Chapter 30 - It's the Small Things That Can Kill You - Aw Poop!

                                                 Chapter 30 – Aw Poop!

Joey rubbed his eyes. He was starting to feel worn down. A glance around the room told him that the others in his little group were feeling the same. He looked over at Jaxon.

Joey reasoned, Jax had been openly lugging Joey’s .38 around ever since Joey handed it to him. The initial idea was that Jax might need it to protect Clara and company while he checked in with Frank. Jax didn’t seem comfortable with weapons, however. He had left the shotgun Sal had given him outside on the lawn and was currently using the handgun to scratch the back of his neck. At best, sooner or later the kid was going to misplace his weapon just like he abandoned the shotgun. At worst, the gun served as an aggressive cue for some of the residents. It made them nervous, and rightly so.

“Jax, I need my hardware back.” Joey said in a tired voice.

“Huh?” I replied. The gun felt heavy and unnatural in my hand.

“My gat, my piece, my iron…” Joey slowly mumbled.

“What?” I squinted and tried to make the wheels of my brain spin faster, but I was tired.

“My rod, my roscoe… you know…bang, bang? Joey said in disbelief.

“Oh, sure. You mean pistol. Here.” I inadvertently pointed the gun at him. His eyes widened a bit but otherwise his face didn’t betray the fact that he now knew giving me a gun of any type was a very bad idea. He snatched in from my hand, checked the cylinder and then placed the pistol back into his shoulder holster.

As an afterthought he said. “Are you carrying anything else that might be considered contraband, just in case we run into the cops tonight?” I awkwardly reached into his hip pocket and pulled out a switchblade knife. I held it out proudly as if it were a prize that I had won at the county fair.

Joey massaged his temples with his fingers. He felt a headache coming on. “Oh, just keep it. If we encounter the police, wipe it down to get rid of your fingerprints and ditch it. The blade is too long to be considered legal.”

“Wow! I feel like I’m in a Raymond Chandler novel.” I said in a state of excitement.

Joey blew out his breath slowly. “Yeah, about that. I feel like I’ve been playing a little loose and reckless lately with your and Clara’s welfare. This isn’t a novel or a movie, Jax. So, here’s the plan from now on. We are going to move Frank into the back of that hearse. Quietly. I fear we have already stirred up enough excitement and probably drawn down undue attention to our presence here at Happy Meadows.”

“Do you think that guy, ‘Cutter’ is laying in wait for us…or is he just after you and Frank?”

Joey had a concerned look on his face. “I’ve never heard of an enforcer that goes by the handle of ‘Cutter’. We have been all over town and even if he is lurking out there somewhere, I don’t see how he could locate us. I don’t think he was working with Billy Touche or this Zach guy or his partner Artie, that we have locked in the broom closet. At this point, I question the source of information about this new assassin. However, we will keep our wits about us and not take unnecessary chances. I’m thinking of sending you and the others home. Sal and I can move Frank to be evaluated by…”

“Milton. Milton Freedman. He runs a bookstore across town. He was a paramedic in the Viet Nam war. You will need either Rico, Fenton, or me to go with you. He doesn’t know who you or Frank are. It’s late at night and the store is closed.”

Joey sighed. “Okay, I’ll take one of you with me.”

I looked out of the side window of Happy Meadows. You could occasionally catch the glow of ball lightning out of the corner of your eye. Otherwise, it was dark. Pitch black.

Joey placed his hand on the back of my shoulder.  “The streets were dark with something more than night.”

“I beg your pardon.” I said in disbelief. “Was that a Chandler quote?”

“What? You think hit men don’t read Raymond Chandler?” Joey grinned like a fox in the shadows approaching a farmhouse, and somehow, I felt reassured about seeing the sunrise again.

“What are our chances of getting across town without running into the F.B.I., cops, or this ‘Cutter’ guy?”

“You know what Chandler said about his characters?” Joey asked with a sly smile.

"No what?" I replied.

“The characters that last until the end of his novels are just ordinary guys with some extraordinary qualities.” Joey winked. “That’s us buddy.”  

                                                                    *      *      *

Phyllis Altmire had been watching the ball lightning and periodic manifestations of the dead with a growing amount of impatience. She wondered why Carmen hadn’t phoned the police. Those phantoms obviously weren’t supposed to be at Happy Meadows. Worse yet, the static outside was starting to interfere with the Carol Burnett Show. The television reception in the lounge was becoming spotty.

Phyllis had decided to take things into her own hands. She marched over to a pay phone and dialed the number of the Kildeer Police Department. She was a frequent caller and as such, she had the number committed to memory. Phyllis reported intruders at Happy Meadows, indicating that they had tampered with powerlines and that the place was experiencing intermittent electrical flashes. The dispatcher took her words to mean that there was a power cable that was both live and down near the entrance of Happy Meadows. She was reassured Phyllis that emergency services were on the way. When asked to identify herself she hung up the phone.

People unfamiliar with the everyday mores of life in an assisted living complex probably wouldn’t grasp the fact that many of the elderly have sticky fingers. This is connected to residents having little in the way of personal property and the habit of frequently loaning personal items to each other. Eventually this creates the feeling that anything left lying around is communal property. With this in mind, please do not judge Phyllis too harshly when I mention her kleptomaniacal behavior.

When I went to wipe the switchblade knife down, as per suggested by Joey Flowers, I absent mindedly left it on a counter in the main lobby. Phyllis spied it and slipped it into the pocket of her housecoat. Then Phyllis, intent to go outdoors and give the spirits of the dead a piece of her mind and announce that she had already reported them to the local police, noticed Joey’s red hoodie left unattended.

It was a chilly evening, and the hoodie was just the right weight for her jaunt outdoors. She slipped it on. Walking down the stairs she lit up a cigarette and eyed the spectral disturbance that had interrupted her television viewing. She also noticed another thing. The sawed-off 12 gauge shotgun that I had abandoned after Rico had nearly slapped it out of my hand.

Phyllis picked it up. She had been a farm wife before entering Happy Meadows. Phyllis knew her way around shotguns. She liked the feel of the gun in her hands. She also noticed something else laying on the ground nearby. A plastic device connected to wires. This device was connected to a series of divots and mounds in the parking lot. It had been constructed at Joey Flowers’ request by his driver Sal. Unbeknownst to Phyllis, someone was watching her with great interest.

A figure in the shadows armed with a bayonet and icepick crept behind a nearby tree. Cutter had been hiding underneath Jerry Gonzales’ hearse when he noticed a commotion and then a slap fight between Jerry himself and another man named Rico. Several other people were involved in the altercation including a known associate of Joey Flowers who was armed and fired a round from his sidearm which ended the fight.

Cutter had never seen Joey Flowers in person but had a description of the man provided by Bobby Moretti’s people. The car Flowers had rented was in the parking lot. Joey was a small man that frequently wore a red hoodie. Cutter silently crept closer to Phyllis. The ball lightning and spectral displays had almost made Cutter abandon his hunt for the evening. But now he was so close to eliminating Flowers that his body was virtually twitching with surges of adrenaline. He raised his weapons.

Suddenly a huge sphere of ball lightning burst illuminating the front lawn. Phyllis turned to see Cutter nearly upon her. She screamed, whirled the shotgun in his direction and pulled the trigger. Her shot missed Cutter by two feet. The recoil of the gun caused her to stagger backwards. “You’re not supposed to be here!” she screamed and jacked another shell into the chamber of the twelve gauge.

Cutter recognized from her voice that he had almost cut the throat of an elderly woman. He was temporarily blinded by the static flash of the lightning. He staggered into the mounds and divots that were buried packets of C-4. All of them connected and carefully wired to a detonator. The detonator was laying on the ground when it was enveloped by another huge ball of static. There was a huge explosion.

Sal’s charges were supposed to incapacitate a car or truck that was trying to ram the entrance of Happy Meadows. A blitz frontal assault, similar to what we thought Jerry Gozalez and his hearse was about to do hours before this.

Instead, the charges of C-4 reduced Cutter’s body to pieces the size of raw chicken livers, which now rained down on Phyllis along with gravel and large clods of earth, as she stoically pitched the gun aside and straightened up.

“Aw poop! I lost my cigarette.” Phyllis said and marched back inside Happy Meadows flicking pieces of Bobby Moretti's hit man off her new red hoodie.