WALKABOUT -Taking a Mulligan (1-5)

 Walkabout

Taking a Mulligan

Wayne Baker writing as Austin Jett

Walkabout – Taking a Mulligan is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and should not be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or locations or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental. Copyright @ 2015 by Wayne A. Baker, a.k.a. Austin Jett. All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book, or portions thereof, in any form. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, downloaded or transmitted in any form by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, except brief extracts for the purpose of review, without the express written permission of the publisher and copyright owner. The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book via the Internet or via any other means without the permission of the publisher and author is illegal and punishable by law.

1

1:51 a.m. Saturday

Page, Indiana

The man lay with his back against the ground, choking on broken teeth and blood. He threw up both hands in an effort to protect his head as his opponent, now sitting astraddle his chest, delivered blows upon him, one after another.

He could feel himself slipping away, the world spinning round. Faces. Laughter. Loud music. Cheers and jeers. In the corner of his eye he spotted a jagged rock, his only hope of ending the merciless beating. As he groped for the rock with his fingertips, desperately trying to bring it closer, his opponent hammered his unprotected eye again and again.

Finally able to grasp the rock, he brought it up in one swift motion, connecting solidly against the side of his opponent’s head. And the fight was over.

2

“That was epic!”

“You get that all on camera?” one of them asked. “It’ll go viral!”

“I don’t know . . . it was pretty graphic. Not so sure we want to post that.”

“Pussy.”

One of the group knelt next to the loser, took a long look and said, “Dude, I think this guy’s dead!”

Quiet.

“You sure?”

“No.”

“Put your fingers against his neck, feel for a pulse,” someone suggested.

“I’m not touching him. You do it.”

“Not gonna happen.”

“We better call 911.”

“No!”

“We got to.”

“No. We’ll all go to jail. I don’t know about you, but I’m not throwing my life away for the likes of . . . this. I start college in the fall.”

The winner struggled to his feet, the rock still in his hand, and staggered toward the group gathered around the man on the ground. “Where’s my money?”

They all exchanged glances. Finally, one of them said, “We ain’t payin’ you shit.”

“You told us you’d pay the winner a hundred bucks and the loser fifty,” the winner said. “I want my money. His, too.”

“You killed a man, dude. We got it all on video. You could go away for a real long time.”

“I ain’t afraid of goin’ back to prison. At least in there I get fed three squares, got me a place to sleep. Out here I eat out of a dumpster, sleep under a bridge. So GIVE me my GODDAMN MONEY!” He looked around at the group. “You better cough it up, ‘less you want me to tell the cops what you done.”

“What we did? Dude, you’re the one killed him.”

“We can’t let anyone find out what happened here tonight.”

“We didn’t do anything wrong.”

“We paid a couple of homeless guys to make a bum fight video. One of them died.”

“We didn’t pay him to kill the guy. He did that on his own.”

“I didn’t have no choice! He was gonna kill me!”

“We can’t just leave the body here. We gotta call this in.”

“There might be another way. My dad  . . .  he runs the funeral home.”

“What can he do about this?”

“Nothing. But I work there. In the crematory.” The words hung in the air. “This guy was homeless. Nobody’s gonna be looking for him. Nobody cares. We can make this go away. Like it never happened. It’s easy.”

One of them pointed to the bloody survivor. “What about him?”

3

 Ty Hamilton

I sat in my SUV with the engine off and windows down, listening to the sounds of the night. Traffic, tree frogs, the occasional barking of a dog, distant rumbling thunder. A light breeze caressed my face like a gentle lover. In the eastern sky, the full moon peered through the branches of the trees along the property boundary.

I had just awakened from a brief nap—something strictly forbidden for a third shift security officer, but other than me, who would know? A check of my watch showed 2:14 a.m. I’d been asleep for nearly an hour and a half.  Hopefully no one had taken advantage of the opportunity to sneak past me and steal any equipment or copper wiring from the property.

I got out of the SUV, stretched and farted, adjusted my nuts. Somewhere in the distance, I could hear voices. Loud music, people laughing, talking loudly, whooping every now and then. Rednecks drinking beer into the wee hours. Nothing out of the ordinary. They’d be at it again tomorrow night, too. Just like every weekend.

Overhead, a corporate jet lined up for the approach to the Page County Airport. Off to the west of its approach path I could see lightning, and the thunder was louder now than before. I waited for the next flash and counted, One thousand one, one thousand two, and so on until I heard the thunder at one thousand twelve. The storm was just a bit over two miles away. The trees began to sway as the wind picked up. If I wanted to stay dry, I had to get started making my rounds right away.

I took my cane and searchlight over to the golf cart parked a few feet away. The wind picked up a bit as I began moving forward in the cart to patrol the perimeter of Lanter Construction’s fifteen-acre lot about three miles west of town and consisted of a rather large metal building which served as both office and maintenance shop and row upon row of construction equipment such as drills, pumps, earth-moving equipment, trucks and trailers loaded with tools. All these sat outside and were very tempting for those who preferred thievery to working an honest job for an honest wage. My job was to prevent the thieves from running off with anything valuable. It was basically boring, and the pay sucked.

My life wasn’t always this way. For years, I had lived anything but an ordinary life. I was a pilot. I traveled a lot, met people from all around the world. Made a ton of money. People respected me.

Forrest Gump said, “Life is like a box of chocolates.” True that, but I always thought of it as being like the TV game show, Let’s Make a Deal. You start out with one thing. Maybe it’s good. Maybe it’s not. But, then you have choices that you have to make without much time to formulate an intelligent decision. All the while, people are yelling at you. “Door Number 1! Door Number 3! No! Keep what you have!” And so, you take a gamble. Picking what’s behind one of those doors is a gamble. So is choosing to stay where you are. That’s what life is. A series of choices, with lots of people who don’t have to live with the consequences telling you what you should do. Sometimes you make informed decisions, others you go with your gut. In the end, every decision you make—from what to have for breakfast to when and where you get your hair cut—they are all gambles, and they each send your life spinning off in a new direction.

Like I said, I had it pretty good. Then, one day, for reasons that seemed good at the time, I gave up what I had and chose Door Number 1—the early retirement package Polaris Air was offering to those of us over the age of fifty-five. I thought it would be nice to sleep at night, like a normal person, at home in my own bed. It seemed like a good idea at the time.

My downward spiral began about six months later. The novelty of not going to work had worn off, replaced by the reality of living on a pension which amounted to only a fraction of what I previously had been earning. I was driving myself crazy, sitting around home all the time. I gained fifty pounds. The pension didn’t go as far as I thought it would. Now, just to stretch it a bit, I was working again, but for little more than minimum wage. I’d give anything for a chance to go back in time, erase my mistake, and sit in the captain’s seat of a Boeing 767 again.

This particular night was like all the others. Boring as hell. I passed time by scanning the lot with my searchlight, trying to find the black cat that prowled the premises. He was getting better at evading me. In the beginning, I had been able to find him just about every night, sometimes two, or even three times. Now, it had been a week, and no sign of the cat.

4

Ty Hamilton

Just as I was about to accelerate forward on the golf cart, I heard something crashing through the brush at the north end of the property. I figured it was probably a deer, maybe two or three of them. They’d likely been grazing in the alfalfa field and spooked by a pack of dogs. But there was no barking, no yapping of coyotes. Even the redneck party had quieted down. There were, however, the sounds of approaching all-terrain vehicles racing across the field, toward Lanter Construction’s property. Toward me. I made out two sets of headlamps intermittently blinking through the brush.

Poachers? I hate those bastards. They go out in the middle of the night shining high intensity beams on deer, usually out of season, and gun them down. No matter if it is a doe that might be pregnant or with a young fawn at her side. They don’t care. I started to reach for my cell phone to make the call to 911, then hesitated. What if they weren’t really thieves or poachers?

I’d already made an emergency call my second night on the job, when I’d heard a gunshot nearby. I had debated the need to call it in. But I was, after all, a security guard. What if they were to find a dead body with a gunshot wound lying along the side of the road the next day? Wouldn’t they ask me if I’d seen or heard anything? No, nothing out of the ordinary, Lieutenant. Unless you count the gunshot. Of course I had to call it in.

5

Ty Hamilton

A deputy from the Page County Sheriff Department came out to see me. Officer Smiley, who, despite her name, wore such a stern expression that I supposed if she ever did actually smile, her face would crack. From the time I called, it took her sixteen minutes to get there, and she’d seemed somewhat annoyed that I had bothered her for no good reason.

“Sir, you’re out in the country,” she had said before leaving the site. “People shoot their guns out here all the time.”

With that in mind I obviously didn’t want to cry “Wolf!” too many times. And, if it took sixteen minutes to respond tonight, and these guys were in fact poachers, it would be too late to stop them. The deer could be slaughtered long before a deputy arrived on scene.

I decided to try something else. I aimed my high-intensity searchlight in the direction of the four-wheelers. The brush was too thick to get a good look at whoever was there, but they did shut off their engines and turn off the lights. It occurred to me that I was a good target as long as I kept my searchlight on, so I turned it off, and against my better judgment, moved toward them, staying in the shadows.

When I first started the job, I admit that I had in fact been a bit jumpy. I was concerned for my own safety. The property was out in the middle of nowhere, poorly lit, and had been hit a couple times in previous weeks. I was alone and unarmed. If they came back again, would they be armed? Would they hesitate to eliminate the only witness? What might happen if I stumbled upon them while making my rounds? No doubt these thoughts all had something to do with my calling 911 with regards to the gunshot.

By now though, after so many weeks of boredom, I welcomed any break from the routine. I was quite certain that most of the locals knew of my presence on the site. They should. From the first night on, I always made a point of shining my search light all around the property, checking the fences, aiming it across the lot in the general direction of the highway any time a car drove by. I wouldn’t shine it directly at the cars. Didn’t want to piss anyone off or create a traffic hazard. I’d just shine it so that they could see that someone was out there, patrolling the property. I figured that in a small town, people would talk at the diner and the barbershop. Word would get out. Lanter Construction had hired a security guard. And the employees, whom the owners of Lanter Construction considered the most likely suspects in the break-ins, certainly already knew that I was there. They would see me when they arrived for work every morning.

It had been four months now, and since that 911 call on the second night, the only action had been the game of hide-and-seek with the cat. I sure hoped it wasn’t dead. Likely even he had gotten bored and gone on to other things. So, as you can imagine, the thought of scaring off poachers was a welcome relief, in my way of thinking.

The crashing sounds had stopped.  There were no more signs of deer anywhere, or of any activity on the other side of the fence. The lightning was more frequent, the thunder louder and only four seconds between the two. I took shelter under an oak tree. Not the smartest thing to do in a thunderstorm, but it did keep the rain off me.