WALKABOUT - Taking a Mulligan (66 - 70)

66

Ty Hamilton

In the corner of my eye, near the end of the woodpile, I spotted movement. A snow-white cat. And there was my hope of not being spotted. I crawled quietly toward it, reached out to scoop it up and toss it toward the oncoming dog. The creature, suddenly aware of my presence, wheeled around to face me. I froze in position. Not a white cat. An albino skunk.

I’d had no previous experience with skunks, so I had no idea if it was smarter for me to remain quiet, and allow the skunk to go on its way, or to turn tail and run. I elected the latter. I sprung to my feet, and began running, just as a car alarm began honking on the street.

67

The man behind the woodpile began running full steam toward the potting shed with the dog not far behind. Soon, the prowler would be spotted, the police called, and tonight’s fact-finding mission would be a bust. Struck by inspiration, the sheriff reached into his pocket, withdrew a key fob and pressed the panic button.The neighbor, distracted by the honking car alarm, turned toward the street, away from the retreating prowler.

Sheriff Bridges stepped out from around the corner of the shed, stuck out an arm, clotheslining the intruder, knocking him on his ass. The sheriff was on top of him in an instant, rolling him over and cuffing him. There was something familiar about this fellow.

68

Ty Hamilton

I ran for all I was worth, away from the skunk. I headed for a nearby potting shed. I didn’t plan to stop there, but rather to use it as concealment as I headed toward the footbridge. Next thing I knew, I ran right into something, and it knocked me over backwards. I landed hard on my back.

Someone was on top of me, rolling me over. I winced as my face made contact with the ground. He pinned me down with a knee to my back, grabbed and cuffed first my left wrist, then the right. I winced as he brought it forcefully behind my back and cuffed it. “Hamilton?” the man whispered. “Is that you?”

The sound of my name startled me. Who would know me here, in Messerton? I turned slightly, onto my side, and saw a squarely built man, standing six feet or more. Sheriff Bridges. Out of uniform, I had not recognized him at first.

So this was it, then. He had been waiting, expecting me to come here, and was arresting me for murder. “Get up,” he said. “And be quiet about it.” The sheriff grabbed my elbow and yanked. It hurt like hell. I struggled, but I did get to my feet just as he shoved me forward. “Move,” he ordered. “And don’t make a sound, or so help me God, I’ll snap your neck,” It was unsettling, hearing an officer of the law make a threat like that. I immediately thought of the people he’d shot trying to escape, or take his gun from him. Was I next?

He shoved me forward. We walked through the yard, out onto the street and toward the Crown Vic parked near the corner. He shoved me hard over the hood of his unmarked unit. “You got any weapons on you?” he asked. “Anything in your pockets that will stick me?”

“No,” I said. “Nothing.”

He rummaged through my pockets. And of course found nothing. He forcefully ushered me to the back of the cruiser, opened the door and shoved me in. In the process, I banged my head against the door frame. He closed the door behind me, and walked back down the street toward the lawn service trailer. A minute later, he returned, put something in the trunk, and got in behind the wheel.

My head was throbbing, and I could feel a small stream of blood running down the side of my face. There was a barely audible ‘click’, followed by a buzzer, and then we were moving. I stared out the side window. We’d gone several blocks, without a word spoken. Finally, I said, “Aren’t you going to read me my rights?” No response. Sheriff Bridges kept driving, apparently deep in thought.

“Okay,” I said. “I watch enough television. I think I know them.” I took a deep breath. “It was self-defense.”

Sheriff Bridges head jerked up slightly, looking at me in the rearview mirror. His eyes narrowed. “Say again?”

“The guy in the river,” I said. “He was hurt. Drowning. I pulled him out and he tried to kill me. Twice.” It felt good to get it off my chest. Tell the truth, and trust that things will work out. “It was him or me,” I said. “I panicked and tried to cover it up. I realize now that was a mistake.”

“I’m impressed,” the sheriff said.

I saw the sign with the arrow for Interstate 70. He drove past it. I said, “Hey, you missed your turn.” Not that I was in a hurry to be booked into the Page County jail. There was no response from the sheriff. I was beginning to feel uneasy. “Where are we going?”

And on we drove, past the city limits, several miles out into the country. Lots of hills, winding roads, and steep ravines. Eventually, the sheriff pulled onto an oil lease road, turned off his headlights and somehow managed to follow the dirt tracks back to a solitary oil well. The only light was from the natural gas flare several yards away from a slow moving pumpjack.

The sheriff brought the car to a stop, put it in PARK. My hands were still cuffed behind my back, and by now my arms were in agony from lack of circulation. “I’m hurting pretty bad back here,” I said. “Can you at least cuff me in front?”

He looked at me in the rearview mirror. “Shut up,” he said, and got out.

69

Ty Hamilton

I swiveled in the back seat as best I could, watching him as he went behind the car and opened the trunk. He came to my door with a shovel in his left hand a shotgun cradled in the crook of his right elbow. He opened the door, pulled me out and unceremoniously shoved me ahead of him.

“Lean over the hood,” he ordered. I did as I was told. He placed the shotgun on the roof of the car and uncuffed me, then yanked me upright by the collar. “Over there,” he tossed the shovel and pointed toward it.

“What the—” I didn’t like where this was going. “Why?”

Sheriff Bridges retrieved the shotgun, pumped a round into the chamber. That is a sound that you can never forget. “Start digging.

Digging my own grave brought back memories of my night on the island, when I had attempted to bury Jared Mulligan, or Michael Welch, whichever he was. Now, like then, there were several rocks of various size that impeded my progress. As I said before, it’s funny how the mind works—mine, anyway—because I couldn’t help but think how helpful it would have been to have had a shovel that night. “Hurry it up,” Sheriff Bridges commanded.

“I’ll trade places if you think you could do it faster,” I said. “Can I have a drink of water?”

“No.”

“Why were you impressed?” I asked.

“Huh?”

“Back in the car. You said my story impressed you.”

The sheriff smirked. “The guy you killed. He had skills. One of the best in the business.”

“What business?” I said. “What are you talking about?”

“Less talk,” he said, “More digging.”

I went through the motions, bringing up a half spade full at a time. I was already mid-thigh depth. I wanted to prolong the inevitable. “He knew me,” I said. “Called me by name. He had a picture of me in his car.” None of this seemed to surprise the sheriff. “I think he was hired to kill me. And I think that now you’re here to finish the job. Can you at least tell me why?”

“I can finish digging the hole myself, if I have to,” Sheriff Bridges said.

I got busy, spading up the earth that would soon be covering me. It might not be so bad, being buried out here. The devil himself might not find me. So, at least I’d have that going for me.

“I lied to you,” I said. “When I told you that I hadn’t looked at the video.” The truth was, I really hadn’t looked at it, but I wanted to press him.

Sheriff Bridges nodded. “We figured as much. That’s why we called in our boy Mulligan, only you somehow managed to get the better of him.”

“Why hire a hit man?” I asked, leaning on the shovel handle.

“Dig, Hamilton,” The sheriff clicked off the safety, and raised the barrel of the shotgun slightly, so that it was aimed at my lower abdomen. “Don’t make me tell you again.”

“Alright, alright,” I said, returning to the task at hand. “Who was he, anyway?”

“Ex-marine. A loner who couldn’t adjust to civilian life. Too boring, I suppose,” the sheriff said. “He was basically a problem solver.”

“I’ve always been curious. How do you find a guy like that? Yellow pages? Google?”

Sheriff Bridges chuckled. Maybe he would change his mind about killing me if he liked my sense of humor. “You deal with a wide variety of people in my business,” he said. “From time to time, you find their services are needed. You help one another.”

“He must have owed you big,” I said.

“He did,” the sheriff replied. “Looks like you’re almost done there.”

There was rustling in the brush, behind him. In the faint glow from the gas flare I saw something white moving about. I’d seen something very similar earlier in the evening. The sheriff turned, shined his flashlight. It was now or never. I reached out, grabbed a rock I had shoveled out a minute before, and heaved it as hard as I could at the sheriff’s head.

70

Ty Hamilton

In my high school baseball days, my favorite position was catcher. I fancied myself the next Johnny Bench. I had a pretty good throwing arm, if I say so myself. I could snap off a throw to pick off a runner who’d taken too big a lead off first, and was equally adept at gunning down those who attempted to steal a base. That was then.

Now, decades later, my best effort to plant a small stone in the sheriff’s temple looked more like what you would expect of a little girl. The stone never came close. But it did hit the albino skunk in the bush not ten feet from him.

What happened next is still kind of a blur in my memory, but it went something like this:

The stone hit the skunk, pissing it off. The skunk wheeled around and sprayed the sheriff, who raised his hands to his face. He dropped the flashlight, and I think maybe he dropped the shotgun, too. He turned his back to the skunk, and I drove the blade of the shovel toward his throat. I scurried out of the hole I had dug, ran to the sheriff’s unmarked car. The sheriff, despite his injury, found his shotgun and managed to fire off two rounds in my general direction. The first took out the driver’s side window. Some of pellets from the second round hit me in my left arm, and I yelped in pain. The other pellets peppered the driver’s side door.

The pain was excruciating, but I had to ignore it or I would never make it out of there. With my good hand, I opened the door and slid in behind the wheel. The sheriff, like all cops everywhere, had kept the engine running. I grasped the shift selector. It wouldn’t budge.

From the dark recesses of my memory, I recalled earlier, when the sheriff had me cuffed, sitting in the back of the car. Before he put the car in gear, there had been a buzzer. And before that, something else. What? A click? Like the sound of a switch. It made sense. Cops always leave their engines running. There had to be some sort of an emergency safety switch, something to prevent unauthorized people from making off with the cop car.

Okay, where? I felt around with my hand across the dashboard, along the front of the seat. No switch, but there was a gun. I grabbed it to return fire through the already shattered window. I squeezed the trigger. Nothing happened. Without thinking about it, I reverted to my Flight Deck Officer training. Tap, rack, and fire. I tapped the bottom of the magazine, racked a round into the chamber, and fired two rounds in the general direction of the sheriff. All in a time frame of two, maybe three seconds, max.

I reached back down, feeling along the front of the seat once more. Again, nothing. As I moved around, my left foot bumped something next to the interior wall, just forward of the door frame. It felt like one of those old floorboard-mounted headlight dimmer switches that were on the cars back in the sixties, when I was a teenager learning to drive. The sheriff was staggering toward me, one hand clutching this throat. With the other, he raised the shotgun. I pressed the switch with my foot. Click. Buzz. I threw the transmission into gear and hit the gas just as the rear windshield exploded.

I ducked instinctively, tried to steer going backwards without seeing where I was going, my foot buried in the accelerator pedal. I sat up just in time to see the main road coming up, too fast. I failed to negotiate the turn, and sailed off the road into a deep ravine.