said. “They’re worse than the seagulls. It’s like the apocalypse out there. Who cares if Chris dies? We’re all going to die, and now we’re probably going to die by either a snake bite or we’ll get taken off by killer seagulls to their killer seagull lair.”

  “A killer seagull lair would suck,” I agreed.

  I left to fill his order. The rest of the shop’s customers had organized itself into three groups. There was the Chris group, the snakes group, and the seagulls group, but the Chris and seagull talk had exhausted itself, so they joined the snakes group.

  “We can’t live like this,” someone said in a panic.

  “I tried shooting them, but those suckers move quick,” someone else said.

  “They almost outran me, and I ran track in high school,” someone from the Chris group shouted to the snakes group.

  “You haven’t been in high school for forty years,” someone from the snakes group told him.

  “You don’t lose track and field legs,” he insisted. “Once you have track and field legs, you always have track and field legs.”

  “The point is that we need to get rid of these snakes!” a woman yelled.

  “I’ve got a grenade,” a man offered.

  “I know what we need to do. We need to hire Quint. Quint will kill the snakes,” someone said.

  “Yes, Quint is the one, but he scares me,” a woman said.

  There was a general murmuring about Quint and his skill at ridding towns of snakes. Everyone seemed to agree that he was the one to solve their problems.

  The door opened, and Augustus from the dispensary came in. Instead of his normal sales pitch and free sample giveaway, he skulked to the back of the shop with his head hung low and hovered by the back counter. I served Eddie and met Augustus in the back of the shop while everyone else was still talking about Quint, the snake killer.

  “May I help you?” I asked Augustus.

  “No. I’m just looking around,” he said, softly.

  “Are you hungry? Today’s soups are sweet & sour cabbage, miso, French onion, and beef & bacon.”

  “Sure. Why not? I’ll take the French onion. You got anything to go with it?”

  “Mouse made toasted baguette croutons with garlic butter. It goes well with the French onion. And we still have some of Auntie Ida’s cheese Danish, if you want that for dessert with coffee.”

  “Sure. Okay,” he said, staring at the door.

  I turned around to see what he was looking at. Through the window, I could see Frances talking to two men who were wearing pinstripe suits and fedora hats. I left to fill Augustus’s order, and after I served him, I looked out the window again. Frances was still talking to the two guys in hats when Bob Hayashi strolled past.

  I gasped. Bob Hayashi. I had never managed to interview him. Now, Chris’s stalker was the number one suspect, but I didn’t like to keep a stone unturned.

  “Hey Bud, I’m going out for a little while,” I announced. I took my apron off and ran out of the shop so I wouldn’t lose Bob.

  Chapter 10

  “Fear is incomplete knowledge.”

  –Agatha Christie

  Frances waved at me when I got outside, but I didn’t have time to say hello, because nothing was going to stop me from talking to Bob. He was already a couple of blocks ahead of me, and I broke into a jog to catch up to him.

  A seagull was in flight above me, and it screeched a couple times. “Don’t you dare!” I called to it. It descended until it was flying just above my head. “Don’t you dare!” I yelled, swatting at it as I kept running to catch up to Bob.

  The seagull dodged and weaved, expertly avoiding my hand. Battling the seagull slowed my pace, and Bob was getting away from me. The seagull screeched, again.

  “I will beat your ass!” I threatened. It didn’t seem to care. It continued to fly above me, as if it was taunting me. I squinted at it. “Is that my hair?” I asked, horrified. Clutched in its talons were a few strands of my long, wavy black hair.

  The bird eyed me, like he was out for revenge. I wouldn’t have minded some revenge, too.

  “I will beat your ass!” I yelled, again, but my threat seemed to egg it on instead of scare him. It squawked again, and it
dove at my head.

  I was a goner. Nothing was going to save me. The seagull was going to attack me, and this time, my hair was never going to grow back. It would probably get my nose, too. And no matter what John said about it, I knew I wouldn’t be attractive without a nose.

  I stopped in my tracks and cowered, raising my arms up to deflect the seagull, as it got set to attack. But it was too fast and strong for my weak attempts at self-preservation. There was no saving me.

  “Go away, bird,” I heard. The voice was deep and gravelly and coming from right next to me. I heard the seagull flap its wings, and I looked up. The seagull was keeping its position over my head, but it wasn’t attacking me. Instead, it was in a standoff with an older man wearing a Vietnam-era military jacket.

  “Save yourself,” I told the man, standing next to me. “He’s vicious. I think he’s their leader.”

  “He’s got lifeless eyes, black eyes. Like a doll’s eyes,” the man growled. “Be gone with ‘ya, you mangy bucket of feathers.”

  The seagull squawked, and just when I thought it was going to attack the man, it flew off, screeching as it flew away.

  “How did you do that?” I asked.

  “Quint’s the name,” he said, his voice sounding like he had razor blades lodged in his throat. “Y’all got a bad bird, here. I’ll catch that bird for you, but it ain’t going to be easy.” He bowed slightly to me and left in the opposite direction.

  “Huh?” I asked, but he was already gone.

  I watched him walk away for a minute in wonder and confusion before I remembered that I was chasing Bob. I broke into a run in my sandals. I could barely make out Bob as he continued walking blocks away from me up Sea Breeze Avenue. I ran full out, trying to catch up to him. I managed to make up quite a bit of distance when I saw Bob do something that shocked me to my toes. Something I never expected.

  I stopped running and watched Bob make a quick left.

  Up the cobblestone road to my house.

  Nobody went up the cobblestone road unless they wanted to see the Bright family, and most of them changed their minds the moment their foot touched the enchanted property line.