Courting Murder

by Bill Hopkins

phone. The screen showed the texter’s identification: UNKNOWN. The message was clear: 2 DWN UR NXT.

  “Real funny, Neal.” He turned the phone off. “You’re a real asshole.”

  His exercise in meditative thinking resulted in zero. The next choice, he knew, was booze or wait for Tina. He reached for the bottle, feeling the weight of the liquor, caressing the smoothness of the glass, touching the highs and lows of the embossed label. Rosswell drew the bottle from the paper bag and lifted it up to the light and marveled at the pure color. The imagined taste of the amber liquid, burning down his throat in blessed relief, blossomed in his mouth.

  He checked his watch. Nearly 10:00 PM. Too late to get drunk. And if he did get drunk, Tina would find him. She would leave him if she found him drunk.

  Roswell stood. He yawned, stretched, and aimed his exhausted body for the bedroom. What better place to wait for Tina than in bed?

  A gunshot shattered his kitchen window, fragmenting the bottle. Tiny shards of glass and a pungent spray covered the table. The noise deafened him momentarily, quickly replaced by ringing in his ears. Who the hell was shooting at him?

  Although the scene lasted but a few seconds, in his mind it stretched out like a bad dream that lasted hours. For another second, Rosswell stood frozen. His brain kicked his butt into gear with the knowledge that the next slug would burst through his brain, rendering it useless. He would be dead. He dove for the floor.

  Rosswell collected the presence of mind to scrabble to the switch, reach a shaking arm upward, and cut the lights in the kitchen. Once the room was plunged into darkness, he tore the sword from the wall, and sprinted down the hallway, flipping off every light. When he gained the living room, he turned off all the lights. Thus far, there’d been one gunshot. He clutched the sword and waited by the front door.

  Breathing so hard he felt like his lungs had inflated to twice their normal size, he used one hand to reach for his cellphone. Patting him- self down twice, he realized he’d left the damned thing in the kitchen. He groped for and found his landline phone. His sweaty hand closed around the handset and pressed it to his ear. It was dead. From the living room window, he spotted the phone company’s pedestal next to the street. It held the copper snaking to the house. The pedestal had been knocked over, wires strewn everywhere.

  Someone rushed through the front door. “Rosswell!”

  Rosswell heard a noise outside, at the back of his house. He grasped the sword, hefting it above his head in a warrior’s stance and whirled around to see who might be coming in the back door, all the while realizing that bringing a sword to a gun fight wasn’t a good idea.

  Rosswell yelled, “Come on, you son of a bitch. Bring it on.”

  Vowing to slice and dice anybody who came after him, he danced around the living room, slashing at the air with the sword. No one would dare attack him when he had that sword.

  Another gunshot exploded. Then another. Each shot produced a strobe-light flash.

  Before the blackness reached out and grabbed him, he turned around and glimpsed Tina in the living room, standing just inside the front doorway, reaching for him before she crashed to the floor.

   Chapter Eight

  Monday night into Tuesday morning

  “Judge, can you hear me?”

  Rosswell squinted through one eye. What he saw through the haze didn’t encourage him. Neal leaned over him, their faces nearly touching. Rosswell moaned, expecting the sword to plunge through his heart at any moment. Neal’s hair brushed Rosswell’s cheek, causing a glacial shudder down his spine. Death hovered close. Instead of the sword, maybe Neal had found Rosswell’s .38 and was fixing to shoot him.

  The smell surrounding Rosswell conjured a memory of a fireworks display. Was he at a Fourth of July celebration? The taste in his mouth felt as if he’d been chewing pennies. There was another smell. An unpleasant smell. Blood.

  There could be only one rational conclusion about what was happening. “I’ve died and gone to hell.”

  “No, you’re not dead,” Neal said. “Keep your mouth shut.”

  “If I’m not dead, why do I have to keep my mouth shut?” He groaned. “I’m hurt bad.”

  “Keep your mouth shut.”

  It hurt him to talk, but Rosswell had to know. “Why the hell did you shoot me?” And, he wondered to himself, Are you going to shoot me again? “You destroyed a fifth of Glenfiddich 18-year-old single malt Scotch.” He hated giving Neal any ideas, such as that he’d been considering drinking the whole bottle. “Tell me before I die why you shot me.”

  “Ross, shut up.”

  “My name. . . .” He found it difficult to think. “It’s not Ross. It’s. . . .”

  “You haven’t been shot, so shut up,” Neal ordered.

  Rosswell’s insides burned. Someone must’ve stuck a red-hot poker through him. Neal was lying. He’d either been shot or was having one hell of an acid reflux attack. No one had ever shot him when he’d served with the Marines in Iraq. He had to wait until he returned to the safety of his hometown before he caught a round.

  “Rosswell,” a second voice said, “open your other eye.”

  That surprised Rosswell. He thought both eyes were open. With difficulty, he opened his other eye. The view, although still blurry, cleared with an agonizing slowness. His glasses were still on his face. How was that possible?

  “Who are you?” Rosswell asked. “Are you Neal’s accomplice?”

  “It’s Frizz. Your neighbor called 911 when he heard the first gunshot.”

  “Neal shot me.”

  “No, Neal didn’t shoot you.”

  “Who shot me?” Rosswell’s throat grew dry and his voice croaked.

  Frizz said, “Neal and I were driving around, talking about the murders. We were practically in front of your house when we got the call.”

  Rosswell said, “You were planning my murder?” Neal still worked on Rosswell, doing something Rosswell couldn’t see.

  “Don’t talk, Ross.”

  “Can you see me?” Frizz asked.

  He held up three fingers. “How many fingers am I holding up?”

  “Is that your foot?”

  “No, Judge, it’s my hand.”

  “For Christ’s sake,” Neal said. “Don’t ask him any more questions. He’s too stupid.”

  Rosswell felt Neal’s hands on him. That wasn’t a good sign. Neal’s hands felt like a glob of rubbery worms crawling over his flesh. In the distance, Rosswell heard the electronic warbling of a siren. There must’ve been a fire somewhere.

  “Where am I?” Rosswell twisted his head from side to side.

  Neal said, “You’re in your house. You cut yourself with your sword.”

  “You shot me,” Rosswell said. “Don’t lie to me, you son of a bitch.”

  Neal said, “I’ve stabilized you and we’re waiting for the ambulance.”

  Rosswell said, “The . . . what?”

  Frizz said, “You must’ve slipped and cut your arm with your sword. An ambulance is taking you to the hospital.”

  Then the real horror of the situation walloped into Rosswell’s gut. He wrenched his head around, looking left and right, up and down. “Where’s Tina?”

  Neal and Frizz glanced at each other for a millisecond, but Rosswell wasn’t so far gone that he didn’t catch it.

  His hands rubbed across the floor, finding a sticky puddle. His blood. And Tina’s blood. Mixed. It had to be. There was too much blood to come from one wound.

  Rosswell said. “Is she all right?”

  Rosswell smelled booze. Scotch, to be exact. Had he passed out at a party?

  “The EMTs are coming,” Neal said.

  “Are they going to pronounce me dead?” he said.

  The EMTs sprinted into the house and Rosswell passed out again.

  In his stupor, Rosswell heard a blonde woman tell him, “Do any- thing you want.” He lifted a hand. She said, “Don’t mess with the makeup.” She poured herself a large single malt Scotch.
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  “Take your clothes off,” he heard himself say.

  The blonde said, “Take them off slow or fast?”

  Was it Tina talking to him? The woman’s face filled with fog. He tried to answer, but couldn’t speak.

  The blonde changed into a dark-complexioned child with black hair. A little girl. Rosswell screamed at her to run away, but she didn’t move.

  The blonde reappeared and slipped a dirty spoon to the little girl. The little girl turned around once and showed Rosswell the spoon, now clean. He spun the girl around and discovered that she clutched the spoon, dirty again, behind her back. The back of the girl’s head was bloody, blown away.

  Rosswell screamed again. “Get the hell out of here. Don’t you understand plain English?” He screamed and screamed.

  The child lost all color, transfiguring into a ghost. Then Rosswell’s father appeared, standing over him with a whip, ready to thrash him. Rosswell glimpsed his mother, hovering behind his father, crying. Rosswell reached around his father, laboring to touch his mother and convince her that everything was all right. He would make sure that nothing hurt her ever again.

  Everyone vanished. A curtain fell in his brain and everything faded to black.

  Rosswell awoke sweating from the nightmare. He found a tube stuck in his right arm and his left arm patched with a mile’s worth of bandages. The windows had the slatted blinds open. Sunlight poured through the clean glass onto his bed and made a striped pattern on his crisp white covers. A nurse, a gray-haired Sumo wrestler of a woman, as broad as she was tall, fussed with the inverted plastic bag hooked to a tube dripping liquid into his veins. He was certain it held a